In the past few weeks, I have been asked regularly what we learned from September 11. The greatest lesson concerned religion. And the lessons are as much about Us as about Them. After 9/11, many commentators focused intensely on Islam, trying to determine what features of that faith led its adherents to bloodshed. Many writers have presented Islam as a stark contrast to Christianity and Judaism, and portrayed a struggle of darkness against light. The Qur’an, in this view, is something like a terrorist manifesto, with so many verses about battles, swords and blood. What’s so startling about this approach is what it says about how little Christians and Jews seem to know about their own scriptures, and their own history.

I agree with the main themes and arguments advanced by Philip Jenkins, not only in his blog post for Contending Modernities, but also in his interesting and important new book, Laying Down the Sword, which I have reviewed at some length for a forthcoming issue of The National Interest. That said, let me play devil’s advocate here and develop a point of view with which I fundamentally disagree, but which Jenkins does not fully counter in his otherwise compelling rejection of the distorted logic of Islamophobes who describe the Qur’an as a “handbook for terrorists.”