Piers Akerman has lunch with the enemy.

SEEKING the truth about Islam, I had lunch in Lakemba last week with Keysar Trad, the most quoted Muslim voice in Australia.

I'll bet he was shuddering all the while at the thought of lowering himself like that, much like that episode of The Simpsons where Mr Burns runs for governor and has to have dinner with the Simpsons for publicity. And did Piers learn anything, other than that his Penguin Classics version of the Koran is considered to be faulty? Well...

If the Penguin Classics edition of the Koran (first published in 1956) is the favoured bedside edition for the terrorist classes and hasn't yet been subjected to a fatwah, then it must be. Now.
If it is responsible for the mayhem in the world – the publishers boast "over a million copies sold worldwide" – it should be withdrawn from sale immediately.

He's right, you know. What we need right now is a good old-fashioned book burning. Piers can get the fuel and the wood for the fire, and I'll get the books. Hell, I'll even throw in some other books Piers won't like, such as the majority report from the enquiry into the "children overboard" affair.

But honestly, just look at what he's saying. He's gone beyond just saying things I disagree with to things that are actually stupid. The "terrorist classes" wouldn't be reading the Penguin Classics edition. They'd be reading it in the original Arabic. Quite apart from the fact that bin Laden et al wouldn't need an English translation of the Koran, the common perception is that the Koran cannot really be translated—this is the position taken even by translators of the book—and the original Arabic text is the only word of Allah and the only text that can be used officially. And a "fatwah" (sic) against it? What sort of "legal opinion based on religious reasoning" against it would he like? Perhaps Piers would also like to declare a jihad against it, since he evidently feels he's being clever using Islamic terms like that. And then he ends with this:

Later, he recommends I read Muhammad Asad's difficult-to-find 1984 edition of the Koran, published by Dar al-Andalus Limited, of Gibraltar.
Well, Mr Trad, the next lunch will be on me.
I'll ask at Elizabeth's Secondhand Book Shop, but what I really want to know is who's putting all the poison in the Koranic poetry, and when will young murderers around the world stop masquerading as Muslims?

I don't get it. Is Piers actually saying that there's a difference between the Islamist terrorists and your average Muslim in the street? Cos the tenor of the rest of his piece somehow doesn't give me that impression. Here's something else he says in this article:

Armed with my well-thumbed Penguin Classics edition of the Koran, I wanted to discuss the increasingly widely held Western view that, tragically, terrorists claiming to be acting in the name of Islam have been making a lot of the news lately.
(That qualification is necessary because other explosive people also claiming to be Muslims are quick to write to the newspapers these days to point out that terrorism is not an Islamic practice.)

Piers would probably have liked to add the word "Bullshit" after that sentence, except the sub-editor would probably have hacked it out. Consider also this excerpt from another op-ed of his from last week:

IT IS well and good for members of Australia's Muslim communities to denounce terrorism and claim in the local press that such murderous activity is un-Islamic, but they're telling the wrong audience.
We've heard it before – and, unfortunately, their declarations fly in the face of the growing, charred mass of evidence now accumulating in Bali's makeshift morgues, and in the historical record of the flattened World Trade Centre site, the rebuilt Pentagon, bombed Indonesian churches, holed ships and dead French, Germans, Kenyans, Tanzanians and others.

So either Piers has suddenly mellowed out somewhat in the last week or else he's displaying his mastery of irony in a way that I'm not picking up. Either way, I don't get it. And to be sure, Piers Akerman's stuff is not usually worth the effort of getting, but this one irritated me enough to go through in more detail...

posted by James Russell | 4:53 PM