An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 82: Ginger Beer With Mothballs. MmmMM (Man (al-Insan))

Man (al-Insan)
Ginger Beer With Mothballs. MmmMM.

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

Man (al-Insan) 1-31
“Has there been for man a period of time when he was not anything worthy of mention?”

I can’t tell if that opening verse is rhetorical or not. It sounds like mankind has always been something worthy of mention, presumably because it was created by Allah and is thus good because of that. The surah goes on to say that “Indeed We created man from the drop of a mixed fluid so that We may test him”. Never mind the test for a moment – the “mixed fluid” is described in the footnotes as sperm and ova, so here at least the Qur’an seems to be acknowledging the female role as something other than merely an incubator.

The “tests” are given in fairly broad strokes - “They give food, for the love of Him, to the needy, the orphan and the prisoner”, the rest is discussed near the end of the surah and concerns, mainly, lots of praying, day and night, and submitting patiently to Allah. I don’t have a lot to say about this; if that’s what makes you happy, go for it.

The rest of the surah concerns details of the afterlife, and for once focuses mainly on paradise rather than the punishments of Hell. One verse does discuss it, and is given as “We have prepared for the faithless chains, iron collars, and a blaze”. Which provokes a strange image of God working away at a forge making chains and iron collars for all the sinners that He somehow knows are going to end up in Hell but at the same time doesn’t really care if they do anything about it or not.

But as odd as that is, the strangely material rewards of the good afterlife are also bizarre when you think about it. The resurrected dead get to live in a garden where “They will find in it neither any [scorching] sun, nor any [biting] cold”, reclining on couches and wearing brocaded silk, served by “immortal youths” who “you will suppose them to be scattered pearls”. So where do these youths come from? The same place as the houris? Presumably some supernatural creation rather than other dead people – is that a good thing, expecting specially created servants to wait on you? Science fiction concerns about robots aside, these are evidently sentient beings. Or maybe they aren’t, maybe we should be no more worried about the rights of magical servitors than we are of robots. Dobbie the House Elf may disagree.

Finally the drinks of heaven get a bit of detail - “the pious will drink from a cup seasoned with Kāfūr”

 And also “They will be served therein with a cup of a drink seasoned with Zanjabīl”. Zanjabīl is apparently ginger, so why it wasn’t just translated as that, I don’t know. So, the drink of heaven is ginger beer? Well, I could go for that. Meanwhile, Kāfūr is apparently camphor. I’m not so sure about that. I think camphor, I think of mothballs. Not something to season a heavenly drink with.

It’s quite a slim chapter, this one, but quite pleasant overall, almost feeling positive about humanity.

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