An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 103: A Big Night For The Prophet (The Ordainment (al-Qadr))
The Ordainment (al-Qadr)
A Big Night For 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
The Ordainment (al-Qadr) 1-5
“Indeed We sent it down on the Night of Ordainment.
What will show you what is the Night of Ordainment?
The Night of Ordainment is better than a thousand months.
In it the angels and the Spirit descend, by the leave of their Lord, with every command.
It is peaceful until the rising of the dawn.”
“It” in the first verse is the Qur’an, and this ties into my question last time about how much of the Qur’an was supposedly revealed to the Prophet in one go. My understanding since then is that it was revealed in blocks, and then written piecemeal from those blocks of revelation. This, as the 25th surah, probably refers to the first and original revelation as the “it” of the first verse. That’s my uneducated guess, anyway.
Pretty obviously, the surah refers to the “Night of Ordainment” (translated as “Night of Decree” on Quran.com), the time of the revelation of the Qur’an, which is pitched (understandably) as a mystical experience. It is “better than a thousand months”; the word “better” is an ambiguous one. The verse implies a timeless sensation to the moment of revelation – one night is like a thousand months; and it also seems to imply that it would take a thousand months to explain all that was given. Not literally a thousand months, this looks like a pretty obvious rhetorical device, a “thousand” being the same as “a very large number”. Finally, perhaps it also implies that all the experiences a man could have in the course of a thousand months were also felt in that night.
The sense of awe and mysticism is continued in the next verse with the descent of angels and The Spirit (which sounds a little like the Holy Spirit of Christianity, expect that it’s something separate from God rather than an aspect, since it descends by His leave). So, a mass heavenly visitation evoking images of some kind of Spielberg-ian light show coming down from the skies, but after that, peace, with the rising dawn not only bringing images of the quiet peace first thing in the morning but also a metaphorical dawn on a day with new understanding. The Prophet is a different person on the morning after the Night of Decree than he was the day before. It’s a dawn on his new life.
This surah is basically a short tone poem, but in many ways that makes it more effective, like many of the psalms were short, personal views on the religious experience with a much tighter focus and so left more of an immediate impression than the longer rambling discourses on rules and expectations.
A Big Night For 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
The Ordainment (al-Qadr) 1-5
“Indeed We sent it down on the Night of Ordainment.
What will show you what is the Night of Ordainment?
The Night of Ordainment is better than a thousand months.
In it the angels and the Spirit descend, by the leave of their Lord, with every command.
It is peaceful until the rising of the dawn.”
“It” in the first verse is the Qur’an, and this ties into my question last time about how much of the Qur’an was supposedly revealed to the Prophet in one go. My understanding since then is that it was revealed in blocks, and then written piecemeal from those blocks of revelation. This, as the 25th surah, probably refers to the first and original revelation as the “it” of the first verse. That’s my uneducated guess, anyway.
Pretty obviously, the surah refers to the “Night of Ordainment” (translated as “Night of Decree” on Quran.com), the time of the revelation of the Qur’an, which is pitched (understandably) as a mystical experience. It is “better than a thousand months”; the word “better” is an ambiguous one. The verse implies a timeless sensation to the moment of revelation – one night is like a thousand months; and it also seems to imply that it would take a thousand months to explain all that was given. Not literally a thousand months, this looks like a pretty obvious rhetorical device, a “thousand” being the same as “a very large number”. Finally, perhaps it also implies that all the experiences a man could have in the course of a thousand months were also felt in that night.
The sense of awe and mysticism is continued in the next verse with the descent of angels and The Spirit (which sounds a little like the Holy Spirit of Christianity, expect that it’s something separate from God rather than an aspect, since it descends by His leave). So, a mass heavenly visitation evoking images of some kind of Spielberg-ian light show coming down from the skies, but after that, peace, with the rising dawn not only bringing images of the quiet peace first thing in the morning but also a metaphorical dawn on a day with new understanding. The Prophet is a different person on the morning after the Night of Decree than he was the day before. It’s a dawn on his new life.
This surah is basically a short tone poem, but in many ways that makes it more effective, like many of the psalms were short, personal views on the religious experience with a much tighter focus and so left more of an immediate impression than the longer rambling discourses on rules and expectations.
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