IN THE SHADOW OF THE KORAN
Last Saturday night before going to bed i clicked on the arts and letters daily website to see if there was anything interesting that had been put up since I last checked. The first, newly-posted, blurb in the articles section was a provocative-sounding piece on a radical Islamic philosopher named Sayyid Qutb. I opened the link and began reading Paul Berman's cover story for the New York Times Sunday magazine which was to be published in hard copy the next morning.
As I read I imagined with mischievous pleasure the scenes of upset that were going to occur because of this article, Of lazy Sunday morning coffee being spilled or left to go cold, of lazy Sunday morning moods being jarred from complacency to fret.
I am not all broke out with genius nor are my friends but we are intellectually curious and better-read than the average bear and spend some time thinking and talking about public occurrences and, after the significance of Qutb's work sunk in, the first reaction was "Why the hell haven't we heard of this guy before?"
It wasn't just us. Berman makes clear that Qutb's writings were largely unknown outside of Islamic circles despite their centrality to current events and their resonance to prominent Western philosophies like existentialism and to philosophers like Marx and Nietzsche. It is astonishing that this man, whose philosophy was so influential among Islamic intellectuals that his support was sought by Gamel Abdul Nasser, and who was imprisoned, hung and thereby martyred when he spurned Nasser's entreaties, who created the Islamist movement and whose surviving brother, an Islamic scholar himself, TAUGHT OSAMA BIN LADEN, would be so anonymous in this cyber-linked small world.
Berman singles out for special significance Qutb's gargantuan thirty volume set of commentaries, "in the shade of the Qur'an," written while Qutb was in Nasser's prison for ten years. As further testament to the apparent inexcusable parochialism that kept this work from wide Western attention only one volume of the work has until recently been available in English and even that was not available (but soon will, it is predicted) from Amazon or Barnes and Noble's main sites but had to be ordered specially from their string of affiliated smaller specialized stores.
I have thus only read that one volume, I have not read the Koran, i am not a religious scholar and i seldom have a positive word to say about any religion, so this post can be discounted as seen fit. I was raised a Christian and so have some familiarity with the Bible and with Christian theology and I have an educated, curious person's passing familiarity with Jewish and Hindu thought.
There are two different things to think about when reading a commentary, one is the thought of the commentator and the other is the nature of the text being interpreted. Maybe the commentator takes liberties with or misinterprets the text. William Shirer wrote of how the Nazi philosophy was based on crackpot economics, astrology, paranoid sociology and lunatic genetics. Qutb's commentaries on the Koran are rigid and doctrinal but no less so than the text being interpreted.
The first impression of "In the shade of the Qur'an" was how different the tone of the Koran was and how different the image of the almighty was from the other religions. Thomas Friedman wrote last year that "Islam is not an angry religion, it's just that a lot of Muslims are angry." I don't know how he could say that. The Koran is an angry, violent, frightful book. over and over again there are vivid, horrific, Bosch-like images of the vengeance that awaits unbelievers.
All religions divide and I am contemptuous of them for that divisiveness, of Judaism's claim to "the chosen people," of Catholicism's similar hubris that it is the church's way or no way. but they are nothing compared to the Koran. The Koran carves the world up into a dichotomy of believers and unbelievers in the starkest terms.
The metaphor used to describe the godhead in Christianity is the "father" with the connotation of benevolence, protection and tough love. the relationship between Allah and Muslims is one of dictator to subject.
Religions are exasperating with their irrationality and the degree to which they have in the past thwarted scientific and intellectual advances because they clashed with official doctrine. The Koran has that too but it has in addition a command not to ask questions that to me is far beyond anything in Christianity, Hinduism or certainly Judaism, which it's my impression, is the most knowledge-friendly religion.
I know the temptation is to discount everything I say and to feel that the portions of the books below are being maliciously taken out of context because of my antipathy to religion and limited exposure to Islamic or any religious thought, but it required no deep textual analysis by me to come to these observations. The fact is, I don't know ENOUGH to interpret maliciously. the books, Qutb's and the Koran, have the subtlety of a two by four.
The Koran consists of 114 surahs, roughly, chapters. The only volume of "Shade" that is in English translation is the last, volume 30, covering surahs 78-114.
Below are examples of the many Bosch-like descriptions of the hell that awaits unbelievers in the Koran. Clearly Islam is not alone in this. The old testament contains many florid, awful images of the same and in the Bhagavad Gita the setting for the conversation between Arjuna and Krishna is a battlefield but, the Koran seems to me to be singular in the prevalence of this imagery.
"[In hell] they shall abide for ages
tasting neither coolness nor any drink,
save boiling fluid and decaying filth:
a fitting recompense." (surah 78)
"On [judgment] day when the earth shall quake,
followed soon afterwards by the sky,
all hearts will be filled with terror,
and all eyes shall be downcast." (surah 79)
"When the sun is darkened,
when the stars fall and disperse,...
when the camels, ten months pregnant, are left untended,...
when the seas are set alight...
when the records are laid bare...
every soul shall know what it has put forward (surah 81)
Qutb comments are not crackpot interpretations of the Koran. Here he writes on surah 81:
"The rhythm...is one of violent movement which leaves nothing in its place. Everything is thrown, smashed or scattered away. the movement is so violent that it excites and frightens."
"The only thing we know of [hell] is that it 'has fuel of men and stones' [from surah 66]. This is, of course, after they have been thrown in it."
"[On judgment day] there will be horror far greater than any man could have ever experienced."
In addition to their frequency of occurrence, passages like the above are made more frightening oftentimes by being combined with rage-filled invective directed toward disbelievers. For example, immediately following the passage quoted above from surah 78 is this:
"They did not expect to be faced with a reckoning,
and roundly denied our revelations
but we noted and recorded all,
(and we shall say:) 'taste this then;
the only increase you shall have is increase in torment.'"
This is now how the Koran says Muslims will treat non-Muslims on judgment day. Disbelievers are taunted and vengeful pleasure is taken in their torment, the recompense for the insult of "roundly den[ying] our revelations." Throughout the Koran and Qutb's commentary is this theme of past humiliation avenged. Qutb:
"It is inconceivable that...evil and tyranny can get away without retribution, or that good, justice and right can be left to suffer...without there being a chance to put things right."
Surah 78 concludes with Allah stating judgment day will be so awful for unbelievers that they will say, "Would that I were dust."
Surah 80:
"Some other faces on [judgment] day shall be covered with dust,
veiled with darkness.
These shall be the faces of the disbelievers, the hardened in sin."
Surah 83:
"Woe on that day to the disbelievers...
they shall roast in hell."
In a remarkable footnote Qutb explains matter-of-factly Islam's Manichean worldview:
"Islam divides all societies, beliefs and practices into two groups: Islamic and ignorant. whatever is in conflict with Islam can only be derived from ignorance...[Allah] will lead mankind in one direction, namely the Islamic direction...Islam describes such [disbelieving] attitude as one of ignorance, and whatever social setup it produces as ignorant."
On surah 81:
"Anyone who follows a different path shall, therefore, bear responsibility for his action."
Iremember Shirer's amazement at the directness of Mein Kamph and how the entire Nazi programme was laid out very directly for the world to read. Qutb's writing reminded me of that and it seems to me to be consistent with the words of the Koran itself.
Fear, not love, is what the Koran uses to influence behavior which is why the relationship between Allah and man was analogized to that of dictator and subject above. In surah 49 the prophet says:
"The noblest of you in Allah's sight is he who fears him most."
In commenting on this sentence Qutb writes that man's earthly concerns with family, power and wealth are made void by Islam, "which substitutes for them a single value [fear] derived directly from Allah, the only value accepted by him."
Qutb says in his commentary on surah 79,
"The fear of Allah is the solid defence against the violent attacks of desire...fear of standing before his lord, the almighty, should be of great help to [man]."
"The [82nd] surah closes with an air of fear and speechless expectation, which contrasts with the air of violent horrors of the opening. in between the two man is addressed with that remonstrance which overwhelms him with a feeling of shame."
Allah is a dictator who rules through fear. there is not one democracy in the Arab world and I believe only one, turkey, in all of Islam.
By contrast the relationship between man and god in Hindu thought is described in the introduction to the Penguin classics edition of the Gita as "the vision of god as man, as the friend to the struggling soul." Iam sure that there are passages in Hindu thought that would seem to contradict that characterization but the point made earlier is that individual passages do not obscure the overall tone of a work. The author of the quote on the Gita is Juan Mascaro and the full context of that quote is his comparison of the tone of the Gita to a piece of music: "After those ineffably sublime harmonies the music descends to softer melodies: it is the vision of god as man, as the friend of the struggling soul. whatever we do for a human being we do it for him."
"Shade's" place as the intellectual basis of the Islamist movement is apparent in several places. Surah 79 concerns the futility of a Pharoah's power in the face of Islam and Qutb writes, "One can only imagine what will be the fate of the disbelievers who do not have similar power, authority or glory but still resist the call of Islam and try to suppress it."
In commenting on surah 80:
"The only hope that remains is that the new Islamic movement will be able to rescue mankind once again from the clutches of ignorance and bring about a second rebirth of humanity..."
On surah 81: "...the declared aim of Islam, to destroy ignorance and save mankind from sinking..."
Islam's anti-intellectualism is clear in several places. Qutb makes this commentary on the themes of surah 78, the discouragement of inquiry, the umbrage taken at disbelief of Islam's revelations and the fate of the unbelievers: "this horrifying position of the disbelievers is the subject of the questions and doubts they raise concerning that fateful tiding."
Below are the first words of surah 78, which concerns the unbelievers questioning of judgment day and resurrection:
"About what are they asking?
about the fateful tiding
on which they are at variance.
no indeed, they shall certainly know!
again, no indeed they shall certainly know."
Qutb writes in commentary, "The surah opens by shunning the enquirers and the enquiry."... "The surah asks what they are talking about: 'about what are they asking?'"..."The question is not meant to solicit information but to draw attention to the singularity of their questioning..."
The last two, "no indeed," lines Qutb says are an "implicit threat which is much more frightening than a direct answer."
"Allah has revealed to us what we need to know of the secrets of the universe so that we may not waste our energy in futile pursuit of useless knowledge."
This is from surah 79:
"They question you about the hour of doom, when will it come?
But why should you be concerned with its exact timing?
The final word concerning it belongs to your lord."
In surah 82 Allah warns mankind that there are angels, "noble recorders...watching over you...who know all your actions." This is not god the father, this is god as an all-knowing dictator. Qutb writes of this passage that it is not clear how this recording is done, nor does it matter, "Allah knows that we are neither given the ability to understand it nor are we going to benefit by understanding it because it does not affect the purpose of our existence."
Allah's unquestioned omnipotence means, and this circular argument is certainly common to all religions, not just Islam, that the complexity and beauty of the universe are proof of that omnipotence. Throughout "Shade" Qutb is utterly dismissive of the possibility of a random universe:
"[One] would then find completely insupportable the argument that all this had been the result of coincidence."
"The very nature of this universe rules out any possibility of its formation by chance."
"The harmony starts with the fact that our solar system is unique among millions and million of planetary systems."
This of course has been proved wrong in the last few years, which presumably led to more rage like the above directed at the "ignorant" unbelievers.
"The fact of elaborate planning, so apparent everywhere in the universe." This is Public Occurrences.
(First published 3/29/03)
Last Saturday night before going to bed i clicked on the arts and letters daily website to see if there was anything interesting that had been put up since I last checked. The first, newly-posted, blurb in the articles section was a provocative-sounding piece on a radical Islamic philosopher named Sayyid Qutb. I opened the link and began reading Paul Berman's cover story for the New York Times Sunday magazine which was to be published in hard copy the next morning.
As I read I imagined with mischievous pleasure the scenes of upset that were going to occur because of this article, Of lazy Sunday morning coffee being spilled or left to go cold, of lazy Sunday morning moods being jarred from complacency to fret.
I am not all broke out with genius nor are my friends but we are intellectually curious and better-read than the average bear and spend some time thinking and talking about public occurrences and, after the significance of Qutb's work sunk in, the first reaction was "Why the hell haven't we heard of this guy before?"
It wasn't just us. Berman makes clear that Qutb's writings were largely unknown outside of Islamic circles despite their centrality to current events and their resonance to prominent Western philosophies like existentialism and to philosophers like Marx and Nietzsche. It is astonishing that this man, whose philosophy was so influential among Islamic intellectuals that his support was sought by Gamel Abdul Nasser, and who was imprisoned, hung and thereby martyred when he spurned Nasser's entreaties, who created the Islamist movement and whose surviving brother, an Islamic scholar himself, TAUGHT OSAMA BIN LADEN, would be so anonymous in this cyber-linked small world.
Berman singles out for special significance Qutb's gargantuan thirty volume set of commentaries, "in the shade of the Qur'an," written while Qutb was in Nasser's prison for ten years. As further testament to the apparent inexcusable parochialism that kept this work from wide Western attention only one volume of the work has until recently been available in English and even that was not available (but soon will, it is predicted) from Amazon or Barnes and Noble's main sites but had to be ordered specially from their string of affiliated smaller specialized stores.
I have thus only read that one volume, I have not read the Koran, i am not a religious scholar and i seldom have a positive word to say about any religion, so this post can be discounted as seen fit. I was raised a Christian and so have some familiarity with the Bible and with Christian theology and I have an educated, curious person's passing familiarity with Jewish and Hindu thought.
There are two different things to think about when reading a commentary, one is the thought of the commentator and the other is the nature of the text being interpreted. Maybe the commentator takes liberties with or misinterprets the text. William Shirer wrote of how the Nazi philosophy was based on crackpot economics, astrology, paranoid sociology and lunatic genetics. Qutb's commentaries on the Koran are rigid and doctrinal but no less so than the text being interpreted.
The first impression of "In the shade of the Qur'an" was how different the tone of the Koran was and how different the image of the almighty was from the other religions. Thomas Friedman wrote last year that "Islam is not an angry religion, it's just that a lot of Muslims are angry." I don't know how he could say that. The Koran is an angry, violent, frightful book. over and over again there are vivid, horrific, Bosch-like images of the vengeance that awaits unbelievers.
All religions divide and I am contemptuous of them for that divisiveness, of Judaism's claim to "the chosen people," of Catholicism's similar hubris that it is the church's way or no way. but they are nothing compared to the Koran. The Koran carves the world up into a dichotomy of believers and unbelievers in the starkest terms.
The metaphor used to describe the godhead in Christianity is the "father" with the connotation of benevolence, protection and tough love. the relationship between Allah and Muslims is one of dictator to subject.
Religions are exasperating with their irrationality and the degree to which they have in the past thwarted scientific and intellectual advances because they clashed with official doctrine. The Koran has that too but it has in addition a command not to ask questions that to me is far beyond anything in Christianity, Hinduism or certainly Judaism, which it's my impression, is the most knowledge-friendly religion.
I know the temptation is to discount everything I say and to feel that the portions of the books below are being maliciously taken out of context because of my antipathy to religion and limited exposure to Islamic or any religious thought, but it required no deep textual analysis by me to come to these observations. The fact is, I don't know ENOUGH to interpret maliciously. the books, Qutb's and the Koran, have the subtlety of a two by four.
The Koran consists of 114 surahs, roughly, chapters. The only volume of "Shade" that is in English translation is the last, volume 30, covering surahs 78-114.
Below are examples of the many Bosch-like descriptions of the hell that awaits unbelievers in the Koran. Clearly Islam is not alone in this. The old testament contains many florid, awful images of the same and in the Bhagavad Gita the setting for the conversation between Arjuna and Krishna is a battlefield but, the Koran seems to me to be singular in the prevalence of this imagery.
"[In hell] they shall abide for ages
tasting neither coolness nor any drink,
save boiling fluid and decaying filth:
a fitting recompense." (surah 78)
"On [judgment] day when the earth shall quake,
followed soon afterwards by the sky,
all hearts will be filled with terror,
and all eyes shall be downcast." (surah 79)
"When the sun is darkened,
when the stars fall and disperse,...
when the camels, ten months pregnant, are left untended,...
when the seas are set alight...
when the records are laid bare...
every soul shall know what it has put forward (surah 81)
Qutb comments are not crackpot interpretations of the Koran. Here he writes on surah 81:
"The rhythm...is one of violent movement which leaves nothing in its place. Everything is thrown, smashed or scattered away. the movement is so violent that it excites and frightens."
"The only thing we know of [hell] is that it 'has fuel of men and stones' [from surah 66]. This is, of course, after they have been thrown in it."
"[On judgment day] there will be horror far greater than any man could have ever experienced."
In addition to their frequency of occurrence, passages like the above are made more frightening oftentimes by being combined with rage-filled invective directed toward disbelievers. For example, immediately following the passage quoted above from surah 78 is this:
"They did not expect to be faced with a reckoning,
and roundly denied our revelations
but we noted and recorded all,
(and we shall say:) 'taste this then;
the only increase you shall have is increase in torment.'"
This is now how the Koran says Muslims will treat non-Muslims on judgment day. Disbelievers are taunted and vengeful pleasure is taken in their torment, the recompense for the insult of "roundly den[ying] our revelations." Throughout the Koran and Qutb's commentary is this theme of past humiliation avenged. Qutb:
"It is inconceivable that...evil and tyranny can get away without retribution, or that good, justice and right can be left to suffer...without there being a chance to put things right."
Surah 78 concludes with Allah stating judgment day will be so awful for unbelievers that they will say, "Would that I were dust."
Surah 80:
"Some other faces on [judgment] day shall be covered with dust,
veiled with darkness.
These shall be the faces of the disbelievers, the hardened in sin."
Surah 83:
"Woe on that day to the disbelievers...
they shall roast in hell."
In a remarkable footnote Qutb explains matter-of-factly Islam's Manichean worldview:
"Islam divides all societies, beliefs and practices into two groups: Islamic and ignorant. whatever is in conflict with Islam can only be derived from ignorance...[Allah] will lead mankind in one direction, namely the Islamic direction...Islam describes such [disbelieving] attitude as one of ignorance, and whatever social setup it produces as ignorant."
On surah 81:
"Anyone who follows a different path shall, therefore, bear responsibility for his action."
Iremember Shirer's amazement at the directness of Mein Kamph and how the entire Nazi programme was laid out very directly for the world to read. Qutb's writing reminded me of that and it seems to me to be consistent with the words of the Koran itself.
Fear, not love, is what the Koran uses to influence behavior which is why the relationship between Allah and man was analogized to that of dictator and subject above. In surah 49 the prophet says:
"The noblest of you in Allah's sight is he who fears him most."
In commenting on this sentence Qutb writes that man's earthly concerns with family, power and wealth are made void by Islam, "which substitutes for them a single value [fear] derived directly from Allah, the only value accepted by him."
Qutb says in his commentary on surah 79,
"The fear of Allah is the solid defence against the violent attacks of desire...fear of standing before his lord, the almighty, should be of great help to [man]."
"The [82nd] surah closes with an air of fear and speechless expectation, which contrasts with the air of violent horrors of the opening. in between the two man is addressed with that remonstrance which overwhelms him with a feeling of shame."
Allah is a dictator who rules through fear. there is not one democracy in the Arab world and I believe only one, turkey, in all of Islam.
By contrast the relationship between man and god in Hindu thought is described in the introduction to the Penguin classics edition of the Gita as "the vision of god as man, as the friend to the struggling soul." Iam sure that there are passages in Hindu thought that would seem to contradict that characterization but the point made earlier is that individual passages do not obscure the overall tone of a work. The author of the quote on the Gita is Juan Mascaro and the full context of that quote is his comparison of the tone of the Gita to a piece of music: "After those ineffably sublime harmonies the music descends to softer melodies: it is the vision of god as man, as the friend of the struggling soul. whatever we do for a human being we do it for him."
"Shade's" place as the intellectual basis of the Islamist movement is apparent in several places. Surah 79 concerns the futility of a Pharoah's power in the face of Islam and Qutb writes, "One can only imagine what will be the fate of the disbelievers who do not have similar power, authority or glory but still resist the call of Islam and try to suppress it."
In commenting on surah 80:
"The only hope that remains is that the new Islamic movement will be able to rescue mankind once again from the clutches of ignorance and bring about a second rebirth of humanity..."
On surah 81: "...the declared aim of Islam, to destroy ignorance and save mankind from sinking..."
Islam's anti-intellectualism is clear in several places. Qutb makes this commentary on the themes of surah 78, the discouragement of inquiry, the umbrage taken at disbelief of Islam's revelations and the fate of the unbelievers: "this horrifying position of the disbelievers is the subject of the questions and doubts they raise concerning that fateful tiding."
Below are the first words of surah 78, which concerns the unbelievers questioning of judgment day and resurrection:
"About what are they asking?
about the fateful tiding
on which they are at variance.
no indeed, they shall certainly know!
again, no indeed they shall certainly know."
Qutb writes in commentary, "The surah opens by shunning the enquirers and the enquiry."... "The surah asks what they are talking about: 'about what are they asking?'"..."The question is not meant to solicit information but to draw attention to the singularity of their questioning..."
The last two, "no indeed," lines Qutb says are an "implicit threat which is much more frightening than a direct answer."
"Allah has revealed to us what we need to know of the secrets of the universe so that we may not waste our energy in futile pursuit of useless knowledge."
This is from surah 79:
"They question you about the hour of doom, when will it come?
But why should you be concerned with its exact timing?
The final word concerning it belongs to your lord."
In surah 82 Allah warns mankind that there are angels, "noble recorders...watching over you...who know all your actions." This is not god the father, this is god as an all-knowing dictator. Qutb writes of this passage that it is not clear how this recording is done, nor does it matter, "Allah knows that we are neither given the ability to understand it nor are we going to benefit by understanding it because it does not affect the purpose of our existence."
Allah's unquestioned omnipotence means, and this circular argument is certainly common to all religions, not just Islam, that the complexity and beauty of the universe are proof of that omnipotence. Throughout "Shade" Qutb is utterly dismissive of the possibility of a random universe:
"[One] would then find completely insupportable the argument that all this had been the result of coincidence."
"The very nature of this universe rules out any possibility of its formation by chance."
"The harmony starts with the fact that our solar system is unique among millions and million of planetary systems."
This of course has been proved wrong in the last few years, which presumably led to more rage like the above directed at the "ignorant" unbelievers.
"The fact of elaborate planning, so apparent everywhere in the universe." This is Public Occurrences.
(First published 3/29/03)
