A reader writes:
I'm Pakistani and I've lived there for over 15 years. Two simple reasons why this is a very bad idea:
1. Anything handed out by Americans will rile up suspicion, even the Koran.
2. Non-Muslims touching the Koran is a massive taboo. Even Muslims aren't allowed to touch the book or recite it without performing wu'du or ghusl (ablution and cleansing) first. Women aren't allowed to touch or recite it when menstruating.Progressive Muslims disagree with these rules, but that's clearly not who we're talking about here.
Another backs up those points with firsthand experience:
I wasn't surprised to hear about the Afghan riots around alleged burning of Korans at Bagram. This incident, and the reaction to it, was inevitable, given the politics of Westerners handling that particular book. We had a similar issue in Kandahar in late 2008. There had been an attempt to reach out to the Afghan people through the distribution by the military of Pashto-Arabic Korans. Very ornate, beautiful books. But Westerners couldn't be seen to handle the books, our Afghan advisors felt, so direct gifting was impossible. So we attempted to give them through the Afghan military, where I was an advisor. This was also problematic.
The military didn't like getting Korans from Westerners' hands either, and they couldn't really give them out themselves, because they knew their defiling origin. So that was a non-starter. We also started to see returns of holy books previously given, as word spread that the words might somehow have been adulterated or bowdlerized by Westerners. It being, of course, impossible to disprove that particular negative, the whole Koran-gifting thing basically shut down.
This, though, created another problem: what to do with the books now? Neither holy nor unholy, they could not be disposed of in any rational manner. The Afghans would not take possession under any circumstances, nor would they give them back to our control (because they were, at least somewhat, still the word of God). This proved a very difficult issue to negotiate, and as I recall ended with basically everyone just agreeing to pretend they weren't there.
I have no doubt that the supply of burnable copies of the Koran at Bagram airbase ended up there in some similar fashion. This is not a goodwill gesture, it seems, that can ever, ever work. Furthermore, as the Western presence winds down and seacans are emptied and their contents disposed of rather than shipped home, one should expect similar such incidents in future.
(Photo: Activists of Pakistani political and Islamic party Jammat-e-Islami (JI), hold up Korans and placards during an anti-US protest over the recent burning of Korans in Afghanistan, in Karachi on March 2, 2012. Two US soldiers were killed by Afghan colleagues on March 1, the latest in a series of such attacks after the burning of Korans at a US base sparked widespread violent protests. In Afghanistan 40 people have been killed in six days of violent demonstrations as protesters targeted Western bases, plunging relations between US-led Western forces and their Afghan allies to an all time low. By Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images)
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