Reading the Qur'an
What I found
The Book:
The Qur’an
Translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem
Oxford University Press
2016
The Talk:
“Goodness does not consist in turning your face towards East or West. The truly good are those who believe in God and the Last Day, in the angels, the Scripture, and the prophets; who give away some of their wealth, however much they cherish it, to their relatives, to orphans, the needy, travellers and beggars, and to liberate those in bondage; those who keep up the prayer and pay the prescribed alms; who keep pledges whenever they make them; who are steadfast in misfortune, adversity, and times of danger. These are the ones who are true, and it is they who are aware of God.” ~ Sura 2:177
For two billion people, the Qur’an is a holy book, the very words of God, transmitted by the angel Gabriel to the prophet Muhammad through a series of unsolicited trances over 23 years in the 7th Century. For Muslims, the teachings of the Qur’an are absolute, universal, and eternal. At the same time, they address specific issues and debates in the life of the Prophet and his community at the time of their revelation.
I found it not really possible to read the Qur’an without some background about the life of Muhammad. The text assumes that the reader knows a lot about the situations being addressed. I ended up watching a couple documentaries1 and listening to a biography to get some historical context. Even rudimentary knowledge was helpful.
However, there is also a critical view: In his 2012 book In The Shadow of the Sword, Tom Holland (now co-host of the popular The Rest Is History podcast) notes that the details of Muhummad’s life, as found in the Hadiths, only first appear in the historical record two centuries after the life of the Prophet, with little to no contemporary evidence to support them prior.
Holland stirred up major controversy in the UK with a documentary, Islam: The Untold Story, based on his book. Rather than Islam inspiring the Arab conquest, he claims, it validated it after the fact, unifying state and religion around one God, one book, and one holy figure, in order to put it on the same level as the Byzantines (and their Christianity) or the Persians (and their Zoroastrianism).
Holland received death threats following his documentary, and his critics called into question his scholarly qualifications. However, Holland’s argument builds on the work of scholars like Patricia Crone (who happened to write one of my all-time favorite books Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World). Crone, too, was a controversial figure, though my understanding is that it is generally agreed that how to interpret and use historical sources in Early Islamic Studies today is a complex and contentious issue, and even scholars who disagree with Holland and Crone think they raise questions that have to be honestly wrestled with.
All that to say, the traditional stories about Muhammad’s life do fill in the blanks that the Qur’an leaves out, but the blanks are definitely there, for the layperson and scholar alike. In this post I’m going to describe my own experience reading the Qur’an for the first time and share some of the parts I found most interesting from a literary point of view.
The sura snowball
The collected suras (chapters or books) of the Qur’an are not arranged in chronological, narrative, or thematic order. Although there are some differences between them, much of them cover the same ideas, often with nearly identical phrasing, referencing the same stories and people, with minor elaborations. The result is that you could likely open to any page and get the following main ideas:
The Prophet’s message comes from God, despite skeptics and doubters.
The message he brings is the same message as that of the Jewish prophets, the Torah, the Gospel, and Jesus, and it is this:
God is the creator of everything that exists, and he sees and records everything that happens.
God is merciful to the penitent and punishes the unrepentant.
God has no divine helpers or divine intermediaries (secondary gods).
At any moment, the Day of Reckoning will arrive, when trumpets will sound and the world will end. Everyone who has ever lived will be judged and sorted into two groups: Believers (i.e., good Jews, Christians, and Muslims) and Non-believers (i.e., materialists/atheists and polytheists/henotheists).
Once the day arrives, there will be no opportunity to repent anymore.
Believers will go to the Garden, a place of lasting relief and bliss.
Non-believers will go to Hell, a place of lasting torment and suffering.
As I mentioned before, each repetition of these ideas is worded slightly different; minor details accrue gradually so that by the end of the book each of these bullet points have snowballed, their full meaning spread out across the entire text.
For example, the reward for believers in the post-resurrection afterlife is “the Garden.” At the beginning of the book, the Garden is described almost exclusively as a place with many streams running through it and with plentiful shade. By the end of the book, however, the description of the Garden is richly ornamented. From Sura 76:
They will be served with silver plates and gleaming silver goblets according to their fancy, and they will be given a drink infused with ginger from a spring called Salsabil. Everlasting youths will attend them—if you could see them, you would think they were scattered pearls—
The description continues, describing the clothes of the Believers as made from green silk and silver brocade. In other passages each Believer is given a maiden who matches his own age (which seems to imply the Believers are male or the intended audience is).
Similarly, the idea of Hell gains more details as it is mentioned, becoming ever more specific and detailed in its descriptions. At the beginning, it’s mostly described as fire and sometimes the damned have iron chains around their necks. However, by the end of the book, the non-believers drink boiling water from “the tree of Zaqqum” and feast on bitter thorns. Angels are their torturers, who beat them, burn them, drag them by their faces, and ruthlessly mock them for their unbelief (“Is this what you doubted?”). The chains of a damned soul are said to be 70 meters long.
In Sura 41, the damned have a dialogue with their own skin:
They will say say to their skins, ‘Why did you testify against us?’ and their skins will reply, ‘God, who gave speech to everything, has given us speech—it was He who created you the first time and to Him you have been returned—yet you did not try to hide yourselves from your years, eyes, and skin to prevent them from testifying against you.’
The full picture of Hell as presented in the Qur’an seems much similar to Western ideas of Hell than the Christian Bible’s own picture, which makes me wonder how much Islamic ideas of Hell shaped the popular Christian imagination of Hell over the centuries.
The good and bad jinn
Gradually, as you read the Qur’an the outlines of an entire cosmology come into view.
There are two types of beings that populate the earth: Humans and jinn. The jinn are not angels2 but unseen earth-bound beings, created before humans from “smokeless fire.” The jinn often mislead and trick humans:
Men have sought refuge with the jinn in the past, but they only misguided them further.
However, jinn are not necessarily evil. In later suras, we learn that there are good jinn and bad jinn. On the day of judgement, the unbelieving jinn will go to hell, while the jinn who believe in the Qur’an and the Prophet will experience the same Garden as humans—including wives! In Sura 55, speaking to both humans and jinn collectively, God presents the rewards of the Garden to persuade them to belief:
There will be maidens restraining their glances, untouched before by man or jinn. Which, then, of your Lord’s blessings do you both deny?
The heaven defense system
There are seven heavens or levels of heaven3. The stars are in the lowest heaven, and they are, in fact, a missile defense system. I am not exaggerating. In multiple passages, stars are described as flaming arrows, poised to strike down any evil spirit or jinn that attempts to get near heaven. In Sura 15:
We have set constellations up in the sky and made it beautiful for all to see, and guarded it from every pelted satan4: any eavesdropper will be pursued by a clearly visible flame.
In Sura 72, the jinn speak:
We tried to reach heaven, but discovered it to be full of stern guards and shooting stars—we used to sit in places there, listening, but anyone trying to listen now will find a shooting star lying in wait for them
It is explained multiple times that if any spirit could get close to heaven, they might hear what is being talked about, and thus know the future.
Solomonic magic
There is one human in the Qur’an who can control the jinn, and that’s the legendary King Solomon. I think the Solomon parts were my favorite. According to the book, Solomon was given control over an army of jinn who served him as slaves. He also had the power over the wind and the ability to communicate with birds.
Sura 27 includes a vivid scene in which Solomon is inspecting his ranks of jinn, men, and birds. Solomon notices that the hoopoe is missing. Then the hoopoe arrives, breathless, announcing that it has seen the Queen of Sheba, a magnificent but unbelieving queen. Solomon sends her a message, and she replies with an envoy of gifts for him. In response, Solomon asks a jinn to bring her throne to him, and the jinn does so in a flash.
When the Queen of Sheba finally arrives:
Then it was said to her, ‘Enter the hall,’ but when she saw it, she thought it was a deep pool of water, and bared her legs. Solomon explained, ‘It is just a hall paved with glass,’ and she said, ‘My Lord, I have wronged myself: I devote myself, with Solomon, to God, the Lord of all worlds.’
The time travel dog
I will end by mentioning the other sura that stuck with me, Sura 18, which discusses a common folktale at the time, known by Christians as the Seven Sleepers. The story goes that in the 3rd Century, a group of Christian boys hid inside a cave to escape Roman persecution and fell asleep. When they awoke, three centuries had passed, and the boys entered town with old Roman coins in their hands to buy some food.
The purpose of the story in the Qur’an is to affirm God’s ability to resurrect the dead, including the dead of the distant past. But it’s also basically a late-antiquity time travel story! There were different versions of the story circulating, with different numbers of years and different numbers of boys. But every version includes the fact that there was a dog and the dog slept too:
Some say, ‘The sleepers were three, and their dog made four,’ others say, ‘There were five, and the dog made six’—guessing in the dark—and some say, ‘They were seven, and their dog made eight.’ Say [Prophet], ‘My Lord knows best how many they were.’
But even in its own version, the Qur’an still includes the dog.
Related:
Blurred lines: Sex, God, and poetry in the gardens of Shiraz
Analysis of the 2024 Hajj heat event and future temperature extremes in Mecca5 (Nature)
Inside the Koran (2008, BBC) and The Life of Muhammad (2011, BBC)
Iblis is the name for the Devil/Satan proper in the Qur’an. At one point he is referred to as a jinn, though it seems clear from other passages that jinn aren’t rebel angels. So my thinking is that Iblis is a jinn in so far as he is an earthbound spirit.
Seven earths are also mentioned.
“Satan” here is a generic term for an evil spirit.
“During the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in June 2024, temperatures soared to a record-breaking 51.8 °C, resulting in the tragic deaths of at least 1300 pilgrims and over 2700 non-fatal injuries.”