An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 30: Apparently Allah has read Dante’s Paradiso, but not a textbook on embryology (The Faithful (Al-Mu’minan))

The Faithful (Al-Mu’minan) 1-118
Apparently Allah has read Dante’s Paradiso, but not a textbook on embryology.

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

The Faithful (Al-Mu’minan) 1-20

“Certainly, the faithful have attained salvation”

Alright, this surah starts off with a discussion of what makes a person one of the “faithful”. Good, let’s see what that might be.

“Those who are humble in their prayers”. Okay, seems reasonable.

“Who avoid vain talk” – a little vague perhaps, what makes talk “vain”? And is that vain as in in pointless, or vain as in boastful? Perhaps in this case the original Arabic word has just the one meaning and it’s more clear.

“Who carry out their [duty of] zakāt” – okay, tithing, seems pretty straightforward. That’s surely more a “dutiful” thing, but let’s go with it.

“Who guard their private parts[…]” – oookay. So, er, some kind of proprietry in behaviour then. Okay, guess I can go with that.

“[…]except from their spouses or their slave women, for then they are not blameworthy”. Say what? Sure, sharing your private parts with your spouse, that’s pretty much a given. “Slave women”? That’s not even ambiguous or metaphorical.  And of course this is all entirely told from the man’s point of view. I’m guessing that neither the spouses nor the slave women get an option to “guard their private parts” if the man decides he wants to exercise his conjugal rights.

There’s a bit more, but it kind of repeats what’s gone before, more about maintaining prayer. That in itself is an odd thing. Just praying a lot doesn’t make you a good person if you intersperse that with a lot of anti-social behaviour. Sounds pretty superficial to me.

The chapter then moves onto the achievements of God, which has the usual kinds of thing we expect – God makes it rain, or not, according to His whim etc., but there’s another expansion on Qur’anic embryology. “Then We created the drop of fluid as a clinging mass. Then We created the clinging mass as a fleshy tissue. Then We created the fleshy tissue as bones. Then We clothed the bones with flesh”. Clearly God doesn’t know about ossification of hyaline cartilage, which is an odd gap in His knowledge if He created everything. Bones aren’t “clothed in flesh”, they harden within an already differentiated embryo, and bone growth and deposition continues through until young adulthood.

Beyond that, there’s an interesting reference that sounds like the Seven Heavens as depicted in Dante -“We created above you the seven tiers”, and reference to “a tree that grows on Mount Sinai which produces oil and a seasoning for those who eat”, which I wonder what that is. Oil-producing is probably an olive; but “seasoning”? Reference to tapenade?

The Faithful 21-40

“There is indeed a moral for you in the cattle: We give you to drink of that which is in their bellies, and you have many uses in them, and you eat some of them”

After a few verses that state that cattle are useful, therefore God, the narrative turns to Noah. The theme here is that the people refuse to believe Noah because he’s just a man, whereas they think God would have sent an angel to warn them. Evidently this is a defence against those who accuse the Prophet of being just a man – all the previous messengers from God were “just men” as well, and those who didn’t listen to them were destroyed.

After Noah we move on several “generations” to another time and another prophet. No names are given, but they’re all pretty much the same. Note that those “who were faithless and who denied the encounter of the Hereafter” nevertheless had been granted riches by God –“ whom We had given affluence in the life of the world”. So, God is apparently quite happy to award material wealth if you actively don’t believe in Him? I can see the counter-argument already; material wealth is actually a hindrance in the afterlife and so God is basically tying heavy spiritual weights to them so that they sink. But it seems an odd way to go about things.

If you want to mess with theists, by the way, you could throw this line at them (25:26) “There is nothing but the life of this world: we live and we die, and we shall not be resurrected”. What? Oh but in context this is a reported speech from non-believers, so don’t get too excited about the Qur’an secretly containing atheist ideas.

I skipped a line into the next chunk (because my 20 verses at a time method is pretty artificial and purely for convenience) because it gives the fate of people that don’t believe the Next Prophet After Noah - “So the Cry seized them justifiably and We turned them into a scum”. Yeah! That line makes me think of the Sontaran character Strax from Doctor Who – I can imagine him offering to turn somebody into “a scum”, when he’s supposed to be buying a newspaper or something innocuous (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4T5eIN3Srs)

The Faithful 41-60

“Then We sent Our apostles successively. Whenever there came to a nation its apostle, they impugned him, so We made them follow one another [to extinction] and We turned them into folktales. So away with the faithless lot!”

Specifically of the previous prophets, this section discusses Moses and Aaron, who are “impugned” by Pharaoh who refuses to listen to them because they are mortal, and so gets destroyed. There’s also a brief allusion to Jesus - “We made the son of Mary and his mother a sign, and sheltered them in a highland, level and watered by a stream”, which doesn’t really gibe with what’s in the Bible but hey, maybe Mary did shelter on some kind of plateau.

The verses then discuss people who “fragmented their religion” and that they should be left in their “stupor”, and that any riches they have were not provided by Allah because He want’s to “bring them good”. We aren’t told why otherwise, except that they should “be aware”, and instead tremble in their hearts at the idea of God.

The Faithful 61-80

“We task no soul except according to its capacity, and with Us is a book that speaks the truth, and they will not be wronged.”

Most of this section concerns itself with addressing those that doubt the Prophet. “There is madness in him” they say of him, which apparently makes the “averse to truth”. Predictably, punishment awaits them. “When We seize their affluent ones with punishment, behold, they make entreaties [to Us]”. The Qur’an tells the Prophet not to bother making entreaties for these people, because it only encourages them if you let them off their eternal burning (actually, to be fair, for once there are no verses here about burning, merely mention that “We opened on them the door of a severe punishment”). The verses continue on the theme of how mighty and all-powerful Allah is.

The Faithful 81-100

“Say, ‘Who is the Lord of the seven heavens and the Lord of the Great Throne?’”

The Prophet is given some arguments to use against people that don’t believe that there will be an afterlife, because previous generations and gods have promised this but no-one’s ever seen it happen. To which they are given a series of questions about who is the best and greatest god – Allah, of course, is the answer. Therefore if Allah can do all the other things the listener is willing to ascribe to Him, then eternal reward/punishment is not going to be hard. That’s how I see the argument presented, anyway.

There’s a bit of tortured logic about how Allah can be the one and only God without partners (or offspring, take that Christians…) because “each god would take away what he created, and some of them would surely rise up against others”. We close with some invocations to God to “protection from the promptings of devils” whatever that might mean. The way the grammar is written it looks like this is the Prophet speaking – does he actually believe that he is beset by supernatural creatures, or is this a metaphor for feelings like doubt and other negative thoughts?

The Faithful 101-118

“Then those whose deeds weigh heavy in the scales —it is they who are the felicitous.”

The surah closes with a look at judgement, where those whose “deeds weigh heavy” are sent to a good place, and those whose “deeds weigh light” suffer having their faces eternally burned off, which makes them “morose”, apparently. I think it’s make you more than morose. Don’t have your face burnt off – pay attention to the signs of Allah, and it’s probably no good pleading after the fact either, you’ll get the answer “Begone in it, and do not speak to Me!”.

Finally there’s some confusing stuff about … someone … being on Earth for one day, or more than one day, or something. And the interesting question that “Did you suppose that We created you aimlessly?” The aim, however, is not clear, except to be “taken back”. In which case, why send away in the first place?