An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 40: The People of Sheba Don’t Like Allah’s Conurbation Planning (Sheba (Saba’) )

Sheba (Saba’) 1-54
The People of Sheba Don’t Like Allah’s Conurbation Planning.

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

Sheba (Saba’) 1-20

“There was certainly a sign for Sheba in their habitation: two gardens, to the right and to the left. ‘Eat of the provision of your Lord and give Him thanks: a good land and an all-forgiving Lord!’ “

We being with the usual – God is great and the Qur’an is true, etc., and then as part of the examples given are a brief look at David and Solomon.

“Certainly We gave David a grace from Us: ‘O mountains and birds, chime in with him!’ And We made iron soft for him”. Making iron soft doesn’t seem like a particularly divine action if one considers the craft of smithing. But I wonder. The next verse reads “Make easy coats of mail, and keep the measure in arranging [the links], and act righteously” and it makes me think that perhaps there’s meant to be a metaphor in there as well as the obvious. Okay, perhaps David was a success because he was able to equip armoured troops, but is this also meant as a metaphor for the “armour of faith”? Is the “soft iron” meant to be something like David finding it easy to be virtuous? (Which he wasn’t, exactly, just ask the wife of Uriah).

Solomon’s reign gets some magical D&D stuff - “And for Solomon [We subjected] the wind: its morning course was a month’s journey and its evening course was a month’s journey. We made a fount of [molten] copper flow for him, and [We placed at his service] some of the jinn who would work for him by the permission of his Lord, and if any of them swerved from Our command, We would make him taste the punishment of the Blaze.” Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t the jinn made from fire in the first place? (Hence Iblis, a being of fire, refusing to bow to Adam, a being of earth). So I’m not sure how the Blaze would necessarily affect them. Unless, of course, it’s metaphorical fire, and just means “punishment” or something like that.

Then we get to the people of Sheba, who have a nice little land but offend Allah so “We unleashed upon them a violent flood and replaced their two gardens with two gardens bearing bitter fruit, tamarisk, and sparse lote trees”. I looked up these plants. Tamarisk grows well on very saline and alkaline soil, a good plant to grow in Sodom and Gomorrah kinds of conditions. The “lote tree” is the Celtis australis, also nettle tree and honeyberry, very tolerant of drought conditions and vaguely related to cannabis. Arabic “sidra”, in this verse “sidrim” which I’m guessing is a plural.

The people of Sheba seem to be prize idiots because although, for some reason, Allah creates hamlets between their larger settlements, the Shebans declare “Our Lord! Make the stages between our journeys far apart”. One – why would they want that? Two – wait, God is responsible for human habitation patterns? Given that Allah then “turned them into folktales and caused them to disintegrate totally” it looks to me like Sheban civilisation collapsed due to some kind of population crisis, which is then back-attributed to the wrath of God.

Sheba 21-40

“Say, ‘Invoke them whom you claim [to be gods] besides Allah! They do not control [even] an atom’s weight in the heavens or the earth, nor have they any share in [either of] them, nor is any of them His supporter.’”

Ah well. That brief interlude into the story of Sheba was interesting, but it looks like we’re back to arguing for the greatness of God by assertion. Every town has people that will refuse to hear the message of the Prophet because they think they are secure with wealth and large families, to which the Prophet is to reply “A-ha! Just you wait!”, or something similar.

There’s an amusing episode where the faithless are confronted with the existence of God at the end of their lives, or judgement day, it’s not explicit, and start blaming each other for not believing. The “abased” keep blaming the “arrogant” for not letting them believe in Allah alone, and the “arrogant” fire back with “we weren’t stopping you”.

“Those who were abased will say to those who were arrogant, ‘Had it not been for you, we would surely have been faithful.’”

“Those who were arrogant will say to those who were abased, ‘Did we keep you from guidance after it had come to you?”

“Those who were abased will say to those who were arrogant, ‘Rather [it was your] night and day plotting, when you prompted us to forswear Allah and to set up equals to Him.’”

Sheba 41-54

“When Our manifest signs are recited to them, they say, ‘This is just a man who desires to keep you from what your fathers used to worship.’ And they say, ‘This is nothing but a fabricated lie.’ The faithless say of the truth when it comes to them: ‘This is nothing but plain magic.’”

God asks the angels if it is they that the polytheists worship, and the angels reply that no, it’s the jinn. There then follows more diatribe about ascribing partners to Allah, how the Messenger is sent as a “warner” and more about why you should only believe in one God.

It strikes me, reading this, that for one thing the message so far really just seems to be asserting that there is one and only Allah and therefore any kinds of polytheism, following the “way of the fathers” and the old Arabic religions, are wrong. But there’s nothing beyond this broad philosophical concept to say why, or even what kind of improvements upon life this will lead to. There’s been a lot of what I refer to as the “look at the trees” arguments, but this is kind of lost on a polytheist. “Look, Allah must exist because it rains,” says the Qur’an. “Well duh, that’s because of the rain gods,” reply the polytheists.

The other thing that struck me is that the constant threats of punishment awaiting anyone not believing in Allah must also be an artefact of 7^th century Arabic culture  – the best way to persuade someone to something is to threaten them if they don’t, rather than offer them something better if they do.

That was quite an interesting chapter, for some reason it threw up a lot of thoughts. Time-wise it seems to be somewhere in the middle of when the various surahs were written, so there has been enough time for some of the Prophet’s ideas to be consolidated but it’s not too far into the angry “burn everyone” tirades of later chapters.