Grotesque Story of the Week: Saddam's Blood Qur'an

If you haven't already encountered this story from The Guardian a few days ago, I'll call it to your attention. It is bizarre in the way that few other than the late Saddam Hussein have been bizarre: for a two year period in the 1990s Saddam gave blood regularly, providing a total of 27 liters which a calligrapher used to write an entire Qur'an in Saddam's blood.

The present government doesn't want it to become a rallying point for old Baathists, who see Saddam as a martyr, but then destroying it might be seen as desecrating the Qur'an. (I would suggest that creating it in the first place amounted to desecrating the Qur'an, but I'm not a faqih or even a Muslim.)

This is one of those problems I'm glad isn't going to be up to me to resolve.