No one would claim that the Qur'an is an easy text, even in translation. For people wise enough to heed Bloom's warning, Sardar's book – an extended meditation built around the Qur'an's first two chapters – is a good place to start. As Harold Bloom, the veteran literary critic, has remarked, 'ignorance of the Qur'an is foolish and increasingly dangerous'. In today's climate, few books are more deserving of study.

A majority insists it is a book of peace, while extremists use it to legitimise mass murder.

As Ziauddin Sardar explains in his preface, what the Qur'an actually says is shrouded in veils of assumptions and received opinions: among Muslims the text is invoked to support directly contradictory positions. The same charge has been made by the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who has called for the book to be banned. Although the university eventually won in court (after conceding an opt-out which very few students took up), in the resulting furore TV commentators across the US compared the Qur'an to Hitler's Mein Kampf.

A conservative forum called the Family Policy Network then sued the university for violating the US constitution by forcing 'incoming freshmen and transfer students to study Islam against their will'. Abdul Basit (3) afsany (2) Aqsa Falak (5) Ayesha (12) Baar Zaadi (2) Bint e Idrees (4) Dasht e harjaye by Sara Urooj (2) Dilon k bandhan by Umme Mariyam Sheikh (2) Fankarah by Razia Ahmad (2) Hichkiyan mohabbat ki by Amna Mehmood (2) Islamic Based Novels (6) Jab naam pukary jaen gy by Bisma Ejaz (2) Khamoshiyan by Sidra Sheikh (2) Khrose umer ki masoom nisha by Nisha Umar (2) Kiran Ahmad (6) Manjdhar e ishq by Hina Asad (2) Mera maan ho tum by Aimen Raza (2) Mirha Shehbaz (2) Mohabbat zard gulab si by Fatima Niazi (2) Mohabbat zard gulab si novel by Fatima Niazi (14) Nadia (2) Naeem Sawan (4) Qamar Un Nisa Qamar (5) Qismat se hari main by Palwisha Safi (2) Qurrat Ul Ain Bashir (2) Rabba mainu maaf kary by Saima Bakhtiyar (2) Raeesa Siddique (3) Romantic Urdu Novels (1984) Sadia Arif (2) Safa Khalid (4) Sameera Ea (2) Sana Shaban (3) Sawera Sehar (2) Sequal Based Novels (2) Shaneela Jabeen Zahidi (6) Shifa Soomro (2) Sunbal Boota (7) Sun mere humsafar by Sanaya Khan (2) Takmeel by S.I n the summer of 2002, responding to the 9/11 atrocity, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill made a selection of verses from the Qur'an a mandatory text for new students.

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