An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 86: Confessions of the Prophet (He Frowned (‘Abasa) )

He Frowned (‘Abasa)
Confessions of the Prophet.

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

He Frowned (‘Abasa) 1-42
“He frowned and turned away when the blind man approached him.”

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been intrigued by who “He” is in this chapter title, and it turns out it’s the Prophet. I wasn’t expecting that. This is a chapter admonishing the Prophet for turning away from a blind man wanting a blessing and instead dealing with “someone who is self-complacent”. The Prophet is told by God that the blind man might have needed to hear the warning of the Qur’an, and that it is not the place of the Prophet to decide who does and doesn’t get to hear the message.

This is a surprisingly self-critical chapter for the Prophet. It’ a Meccan one and I’m willing to bet it’s relatively early (a check in the index indicates 24th out of 114).

The rest is made up of familiar material – how God evidently has power because He created mankind from a drop of seminal fluid and then fashioned him into a shape, and also provided food, in a list that covers several shorts verses and amusingly attempts to be very comprehensive – “made the grain grow in it, and vines and vegetables, olives and date palms, and densely-planted gardens, fruits and pastures, as a sustenance for you and your livestock.”

Then the surah ends with a brief description of the two fates awaiting people in the afterlife, either their faces are “bright, laughing and joyous” or “covered in dust, overcast with gloom”. There’s nothing startlingly new there, and I’m beginning to suspect that the remaining thirty four chapters are going to be much of the same.

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