I am obsessed with the Quran. I love the Quran like little boys love Harry Potter. Like white folk loved Outkast's Speakerboxxx and thugs loved Outkast's ATLeans. Like geeks love MySQL. Like girls love Gucci. I love it like Dantes loved Mercedes. I love it like Rumi loved Shams; Hallaj, God; and Nietzsche, himself. I love the Quran like Bela Bartok loved laughter and Romanians love them gypsies. I love the Quran like I loved Sophie Marceau when I was a lonely teen. I love the Quran more; much more.

The Quran is my favorite novel, favorite poem, favorite recording, favorite creation. Its Prophets are more real to me than a thousand Aragorns and Legolases. Its Karuns and Zulqurnains are more devastating than a thousand Saurons. At the end of the day, when my toes won't bend from having walked in the cold so long, and my eyes won't close from having stayed open at work so long, I go to the Quran and Tawfeeq al Sayegh busts out in a recitation of al-Fajr, and my achilles heel melts in warmth, and my spinal cortex straightens and sets. I am overawed by the humanity of the book and I feel transcendence. Like any slave to beauty, I want nothing more than to scatter the perfume of the Quran in a thousand directions and share with others the luxuriant fragrance.

But there are those who turn "my preciousss" into pungence; my warmth into fire; my beloved into a blizzard of death; my love into a lizard. Their names come easy to the mouth, like phlegm should: Osama, Zarqawi, Bakri. They echo against the names of others who knew how to bastardize beauty: Stalin, Bakunin, Cheney.

However, these men are merely expressions of a deeper malaise. They have theological enablers who leaked the wines of worship from the Quran and injected instead the blood of desert scorpions. I speak of those men who change the verses of the Quran to serve their own disreputable ends; who by way of parantheticals not actually in the Arabic create a class of hate that breeds only blood and bombs.

The Fatiha, The Opening, Magisterial and Evocative, which begins with "Praise For The Lord Of The Worlds" ends up in a taxonomy of exclusion by way of parentheses:

Guide us to the Straight Way. The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (the way) of those who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians).

No longer in this newly rewritten Quran is a believer left to reflect upon his being in relation to the unknown, his entry into the mysteries of existence, but to hate the Jew, hate the Christian. How could the Lord of all the Worlds accept such rancor toward His creation? Don't ask God; ask the government of Saudi Arabia which peddles this "noble" anti-Quran; ask the "Islamic" University of Medina; ask Shaykh Bin Baz, Saudi Grand Mufti until 1999 who certified these insertions; and the King Fahd Center For Printing of the Holy Quran.

This is what Michael Sells calls War as Worship; Worship as War. This is the Quran I hate; this caricature of beauty. This is the Quran I will jihad against. (You must wait for my plot, but I shall plot).