An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 72: God says I don’t need to do the washing up (The Forbidding (al-Tahrim))

The Forbidding (al-Tahrim)

God says I don’t need to do the washing up.

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 Forbidding (al-Tahrim) 1-12

“O Prophet! Why do you prohibit [yourself] what Allah has made lawful for you, seeking to please your wives?”

The first half of this chapter is hilarious, as it basically comes down to the Prophet having a proxy domestic with two of his wives, and then claiming that God is on his side, so there.

As the verse above suggests, the Prophet has evidently made a promise to his wives not to do something that is otherwise deemed lawful by God (via the words that happen to be received by the Prophet…). And so he tries to get out of this promise by claiming that he has been told “Allah has certainly made lawful for you the dissolution of your oaths”.

God says it’s okay for me to do that thing I told you I wouldn’t do, honey. See, I wrote it down. And what is that thing? Well … it’s all given very elliptically, as usual, an I’ll quote the verse in full because it’s amusing.

“When the Prophet confided to one of his wives a matter, but when she divulged it, and Allah apprised him about it, he announced [to her] part of it and disregarded part of it. So when he told her about it, she said, ‘Who informed you about it?’ He said, ‘The All-knowing and the All-aware informed me’”. Now, if that doesn’t sound to you like somebody saying “And then she did that thing and I was all like I don’t think so but Allah told me that He heard her saying to Becky that she really liked Josh and anyway I don’t care what she thinks and she was all like nuh-uh”, then you are a better person than me (you probably are).

Not only has God told the Prophet that it’s okay for his to do The Thing, apparently He’s also said that the wives need to repent for making him swear not to do The Thing in the first place - “If the two of you repent to Allah … for your hearts have certainly swerved, and if you back each other against him, then [know that] Allah is indeed his guardian, and Gabriel, the righteous among the faithful, and, thereafter, the angels are his supporters.”

Note the “not only God but the Angel Gabriel and all the other angels in the world in space” ending there. The two wives, by the way, are apparently Ḥafṣah and ʿĀyishah, but this isn’t mentioned in the surah itself. How the commentary knows this, I couldn’t say. I know there’s meant to be chains of evidence that are supposed to authenticate the hadiths (the isnad), perhaps there’s some similar commentary tradition for the Qur’an. It’d probably be useful for me to look it up. Oh, and I almost the forgot the (semi-) veiled threat at the end - “It may be that if he divorces you his Lord will give him, in [your] stead, wives better than you”. Oooh! Handbags!

After this bit of fun, the surah turns to the usual talk about the faithful going to gardens with streams and the faithless being roasted by dutiful angels, as well as another one of those awkward verses - “Wage jihād against the faithless and the hypocrites, and be severe with them” – upon which a great deal of difference in meaning hangs on how the reader interprets jihad and “severe”.

After this, the surah skips back to some good and bad role-models for women, presumably as an addendum to the wives on how they should behave. The wives of Noah and Lot get mentioned as being “under two of our righteous servants, yet they betrayed them”. Mrs Noah I don’t recall doing … well, anything. And Mrs Lot, I’m not sure if I’d call it a “betrayal”, the looking back. In fact in the Qur’an she doesn’t even do that; God just decides to off her for no given reason.

By way of contrast, Mrs Pharaoh is a good woman because she prays to Allah and turns her back on her husband and his religion, and Mary is also an example of a goodly woman (for keeping her virginity, basically).