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    Unavailable
    What the Qur'an Meant: And Why It Matters
    Unavailable
    What the Qur'an Meant: And Why It Matters
    Unavailable
    What the Qur'an Meant: And Why It Matters
    Audiobook6 hours

    What the Qur'an Meant: And Why It Matters

    Written by Garry Wills

    Narrated by Robertson Dean

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    America's leading religious scholar and public intellectual introduces lay readers to the Qur'an with a measured, powerful reading of the ancient text

    Garry Wills has spent a lifetime thinking and writing about Christianity. In What the Qur'an Meant, Wills invites readers to join him as he embarks on a timely and necessary reconsideration of the Qur'an, leading us through perplexing passages with insight and erudition. What does the Qur'an actually say about veiling women? Does it justify religious war?
         There was a time when ordinary Americans did not have to know much about Islam. That is no longer the case. We blundered into the longest war in our history without knowing basic facts about the Islamic civilization with which we were dealing. We are constantly fed false information about Islam—claims that it is essentially a religion of violence, that its sacred book is a handbook for terrorists. There is no way to assess these claims unless we have at least some knowledge of the Qur'an.
         In this book Wills, as a non-Muslim with an open mind, reads the Qur'an with sympathy but with rigor, trying to discover why other non-Muslims—such as Pope Francis—find it an inspiring book, worthy to guide people down through the centuries. There are many traditions that add to and distort and blunt the actual words of the text. What Wills does resembles the work of art restorers who clean away accumulated layers of dust to find the original meaning. He compares the Qur'an with other sacred books, the Old Testament and the New Testament, to show many parallels between them. There are also parallel difficulties of interpretation, which call for patient exploration—and which offer some thrills of discovery. What the Qur'an Meant is the opening of a conversation on one of the world's most practiced religions.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 3, 2017
    ISBN9780525500032
    Unavailable
    What the Qur'an Meant: And Why It Matters
    Author

    Garry Wills

    Garry Wills is the author of 21 books, including the bestseller Lincoln at Gettysburg (winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award), John Wayne's America, Certain Trumpets, Under God, and Necessary Evil. A frequent contributor to many national publications, including the New York Times Magazine and the New York Review of Books, he is also an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University and lives in Evanston, Illinois.

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    Reviews for What the Qur'an Meant

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    • 3/5
      If it weren’t for his apologetics for the cruel punishments in the Quran—he ignores the fact that several modern Islamic countries practice similar punishments as ISIS—I would have given it four stars.

      The book is excellently written and narrated, and adds some important nuance and context to bellicose passages of the Quran. However, he says that only tiny fringes of the Islamic world support cruel punishments, which is false (Saudi Arabia and Iran aren’t tiny fringes!)

      If you ignore the apologetics, false equivalences, and outright omissions of inconvenient facts in the book, the book is a halfway decent introduction to the basics of the theology of Islam.

      1 person found this helpful