The Naval Chaplaincy School and Center (NCSC), The U.S. Army Chaplain Center and School (USACHCS), and the U.S. Air Force Chaplain Service Institute (AFCSI) were united several years ago [1] in Fort Jackson, SC to form the Armed Forces Chaplaincy Center AFCC. Colonel Chet Lanious, USACHCS’ director of the Center for
It is also permitted to burn and then bury it in a place that is far removed from rubbish, trash, paths and walkways. (Doing this) will safeguard it from any type of degradation and debasement, as well as a protection for the Koran so that there does not occur any confusion, distortion or dispute due to the spreading and circulation of copies of the Koran that have printing and/or publishing errors.
Moreover, just this past September 16, 2011, during a PBS interview [4], Imam Jihad Turk, Director of Religious Affairs, at the Islamic Center of Southern California, provided these pellucid, and succinct directives
When Muslims want to respectfully dispose of a text of the Koran that is no longer usable, we will burn it. So if someone, for example, in their own private collection or library had a text of the Koran that was damaged or that was in disrepair, so the binding was ruined, etc., or it got torn, they might bring it by to the Islamic Center and ask that someone here dispose of it properly if they were unsure how to do that. And what I’ll do is I’ll take it to my fireplace at home and burn it there in the fireplace. So I sort of take the pages out and then burn it to make sure that it gets thoroughly charred and is no longer recognizable as script.
Imam Turk reinforced his views by mentioning [4] a critically important historical incident from the advent of Islam: when the third “Rightly Guided Caliph” Uthman engaged in an extensive, systematic campaign of Koran burning.
The pious Muslim narrative of Uthman’s exploits is summarized in a canonical Hadith from Sahih Bukhari Volume 6, Book 61, Number 510 [5]:
Narrated Anas bin Malik: Hudhaifa bin Al-Yaman came to Uthman at the time when the people of Sham and the people of
The great scholar of early Islam, Leone Caetani (1869-1935), published an essay in The Muslim World Vol. 5, 1915, pp. 380-390, (reproduced in, Ibn Warraq, The Origins of the Koran, Prometheus Books, 1998, pp.67-75; extracts from pp. 69,74) entitled, “Uthman and the Rescension of the Koran,” which included these confirmatory observations about the rationale for assiduously gathering and burning essentially all of the extant Korans in 650/51 A.D. Caetani’s observations emphasize how Uthman’s actions, which tacitly acknowledge the existence of Koranic “variants,” and suggest a very human origin of the text, were motivated by a desire to enforce the dogma of the Koran being uncreated, unchanging, the eternal word of Allah—a belief which persists amongst the Muslim masses to this day.
The official canonical redaction undertaken at Uthman’s command, was due to the uncertainty which reigned in reference to the text. It is clear that in 30 A.H. (650/51 A.D.) no official redaction existed. [Islamic] Tradition itself [i.e., the hadith, Sahih Bukhari Volume 6, Book 61, Number 510 [5], above] admits that there were various “schools,” one in Iraq, one in Syria, one in al-Basrah, besides others in smaller places, and then, exaggerating in an orthodox sense this scandal, tries to make out that the divergences were wholly immaterial; but such affirmations accord ill with the opposition excited by the caliph’s act in al-Kufah. The official version must have contained somewhat serious modifications…
Uthman ordered the compilation of a single official text of the Koran, and the violent suppression, the destruction by fire of all the other copies existing in the provinces…It should be added that even if all existing copies of the Koran could not be traced to Uthman’s official copy, anyone who cast aspersions on Uthman’s action would be liable to the charge of raising doubts about the foundation of all Islam, for the Islamic world from one end to the other lives in the conviction that the text existing today represents the true, eternal, immutable word of God.
The Islamic doctrine, historical precedent, and, most importantly, contemporary recommendations by both a sincere, ecumenical American military chaplain, and a respected American Muslim cleric, described above, should lead to inescapable conclusions. An America possessed with political and military leaders befitting our great nation’s heritage, would not be engaged in groveling apologies [6] for the cynically manipulated, lethal fanaticism unleashed by our “Afghan allies” in response to the disposal of Korans defaced by captured Afghan jihadists using these “holy books” as an illicit messaging system to communicate with one another. Instead courageous, morally upright US leaders would be demanding apologies from the Karzai government and its “parliament” for fomenting murderous jihad violence [7] that today claimed the lives of two US soldiers [8].