World’s most powerful book

World’s most powerful book

Al Makin, Yogyakarta | Tue, 09/28/2010 10:11 AM | Opinion, The Jakarta Post

I found the expression “Der Koran — Das mächtigste Buch der Welt” — which means “The Koran, the most powerful book in the world” — in the German magazine Der Spiegel No. 52, year 2007. As many said, the phrase, which lampoons the way in which the Koran is still predominantly regarded in “conventional” Muslim theology until today, is indeed provocative.

Of course, this Holy Scripture — like any other scripture belonging to any other religion — literally can do nothing to defend itself from any “blasphemous acts” that befall it.

The believers, who always serve as the guardians of the truth contained by the scripture, will keenly and earnestly do anything to “inflict punishment” upon those who intentionally harm the one-and-half-millennium-old book’s reputation.

One verse in the scripture says that God has sent down the scripture, the content and “truth” of which He Himself will always guard. In fact, believers feel that they are entrusted by God to take any necessary action, whenever its authority is questioned.

No scripture in the world has so high a status in the theological system, which has survived until today, as the Koran, whose every letter, word, sentence, verse and chapter is protected by angels.

Every believer must hold that a change had never occurred in the content and language of the scripture for 15 centuries. For them, it is simply the greatest miracle revealed by the Prophet Muhammad.

The expression evoked by Der Spiegel is relevant in order to recall the way the threat of burning the Koran by Terry Jones and his group was cancelled, substituted instead by tearing a few pages of the Koran — rather like in the movie Fitna produced by a controversial member of the Dutch parliament, Geertz Wilders, with the sound of the tearing of a page of the Koran. These are the boldest “blasphemous acts” they could possibly commit.

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