Excerpt:
There seems to be an almost inevitable irritation when novelists in Britain and America, with their long history of free speech, touch on matters Islamic. I am not the first and probably won't be the last to have ruffled some feathers, though I feel sad about this, because my new novel, A Week in December, is carefully researched, and, among its main characters, presents a hugely sympathetic and loving Muslim family; it is furthermore made clear that the parents' kindness and good citizenship spring not just from being naturally good eggs but from their devotion to the Koran.
The crucial issue, I suppose, that divides Muslims from other religions is the nature of the holy scripture. We Christians and Jews have long accepted that our scriptures were written by humans; indeed, much biblical scholarship focuses on exactly which humans, and when.
For Muslims, after some intra-religious debate, it was agreed that the Koran is "uncreated": this means, as I understand it, that it is literally and in every syllable the word of the Almighty, unshaped ("uncreated") by human hand.