I know very little about the Qu'ran. Only what I've ascertained from the late-night ramblings of my peers and the racially-fueled binges of media pundits. I know it's significant. I'm not so sure why. I know it has a history, I'm not sure what kind. I know it's polarizing. I don't know what the poles are nor do I know on what they might balance. 

I should be interested, but I'm not really. Maybe that's changing. 

I read today that in the late 1990s Saddam Hussein commissioned a text of the Qu'ran be written, not in ink but in his own blood. 

He's been dead for 7 years now. A modern-day tyrant. Still though, from what little I know of Islam, the act of writing its holy text in blood seems violently beautiful. In what other way can we think of the religions of our world but in the way they are practiced? In the way they are spoken? In their language?

If you want to be politically correct and will it otherwise, fine, but the way we talk about Islam today is as a religion of violence. As a religion that birthed from its womb a day of dust and fire and screaming, people's heads turned up to God only to see the fallen fall. Were those his tears crashing into the pavement? Crashing into other tears?

What does it say when a viscous and inhumane tyrant vilified across the world as a monster of the Muslim world writes out the Qu'ran with 27 litres of his own blood? Does it corroborate what we all want to hear? Does it make evil the entire religion and damn its people?

Or can it be beautiful? Can it exist as a frozen moment in time, a singularity, not just of a religion but of an entire world zeitgeist? What will they say of it as an artifact 500 years from now? 

That conversation most certainly will depend on the one we're having right now. The way in which we talk about Saddam's Qu'ran.

Can we allow a text written in blood to be beautiful knowing what we know? Can we allow Islam to be?

What's beautiful and what's evil is not so often quite obvious..