The man, who requested anonymity lest he become the "face of a thousand fatwas," was drinking a Coca-Cola at a Borders bookstore and "placed the beverage on the holiest of Muslim texts."

An outraged Borders patron recorded the "entire ghastly event on his video cell phone" and sent the recording to a local mosque and an ACLU branch office. Within hours, news of the "sordid affair" reached the Middle East and the corpses began piling up.

"Dude…my bad," said the man, who ended up finishing – and enjoying – his Coke. "I had no idea that was a Koran I put my Coke on. Tell the families or whatever I'm, like, sorry."

"He should be," said a local Muslim cleric. "Allah specifically states...O.K., I don't know exactly where...but it's probably official policy that infidels putting a drink on a Koran deserves a nice, big fatwa. That the drink was the poisonous liquid of American imperialism makes it even worse."

Last week, it was discovered that a Koran wasn't flushed down a toilet on an American military base. About 20 died in the Muslim world as a result.