An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 36: Melanin Proves the Existence of God. Plus: Not enough Byzantium (The Byzantines (Al-Rum))

The Byzantines (Al-Rum) 1-60
Melanin Proves the Existence of God. Plus: Not enough Byzantium.

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 Byzantines (Al-Rum) 1-20
“Byzantium has been vanquished in a nearby territory, but following their defeat they will be victors”

According to Tom Holland in “In the Shadow of the Sword”, the pre-Islamic Arabs would serve as mercenary troops for the Roman (Byzantine) and Persian Empires, often rival tribes at the same time. Here, though, the Qur’an comes down on the side of the Romans, predicting that Allah will grant them victory in the future. One assumes that this is because they are People of the Book, Christians, rather than the dualist Zoroastrians or some other kind of polytheist.

The verses don’t expand upon this interesting bit of geopolitics, sadly, but simply declare Allah to be the only God that has a plan and anyone worshipping other gods will be surprised when these gods don’t protect them from a good burning. It’s pointed out that the ruins of old civilisations that were (apparently) destroyed by Allah dot the countryside as evidence.

We also get a weird verse that declare “He brings forth the living from the dead, and brings forth the dead from the living, and revives the earth after its death. Likewise you [too] shall be raised [from the dead].” The living from the dead, I can understand as a form of afterlife, but dead from the living? Some good old smiting, I guess.

The Byzantines 21-40
“Among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the difference of your languages and colours. There are indeed signs in that for those who know.”

This section beings with a list of phenomena that apparently prove the existence of Allah – people with different skin colour, rain, earthquakes and sleep. Another variant on the “things exist, therefore God” non-argument.

That’s largely it, apart from some discussion about what is and isn’t the right kind of faith. And it seems that you just can’t win. On the one hand “When distress befalls people, they supplicate their Lord, turning to Him in penitence. Then, when He lets them taste His mercy, behold, a part of them ascribe partners to their Lord,” but on the other “And when We let people taste [Our] mercy, they exult in it; but should an ill visit them because of what their hands have sent ahead, behold, they become despondent!” In other words, you’ve got to thank God for everything good *and* bad that happens to you, otherwise you’re some kind of hypocrite.

What makes you righteous, by the way, as well as offering prayer at dusk and dawn, is giving your money to a religious leader. To pass on to the poor, obviously. “That which you give in usury in order that it may increase people’s wealth does not increase with Allah. But what you pay as zakāt seeking Allah’s pleasure —it is they who will be given a manifold increase.”

The Byzantines 41-60
“Say, ‘Travel over the land and then observe how was the fate of those who were before [you], most of whom were polytheists.’”

The problem with that idea expressed in the quote above is that quite often the polytheists will have done quite alright for themselves. The Roman Empire managed to last for hundreds of years as a polytheistic culture, as did Egypt, Greece, China and India. And the Zoroastrian Persian Empire at this time was still pretty strong and powerful. So the only conclusion the traveller is going to get is that for some reason Allah doesn’t seem to be smiting these people down, or if they are no longer the same great civilisations that they once were, He took His own sweet time doing anything about them.

There’s really nothing else new in the rest of this chapter, it’s all along the lines that if you have faith then you will have cognitive bias understanding towards Allah, and it’ll stop you getting a good burning. I’m very disappointed about how short shrift the Byzantines got in lieu of yet more of the same old sentiments.

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