After finishing my Friday prayer at ADAMS Center mosque, in Sterling VA, yesterday, Dr. Peter Lavoy, acting assistant secretary of defense for Asia and Pacific security affairs, offered apology to Washington-area Muslims for the burning of Qurans at Bagram Air Base near Kabul, Afghanistan. This is part of the series of apologies offered by President Obama and US officials. He announced retraining all 140,000 coalition troops in Afghanistan in the handling of religious materials.
Burning and trashing of Quran, last week, is not the first incident of discretion towards this book. It happened in 2005 in Guantanamo, 2007 Nigeria, and on March 20, 2011 in Florida by pastor Wayne Sapp and overseen by pastor Terry Jones who announced “International Burn a Quran Day” to commemorate the 10th anniversary of September 11. On the other hand we see the violent reaction of people in Afghanistan that costs tens of lives of the demonstrators repeating over and over again!
Whether mistreatment was unintentional and out of ignorance in the recent case, or intentional and out of ignorance also, as in last year’s, the proper treatment and retraining would be more effective when the people understand what the book is about. For this, I’d like to share what I wrote to one of my friends in 2006
Click the link above to open the Power Point presentation in native (ppt) or show (pps) format.
Excellent and very simple way of describing Quran by Quran itself and faith, may Allah SWTA guide all of humainity and reward those who did this work, Ameen.