Which makes it a shame that his book is ill-served by its title.

So what happens when a leading Catholic intellectual reads the Quran, especially one as attuned to language as Garry Wills? The answer, as unlikely as it may seem at first glance, is a delight. This is the version favored by both Islamophobes and their partners in distortion, Muslim extremists - partners in bigotry and its correlate, ignorance. In what I call the highlighter version, phrases and snippets are taken entirely out of context and even invented out of thin air, like the 72 virgins in paradise (I kept waiting for them, but they never appeared). And that’s when I realized that the fact that so few people actually read the Quran is precisely why it’s so easy to quote. I finally read it properly - as properly as I could, that is, using several different translations alongside the original Arabic - as part of my research for a biography of Muhammad. The Quran may look like a short book, but it’s not one you can curl up with on a rainy Sunday afternoon and read cover to cover. Good intentions, it seemed, were not enough. 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. The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of history’s heroic greats, yet called the Quran “as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. I know many well-intentioned people who’ve begun reading the Quran and given up within a few pages. WHAT THE QUR’AN MEANT And Why It Matters By Garry Wills 226 pp.

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