An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 97: Destroy a City? It’s Nothing (The Sun (al-Shams))
The Sun (al-Shams)
Destroy a City? It’s Nothing.
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 Sun (al-Shams) 1-15
“By the sun and her forenoon splendour, by the moon when he follows her”
The surah opens with a lengthy oath to the sun and moon, followed by other things which I’ll get to shortly.
First: it’s interesting that the sun is seen as female and the moon as male. I’m so used to sun gods and moon goddesses that it’s unusual, but not unheard of, to see it the other ways around. Whether this is just an artefact of Arabic having linguistic genders like many languages (and if it is, this is the first time nouns have been given a gender), or if it’s a holdover from pre-Islamic Arabic beliefs I couldn’t guess. I’d presume that the Qur’an doesn’t still consider the sun and moon to be gods, but perhaps they are thought to be some kind of angelic entity? Or it’s merely a figure of speech, of course.
The oath continues, referring to the sun, “by the day when it reveals her, by the night when it covers her”. I mean, again that’s not exactly how it happens, is it? I’m going to go for assuming this is a rhetoric device rather than an actual belief that the sun is always there but covered up by “night”. As a poetic idea, I quite like it. As an attempt to explain day and night, it’s pretty weak. So, I’ll be generous and assume poetic device. Apart from anything else, it kind of strikes the hyperbolic tone one might expect of an oath. (Counter to that, if this is Allah swearing an oath, you’d think He’d do so by things that were demonstrably true).
And the oath continues still more, with a nice little triad of “by the sky and Him who built it, by the earth and Him who spread it, by the soul and Him who fashioned it”. I don’t have much else to say on that, except that it’s a nice enough bit of poetry. The last line is broken up, though, by the addition of an extra verse expanding upon the nature of the soul, that Allah “inspired it with [discernment between] its virtues and vices”.
Unfortunately, after a long lead-in with this elaborate oath, the whole construction ends very weakly with - “one who purifies it is felicitous, and one who betrays it fails”. (“It”, in this case, would appear to be the soul). After that set up I was hoping for something equally as elaborate and rhetorically powerful as the thing sworn to; I guess not.
The surah then veers off to talk about Thamūd, and how when “the apostle of Allah said to them, ‘Let Allah’s she-camel drink!’” the people of Thamūd hamstrung it and so Allah levelled their city in the middle of the night”. “And He does not fear its outcome”, the surah confusingly ends. Outcome of what? And why would Allah fear anything anyway? (Well, I suppose the gist is that He doesn’t, but it’s an odd wording). Just in case, I checked with Quran.com and their version is “And He does not fear the consequence thereof”, which amounts to the same thing.
Am I to interpret that as saying that Allah destroyed a city and it doesn’t bother Him? I mean, yeah, I guess if you are the sole and supreme God of the universe, to whom are you going to be answerable, and what could possibly happen that you couldn’t fix? Is that meant to be the point?
Destroy a City? It’s Nothing.
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 Sun (al-Shams) 1-15
“By the sun and her forenoon splendour, by the moon when he follows her”
The surah opens with a lengthy oath to the sun and moon, followed by other things which I’ll get to shortly.
First: it’s interesting that the sun is seen as female and the moon as male. I’m so used to sun gods and moon goddesses that it’s unusual, but not unheard of, to see it the other ways around. Whether this is just an artefact of Arabic having linguistic genders like many languages (and if it is, this is the first time nouns have been given a gender), or if it’s a holdover from pre-Islamic Arabic beliefs I couldn’t guess. I’d presume that the Qur’an doesn’t still consider the sun and moon to be gods, but perhaps they are thought to be some kind of angelic entity? Or it’s merely a figure of speech, of course.
The oath continues, referring to the sun, “by the day when it reveals her, by the night when it covers her”. I mean, again that’s not exactly how it happens, is it? I’m going to go for assuming this is a rhetoric device rather than an actual belief that the sun is always there but covered up by “night”. As a poetic idea, I quite like it. As an attempt to explain day and night, it’s pretty weak. So, I’ll be generous and assume poetic device. Apart from anything else, it kind of strikes the hyperbolic tone one might expect of an oath. (Counter to that, if this is Allah swearing an oath, you’d think He’d do so by things that were demonstrably true).
And the oath continues still more, with a nice little triad of “by the sky and Him who built it, by the earth and Him who spread it, by the soul and Him who fashioned it”. I don’t have much else to say on that, except that it’s a nice enough bit of poetry. The last line is broken up, though, by the addition of an extra verse expanding upon the nature of the soul, that Allah “inspired it with [discernment between] its virtues and vices”.
Unfortunately, after a long lead-in with this elaborate oath, the whole construction ends very weakly with - “one who purifies it is felicitous, and one who betrays it fails”. (“It”, in this case, would appear to be the soul). After that set up I was hoping for something equally as elaborate and rhetorically powerful as the thing sworn to; I guess not.
The surah then veers off to talk about Thamūd, and how when “the apostle of Allah said to them, ‘Let Allah’s she-camel drink!’” the people of Thamūd hamstrung it and so Allah levelled their city in the middle of the night”. “And He does not fear its outcome”, the surah confusingly ends. Outcome of what? And why would Allah fear anything anyway? (Well, I suppose the gist is that He doesn’t, but it’s an odd wording). Just in case, I checked with Quran.com and their version is “And He does not fear the consequence thereof”, which amounts to the same thing.
Am I to interpret that as saying that Allah destroyed a city and it doesn’t bother Him? I mean, yeah, I guess if you are the sole and supreme God of the universe, to whom are you going to be answerable, and what could possibly happen that you couldn’t fix? Is that meant to be the point?
Comments
Post a Comment