An Open Letter to Talal Itani

Thank you, Reverend Sage, for the purity and clarity of your English translation of the Holy Quran. I feel on reading it that your remarkable and worthy Faith has, for the first time that I am aware of, been given  a deservedly comprehensible and intellectually and stylistically respectable presence in my native language.  This, no doubt, is how the Quran should sound in English.

Not, alas, of course, that I am persuaded by it, but that I am assured that at last I understand Islam via its Sacred Scriptures.  Do the faithful never shudder a bit at the insistence straight through from the very beginning of the Quran on "Belief in the way that others believe"--nor feel, with disquiet, that such insistence is the very essence of duplicity and charlatanry?