When I read other blogs, I see a lot of scoffing at the importance of desecrations of the Quran. It's a religious document, after all, and we as a nation explicitly reject reverence towards any religious document. There's the occasional reference to
Piss Christ or the like, but, in reality, the posters openly say that they just don't get it.
Bizarrely, I felt the same way. Yes, intellectually, I understand the symbolism of the Quran in particular: in a religion which at least nominally forbids any human or animal imagery (in order to prevent idolatry), the text of the Quran itself has beome a sacred thing. As a religious person, I should have been outraged. I wasn't.
Today, I think I figured out why.
I was reading through the news about the protests in Pakistan when I came across
this piece. Stop and look at the first paragraph for a second:
Muslims spat on the American flag, threw tomatoes at a picture of President Bush and burned the U.S. Constitution in protests Friday from Iraq to Indonesia over the alleged desecration of Islam's holy book at Guantanamo Bay prison.
Burned the Constitution? Huh? Bizarre -- why would anyone care about burning a copy of the Constitution? Anyone who wants one can get another.
The only pissing on the Constitution I care about is that which the American Taliban and their servants are doing -- and they're pissing on the meaning of the Constitution, not the Constitution itself. Why would any American care if you spat on, pissed on, or burned a copy of the document? It's just paper and ink!
That's when it hit me. I don't care, but not because I don't understand. My culture believes (correctly, in my opinion) that a copy of a document is not the document itself. If you identify a copy of the Quran with the Platonis meaning of the Quran itself, then harming a copy does become an offense against God.
Thoughts?