An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 62: A Bias Towards Right-Handed Males. Plus: What, I Was Supposed To Take This Seriously? (The Imminent (al-Waqi’ah))

The Imminent (al-Waqi’ah) 1-96
A Bias Towards Right-Handed Males. Plus: What, I Was Supposed To Take This Seriously?

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 Imminent (al-Waqi’ah) 1-20

“When the Imminent [Hour] befalls —there is no denying that it will befall— [it will be] lowering, exalting.”

The “Imminent Hour” is the Day of Judgement – I like that the Qur’an brooks no disagreement that it will occur. “No,” it says, “it will, you can’t deny it.” No need to offer any proof other than the assertion, because It’s Written. I like the poetry of “lowering, exalting”, because of the different effects on what are described as three groups, the People of the Right Hand, the People of the Left Hand “and the Foremost Ones are the foremost ones”. Yes. They would be.

First of all we get a description of the reward of the Foremost Ones, reclining on brocaded couches, “waited upon by immortal youths” and given wine that doesn’t make you drunk or give you a hangover. (“which neither causes them headache nor stupefaction”). If this is the case, I can’t quite fathom why some sects of Islam forbid alcohol. In order to appreciate heavenly wine, you’d probably need to cultivate a taste for earthly wine, I would have thought, otherwise by what yardstick would you know it was any good? God could be serving you up some cheap old plonk and you’d have to say “Mmm, lovely” because you’ve been told that it’s the best ever and you’d feel stupid for saying you didn’t like it.

The Imminent 21-40

“And the People of the Right Hand —what are the People of the Right Hand?”

Before we get to the People of the Right Hand, we learn that the Foremost Ones are given “wide-eyed houris” as a reward. Which still raises the question of if women even get to go to Paradise.

Anyway, the Right-Handers get something similar, under shady lote trees, with fruit, but in this case they are given virginal spouses made from dead women. How this differs from big-eyed houris, I don’t know. It sounds like you don’t need to marry a big-eyed houri and can use and discard them as you see fit, whereas for a mere Right-Hander you have to keep what you buy.

Oh, and I’m not joking about the dead women part – “We have created them with a special creation, and made them virgins, loving, of a like age, for the People of the Right Hand. A multitude from the former [generations] and a multitude from the latter [ones].”

Although, it’s possible that the “multitudes” refer to the Right-Handers rather than the source of the virgin brides. Nevertheless, these virgin brides are specially made. “Of a like age” raises an interesting question – is Paradise full of old people, like Florida, or do you get to choose what age you are once you die? I mean, the whole sales pitch here is towards physical rewards rather than anything spiritual, so it’s evidently meant to be a rebirth kind of thing rather than living as glowing energy floating around the Godhead kind of thing.

The Imminent 41-60

“And the People of the Left Hand —what are the People of the Left Hand?”

So the Foremost are evidently the good believers, and I guess the Right-Handers are those who were good enough but not, I don’t know, holy men or something. And so the Left-Handers are the bad people who end up drinking boiling water and choking on a black smoke. “Then indeed, you, astray deniers, will surely eat from the Zaqqūm tree”. Ah yes, the Zaqqum, the Tree of Hell with fruits like rotting heads that eat you from the inside. I’m so stealing that idea.

Having established the three different fates awaiting on Judgement Day (which I admit is a novel change on merely having two, even though two are pretty much the same, just one’s the VIP section), the Qur’an moves on to asking why anyone would not believe in Allah, including the unexpected question “Have you considered the sperm that you emit?”

It’s made by God, apparently, and not the process of spermatogenesis involving Leydig and Sertoli cells. Oh, and another good example of how the Qur’an assumes that its audience is male.

The Imminent 61-80

“Have you considered the water that you drink? Is it you who bring it down from the rain cloud, or is it We who bring [it] down?”

These verses are basically a litany of things that could not be explained so therefore it must be God – crops growing from seed and sometimes failing, rain, water becoming foul, trees growing and fire burning them. It’s got a nice poetic structure to it, but otherwise, eh. Seen it all before.

The Imminent 81-96

“What! Do you take lightly this discourse? And make your denial of it your vocation?”

Oh hey, that’s me. Although I’d say it’s not so much denial, since as with the Bible read-through, my intentions were to honestly see what I could learn from these texts. And the answer so far has been … not a lot. It doesn’t help when the text itself has a slyly jokey tone to it; I love, for example, the sarcastic tone when describing what awaits the People of the Left Hand - “then a treat of boiling water”. Mmm! Enjoy your treat of a good roasting! It’s not my fault, that’s amusing. It’s like when God passive-aggressively complains about Moses breaking the first set of commandment tablets in the book of Exodus.

Apart from the idea that the soul passes out of the throat of a dying man, the rest of this is pretty much a re-iteration of the three different fates. I haven’t yet pointed out the anti-leftie bias that the People of the Left Hand are the bad ones; there’s nothing new here, given the roots of the words “sinister”, "dextrous", "gauche" and "adroit", and obviously it’s only a metaphor, but, you know, micro-aggressions and all that. I wonder if there is any bias against left-handed people in some areas of Islam in the same way the left-handed people in Victorian Britain used to have the left-handedness beaten out of them. Whereas now they just have to use scissors awkwardly.