An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part Two: A Quick Summary of Genesis and Exodus, and a Nice Yellow Cow (The Cow (al-Baqarah) 1-100)

The Cow (al-Baqarah) 1-100

A Quick Summary of Genesis and Exodus, and a Nice Yellow Cow.

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 Cow (al-Baqarah) 1-20

“When they are told, ‘Do not cause corruption on the earth,’ they say, ‘We are only reformers!’

The chapter opens with a curious little phrase, essentially three characters in Arabic – “Alif, Lam, Mim”, almost as if the Prophet was testing out his pen. There’s no evident meaning to this, and my first thought was that there must be some kind of idea that this is a hidden message. It turns out that there are a few more cases of this throughout the Qu’ran, but that despite some attempts to try to fathom it out it doesn’t seem to be as big a deal as I thought it might have been; there doesn’t appear to be anything akin to the “Bible Code” for example, that “proves” some kind of secret message. So I guess the tendency amongst Islamic scholars has been to shrug it off as some kind of unknowable oddity. Perhaps the thought is that Allah will make the meaning known when it is time for the meaning to be known.

The main part of this section of the surah is to separate out those who will hear the message in the Qu’ran and those who will not, for “This is the Book, there is no doubt in it”. Straight away we run into the thorny issue of how non-believers can work if a God is all-powerful, all knowing, and His holy writings are some kind of ineffable truth. It ought to be, surely, impossible for anyone to read such writings or to hear of such a God and still not accept everything as true. The Qu’ran tells us that, concerning “the faithless” that it is the “same to them whether you warn them or do not warn them, they will not have faith”, and that this is because “Allah has set a seal on their hearts and their hearing”. So, if a person does not come to believe in Allah, it is because Allah has made them that way? There are similar sentiments in the Bible concerning non-believers.

Which raises the question – why? Especially since “there is a great punishment for them”. Again – why? Why punish a creation for being exactly as you created it? This seems to me to be like building two cars, one a high performance V8 engine, the other with a two-stroke lawnmower engine, and then threatening to destroy the one that loses a race, and being angry at it for losing.

The alternative, of course, is that humans can choose what they believe, and that is problematic again for religions with all-powerful deities, because then the creation is able to reject the creator and therefore the creator can’t be the obvious answer and perfection that it is made out to be.

The rest of this section concerns itself less with the absolute non-believers, but with those who profess to believe but don’t do so in their heart. This, again, was a recurrent theme in the Bible, and a tool for maintaining orthodoxy by setting up a concept of apostacy. The Qu’ran sets up an excuse for religious conservatism by lumping any kind of reformers in with group of pretend-believers; “When they are told, ‘Do not cause corruption on the earth,’ they say, ‘We are only reformers!’”. Beware of anyone trying to change things, this verse tells us, for they are liars and deceivers. “Had Allah willed, He would have taken away their hearing and their sight”, it says; giving another way out – maybe these troublesome reformers don’t get punished by Allah for their apostacy, but that’s only because He chooses not to and as mere mortals who are we to know or understand His ways?

The Cow 21-40

“We said, ‘O Adam, dwell with your mate in paradise, and eat thereof freely whencesoever you wish; but do not approach this tree, lest you should be among the wrongdoers.’”

Before getting into the meat of this section of the surah, it’s worth addressing the use of pronouns in the Qu’ran. The book is written as a first-person testimony, and the speaker is Allah, using the pronouns “We” and “Us” etc. The writing is addressed to “you”, which sometimes refers to the reader/listener, humanity in general, and sometimes to the Prophet. Helpfully the version I’m using makes it plain which “you” the text is addressed to, which perhaps is more clear in the Arabic.

This is quite interesting in that it means that the Prophet is pretty much taking himself out of the equation; he’s only the vessel for the message. In the Bible any speech by God was much more reported text – “And God said…” etc., so I guess the Qu’ran is aimed at being much more the direct word of God.

The first few verses continue on the theme of before, about believers and non-believers, who must “beware the fire whose fuel is humans and stones”. From my Bible read-through, the issue of punishment in Hell was quite a late addition. The original covenant between God and the people of Abraham to Moses was simply that if they follow His laws, they will become prosperous and numerous, a very material reward. Jesus taught that through His teachings His followers would find the “Kingdom of God”, but there was no clear idea of what that meant – it seemed as much a state of mind or a new age on Earth as it did a Heavenly reward. Only when we get to Paul do we find the promise of “eternal life” through the worship of Christ, but non-believers simply don’t get a ticket to heaven, there is no punishment for them. Only when we get to the writings of John do we see any concept of an eternal punishment, and this is mainly as a warning for people following a different Christian doctrine to the one John and Peter are teaching (although we are left with no clear picture of the specific doctrinal points of difference). Right off the bat the Qu’ran seems to have taken the idea of Hell and run with it. I note, however, that the surahs are not printed in the order they were written; this one is 87^th out of 114, so it’ll be interesting to see if a similar development from carrot only to carrot and stick happens within the Qu’ran as it does in the Bible.

There are two main elements to the chapter. One is similar in sense to many of the Psalms and to Job, for example. The argument that Allah created everything so you should worship Him – “He who made the earth a place of repose for you, and the sky a canopy, and He sends down water from the sky, and with it He brings forth crops for your sustenance”, and then onto the story of Adam.

Note that Eve is not mentioned by name, only in the verse where Allah tells Adam to “dwell with your mate within paradise”. Neither, here, is Eve specifically blamed for eating the forbidden fruit, the blame is shifted to both of them, and specifically Satan, aka Iblis, a rebel angel. Recall that in Genesis there is no direct suggestion that the serpent is the Devil; here there is no doubt.

There are differences to the Eden story, however. Allah tells Adam to state the names of all the angels, and the angels bow down before Man because of this power of names, except for Iblis the proud. Neither is there any indication of what it is about the forbidden tree that is forbidden. It Just Is.

However, when Allah banishes Adam from paradise He does say that He’ll be available should Adam need – “We said, ‘Get down from it, all together! Yet, should any guidance come to you from Me, those who follow My guidance shall have no fear, nor shall they grieve.”

The Cow 41-60

“O Children of Israel, remember My blessing which I bestowed upon you, and that I gave you an advantage over all the nations.”

The bulk of this section concerns the events of Exodus, relating how Allah allows the Israelites to escape Egypt by parting the Red Sea, making the covenant with Moses, the punishment for those who worshipped the Golden Calf, manna and quails from Heaven and the arrival at “a city” which could be equivalent to Jericho. This is similar in tone to some of the Biblical epistles directed at the Jewish Christians, whereby the writers, usually Peter or John, remind the reader of the various promises kept by God in the Old Testament.

Of note here is the concept that Allah gives to Moses the “Criterion”, (I think “al-Furqan”) to determine truth from falsehood. I’m not sure if this refers to Mosaic Law or to a more mystical awareness, but it’s an interesting concept.

The rest of this section, in the first few verses, skim over the proper way to act – bowing to pray with others and giving the zakat tithe, for example. It’s also noted that prayer “is indeed hard except for the humble”.

The Cow 61-80

“And when Moses said to his people, ‘Indeed Allah commands you to slaughter a cow,’ they said, ‘Do you take us in derision?’”

This section includes what I assume is the reason that this particular surah is called “The Cow”. In it Moses commands his people to sacrifice a cow, and there’s quite a nice little repetition element whereby the people keep coming back to Moses for more details – “They said, ‘Invoke your Lord for us, that He may clarify for us what she may be.’” After a few rounds of this game, the people winkle out the details of the cow – neither young nor old, of a bright yellow colour and one unbroken to the plough and without blemish, and they sacrifice the cow.

There are a few odd verses that follow this interlude, wherein “when you killed a soul and accused on another about it”, the dead person is to be struck with “a piece of it” and is revived. Is “it” the cow? Otherwise, to what does “it” attribute?

Other events occur, some of which are reminiscent of Exodus and some not. For example, Allah curses the people for wanting variety in their diet (“that which the earth grows —its greens and its cucumbers, its garlic, its lentils, and its onions”) instead of, one assumes, quails and manna. Which seems a needlessly vengeful act. There are also contradictory messages about other religions. We are told that “Indeed the faithful, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabaeans —those of them who have faith in Allah and the Last Day and act righteously— they shall have their reward near their Lord, and they will have no fear, nor will they grieve”. I don’t know who the Sabaens are, but still. However a few verses later we are told, in the context of teaching the Qu’ran to the Jews, that “Are you then eager that they should believe you, though a part of them would hear the word of Allah and then they would distort it”. The attitude seems to be, then, that the Jews have their own covenant with God/Allah, for which they are righteous, but would only distort the Qu’ranic message if it was taught to them. Later, too, we are warned about those who can’t read the word of Allah and make it up.

The Cow 81-100

“Certainly whoever commits misdeeds and is besieged by his iniquity —such shall be the inmates of the Fire, and they shall remain in it [forever].”

More promises of punishment for transgressors, using the worshippers of the Golden Calf as an example of the faithless. According to these verses these are people that say “we hear and disobey” and also consider obedience to scripture to be evil. This all seems pretty standard religious fare to me by now – those who you feel are not following our religion to an adequate degree of diligence you can safely label as transgressors and persecute them with not only impunity but a sense of moral righteousness. ‘Twas ever thus.

We get some mention here of Jesus – “Certainly We gave Moses the Book, and followed him with the apostles, and We gave Jesus, the son of Mary, manifest proofs, and confirmed him with the Holy Spirit” and also we get a little verse that confirms what are righteous actions – “‘Worship no one but Allah, do good to parents, relatives, orphans, and the needy, and speak kindly to people, and maintain the prayer, and give the zakāt’”. This all seems pretty reasonable, to be honest. Remove the monotheism and the prayer as being largely irrelevant to how a person’s actions affect anybody else, and that seems like a fair way of living. Do we really need the threat of eternal hellfire to enforce it? Doesn’t that kind of undermine the message of compassion? I misread this at first, I came away thinking that it said to speak kindly to people and animals for some reason, which would have been an even nicer sentiment but at odds with Allah’s desire for the sacrifice of a yellow cow.