An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 56: Feed Me, Seymour (Qaf)

Qaf (Qaf) 1-45
Feed Me, Seymour.

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

Qaf (Qaf) 1-20
“What! When we are dead and have become dust [shall we be raised again]? That is a far-fetched return!’”

The chapter starts with putting words into the mouths of the faithless, who says that being raised from death is a far-fetched claim, but this leaves them “now in a perplexed state of affairs”.

By way of refutation that Qur’an offers three arguments – things exist, therefore God (such as “salubrious rain”, mountains and also “Have they not then observed the sky above them, how We have built it and adorned it, and that there are no cracks in it?” There are no “cracks in the sky”? Well, no, that’s because it’s not a crystal dome of the firmament but a foul and pestilent canopy of vapours. Which wouldn’t have cracks. Unless you count holes in the ozone layer, which I suppose there wasn’t in the 7th century due to a distinct lack of CFC-powered aerosols.

The second argument is a list of other places destroyed because they didn’t listen to prophets, and we get the full works – the people of Noah and Lot, Egyptians, Rass, Ad, Thamud, Aykah and Tubba’. This time there are no further details, but the specifics are given many times elsewhere.

And the final argument is that, well, you’ll soon find out you were wrong when you die, so ha ha! There’s a nice bit of imagery about God being closer to a person than his jugular vein, which seems to carry an implicit threat about slicing that vein (or maybe that’s just me).

Oh, and “Qaf” is today’s mysterious Arabic character at the start of the surah. So I’m guessing a distinct lack of any other novel theme if that’s the name that was given to it. It’s unusual to have just the one character, so far it’s been two or three.

Qaf 21-45
“Then every soul will come accompanied by a driver and a witness”

Presumably, the “driver” and the “witness” are supernatural figures, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense in terms of how “every soul” would fit into that. I would guess that the “driver” is more like someone whipping them on and not chauffeuring them.

The pronoun attributions get a bit clumsy again, with various references to “the two of you” (which I guess to be the driver and the witness), and “his companion”. Who “he” is, I don’t know; one of the driver or witness and the companion is the other? At any rate, the notes tell me that it refers to Satan, who basically says “Hey, look, anything bad this soul did was nothing to do with me, it was all their own doing”. Which says to me Satan isn’t really doing his job.

But at any rate God isn’t interested and is unmoved, saying “The word [of judgement] is unalterable with Me, and I am not tyrannical to the servants”. My judgment is final an unalterable, but I’m not a tyrant. I just like burning people that annoy me. Okay.

Ongoing, it becomes clear, if we hadn’t guessed already, that this whole scenario is referring to the Day of Judgement, with an entertainingly greedy Hell proclaiming “Feed me more sinners!” - “The day when We shall say to hell, ‘Are you full?’ It will say, ‘Is there any more?’” I refer back to the flesh telling tales on a person, and how it seemed unlikely that this is actually meant as a literal reference to talking hands, etc. This is similar – Hell isn’t really talking like Audrey Two from Little Shop of Horrors, it’s just a metaphor that there’s always room in Hell for the wrongdoers. Obvs.

Oh, and if this feeding the furnaces of Hell wasn’t bad enough, there’s a zombie apocalypse since “The day the earth is split open for [disentombing] them”, and the dead come back to be judged.

Fun and games. You have to wonder how this was visualised – is everyone physical or incorporeal, looking like they were in life or looking like they’ve rotted down to? What happens to the dead who’ve been dead so long that there’s nothing left of them? Not even bones last forever if the circumstances aren’t condusive. And what about cremations or people that have been made into an ossuary? You have to think these things through.

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