An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part Four: You must do that thing. Unless you can't. Or don't want to (The Cow (al-Baqarah) 201-286)

The Cow (al-Baqarah) 201-286
You must do that thing. Unless you can't. Or don't want to. 

Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Qur’an version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Qur’an, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post https://bit.ly/2ApLDy0

For the online Qur’an that I use, see here http://al-quran.info and http://quran.com

And now:

The Cow (al-Baqarah) 201-220

 “Warfare has been prescribed for you, though it is repulsive to you. Yet it may be that you dislike something while it is good for you, and it may be that you love something while it is bad for you, and Allah knows and you do not know.”

Once again these verses are something of a mixed bag, starting with warning about one “whose talk about worldly life impresses you” but that “if he were to wield authority, he would try to cause corruption in the land, and to ruin the crop and the stock”. It’s not clear from the following verses if this is specifically referring to Satan, or to a particular individual, or to a certain type of person who should be avoided as a leader. Perhaps all of the above.

There’s some more about the need to be faithful above all else, and then a few rules and regulations concerning what should be given in charity (answer, whatever you can, anything is better than nothing), and how waging warfare might be distasteful to the worshipper but that this is justified if the alternative is to be kept away from the Holy Mosque. Later surahs will show that during the Medinan period, the Prophet and his followers were booted out of Mecca by polytheists, and these was a great deal of struggle in them trying to reclaim it for the new religion.

The Cow 221-240

“Your women are a tillage for you, so come to your tillage whenever you like, and send ahead for your souls, and be Godwary, and know that you will encounter Him; and give good news to the faithful.”

The bulk of these verses deal with women, and predominantly various divorce rules, which seem to come down to; a man can abstain from sex with his wife for up to four months during which she is in a kind of legal limbo, and after this he may decide to divorce her, or not. And he can pretty much divorce when he feels like, but the rules for remarrying again are pretty lax as well. There doesn’t seem to be anything here that allows that woman much of a say in these procedures.

Another good example of how equivocating some of these Qu’ranic rules are is given in the injunction that “Mothers shall suckle their children for two full years”. Except that “if the couple desire to wean, with mutual consent and consultation, there will be no sin upon them”, or that “if you want to have your children wet-nursed, there will be no sin upon”. So the first law doesn’t really stand if you don’t want it to. One phrase that gets used a lot in this section is that things be done “in accordance with honourable norms”, whatever these might be.

There’s another good example of how this surah, at least, skips around a lot, as we jump from divorce laws for a couple of verses to remind the reader to observe prayers, especially the “middle prayer”, but that if you fear danger you can pray on foot or mounted rather than stopping. According to the footnotes for the online version mention that the interpretation of “the middle prayer” has been interpreted in different tradition as the noon, afternoon, sunset and dawn prayers. Which is a big spread of interpretation.

The Cow 241-260

“Thus they routed them with Allah’s will, and David killed Goliath, and Allah gave him the kingdom and wisdom, and taught him whatever He liked. Were it not for Allah’s repelling the people by means of one another, the earth would surely have been corrupted; but Allah is gracious to the world’s creatures.”

We move on from divorce laws to some more Old Testament history, or a version of it at least. We get a recounting of the Israelites asking for a king and getting Saul, but here the “elite of the Israelites” disavow Saul not because he is a mad man but because he is poor - “we have a greater right to kingship than him, as he has not been given ample wealth?” The Israelites cross a stream where if they drink then they are unfaithful, which most of them do, yet they prevail against the Philistines nonetheless.

The narrative skips to Jesus and tells us that Allah could have prevented doctrinal disputes amongst Christians but chose not to for His own inscrutable reasons. There are a couple of other Biblical references to things that I don’t remember – Nimrod arguing with Moses that he (Nimrod) brings life and death the same as God, and Ezra falling asleep for one hundred years to prove the existence of God. Nope, me neither. To cap it all off there’s a bit more waxing eloquent about great Allah is because “Neither drowsiness befalls Him nor sleep. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth.”

The Cow 261-286

“Allah brings usury to naught, but He makes charities flourish. Allah does not like any sinful ingrate.”

Most of this final section covers acts of charity, and guidelines for lending money. Lending money with interest, usury, is considered a grave no-no, and there is a lengthy verse (282) concerning the legal way of arranging a loan between people, including getting a witness or a guardian for those not capable of making the decision on their own. Charity can be done in secret or in public, it doesn’t matter to Allah, but it is something that should be done in order to be righteous – “If you disclose your charities, that is well, but if you hide them and give them to the poor, that is better for you”.

There are also some verses warning against seeking riches for their own sake, as opposed to giving to charity, and there’s the interesting theological concept that the reason people seek wealth is because Satan has given them a fear of poverty. That’s an interesting perspective – it’s not greed for riches that Satan has given them, as might be taught in Christian theology. It’s a fear of loss. That’s a much more cunning and subtle method to manipulate people, I like it.

Which brings us to the end of “The Cow”. What a strange, mixed collection of rules and Old Testament fragments (that read like they were recounted by someone who has kind of sort of heard of some stories of Moses and got them all a bit confused with other fragments). There are a lot of threats of burning, lots of random jumps between topics, lots of repetition of stock or ritualistic phrases (such as “Allah is not oblivious of what you do”). I’m hoping that as we get to some of the shorter surahs they will be a bit more cohesive than this, perhaps only dealing with one topic at a time because, frankly, this one was all over the place.

The one thing I’ll take away from it, despite the endless threats of burning, is that most of the rules are quite flexible – it doesn’t really matter which direction you pray, as long as you pray; you should breastfeed your child, unless you decide not to; and so on.