An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 88: It’s the End of the World, and Nobody Cares (The Rending (al-Infitar))

The Rending (al-Infitar)
It’s the End of the World, and Nobody Cares.

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 Rending (al-Infitar) 1-19
“When the sky is rent apart, when the stars are scattered, when the seas are merged, when the graves are overturned, then a soul shall know what it has sent ahead and left behind.”

Haven’t we been here already? In the Winding Up, we are told of a time “When the sun is wound up, when the stars scatter, when the mountains are set moving, when the pregnant camels are neglected”. So, we’re again talking of the Day of Judgment, or, as it is called in this surah, the Day of Retribution.

It’s a very short surah, and many of the verses are short. For example, the assertion that supernatural forces watch and note everything that you do - “Indeed, there are over you watchers, noble writers who know whatever you do”, covers three verses, one of which (Verse 11) is merely “noble writers”. Are these watchers angels? And in which case, why does Allah need to outsource His oversight duties considering pretty much everywhere else in the Qur’an it’s asserted that “He knows best what you do”, or something similar. I did wonder if this was a really early surah and the concept of exactly how omnipresent Allah is was not yet developed, but it’s given as the 82nd chronological surah (which, remarkably, means it has the same chronological placement as it does in the placement according to size) it’s a very late one in the Meccan sequence.

After briefly lighting on the punishment or rewards that await (very briefly, one short verse for each), the surah asks “And what will show you what is the Day of Retribution? Again, what will show you what is the Day of Retribution?” We heard you the first time. The answer given is not particularly useful - “It is a day when no soul will be of any avail to another soul and all command that day will belong to Allah.”

I’ve mentioned this before, but I doubt the morality of removing the capacity or desire of helping others from people that have lived a good life. You’ve been a civil rights lawyer, or you’ve been a doctor with MSF helping children injured in a warzone somewhere. Come the Day of Retribution you’re suddenly unable to continue helping the kinds of people you’ve spent your entire life helping. Not only that, but you more than likely lose the desire to help. And so the altruistic personality traits that have defined you are stripped away from you; in which case, who are you?

And maybe that’s the point of submission to Allah – you really are nothing compared to Allah. Except that this seems very bleak and nihilistic for a religion, which usually exist to provide comforting pablum to protect against existential angst.

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