An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 51: A Disappointing Lack of Humanoid Crows (Crowling/Crouching (al-Jathiyah))

Crowling/Crouching (al-Jathiyah) 1-37
A Disappointing Lack of Humanoid Crows.

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

Crouching (al-Jathiyah) 1-20
“And in your creation [too], and whatever animals that He scatters abroad, there are signs for a people who have certainty.”

Before I began this read-through I set up a series of folders, one for each chapter. The various chapter names were interesting and evocative, but this one stuck in my mind – who or what is (a) crowling? It sounds like some kind of crow-like creature, a kenku perhaps. Or some strange noise that’s a cross between crowing and growling. It looks like, sadly, it’s a spelling error and probably ought to be “crawling”, since alternative translations of al-Jathiyah are “Kneeling” and “Crouching”. Which is all a bit dull, and actually it’s like most of the exciting sounding surah titles already – they turn out to be something fairly mundane and referenced once in one verse. Although, to be fair, some have lived up to the name, usually ones about people, and The Elevations was cool.

The surah begins with a familiar argument that the existence of things proves the existence of God for “those who have certainty”, which seems like a circular argument. If you already think that because it rains it must be God that does it, then yes, you will have the “reason” to make that deduction. And of course if you *don’t* think that, then “as for those who defy the signs of their Lord, for them is a painful punishment due to defilement”. Yes, believe or die. No, sorry, believe or suffer for eternity.

We are also told that “Then We set you upon a clear course of the Law; so follow it”. Except that largely so far there hasn’t been a clear course of the Law set down in the Qur’an. There’s a bit about not disinheriting orphans, and those convoluted inheritance laws, but nothing along the lines of Leviticus that clearly delineates God’s Law. This surah is chronologically the 65th, so perhaps in numbers 1-50 there is something that I’ve not yet come to.

Crouching 21-37
“Do those who have perpetrated misdeeds suppose that We shall treat them as those who have faith and do righteous deeds, their life and death being equal? Evil is the judgement that they make!”

The rest of this chapter is really just Pascal’s Wager; the righteous get rewarded and the non-believers get punished, so it’s foolish not to believe. Although it seems like it’s one of those things that you can’t help anyway, since a non-believer is one “whom Allah has led astray knowingly, and set a seal upon his hearing and his heart, and put a blindfold on his sight? So who will guide him after Allah?” So if Allah has decided to stop the non-believer from believing, how on earth can they hope ot be saved? That’s a kind of divine version of “Stop hitting yourself”.

I had to laugh at the verse where the non-believers are made to say “There is nothing but the life of this world: we live and we die, and nothing but time destroys us” because the rebuttal is “But they do not have any knowledge of that, and they only make conjectures”. Which is exactly the same arguments you can hear from American Fundies against evolution today. And yet, somehow, they miss the irony that the argument presented here is that an unseen and invisible super-powerful entity will punish or reward everyone the ever lived sometime in the distant future when everything ends. Because *that* can’t possibly be conjecture.

Well, I’m disappointed by the complete lack of black feathers in that chapter.

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