And that number 72 never appears.

Study The Quran

But in fact, here in the northwest, we're living very close to the real Koranic idea of paradise, defined 36 times as gardens watered by running streams.

The Koran is Islamic scripture.

And I began to grasp why it's said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic.

The truth of the matter is otherwise.

And this man, Terry Jones

But all is not lost in translation.

But the truth is nobody really knows, and that's the point.

Now there are two groups that exist within the Muslim world.

Edith, I was raised on the torah... my wife, on the koran.

But the thing is, how come it's news to most people?

Step two

There were a bajillion of them, all on Lance Corporal's Koran, his clothes, but none on his misbaha.

Indeed, some of the world traditions think very little of religious orthodoxy.

Then they take us to a madrassa and teach us things from the Koran.

I don't belong there.

The prophet wanted every believer to be able to read the Koran for themselves.

And after he would leave, women and girls would stay behind.

Through our subconscious, in your dreams the Koran calls our state of sleep the lesser death,

I did resist the temptation to skip to the back where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are.

This is the kind of thinking that went into creating The 99.

And the result of this is that if you do a Google search on images right now and you type in illuminated manuscript Koran for example, 24 of the 28 images you'll find come from my institution.

Throughout its history, Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations both ancient and modern.

It wants to be chanted out loud, to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue.

A girl, if you're lucky, in the corner of a dark room

Love your enemies. Honor the stranger.

In the name of God, the compassionating, the compassionate.

This is also, I think, confirmed by the fact that the seclusion of women in creating a divided society is something that you also do not find in the Koran, the very core of Islam the divine core of Islam that all Muslims, and equally myself, believe.

So the Koran in English is a kind of shadow of itself, or as Arthur Arberry called his version,

You know, I think that there's a big parallel between bending the crucifix out of shape and creating swastikas.

But now look at our world. And we are living in a world that is where religion has been hijacked.

(Music) She was preserved by modesty of the religion She was adorned by the light of the Quran

The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of the world's greatest heroes, yet even he called the Koran

Tom wanted to be able to read the original Quran and solely for that reason he started learning Arabic.

She said, The first thing anyone who is a Muslim knows is that the Koran requires and strongly supports literacy.

So this past spring, as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Muhammad,

It says exactly their blood shall be upon themselves . This is in Leviticus. It is of course also in the Torah.

What happened, that is, on the night in the year 610 when Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran on a mountain just outside Mecca?

And this is so infuriating and humiliating for the population of Afghanistan, that it makes the recruitment for al Qaeda very easy, when people are so disgusted by, for example, the burning of the Koran.

And we need to establish that existentially before we do so sociopolitically.

My last book was about the story behind the Shi'a Sunni split, and for that I'd worked closely with the earliest Islamic histories, so I knew the events to which the Koran constantly refers, its frame of reference.

Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine that the Koran can be read as we usually read a book as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach, as though God and the Koran is entirely in the voice of God speaking to Muhammad were just another author on the bestseller list.

And where the Bible is addressed exclusively to men, using the second and third person masculine, the Koran includes women talking, for instance, of believing men and believing women, honorable men and honorable women.

This was perhaps the biggest surprise how flexible the Koran is, at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible.