“Oops, sorry. It looks like we were wrong.” Thus Newsweek apologizes for its story in last week’s issue that American intelligence interrogators in Guantanamo desecrated the Koran in front of Muslim prisoners and flushed it down the toilet – an error that has to date cost the lives of 16 people killed in the anti-American riots that the story set off in various parts of the Islamic world.

One wonders why a supposedly responsible magazine like Newsweek didn’t manifest a tad less credulity toward a report indicating that American intelligence is run not only by anti-Muslim barbarians, but also by total imbeciles. Who else would think that the way to get a terror suspect to be more cooperative is by treating his holy scriptures as excrement? The strong tendency in today’s world to believe that America is in the hands of cretins has, apparently, its supporters in the American media, too.

But one also wonders about something else. Suppose for a moment that the shoe had been on the other foot – that is, that Newsweek had run a story about intelligence interrogators in a Muslim country desecrating the New Testament or the Hebrew Bible in a facility holding Christian or Jewish prisoners. What would have been the reaction?

There would have been angry protests, of course. Perhaps even a few noisy rallies at churches or synagogues. But riots? 16 deaths? It’s hard to imagine.

Do Muslims really revere the Koran so much more than Christians and Jews do the Bible? It would seem so. They certainly act as if they do. Think of the Salman Rushdie affair. For years this Muslim-born novelist was threatened with death all over the Muslim world for parodying certain episodes in the Koran. A Christian or Jewish novelist who did the same with the Bible would get yawned at.

Indeed, that Muslims do take their religion more seriously is, sociologically speaking, the case. The percentage of observant Muslims in any Islamic country is considerably higher than that of observant Christians in the West or observant Jews in Israel.

One might also point out that inhabitants of Muslim countries tend in general to resort to violence in social situations more often than do Jews or Christians (think of honor killings, for example), so that their doing so in support of their religious beliefs is part of a larger pattern of behavior.

And yet any psychologist would say that, nevertheless, when it comes to the Koran there is a clear measure of overreacting – and that we usually overreact not when we are strongly convinced of something but when, on the contrary, we are deeply afraid that our convictions may be wrong.

Is it possible that deep down the Muslim world fears that, compared to the Jewish and Christian Bibles, the Koran is simply not a very well-written, nor a very interesting, nor a very enlightening book?

Because – although it’s highly politically incorrect to say so – it isn’t. It is, almost unremittingly from beginning to end, a distressingly turgid and bombastic document.

Granted, one can say the same, or worse, about parts of the Old and New Testaments. If Jewish Scripture were confined to the ritual laws and genealogies of the Pentateuch, the gory conquistadorial accounts in Joshua, the trite maxims of Proverbs, and the dry-as-dust historical synopses of Chronicles, there wouldn’t be a great deal to say for it, either. Nor would there be for the New Testament if all we had of it were the perfunctory epistles of Philemon and Jude and the lurid eschatological fantasies of Revelations.

These two books, however, are not single works but anthologies. They speak not with one but with numerous voices in various styles of prose and poetry, and many of these voices, some narrating stories containing a large number of unforgettable characters, are intellectually brilliant, wonderfully observant, genuinely soul-searching, deeply anguished, poignantly quivering with human experience – the voices of literary and religious genius. One doesn’t have to believe in the God-givenness or divine inspiration of the Bible to see the greatness in many of its pages. In fact, it is often the nonbeliever reading it with a skeptical mind who can most appreciate its beauty and profundity.

One cannot say the same of the Koran. Although it is half the length of the “Old” Testament and far longer than the New, the only voice and character in it are Muhammad’s. For the Muslim believer, this voice may be the height of sublimity. Yet for anyone else, it is drearily pompous, self-satisfied, and repetitive. It has only one register, that of declamatory rhetoric, and not many emotions, of which anger against anyone doubting its truth is perhaps the most dominant.

One can speculate at length about what it means for a culture or society to adopt such a book at its holy writ and make it the ultimate standard by which all other intellectual and literary endeavor is judged. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that Islam at its best – and unfortunately, what we often see of it today is its worst – is not so much a response to the inspiration of the Koran as a magnificent overcoming of the Koran’s limitations.

Consciously, of course, no Muslim thinks about it this way. But would Muslims be quite so defensive about the Koran if they didn’t in some place fear that this was so? Would they be quite so adamant about banning from their own societies the slightest debate about the Koran’s contents or provenance, so that Koranic studies in the Islamic world today are roughly where Bible studies were in Europe in the 14th century? That, too, is hard to imagine. There’s a lot more insecurity here than meets the eye.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.