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This is yet another late Meccan sura. Its name comes from v. 35, where Abraham appears and prays, but following the convention of the naming of Qur’an chapters, this name has little to do with the content of this sura; more is said about Abraham elsewhere in the Qur’an.
Verses 1-4 celebrate the “Book which We have revealed unto thee” (v. 1) — which is, of course, the Qur’an that was delivered to Muhammad. In the words of Ibn Kathir, it is “the most honored Book, that Allah sent down from heaven to the most honored Messenger of Allah sent to all the people of the earth, Arabs and non-Arabs alike.”
With this Book, Muhammad can “lead mankind out of the depths of darkness into light” (v. 1) – the light of Allah – but of course for the unbelievers there is a terrible penalty in store (v. 2): “woe to them on the Day of Judgment because they defied you, O Muhammad, and rejected you,” says Ibn Kathir. For they dared to prefer this world to the next and to keep people from the path of Allah, and they “seek therein something crooked” (v. 3) – that is, they are, in the words of Maulana Bulandshahri, “ever vigilant to expose any defect that they hope to find in the religion (D’in) of Islam.” Yet Allah has sent messengers to people speaking in their own language so they can understand the message clearly (v. 4), but after that, says the Tafsir al-Jalalayn, “God then sends astray whomever He will and He guides whomever He will.”
Then verses 5-15 return to the stories of Moses (vv. 5-8) and some of the other prophets (v. 9). The unbelievers “thrust their hands into their mouths” (v. 9) on hearing the messengers’ clear proofs. “It is said,” explains Ibn Kathir, “that they pointed to the Messengers’ mouths asking them to stop calling them to Allah, the Exalted and Most Honored. It is also said that it means, they placed their hands on their mouths in denial of the Messengers. It was also said that it means that they did not answer the call of the Messengers, or they were biting their hands in rage.” Then comes a dialogue between the unbelievers and the messengers (vv. 10-15) that appears to be meant to apply to all the experiences of all the prophets Allah has sent to the world, but which once again, as we have seen in other late Meccan suras, closely traces and universalizes Muhammad’s dealings with his own people, the pagan Quraysh of Mecca. Maulana Maududi makes this clear when he explains that v. 13, “The disbelievers warned their Messengers, ‘You shall have to return to our community or we will assuredly expel you from our land,’” is a reference to a threat the Quraysh had issued to Muhammad: the verse “clearly indicates,” he says, “that the persecution of the Muslims was at its worst at the time of the revelation of this Surah, and the people of Makkah were bent on expelling the Believers from there like the disbelievers of the former Prophets.”
But Allah will turn the tables on the unbelievers: “Verily we shall destroy the wrong-doers, and verily We shall make you” – that is, Muhammad and the Muslims – “to dwell in the land after them” (vv. 13-14).
This leads to more warnings for the unbeliever in verses 16-23: “In front of such a one is Hell, and he is given, for drink, boiling fetid water” (v. 16). They will suffer “chastisement unrelenting” (v. 17) and their work in this world will come to nothing (v. 18). Allah can even replace the entire creation if he wishes (v. 20). On Judgment Day, the weak will blame the arrogant (v. 21), and Satan will acknowledge that while both he and Allah made promises to people, he – Satan – proved to be a betrayer (v. 22). According to Ibn Jarir, Satan will tell the unbelievers at that point, when it’s too late: “I deny being a partner with Allah, the Exalted and Most Honored.” And “Iblis [Satan],” says Ibn Kathir, “may Allah curse him, will stand and address” those whom he led astray, “in order to add depression to their depression, sorrow to their sorrow and grief to their grief.” No mention is made, however, of the conundrum created by Allah’s leading people astray. The righteous, in any case, will enter “gardens beneath which rivers flow” (v. 23).
Verses 24-27 compare the word of Allah to a strong tree and the “evil Word” to a tree without roots, reminiscent of Jesus’ parable in Matthew 7:17-19 (see also 7:24-27). Muhammad once told his companions, “There is a tree among the trees which is as blessed as a Muslim,” and explained, “It is the datepalm tree.” This may have been because of the spiritual powers of dates. Muhammad also said: “He who eats seven ‘Ajwa dates every morning, will not be affected by poison or magic on the day he eats them.” Allah will strengthen the believers in this world and the next (v. 27); Muhammad explained: “When a Muslim is questioned in his grave, he will testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is Allah’s Apostle, and that is what is meant by Allah’s statement” in v. 27.
Verses 28-34 again warn the unbelievers of hellfire and remind them of Allah’s blessings. In a hadith, Muhammad identifies “those who have changed the favor of Allah into blasphemy” (v. 28) as “the disbelieving pagans of Mecca,” thus reinforcing Maududi’s impression of this sura as a warning to the Quraysh when tensions between them and the Muslims were high.
In verses 35-41 Abraham prays that Allah will make Mecca a city of “peace and security” (v. 35) and for his children, some of whom he has made to “dwell in a valley without cultivation, by Thy Sacred House” – that is, the Ka’aba, which Abraham built, according to Islamic tradition. That the land is barren makes them dependent upon the good will of those in the area: Abraham asks Allah to “fill the hearts of some among men with love towards them, and feed them with fruits” (v. 37). However, according to Ibn ‘Abbas, Mujahid and Sa‘id bin Jubayr, this is restricted to Muslims only: “Had Ibrahim said, ‘The hearts of mankind’, Persians, Romans, the Jews, the Christians and all other people would have gathered around” the Ka’aba. But Abraham, they explain, said “some among men,” thus “making it exclusive to Muslims only.”
According to one of Muhammad’s companions, Abdullah bin Amr, Muhammad recited part of Abraham’s prayer here – “They have indeed led astray many among mankind” (v. 36) – and wept, crying out three times: “O Allah, Save my Ummah [community]!” In another indication of the importance of Muhammad to Allah, he sent Gabriel to the prophet with these instructions: “Go to Muhammad and tell him this; ‘We will make you pleased with your Ummah, O Muhammad, and will not treat them in a way you dislike.’”
Verses 42-52 repeat that the sinners who remain heedless of Allah’s truth will nonetheless face his dreadful judgment.
(Here you can find links to all the earlier "Blogging the Qur'an" segments. Here is a good Arabic Qur’an, with English translations available; here are two popular Muslim translations, those of Abdullah Yusuf Ali and Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, along with a third by M. H. Shakir. Here is another popular translation, that of Muhammad Asad. And here is an omnibus of ten Qur’an translations.)
Posted by Robert at February 4, 2008 7:36 AM
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"...sent down from heaven to the most honored Messenger of Allah..."
Why do I always cringe when I read something like this about the profiteer Muhammad?
Most 'honored' for stealing from those who earned their wealth? Most 'honored' for killing opponents and those who simply disagreed? Most 'honored' for enslaving women and children? Most 'honored' for raping women, including a 9 year old child? Most 'honored' for molesting a little girl (and no telling how many others)?
I don't think Muslims really know what the word "honor" means. They should look it up, along with "compassion" and "peace".
Posted by: DJM![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 4, 2008 7:59 AM
"...that is, they are, in the words of Maulana Bulandshahri, “ever vigilant to expose any defect that they hope to find in the religion (D’in) of Islam.”
It's not hard to do that if one uses reason.
For example, where is the proof of this?(below)- except in the sick mind of Muhammad.
".....mainstream Islamic tradition regards the Jewish and Christian Scriptures as corrupted: they don’t, after all, confirm what is in the Qur’an, and so Jews and Christians must have dared to alter them – and now “their forgeries deceive them as to their own religion” (v. 24). Asad therefore emphasizes that “it is to be borne in mind that the Gospel frequently mentioned in the Qur’an is not identical with what is known today as the Four Gospels, but refers to an original, since lost, revelation bestowed upon Jesus and known to his contemporaries under its Greek name of Evangelion (‘Good Tiding’), on which the Arabicized form Injil is based. It was probably the source from which the Synoptic Gospels derived much of their material and some of the teachings attributed to Jesus. The fact of its having been lost and forgotten is alluded to in the Qur’an in 5:14.”-Robert Spencer
BTW, Muslim deception is a topic of conversation among many now....
at February 4, 2008 8:03 AM
The phrase "uswa hasana" is used three times in the Qur'an, once for Muhammad, and twice for Abraham. Does it appear in this sura twice, or only once, or not at all?
Posted by: Hugh at February 4, 2008 8:12 AM
Hugh:
Not at all. It appears in 33:21, referring to Muhammad, and 60:4 and 60:6, referring to Abraham.
Yrs
Robert
at February 4, 2008 8:15 AM
I guess I better start eating dates everyday.
Posted by: tanstaafl at February 4, 2008 8:52 AM
"but of course for the unbelievers there is a terrible penalty in store (v. 2): “woe to them on the Day of Judgment because they defied you, O Muhammad,"
But of course!
What a beautiful book.
Posted by: darcy at February 4, 2008 8:56 AM
“none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is Allah’s Apostle..."
You see, that sums it up, for me. I could say there was no God but God, but I could never say with any belief that Muhammed was his Messenger.
Muhammed is the worm in the apple of Islam. One cannot declare himself a Muslim, unless he embraces Muhammed, and I'd sooner embrace a puffer fish (and come away from the experience with less harm).
Guess I'm destined to be beheaded...
Too bad the Qur'an cannot be extricated from Muhammed. Islam might have more converts, if it could. It would certainly be a less violent work of "literature". Shorter, too.
Posted by: Abscedere at February 4, 2008 9:48 AM
'Verses 1-4 celebrate the “Book which We have revealed unto thee” (v. 1) — which is, of course, the Qur’an that was delivered to Muhammad. In the words of Ibn Kathir, it is “the most honored Book, that Allah sent down from heaven to the most honored Messenger of Allah sent to all the people of the earth, Arabs and non-Arabs alike.”"
This would be a handy set of verses to keep in mind to answer the inevitable "do you speak Arabic?" argument of the Muslims.
at February 4, 2008 9:50 AM
Absecdere -
I've always wondered why an omnipotent being would "choose" to communicate in only one language.
Posted by: tanstaafl at February 4, 2008 10:20 AM
Robert,
I have a question regarding Qur'anic translations.
You've written before that the Qur'an should traditionally be read and recited in Arabic, and this is one reason why many Western Muslims have little knowledge of what is actually in the book.
And yet we have numerous translations in English and other languages. So doesn't that make men like Pickthall and Ali kind of heretical? And yet these men seem to be highly respected, and as far as I know English translations of the Qur'an aren't being denounced by Muslims. Why is this?
Posted by: Ben at February 4, 2008 11:18 AM
tanstaafl:
Full omnipotence means one doesn´t obey reason or anything else.
Early Islamic thinkers complained that the Jews falsely believed that God was "fettered" by law. According to Muslims, Allah is so omnipotent that He is not fettered in any way. Allah obeys no one and no law, not even the laws of reason. His omnipotence means He obeys only himself. That is perhaps the chief reason the scientific revolution did not take place in the Islamic world. The cosmos, in the usual Islamic view, does not obey laws, it at each moment obeys Allah alone. There is thus little strong sense of an orderly consistency that human beings could investigate according to the laws of reason.
The concept of omnipotence is one of the areas where the Judeo-Christian tradition differs profoundly from the Islamic. Some -- like the American logician and process philosopher Charles Hartshorne -- have argued that the concepts of divine omnipotence and omniscience are not really present in the Bible, but were later introduced into Judeo-Christian theology by medieval theologians or from other sources. Hartshorne held that God was neither omnipotent nor omniscient (for one thing, because human freedom is real), and that a rehabilitation of Anselm´s failed proof of God´s existence yields a number of successful logical proofs of God´s existence. But today few people clearly realize one can conceive of God without the concepts of omniscience and omnipotence. God is superlative in a number of ways, but without those two qualities. And God is in some sense evolving, it seems.
The Christian philosopher Berdyaev also argued that omnipotence was not a part of true Christianity but rather a mere human projection onto God of a concept derived from the experience of earthly dictators. Islam in particular seems to model its theology after the experience of extreme tyrannies.
Posted by: traeh at February 4, 2008 11:47 AM
(v. 35) and for his children, some of whom he has made to “dwell in a valley without cultivation, by Thy Sacred House” – that is, the Ka’aba, which Abraham built, according to Islamic tradition. That the land is barren makes them dependent upon the good will of those in the area: Abraham asks Allah to “fill the hearts of some among men with love towards them, and feed them with fruits”
Well the land around Ka'aba is not barren anymore, it has been cultivated with buildings...Google maps..."and feed them with fruits”...If you look closely you can see a 7/11 store on one corner of town, and a Mekka burger joint on another.
at February 4, 2008 12:14 PM
Addendum on Islamic logic:
Warner over at Center for the Study of Political Islam argues that to understand the Qur'an as Muslim experts understand it, one must approach it with a different attitude to logic than a Western non-Muslim might typically employ. Where there are contradictions in the Qur'an or Hadith or Sira, both sides of the contradiction must be taken as true. Allah trumps logic. This relates to my earlier comment on this thread.
So instead of trying to resolve the contradictions in the "Trilogy" (that´s how Warner refers to the Qur'an, Hadith, Sira), Warner takes a statistical approach. Thus 3%, say, of statements in the Hadith that refer to jihad refer to peaceful inner struggle, and 97% of jihad statements refer to warlike outward jihad. So Warner concludes that in Islamic theology, 3% of jihad is non-violent.
And Warner acknowledges the reality of abrogation (the Qur'an verses that tell us that if a later verse contradicts an earlier, the later is better), yet at the same time Warner says that both the Mecca and Medina stages of Islam are understood as true and valid examples, as far as Islamic thinkers are concerned.
I'm oversimplifying Warner´s approach, but that´s part of the gist as I understand it.
Posted by: traeh at February 4, 2008 12:29 PM
Muhammad can “lead mankind out of the depths of darkness into light
I think this should read Muhammad can “lead mankind out of the depths of light into darkness and has done this for over a billion people
at February 4, 2008 12:38 PM
During the Jerusalem (al-Quds) qibla (prayer direction), Muhammad had sought recognition as the last prophet of the Jews. It was later, after their rejection of him, that he changed the qibla. Try to apply god-logic to the narrative. You can't, because said narrative is ground in the phony prophet's personal revenge-power motivation. Islamic history would be comedy, if hundreds of millions had not been slaughtered in the name of allah's enslavers.
Reminder to those deluded by belief in a deity: Abraham was a Chaldean. Chaldean artifacts reveal a social structure in which magic was pervasive, and magicians ruled. Good magic is good deception. It was the Muse, and not the Wizard Divines, who guided the Greco-Roman heros and scholars. Plato did all his writing in a shrine to the Muses.
Posted by: supercargo at February 5, 2008 12:11 AM
supercargo
I do not agree with your contention that the Biblical Abraham was a Chaldean magician, peddling the same god-delusions as everyone else..(I presume you also subscribe to the idea that Moses was just one more Egyptian magician?)
Read Tom Cahill "The Gifts of the Jews". Read, too, Franz Rosenzweig, "The Star of Redemption". You will find that the Hebrews turned their backs, implacably, upon the world of god-king magicians.
It was not for nothing that the Greco-Romans – yes, those noble philosophic Greeks and Romans - accused first the Jews, and then, later, the Christians, of being "atheists". The Roman general was, I suspect, horrified when he broke into the Holy of Holies of the Jewish temple and found there …emptiness, the appurtenances of worship, but nothing recognisable as a statue of a god. Christians, of course, equally horrifyingly (to refined and noble pagan sensibilities) exalt as the ultimate Revelation a Jewish carpenter who had been publicly executed by an obscenely humiliating form of death reserved for slaves and rebels.
Cahill and Rosenzweig will teach you that what divides the Pentateuch (and every other part of the Hebrew Bible, and then, later, rooted in Judaism, the Christian Scriptures) from the world in which it was written – and, indeed, from every other system of thought, including that of Plato or Aristotle, is a bottomless gulf.
Islam, which Jacques Ellul sees as a monotheistic paganism, is seamlessly continuous with the world from which Abraham, and Moses, escaped; whereas the Hebrew scriptures record a radical DIScontinuity. Cahill in his book refers to two Great Escapes: the Escape from Ur of the Chaldees, and the Escape from Egypt; both of which represent the Escape from "The World of the Wheel".
Abraham is told "Lech lecha"! GET OUT!! And he goes, turning his back upon Ur, up and out of the world of the Wheel, into the world of History, ‘to a land that I will show you’, a world of linear time rather than perpetual repetition.
Moses is told to tell Pharaoh: "LET MY PEOPLE GO!" And when Pharaoh won't, YHWH simply...takes them. It's a prison break. I have read Plato and Aristotle; I tell you that neither of them could ever have imagined anything like the Exodus.
The New Testament simply extends the story by claiming that YHWH the Liberator crowns this history of Escapes by a third, the most stunning of all - The Resurrection. Get hold of David Bentley Hart’s "The Beauty of the Infinite": read the sections entitled "The Will to Power", "The Covenant of Light", and - best of all - "The Consolations of Tragedy, the Terrors of Easter".
Hart argues, very cogently, that even the greatest of the pagan philosophers could not in the end escape the limits of the world within which they arose. Nietzsche’s great project was to attempt to annihilate the Jewish and Christian ‘interruption’ – which he regarded as contemptible - in order to re-found the world of the pagan Hero. The logical outcome of Nietzsche’s project was Hitler’s attempt to physically annihilate the Jews, to burn them, and all their works; to obliterate the scandal.
Hart, p. 130: “There was, within the history of Western philosophy, in the midst of its achievements and failures, a singular interruption, the arrival of a discourse of truth in which every principle of necessity became subordinate to the higher principle of gratuity [i.e. grace, or gift]. Christian thought, and its long history of metaphysical speculation, did not occur as just another episode in the genealogy of nihilism; it was in fact so profound a disruption of many of the most basic premises of philosophy, and so audacious a rescue of many of philosophy’s truths from the impotent embrace of mere metaphysical ambition, that it is doubtful yet that philosophy understands what happened to it, or why now it cannot be anything but an ever more self-tormenting denial of that interruption.”
Back to ‘magic’. The classic magical cults depend on secrecy, gnosis, illumination, obfuscation, the Occult, the esoteric/ exoteric distinction between the Wise Few who Know and the Contemptible Many, who do not and cannot Know (Islam reproduces this paradigm exactly, in its bizarre insistence on the untranslatability of the Arabic Quran, and its belief that Islam = Knowledge and Non-Islam = Ignorance). The Torah and the Gospels are the diametrical opposite: they are public and relentlessly transparent, WYSIWYG.
at February 5, 2008 11:36 PM
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