An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part One: May Allah guide our way (The Opening (al-Fatihah) 1-7)

The Opening (al-Fatihah) 1-7
May Allah guide our way

Welcome to the first 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 Opening (al-Fatihah) 1-7
“In the Name of Allah, the All-beneficent, the All-merciful.”

We begin, then, with a short chapter that is basically an invocation to Allah, “Master of the Day of Retribution” to guide the reader or listener on the “straight path, the path of those whom You have blessed”. To give the full version, since its only seven verses long, this is the Quran.com variant:

“In the name of Allah, the Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful.
[All] praise is [due] to Allah, Lord of the worlds –
The Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful,
Sovereign of the Day of Recompense.
It is You we worship and You we ask for help.
Guide us to the straight path –
The path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked [Your] anger or of those who are astray.”

That all seems pretty straightforward, it feels like a formulaic utterance and I wonder if we’ll see it again, or similar forms, as we go forward. The idea, I guess, is to make sure that the reader is in the right frame of mind so as to gain wisdom from what follows. But that really is all there is to this chapter, so onwards to the first full chapter.

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