A year ago in Washington, I met David Plotz, deputy editor of Slate magazine who was then six months into an ambitious project to blog the Bible. As his first post explained, he had always been a proud Jew but a not particularly observant one. Idly picking up the Torah one day at a cousin’s batmitzvah had left him unsettled — not just by the moral implications of the story he read, but by what else he might have either forgotten or never learned. He resolved there and then, for the first time as an adult, to read the Bible from beginning to end and blog about it as he went along.

His thoughts and discoveries as he blogged the Old Testament can be found at Slate and they make fascinating reading. Plotz later described the experience as the most rewarding journalistic year of his life, in his final post.
My trip to Washington came 18 months after the London bombings of July 2005, where four suicide bombers had murdered 52 people and injured 700 others. Immediately, it revived the heated debate that had begun in earnest after 9/11: what was motivating young Muslims to kill their fellow citizens? The statements from the grave cited western support for oppressive regimes and western intervention in Islamic countries as their justification. But the language they used constantly referred back to their Islamic beliefs.

Since then, the debate has spilled over into every aspect of Muslim life, placing Muslims and their faith under unprecedented scrutiny — everything from from women’s clothes and family relationships to reading habits and how and where people pray.

Watching that played out across the media has sometimes been deeply disturbing: the violence of the language used, the mutual antagonism, the generalisations, the blame and counter-blame. But what has also struck me is the level of disagreement (some might call it ignorance) among non-Muslims about what Muslims believe, and why.

And reflecting on that, as I listened to David Plotz, is why I thought we might use the same concept and try blogging the Quran. Not just what it says about jihad or apostasy but the whole book, from beginning to end, all its verses and all its themes. How should Islam’s sacred book be read and understood in the 21st century? What is the meaning and significance that Muslims derive from it? How should non-Muslims interpret its message?
I thought it might provide a new interface between Muslims and non-Muslims, while the collaboration that Plotz describes — the way the internet allows readers to shape and guide the journalism — was something a newspaper could host.

It was then just a matter of finding the right blogger. Zia Sardar would freely admit that he’s never considered himself a blog-savvy writer. This will be his first foray into interactive journalism. But as the author of Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim (among many other books), he really knows his subject.
Blogging the Quran is conceived as a year-long project. Before the blogs proper start, Zia has written three introductory pieces: a personal piece about what the Quran means to him, the nature and style of the Quran — its structure and why it’s such a difficult book to read. The third piece is about the study and interpretations of the Quran.

He’ll then start at the beginning — al-Fatiha 1-5: God. And in subsequent weeks, until the end of the year, he’ll blog sometimes by looking at particular verses, sometimes by themes and concepts and sometimes by topics.

The Guardian