An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part Nine: Why You Can Eat Roadkill If You’re Hungry. Plus: Christians and Jews – They’re a Bit Rubbish (The Table (al-Ma’idah) 1-100)

The Table (al-Ma’idah) 1-100
Why You Can Eat Roadkill If You’re Hungry. Plus: Christians and Jews – They’re a Bit Rubbish.

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 Table (al-Ma’idah) 1-10

 “O you who have faith! Keep your agreements. You are permitted animals of grazing livestock, disallowing game while you are in pilgrim sanctity.¹ Indeed Allah decrees whatever He desires.”

One of the things I do quite like about the Qur’an are the enigmatic headings for the surah. I think the version I’m using goes for the most prosaic translation, because it gives alternatives as “The Feast” and “The Heavenly Repast”. From the description it sounds like a kind of posthumous version of the Last Supper (which would be akin to Pentecost by my reckoning).

And, well, we’re straight into some meat, literally and figuratively. No preamble in praise of Allah this time, straight to some hard and fast rules. These are mostly dietary, concerning no hunting during pilgrimage and various specific foodstuffs that are forbidden –“carrion, blood, the flesh of swine, and what has been offered to other than Allah, and the animal strangled or beaten to death, and that which dies by falling or is gored to death, and that which is mangled by a beast of prey —barring that which you may purif¹— and what is sacrificed on stone altars”. This being the Qur’an, there’s always an exception. If you’re really hungry you can eat these things – I think the sentiment is that if it’s the difference between starving to death or breaking the rules, you’re allowed to eat because you aren’t deliberately setting out to sin. Which is a nice bit of pragmatism, I think. Later on we are also told that food that is allowed to The People of the Book (which here I think means Jews *and* Christians) is also allowed to Muslims, and vice versa. Which means I’m allowed to go into the butcher’s shop called “Halal, Is It Meat You’re Looking For?” in Tooting. Except maybe not, since I’m an unbeliever. And it might not really exist.

The same verse also mentions that “chaste women” from “the faithful” are “allowed”, but must be taken as wives with a proper dowry. I don’t know if that refers to women from the other People of the Book faiths (since they are juxtaposed with the dietary regulations) or what. Nothing the other way around, of course.

There’s a re-iteration about ritual cleaning before prayer, and that if washing isn’t possible then wiping your hands on the ground will suffice, because “Allah does not desire to put you to hardship, but He desires to purify you”. There are a couple of specific Arabic terms in this verse which I looked up – junub, which means being impure by having jizz on you (true), and tayammum, which is the dust-bath version of ritual washing mentioned above.

Finally we get to the chorus, of how great God is etc., and then onto some discussion about how the Qur’an is a corrected version of the corrupted texts that the Jews and Christians use – “clarifying for you much of what you used to hide of the Book” – which I suspect they disagree with. There’s also some discussion about the specific faults in faith of the Jews (which seems, basically, to be a general failure to follow God’s covenant) and the Christians (by saying that the Messiah is God), and how the Qur’an sets these things straight. Because religious people love being told that they’ve got their faith wrong. It points out, quite logically, that although both Jews and Christians claim to be God’s most beloved people, yet they still suffer misfortune the same as everyone else. What’s intriguing here is there’s no claim that submitting to Allah will lessen that in any way, but the implication seems to be that this is the more sensible thing to do – Allah does what Allah wills and there’s not a lot anyone can do about it. Be the grass that bends in the wind rather than a rigid branch that will break when the storm comes.

The Table 21-40

“They said, ‘O Moses, we will never enter it so long as they remain in it. Go ahead, you and your Lord, and fight! We will be sitting right here.’”

There are a couple of Old Testament stories related here, sort of. Firstly we get a story about Moses planning to invade a city but his followers are frightened because “there are a tyrannical people in it. We will not enter it until they leave it. But once they leave it, we will go in”. A couple of prophets try to get the people to attack, but they refuse and tell Moses to take his God and go and fight. Moses points out that it isn’t *his* God, and curses the faithless followers to wander the wilderness for forty years.

There seems to be at least three biblical incidents being mingled together here – the spies being sent into Canaan and frightening everyone with tales of giants, possibly elements of Jericho, and in the Bible the Israelites end up wandering in the desert because of the whole Golden Calf thing.

Next we get Cain and Abel (here named only as “Adam’s two sons”). Cain’s sacrifice gets refused because he is not “godwary”, and Abel refuses to fight him but gives a little passive-aggressive line about “I want you to sin by striking me and thus earning your place in the fire”. “So his soul prompted him to kill his brother, and he killed him, and thus became one of the losers”. “Losers” is a funny translation, it crops up from time to time but I’ve not flagged it so far. I’m picturing finger and thumb in an L-shape on the forehead behaviour. Loooooooserrrrrr!

A crow shows Cain how to bury the body (that’s a new one), and then the verse somehow segues into God’s law to the Israelites “whoever kills a soul, without [its being guilty of] manslaughter or corruption on the earth, is as though he had killed all mankind, and whoever saves a life is as though he had saved all mankind”. It’s nice that God includes that get-out clause so you can kill people who are murderers or are “guilty of corruption” which is tremendously vague. So on the surface it sounds all peaceful and forgiving but dig a little and it’s useless.

The next verse kind of adds to that, in that it equates “corruption” with waging war against Allah and His apostle, for which the punishment is to have a hand and a foot from opposite sides of the body cut off. There’s another one of those moments where you really need to read ahead, because the next verse says “…excepting those that repent before you capture them”. Having now got a bit more of a clue about corruption, we now get some vagueness about “waging war”. Is this literally waging war, with fighting and battles, or is it metaphorical waging war with philosophical arguments? I think that if potential mutilation is on the line we need to be crystal clear with no room for ambiguity.

We also get the source for the infamous cutting off of the hand of a thief. Again, the next verse continues with the important addendum not to do this is they are sorry.

The Table (41-60)

“And in it We prescribed for them: a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, and an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and retaliation for wounds. Yet whoever remits it out of charity, that shall be an atonement for him. Those who do not judge by what Allah has sent down —it is they who are the wrongdoers.”

The general gist of most of the verses in this batch seem to be that God gave the Torah to the Jews, and the “Evangel” to the Christians, and if either of those people follow their particular set of rules given by God, then good for them, but Muslims should follow the path given to them (in the Qur’an) and not that set down in earlier holy books, nor even mix with Jews and Christians who are, apparently, “are allies of each other”. Maybe at the time of writing, perhaps, and there have been periods such as Frederick Barbarossa granting the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire freedom of worship and Imperial protection, but the relationship between Christians and Jews has also been, fractious, shall we say.

And according to these verses, this three-way division of the Abrahamic faiths is part of Allah’s plan – “For each [community] among you We had appointed a code [of law] and a path,¹ and had Allah wished He would have made you one community, but [His purposes required] that He should test you in respect to what He has given you”. Does that also include the many different subdivisions of each of those religions? Well, according to Islam it would have to, since everything is down to Allah.

The rest of these verses deal with the possibility of “eavesdroppers” who will then go and spread lies about the religion, and those who mock Muslims for kneeling in prayer, which, we are told, could be anyone from the other faiths or infidels in general. So, distrust the outsider, in other words. There’s a new punishment as well; not merely burning this time but Allah also “turned some of whom into apes and swine”. Before burning them, I assume.

The Table 61-80

“Had they observed the Torah and the Evangel, and what was sent down to them from their Lord, they would surely have drawn nourishment from above them and from beneath their feet. There is an upright group among them, but evil is what many of them do.”

These verses mainly deal with the failings of Jews and Christians (just for a change). The Prophet is told that many of the Jews erred in their faith and don’t follow the words that were given to them – it’s a little unclear from these verses if they are also wrong because they don’t respect the latest word of God in the form of the Qur’an, or that it is merely for not following the Torah that they are wrong. Not listening to, or even persecuting, apostles sent by God are also listed as the crimes of the Jews, of which I can only think of two – Jesus and the Prophet. And many of them of them did adopt the religion of Jesus, not least the Biblical disciples.

The Christians, however, not only are supposed to follow their Book (the Evangel), but they are wrong in supposing Jesus to also be God. One wonders if, had the Muslims had much contact with the Gothic Arians who denied the divinity of Christ, the two religions would have got along much better compared to the Orthodox Byzantines who would have been first contact with Christianity and the Arabic Muslims. (Also interesting is that the “Evangelion” is the Gnostic version of the Bible).

According to the Qur’an, Jesus said “‘O Children of Israel! Worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord. Indeed whoever ascribes partners to Allah, Allah shall forbid him [entry into] paradise, and his refuge shall be the Fire, and the wrongdoers will not have any helpers”. I don’t remember those exact words from my Bible read-through, but to be fair I think Jesus does say something about there only being one God. The Trinity, also, is noted as erroneous theology – I’m not sure it’s entirely understood here because the Trinity still only posits one God, merely a faceted one. I guess Allah has no facets, especially not a human form.

The Table 81-100

“When they hear what has been revealed to the Apostle, you see their eyes fill with tears because of the truth that they recognize. They say, ‘Our Lord, we believe; so write us down among the witnesses.”

The “they” in the quote above are Christians. The preceding verse states that Jews and polytheists are the most likely to ignore the words of the Qur’an, but Christians are the most like Muslims because there are priests and monks “who are not arrogant”. That’s funny, I think I discussed in the Bible readthrough about how similar some of the injuctions and behaviours between different religions are.

So those verses follow on from the previous section, and we segue through the usual “paradise or burning” verses to some actual rules again. Some are dietary, largely vague (see elsewhere for specific allowed and disallowed foods). Oaths are addressed, but only ones that you mean (“Allah shall not take you to task for what is frivolous in your oaths”). Now, does that mean swearing to something that has little import? Anyway, the penalty for breaking an oath is to give “ten needy persons with the average food you give to your families, or their clothing, or the freeing of a slave”. The verses skip to cover some stuff discussed below, then jumps back to dietary rules – there is no shame if you ate something forbidden before the Qur’an was written. When in a place of pilgrimage you can’t hunt, but you can eat seafood. So, seafood. In the middle of a desert. Okay.

“Wine, gambling, idols and divining arrows” are forbidden (but not other alcoholic drinks?) on the basis that wine and gambling can lead to fights, the last two I guess fall under the reach of the idolatry umbrella I would guess.