Reading the Qur'an Now

On many occasions people have said to me that they want to read the Qur'an in order to discover why Muslims want to destroy the West, or why Muslim women can be beaten and must be veiled. Only rarely do I hear from people that they want to read the Qur'an to learn how the message it contains has inspired religious faith and practice for fourteen centuries for a global community now made up of more than a billion people.
The fact that the Qur'an is often viewed as a terrorist training manual or a handbook for the subjugation and abuse of women, rather than as sacred scripture, is part of contemporary reality. Words like jihad and hijab have worked their way into common parlance all over the world, and the memory and consequences of what took place on September 11, 2001 live on through personal sentiment, political rhetoric, the imposition of extreme security measures (especially at airports), as well as through the unsettled and unsettling struggles taking place in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere.
When we read the Qur'an today, we cannot erase what has happened in the world over the past few decades, nor can we directly combat the biases that have emerged in response to what has taken place. We can try to bracket out these influences by acknowledging that they exist, and by approaching the Qur'an with an open mind and an open heart, in an effort to see what it has to say on its own terms. I do not mean that we should try to read the Qur'an outside the context of recent history (this, of course, is an impossibility). What I do mean is that we should not look to the Qur'an to confirm our preconceptions about what is happening in the world. Rather, we should see what ideas are presented in the Qur'an and then reflect upon what would be happening in the world if people were to act in accordance with the message it contains.