Perhaps it will be possible, once you are done, and he is done, to lay the two commentaries -- both of them helpful, but helpful in very different ways -- side by side (synoptically, as the good doctors of Divinity Avenue like to say). And then we shall all be able to compare, contrast, discuss the obvious Questions For Study and Discussion.

Something for you to look forward to. Ziauddin Sardar, I suspect, will not be quite as enthusiastic.

But how can he prevent it?

Posted by: Hugh at January 7, 2008 10:07 AM

Sardar has called for re-interpretation of the Qur'an and Ahadith, but I doubt his series and yours will share a lot of commonality. Just a hunch.

"I also will be keeping up with Mr. Sardar's efforts, and commenting on them here where appropriate."

I expect quite a bit of this.

Posted by: awake at January 7, 2008 10:27 AM

It is unfortunate that Mr. Sardar does not plan to take questions from all and sundry in the comments field

Despite his efforts to limit/frame the field of discussion, I look forward to following this series, and more importantly the expected frameless unlimited discussion no doubt to take place over the web.

Additionally, I expect JW/DW/HA to receive additional exposure since he chose to title his venture "Blogging the Koran". That's an added bonus to celebrate!

Posted by: heroyalwhyness at January 7, 2008 10:47 AM

I don't know. His introduction is a little bit on the lala side of things. One thing is that the koran is in a lot of different languages. This thing where it is in Arabic and very few know what it means is suspect to me. And let us say then that very few do understand it - when I read it - it is telling me that beating up women, torture, killing, stealing and lying are ok too. I don't know what is so great about this book that muslims just fawn over. The imams primary duty is to teach jihad, but reading the koran tells me that too.

Even the more peaceful passages - they are kludgy to me. This quote 'The eloquence, clarity, precision and grace of the Qur’an cannot be but from Allah' leaves me scratching my head. I just don't see it, or I guess I should say I just don't read it. I think it is because muslims just don't read too much else. Sometimes it sounds like mohammed just going on and on and on.. ad nauseum.

I am suspect on this new blogging the koran also because it looks as if anyone who has a comment has to go through someone to post so anyone who might disagree will probably get censored - a great favorite thing that muslims like to do too. censor and twist.

Posted by: R_not at January 7, 2008 10:53 AM

I am a big fan of your series, and I am very curious how the Guardian will deal with passages about beating your wife, killing the unbelievers,...Will there be enlightenment or apologetics?

Posted by: Silly Allah at January 7, 2008 11:36 AM

Dear Mr. Sandar -

Why did Amina and Sarad die?

Is it just "inevitable"?

Doesn't the Qur'an forbid such actions?

The Qur'an says nothing about dating infidels - I know Muslim women marrying unbelievers is forbidden (haram) in the Qur'an, but this was just dating. Teenagers in America do it all the time.
It's not illegal in the US and Mr. Said immigrated to this country over 20 years ago.

Shouldn't Muslims obey the laws of the country they move to?

Posted by: tanstaafl at January 7, 2008 11:37 AM

In his part autobiography 'Desperately seeking paradise', Sardar made a statement that sounded something like: 'every line in the Koran has a literal, metaphorical, symbolic and mystical meaning' (the 2nd and 3rd terms might have been slightly different). With such an approach, the possibilities for lying by shifting between levels of meaning could be limitless.

Posted by: wallyUK at January 7, 2008 11:41 AM

Sardar's "Blogging the Qur'an" will be heavy on two things:

1) the "human interest" side, where he tells us -- he has already begun to do so -- about how he first heard the Qur'an, read to him as he sat, aged six, on his mother's lap, lisping in numbers, and the numbers -- Sura and Ayat -- came. We'll get, we Infidels, a picture all curry and gemutlichkeit, making the whole thing humanly appealing -- see, we Muslims are no different from that Scottish crofter, weaving his Harris tweed just outside Stornaway, and reading the Bible -- the only book in his modest house -- to his Presbyertian offspring.

2) the various "levels" of interpretation will be given, with the "literal" one presented as just one among many, the one "favored by extremists" when, in fact, the "literal" one is what 99% of the world's Muslims adhere to, for the Qur'an is the uncreated and immutable word of God.

But by the time Ziauddin Sardar is through, the hapless Infidel readers will be convinced that there are many different "levels of interpretation" that are accepted, and our only task -- oh, such a simple task -- is to ensure that more and more Muslims swell the ranks of those who accept the "mystical" or "figurative" interpretation, and fewer and fewer are left to be swayed by the bad old "literal interpretation."

3) "Blogging the Qur'an" has one other obvious virtue, from the viewpoint of Ziauddin Sardar. He's grown up in England, and knows his Infidels. The more he can keep them away from the Hadith and the Sira, the more he can keep them focussed on Islam as consisting only of the Qur'an, the more he can distract Infidels from finding out about the details of the life, and the words, of Muhammad -- uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil -- the more chance he will have of prettifying -- O Most Beautified Islam! -- the picture to be presented, now that Ziauddin Sardar is here to rescue the Fair Maid of Mecca and titivate her sufficiently so that she will be, on the sound-stage of the Infidels, ready for her close-up.

Very clever, in his own confused and confusing way -- the way of those Muslims who know that something is deeply wrong with Islam but insist on remaining as Muslims, and don't know quite how to handle the Infidels, or for that matter how to handle Islam --- is Ziauddin Sardar.

But not clever enough.

Posted by: Hugh at January 7, 2008 12:48 PM

Sardar's "Blogging the Qur'an" will be heavy on three things:

1) the "human interest" side, where he tells us -- he has already begun to do so -- about how he first heard the Qur'an, read to him as he sat, aged six, on his mother's lap, lisping in numbers, and the numbers -- Sura and Ayat -- came. We'll get, we Infidels, a picture all curry and gemutlichkeit, making the whole thing humanly appealing -- see, we Muslims are no different from that Scottish crofter, weaving his Harris tweed just outside Stornaway, and reading the Bible -- the only book in his modest house -- to his Presbyertian offspring.

2) the various "levels" of interpretation will be given, with the "literal" one presented as just one among many, the one "favored by extremists" when, in fact, the "literal" one is what 99% of the world's Muslims adhere to, for the Qur'an is the uncreated and immutable word of God.

But by the time Ziauddin Sardar is through, the hapless Infidel readers will be convinced that there are many different "levels of interpretation" that are accepted, and our only task -- oh, such a simple task -- is to ensure that more and more Muslims swell the ranks of those who accept the "mystical" or "figurative" interpretation, and fewer and fewer are left to be swayed by the bad old "literal interpretation."

3) "Blogging the Qur'an" has one other obvious virtue, from the viewpoint of Ziauddin Sardar. He's grown up in England, and knows his Infidels. The more he can keep them away from the Hadith and the Sira, the more he can keep them focussed on Islam as consisting only of the Qur'an, the more he can distract Infidels from finding out about the details of the life, and the words, of Muhammad -- uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil -- the more chance he will have of prettifying -- O Most Beautified Islam! -- the picture to be presented, now that Ziauddin Sardar is here to rescue the Fair Maid of Mecca and titivate her sufficiently so that she will be, on the sound-stage of the Infidels, ready for her close-up.

Very clever, in his own confused and confusing way -- the way of those Muslims who know that something is deeply wrong with Islam but insist on remaining as Muslims, and don't know quite how to handle the Infidels, or for that matter how to handle Islam --- is Ziauddin Sardar.

But not clever enough.

Posted by: Hugh at January 7, 2008 12:50 PM

Sardar's Da'wa

Watching the socialist Left latch onto the most retrograde and regressive force availiable, Islam, is the hypocritical legacy of every so-called progressive useful idiot in the world today. The Worthless Generation, full of pretensions of adequacy, manages to kill off the West using the most primitive ideology in the book. It would be funny if it were hypothetical.

Posted by: Beagle at January 7, 2008 1:35 PM

Sardar is certainly a slippery customer: the very fact that the phrase blogging the Koran is a rip off and a reaction to Spencer is omitted by him as a matter of course.
The very first page of his autobiography rang alarm bells with me because he described, of all things, the odours that greet one on entering a mosque. I vaguely remember him listing a whole array of exotic things including ghee and hot milk and in the middle of all these things he included 'warm feet': my personal memories of the East London Mosque were that it smelled of dirty socks. He had deliberately euphemised this striking characteristic and then buried it among lesser details.

It's nice to see he is now a cultural commentator: he used to style himself as a Muslim expert on science until it became obvious that he had no serious contribution to make on the subject. He never actually seemed to state his views on the theory of evolution, which I would have thought was an important topic for a man who once talked of a new Islamic science coming into being. His close colleague, the Welsh convert, Merryl Wynn Davis, did write a screed on the subject. She effectively demolished it (to her satisfaction) by using po-mo deconstructionist techniques. In fact it was like watching someone trying to break up a giant piece of earth moving equipment by flapping at it with an inflated pig's bladder. Sardar is fond of post-modernist philosophy and it seemed to me that the article had his finger prints all over it.

With a bit of luck his blog will indulge itself to the full in the jargon and excesses of recent French philosophy making him look ridiculous to all but the willingly fooled.

Posted by: wallyUK at January 7, 2008 2:03 PM

It won't matter if a side-by-side comparison is made. As long as the muslims continue the line that unless you are muslim you can't understand islam, nothing will change. It all comes back to that superiority issue. As if no non-muslim is capable of intelligent thought. Of course the reality is we haven't been brainwashed in regards to islam. Sure, those of us who have thrown off the shackles of the islam propaganda machine will find it interesting and instructive, but in the end nothing will change. We will keep finding the massive holes in the koran and they will keep calling us racists, bigots, islamophobes, etc. The best we can do at this point is for JW et al to continue their crusade to educate the public about the nature of islam.

Posted by: Kevin at January 7, 2008 2:32 PM

What a great idea, I wonder where they got it from?

Knowing the Guardian, the spin will be like that in a Toilet. Round and round and round it goes, where it ends up, everyone knows.

Posted by: flowerknife_us at January 7, 2008 2:41 PM

Here is a previous posting about Ziauddin Sardar:

"Hasan Suroor is a great admirer, those who read his full text will at once realize, of Ziauddin Sardar, a Muslim who pushes the line about the Great Achievements of Islam in Science, and who hews to a slightly-less obvious version of the Musliim cant about how "all of subsequent science is to be found in the Qur'an" -- an extraordinary belief that ought to disqualify anyone from being taken seriously in the advanced West, much less be allowed to review books having to do with "Islam and Science" in Nature and The New Statesman (as Ziauddin Sardar has been allowed to do).

Here's a good comment from British science writer Lewis Jones:

01/23/2006

Science Allah Carte

"Muslim science? On the face of it, it seems as incongruous as Christian physics or Jewish oceanography. But can Islam plead a special case? A popular element along these lines has always been Islam's historical track record. When Ziauddin Sardar published his thoughts on the subject in New Scientist almost a quarter of a century ago, he titled his article, not "Can science come to Islam?" but "Can science come back to Islam?"

In the words of F.R. Rosenthal (The Classical Heritage of Islam): "Islamic rational scholarship, which we have mainly in mind when we speak of the greatness of Muslim civilization, depends in its entirety on classical antiquity . . . Islamic civilization as we know it would simply not have existed without the Greek heritage."

Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim, points out: "Islamic science was founded on the works of the ancient Greeks, and the Muslims are important as the transmitters of Greek (and Hindu) learning that may well have been lost otherwise" (Aristotle, Plato, Galen, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Euclid, Ptolemy). And even so, "most of the translators were Christian."

Warraq writes: "There is a persistent myth that Islam encouraged science. Adherents of this myth quote the Koran and hadith [traditional sayings of Muhammad] to prove their point . . . 'Seek knowledge, in China if necessary'; 'The search after knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim.' This is nonsense, because the knowledge advocated in the previous quotes is religious knowledge. Orthodoxy has always been suspicious of 'knowledge for its own sake,' and unfettered inquiry is deemed dangerous to the faith. . . . All sciences are blameworthy that are useless for acting rightly toward God."

"Those who kill do not think they are committing any crime," said Girija Shankar Jaiswal (a lawyer who argues cases for victimized women). "They think they are becoming martyrs. They do not mind going to jail."

Al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham was one of the greatest scientists of medieval Islam, and his "Optics" strongly influenced Kepler. The French philologist Ernest Renan wrote: "A disciple of Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher, relates that he was in Baghdad on business, when the library of a certain philosopher (who died in 1214) was burned there. The preacher, who conducted the execution of the sentence, threw into the flames, with his own hands, an astronomical work of Ibn al-Haitham, after he had pointed to a delineation therein given of the sphere of the earth, as an unhappy symbol of impious Atheism."

One is reminded of the nineteenth century English politician John Morley, discussing the life of Voltaire: "Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat."

In the twelfth century Averroes studied medicine and philosophy, and his work on Aristotle was responsible for the development of the inductive, empirical sciences. His reward was to be tried as a heretic, condemned, and exiled. Yet his name is often put forward as being at the forefront of the Islamic history of science.

Renan begged to differ: "To give Islam the credit of Averroes and so many other illustrious thinkers, who passed half their life in prison, in forced hiding, in disgrace, whose books were burned and whose writings almost suppressed by theological authority, are as if one were to ascribe to the Inquisition the discoveries of Galileo, and a whole scientific development which it was not able to prevent."

There is also a current line of thought that assumes Islamic science has been "hijacked" by fundamentalists, and that all ills can be conveniently attributed to them. But shifting the burden of anti-science to an isolated hard-core fundamentalist group evades the central issue. Taslima Nasreen had a government warrant issued for her arrest in Bangladesh (for "outraging religious feelings"), and has some experience of official Muslim displeasure. "I don't find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists," she says. ". . . I need to say that, because some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems."

In New Scientist (15 December 2001), Ziauddin Sardar reported: "One particular study, sponsored by the International Federation of Institutes of Advanced Studies (IFIAS) in Stockholm brought together Muslim scientists and scholars worldwide in seminars held between 1980 and 1983. The IFIAS study, published as The Touch of Midas, concluded that the issue of science and values in Islam must be treated within a framework of concepts that shape the goals of a Muslim society."

Sardar also reports that the early 1990s brought a shift into obscurantism by the defenders of Muslim science: "it began to be argued that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, could be found in the Koran. This thesis received a tremendous boost from the well-funded Saudi project, Scientific Miracles in the Qur'an (Koran). The project spanned both empirical work, involving comparisons of those verses of the Koran that deal with astronomy and embryology with the latest discoveries, and popularizations through conferences and seminars. Relativity, quantum mechanics, big bang theory, embryology-practically everything was 'discovered' in the Koran."

In summary: "science becomes not a problem-solving enterprise or objective enquiry, but a mystical quest to understand the Absolute. Conjecture and hypothesis have no real place; all enquiry must be subordinate to the mystical experience."

Nor are there any visible prospects that there will even be open debate in print on the subject. It is a numbing thought that there does not exist a single secular Arabic periodical. In any case, debates that revolve around the concept of heresy are unlikely to lead anywhere worth reaching.

"The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas-uncertainty, progress, change-into crimes." Those are the words of Salman Rushdie in his Herbert Reade Memorial lecture in February of 1990, while in hiding from a fatwa for blasphemy."

Ziauddin Sardar is a more sophisticated and better educated Defender of the Faith, but as Lewis Jones notes, when Ziauddin Sardar published a piece in New Scientist almost a quarter of a century ago, he titled his article not "Can science come to Islam?" but "Can science come back to Islam?"

In other words, Ziauddin Sardar at this point would not dare to suggest direcdtly that all of modern physics and biology can be found in the Qur'an, knowing perfectly well he would be laughed out of the court of public opinion. But he still maintains, even as he denounces those who, by straightforwardly making such claims, cause damage to the "image" of Islam and, as important, to the standing and professional well-being of Ziauddin Sardar and all those like him busily defending and protecting Islam as best they can, as reality keeps breaking in and Infidels begin, horrifically for people like Ziauddin Sardar to wake up and start to inform themselves, and do so not because there is some vast Western conspiracy to blacken the name of Islam, but only because the behavior of some Muslims themselves in Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, and the obvious support given to that behavior by many other Muslims, and finally the obvious nonsense and lies that the Defenders of the Faith indulge in, even when they purport to be the good guys, the reformers, the people who want, as Hasan Suroor wants, an end to "denial" but does not go nearly far enough, goes only so far as to do what he can to protect the image of Islam and to avoid talking about the deep and possiblly immutable problem that a Total Belief-System, predicated on a state of permanent hostility or war between Believers and Infidels, poses to all those Infidels -- who, it might be added, comprise 85% of the world's population.
Muslims themselves, through their behavior, have made it impossible to ignore the texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam which do all the damage to the "image" of Islam that could possibly be done. Nothing Infidels say or do has anything to add to what Muslims themselves say and do. All Infidels are now doing is looking, less naively, at reality, and with growing understanding the more they connect the dots from, say, southern Thailand to southern Sudan to southern Nigeria to bombs that go off in metros in Madrid and London, and murders that are committed in Amsterdam and Beslan and Moscow and Toronto, and connect the dots between all of these, and the other dots -- the Money Weapon deployed to pay for mosques, and madrasas, and propaganda, and to silence all Infidel critics by threats of litigation, and to pay for armies of Western hirelings, and the campaigns of Da'wa that target the psychically and economically marginal in Infidel societies, and finally, the demographic conquest that is spoken and written about so openly, so enthusiastically, by Muslims in public (see Boumedienne at the U.N. in 1974, about the future conquest of Europe by the forces of Islam not through military might but through the "wombs of Muslim women"; see the letters pages of Muslim newspapers such as the English-language "Dawn" in Pakistan), and on Muslim websites everywhere."

[Posted by: Hugh at August 12, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at January 7, 2008 2:49 PM

Here is my post:

"I have been reading the Qur'an and I am interested in two questions:

1. What English translation do you recommend?

2. I am honestly interested in the following question. I preface this with the statement that it is not intended as an insult. I would note that I would not have to make that statement with any other major religion in the world today. Here is my question - I can't help but notice that there isn't a lot of religion in the Qur'an. Why is this so?"

I got an answer for the first question. As to the second...............the clock is ticking.

Posted by: tanstaafl at January 7, 2008 2:50 PM

If it's in the Guardian it will be PC/multiculti rubbish. And even if they did have comments you would be censored to the hilt. Every time I try and comment on sites like the Guardian and the BBC I am always censored even though I never use "hate speech".

If there is one thing Gurdianistas and Al-BBC hate, it's facts.

Did someone say hidden agenda?

Posted by: DaveMate at January 7, 2008 3:29 PM

tanstaafi:

I can't help but notice that there isn't a lot of religion in the Qur'an. Why is this so?

If you'll pardon a Clintonesque response, I suppose it all depends on what your definition of "religion" is. To hundreds of millions of Muslims, "religion" is precisely what is in the Qur'an.

Cordially
Robert Spencer

Posted by: jihadwatch at January 7, 2008 4:47 PM

From Georgina Henry's introduction in the link above:

Blogging the Qur'an is conceived as a year-long project. Before the blogs proper start, Zia has written three introductory pieces: one, which is on the site today, is a personal piece about what the Qur'an means to him. Next week, he'll discuss the nature and style of the Qur'an - explaining its structure and why it's such a difficult book to read. The third piece will be about the study and interpretations of the Qur'an.

In week four, he'll start at the beginning - al-Fatiha 1-5: God. And in subsequent weeks, until the end of the year, he'll blog sometimes by looking at particular verses, sometimes by themes and concepts and sometimes by topics. But he won't be hurried to the contentious bits: he'll move at his own pace.

Oh, and he won't deal with all the verses: he'll sometimes go by verses, sometimes themes and concepts and sometimes topics (whatever all that means). In other words, retain the ability to gloss over any ugly verses that may exist, and simply highlight the relatively neutral ones.

Posted by: Infidel Pride at January 7, 2008 6:04 PM

This whole thing sort of reminds me of that Islam is Peace campaign in Britain. Jesus said you can whitewash the outside of the grave all you want but inside is still filled with bones and rottenness of all sorts.

Posted by: j_not_a at January 7, 2008 8:17 PM

"he'll [Ziauddin Sardar] discuss the nature and style of the Qur'an - explaining its structure and why it's such a difficult book to read. The third piece will be about the study and interpretations of the Qur'an."
-- from a posting above

Readers might better find out about the "nature and style of the Qur'an" and "the study and interpretations of the Qur'an" from Michael Cook, in his "The Koran: A Very Short Introduction."

One pleasing thought is this. Ziauddin is not an Arab. Yet here he is, setting forth his own guide ot the Qur'an as a Muslim, in the islamophilic Guardian. When an Infidel -- Michael Cook in his "Very Short Introduction" or Spencer in his "Blogging the Qur'an -- dares to discuss the Qur'an, Arab Muslims use as their threshhold shut-up-he-explained tactics, the claim that "if you don't know Arabic, you can't possibly say anything of value about the Qur'an."

Now, as a kind of representative of the 80% of the world's Muslims who are not Arabs, is Ziauddin Sardar, who thanks to the islamisant Guardian will be "Blogging the Qur'an."

And that makes it just a bit harder for the Arab Muslim apologists who Defend the Faith to claim, quite so cavalierly, that a non-native speaker of Arabic has no right, no competence, to comment on the Qur'an.

Posted by: Hugh at January 7, 2008 8:23 PM

I agree wholeheartedly with Hugh on this one.

Posted by: Kafir Nonbeliever at January 7, 2008 9:34 PM

Hugh & Kafir

A Pakistani ain't going to prefer a non-Arabic over Arabic culture: here's what Ziauddin has to say re: the Arabic issue on the Quran:

I would sit in front of my mother and read out some selected verses. She would then explain their meaning in Urdu with the aid of a translation. I would then read out the English translation of the same verses. Then, we would chat; and totally disagree.

My first problem was with the Urdu translation. Urdu is an exquisite, beautiful and poetic language. It is suffused with Arabic words. That's why those, like me, who read Urdu find it easy to read Arabic. (We simply read Arabic as though it was written in Urdu!). But I found Urdu translations of the Qur'an to be rather ugly. Worse: the Urdu translation was often at odds with the English translation. The same verse sometimes conveyed quite different meanings when read in Urdu and English translations. Reading the Qur'an, I quickly realised, is one thing, understanding it is quite another.

Posted by: Infidel Pride at January 7, 2008 11:34 PM

As someone who spent 7 years in graduate school working on the theory and practice of translation, of course there is no exact equivalent translation of the Arabic into any other language. But, like most things in life, the 80/20 rule applies, in that 80% (at least) of the translation will carry through the original language's meaning unscathed. Human languages only differ on the margins. Period.

Also, from my personal experience reading across many world literatures, even only understanding 80% of the original meaning of the Koran shows that it's no great shakes as literature or doctrine, regardless of what the other 20% would say. As someone said above, Muslims completely lack the empirical basis to make any assertions about the Koran in a global context because they don't read any other literature and the Arab literature before the Koran was, to all indications, even worse than the Koran. That's like eating a small pile of dog crap instead of eating a large pile of dog crap and saying the small pile is better. No, they're both dog crap and, meanwhile, the rest of the world is eating filet mignon.

I knew a guy who knew Arabic and Ancient Greek (among other languages) and when I told him I knew Ancient Greek as well, he said that Plato in Ancient Greek was by far his favorite thing to read. It's only aesthetic philistinism that would have anyone prefer the Koran to Plato.

Posted by: venividivici at January 8, 2008 7:33 AM

Mr. Spenser -

Yes, millions of Muslims believe it is a religion. Millions of "Muslims in name only" live by its dictates.

However, taken in aggregate, the Qur'an's spirtuality consists of lauding the benefits of being a believer (72 virgins, 4 wives, all the slave girls possessed by "your right hand", wife beating, war booty and the submission of unbelievers) and detailing hell's punishments for the unbeliever (detailed with an extraordinary relish).

In short, the old carrot and stick approach.

Not that other religions don't use this method, but it seems to be the only thing in the Qur'an. No parables, history of the followers, religious stories, narrative of any sort or moral instruction of any sort. Believe in this and you get paradise, don't believe and you go to hell.

What is been described is a system of governance. not a religion.

Posted by: tanstaafl at January 8, 2008 8:50 AM

Robert Spencer - forgive me for putting an "s" in your name. I can only blame my New England background and yet another senior moment.

Tanstaafl

Posted by: tanstaafl at January 8, 2008 8:52 AM