An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 87: Vapourised Camels (The Winding Up (al-Takwir))

The Winding Up (al-Takwir)
Vapourised Camels.

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 Winding Up (al-Takwir) 1-29

“When the sun is wound up, when the stars scatter, when the mountains are set moving, when the pregnant camels are neglected,”

The “Winding Up” is the running down, the finishing, of the universe (an alternative reading to the quote above is “when the sun goes dark”. Now, some might consider that the sun winding up and the stars scattering is an accurate reference to the eventual energy death of the universe trillions of years in the future. But in which case, there will no longer be any mountains to set moving (having been vapourised by the expansion of the sun’s corona), let alone any untended pregnant camels. I’m going to have to out this down to wild speculation touching on a vague similarity to truth, I’m afraid.

It’s good poetry, though, and goes on to include other images such as “when the wild beasts are mustered” and “when the seas are set afire”, even though again these two things are rather magnitudes apart in terms of cosmic disaster.

There’s also mention of “when the girl buried-alive will be asked for what sin she was killed”, which is a worrying image. Is the implication that it was wrong to bury this girl alive, or is this seen as a normal practice?

The point being of all this apocalyptic imagery is that, of course, this is when the souls get judged and sorted according to their desserts. That this is a true thing is sworn with again some nicely poetic language “So I swear by the stars that return, the planets that hide, by the night as it approaches, by the dawn as it breathes”, that “Your companion is not crazy”. By “your companion” I think we can assume to mean the Prophet, who claims that his visions are true and given by God and that “it is not the speech of an outcast Satan”.

And that’s really about it. Subject-wise it’s more of the same kind of thing but I did like the dramatic imagery and language used here. Although the domestic livestock references in some ways serve as a nice human-scale counterpoint to the cosmic drama, by being so everyday and mundane they also come across as jarring; perhaps this is the point.