An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 37: Don’t be a Donkey, Breast-feeding Toddlers and Seas of Ink (Luqmān)

Luqmān (Luqmān) 1-34
Don’t be a Donkey, Breast-feeding Toddlers and Seas of Ink.

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

Luqmān (Luqmān) 1-20
“When Luqman said to his son, as he advised him: ‘O my son! Do not ascribe any partners to Allah. Polytheism is indeed a great injustice.’”

After some opening verses about how the Qur’an is for those with the wisdom to read it, not for the ignorant or unbelievers, we get a character Luqmān, also known as Lukman The Wise, giving some advice to his son.

Some of it is so vague as to be useless –“bid what is right and forbid what is wrong”, but also includes advice not to be a swaggering braggart and to speak softly because “the ungainliest of voices is the donkey’s voice”. Luqmān also advises his son to honour his parents (well, he would) with the strange snippet that “weaning takes two years”. This is advice to honour your mother because she carried you and looked after you as a baby, but a two year weaning? Is that normal?

Near the beginning this section talks about the unbeliever - “And when Our signs are recited to him he turns away disdainfully as if he had not heard them [at all], as if there were a deafness in his ears”  but then goes on to say “So inform him of a painful punishment”. Wait … if he’s not listening before, why’s he going to listen now? That explains a lot of the behaviour of religious YouTube commentors on atheist channels who threaten people with punishment in a place they don’t believe in.

Luqmān 21-34
“Indeed the knowledge of the Hour is with Allah. He sends down the rain, and He knows what is in the wombs. No soul knows what it will earn tomorrow, and no soul knows in what land it will die. Indeed Allah is all-knowing, all-aware.”

More along the lines that Allah is great and you’re foolish if you don’t accept that. I’m not sure if the text is still written as Luqmān talking to his son, or as the Prophet talking to the reader, but whichever we are told to avoid the unbeliever and not worry about them because “We will provide for them for a short time, then We will shove them toward a harsh punishment.”

There’s quite a nice poetic turn of phrase where it’s said that “If all the trees on the earth were pens, and the sea replenished with seven more seas [were ink], the words of Allah would not be spent”, and it makes me wish for more of this and a bit of variety compared to the fairly repetitive arguments we’ve been getting. But that’s kind of it. At least the surahs are generally getting shorter.

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