Garry Wills attempts to demystify the Quran

Americans are obsessed with Islam as an idea, as a mystery and as an existential threat to the West. As a result, our debates over Islam and Muslims aren’t really about “them” as much as they are about “us” — and the supposed battle between the two. In his new book, “What the Qur’an Meant: And Why It Matters,” historian Garry Wills shows how some Americans use Muslims as a way to define who they themselves are and what they stand for, and to sharpen their definition of Western civilization.

The 2016 presidential race was a case in point. As Wills writes, “The crowded field of Republican candidates sounded, at times, as if they were running against Islam, not against Democrats.” Wills, the author of “Why I Am a Catholic,” comes at Islam as a sympathetic outsider.

His premise is noble enough: that ignorance can be fought with knowledge. If only more people became more informed about the Quran, they might not believe those who insist that Islam is a dangerous religion. So it’s hard to fault Wills for some cliched reassurances. For example, he writes of al-Qaida and the soldiers of the Islamic State: “The minority fanatics seem to be unaware of their own traditions.”

Here, Wills shows that his knowledge of the Islamic State’s theology is sometimes limited. The problem isn’t that Islamic State chief Abu Bakr alBaghdadi is unaware of more broad-minded interpretations of the Quran; it’s that he thinks they’re wrong. The Islamic State’s Salafi-jihadist rendering of Islam — a kind of originalist approach to the canonical texts — is appealing to its followers precisely because it distrusts accumulated tradition that has helped Muslims adapt Islamic law for changing times. For the Islamic State’s ideologues, modernity has bent Islam to its will, and their job is to reverse that process.

Wills sometimes seeks to present Islam as something it never was. He claims that a “mountain of evidence” demonstrates that “Islam favors peace over violence.” But Islam is not a pacifist religion. For centuries, Muslim jurists developed a body of law on the waging of war, including how to treat prisoners and civilians caught in conflict and the definition of what properly qualifies as jihad. Wills leaves an intriguing question unanswered: Why should Islam be pacifist in the first place? Since religions are more than just private belief systems, they inevitably must account not only for the ideal of peace but for the reality of war.

Wills makes other claims that are simply misleading, as when he asserts that “there are no ‘portions’ of the Qur’an that discuss Shari’ah.” In support of his argument, he says that only about 500 of the Quran’s 6,235 verses deal with legal matters. The Quran is not a legal manual, but 8 percent of a book isn’t exactly nothing, either. The holy book is one of the major sources for interpreting Sharia.

In a modern liberal context, the law explicitly belongs to the realm of politics and governance, while religion is seen as something separate, sacred and personal. This is not only a modern conception of law — a product of the nation-state system and the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with the rational — but a distinctly Christian one as well.

This is not a book by a scholar of Islam, so it shouldn’t be judged for its lack of originality. It is a book for people who know little about the religion. But if the millions of Americans who found themselves suspicious of Muslims weren’t already reassured by George W. Bush’s pronouncements of Islam as a religion of peace, it’s unclear why Wills would do much better.

Trying to make Islam digestible to non-Muslims by making it peaceful and legally ambivalent may only inspire more confusion. What happens when, after reading about this palatable, peaceful and unthreatening religion, Americans are confronted by a version of it that is unapologetically assertive and uncompromising?