Ziauddin Sardar situates Sebastian Faulks’s blunt dismissal of the literary and ethical merits of the Qur’an at the end of a long history of similarly ungenerous readings:
Alas, poor Sebastian Faulks! First he annoys the Muslims by declaring, in a Sunday Times interview, that the Qur’an is “the rantings of a schizophrenic” with “no ethical dimension”. Then he upsets the Islamophobes by apologising. The poor sod has been hit by a self-inflicted double whammy.
There is, however, nothing new about Faulks’ comments. It has, sadly, always been thus. If he overstated “in order to make a point more clearly” he ended up uttering standard judgment of western civilisation from Dante to Amis.
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