The Muslim holy book

OpinionJournal publised a featured article

Newsweek and the Quran
The Muslim holy book isn't just a "bible."
It's far more sacred than that.
The Quran is not "the Bible" of Muslims. It is infinitely more sacred than that. To use a Jewish analogy, it is more like the oral Torah first revealed on Mount Sinai, which was later passed on orally through the prophets and eventually written down on scrolls for all to read.

Or perhaps like the Ten Commandments, written in stone by God himself, and which the courts say cannot be on government property.

Whereas Christians regard the Bible as written by human beings inspired by God, Muslims regard the Quran--the word means "The Recitation"--as the very words of God, revealed aurally to the Prophet Muhammad in Arabic. To hear those words recited is, for Muslims, to hear Allah. If, for Christians, Jesus is the logos or eternal Word of God made flesh, the Quran is the Word of God made book, and every Arabic syllable in it lives as the breath of the divine.

And while our school children are allowed to have symbols of Jewish, Moslem, or Kwanza faith during celebrations in late December, they insist that Christ be removed from Christmas, and that the celebration be called Winter Holiday

In short, what Christ is for Christians the Quran (in Arabic) is for Muslims: the living Word of God made present in this world. Moreover, to recite the suras or verses of the Quran, as devout Muslims do, is to breathe in the very words of Allah.

When they select out phrases from the "very words of Allah" and deliberately misinterpret them to cause naive Muslims to commit violence in the name of Allah, what do you call it? Blasphemy?

Thus, recitation of the Quran is for Muslims much like what receiving the Eucharist is for Catholics--a very intimate ingestion of the divine itself. This, then, according to Newsweek's story--now retracted and "regretted" by the magazine's editor--is what some interrogators flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay.