LiberalChristians may take a cavalier view of the Bible, but orthodox Christians believe it is the word of God. The Koran even imitates the style of some of the prophets and apocalyptic books such as Daniel and Revelation. Furthermore, Mohammed wrote not a word but dictasted to many different little scribes. Not until after the sudden death were the pieces collected and made into the present. The oldest extant manuscript of the Koran is not nearer in time to his lifetime than the oldest copies of the New Testament.
But Rush made a very good point: IF the Koran is so sacred to Muslims,WHO is going to persuade them to take a different look at it?
Very few scholars are engaged in the “higher Criticism” of the Koran, and they have only a tiny following even among westernized Muslims.
Liberals who expect Muslims to abandon their belief in the Koran and to convert to their “enlightened “ views,are just kidding themselves. Those who ,look for a reformation, forget that the Protestant Reformation sought a return to primitive Christianity. That is exactly what the radical Muslims are trying to do. The Reformation was a reaction to the Renaissance. Muslim fundamentalism, is a reaction to modernism, which they see as a form of fidelity.
We Orthodox, unlike protestants, many of whom seem to believe that the canon of Scripture as abridged by Luther is a Christian Qu'ran, are not particularly disturbed by "higher criticism". We regard the editorial and selection process by which the Church arrived at Her books to be divinely inspired as much as the composition of the long-lost ur-text. We object to the RSV and many other new protestant translations precisely because in their enthusiasm for the unrecoverable ur-text (assumed to be directly dictated by God, hence my description of the attitude as making the Bible into a Christian Qu'ran = recitation), the translators depart from the Scriptures received by the Church in favor of minority testimonies from the oldest manuscripts in the New Testament, and in favor of the Masorete (redacted by Christ-denying rabbis) in the Old Testament.
Rush, of course, fails to realize that the most obnoxious features of Islam are not grounded in the text of the Qu'ran per se, but, first, in the Hadiths (the traditional life of Mohammed) and the conceit that Mohammed (a barbarous, pedophile warlord) was the perfect exemplar of human behavior, and second in the hermeneutic principle of "naskh" or abrogation, by which the later-written (warlike) sections of the Qu'ran are held to abrogate the earlier-written (pacific) sections of the Qu'ran. There is a reformist movement, albeit very small, called Qu'ran-Only Islam that does away with the Hadiths. There are also minor schools of Islamic jurisprudence that object to naskh. A Qu'ran-Only Islam which adopted the standard Christian-style hermeneutic principle that "one part of Scripture not be expounded in a way repugnant to another" in place of naskh would be a very different religion, and one much easier to live alongside.
Rush, and those who equate burning Bibles with burning Qu'rans, also overlook the fact that the Mohammedan conception of God imprisons Allah in his own transcendence. Unlike the One True God, the All-Holy Trinity, who in the Incarnation reveals Himself in the Person of the Son, the Mohammedan Allah cannot reveal himself, but can only reveal his will. Thus, for the pious Muslim the Qu'ran is the nearest thing to a sacrament of God's presence he has available to him. The offense caused Muslims by desecrating a Qu'ran is more akin to the offense caused to a traditional Christian, whether Orthodox, Latin, Coptic, . . . by desecrating the consecrated Eucharist than it is to the offense caused by desecrating a Bible. (I suppose it's analogous to the offense caused protestants of the "God-Breathed Bible" variety by burning Bibles, since they uniformly seem to be Zwinglians in their Eucharistic theology -- I'm not sure why "This is my body" gets exempted from their literalist hermeneutic, but I digress.)
LiberalChristians
An oxymoron without equal.
Another point on the rest of your post -
There is no reason to examine the Koran with a “higher criticism”. Simply revealing what it says in unvarnished plain English (wwhttp://www.thestraightway.org/Quran.asp) offends every human’s God given sense of right and wrong.
It’s like anything of the left/Satan - tell the truth about it and people are naturally repulsed.
“the Protestant Reformation sought a return to primitive Christianity.”
The Protestant Reformation sought a return to the Word of God, not man’s unscriptural traditions of praying to dead people, worshiping icons and not understanding that good works does not lead to salvation; salvation leads to good works.