An Atheist Explore the Qur'an Part Seventeen: Spot the Logical Fallacy. Plus One Verse – One Verse! – About Jonah (Jonah (Yunus) 1-109)

Jonah (Yunus) 1-109
Spot the Logical Fallacy. Plus One Verse – One Verse! – About Jonah.

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:

Jonah (Yunus) 1-20

“Indeed in the alternation of night and day, and whatever Allah has created in the heavens and the earth, there are surely signs for a people who are Godwary.”

The story of Jonah is a pretty well-known Biblical tale – God wants Jonah to prophesy to Nineveh, Jonah refuses and ends up in a series of scrapes, including famously being swallowed by a “giant fish” as God railroads him back to Nineveh. It’ll be interesting what elements of that, if any, will be found in the Qur’anic version of the story.

The commentary raises an interesting point – Jonah is a prophet whose mission was successful, which makes a contrast I didn’t notice with the Biblical read through [Edit: Actually it looks like I did – I’d forgotten when I first wrote this]. Compared to prophets like, say, Jeremiah, who offer prophecies all over the place but tend to be ignored, Jonah refuses to be a prophet until he’s forced into it, but then the Ninevites (?) do actually heed his message. Hm.

The opening verses don’t really take us anywhere new so far – more about how Allah created everything and if you don’t believe in Him you will get “boiling water to drink” in the afterlife (Mm, nice cup of tea). There are a few verses which seem to form the basis of some typical Muslim apologetics that I’ve come across – the quoted verse above, for example, is an example of the “Argument From Trees” type of apologist – things exist, therefore Allah. I usually counter with examples of things like cholera, tapeworms and earthquakes, and if that gets an answer it all it then tends to skew the argument to “things that exist that I like are due to Allah”, or maybe something about ineffable reasons for destructive things to exist. It’s never very satisfying.

The counterpart to this is comes in the subset verse “Allah did not create all that except with reason. He elaborates the signs for a people who have knowledge”, which can come across as a call for confirmation bias – of course things will look like signs of the existence of God if want things to look like signs for an existence of God.

There’s a bit more about prophets and worshipping false gods (who will provide neither good nor evil for their worshippers as they don’t exist), and then we go on.

Jonah 21-40

“When We let people taste [Our] mercy after a distress that has befallen them, behold, they scheme against Our signs! Say, ‘Allah is more swift at devising.’ Indeed Our messengers write down what you scheme.”

These verses start with a continuation of a theme from the previous verses, that people are quick to ask God for help when times are bad, but forget to thank God when things go smoothly. These lines are reminder that all things come from Allah. It does raise the question about how the will of Allah is supposed to work. The verses mention sailors on a smooth sea and on a stormy sea, the idea being that they will ask Allah from succour from the storm. But … didn’t Allah cause the storm in the first place for ineffable divine purposes? So by praying for bad things to stop you’d be asking for God to defy His own will for your own selfish purposes. By that logic it ought also be equally feasible to say to God “this calm sea journey is too boring, please can we have a storm?” but no-one ever seems to propose that.

There’s some more about Allah creating everything, and the usual about sorting out the righteous and the polytheists and the unbelievers, etc. There’s one lengthy verse that bears examining:

“The parable of the life of this world is that of water which We send down from the sky. It mingles with the earth’s vegetation from which humans and cattle eat. When the earth puts on its luster and is adorned, and its inhabitants think they have power over it, Our edict comes to it, by night or day, whereat We turn it into a mown field, as if it did not flourish the day before. Thus do We elaborate the signs for a people who reflect.”

Now at first I thought that was merely another “God does everything” verse, concerning rain and fertility. But that’s not a parable, so I looked for possible metaphor. The most obvious one is that “rain” represents God’s blessings, and the fertile grass the spiritual growth of people that receive it. Possibly.

A couple of other verses from this section to conclude: “Most of them just follow conjecture; indeed conjecture is no substitute for the truth. Indeed Allah knows best what they do.” Sounds like typical equivocation – how do you get “truth” without conjecture? Presumably by simply accepting someone’s word as being “truth”, as the following verse reads “This Qurʾān could not have been fabricated by anyone besides Allah; rather it is a confirmation of what was [revealed] before it, and an elaboration of the Book, there is no doubt in it, from the Lord of all the worlds.””. Which is might convenient, I love that old circular reasoning. This book says it’s true, so it must be true.

Jonah 41-60
“There is an apostle for every nation; so when their apostle comes, judgement is made between them with justice, and they are not wronged.”

I don’t think I’ve got much to say for these verses. There’s a lot of the usual stuff about Allah judging people and how if someone does not come to Allah then anything that happens to them (lake of fire and other assorted burnings) is their own fault. Plus some verses along the themes given above, about apostles (or “messengers”) for each nation, so that each nation at least has the opportunity to turn to Allah. This is hedged with some lines about everything having its time and place, so that basically prophets can be as vague as they like about stuff, it seems to me.

Jonah 61-80

“Look! To Allah indeed belongs whoever is in the heavens and whoever is on the earth. And what do they pursue who invoke partners besides Allah? They merely follow conjectures and they just make surmises.”

These verses cover two broad topics; starting with a continuation of before, about how nothing happens without Allah’s command, and how foolish anyone is that worships other gods. There’s a verse that says “They say, ‘Allah has taken a son!’ Immaculate is He! He is the All-sufficient. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is in the earth. You have no authority for this [statement]. Do you attribute to Allah what you do not know?” which makes me wonder if this is aimed at Christians, giving a son to God (which we’ve already seen elsewhere in the Qur’an is considered a misrepresentation of God in the eyes of the Prophet).

The next verses, running into the next section, discuss Old Testament prophets again; first Noah, and then Moses and Aaron, and in this instance running pretty much as the Old Testament stories do. Verse 80 is where Moses calls for Pharaoh’s magicians to throw down their staffs – we’ll pick this up in the next section.

Jonah 81-109

“Why has there not been any town that might believe, so that its belief might benefit it, except the people of Jonah? When they believed, We removed from them the punishment of disgrace in the life of this world, and We provided for them for a while.”

That’s it – the above verse is the sole reference to Jonah in a surah called “Jonah”. Frankly, I feel let down. No whales or anything.

We pick up, initially, where we left off, with Moses declaring the magician’s tricks to be, well, magician’s tricks. There’s no mention here, unlike Exodus, of Moses doing the same trick and his snake eating the other snakes. Moses in the Qur’an merely dismisses the magicians and calls upon God to discomfit the Egyptians to prove His existence. There’s no mention of the plagues, but we do get the crossing of the Red Sea (here just “the sea”). According to the Qur’anic account Pharaoh calls out “ ‘I believe that there is no god except Him in whom the Children of Israel believe, and I am one of those who submit [to Him]!’” when drowning, and is saved as an example. I don’t think Pharaoh even follows in Exodus, he just sends his men out.

The chapter ends with a kind of summation of the themes; you should listen to prophets so that you can be saved, with the Qur’an placing itself alongside an established tradition of Israelite prophets.