An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part Five: The Immaculate Conception, Islam Style (The Family of Imran (al-Imran) 1-100)

The Family of Imran (al-Imran) 1-100
The Immaculate Conception, Islam Style.

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 Family of Imran (al-Imran) 1-20

 “It is He who forms you in the wombs however He wishes. There is no god except Him, the All-mighty, the All-wise.”

So, sometimes Allah wishes children to be born with cleft palates, or arthrogryposes, or spinal bifida, or a whole load of other developmental deformities? Well, I guess He really must be All-wise.

This Surah also starts with the enigmatic characters “Alif, Lam, Mim”, and again there’s no evident reason for it. As for the rest of this section, there’s once again much talk of people being burned forever, a favourite theme of The Cow, but there are also mentions of the various revelatory books of Allah – the Torah, the Evangel and the Criterion. I think I guessed before that The Criterion is presumably the internal name for the Qu’ran; I’d guess that the “Evangel” is the New Testament.

We are told more about The Book (unclear here if it means all of those holy books or just this one), that “Parts of it are definitive verses, which are the mother of the Book, while others are metaphorical”. Which I worked out for myself but it’s good to hear it told straight up. However, oddly, “As for those in whose hearts is deviance, they pursue what is metaphorical in it, courting temptation and courting its interpretation”. Which I guess is an admonishment not to look only at the metaphorical bits and interpret them as you see fit, according to your own prejudices. That’s an interesting sentiment to be expressed, and probably ought to be reinforced more often.

There is then a discussion on focussing too much on worldly pleasures rather than those of the afterlife – “To mankind has been made to seem decorous the love of [worldly] desires, including women and children, accumulated piles of gold and silver, horses of mark, livestock, and farms. Those are the wares of the life of this world; but Allah—with Him is a good destination.” This verse makes me wonder – by whom have these things been made to seem decorous? I’d assume that the Qu’ran would tell me “Satan”, but it doesn’t here.

These verses end with some advice directly to the Prophet on how best to convert people, by telling them that “‘I have submitted my will to Allah, and [so has] he who follows me.’”

The Family of Imran 21-40

“When the wife of Imran said, ‘My Lord, I dedicate to You what is in my belly, in consecration. Accept it from me; indeed You are the All-hearing, the All-knowing.’”

The first few verses of this section tend to go on about how Allah loves the faithful and will burn the unfaithful, knows everything in your heart, is All-Merciful, yada yada. Although I’m only two books and a few hundred verses in, this seems like pretty much a common refrain. The second part is more interesting, as we get some actual sequential events.

The wife of Imran (she doesn’t get a name) consecrates her baby to Allah. Who, you may ask, is Imran? This is a good question, but he gets mentioned in the same verse as Adam, Noah, the progeny of Abraham and the progeny of Imran. Which would make him equivalent too … I don’t know. Ishmael? Esau?

Anyway, Mrs. Imran gives birth to a girl Mary, who might be the biblical mother of Jesus, or perhaps another Mary, we don’t know yet. But Allah sends Zechariah to look after her, and Mary grows up knowing that all that is provided is by the will of Allah. Then some angels visit Zechariah and tell him “Allah gives you the good news of John, as a confirmer of a Word of Allah, eminent and chaste, a prophet, among the righteous.”, and from the context it’s evident that this refers to John the Baptist, and the “Word of Allah” is Jesus, but then Zechariah asks “He said, ‘My Lord, how shall I have a son while old age has overtaken me and my wife is barren?’ He said, ‘So it is that Allah does whatever He wishes.’”

Now … wait a minute. This all feels a bit like somebody once heard some Bible stories and is trying to recount them but getting them all mixed up. So, we’ve got Mary, we’ve got John the Baptist, we’ve got Zechariah who if I recall was an Old Testament prophet, and Zechariah is somehow taking over the story of Abraham and Sarah. Okay…. I’ll try reading on and see what happens next.

The Family of Imran 41-60

“And when Jesus sensed their faithlessness, he said, ‘Who will be my helpers toward Allah?’ The Disciples said, ‘We will be helpers of Allah. We have faith in Allah, and bear witness that we are muslims.”

Okay, this clears up some questions from before, in the Mary who is the daughter of Imran is the Virgin Mary, because an angel comes to her and tells her that Allah will create her a son who will be Jesus.

Allah, or the angel, gives Mary a prophecy of Jesus’ life, which is also sort of a description of the life as it happens, in quite a nice literary device – I can’t explain it that well, I guess it’s that the tense switches towards the end, perhaps. Anyway, Jesus will confirm the truth of the Torah, but also “make lawful for you some of the things that were forbidden you”, which is an interesting concept as it implies quite strongly that religious rules can be changed through time.

We get another name for the Quran, the Wise Reminder, and move towards the end of Jesus life where he is plotted against by the Jews and then Allah tells him that “I shall raise you up toward Myself, and I shall clear you of [the calumnies of] the faithless, and I shall set those who follow you above the faithless until the Day of Resurrection”.

I must admit, I enjoy the audacity of stating outright that Jesus and the apostles were Muslims – it’s a bit of fair-play turnaround from Christians appropriating pagan customs and festivals and making them Christian (e.g. winter solstice fire festivals becoming Christmas and spring equinox rebirth ceremonies becoming Easter). Here the Qu’ran says “Yes, this happened, and it shows that they were all good Muslims”. Fun stuff.

Oh, Zechariah, by the way, is shown a sign by Allah, the sign being that he cannot speak for three days.

The Family of Imran 61-80

“Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian. Rather he was a ḥanīf, a muslim, and he was not one of the polytheists.”

The Qu’ran makes an interesting point here, and I think I noted in during my Bible readthrough – Abraham comes before all the laws given to Moses, so he isn’t, in the sense of following any particular religious proscriptions, the same as the Israelites that come after him. I like that once again it simply asserts that he can be defined as a Muslim – I’m reminded of a character from the sketch show Goodness Gracious Me, the Indian father who asserts that all aspects of British culture are, in fact, derived from Indian culture and cites spurious reasoning to back this up – here’s a particularly relevant example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tw7LIykvBw

A lot of this section concerns the “People of the Book”, which in this case seems to be specifically Jews rather than Christians, and how some of them follow the ways of Allah and others claim worship through themselves, and some are reliable people to lend money to, and some are not. Also looming large is Allah’s dislike of religious hypocrisy. There’s burning, once again, but also the ongoing even-handedness/equivocation that we’ve seen previously.

The Family of Imran 81-100

“Say, ‘We have faith in Allah, and in what has been sent down to us, and what was sent down to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob and the Tribes, and that which Moses and Jesus were given, and the prophets, from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and to Him do we submit.’”

This section raises an intriguing question. As in the verse given above, once again the Qu’ran is claiming elements of Judaism and Christianity to actually be parts of Islam. In the next verse it states that people should follow no religion but Islam, but that raises the question of whether Judaism and Christianity in and of themselves are considered Islam or not. I would guess that, since within Islam itself that are various denominations then the absolute best the other Abrahamic faiths could expect is to be treated as a perverted form of Islam even with this appropriation of the elements of the faiths.

What most of this section talks about is a common theme so far in the Qu’ran, that Allah seems to dislike most a person that has had faith but turned away from it. This makes sense from a psychological point of view of the religious leaders. Someone who doesn’t have faith in the first place is a lost cause and not worth too much bother, but if you’ve got followers then you need to make sure that they stay as followers and don’t leave. A loyal customer base, after all, is a good business strategy and requires less work than building a new one.

There are a few verses at the end, which we might see continued in the next block of verses, that speaks about the “house” at Bakkah and “Abraham’s Station” that we’ve seen mentioned before. The implication here is that someone is, at the time this was written, preventing access to the House At Bakkah, because the text specifically condemns them –“ O People of the Book! why do you bar the faithful from the way of Allah, seeking to make it crooked”. Evidently there’s some kind of political struggle going on here.