It’s getting worse. I’ve found a few breathtakingly humane passages in these chapters, like the one from “Cattle” about showing loving kindness to your parents and not murdering one’s own children out of poverty. The rest might read something like this:
“Yadda yadda. Blah blah blah kill the infidels. Yadda yadda piety blah blah reward will be yours if only you are faithful to the word of God. Yadda yadda blah blah blah. God is Compassionate to all (except the evil nonbelievers who will pull up sheets of fire over themselves as they roast forever in burning hell).
I know it’s not much help to those who haven’t yet read the Qur’an, but it’s the feeling I have reading page after page of the same exact rhetoric. If ever any book was in need of a decent editor, it is this. The whole thing might boil down to a single tweet:
Be faithful God knows the pious will be rewarded and the unbelievers will burn yadda yadda yadda.
And I think there are still some unused characters in that. I don’t know if I’ll make it all the way through unless Allah creates some action, or some characters, or some really great poetry. Say what you will about the Bible, it is a more dimensional read. I’m getting bored. Help.
A further thought: how would Moby-Dick have turned out had Herman Melville been raised as a Muslim? And you thought the whaling chapters were pedantic?
Marc Di Martino 
It’s this freedom under your own “occidental” view? To humiliate and insult some other people’s beliefs.
It’s this the hightest point of your career as a man of letters?
Bitching and bitching from a tiny aparment, struggling to live decently. Theorizing about religion and values.
Life sucks in the USA, and sucks more and more in most of occidental countries. Skepticism, materialism, pragmatism; meanwhile getting fat, bald, broke… without dreams.
I dislike this post, very much and feel embarrassed about things like this.
Well, in brief, yes. Freedom of speech does not protect one from being offended by another’s opinion. If you want your comments to be published, I advise you to refrain from ad hominem attacks on the author (like the one above). They only make you sound stupid, and deprive your arguments of any power they might otherwise have.
Well, once again you’re mistaken, and misunderstood.
I was not refering to you at any point, but to most of the people i observe… I was refering to you explicitly when I wrote about your career as a writer.
I talk more about the actual lack of values, and respect… I think that some other cultures still have the chance to preserve convictions; the occidental ones are dying; the sense of community.
Decadence.
You see Marc? This is the farthest you get, controversy, polemic. Free speech. Just to break balls, right? Intellectuals?
No, all this is delirious.
i dunno what happened to you. you used to rock man
I appreciate your moralizing, Borja, and your attempts to save my soul. Perhaps you could focus your argument, however, on presenting an actual point of view instead of righteously proclaiming that I’m not cool anymore because I have a different point of view than you do. Try to sound halfway intelligent, even if you’re drunk.