The Koran is ambiguous, as is the Bible, and the US Constitution. Indeed any meaningful statute passed by a legislature has some measure of ambiguity. Reconciling these ambiguities by means of textual interpretation is a large part of the reason why there are theologians, rabbis, muftis and Supreme Court justices.<p>Based on what I&#x27;ve read, in the case of Islam there has been a huge amount of exegeses and there are complex rules of interpretation that govern the meaning of texts. Trying to CTRL-F a translation of the Koran for &quot;slay&quot; as someone suggested elsewhere is a bizarre way to try to figure out the meaning of a text which has been pored over by great minds for centuries. I think it is a result of the fact that those of us with technical backgrounds tend to be dismissive of the humanities, uncomfortable with ambiguity and prone to literalism.[1]<p>The interesting thing is that discarding exegesis is exactly the approach taken by the Salafist&#x2F;Wahabist tradition of the Saudis, and of ISIS and Al-Qaeda. 1400 years of scholarship is replaced with a literal textualist reading of the Koran and Hadiths, and thus justification is found for the most henious of crimes. There is a Latin phrase that describes this approach of discarding precedent entirety in favor of novel readings of a text, but it escapes me for now.<p>The Koran, or the Bible are not &quot;violent&quot; books not are they &quot;peaceful&quot;, they are merely collections of words that need to be interpreted by their readers. It is unfortunate that the intellectually bankrupt literalist interpretation of the Koran is on the ascendant in the Middle East because of Saudi oil money, and that it presently lends itself to the justification of terrorism (even if the Saudi regime itself opposes terrorism).<p>[1] This could be a reason why terrorist jihadism, buttressed by literalist readings attracts a disproportionate number of engineering types.