An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 120: My Pretentious Maunderings on Morality (Humans (al-Naas))

Humans (al-Naas)
My Pretentious Maunderings on Morality.

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

Humans (al-Naas) 1-6
Say, ‘I seek the protection of the Lord of humans,
Sovereign of humans,
God of humans,
from the evil of the sneaky tempter
who puts temptations into the breasts of humans,
from among the jinn and humans.’”

It seems somehow fitting to end the Qur’an with a chapter about humanity, almost as if the book has led from divinity down to humanity. It would be better if that was actually what happens in the text but, shh, let’s not spoil the moment with annoying facts.

Here we are at the last book, and like the previous one this is more like a prayer of protection than any instructions or revelations. The al-Quran.info version uses “humans”, whereas the Quran.com translation says “The Mankind”. To be honest I think “mankind” seems better in context because it carries with it notions of civilization and shared humanity whereas “humans” sounds like a basic biological term. Quite why the two translations seem to have swapped a definite article though. “Mankind” and “The Humans”, surely? Not “The Mankind” and “Humans”.

Anyway, the idea seems to be that Allah has a particular interest in humans. Now, elsewhere we’ve been told many times that Allah is the God of Everything, and also that He isn’t particularly bothered by the behaviour of individuals who chose not the heed the warnings of the Qur’an. And yet the idea that humans are somehow different to all other life on the planet due to supernatural factors is a compelling one. A combination of the cognitive ability to recognize self, our futures and be aware of our actions, combined with superior linguistic ability means that we can come up with, and communicate, ideas like destiny or morality or free will. Because certain actions by ourselves or by others make us feel a complex blend of emotions we have the concept of morality, and because these feelings are, like all other emotional states, a combination of deep physiological responses coupled with high-level cognitive interpretation, they seems strange and mysterious to us, as if they come from elsewhere.

Thus, the idea of a deity or deities that have imparted this moral sense to us. However, this explanation, initially reasonable as it seems, never holds up to scrutiny. The mere fact of the “Problem of Evil” leads to complex philosophical knots to try to justify why people do wrong, and even in some cases what actions are right and wrong in the first place. By not adhering to a particular religious interpretation, however, and instead looking at how and why humans actually behave, we get a much better understanding of ourselves without having to resort to philosophical knots. It’s not always a flattering picture, but then facts don’t care about your feelings (tm). But the other fascinating thing about humans is that, because we can be aware of our thoughts and behaviours, we can endeavour to change them for the better. No God needed.

This chapter instead blames ill-feeling on “the sneaky tempter”, or as Quran.com puts it less weirdly, “From the evil of the retreating whisperer –Who whispers [evil] into the breasts of mankind – From among the jinn and mankind“. It’s a little tricky to parse this, but it looks to me that the “sneaky tempter” or “retreating whisperer” is not a supernatural figure, isn’t “The Devil”, but is merely any dubious person from among the humans and the jinn. In other words, this is a little prayer for a person to use so as not to give into their own worst instincts or the enticements of others. And in that sense, stripped of the supernatural, it seems like a perfectly reasonable psychological tool.

And with that rather heavy dive after a fairly simple chapter, I bid farewell to the Qur’an. A summary of my thoughts will follow in the next post.

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