Why the Koran must not be burnt Uthman had a recension made, and copies distributed to the principal cities of the empire, with orders that all other versions be destroyed. There was, according to the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, strong opposition to this from Kufa, where ill feeling already existed towards Uthman. But elsewhere there seems to have been no difficulty. Uthman was killed in a separate incident in 656, only 24 years after Mohammed's death. In Cairo, the Ben Ezra synagogue had a genizah where manuscripts had collected for 1,000 years. In 1896 the scholar Solomon Schechter, with the support of Charles Taylor, the Master of St John's College, Cambridge, travelled to Cairo and secured permission to take them away. There are now 140,000 fragments from the genizah under study in Cambridge. Christians have a tradition of burying a bible or Gospel book with a dead person. I wrote here in 2007 about the beautiful little volume of the Gospel according to St John buried with St Cuthbert in 697. But, if anything, the practice for disposing of worn-out bibles is to burn them. Canon Law in the Catholic Church only specifies that blessed objects are not to be made over to inappropriate use. If bibles were to be burnt, their ashes would be scattered in a place where they would not be trampled upon. It has been suggested that in the American Protestant world burning a bible would not be thought reverent, even though there is a protocol for burning a damaged US flag. In another parallel, medieval churches in England usually have a piscina in the chancel, a niche with a drain that sends water to the earth outside. This would be used for surplus holy water or water with which the priest washed his hands at the time of the Offertory. He would drink water that had purified his fingers after Communion. All these rituals relate to things made holy by being blessed or by containing a reference to God. The Koran is regarded by Muslims as the uncreated word of God. In the Catholic Church, bread and wine consecrated in the Mass are regarded as Jesus Christ really present, God and man. There is no alternative, as far as I know, to these "sacred species" (as they are known) being eaten or drunk. In the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer of 1662 it is stipulated that any consecrated bread and wine be eaten and drunk "reverently." In this case, burning would certainly be a grave affront.