An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 90: More Apocalypse and Assertions (The Splitting (al-Inshiqaq))

The Splitting (al-Inshiqaq)
More Apocalypse and Assertions.

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 Splitting (al-Inshiqaq) 1-25
“When the sky is split open and gives ear to its Lord as it should.”

Again?

Looking at the index, this one chronologically comes after The Rending as well. Really, was there a need for not only the same theme but the same imagery quite so soon?

Well, anyway, the sky splits open, and the earth “throws out what is in it”, and people come back from the dead for their final reward/punishment, “labouring toward your Lord laboriously”. We have the people who are given their record in the right hand who receive an “easy reckoning”. Meanwhile, those who are “given his record from behind his back” enters The Blaze ™. Note that this is similar to the People of the Right Hand and People of the Left Hand that we came across before, except this time instead of the left hand, it’s behind the back for some reason. And are we talking about the supplicant’s hand/back or God’s hand/back? It’s not clear, although given that the pronouns aren’t capitalised it sounds like it’s the person being judged.

There’s a nice poetic image in the verses “So I swear by the evening glow, by the night and what it is fraught with”. Makes me wonder what the night is “fraught with”, though. Stuff, probably. And what is sworn by the evening glow, etc.? That “you will surely fare from stage to stage”, in other words (I guess), that the above stuff is true.

The chapter ends by asking what is the matter with people that “will not believe”? No answer is given, but the pragmatic decision is to warn them what awaits in the afterlife and then let Allah sort it out. To the faithful it must feel sometimes like trying to get someone to stop smoking, or wear a cycle helmet, or change some other behaviour that you can see is bad for the person doing it. The difference is, though, that we can see the effects of lung cancer or head trauma. Nobody yet has come back from Hell to say, hey kids, don’t be like me. I’m afraid that it’s not that the problem is with people that “will not believe”, the problem is that the message is not very convincing.

No matter how many times you repeat the same thing.

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