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“One of the challenges for practitioners of any religion is wrestling with elements in their tradition that have been used to justify evil and then bending those elements back toward the good. Many Christians ignore New Testament passages that blame Jews for the death of Jesus. But because some Christians have used these passages to justify hatred, persecution, and murder of Jews, the challenge is to attend to these words with care and then to drain them of anti-Semitic connotations. Similarly, the challenge for Muslims is to attend to passages in the Quran that extremists have used to justify unjust killing. Many Muslims are meeting this challenge. To suicide bombers, they point out that the Quran condemns suicide unequivocally—"Do not kill yourselves" (4:29)—and promises hell for those who do so. To those who kill women or children or civilians, they point out that the Quran condemns mass murder (5:32) and insists on proportionality (2:194). Since the seventh century, Islamic law has been committed to vigorously defending the rights of noncombatants.” — Stephen Prothero