An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 53: Why Specificity Helps Avoid Centuries of Violent Culture Clash (Muhammad)

Muhammad (Muhammad) 1-38
Why Specificity Helps Avoid Centuries of Violent Culture Clash.

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

Muhammad (Muhammad) 1-20
“Those who are [themselves] faithless and bar [others] from the way of Allah —He has made their works go awry.”

Having carefully used the term “the Prophet” throughout this read-through out of politeness, it’s a little jarring to see the name Muhammad thrown out so specifically. And also how many different transliterations that there are. It seems a little odd, I think, because the general gist so far has been that the Prophet has downplayed his role in the Qur’an, putting himself just in the role of a humble messenger of God’s word. It is the Qur’an itself that is the important thing, not the man to whom it has been revealed. And so the sense of his identity as anything other than a role – the Prophet or the Apostle – has been diminished to the extent that a personal noun suddenly seems out of place.

There’s the usual discussion about the faithful versus the faithless, with the unhelpfully vague “the faithless follow falsehood, and because the faithful follow the truth". We also get more details on paradise - “therein are streams of unstaling water, and streams of milk unchanging in flavour, and streams of wine delicious to the drinkers, and streams of purified honey”. A stream of honey would be a fun thing to play with, I think. Possibly this is meant not as a fluvium but as a metaphor for “copious amounts”. The question is, is this meant to be literal (as with the black-eyed houris)? Is the afterlife really meant to actually be a place with actual rivers of milk and fruit trees and girls? Or is it metaphorical, and meant to be that the spiritual bliss experienced is as if a person were sent to such a place?

And because this is a later book, we get some unfortunate verses about violence - “When you meet the faithless in battle, strike their necks. When you have thoroughly decimated them, bind the captives firmly.” The context is that the Prophet has been kicked out of Mecca by the polytheists, and so he’s urging his followers into battle to take it back. But this, as well as verses where the Prophet gets in a huff with the Jews for not thinking that his super-duper new Holy Book isn’t the greatest thing ever, or for the backsliders who didn’t commit to battle fully enough, provide plenty of fodder for justifying violence in the name of Islam.

We also get an excuse for why the Muslims have to do battle to get Mecca back - “had Allah wished He could have taken vengeance on them”. Yeah, God could totes have done it if he wanted to, but He, like, doesn’t feel like it today, yeah?

Muhammad 21-38
“May it not be that if you were to wield authority you would cause corruption in the land and ill-treat your blood relations?”

There are a miscellany of topics in this last batch of verses, continuing on from last time and urging ”do not slacken and [do not] call for peace when you have the upper hand”, which again doesn’t help the whole “religion of peace” thing, but again is pretty clearly meant to urge people on for this particular fight.

There are thought police, though, with Allah telling the Prophet that He could make it so that hypocrites are easy to spot - “If We wish, We will show them to you so that you recognize them by their mark. Yet you will recognize them by their tone of speech, and Allah knows your deeds.”

There are also more threats of divine punishment for the polytheists for opposing the Prophet, as well as for anyone not committing to the fight, including those that are stingy (possibly in actual financial terms, or possibly with their faith) - “yet among you there are those who are stingy; and whoever is stingy is stingy only to himself”. It make the word “stingy” seem very odd. Was that really the best translation that they came up with? Couldn’t we have had something a little more poetic or sophisticated, like “parsimonious”?

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