Qur'an

The Koran is mentioned as one of several religious texts used to characterize the closed-mindedness that the book attributes to worshipers of scientism. It functions less as a described object than as a comparison point in the book’s larger conflict between inherited authority and radical intellectual change.

Appearance and Immediate Context

The Koran appears in a passage arguing that adherents of scientism should not be expected to accept genuinely new ideas. They are compared with believers in the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran: all are presented as committed to a settled paradigm and resistant to the possibility that a new framework could overturn what they currently regard as truth. The comparison places the Koran within a list of scriptures invoked rhetorically to represent doctrinal certainty.

Religion, Authority, and Reason

The book’s use of the Koran belongs to its broader account of the relationship between faith, authority, and knowledge. In its discussion of Martin Luther and Protestantism, it describes the rejection of established religious authority in favor of individual faith in the Bible, then extends that pattern to right-wing American hostility toward the State, experts, reason, logic, and qualifications. The Koran is not examined on its own terms; instead, it participates in the book’s general contrast between authoritative systems and the demand for independent reasoning.

Contrast with Scientism

The comparison is deliberately symmetrical. The book argues that replacing a religious paradigm with a prevailing scientific paradigm does not necessarily produce intellectual openness. In this formulation, materialism is expected to give way to idealism, empiricism to rationalism, and science to ontological mathematics. The Koran therefore serves as a marker in an analogy: scientism is criticized for reproducing the conservatism and certainty that its adherents may associate with religious belief.

Political and Thematic Significance

The Koran’s significance is consequently indirect and polemical. Elsewhere, the book describes a world ruled by the Ownership Class, interprets submission through Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, and links contemporary political conflict to the struggle between the Union and the Confederacy. It also presents Donald Trump’s rise as a crisis produced by the right wing’s decision to place a senior member of the 1% in the White House. Against this political background, the Koran belongs to a recurring vocabulary of belief systems, authorities, and competing claims to truth. Its brief appearance helps the book frame intellectual history as a contest between inherited certainty and the disruptive arrival of a new paradigm, without supplying a detailed account of the scripture itself.