What did you think of him so far?

Yes, I was thinking of Morecambe and Wise.

We're a quarter of the way now (14 weeks done out of 55), and Sardar's goals and methods are becoming clear. To understand them we have to start with his central problem. His problem is this.

He's clearly a man with a moderate tendency in religion. He talks about the need for Muslims to be a 'middle' people, he makes the right liberal noises about women, holy war and so on. If he was a Christian, he'd be something like Madeleine Bunting, or the old Bishop of Durham.

But in one respect he's as fundamentalist as Sayyid Qutb. The Qur'an is the word of God, full stop. While Christians of his stamp are entirely happy to regard the Bible as flawed, full of good things but also error-strewn and prone to moral outrages, for Sardar there is no question of that kind of laxity with the Qur'an.

Which is a problem, because the Qur'an has just as many dodgy bits as the Bible. In fact it's arguably worse, because it combines Old Testament atrocities with New Testament hellfire.

So that's his problem. The option to write off the appalling bits as human error just isn't there. Instead, he has to find ways to maintain the pretence that they don't say what they clearly do.

So that's his problem. What's ours? Well, we don't really have an equivalent problem, because we've limited our goals to demonstrating that his problem actually is a problem. All we have to do is just pick holes in his analysis. Not all of it, because it isn't a problem for us if he's partly right. If we can find one verse in the Qur'an which fails the divinity test, the whole thing fails with it, because God's word has to be perfect. In point of fact we've found hundreds, but really we didn't need most of them at all. The rules of the game would seem incredibly unfair, if they weren't his rules.

Of course, one of his methods is to deny the implications of these rules, but we'll be talking about his methods in the next post.

What are his goals? Well, his main goal is to resolve this problem, but just to prove he can juggle more than one logical impossibility at a time he gives himself another one.

His other goal is to demonstrate that the Qur'an is the work of God, purely by showing how wonderful it is. The text itself, when examined, questioned by a doubting mind, leads to the conclusion its origin is not human but a revelation of the divine, he says, as if his job wasn't impossible already.

We can dispose of this fairly quickly, just by considering the number of hurdles you'd have to jump before any genuinely doubting mind could consider such a claim established.

Firstly, you'd need to refute any suggestion of contradiction, moral obscenity or historical inaccuracy in the book. The book would have to be visibly perfect from a scholarly point of view. This is just a restatement of his first goal.

But then, on top of that, you'd need to find some kind of measure of human capacity in the field of holy book writing. Perhaps you'd look for structural complexity, for thematic consistency, for nobility of sentiment. To be honest the mind kind of bounces off the question, but he's posed it so we can only do our best.

Once you'd come up with a set of criteria, you'd then have to show that the Qur'an met at least one of them. That it was more poetic than Ovid, more subtly structured than a Shakespeare play, more inspiring to the spirit than a Martin Luther King speech. And not just a bit more. So much better, so much more divine that it was beyond the bounds of mere coincidence.

That's what you'd have to do to convince the doubting mind. Of course, to convince the religious mind you'd just have to say how nice it would be. Especially if you'd had control of that mind ever since it was six.

He seems to have backed away from this evidentiary goal of late, and we've heard no mention of it for a while. He's still pursuing his first goal though. In fact he restated it in Answers to questions recently. I refer to the premise I stated at the start of this blog: namely, that for me the Qur'an is the Word of God. The whole function of this blog is to discover how Muslim believers relate to the Qur'an today.

Of course, it may just be that he doesn't use words as precisely as secularists. I was surprised to learn that finding out how Muslim believers relate to the Qur'an today was the whole function of this blog, because I'd thought it was mainly a personal view, rather than an analysis of the broad spectrum of contemporary Muslim opinion. I'm also not sure why the Qur'an should be the word of God for him. Surely it either is or it isn't.

I don't think he really means what that paragraph implies at all. I think he thinks the Qur'an is the word of God full stop, and I think this blog is a personal view rather than a summary of Muslim thought. I also think that our expectation that the words he uses should mean something coherent and consistent by our standards is irrelevant to him.

In my observation, religious people treat religion as if it was literature. There is no need for statements to be consistent with each other, as long as they have metaphorical resonance. Meaning is just a complex web of cross-references, and the kind of precision that for instance a scientist would bring to an analysis would seem limiting to them. Of course, they then go on to make factual claims which could only be sustained with a more rigorous methodology, but for them that doesn't seem to matter.

That's why they're so rubbish at proper argument. It's because they don't really care. Oh, they may write articles and comments with some superficial methodical intent, but on some level they're just humouring us. For them, unverifiable supposition is always where it's at.

So for Sardar, the use of the word whole doesn't imply any kind of logical exclusion. If we were to say that a particular goal was the whole function of a blog, we would mean that other goals weren't its function. He does not. To him the word whole is probably more of an emotional intensifier, meaning something like this next bit really matters to me. Similarly, how Muslim believers relate to the Qur'an today is code for how Muslims like me do.

So that's his goals. Our goals are simple. We don't think the Qur'an is the word of God, and we think Sardar's attempts to reconcile the text as written with his own liberal views do violence to the text. We seek to establish that the text is a plausible candidate for the kind of treatment that modern theologians give the Bible, but cannot be taken seriously as the word of God, because no conceivable deity would write such a book.

Let's not leave our real motive so ulterior, though. We seek to undermine the idea of revealed truth because we think it's a step towards a planet with no religion on it at all. We've seen it in Britain. True religion, true Book-bashing literalism, is powerful medicine. This new brand, this liberal religion, is more like some kind of homeopathic tincture. It looks like the real thing, but doesn't offer any protection against the epidemic of secularism at all.

So much for problems and goals. What about his methods? And ours? More on that later in the week.