Dissecting the Quran

Book review of 'What The Qur'an Meant'

WHAT THE QUR’AN MEANT

And Why It Matters

Garry Wills

Viking Books

226 pages; $25

I know many well-intentioned people who’ve begun reading the Quran and given up within a few pages. The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of history’s heroic greats, yet called the Quran “as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble.”

It’s hard not to sympathise. Over the years, I’d picked up various translations, started reading, and rapidly found myself very much an agnostic Jew lost in a Muslim landscape. Good intentions, it seemed, were not enough. The Quran may look like a short book, but it’s not one