#quranreadalong

[quranreadalong]

SLIGHT PROBLEM: NO ONE KNOWS HOW THE ISLAMIC AFTERLIFE WORKS

So. Last time we read this, in reference to the evil pharaoh of the Exodus story.

Allah warded off from [Moses] the evils which they plotted, while a dreadful doom encompassed Pharaoh's folk, The Fire; they are exposed to it morning and evening; and on the day when the Hour upriseth (it is said): Cause Pharaoh's folk to enter the most awful doom.

The pharaoh and his underlings are currently being tortured, before the Day of Judgement, at which time they will... be tortured even more.

This is our first taste of the poorly-attested, barely-understood, but nonetheless mostly agreed-upon concept of adhab al-qabr, literally the “torment of the grave”. This is not a concept that is mentioned in the Quran, beyond the ayah above, but it is found in several ahadith.

You see, Islam has the same problem as Christianity with regards to the whole afterlife thing--the Day of Judgement is meant to sort people into heaven and hellbound categories, but there are stories within both religions indicating that people are punished or rewarded long before this day. Maybe early Muslims didn’t care much about this topic because they believed that the Day of Judgement was approaching fast. Mohammed enjoyed scaring his followers by indicating that the day was getting close, as we’ve seen in the Quran itself. But, uh, that didn’t happen. And so here we are around 1400 years later, and the question of what happens to people’s souls between their deaths and their resurrection at the end of the world has become increasingly pertinent.

Islamic tradition largely holds that this period takes place in a metaphysical realm, time, or just a condition called barzakh, meaning “barrier” (between life and the “actual” afterlife). The word comes from this line in surah 23:

behind them is a barrier until the day when they are raised

Now, tbh, this just says the barrier is behind them, meaning the dead can’t come back to life (Unless Allah Willeth, etc). As we’ve seen multiple times now, Mohammed said that on the Day of Judgement, the disbelievers will beg Allah for a second chance at life and he’ll tell them to fuck off into hell. It’s usually implied that this is their first conscious experience after death. In fact, throughout the Quran, we’re made to believe that people won’t even notice that any time has passed between their deaths and resurrection. The doomed disbelievers who are raised on the Day of Judgement say they were “sleeping” while in their graves, which is odd if they spent the entirety of their time there being tortured, either physically or spiritually (no one knows if the torture is meant to be inflicted upon their bodies or just their souls).

Regardless, the reason why barzakh is a thing is because both the Quran and the ahadith refer to people enduring torment before the end of the world, and scholars needed to come up with some sort of theological explanation for this. Barzakh was the nearest equivalent, so they went with that (though what “barzakh” actually meant varied within the first two centuries of Islam).

In the barzakh realm/time/whatever after death, people will be subjected to two fates: punishment and reward, similar to the Christian theological idea of “particular judgement” preceding the final judgement (which was also debated among different sects of Christians, with some saying that the dead were just unconscious until they were resurrected). The punishment is for wrongdoers, and is the adhab al-qabr in question. A hadith assures us that this is a real thing, and perhaps tells us where Mohammed got the concept from.

There came to me two old women from the old Jewesses of Medina [who] said: The people of the grave are tormented ... He (the Prophet) said: They told the truth; they would be tormented (so much) that the animals would listen to it. She ('A'isha) said: Never did I see him (the Holy Prophet) afterwards but seeking refuge from the torment of the grave in prayer.

The torment of the grave is clearly distinguished from the torment of hell in other very reputable ahadith--so there is a definite basis for the concept, despite its absence from the Quran itself. A variety of other ahadith flesh out the concept. First of all, that line about animals hearing it was apparently meant to be taken literally:

The Messenger of Allah went out after the sun had set, and heard a sound. He said '(It is) Jews being tormented in their graves.’

As for the disbeliever or the hypocrite, it is said to him (in his grave): 'What did you say about this man (Mohammed)?' He says: 'I do not know; I used to say what the people said (ie, he is an idiot moron).' It is said to him (by the angels): 'You did not understand and you did not follow those who had understanding.' Then he is dealt a blow between his ears and the man utters a scream which everything near him hears, except for the two races (humans and jinn).''

Even dead Jews bothered Mohammed. Christ.

Secondly, the “sins” that cause you to be tormented range in severity from disbelief all the way down to............. uh...

The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) happened to pass by two graves and said: They (their occupants) are being tormented, but they are not tormented for a grievous sin. One of them [gossiped] and the other did not keep himself safe from being defiled by urine. He then called for a fresh twig and split it into two parts, and planted them on each grave and then said: Perhaps, their punishment way be mitigated as long as these twigs remain fresh.

...not changing your nasty-ass urine-stained clothes. Nice of Mohammed to have pity on that guy, though. This indicates that some of the torment of the grave can be lessened by the actions of the living, though why putting an object on someone’s grave accomplishes this is A Mystery Of Allah.

Whether Muslims will be subjected to any of this torture is unclear. A hadith suggests they will not.

“Allah will keep firm those who believe, with the word that stands firm.” [14:27] This has been revealed concerning the torment of the grave. It will be said to him: ‘Who is your Lord?’ He will say: ‘My Lord is Allah, and my Prophet is Muhammad.’

(It’s said in less-reputable stories that angels named Munkar and Nakir are responsible for asking these questions, sometimes with a third angel named Ruman thrown in. They are generally depicted as very scary looking in order to frighten people.)

As for those Muslims who get to experience their pre-Day-of-Judgement rewards, it’s... also unclear what happens to them. Islamic scholars sometimes point to this verse from back in the third surah, following the Battle of Uhud, as a reference to barzakh:

And never think of those who have been killed in the cause of Allah as dead. Rather, they are alive with their Lord, receiving provision, Rejoicing in what Allah has bestowed upon them of His bounty, and they receive good tidings about those [to be martyred] after them who have not yet joined them - that there will be no fear concerning them, nor will they grieve.

And in a hadith, it’s said that these dead soldiers are turned into green birds who live in jannah... presumably temporarily, so they can enjoy their lady-lovin’ rewards later. But both the hadith and the Quran make it clear that Muslims who die while waging jihad (in addition to prophets etc) are given express tickets to heaven itself... they’re not in some in-between state. So this can’t be barzakh or the good equivalent of the torment of the grave. I mean, it can, if you want to connect the two badly enough, but it doesn’t make much sense.

So some Islamic scholars proposed more modest rewards. After satisfactorily answering the angels’ questions, they say, dead Muslims in their graves will get a sneak peek into jannah, filling them with hope and tiding them over until the Day of Judgement. The grave itself will be made spacious and well-lit for them, then they can sleep peacefully. (“Wow this is rly helpful!!!” - guy who has been dead for 800 years and is now a femur bone and some ashes.)

The sneak peek hadith linked above basically states that people will know whether they’re going to hell or heaven right after answering the questions, though, so why does the Quran show the disbelievers being shocked when they’re sentenced to hell? What’s even the point of the Day of Judgement when they’ve already received judgement? Why bother with the bridge thing and all the dramatics? Lo! It is a mystery. Then again, Allah judges everyone before they’re even born, so I guess it makes just as much sense as everything else in this religion, which is to say none at all.

At the end of the day, what we really have here is a disconnect between the Quran itself and the ahadith, which does happen every now and then. Nothing in the Quran beyond this one line clearly says that dead people will be doing or experiencing anything other than... being dead, with the exception of those granted Instant Jannah. But the ahadith make it abundantly clear that this is not the case. The ahadith referencing this are very strong and can’t be dismissed as later fabrications.

As for why this disconnect may have arisen in the first place, the hadith from Aisha perhaps suggests that Mohammed made adhab al-qabr a more central part of Islam only after he heard Jews in Medina talking about it a lot. Perhaps he himself didn’t fully understand how all of this was meant to work, since neither Jews nor Christians offered a solid, unified explanation for it, and he didn’t want to incorporate it into the Quran beyond this line. Or maybe he just needed to give his followers some extra motivation to keep following him--now they weren’t just risking torment in hell, but also torment before hell. I don’t know.

What I do know is that the concept of the torment of the grave, and a consciousness-after-death concept more broadly (even if only for a moment), has become an accepted part of Islam over the centuries despite its near-total absence from the Quran. Not everyone can agree on the exact nature of it all, since there really isn’t much material to base it upon, but most do agree that it is a thing. Somehow.

Anyway the real answer to this and many other theological mysteries is that Mohammed didn’t think all of this through clearly enough and so Islamic scholars had to try to fix his mistakes for several centuries. O well!

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#historylesson #quranreadalong #surah 40 #ghafir

[urfavmurtad]

Why did you leave islam?

Hey anon, I think I’ve already answered this but I don’t mind answering it in more detail if that’s what you want. There wasn’t any one triggering moment tbh. My parents are both very religious (my mom especially, she is a hafiza) and I’ve been shoved into Islamic education classes since I was a kid. Even back then a lot of things didn’t quite add up for me. Little things mostly, like I’d notice errors in the Quran and be like 🤔. Just minor details, like the mixup between Maryam (mother of Jesus) and Miriam (sister of Moses) and things like that. Or I’d just think about stories like Adam/Eve, Noah, Moses, Dhu al-Qarnayn, Isra/Miraj, the moon splitting etc and think… uhh this shit ain’t happen.

But I still 100% thought of myself and identified as Muslim until a few years after we moved to America. I was maybe 12-13 and started considering the way I’d been raised and the way I’d been taught to think and behave. Before then, I really hadn’t thought about any of that stuff. Not just basic stuff like hijab and things like that but general… rules about how society should function. How women should behave. How people’s lives should be regulated. Everything from regulations of sexuality to even financial regulations I was skeptical of. I saw misogyny in rules that I had previously been taught existed to “protect women”. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I didn’t agree with much of it, and some of it I thought was actively harmful. I started to consider how it had impacted my behavior, my view of other women, the way I interacted with the world in general, and I realized that it was mostly a negative impact. I had grown up being self-conscious of my body just because it was a female body, I had regulated my movements and emotions around men even when they were people I fully trusted, I had felt the need to view men as authority figures above women, and I had been taught that my main role in life should be as a man’s dutiful wife and as a mother to many children. And I didn’t want that!

Like 99% of other girls raised Muslim, I was also quite ignorant of much of Islamic history and what the Quran actually says and, more importantly, how it has been used to oppress women. The single most shocking thing to me as a young girl was the sexual slavery. The Quran allows women to be held as slaves and raped by their owners, regardless of whether either the slave master or the slave is married. This is stated repeatedly, in clear language, throughout the Quran (4:3, 4:24, 70:30, etc). Despite the fact that I had an Islamic education in high school, this fact was rarely brought up and immediately dismissed as “oh that was just part of the culture” whenever the subject was raised. That’s when I knew I was being fed a load of misogynistic crap. This is something written in a book we are meant to base our entire lives upon. The Quran is meant to be eternal. Either my own teachers didn’t truly believe that, or they were lying to me, and neither option made me very happy. The fact that many Muslim empires throughout history had open, institutionalized sexual slavery for upper-class men also did not escape my notice. Women throughout Islamic history had been abused, enslaved, and raped–and I was being told to defend an ideology that allowed it. (Later I would go on to learn more about Islamic history, from Muslim sources, and realize that the Quran’s verses about raping slaves weren’t merely allowances but encouragement. Mohammed’s soldiers were uncomfortable with the thought of raping enslaved women who were married and Mohammed “revealed” that Allah thought it was fine.)

I realized that not only did I not believe in the religion at all, but I didn’t even like it. The long list of rules, the whole moral philosophy is just deeply unappealing to me and it got less appealing as I learned more, which is not a good sign. And no shade (well, some shade tbqh), the Quran itself is… not cute to me, as I have elaborated on in the @quranreadalong sideblog, so even if I ignored the ahadith, I still wouldn’t have liked the religion as an ideology. I think I still self-identified as Muslim even then, but I was no longer very into it. When I prayed, I was just going through the motions at that point, and I think I considered my attachment to Islam more “cultural” than actually religious.

A bit after that, I dived into Islamic history. My mother has all kinds of books and was happy to let me read them and even discuss them with me. But the more I read, the more I got a “Hans, are we the baddies?” sense. I developed a pretty strong dislike of Mohammed as a person, and realized that a lot of what I’d been taught (and also just assumed) about the early history of Islam was completely wrong. And so I felt my last “cultural” attachment to the religion start to slip away. If I don’t believe in the religion, don’t like the religion, don’t respect the founders of the religion, and don’t appreciate the manner by which that religion became part of my ancestors’ “culture” nor the impact of it on said culture, what exactly is left for me?

In high school I had a Big Gay Awakening and that was really the last straw. I’m fortunate that it happened after I began doubting religion and not before it, because I think I would have had a lot of self-hatred otherwise. (In hindsight I always had feelings for girls, but I assumed it was normal to not be attracted to men and have little crushes on girls instead. My younger self just assumed that would change at some point, and it never did.) Why would I invest any emotional energy into an ideology that doesn’t even respect me as a person?

So when I was… maybe 16-17, I think, I was pretty much mentally checked out of Islam. I still present as a Muslim and no one irl beyond like two people is aware that I’m even slightly non-religious, because my parents would be furious if they found out (to say nothing of me being a lesbian). Since then, nothing has drawn me back into religion; most of the time I find myself being drawn even farther from it. In hindsight, so much of what I’d been taught was either bullshit or manipulative, and I lowkey resent it a bit for that reason.

But I started reading more about the history of religion, including Islam but not just limited to it. I learned more about how Judaism became monotheistic. I read the Biblical versions of stories in the Quran and looked into where Mohammed got the non-Biblical stories. I read up on all sorts of Islamic empires and historians. I still like studying Islam. I just don’t believe in it anymore and I don’t think I will ever believe in any religion for the rest of my life. That’s the long answer anon, hope it is helpful. ✌

#ask #anon #ex muslim #rant

[quranreadalong]

#198, Surah 40

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 198

We’ll finish this up today, meaning we didn’t make it to #200 in this surah after all. That’ll be in surah 41, then. O well, the next surah is more of this same disbelievers-are-doomed shit, so it doesn’t rly matter tbh!

40:61 is our starting point. Allah made the night so people could sleep, and also made everything in general, so everyone should worship him and believe Mohammed’s revelations. Those who do not are delusional liars. (Bad!)

Allah also made the earth a dwelling-place for humans, made the sky a ceiling for the earth (hmm), and created humans themselves. Therefore, everyone should worship him. Yes, that’s exactly what he just said three lines ago. Lo! Allah loveth repeating himself.

Again Mohammed is commanded to proclaim that Allah is the only god and he is a prophet. We get a repeat of the whole human-creation-cycle that we’ve seen multiple times now: the first human was created from dust/clay, then Adam’s children were created from a drop of semen and became “clots” in the womb of Eve, then they were born, grew into adults, and began to decline in old age. Allah is in control of all of that. Fair enough, neutral.

Back to bitching about those who disbelieve in Mohammed’s revelations, though. 40:70 begins a long kuffar hell counter (1) hit:

Those who deny the Scripture and that wherewith We send Our messengers. But they will come to know, When carcans are about their necks and chains. They are dragged Through boiling waters; then they are thrust into the Fire.

Ahh yes, the disbelievers-in-chains imagery. A bit stale at this point, really. As is the description of the scene where Allah taunts the disbelievers and asks them where their fake gods are, the statement that Allah is the one who sends disbelievers astray, and another ayah about how disbelievers are insolent and hellbound. Just gets a tad boring after seeing it so many times, I’m afraid. Still bad, though.

Aight, we’re finally at the end of the surah. Let’s see if Mo can pull it together and give us something worthwhile here. Hm... everyone will be brought before Allah after they die. Eh. Allah’s punishment will come upon the liars eventually. Questionable and basically a threat, but still eh. Allah gave various animals to humanity for food and transport purposes, and shows humans “tokens” of his grandeur. Zzz.

Well, this is the end of the surah. Let’s see what we got. It’s... another “travel the land and see the consequences!!” for denying prophets (meaning doom unto disbelievers) ayah. Joy! We’re done here.

The Quran Read-Along: Day 198

Ayat: 25

Good: 0

Neutral: 13 (40:61-62, 40:64-69, 40:77-81)

Bad: 12 (40:63, 40:70-76, 40:82-85)

Kuffar hell counter: 1 (40:69-76)

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#surah 40 #quranreadalong #ghafir

[quranreadalong]

#196, Surah 40

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 196

It’s ya boy Moses. Again. There are actually some new, never-before-seen details in this section--details that barely impact the outcome of the story at all. GET EXCITED!!

40:24 re-introduces some of the secondary characters we’ve seen in various versions of the Exodus story thus far: Moses was denied by the pharaoh, Haman, and Korah, who “said: A lying sorcerer!”.

Y’all remember the pharaoh, obviously, and hopefully you remember Haman, the evil advisor accidentally transplanted from the Book of Esther into the Quranic Exodus. Korah is a Hebrew guy from that one story in surah 28 where he was greedy and Allah made the earth swallow him up. He was called a disbeliever in that story, but I think this is the first time we’ve been told that he accused Moses of being a liar. Hey, a new detail!

Another new detail is this:

And when he brought them the Truth from Our presence, they said: Slay the sons of those who believe with him, and spare their women. But the plot of disbelievers is in naught but error.

(I’m ignoring that last sentence because I want to talk about something else rn, DAMN IT MOHAMMED!)

When Moses starts his prophet gig, the pharaoh declares that Hebrew boys will be put to death. But the Exodus story (in the Bible and the Quran) starts with the pharaoh killing Hebrew boys, which is why Moses’ mother sends him away. From surah 28:

Pharaoh exalted himself in the land and made its people into factions, oppressing a sector among them, slaughtering their [newborn] sons and keeping their females alive. Indeed, he was of the corrupters. And We wanted to confer favor upon those who were oppressed in the land and make them leaders and make them inheritors And establish them in the land and show Pharaoh and [his minister] Haman and their soldiers through them that which they had feared. And We inspired to the mother of Moses, "Suckle him; but when you fear for him, cast him into the river and do not fear and do not grieve. Indeed, We will return him to you and will make him [one] of the messengers."

So this seems to be a second incident of Hebrew-boy-killing, taking place when Moses is an adult. (Pharaoh and Haman have been around for quite a while, evidently.) This part is not in the Bible, nor in any other suwar, and I can’t find any basis for it in Jewish or Christian texts. None of the tafsirs have much to say about it, beyond noting that it happened. So I have two theories for what happened here:

1) Mohammed just fucked up and accidentally changed the chronology in this surah--there was supposed to be only one kid-killing incident, at the intro to the Moses story.

2) Mohammed either misunderstood the “death of the firstborn” incident from the Bible (where YHWH kills all the Egyptians’ firstborn sons) or did understand it, but disliked it and therefore changed it so that the Egyptians were the ones killing kids.

The plagues that Allah/YHWH sends upon Egypt are mentioned in an ayah back in surah 7. Locusts, (water turning into) blood, lice, and frogs are all named, as in the Bible. One additional plague is mentioned--tufana, which seems to mean “flood”. There isn’t any flood mentioned in the Exodus version, but there is an enormous storm with lightning, thunder, and hail, and it’s probably supposed to refer to that. The Passover incident involving the deaths of the firstborn sons (and four other plagues preceding it: darkness, boils, diseased livestock, and a swarm of deadly animals) is not mentioned in the Quran.

So all we can say is that the Passover story was completely left out of Islam, but we can’t really conclude why that might be. Allah doesn’t have a problem killing kids who he knows will grow up to be disbelievers (see: the al-Khidr story), so it’s not like the story violated some tenet of Islam. Perhaps Mo was still uncomfortable with it, though, and thought the unfortunate genocide would work better as a plot point if the Egyptians were the ones doing it. Mohammed did have a tendency to make the various disbelieving civilizations cartoonishly evil in some suwar, whereas they come across as just skeptical or apathetic in other suwar (see: the variants of the Saleh story). So adding a line about the Egyptians killing kids twice just to make them seem extra dickish wouldn’t be unprecedented.

This question is similar to the whole thing with the Samaritan building the golden calf--sometimes it’s hard to tell if Mohammed intentionally fucked up the story because he disliked its message, or if he just did it accidentally because he got confused by similar wording or repeated themes. We’ll never know. But in this particular case, my money is on the latter.

Regardless, the pharaoh also wants to kill Moses himself because he’s afraid that Moses will “cause confusion in the land” with his religious preaching. Moses prays for Allah to protect him from the pharaoh and all other disbelievers.

In 40:28, we have yet another new addition to the story.

a believing man of Pharaoh's family (*other translations: “of Pharaoh’s folk”), who hid his faith, said: Would ye kill a man because he saith: My Lord is Allah, and hath brought you clear proofs from your Lord? 

I guess we’re just forgetting the part where the pharaoh was initially mad at Moses for killing some Egyptian guy in cold blood. Remember that? I guess that got retconned, and the pharaoh is just mad at Moses because he dislikes The True Religion in this version of the story. Hmm.

But who is this Muslim Egyptian fellow? The Jalals suggest it was the pharaoh’s unnamed cousin, though I’ve also seen him described as the pharaoh’s treasurer. A small minority read the grammar here, tortuously, as “a believing man--who hid his faith from Pharaoh’s family--said”, meaning he may not have been Egyptian at all. No one seems to know who he was, and again there aren’t any Jewish or Christian traditions I can find that contain this scene. The cousin interpretation is the most popular one in tafsir works, so let’s call him the pharaoh’s cousin.

This gentleman tells the pharaoh that no one can stop the wrath of Allah (in reference to the punishments brought upon the people of Hud, Saleh, etc, incidentally putting all of those pre-Moses in the chronology), though the pharaoh dismisses his concerns. But the cousin continues his rant, saying that he also fears that Allah will doom them in the afterlife.

I’ve been generous by designating all of the above as neutral, given the circumstances, but his rant does contain a couple of bad lines: the typical “he whom Allah sendeth astray, for him there is no guide” in 40:33 and a line stating that these astray people, who are hated by Allah, are those who doubt prophets. That ayah contains a line stating that the Egyptians doubted the revelations of Joseph many generations ago, and this is why Allah has made them go astray. But... um... did they? Wasn’t he made the chief advisor or something at the end of surah 12, because they did believe him? I mean, yeah, they didn’t become Muslims. But as far as I recall, the only people Joseph told to become Muslims were those guys in jail. Not the population in general. Right? Whatever.

The pharaoh stares at his cousin blankly for a couple of minutes and decides to ignore everything he just said, instead turning to Haman and telling him to build the pseudo-Tower of Babel. He wants to reach the "roads of the heavens" so he can see Allah (if he exists). Allah makes the pharaoh think this is a good idea, but then makes the plan end in ruin. Questionable free will violation there, but whatever.

NEXT TIME: The pharaoh’s cousin makes a return appearance for some kuffar dooming fun times!!!

The Quran Read-Along: Day 196

Ayat: 15

Good: 0

Neutral: 12 (40:23-32, 40:36-37)

Bad: 3 (40:33-40:35)

Kuffar hell counter: 0

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#ghafir #quranreadalong #surah 40

[quranreadalong]

#197, Surah 40

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 197

The pharaoh has tried and failed to build The Stairway To Heaven and now his maybe-cousin has more hot takes to share. We rejoin our heroes in 40:38.

Maybe-cousin tells people to listen to him, because he will tell them how to behave properly. This life, he tells them, is only a temporary “enjoyment”--the afterlife is what will go on forever. Therefore, they should focus on getting to jannah.

That prompts a good ayah of the good-Muslims-go-to-heaven variety:

whoso doeth right, whether male or female, and is a believer, (all) such will enter the Garden

...naturally followed immediately by a kuffar hell counter (1) hit:

And, O my people! What aileth me that I call you unto deliverance when ye call me unto the Fire? Ye call me to disbelieve in Allah and ascribe unto Him as partners that whereof I have no knowledge, while I call you unto the Mighty, the Forgiver. Assuredly that whereunto ye call me hath no claim in the world or in the Hereafter, and our return will be unto Allah, and the prodigals will be owners of the Fire.

Now even nameless secondary characters are repeating Mohammed’s stale-ass rants, this is gettin out of control tbh! But okay... telling people to be polytheists is the same as calling them unto the Fire (bad), disbelievers’ gods are fake, and those who transgress Allah’s limits are going to hell. Right. Well. On its own, I’ll leave that last one as neutral because it doesn’t specify who the “transgressors” are, even though in context it’s obvious what it means.

The guy concludes his speech by saying that Allah sees all, and then we’re back to Mohammed’s narrations in 40:45. The pharaoh’s people were punished with The Fire--they are “exposed to it morning and evening”, and will be punished even further on the Day of Judgement. Keep this in mind for tomorrow, we’re gonna have a whole fun special bonus section about it.

We have the typical scene of the peasant-disbelievers asking the leader-disbelievers in hell if they can lessen their torment, since the former were just following the lead of the latter. The leader-disbelievers will say they can’t do anything to help, but will ask the “guards of hell” for some relief. (As we saw back in the section on Mohammed’s “journey to heaven”, the angel Malik is in charge of hell and keeping its fires lit; the other "guards” serve beneath him). Alas, the guards respond in 40:50:

They say: Came not your messengers unto you with clear proofs? They say: Yea, verily. They say: Then do ye pray, although the prayer of disbelievers is in vain.

Kuffar hell counter: 2! And bad. We’ll see Malik mentioned by name in a later surah, so look forward to that. The word means “master” or “owner” (of The Fire presumably), and it is typically interpreted as the angel’s name rather than just a title, though there was some debate over that by early Islamic scholars.

Anyway... Allah helps Muslims and prophets in both life (when he isn’t inflicting “tests” upon them like Uhud, eh?) and on the Day of Judgement--a day when the wrongdoers will be cursed. Whatever. We have one last mention of how Allah gave the Torah, “a reminder for men of understanding”, to Moses to cap off that whole Exodus section, and now we’re in the last third of the surah.

Allah commands Mohammed to pray to him and ignore those who “wrangle concerning the revelations of Allah”, because those disbelievers are just prideful and wrong. They refuse to recognize that Allah’s creation of the heavens and earth (which the disbelievers do believe in) was a greater task than his creation of humanity. Ibn Kathir says this is meant to emphasize that the disbelievers’ refusal to believe in the resurrection is therefore dumb, since if creating humanity was easy for Allah, then re-creating people’s bodies would be, too. That is... not why they didn’t believe in resurrection, but sure!!

We’ll end today’s section with a typical rant about how “the blind man and the seer are not equal”, meaning Muslims and disbelievers are not equal. The latter should know that the hour of judgement is coming (NARRATOR: It wasn’t.), and on that day those who refuse to serve Allah will be sent into hell. What a cute lil kuffar hell counter (3) hit to cap off the day.

NEXT TIME: We finish the surah!

The Quran Read-Along: Day 197

Ayat: 22

Good: 1 (40:40)

Neutral: 14 (40:38-39, 40:43-45, 40:51-59)

Bad: 7 (40:41-42, 40:47-50, 40:60)

Kuffar hell counter: 3 (40:41-43, 40:47-50, 40:60)

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#ghafir #surah 40 #quranreadalong

[quranreadalong]

#195, Surah 40

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 195

Hey kids! Eid Mubarak! Guess what I’m gonna give you as a gift? Iiiiiiit’s another shitty god damned mid-Meccan surah about how much the disbelievers of Mecca suck and will be punished like the disbelievers of old! Will the wonders never cease!

Well, there may be a small handful of Medina ayat thrown in here, but the majority of it is the same crap we’ve seen a mind-numbingly large number of times by now. Disbelievers go to hell, stories of past disbelieving civilizations getting fucked up, complaints about polytheism, the works. It’s called either Ghafir (“Forgiver”--whoever named these things had a sense of humor!) or Al-Mumin (“The Believer”/Muslim) depending on the source. Well..... god damn it. Here we go again.

Random letters (HM) start us off. “HM”, or “Hm.”, is my reaction to this surah in general. Another miracle of Islam. The Quran is from Allah, who is the only god and is also both the “Accepter of repentance” and “the Stern in punishment”.

The only people who deny Mohammed’s revelations are disbelievers, which handily concludes the “are Christians and Jews considered kuffar?” question from several suwar ago.

Mohammed then launches into some good ol’ biblical stories. Allah sent a bunch of prophets to various civilizations, and every one of those civilizations tried to argue with the prophets and “seize” them. So Allah seized them, as in killed them. As always, the point of Allah sending prophets to people when none of them ever convinced their civilizations to believe--by Allah’s own will--remains unclear.

Regardless, disbelievers are owners of the fires of hell. Sigh... kuffar hell counter: 1!, and bad. Muslims, however, are protected from hell and evil things in general by the angels around Allah’s throne, who ask him to be merciful to those who follow The Way of Allah and are “good” (good).

Back to the disbelievers. On the Day of Judgement, they will face Allah’s abhorrence. They will beg Allah for some way out of hell, but the answer is no, because they are big fat polytheists.

This is (your plight) because, when Allah only was invoked, ye disbelieved, but when some partner was ascribed to Him ye were believing.

............sigh. Kuffar hell counter: 2! and still bad.

40:13 begins an Allah-is-god section. Allah gives people provisions by sending rain from the sky, and therefore deserves to be worshiped alone. Some individuals are selected as prophets by Allah, so they can warn their people of the impending Day of Judgement, when nothing will be hidden from Allah and everyone will get what they deserve--for better or worse. Well, at least that’s neutral enough.

The “wrongdoers” will be terrified on this day, because Allah knows that they are traitors for praying to other gods. Gonna have to put that down as a bad one and a kuffar hell counter (3) hit, since it specifies it’s happening on the Day of Judgement and is therefore referring to hell-doom rather than genocide-doom. They should have known that disbelief would result in tragedy, as they have traveled the land and seen the consequences!! etc of disbelief. Allah sent prophets to all those past civilizations, “but they disbelieved; so Allah seized them.”

And that is Mohammed’s lead-in to........ the Exodus story! Again! Yaaay! Actually, it’s the Exodus-Book of Esther-Tower of Babel story, but we’ve seen that before, too. There is like one new detail this time, so have perseverance, readers. We’ll get through this.

NEXT TIME: Various people are doomed for their disbelief!

The Quran Read-Along: Day 195

Ayat: 22

Good: 1 (40:8)

Neutral: 13 (40:1-5, 40:7, 40:9, 40:11, 40:13-17)

Bad: 8 (40:6, 40:10, 40:12, 40:18-22)

Kuffar hell counter: 3 (40:6, 40:10-12, 40:18-20)

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#ghafir #surah 40 #quranreadalong

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THE GOOD QURAN, PT 38: SURAH 39

I kinda padded this surah with some filler because I had so little to talk about, given that it’s all just a “STOPPPP BEING POLYTHEISTS” rant. But we got it done in four days, which isn’t too bad. 4/75 (5%) of the surah was good.

All of them are “good Muslims go to heaven” ayat. 39:10 promises that those Muslims who do good will be rewarded in the afterlife, as does 39:34. 39:35 adds that Allah will forgive even the worst sins of Muslims..... honestly idk if this is actually good if taken to its logical extreme, but whatever. 39:53 likewise says that Allah forgives all the sins of Muslims. That precedes a long rant about how he does not forgive disbelief, which leads us to the Good Quran’s counterpart...

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#az zumar #surah 39 #quranreadalong #goodquran

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#194, Surah 39

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 194

I think we’re gonna finish the surah today. Fair warning: this is very doom-heavy. It’s not gonna be the most enlightening section.

39:52 tells us that Allah gives stuff to some people and takes it away from others. Sure. Allah will forgive all the sins of Muslims (that’s relatively good), so people should repent before The Doom arrives when they least expect it. If they don’t, they’re gonna regret scoffing at Allah’s revelations and neglecting their duty towards him. That’s.... less good, and it continues in 39:58:

Or should say, when it seeth the doom: Oh, that I had but a second chance that I might be among the righteous! (But now the answer will be): Nay, for My revelations came unto thee, but thou didst deny them and wast scornful and wast among the disbelievers. And on the Day of Resurrection thou (Muhammad) seest those who lied concerning Allah with their faces blackened. Is not the home of the scorners in hell?

O........ well. Huh. That is one hell of a long kuffar hell counter (1) hit. And it’s all bad, obviously. I always appreciate it when Mohammed goes on about the “evildoers” or “unrighteous” etc being doomed, because taken literally that’s not innately bad, but then he clarifies that they’re awful people because they are disbelievers. Makes my job a lot easier. (Pious Muslims, naturally, don’t have to fear any of the above.)

Allah is god etc. Disbelievers are losers and fools and failures. (Bad.) Humans must worship Allah alone. Again, I’d like to remind everyone that he said this shit, every day, to the long-suffering polytheists of Mecca for a decade. 39:67 is vaguely interesting and at least a change of pace:

And they esteem not Allah as He hath the right to be esteemed, when the whole earth is His handful on the Day of Resurrection, and the heavens are rolled in His right hand.

At the end of the world, Allah will literally be holding the earth in his hand, with the heavens all rolled up like rolls of parchment paper in his other hand. A hadith says this was something said by a Jewish rabbi, so presumably this is some Jewish tradition. The scroll-heaven thing is in the Bible, anyway. If you’re wondering where people will be standing in this case, given that the heavens and earth are indisposed for the moment, the answer is apparently the narrow bridge over jahannam, traditionally called sirat (meaning “path”). Those who get to go to jannah will make it over the bridge, while those who do not will fall into the fires below. The speed at which Muslims will cross the bridge will vary (based on how faithful they are or how few sins they have accumulated). Evidently various groups of people in the Middle East were fond of this bridge idea, since it’s present in Zoroastrianism too. The Muslim version is just particularly ridiculous.

Anyway, in other end-of-the-world news, we have another reference to the whole angel trumpet thing that Mo yanked from the Book of Revelation. One trumpet blast will kill everyone “save him whom Allah willeth”, while another will signal the resurrection and impending judgement. Questionable, but I guess neutral. After this happens, Allah will read from “the Book”--presumably the record of everything that has ever happened/everything everyone has ever done, more on that later--and bring out the prophets as witnesses for or against people (why does he need them for this, again?). Everyone will be judged and get what’s coming to them.

The disbelievers, we are reminded yet again in 39:71, will be sent to hell for denying Allah’s revelations. Kuffar hell counter: 2! Those who were dutiful to Allah will instead be congratulated in jannah for reaching this happy end, and they will rejoice. Also angels will surround Allah’s throne and sing his praises.

...whatever.

The Quran Read-Along: Day 194

Ayat: 24

Good: 1 (39:53)

Neutral: 13 (39:52, 39:54-55, 39:61-62, 39:66-70, 39:73-75)

Bad: 10 (39:56-60, 39:63-65, 39:71-72)

Kuffar hell counter: 2 (39:54-60, 39:71-72)

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#az zumar #surah 39 #quranreadalong

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#191, Surah 39

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 191

I’m curious to see where we’ll be at day #200. Inshallah, it will be a surah better than this one. Surah 39 is called Az-Zumar (“The Groups” or “The Companies”... of disbelievers being driven into hell), it comes from the mid-Mecca days and it is a skippable surah in the sense that there ain’t anything in here we haven’t seen before. The entire thing is one long kuffar hell counter hit.

Well.... let’s do this. Again.

The Quran is from Allah, and it was sent to Mohammed so he could tell everyone the “truth”. The truth in question is that Allah is the only god, and Allah will judge those liars who believe otherwise at the end of the world. Riveting.

This surah might be a bit light on the commentary, given how much of it is just repeated material. Let’s see if we have anything to work with here... 39:4:

If Allah had willed to choose a son, He could have chosen what He would of that which He hath created.

Allah could have made someone his son, but he didn’t, because he didn’t want to share his Netflix account with any family members. We’ve seen this reference to Allah’s non-son before. Sometimes it’s in reference to Christians (Jesus), and in Mohammed’s delusional mind it could also be a reference to Jews (remember the Ezra thing from surah 9?). But this is a Meccan surah, directed at polytheists... and the Quran implies that the polytheists believed Allah only had daughters, not sons. So who is the son of Allah that Mohammed is ranting about here?

If you remember surah 6, which is also a Meccan surah but may have some ayat from Medina stuck in it, we came across this:

Yet they ascribe as partners unto Him the jinn, although He did create them, and impute falsely, without knowledge, sons and daughters unto Him.

Who ascribes sons and daughters to Allah? Disbelievers in general, including Christians and Jews? It doesn’t give the identity of the evildoers in question, so we don’t know. Like I said in surah 37, the relationships between all the gods of the pre-Islamic pantheon remain obscure because of how little was written down--the Quran tells us that Allah+Allat+Manat+al-Uzza were a family, but nothing beyond that. A later verse in the Quran implies that the polytheists believed Allah had a wife or multiple wives, the mothers of his daughters, and their identities are also unknown. So it’s possible Allah was believed to have a son, or multiple sons, maybe including Hubal or one of the other gods popular in the area. Or the verse is just complaining about Christians and Jews. We dunno!

Moving on, Allah made the heavens and earth and night and day etc. He also created humanity and... eight types of farm animals. (Ibn Kathir says this means “a pair of sheep, a pair of goats, a pair of camels and a pair of oxen”). Some people are nonetheless insufficiently thankful towards Allah, and this displeases him. Allah is especially displeased by people who only pray to Allah in bad times, and pray to other gods in good times. Our first kuffar hell counter (1) hit follows that:

Take pleasure in thy disbelief a while. Lo! thou art of the owners of the Fire.

Bad, the rest so far is neutral. Allah also reminds us that those who pray to him are not equal to those who do not, which is his typical nonsense, but then adds that good Muslims will be rewarded with jannah, which is good.

Mohammed finishes up today’s section in 39:11 by informing us for the seven thousandth time that Allah has commanded him to be a Muslim--the Muslim--not a polytheist. Allah will punish him with The Doom if he disobeys this order, so he must obey and worship Allah alone. Mohammed’s dramatic ass pretending to threaten himself is neutral.

NEXT TIME: Doom, fire, woe, hell, etc.

The Quran Read-Along: Day 191

Ayat: 14

Good: 1 (39:10)

Neutral: 12 (39:1-7, 39:9, 39:11-14)

Bad: 1 (39:8)

Kuffar hell counter: 1 (39:8)

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#az zumar #surah 39 #quranreadalong

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#190, Surah 38

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 190

Today we’re gonna quickly wrap up the surah. There isn’t anything new here, so this is very much a skip-it-if-you-want section.

38:65 starts us off. Mohammed is a prophet, Allah is god. Great. The people of Mecca turn away from Allah’s wonderful revelations and therefore suck. Cool. Mo again emphasizes that he has been sent as a warner, and we have an exciting rundown of the Iblis story for the hundredth time after that, called the dispute of the “Highest Chiefs” (angels) here.

Allah tells the angels that he’s gonna create a mortal out of clay, and they have to bow before this mortal clay-man when he’s done. All of them do so, except Iblis. Allah asks him what’s good; Iblis says he’s cooler than Adam, since Adam is made of clay while Iblis is made of fire (being a jinni-angel), and therefore he refuses to be subservient to him. Allah kicks Iblis out of heaven and curses him for his disobedience.

Iblis/Shaytan asks Allah if he can delay his punishment til the Day of Judgement in 38:79. Allah’s like “uhh sure I guess?”, and Iblis replies “shit man thank you, imma just go mislead all humans now, except muslims”. Allah is fine with this and says he’ll just send the humans who are not “single-minded slaves of Allah” to hell.

Mohammed is very proud of himself for relating the above tedious crap and announces he’s not even asking for anyone’s money in return for his “reminders”. The Quraysh will realize he’s telling the truth eventually.

Zzzzz. Pretty much all of that is neutral, and extremely boring. The part where Allah says he’ll send the followers of Shaytan to hell is a heavily implied kuffar hell counter hit, but still, it’s not explicit. So the counter can stay blank. But I will put that one line down as bad, because really, Allah is letting Shaytan mislead people and then sentencing them to hell for it. Rude.

Hey, at least we got a tiny bit of new material yesterday.

The Quran Read-Along: Day 190

Ayat: 24

Good: 0

Neutral: 23 (38:65-84, 38:86-88)

Bad: 1 (38:85)

Kuffar hell counter: 0

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#sad #quranreadalong #surah 38

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#181, Surah 37

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 181

See? We covered 38 ayat yesterday. We’re flying through this trash heap.

Yesterday we ended with The Disbelievers being (justly) doomed to hell for refusing to follow a, quote, “mad poet”. Today we’ll begin with the happier topic of the jannah-bound “single-minded slaves of Allah” in 37:40. What reward awaits them? “Fruits” in the gardens of delight, we are told. They will recline upon couches while drinking from a cup filled with a delicious drink (wine, according to tradition) that flows from a magical spring or fountain. They will not be remotely troubled, either physically or mentally.

Well, that’s pleasant, if neutral. Jannah sounds quite chill. One more thing about what awaits the believers:

with them are those of modest gaze, with lovely eyes, (Pure) as they were hidden eggs (of the ostrich).

Yeah, it’s the jannah ladies again. This time, fortunately, we are not discussing whether they produce feces or not. Instead the focus is on their eyes. They have big, beautiful eyes--and they only have eyes for the guy in question. Seems self-explanatory.

What’s up with the egg thing, though? It literally means “protected white (things)”, in this case presumably eggs (though Arberry translates it as pearls). Some interpret this as just meaning their color, as paleness was perceived as beautiful. It seems like the egg-metaphor was a popular trope in Arabic poetry, assuming this is authentic:

In complexion she is like the first egg of the ostrich---white, mixed with yellow.

For reference:

The ladies’ extreme paleness is also mentioned in the ahadith:

everyone will have two wives from the houris, (who will be so beautiful, pure and transparent that) the marrow of the bones of their legs will be seen through the bones and the flesh.

(Oh MOHAMMED...)

Others take it to just refer to their status as untouched virgins. Ibn Kathir reports:

"The white of the egg when its shell is removed.'' ... the outer shell is touched by the wing of the bird and the nest, and by people's hands, unlike the interior of the egg.

Or it could just mean both things! In any case, it’s just portraying the ladies as desirable. Well, uh... it’s still neutral. A straight man wrote this, cut him some slack.

Allah shares a little story about a couple of Muslims in jannah, who are chatting with one another in 37:50. One says he used to know a guy who asked him “y’all really believe this dumb shit about resurrection?” He wonders what happened to this man. The other guy says “have you looked for him?” And lo! “Then looketh he and seeth him in the depth of hell.” (Bad!)

The guy in heaven will tell his hellfire-dwelling buddy that he almost caused his ruin, ie he almost led him into disbelief and therefore hell. Fortunately, Allah decided to lead him onto the correct path of Islam instead.

Our thrilling tale concludes with the grammatically-confusing section beginning in 37:58, which appears to be Muslims in heaven rejoicing that in the afterlife, there is no punishment for believers. This is the supreme triumph that all Muslims should work towards. The disbelievers, on the other hand.... well, that is a story for tomorrow’s post.

NEXT TIME: Hell’s Kitchen!!!!

The Quran Read-Along: Day 181

Ayat: 24

Good: 0

Neutral: 21 (37:39-54, 37:57-61)

Bad: 2 (37:55-56)

Kuffar hell counter: 1 (37:51-55)

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#as saffat #surah 37 #quranreadalong

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#186, Surah 37

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 186

We’re gonna finish the surah today and you, like me, will come to regret the fact that Islam supplanted the much cooler religion of Arab polytheism.

Let’s see... last time, Mo was complaining that the polytheists believed that Allah preferred daughters to sons. In 37:154 he calls them sick and wrong for this belief, and tells them to “reflect” upon the fact that they have no right to make such statements. If they disagree with Mo’s bleating, they have to show proof that they’re right. (Mohammed does not have to show proof that he’s right, of course.)

Whatever. Neutral. We have another interesting tidbit about Arab polytheism in 37:158. If you recall from aaaaaall the way back in surah 17, Allah’s (fake) daughters were said to be angels. Here, however...:

And they imagine kinship between him and the jinn, whereas the jinn know well that they will be brought before (Him).

...Allah has jinn family members. What’s that supposed to mean?

The interpretations of this one are all over the place. The two Jalals say that the aforementioned jinn are the same as the angels mentioned in surah 17, and both terms refer to Allah’s three daughters: “they are so called because they are hidden (ijtinān) from vision”. So they interpret “jinn” here as just referring to something invisible or otherworldly, not necessarily the often-malevolent trickster figure things we’re used to. It wouldn’t be the first time an angel was also described as a jinni, since our pal Iblis/Shaytan is said to have been an angel from “among the jinn”. And we’ve seen Mohammed declare that the polytheists’ fake gods are really angels, jinn, and dead humans, all at once. So I guess that at least fits the Quran’s theme of throwing shit at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

But Ibn Kathir offers us a completely different explanation for this verse, attributed to a now-lost work from the early 700s AD:

“The idolators said that the angels were the daughters of Allah. Abu Bakr, may Allah be pleased with him, said, `Then who are their mothers?' They said, `The daughters of the leaders of the Jinn.'”

Here, the jinn aren’t synonymous with Allah’s daughters. Instead, they’re Allah’s wives--the mothers of his daughters. This hadith is obviously sketchy--Abu Bakr was raised in a polytheistic city, so if the identity of Allah’s spouse(s) was common knowledge, he would have known that without asking. But I figured it was worth posting it anyway, since tbh the “oh jinn just means angels” explanation strikes me as equally sketchy. Maybe the good pre-Islamic jinn--there were good ones and bad ones, just like in Islam--had some relationships with the gods, and some even reproduced with them? I dunno! The problem with Arab polytheism is that the Quran is the only contemporary text we have describing it, and yet no one even knows wtf it’s talking about!

Whatever Mohammed is accusing the polytheists of believing, it offends him very much, and no Muslim would dare utter such blasphemy. The only people who can be tempted by the polytheists’ words are those who are already destined to be burned in hell. (Bad, kuffar hell counter: 1!)

We finally come full circle with a title-drop ayah all the way at the end of the surah:

There is not one of us but hath his known position. Lo! we, even we are they who set the ranks, Lo! we, even we are they who hymn His praise

That’s all fine and neutral, but who is talking here, exactly? Seems like the angels, right, since we’re talking about some group of people/things (“us”) who hymn Allah’s praise. Where’d Allah go? Maybe he was watching Top Chef and Gabriel had to improvise a few lines. Hmm....

Anyway, Mo tells us that some of the disbelievers claimed that if they had “a reminder from the men of old”--meaning a prophet (not Mohammed) who gave them a book or a miracle or something--they’d all be Muslims. But they didn’t receive any such divine guidance, and this current asshole ain’t convincing them of anything, so tough shit. They will come to know the consequences of their disbelief. That’s bad, as the conclusion to the surah will make clear.

In 37:171, Allah reminds us of how he told his past prophets and their followers that they would be victorious over their enemies. He then instructs Mohammed to sit back and wait for The Doom to come over the people of Mecca.

The Meccans may say “ok.... so where it at?”, but they should think twice about “hastening on” The Doom, because it will be a very bad day for all of them (bad). Again Mo is commanded to sit and wait for it.

To wrap up this trash heap: Allah is god, peace be upon his prophets, praise Allah.

Sigh.

The Quran Read-Along: Day 186

Ayat: 29

Good: 0

Neutral: 26 (37:154-162, 37:164-169, 37:171-176, 37:178-182)

Bad: 3 (37:163, 37:170, 37:177)

Kuffar hell counter: 1 (37:161-163)

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#as saffat #surah 37 #quranreadalong

[quranreadalong]

#185, Surah 37

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 185

I know y’all don’t really wanna go through the whole Lot story again, so fortunately Allah has given us the abridged version this time around. 37:134 starts us off by stating that Allah saved Lot & Fam from the destruction of the city--“Save an old woman among those who stayed behind”, meaning Lot’s wife, who was killed along with everyone else. (That’s bad.) Mohammed again tells the Quraysh that they’ve passed by the ruins of Sodom, which serve as a warning. As I’ve said before, the exact location of Sodom and Gomorrah isn’t stated in either the Bible or the Quran. Most tafsir authors place it near the Dead Sea, possibly referencing that one Byzantine monastery; others just state it was somewhere on the route between Mecca and Syria. The Quran’s repeated insistence that the Quraysh have seen these ruins in person implies that 7th century tradition associated some specific spot with the city, but we don’t know what spot. (The ruins in question probably had nothing to do with Sodom anyway, so.)

Poor Lot doesn’t get the typical “he was good so he gets PBUHed” conclusion to his story. Instead, we move straight on to the next prophet, Jonah. Jonah has been mentioned before--the tenth surah is named after him, if you recall--but as far as I remember, this is the first time we’ll actually see his full story.

Allah sent Jonah as a prophet to some people (the city of Nineveh, according to the Bible). Jonah was not overly enthusiastic about this. 37:140-147:

he fled unto the laden ship, And then drew lots and was of those rejected; And the fish swallowed him while he was blameworthy; And had he not been one of those who glorify (Allah) He would have tarried in its belly till the day when they are raised

Then We cast him on a desert shore while he was sick; And We caused a tree of gourd to grow above him; And We sent him to a hundred thousand (folk) or more

The Islamic Jonah is basically the same as the Biblical guy. Allah says “go be a prophet”. Jonah is a weak bitch and runs away on a ship. Allah sends a giant storm upon the sea to indicate his displeasure; the sailors aboard the ship “cast lots” (a form of divination I guess) and decide that Jonah is to blame. So they throw him overboard and he gets swallowed up by some giant sea creature. Jonah realizes he’s fucked up and prays to Allah while chilling in the fish’s stomach, and Allah forgives him. So the fish.... throws him up and/or shoots him through its blowhole (if you prefer the “whale” interpretation) and he washes up on the shore. Allah provides him with shade in the form of a large gourd plant, then he finally goes to preach to the people of Nineveh, who end up believing him. All of that is from the Biblical story.

Uh... I mean, making a giant sea creature swallow some guy cuz he didn’t wanna be a prophet seems harsh, but maybe all’s well that ends well?? I dunno! I’m being nice today, so neutral. I guess.

Alright, we’re done with the prophets for now. Let’s move on to another topic. Mo is back to bitching about polytheistic traditions in 37:149-153:

Now ask them (O Muhammad): Hath thy Lord daughters whereas they have sons? Or created We the angels females while they were present? Lo! it is of their falsehood that they say: Allah hath begotten. Allah! verily they tell a lie. (And again of their falsehood): He hath preferred daughters to sons.

There are those women-hating polytheists again, them and their damn....... insistence that Allah prefers daughters to sons!!! Misogynists!

I mentioned in a previous section that (owing to a lack of surviving texts) the relationship between the gods of the pre-Islamic polytheistic pantheon is kind of unclear. Allah is said to be the father of some other deities, but evidently not all of them. Here, Mohammed implies that--according to the polytheists--Allah only has daughters, not sons. The daughters in question, named elsewhere in the Quran, are Allat, al-Uzza, and Manat. Since Mo brought this topic up, let’s look at this further. It’s time for what I’d like to call...

THE ARAB POLYTHEISM POWER HOUR

So let’s talk about some good ol’ fashioned Arab gods and goddesses of bygone days. To avoid offending anyone, they will be represented as Pokemon.

Arabs had multiple gods; some had unique roles throughout the peninsula, while others (especially more minor gods) were just defined as the protectors of a certain group or another. Various traditions, including animal sacrifice, divination, and prayers, were performed to invoke the blessings of a particular god.

The Quran tells us that the people of Mecca viewed their religion as the practice of their ancestors, and that’s why it was so important to them. It wasn’t specifically about morals or whatever--they had secular tribal customs for that. The gods were their heritage, something linking them to ancient Arab history (until Mo shat all over that).

The Islamic Allah needs no introduction, but his unevolved polytheistic form does need one.

Allah is an ancient name in the Arab pantheon. It seems to have originated with the “northern Arabs” inhabiting the deserts of Syria, Jordan, and northern Saudi Arabia; it’s referenced in records dating back to the Nabataean era, during which some Arabs were named Abdallahi, the precursor to the later “Abdallah”. Allah’s name is probably a contraction of al-ilah (the god), though it may also be related to the Aramaic word alaha.

While Arabized Christians today call their god Allah just like Muslims do, pre-Islamic northern Arab Christians tended to use the word al-ilah instead. Some people in southern Arabia also used a variant of al-ilah, while others preferred titles like Rahman or Rahmanan, meaning “the merciful”. The latter may have originally been the name of a polytheistic god, but was evidently conflated with the monotheistic god in the two centuries or so prior to Islam’s creation. Yemen was home to both Jews and Christians, as we’ve seen before, and either of those two groups could have been responsible for the inscriptions declaring Rahman the god.

But polytheists in western and northern Arabia were the main ones calling some specific god “Allah” in the pre-Islamic era--which is not surprising, since Mohammed says over and over in the Quran that the polytheists in Mecca do believe in some god called “Allah” (they just believed in other gods in addition to him, which is why Mohammed was upset). The question is who this pre-Islamic Allah was. If we assume “Allah” = “the god”, was this just a title for some other god, or was he a god unto himself? Did polytheistic Arabs believe Allah was the god worshiped by Jews and Christians? Because they wrote virtually nothing about the mythology of their religion, it’s hard to say. But we can do some guesswork.

While pre-Islamic Arabs were aware of the whole Abraham story and at least some of them were exposed to Christianity and Judaism, Mohammed’s conflation of “Allah” and the Biblical god wasn’t the word’s initial meaning. Scholars believe that the term originally just referred to the most important male deity within a particular Arab group’s pantheon, presumably with “Allat” being the most important female deity. It was an honorary title. In other words, one group’s Allah and Allat could’ve referred to different gods than another group’s Allah and Allat.

But it seems that the terms slowly began to crystallize over time, and the identities and attributes of Allah and Allat became less versatile over the years. By Mohammed’s era, Hijazi Arabs seem to have used the words to refer to specific gods who were related to each other. Allah was the father of Allat, in addition to her sisters Manat and al-Uzza. He was evidently the most powerful god of the pre-Islamic pantheon... but not necessarily the most popular one.

As we saw earlier in this surah, pre-Islamic Arabs believed that the god Allah created the heavens and earth; in surah 10, we were also told that they believed Allah gave them sustenance by making crops grow and such. So it seems pretty clear that he was seen as a creator god and general maintainer of the physical world. His role beyond that is less clear; Allah’s name occasionally shows up in earlier inscriptions with some basic prayers (of the “grant so-and-so prosperity” variety), but prayers to a bunch of other gods are way more common.

The Quran says that Arabs in Mo’s lifetime prayed to Allah sometimes--especially while on voyages over the sea--but they preferred to pray to other gods while on land. And Islamic texts make it pretty clear that Arabs devoted most of their worship to other gods. So it seems he was not viewed as a god whose primary role was to cater to humanity. He was, like, an absentee father who occasionally sent you gifts on holidays or some shit.

In Islam, Allah was conflated with the Biblical god. But it seems like this was really Mohammed’s invention, and not something that polytheists believed in. Biblical stories are basically never referenced by polytheists in either inscriptions or in Islamic texts, and polytheists seem to have never given their kids Biblical names like Ibrahim. On the other hand, 7th century Arabs were certainly well aware of the existence of both Judaism and Christianity, and it seems like they at least knew a few biblical stories and characters from those stories. (Abraham, Ishmael, Jesus, and Mary are all said to have been represented within the Kaaba in a hadith). Then there’s that weird incident from back in surah 2 that implies the polytheists of Medina maybe believed in the Jewish god, despite not being Jews? So maybe the truth is slightly more complicated: the polytheistic Allah may have been recognized as the same god as the one Jews and Christians prayed to--the polytheists just didn’t believe that he had all the attributes that Jews and Christians assigned to him (ie, polytheism = hellfire).

In fact it seems like they didn’t view Allah’s role as being focused on humanity at all. He created the world and evidently all terrestrial life in the past, and he may have been in charge of the ongoing creation of new life (which would explain the thing with the ladies in Medina). But he wasn’t sitting around listening to people’s prayers for winning a battle or finding someone to marry. His daughters handled those issues instead.

Like Allah, Allat has been around for quite a while, and her name is found in ancient Nabataean records. Names like Wahballat (gift of Allat) and Saadallat (joy of Allat) are recorded before the fourth century AD. The word “Allat” itself was used all the way back in the fourth century BC, in inscriptions related to the ancient Qedar tribe, and so Allat may be the longest-surviving name in the northern Arab pantheon. Some scholars speculate that she originated as the Arab version of the ancient Ugarite goddess Atirat (also called Elat), who was also the precursor of the Canaanite goddess Asherah, the wife of the creator-god El. If that is the case, then Arab groups who interacted with the Syrian Ugarites gradually brought the goddess south with them.

Also like Allah, Allat’s mythology and her relationship with other gods seems to have changed over time until it crystallized in later years. By Mohammed’s era, “Allat” was the name of a specific goddess worshiped in the Hijaz, with her main shrine located in the city of Taif. Her father was Allah and her sisters were al-Uzza and Manat. But it’s possible that in another version of the story, Allat was instead Allah’s wife, not his daughter. And in other versions of the story from Arabs living further to the north, Allat is instead listed as a daughter of the deity Ruda and the wife of the Nabataeans’ chief god Dushara, neither of whom seems to have been super well-known in Mo’s era (though both were evidently still worshiped by some groups, somewhere, and are mentioned in the early anti-polytheist screed Book of Idols).

Unlike Allah, Allat was a goddess explicitly concerned with human affairs, and her role in this realm seems to have been pretty all-encompassing from the first time she shows up in the records to the time of Arab polytheism’s destruction. There was a reason why people prayed to Allat more than Allah: Allat was the one who seemed to care about them. She directly intervened in the lives of humans. Allat provided the good with mercy, but punished the evil with her wrath. As such, people extended prayers and offerings to her in the hopes of earning her favor. In Robert Hoyland’s Arabia and the Arabs, the author says:

She is asked to extend solicitude and to display mercy. Of her are expected well being, ease and prosperity. Travellers pray that she might accompany them in their migrations and provide clement weather. She is entreated for protection against the enemy, vengeance on the aggressor, booty for her faithful in their raids and infliction of blindness and lameness upon whomsoever defaces their inscriptions.

Northern Arabs who came into contact with Greek culture sometimes conflated Allat with the Greek goddess Athena, who was a a personification of justice and a goddess of war. It’s likely that they shared a lot of similarities. That does not mean that Allat’s role was identical to Athena’s, though. Allat wasn’t the only Arab goddess-of-war in town.

Ibn Ishaq’s sira says that the Quraysh worshiped Allat, but they and their cousin tribe the Banu Kinana were particular devotees of the goddess al-Uzza. Her idol was apparently located in Nakhla (the place where the first deadly raid happened, if you recall), until Khalid ibn Walid destroyed it. A number of Qurayshi men were named Abdul-Uzza, including one of Mohammed’s uncles.

She is typically listed as the sister of Allat and Manat and the daughter of Allah. Some Islamic sources say she had two daughters of her own; it’s not clear if these daughters are meant to be Allat and Manat, in some variant of the story in which al-Uzza is instead Allah’s wife, or if they’re some other goddesses. Regardless, it seems she was always a member of some family of gods.

Al-Uzza was worshiped by the Nabataeans like her maybe-sister and maybe-father, though her shrines were spread throughout Arabia, from the Sinai in the west down through the Hijaz. She was sometimes paired with Dushara, like Allat, and her stone idols were frequently placed beside his. (Interestingly, al-Uzza’s stones were always larger than Dushara’s whenever they were placed together.) As always, the relationship between the two is unclear. Some texts suggest al-Uzza was Dushara’s virgin mother, like this work from a Cypriot Christian in the 4th century AD that seems to be about her:

in the idolatrous temple at Petra... they praise the virgin with hymns in the Arabic language and call her khaabu ...  and the child who is born of her they call Dusares.

But it’s possible that in earlier times, al-Uzza was instead the wife of Dushara, before maybe being supplanted in that role by Allat.... who then became the daughter of Allah in the Hijaz. Some scholars think al-Uzza was the Allat of the Nabataeans. I dunno! Turns out it’s hard as fuck to put the mythology of a religion together when that religion spans a thousand years and left behind little in the way of writing.

We at least know what her name means. Inscriptions in the city of Petra (in Jordan) refer to al-Uzza as “the mighty goddess”, which is also what some polytheists are said to have called her in Islamic texts. Her name was probably derived from the word azza, meaning “powerful”. She was not a weak goddess--and Islamic texts show the Meccans calling upon her in battle. In al-Tabari’s history, Abu Sufyan is quoted as saying that al-Uzza was on the polytheists’ side on the day of Uhud. She was that bitch.

Some scholars think that al-Uzza was conflated with the Egyptian Isis, the Greek Aphrodite/Roman Venus, or both in the northern parts of Arabia. The Isis link is a bit shaky, but the Aphrodite/Venus conflation does seem to have happened. Like Athena and Allat, this doesn’t mean that al-Uzza played the same role as either of those goddesses, though she may well have shared certain traits with them. There’s nothing to suggest that al-Uzza was particularly associated with love or lust, for example, whereas such things define Aphrodite.

But one trait that al-Uzza might share with them is perhaps an association with the stars, more specifically the morning/evening star (Venus). It’s not a sure thing, but 3rd-5th century Christian authors in the Middle East do make the connection between al-Uzza and the planet Venus. Christian authors can’t be trusted to report accurately on polytheistic traditions any more than later Muslim ones can, since both were hostile to their practices. But since polytheists didn’t really write about any of this themselves, that’s all we have to go by. And we do know that pre-Islamic Arabs attached great significance to the celestial bodies in general--the sun, moon, and stars all held spiritual meaning for them.

So taken all together, I think it’s pretty safe to say that al-Uzza was generally regarded as a powerful female member of a divine family, one who was called upon in battle and had some connection to celestial bodies.

That just leaves us with Manat. Manat is my favorite of the “sisters”, and I think she’s the most interesting. She was worshiped throughout the region, including in Mecca, but like the other goddesses, some tribes worshiped her more than others. Before Islam came around, Manat was the main deity worshiped by the two Azd branches (Banu Aws and Banu Khazraj) of Medina. Those Ghassanids who had not converted to Christianity also continued to primarily devote themselves to Manat. Ibn Ishaq says that her main shrine was near Qudayd, which is around 60 miles to the north of the modern city of Jeddah in the Hijaz. Like the others, she is found in Nabataean inscriptions, though dedications to Manat have been found all over the place, including in eastern Arabia (the modern-day UAE) as well.

Unlike Allat and al-Uzza, whose exact roles are kind of hard to pin down, we know a lot about Manat because she was associated with one particular concept throughout her entire existence. That concept is fate. Her name literally means “fate”, stemming from manaya. In this context, “fate” is essentially synonymous with death, or the inevitability of it. The phrase “struck down by fate” was a euphemism for dying--not just violent deaths, but all people’s deaths, stemming from the inescapable passage of time. So while it seems intuitive that Allat is kind of the female counterpart to Allah, I think it’s more fitting to put Manat in that role. Allah created life; Manat ended it. Both were all-powerful.

Death was inescapable and apparently final in Arab polytheism. The Quran tells us that polytheists flatly rejected the concept of resurrection as illogical. Once they died, their bodies would turn to dust and bones, and that was it. Everyone would be “struck down by fate” forever, no matter how rich they were or how good they were. This theme is found throughout the supposed pre-Islamic poetry collected by early Muslims.

It seems as though most polytheistic Arabs did not believe in a spiritual afterlife, either, beyond perhaps some vague ideas related to ghosts. (Some Muslim scholars say that pre-Islamic Arabs believed that when someone died violently and their murder was never avenged, they haunted people in the form of a spirit-owl.) There aren’t any inscriptions mentioning a place like heaven or hell, which would be very strange if they did believe in it. And the Quran tells us that they didn’t believe in a Day of Judgement and also quotes the polytheists as saying:

There is naught but our life of the world; we die and we live, and naught destroyeth us save time

But a small number of pre-Islamic poems collected in the Islamic era do mention concepts related to the afterlife. For example, one famous poem says this, which is basically identical to Islamic theology:

Do not conceal from God what is in your breast that it may be hidden; whatever it concealed, God knows all about it. Either it will be put off and placed recorded in a book, and preserved there until the judgement day; or the punishment be hastened and so he will take revenge.

That would seem to suggest.... something about the afterlife, right? Like what else would “judgement” refer to here if not some hell/heaven-type sorting activity? Well, maybe the Quran--which is mostly just an anti-polytheistic rant--isn’t an accurate reflection of pre-Islamic beliefs! On the other hand, these pre-Islamic poems were recited orally until they were recorded in Islamic times, and they probably aren’t exact reflections of actual pre-Islamic poetry. It’s completely possible some lines were added to them or subtracted from them over the decades. Either Islam borrowed way more concepts from pre-Islamic religion than Islamic literature and pre-Islamic inscriptions indicate, or Islamic concepts got folded into these poems over the years. Based on the lack of inscriptions about any sort of heaven or afterlife or judgement day, let’s go with the latter possibility for now.

Admittedly, the idea that everyone ultimately met the same fate was pretty unusual by Mohammed’s era. Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity all had some concept of divine judgement and afterlife realms for good and bad people, even if the details were sometimes vague. So by this era, if most Arabs rejected the concept of both, that would’ve made them relics of a bygone age. The possibility of an afterlife could have been something that helped Mohammed gain his first recruits from the polytheists of Mecca. If they were afraid of the nothingness after death that polytheists believed awaited them, and they were also afraid of being burned in a fire, which Mohammed said awaited them, then converting was the only way to achieve the goal of a peaceful afterlife.

But if Manat is basically the Grim Reaper and no one can escape her, what’s the point of praying to her, as some Arab tribes did? When they presented her with offerings, what were they hoping to gain?

Knowledge is one option. Pre-Islamic Arabs loved trying to gain insight into the future. They wanted to know as much as possible about it, a cultural trait that continued long into the Islamic era (despite many of the divination practices being explicitly against Islam). Maybe there was some Final Destination shit going on here--if you “knew” how you were gonna die, perhaps it was possible to avoid it if you asked Manat nicely, even if you couldn’t avoid death itself. Or perhaps she was invoked to grant people a glorious or painless death and to ensure that they were remembered in the memories of their people.

Islamic sources didn’t record anything about the details of how or why people worshiped Manat, so we can only speculate. I still think the creepy death lady is cool.

Anyway, to wrap this up...

Arab polytheism seems to have been very fluid. It wasn’t the case that there was one god to whom everyone owed their worship, and then a bunch of subservient gods after him. Some tribes fully dedicated themselves to one deity, while others offered sacrifices to a small number of others. Some deities were worshiped by only a few people, while others like Manat and Allat had lots of adherents all over Arabia. There aren’t any records of any Arab group trying to force other groups to worship their god alone, with one exception (cough).

A god was typically represented by an idol made of stone. People would offer animal or food sacrifices to this idol, and priests and priestesses would sometimes try to predict the future by performing divining rituals in front of the idol. The area around a tribe’s idol was typically considered sacred territory within which no violence was allowed (like the Kaaba).

Because the idols were seen as the gods, or at least as possessing the gods’ spirits or whatever, destroying an idol meant destroying the god it was associated with. Thus why Mo sent his goons around to attack polytheistic shrines--they were literally “killing” the other gods, according to the polytheistic understanding of it.

Arabs didn’t write many religious texts beyond short inscriptions, and Arab polytheism’s destruction by Islam was so complete that even people living barely a century after Mohammed’s death seemed to know virtually nothing about polytheistic customs. So there is little that we know about any of these gods, and even less is known about any sort of mythological stories that they may have featured in. (In fact some Western scholars believe that there was no mythology, and all the gods were more or less interchangeable and devoid of individual features--but clearly there was something giving certain gods an oral history or backstory, or else the insistence that some gods were related to each other doesn’t make any sense.) Often there is nothing known about them beyond their names. Complicating matters is the fact that the popularity of various gods changed over time, so a god extremely important to, say, the Qedar may have only been worshiped by a few people in late Nabataean times, whereas an important Nabataean god may have barely been worshiped in Mohammed’s era.

For example, Islamic texts tell us that a god named Hubal was worshiped in Mecca. Ibn Ishaq says that there were a bunch of arrows next to his idol that people used as divination tools. Beyond that, reputable sources don’t tell us anything about him; he may have been another old Nabataean god. Nuha is a goddess dating back to the Qedar days who seems to be associated with passion and emotion (there is an inscription stating that “by Nuha is the jealousy of a lover”), but by the Islamic era she’s virtually unheard of. As one god’s popularity waned, it’s possible that their idols and attributes were given to other gods instead.

That probably explains how Allat, Manat, and al-Uzza became sisters and Allah became their father over time. But it’s still unclear why the three goddesses were labeled the children of Allah, while the others weren’t given that title. Why is it that those three became a trio, exactly? The verse above implies the polytheists believed he only had daughters--but other parts of the Quran say the disbelievers believed he had sons and daughters. So maybe he had three daughters and, like, one or two unnamed sons? Or maybe he just preferred the girls to the boys?

There are obviously too many missing pieces in the mythology of Arab polytheism for us to put the whole story together, but my best guess is that they believed some unthinking/amoral force gave rise to Gen 1 gods like Allah (who then created the world and the other gods and goddesses). This force was irrelevant in the context of their religious practices because it presumably didn’t interact with humanity at all. Unlike monotheists, the polytheists believed that higher powers didn’t need worship or devotion and certainly weren’t gonna throw hissy fits if people didn’t bow to their asses five times a day; people prayed to gods when they themselves needed something in particular. That’s why they saw no issue with devoting more of their time to Allat than Allah, even though Allah was the one who created the world: Allat was the one more likely to give them stuff when they asked for it. Allah was hanging out shaping new babies to send into the world, or whatever--he was just fine without people praying to him and asking him for help acing a test. Seems like a better guy than the one we ended up with, tbh...

NEXT TIME: Back to monotheism!!!

The Quran Read-Along: Day 185

Ayat: 21

Good: 0

Neutral: 19 (37:133-134, 37:137-153)

Bad: 2 (37:135-136)

Kuffar hell counter: 0

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#historylesson #as saffat #quranreadalong #surah 37

[quranreadalong]

#184, Surah 37

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 184

We’ve only got a few lines of the Abraham story left, so let’s finish them. 37:106 is where we stopped last time. Allah tells us the child sacrifice thing was just a test for Abraham, which is dickish and bad. We’re then told that Allah “ransomed him (Isaac/Ishmael) with a tremendous victim”. This is presumably a reference to the ram that Abraham is told to sacrifice instead of his son, which is in Genesis but not the Quran.

And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.   

Later generations gave Abraham the honorary “peace be upon him” status after he died, which was his reward for being good and faithful to Allah. I guess that second-to-last one is good, in a very generous sense of the word.

Anyway, that takes care of Abraham. After him comes Isaac, who is one of “the righteous” (also good, I guess?). Isaac had a bunch of descendants of various moral alignments. Two of those descendants were Moses and Aaron, whose people achieved victory after enduring great distress. Allah gave them the Torah and “showed them the right path”. Moses and Aaron were likewise honored with PBUH status by later generations because they were good and faithful Muslims. I’m being very generous by putting all those “we reward prophets with PBUHs” lines down as good, I know. Everything else is neutral.

37:123 brings us to a prophet we haven’t talked about much: Elijah, or “Elias” as Pickthall’s translation calls him (Ilyas in Arabic). He tells his people to stop doin whatever they’re doin, then clarifies:

Will ye cry unto Baal and forsake the Best of creators, Allah, your Lord and Lord of your forefathers? But they denied him, so they surely will be haled forth (to the doom) Save single-minded slaves of Allah.

Yeah that’s a kuffar hell counter hit (1) and bad, but we haven’t gone over Elijah’s story yet and this is the only place it’s really elaborated upon. So for those of you unfamiliar with both the Bible and the Quran, lemme give a brief recap. If you remember from one of our history lessons, one of the kings of the northern kingdom of Israel was named Ahab, who is presented as a dick in the (Judah-centric) Bible but seems to have been a fine king in reality. Ahab’s wife Jezebel was a foreigner, a Canaanite princess of the city-state of Sidon (which is now Saida in Lebanon). Jezebel is said to have led her husband astray into idolatry, as all non-Jewish women are accused of doing in the Bible.

As a Canaanite, Jezebel worshiped the god Baal and the goddess Ashera. Ahab began to emulate her religious beliefs, leading his people down the path of insolence towards YHWH. Seeing this and despairing, lo! Elijah rises up and executes the priests of Baal. He runs away (since u know... he just murdered ppl and stuff) and goes on various adventures that lay the groundwork for the defeat of the ungodly and the cults of Baal and Ashera etc. At the end of his adventures, a chariot of fire comes and takes Elijah away, apparently up to heaven.

None of that is in the Quran--it’s from the Books of Kings, which Mohammed didn’t seem super familiar with--but that’s what’s being alluded to in the verses up there. Mo might not have remembered the full details of Elijah’s story, but at least he remembered “Elijah = Baal hater”.

Nothing else is said of Elijah in any reputable sources, though later Islamic tradition vastly inflated his role, just like Ishmael. By Ibn Kathir’s time, there was a tradition that held that Elijah was, like al-Khidr, still alive and could appear to people (though Ibn Kathir says this isn’t true). Al-Tabari’s account of the Elijah story mostly lines up with the Biblical version, at least in a vague sense, though some details are odd (according to him, people in Ibn Ishaq’s era said that Baal was “a woman” who the Canaanites worshiped, which is perhaps an accidental conflation with Ashera).

Anyway later generations said PBUH because Elijah was good and a faithful Muslim, as always. Whatever.

We have two more sections to go til the end of the surah, I think. Hang in there folx. This is the last time we’ll ever have this many ayat to get through!

NEXT TIME: Jonah’s vore adventures!!!

The Quran Read-Along: Day 184

Ayat: 27

Good: 4 (37:110, 37:112, 37:121, 37:131)

Neutral: 21 (37:107-109, 37:111, 37:113-120, 37:122-126, 37:128-130, 37:132)

Bad: 2 (37:106, 37:127)

Kuffar hell counter: 1 (37:125-128)

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#as saffat #quranreadalong #surah 37

[quranreadalong]

#175, Surah 36

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 175

Hello brothers and sisters. I am Doctor Zakir Naik--a medical doctor, who has been invited to discuss the first half of this surah with you. And I will tell you of a story. Brother came to me and said I have question: the Quran is the perfect book. Yet some say “these are ravings of a clown from 7th century Arabia who had confusion over science, history, and theology, and also a clear personality disorder”. So how can it be perfect, this book, if it has all these issues? These are his words to me.

Brother ask a very intellectual question. As a medical doctor, I will provide you with answers. We will find that--not only are there no errors in our Noble Quran, but in fact it is a greater science textbook than any produced for a thousand years. As well, this fact has been acknowledged by Western professors. According to famous scientist Steven Hawking quote, “How can anyone deny the miracles of the Quran” end quote. (Source: islam-truth-religion.co.uk/praise.html)

We will look now to the surah Ya Sin, revealed in our beloved Prophet (SAW)’s mid-Mecca days. You see immediately that we begin with "YS”. Random letters, some might tell you, if they are uneducated. But if we examine them closer, we see that they stand for Yes Science. All scholars agree. The Noble Quran is a book of wisdom, sent to our beloved Prophet (SAW) and those with him on the correct path of Islam, from Allah who is God. This was necessary, because no prophet had been sent to the kuffar of Mecca before.

But if you note, brothers and sisters, we are then told in 36:7:

Already hath the judgment, (for their infidelity) proved true of most of them, for they believe not. Lo! We have put on their necks carcans reaching unto the chins, so that they are made stiff-necked. And We have set a bar before them and a bar behind them, and (thus) have covered them so that they see not. Whether thou warn them or thou warn them not, it is alike for them, for they believe not.

What does this mean, brothers and sisters? Why does God send a prophet (SAW) to a people who, in His words He says, most of them will not believe--or are incapable of believing, we should say, by His own orders? Why does He make a people spiritually blind, and then punish when they do not convert? Is this not bad and nonsensical, the earlier brother might ask me.

A very good question. But look closer and you will see the truth is already stated for us and in fact it provides much sense: God is bored and playing a video game, and He is giving himself a handicap so the game is not boring, you see now. If everyone in Mecca converted, you see, the game would be over too soon and He would have to go back to His sad daily life as a programmer at Alibaba. Those who have carefully studied Islam know this. Have you seen Sword Art Online, brothers and sisters? The kuffar will tell you that it is a terrible show, but in fact it is a careful depiction of the true faith Islam, as the creator of the show himself has stated (source: anime-invites-to-islam.org/testimonials).

But dear reader, you may think still “is this not unfair?” Think of your favorite MMO, or if you have social life think yourself to have a favorite MMO. Who decides what is correct, you or the creator of the game. Exactly, you are understanding.

Now that we have establish this truth we may continue. The Quran was sent only to those who believe in God, and they will be rewarded. God can bring the dead to life and records actions in his book.

[There is a very dumb backstory to this verse, according to al-Wahidi. The “book” in question is generally interpreted as the same thing as the “Preserved Tablet” or al-lawh al-mahfuz, which we will see later. It’s basically Allah’s record of everything everyone has ever or will ever do.]

Brothers and sisters, let us conclude this day with a story. God sent messengers to some people. He sent three to these people, in fact, because they denied the first two, yet also they denied the third. The messengers assured all that they were in fact conveyors of the true religion, yet in response the disbelievers threaten to stone them to death. Note brothers, note how yet again God cannot come up with a version of the persecuted-messengers story that does not involve this element. It is a technique designed to emphasize how evil the disbelievers are, called “repetition”. Islam invented this literary “repetition”, which the West would not emulate for a thousand years.

Another technique we the ummah have invented is the technique of “cliffhanger”. What will become of these mysterious three people and the rejectors? We must wait for tomorrow, like a story in One Thousand and One Nights, which invented literature.

NEXT TIME: Miracles of the Noble Quran as all believe, including Western scientists!!

The Quran Read-Along: Day 175

Ayat: 18

Good: 0

Neutral: 15 (36:1-7, 36:11-18)

Bad: 3 (36:8-10)

Kuffar hell counter: 0

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#ya sin #surah 36 #quranreadalong

[quranreadalong]

THE BAD QURAN, PT 35: SURAH 36

Only 8.4% (7/83) of surah 36 was bad, and the bad stuff is just the same old, same old. But that’s still seven more bad ayat than good ayat. O well.

We have some of Allah’s typical passive-aggressive trolling to start us off, with 36:8 telling us that he is preventing the disbelievers from “seeing” the True Path Of Islam beneath them or around them (36:9), so there’s nothing Mohammed can do to make them Muslim (36:10). Then why you complaining, Allah? Smh.

There’s a brief, typical mention of Allah’s Genocide Tour in 36:31 (“how many generations We destroyed before them”), and then near the end there’s some also-typical ranting about hell. The disbelievers, whose disbelief marks them as followers of Shaytan, will be thrown in hell (36:63) for their... disbelief (36:64). According to 36:65, they will be unable to speak in their own defense, and their limbs will betray them and reveal their crimes of... disbelief. Riveting stuff, as always.

SPECIAL BONUS SECTION: HALL OF SHAME!

The following ayat condemn disbelievers to hell and pinged our kuffar hell counter. They will be copied and pasted word-for-word. Enjoy… the doom!

Did I not charge you, O ye sons of Adam, that ye worship not the devil - Lo! he is your open foe! - But that ye worship Me? That was the right path. Yet he hath led astray of you a great multitude. Had ye then no sense? This is hell which ye were promised (if ye followed him). Burn therein this day for that ye disbelieved.

My poor long-suffering readers... I have some big news to share. The next surah is the last one over 100 ayat long. All fucking praise is due to Allah!!! And while it’s long in terms of number of ayat, they’re short lines (because it’s a Meccan surah)--more a surah 26 than a surah 2, if you will. There are.... maybe... ten semi-interesting lines, so! Hopefully it won’t be a complete waste of our time. Tune in for: disgusting fruit that grows in hell! Allah’s vore fanfic! Whose Child Sacrifice Is It Anyway?! And more!!

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#ya sin #surah 36 #quranreadalong #badquran