What to Do With a Koran Written in Saddam's Blood?

Nearly eight years after Saddam Hussein’s fall from power, Iraqi officials are still grappling with relics of his rule. Debate is raging over the fate of a Koran written in 27 liters of Saddam’s own blood, drawn by a nurse and lettered by a calligrapher over a two-year period in the late 1990s, the Guardian reports. The object is kept in a vault that requires three keys—“and none of them are held in one place,” says a Sunni leader.

The Shia government wants to keep the Blood Koran hidden from view, fearful that it could ignite a resurgence of members of Saddam’s still-violent Baath party. Many Sunnis, meanwhile, worry about the religious implications of offering this book the reverence typically given the Koran. And while much of what Saddam left has been destroyed, some say it’s important to keep relics like this one as a reminder of “the brutality of Saddam.”
(More Koran stories.)