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Americas leading religious scholar and public intellectual introduces lay readers to the Quran with a measured, powerful reading of the ancient text

Garry Wills has spent a lifetime thinking and writing about Christianity. In What the Quran Meant, Wills invites readers to join him as he embarks on a timely and necessary reconsideration of the Quran, leading us through perplexing passages with insight and erudition. What does the Quran actually say about veiling women? Does it justify religious war?

There was a time when ordinary Americans did not have to know much about Islam. That is no longer the case. We blundered into the longest war in our history without knowing basic facts about the Islamic civilization with which we were dealing. We are constantly fed false information about Islamclaims that it is essentially a religion of violence, that its sacred book is a handbook for terrorists. There is no way to assess these claims unless we have at least some knowledge of the Quran.

In this book Wills, as a non-Muslim with an open mind, reads the Quran with sympathy but with rigor, trying to discover why other non-Muslimssuch as Pope Francisfind it an inspiring book, worthy to guide people down through the centuries. There are many traditions that add to and distort and blunt the actual words of the text. What Wills does resembles the work of art restorers who clean away accumulated layers of dust to find the original meaning. He compares the Quran with other sacred books, the Old Testament and the New Testament, to show many parallels between them. There are also parallel difficulties of interpretation, which call for patient explorationand which offer some thrills of discovery. What the Quran Meant is the opening of a conversation on one of the worlds most practiced religions.