An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 59: Mrs Allah and the Tree At The End Of The Universe (The Star (al-Najm))

The Star (al-Najm) 1-62
Mrs Allah and the Tree At The End Of The Universe.

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

The Star (al-Najm) 1-20

“By the star when it sets: your companion has neither gone astray, nor gone amiss.”

There’s a certain mystical feel to these opening verses, beginning with the swearing by a setting (or falling star), where it describes the experiences of the Prophet when given his revelations.

First of all he sees… something… on the “highest horizon” that draws within “two bow’s lengths” which gives a revelation of “whatever he revealed”. The next revelation discussed occurs near the “Lote Tree of the Ultimate Boundary, near which is the Garden of the Abode”, which is a magical tree at the end of the universe that marks the boundary with the domain of God. Trippy.

There’s a verse preceding the first revelation that’s translated as “possessed of sound judgement. He settled…”, which has a lot of different translations in the footnotes. It could be “possessed of strength...”.  “He” could refer to the Prophet or to the Angel Gabriel. “settled” could be “stood upright”. That’s a lot of options for a short verse. I took both the original Arabic (“ذو مِرَّةٍ فَاستَوىٰ”) and the transliteration “dhū mirratin fa-stawā” and plugged them into Google Translate (admittedly only a rough guide at best) and it gave me … “Once upon a time”. Which isn’t like either version, but actually makes as much sense in context!

And then in verse 20 we get “Have you considered Lāt and ʿUzzā? and Manāt, the third one?” For one thing, I feel sorry for Manāt for being “the third one”, but also, no, because I don’t know to what this refers. My first thought was that it was more cities destroyed for disobeying God, but hopefully the next section will enlighten me (ʿUzzā sounds familiar though).

The Star 21-40

“Are you to have males and He females? That, then, will be an unfair division!”

Okay, so, nothing about Lāt and ʿUzzā? and Manāt, the third one. Guess I’ll need to look that up myself – more on that at the end of this chapter. But the notion here seems to be about ascribing to God female companions, and that this, somehow, is “unfair”. It’s made clear later on that “those who do not believe in the Hereafter give female names to the angels”, which to be honest seems like a pretty harmless thing. At least one could argue that they accept the existence of angels. But, presumably, women are dirty and inferior and God likes to hang around with men only. Or perhaps it’s meant to suggest that angels are genderless and not to be considered in this way, in which case it probably doesn’t matter what name they have.

Later on, with no apparent sense of irony or self-awareness, that Qur’an tells us that “conjecture is no substitute for the truth”. And then there’s almost a description of righteous behaviour, amidst the usual discussion about God seeing everything and giving everyone their just desserts in the afterlife. It has the familiar Qur’anic ambivalence about actions - “Those who avoid major sins and indecencies, excepting [minor and occasional] lapses” – so that you should try to avoid major sins and indecencies (whatever those may be…) but if you slip up a bit from time to time … eh. These things happen.

The Star 41-62

“and that it is He who created the mates, the male and the female, from a drop of [seminal] fluid when emitted”

Possibly the whole stressing about female angels stems from the biology given above – that it’s the semen that is the procreative element, and I would guess women are seen as merely the incubator for the man’s offspring. God evidently forgot to pass on any information about ovulation.

There are a few new powers attributed to Allah here - “it is He who makes [men] laugh, and makes [them] weep” and “He who is the Lord of Sirius”. Why Sirius, I don’t know (Google Translate turns this into “the hair”!) but for once the theme of The Star returns at the end of the chapter.

Here, at last, are references to Ad and Thamud and Noah and (obliquely) Sodom getting destroyed. The verses ask “Do you then wonder at this discourse, and laugh and not weep […]?” Well, just a few verses ago you said that it’s God that makes men laugh and weep, so whichever I do, is it me or am I just being hag-ridden by Allah?

Back to Lāt and ʿUzzā? and Manāt, it turns out that they were all pre-Islamic goddesses, which ties in with the idea of complaining about assigning female names to angels and female companions to God. In fact Lāt, or al- Lāt, has quite a lengthy Wikipedia entry. Not only was she becoming conflated with ideas of Athena and Ashtarte, but as al-Lāt she was considered to be the wife of Allah. No wonder the Prophet was so against her. It seems to me a shame that these goddesses were ousted by a furiously patriarchal monotheism. Give that most Middle Eastern nations seem to swing between unstable and authoritarian with little in between, I wonder if a more equitable religion would have affected this?