By: November 21, 2018 n What the Qur’an Meant, and Why It Matters historian Garry Wills takes up the admirable task of learning about the Koran. The book begins with a brief introduction justifying the project in the name of contemporary affairs.

In Part I, Wills rebukes the various kinds of ignorance and folly that a better reading of the Koran could combat. In Part II, taking up over two-thirds of the book, he is concerned with interpretations of the Koran, often designed to correct the errors enumerated in Part I.

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Wills doesn’t know Arabic, so he relies on experts for guidance. He makes especially frequent use of Study Quran (2015), a new English translation with hundreds of pages of commentary, edited by Muslim reformist intellectual Seyyed Hossein Nasr. This is an impressive work, but one that tends to confirm Wills’s own liberal perspective.

Wills makes up to some extent for his unfamiliarity with Arabic by means of his Christian background, which proves to be extremely valuable for approaching the Koran. Some of his book’s most illuminating sections involve comparisons between the Koran and Christian scripture. The most useful sections are characterized by an earnest inquiry into the Koran’s religious meaning, with an emphasis on themes that should be familiar to fellow monotheists. Chapters 4-6, in particular, consider literary and religious themes in the Koran without any bitter political bone to chew. In Chapter 4, Wills describes quite beautifully the importance of water and rain in the Koran.

Scarce and life-giving for the desert people among whom the Koran originated, water serves as a symbol of divine fertility, guidance, and grace. Water-related imagery also represents the insatiable thirst of hell, and perfect satisfaction of heaven. In Chapter 5, Wills examines the meaning of the cosmos in the Koran. He shows how every aspect of it, from mineral to animal to angelic, speaks to the glory of its creator. Even angels are expected to recognize their dependence on God: Iblis, who disobeyed God by refusing to bow down to His human creation, is transformed into Satan. God’s ubiquity is a great leveler. Yet this infinitely powerful, remote God is also very close to humans: most importantly, He chooses to speak clearly and succinctly by means of prophecy.

In Chapter 6, “The Perpetual Stream of Prophets,” Wills compares the characters of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus in the Bible and Koran, emphasizing just how much the two books have in common. He reminds Judeo-Christian readers that Muslims, far from being simply foreign or strange, belong to another branch of our own tradition. Religiously-educated Americans will find much in the Koran that is strangely familiar. Driving home this point is something that Wills is quite able to accomplish. Yet his ecumenical agenda goes further: he argues that “Allah protects equally the synagogue, the church, and the mosque.” This claim segues into a section where Wills attempts to prove the tolerance and peacefulness of the Koranic teaching. Wills could have justified his enterprise with the perfectly unobjectionable claim that “a book so important to so many of our fellow humans” should be familiar to us.

Instead, he devotes the book’s first third to a sweeping attack on the ignorance toward Islam prevalent in the United States. Though Donald Trump’s outrageous comments about Muslims are roundly criticized, the current President is hardly the focus of Wills’s ire. On the introduction’s first page, he already has William F. Buckley, Jr., in his sights. The first chapter, titled “Secular Ignorance,” consists of a blistering assault on the Iraq War, along with everyone associated with it. While this chapter follows logically from Wills’s earlier assertion that the very project of learning about the Koran arose in response to the “disastrous invasion of Iraq,” on the whole it is largely gratuitous.