An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 84: It’s Great News, Just Not Good News. Apart From The Heavenly Sex Slaves (The Tiding (al-Naba’))

The Tiding (al-Naba’)
It’s Great News, Just Not Good News. Apart From The Heavenly Sex Slaves.

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 Tiding (al-Naba’) 1-40
“What is it about which they question each other?! [Is it] about the great tiding, the one about which they differ?”

The verses for this surah are mostly very short, so I’m tackling it as one chunk rather than divisions of twenty verses. This may well become the norm from hereon in as the chapters get shorter and shorter.

One of the alternative renderings for the title is The Great News, which is a gnat’s whisker from being the “Good News” of the Christian Gospels. I’m not sure the news here could exactly be balled “good” though; “great”, in the sense of having a lot of import, is a better word to use. Whilst the “Good News” of the Gospels is that humanity has a saviour from its sinful nature (God provides a solution to a problem He created), the news, the Tidings, here, are that there will one day be a Judgement Day, when “the sky will be opened and become gates and the mountains will be set moving and become a mirage”.

Yes. We’re on the old Judgement Day theme yet *again*.

First of all the chapter references things that exist and therefore demonstrate the power of God – mountains, rain, the sun (like a “radiant lamp”), two sexes and seven heavens. From this somewhat shaky logical starting point, the chapter, as previous chapters, then expounds that if God can do this then it naturally follows that He can do all the miraculous things that it is about to describe concerning the end of this world and the rewards/punishments in the next.

And so the latter verses of the chapter discuss first the punishments (being given boiling water and pus to drink) and then the rewards – pleasant gardens and “buxom maidens of a like age”. “Buxom” seemed an odd choice of words (it feels like it ought to be followed by the words “bar wench”).

I put the Arabic verse into Google Translate and got “And as a warriors”, at which point I decided that Google Translate is really not very capable with Arabic. I tried some other translators, and one called Arabdict gave me “And youthful virgins, like of age”. This seemed more like the previous expressions, which leads me to believe that either the person that translated this particular surah had a penchant for busty girls, or thought that “buxom” and “nubile” were the same kind of thing.

Pendantry aside, it’s still a somewhat disturbing concept, that a God that created the universe and is supposedly ineffable and beyond human comprehension, should make sex slaves as a reward for worshiping Him. Just let that one sink in.

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