I never expected blogging the Qur'an to be easy. But the exercise turned out to be much harder than I expected. By far the hardest thing for me to do was to answer all the questions raised by Madeleine and other bloggers. Indeed, I have discovered that answering all the possible questions one can raise in relation to the Qur'an is almost impossible.

At a recent conference, I was sitting between a cabinet minister and a senior economist when they fell into conversation about their summer reading - the Qur'an. Both had been horrified by what they had read.

Blogging the Qur'an has thankfully avoided a missionising tone, even if at midpoint Madeleine Bunting felt constrained to say that she had not the slightest intention of converting. It is true to say there is a pious Muslim expectation, often in response to evangelism from colonial times onwards, that such an experiment could only be an exercise in stealth conversion. Yet the Qur'an itself denies compulsion in religion: calling for wisdom and goodly exhortation but not coercion, as guidance is only in the divine gift. The Qur'an not only enshrines freedom of conscience but regards religious and cultural pluralism as an essential feature of the human condition and a sign of God's creative power.

Before Blogging the Qur'an, I was in many ways a typical Muslim: I desperately wanted a holistic and spiritual Islamic experience, but none was forthcoming. I knew the Qur'an must be my starting point, but I was clueless about how best to engage it. So when I stumbled on Blogging the Qur'an web page - and how fortunate I was to have done so on the very day it was launched - I couldn't believe my luck. I was immediately struck by the novelty of the endeavor, but especially by Zia's extraordinary sincerity. Here was someone who wanted to explore the Qur'an and share his views of what he "understands and thinks of the Qur'an as a dynamic text" but who clearly explained that he didn't have the (traditional) qualifications of a Qur'an scholar. This could be interesting, I thought.

I admit I am an outsider, a novice, and of course full of religious prejudice, but it has to be said: I have never been so grateful for the clarity of Genesis. It tells a story, of God's creation of the world and humanity, of the fall, and then of God's strange decision to work with a particular tribe. I had never really appreciated the clarity and solidity of this narrative until trying to read the opening sections of the Qur'an. There are various voices, and a lot of rhetoric, some of it violent. And there are references to various characters - a certain amount of background knowledge seems to be assumed. It's like reading The Waste Land.

Growing up in a Muslim family I learned the significance of the Qur'an from an early age. My first memories emphasised the reverence this mysterious book was accorded. Wrapped in a red silk cloth and kept on top of the wardrobe, it was brought down frequently by my mother and father, who would perform a cleansing ritual before sitting down in calm contemplation to recite the text which to my young ears was an intoxicating melody of lyricism with elongated vowels and dulcet tones that would fill me with awe and wonder.

Welcome to the final week of Blogging the Qur'an.