Why do Muslims become very angry if there is a physical offense to the Koran? What's wrong if someone fired or threw the book of Koran?

You can’t desecrate something that is divine and/or sacred to someone and expect that to not upset them.

If you burn a bible, you’ll see more than a fair share of death threats.

Death threats for burning a Bible? That’s news to me. Do you have any reliable citations on that. Fair share? Perhaps a lone wingnut here or there but hardly much more, if that.

Death threats for burning the Koran? Not unexpected as per the idiot guy in Florida making headlines by threatening to burn a copy of the Koran. Nitwit (but hardly deserving of the death penalty).

But I generally agree with what was said about desecrating things regarded as holy. The only reason for someone to do that would be out of total disrespect or to purposely provoke.

One bit of interest however. Apparently it’s not a two way street of mutual respect as they felt perfectly justified in going out of their way to dynamite several large carvings of Buddha in Afghanistan for no apparent reason other than a raw display of power and control.

Talk about a double standard…

Because unlike the majority of Christians, Muslims take their religion seriously.

All books deserve to be treated with some respect and I think you have to look at why someone was angry enough to fire or throw the book in the first place.

I would guess they become angry either out of fear or because it shows incredible disrespect. Why is it surprising it would cause an emotional response? Look how some people freak out if the American flag is burned in protest. Burning cross on a lawn.

As the noble Koran contains the greatest legislations, the best morals and the most eloquent instructions coming from God, Muslims get interested in respecting and glorifying it whatever it is.
As the holy Koran contains the sacred words, so it refers to it and it is a symbol for it, so respecting and venerating the book is respecting and venerating the holy Koran, and offending it is an offence to the meanings and the legislations it has, so we get angry when someone offends it. We see nowadays that countries get angry and sometimes start violent wars when offending a symbol like a flag, is the flag the country or it is just a symbol to it? Offending the symbol of a country is an offense to the whole country, also offending the president of a country or a delegation or anyone who represents it anywhere, here offending the symbols is an offense to what these symbols represent.

Well, you could see if you feel very upset if you think of someone burning or otherwise desecrating the flag.

For me, it speaks volumes about the doer, and I tend to just feel sorry for them.

I had a friend years ago who was some flavor of Bible thumper. He said his sect did not consider the Bible book itself to be holy. It is the meaning and the words that are important to them. He said it was ok for mark it up, underline passages, tear out pages, and throw it out when it falls apart. The book was printed by man and is only paper and ink. He mentioned there are other groups that consider a Bible holy and must be treated with respect – even though it was printed by the millions and left behind in many hotel rooms.

As an engineer it seems if someone can process trees to make paper, chemicals to make ink, and steel to make a printing press, the book itself is man-made not divine. The ideas can be considered holy but the book is just a book, or flag, or drawing.- and all three are likely made and printed in a chinese sweatshop to keep cost low..

@ragingloli Maybe not every Christian, but Christians do take their religion seriously. If they don’t, there are reasons for it. One of them being that they really weren’t a Christian in the first place.

@flutherother I agree. Every book was a product of someone’s hard work and time. But, no book is worth a death threat. I would get angry at someone if they burnt a Bible, because people dedicate their lives to following whats written in that book. It doesn’t deserve to be treated like trash. Just like other people spent years of their life writing books for others enjoyment. The Bible has a very personal meaning to me, but I wouldn’t dream of making a death threat or abusing someone because they mistreated a book.

@LuckyGuy Your friend has it right in my opinion. :D

@LeilaniLane He said he learned so much more by marking it up and actually using it. I marked up my physics text books and that helped me learn.

A book, any book, is made up of cellulose, hemi-cellulose and lignin with a little ink. It has a heat value of about 7900 BTU per pound or roughly $0.15 per pound oil equivalent. That is simple physics and chemistry. Any value above that comes from human emotion.

What happens when a Koran or Bible is borrowed from the library and loaded electronically to a Kindle, Nook, etc. e-reader? Is it a crime for the library to erase it when the due date is up?

@LuckyGuy

What you’ve expressed is basically the viewpoint of every Christian whom I’ve ever met.

There are some who underline passages for Bible Study (sometimes using multiple marker colors coded by subject) and usually carry theirs with them to each and every meeting.

Understandably, over time, they can get rather tattered and raggedy looking from frequent use.

Others don’t get such heavy use because Bible study is primarily done at home and they don’t normally carry them everywhere.

But regardless of which, I’ve yet to encounter anyone who would utter death threats over destruction of a Bible. They’d just go and buy another. If someone had purposely destroyed their Bible they might get aggravated about it but that’s about as far as it goes.

I’ve been told by some Christians I know who are Orthodox (usually Greek or Russian) that Bible kissing is not unusual but I don’t know of any other Christian groups for whom that’s a normal practice.

It’s a book printed on paper just like any other. It’s the ideas which are given reverence. Even for those who are extreme Bible literalists, I’ve yet to encounter any going so far as death threats. That’s why I questioned that assertion made in the first post. It just doesn’t happen.

Maybe aggravation, but death threats? Unheard of by me and anyone else whom I know.

@Buttonstc
You and I know the same types of Christians. :P
Being in a very large church community, I’d say it is rare to make death threats on Bible damage. It just doesn’t happen. Angry and aggravated by it, are usual, if not a given.

I’ve kissed my Bible on occasion. Not as a religious practice though. I’m your good ‘ol southern Baptist, lol. I’ve also slept with my Bible under my pillow before.

Shall we take a poll? We can do a Bible, a Torah, a Koran and see who we get the most death threats from. Who wants to start?

@Here2_4 Or simply draw a picture. I think we can predict the results.

@Buttonstc “Apparently it’s not a two way street of mutual respect as they felt perfectly justified in going out of their way to dynamite several large carvings of Buddha in Afghanistan”

Not Muslims, the Taliban. For a thousand years Muslims were content with leaving them as they were. And, no great loss really.

@Darth_Algar I believe the Taliban used Muslim doctrine to justify it. Maybe they just needed targets for RPG practice.

They passed up an opportunity to bring tourists and wealth into the area. By blasting those stone carvings they helped keep themselves in the stone age.

Possibly the symbolism is scary for them? When swastikas were drawn on dorm room doors at my school a friend asked why people were so upset on campus. Because that shit terrifies us Jews! Not that we want to go out and kill anyone, but we want to make sure no one is going to try to hurt or kill us.

I know some of my Christian friends feel under attack. Every time the government or community decided to do fewer Christian things, because of separation of church and state, they feel like people are trying to put an end to the religion. Again, the majority don’t want to hurt people because of it, but they do speak up and there are a few loose cannons that do stupid things that can cause harm.

Fear motivates people and so does an attack. If burning the Quran feels like an attack then there is going to be a response most likely.

It seems to me that this kind of reaction has more to do with ideas of honor than with theology. We Americans have a hard time understanding how powerful and central this idea of honor still is in many cultures. It used to be that here, too, a perceived slight was grounds for killing (and still is in certain circles), but somewhere along the way most of us stopped being willing to go to battle over such an abstraction.

When you live in a society that allows for so many different points of view, you have to realize that what you consider important or sacred may not mean a thing to others around you. If you pick a fight with everyone who treads on a principle you value out of concern for upholding the honor of your family or faith or heritage, then it all goes to hell. So you grow a thick skin. You realize that what really counts is staying true to your own values, not policing the attitudes of others toward your values.

Many Muslims come from more homogenous societies than ours, and haven’t had to develop this kind of tolerance for insult. They’re used to everyone having similar values and playing by the same cultural rules. But the world is changing. Everyone’s sacred symbols are going to get scuffed and scorned by others in this increasingly global community. Our mutual survival requires, yes, a certain sensitivity to the values of others, but also equanimity in the face of insult.

One thing I remember from working in a library was the trouble we had storing the Koran. According to tradition, it’s supposed to always be shelved on the top shelf. It’s call number is 298. Just by the way the Dewey decimal system works out on the shelves, the 290s are almost always on the bottom row of the first set of numbered shelves. We put the Koran on the top shelf and left a piece of wood with the words “Koran 298 – See top shelf”

Not everyone knew this custom and I kind of wish some of the more devout Muslims would cut a little more slack to libraries. Putting the book on the bottom shelf is not the same as burning it. But I heard from some people that they got chewed out for putting it on the bottom shelf by mistake a few times.

@keobooks Interesting. I guess the library could always just not carry the Koran at all. Then they couldn’t complain about the shelf. I wonder if all libraries and book stores try to accommodate the top shelf thing like your library did?

The library I worked at the time had a large Islamic population. The other libraries I worked at didn’t carry a copy of the koran as far as I know.