An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 61: Anakin Skywalker, Flat Earthers, The Gate of Tears and a really horrible spa (The All-Beneficent (al-Rahman))

The All-Beneficent (al-Rahman) 1-78
Anakin Skywalker, Flat Earthers, The Gate of Tears and a really horrible spa.

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 All-Beneficent (al-Rahman) 1-20

“The All-beneficent has taught the Qurʾān.”

I haven’t really mentioned it before, but pretty much every surah (except, I think, one), begins with a declaration, the “bismillah” - "bi-smi llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm”, meaning “In the Name of Allah, the All-beneficent, the All-merciful.” So, it’s pretty evident what is meant by the All-Beneficent.

These are short verses, so each section in this commentary will likely be brief. This is mostly a list of things that exist, such as the sun and moon (which are “disposed [calculatedly]”), plants etc., each mention met with a recurring refrain of “So which of your Lord’s bounties will you both deny?”

“You” here referring to the humans and jinn to whom this surah is addressed.

It’s also claimed that “He raised the sky and set up the balance declaring, ‘Do not infringe the balance! Maintain the weights with justice, and do not shorten the balance!’” I’ve noted before, and in the Bible, that it seems strange that God should concern Himself with trading standards, but from these verses the “balance” comes across as a metaphor – the balance of nature, the balance of good and evil, I’m not sure. Or perhaps that a “good” person is “balanced” and an “evil” person is “unbalanced”. This reminds me of an argument I’ve seen applied to Star Wars, put forward by Lucas himself I think; that “bringing balance to The Force” is not about making the Light and Dark sides equal; it’s that the Light side is balanced, calm, measured, whilst the Dark side is chaotic and unbalanced.

The enigmatic verse that says that God is “Lord of the two easts, and Lord of the two wests!” is, according to the handy footnotes, due to the different locations of sunset and sunrise at winter and summer solstice. Flat earth confirmed!

The All-Beneficent 21-40

“O company of jinn and humans! If you can pass through the confines of the heavens and the earth, then do pass through. But you will not pass through except by an authority [from Allah].”

These verses continue the argument that Things Exist Therefore God, but it’s got some nice poetry. There’s an ongoing motif where something is mentioned, and the question “So which of your Lord’s bounties will you both deny?” follows in the next verse, all the way through. I like the rhythm it gives the language, even if the arguments are a little weak. Once again ships get referred to as the work of Allah. Last time this was mentioned (I forget the surah) it was rather implied that it wasn’t the ships, but the wind that propels them and the sea that could destroy them at any minute that show the signs of Allah. Which makes more sense to me, sailing a ship at sea is a good way to demonstrate insignificance in the face of nature. But here it’s the ships again that seem miraculous. Unless it’s an elaborate metaphor – the footnotes did refer once to camels (ship of the desert).

There’s also a mention, continuing from the previous section, of two seas that do not mix. I did wonder, given that you can get this visual appearance where two bodies meet at a cape, if there was anything off the Arabian peninsular where this effect occurred, but couldn’t find anything with a lazy half-arsed search. I did learn that the strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden is known as the “Gate of Tears” in Arabic, which is a great name.

The All-Beneficent 41-60

“The guilty will be recognized by their mark; so they will be seized by the forelocks and the feet.”

The surah now moves onto describing the fates of the “guilty” and “him who stands in awe of his Lord”. The guilty end up alternating between fire and boiling water – that’s a new one, like a really horrible spa. Meanwhile the “Godwary”, a term often used but not here, end up with *two* gardens now, not just the one, each one with a stream and endless fruit, plus green silk to recline on (I wonder why green specifically?), and the women that you get are untouched by human or jinn.

The All-Beneficent 61-78

“Beside these two, there will be two [other] gardens.”

Wait… now there are another two gardens, but they sound pretty similar, if not identical, to the first two. Streams, plentiful fruit, virginal houris reclining in pavilions on green cushions.

Really that’s about it. The verses are extremely short; verse 64, for example, simply reads “Dark green” (“mudhāmmatān”). The bulk is taken up by the “which of these will you deny?” refrain.

Even though there’s nothing particularly novel in this chapter, the poetic device is good, making it seems almost more like a psalm than any of the other chapters so far. I quite enjoyed it.