Exactly. While the *Fatihah * appears first in the Qur’an, it wasn’t actually the first surah to be revealed. That prize goes to *Al-Qalam * or “The Pen”.
That’s right. Not only are the chapters not in order of writing (if y’all don’t mind, let’s use this term instead of revelation as this is a literary discussion of the tome), but some verses in some surahs are written later than the majority of the surah.
Good discussion so far, in my humble opinion. Let’s move to The Cow. The surah is 286 verses long, not counting the basmala. First let’s discuss verse one:
which is transliterated as
For those unfamiliar with the Arabic alphabet, those are the names of three letters. It’s not a sentence.
I fetched the Arabic from this bilingual online text.
Actually, it is not recommended to say Bismillah al Rahman al Rahim. That phrase means, “In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful”. Thus, it is not proper to recite when you are about to take an animal’s life. It is enough to just say Bismillah or Bismillahi Allahu Akbar (In the name of God, God is Great) Cite
“Alif lām mīm”
Several surahs start with letters of the alphabet. Like Monty said, they don’t make a word.* When reading aloud, you just say the names of the letters. There is a special term for these: al-huruf al-muqatta‘at ‘the disjunct letters’.
There is no explanation for what those letters are doing there like that. I have a theory, lots of people have theories, but no one really knows. 
If you read alif-lam-mim as a word, it would spell the word alam meaning ‘pain’, but here in verse 2:1 it isn’t read that way. And the muqatta‘at in other surahs don’t even spell out any coincidental words. A few surahs are named for their disjunct letters: Ta Ha, Ha Mim, Ya Sin. (Taha and Yasin are also used as male given names.)
Aw, c’mon, Joanna, share your theory with us.
I don’t intend this to turn into a hijack as Monty has already had to deal with that in GD, but I really fail to see the distinction here. No matter which version of the words you use, uyou are still sanctifying the slaughter of the animal and making it halal by invoking the name of God. Whether you say Bismillah, or Bismillah al Rahman al Rahim, it’s essentially the same thing.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…
It is usually held that these letters are one of the mysteries of the Qur’an and that the reason for their existence and placement is essentially unknowable. Most Muslims believe that God had a good (probably mystical) reason for those precise letters to be in that precise place, but it’s a secret that shouldn’t be delved into too deeply.
Nonetheless, some of the more literal-minded examiners of the Qur’an have suggested that these letters are the initials of whoever transcribed the surah in the first place, when it made the transition from oral revelation to written scripture. This suggests that the letters are of human, rather than divine origin, and therefore this theory is considered blasphemous.
OK, now for the Cow one.
A naive question to begin -
What is “ghaib”?
The yellow cow part I think I get - it is a reference to the golden calf of the Exodus. Gabriel seems to be saying that the Jews did not keep their covenant with Allah, nor with Muhammed, and did not accept Muhammed as a prophet of Allah. So this part -
is a little ironic.
And I don’t know what this -
means. What exactly is he saying here?
Regards,
Shodan
It means “unseen”. It’s the spiritual world, the realm of faith.
It’s Muhammed arguing with the Jews and Christians. Muhammed is saying to them, to paraphrase, "Are you going to argue with us about Allah (and say we don’t worship him)? He’s our Lord and your Lord, and we’ll worship Him the way we think, and you worship Him the way you think, and we’re sincere in our worship.
"Do you think that Abraham, and Ishmael, and Jacob, and the tribes (of Israel) were Jews or Christians (that they’d approve of your beliefs about Allah and the way you worship Him)? Do you know better (how you should worship Allah) than Allah does? And who’s more unjust than the person who conceals a testimony that he has from Allah (the way that you Jews and Christians do, by taking the testimony of Abraham, Ishmael, Jacob, etc, and replacing it with your own beliefs.) And Allah notices what you’re doing.
Thanks.
Hmmm. ISTM that in the first paragraph, he is arguing that the Jews and Christians should live and let live, and allow the Muslims to worship as they think right. Then in the second paragraph, he is arguing that Abraham et al. think that Islamic worship is correct and Jewish worship is wrong.
So the answer to the question -
is “Jews, obviously”.
The “poor tax” has been mentioned a couple of times already in the text. I would like to see where the Old Testament imposes that on Jews, or where that specific practice is imposed by Christ. Muhammed/Gabriel is taking a lot for granted here. Maybe I am confused because these are not in chronological order.
First of the problematic verses, and right about at the part where Gabriel talks about the hajj.
In context, it doesn’t sound so bad. Gabriel is saying it is OK to fight against unbelievers who fight against you, but don’t overreact and do worse to them than they did to you. Certainly a sharp contrast to “turn the other cheek”, but at least some kind of limits are being set.
But
he says this a couple of times. ISTM that he is saying that it is better to go to war against your persecutors than to allow persecution, even during Ramadan. But it also seems to justify religious war in general, since religious war is not as bad as Muslims being persecuted.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, yes, that is what he’s arguing. Remember, the Muslim believe was that God revealed His word to Abraham, et al., and those prophets worshiped correctly, but then their followers eventually corrupted their teachings into Judaism and Christianity. So what he’s saying was that Abraham, Ishmael, Issac, etc. weren’t Jews…they were really Muslims. If they were to come back to life and see the way Jews worship and the way Muhammed’s followers worship, they’d say, “Muhammed and his followers are worshiping the right way, the way we did. You Jews have it wrong and aren’t doing what we said you should do.”
Well, it justifies war against persecutors, at least.
Sorry, for double posting, but there’s also support for that in 2.83-2.87
These verses are probably the ones most often quoted by those who would like to portray Islam as an aggressive and violent faith, but I agree with you that when seen in context, they simply don’t support that view. As I see it, these verses say that it is only ok to fight your persecutors when you have already been attacked by them, and even when fighting back you must maintain a strict measure of proportionality and adhere to strict limits. I think the “limits” referred to here are the ones laid down in the Sunnah regarding the Islamic Rules of War.
However, where Islam differs from Christianity is in the concept of “turning the Other Cheek”. I think these verses are saying that If you really *have * to fight back against your oppressors, then fight them hard and give them no quarter until they desist. If they desist, then you must stop and not hold it against them because “God is forgiving, Merciful.”
As for “persecution is worse than slaughter”, I’m not really sure I understand this bit, but I don’t take it as a *carte blanche * for religious war.
The main concept to be kept in mind all through reading the Qur’an is that it’s a book meant to be read aloud. In traditional Qur’an cantillation, when they pronounce the letter names, they draw out the syllables very long, using a whole lungful of air. Why do they add such emphasis to totally meaningless syllables? Something must be going on here besides regular textual utterance. It’s as though the reciter is concentrating on the sound vibrations purely for their own sake. Which is strange, considering how the Qur’an is always telling us how intelligible it is to the human understanding.
My theory comes from my background in yoga, where Sanskrit mantras are (often meaningless) syllables intoned for the sake of sound vibration and its effect on consciousness. Arabic is believed to be a sacred language like Sanskrit that has that effect in its phonetic sounds alone. I don’t mean for this to sound all woo-woo, but I tried this. I first noted how my mind felt inside. Then I read some of the letters at the beginnings of some surahs and noticed if I felt any different. I felt more of a calm, focused, meditative state.
So these sounds function like yogic mantras. They help to awaken spiritual moods in the reader through sound vibrations. In Sanskrit, the sound of each letter is believed to carry its own effect on consciousness. Maybe that’s how come the Arabic letters are arranged in certain patterns. I don’t know, but that’s all I got.
We need to back up just a moment. The Qur’an is believed to be the word of Allah, every letter of it, not the word of Gabriel. The angel is just a messenger, just the conduit for the message.
I think the question came up because God is saying “praise God” and it seems illogical for God to indulge in self-praise. I think Muslims understand this in two ways:
- Of course Allah is praising Allah, ¿como no? Since Allah is worthy of all praise, and always tells the truth, self-praise is a logical utterance for Allah.
- Allah is teaching the people what words to pray with, like in the “Our Father.”
- salam ‘alaykum, ya Ubal!
Yes, so it seems - no uprooting fruit trees and the like.
Not carte blanche, precisely, just a presumption that an appropriate reaction to persecution is war.
I should make it clear that I am a Christian, and tend to contrast what the Qur’an says with what the Bible says. There is a verse in the Gospels where Jesus says, “If they persecute you in one city, flee to the next” (Matthew 10:23).
I have heard it said that Islam was an Old Testament religion preached six centuries after Christ. ISTM that there is much more similarity between the Old Testament and the Qur’an than the New Testament. Even the Cow surah talks a little about purity rules (don’t eat anything that dies of itself, or pork), while the NT talks about how Jesus declared all foods clean, and that Gentiles were not obligated to keep kosher and so forth.
I’m guessing that non-Muslims were only obligated to pay the poor tax and were otherwise OK as far as Islam was concerned. Of course, in practice this kind of “separate but equal” idea tended to bring about dhimmi-tude just as it did Jim Crow in the US. But there is nothing to justify bad treatment of Christians and Jews in this surah at least. Just the opposite - there is much condemnation of apostate or hypocritical Muslims, and relatively less condemnation of “people of the Book”. I am assuming that “the Book” refers to the Bible, and not the Qur’an. Sometimes it is not immediately clear, just as it is not always clear that “We” means Allah, not Muhammed and/or Gabriel.
Regards,
Shodan
May we please limit the hijacks? I’m not sure it’s necessary to contrast the Qur’an with what another faith’s scripture says when we’re just dealing, at the moment, with what’s written in the Qur’an.
Of course, there are parts of the Qur’an that repeat what’s in the Bible, and in that case, a comparison is, IMHO, necessary as the two versions differ in either slight or major points.
I forgot to ask something about this surah: what verses, if any, are considere to be later revelations than the rest of the surah?
I don’t know, Monty, al-Baqarah is such a big file, it must have been downloaded on different occasions in sections that were later assembled.
Muhammad said when he got revelation, sometimes it was like Gabriel was a person speaking to him. Other times, he said it was like a loud bell…after the ringing subsided, the words stayed in his memory…but it was a lot harder on him to get it that way. It made his body go rigid while it lasted and he would tremble and break out in a cold sweat. One time he was lounging and resting on someone else’s legs. Then suddenly the revelation started and the other person said their legs felt about to break, Muhammad’s body got so heavy.
So if it stressed him out that much, I doubt he would have held up for all 286 verses in one sitting.
I was contrasting it largely because of this passage -
But my apologies anyway.
Regards,
Shodan