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Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice: A Layman's Guide To The Koran

by Bernard Payeur

280 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #06-1774; ISBN 1-4251-0017-1; US$20.22, C$20.22, EUR13.81, £10.44

Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice, A Layman*s Mildly Irreverent Guide To The Koran. The title says it all. The Muslim Holy Book explained in a way we can all understand.

About the Book

Is this what the Koran is all about?

With the Koran as their legal and moral justification, the Taliban executed women and girls in soccer stadiums. Anonymous in oppressive burqas - invisible in life, invisible in death - brought into the stadium in the back of pick-up trucks and forced to kneel on the ground, then shot in the back of the head to the obvious pleasure of the bearded young and old men milling around and shouting Allahu Akbar, God is Great.

Scenes from a soccer stadium in Kabul after the Taliban took power.

A sixteen year old Iranian girl from the town of Neka is hung from a crane and agonizes for more than forty-five minutes, the movements in her black burqa, the only indication that inside that black sack-like robe an innocent girl is slowly choking to death. The town's people looking up at that obscene garment, sealed at the top with a hangman's knot that is slowly strangling the struggling teenager, sob and condemn the Mullahs - Islamic scholars, interpreters of the Koran - for condemning the young girl to this horrible, lingering death. The girl's crime ... having pre-marital sex.

Scenes from Iran, 2004

"Look, teacher," a child cried out during a school evacuation as flames exploded out of the twin towers, "The birds are on fire." The birds, human beings jumping to their death to escape the fire that was consuming them courtesy of young Muslim men whose leader Muhammad Atta claimed would be rewarded by the God of the Koran with virgins by the score once their killing work, in His name, was done.

Scenes from New York, September 11, 2001

Read Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice
and make up your own mind.