Media falsely cited the Quran as having 6,666 sentences to invoke Satanic imagery.

Evidence

Narratives like this create imagery of a privileged white boy who forgoes all luxuries as a result of his conversion to Islam. In tracking Lindh’s transition from a “normal” American teenager to Muslim terrorist, Newsweek creates an implicit psychological profile for him, underscoring his “deviance” from normative (white, middle-class) masculinity. Through a curious numbercrunching process that cites Lindh’s devotion to the “6,666 sentences” of the Qur’an, the article evokes references to Satan’s sixes in the service of painting a damning portrait of Lindh, when there are in fact 6,346 verses, 114 chapters, and 57,152 sentences in the Qur’an. The blatant misinformation of such a narrative emphasizes difference: he was like us, and then he became something vaguely sinister, involved in a numerological scheme that evokes the greatest enemy of Christianity. In this narrative, converting to Islam involves a transformation from civilized to uncivilized, marked by religious compulsion and rigidity. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 918

Categorization

• CANDY: The false ‘6,666 sentences’ of the Quran vs. actual 57,152 sentences is a crisp, tweetable gotcha.
• SHARE: Send to anyone into media critique or religious studies — the exact numerological trick (Satan’s sixes) is a precise, debunkable detail.
• SEED: Angle: how false statistics about scripture become narrative shorthand for demonizing conversion.