An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 77: The Potato People, and Cool Pagan Gods (Noah (Nuh))

Noah (Nuh)
The Potato People, and Cool Pagan Gods.

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

Noah (Nuh) 1-28
“Indeed We sent Noah to his people, [saying,] ‘Warn your people before a painful punishment overtakes them.’”

I thought that perhaps there might be a re-telling of Genesis 6-8 here, but largely any story of the flood and the Ark is brushed over in favour of a yet another discussion on faith. The version of Noah presented here is sent by God to preach to the people and warn them of the flood, but this doesn’t happen in Genesis. In the Biblical version, God simply chooses Noah (the drunken nudist) as being the most (only) moral person around. Noah makes no attempt to warn or save other people, and shuts the doors of the Ark when the rains come.

But the Qur’anic version has Noah as a prophet, telling people to believe in Allah “that He may forgive you some of your sins and respite you until a specified time”. “Some of your sins”, I like that. Maybe the small ones. But not all of them.

The people, predictably, don’t listen - “they would put their fingers into their ears and draw their cloaks over their heads”. Once again, God seems to have a terrible time getting His message out there. Perhaps it doesn’t help when His prophets go around telling cosmological untruths like “Have you not seen how Allah has created seven heavens in layers, and has made therein the moon for a light, and the sun for a lamp?” and biologically fallacious material such as “Allah made you grow from the earth, with a [vegetable] growth”. No, there aren’t Seven Heavens fitted with lamps, and humans didn’t grow from the dirt like a potato.

The non-believers ignore Noah and instead urge each other to maintain belief in some intriguingly named gods - “Do not abandon Wadd, nor Suwā, nor Yaghūth, Yaʿūq and Nasr”. Wikipedia is very light on details of these gods, the early Muslims having apparently done a good job of erasing them from history. The most detail I got was on Wadd, a moon deity associated with snakes and a hunter style iconography remniscient of Orion and Apollo. Of the others all I got was “Wadd was worshipped in the form of a man, Suwāʿ in that of a woman, Yaghūth in that of a lion, Yaʿūq in that of a horse and Nasr in that of an eagle”. I can’t help but note the man/lion/eagle forms that match not only the supporters of the heavenly throne as seen by Ezekiel, but the associations of the Gospel writers. Maybe a horse got confused with an ox at some point to really make the connection, but on the other hand eagles and lions are both pretty common totemic animals so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was pure coincidence. Note also the Lovecraftian feel to “Yaghūth”. Yog-Sothoth? Yuggoth?

Anyway, back to Noah. Noah gets fed up with trying to convince the non-believers and so asks God that He “not leave on the earth any inhabitant from among the faithless” and everyone is drowned. Note that there’s no mention here of an ark, nor anything about saving animals, etc. If this was all we had to go on for Noah’s story we’d have no way of knowing how Noah was supposed to have survived the wrath of God.

And that’s really about it. The most interesting part was the list of mysterious pagan gods, and I’m definitely filing that away into the vault of cool ideas. Which is probably the complete opposite of what I’m supposed to get from this chapter.

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