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Introduction

Hadith play a central role in Sunni Islam, and if we were to ask the obvious next question “how important?”: The simplest answer is “50/50”. The way that Sunni Islam is set up today, the Qur’an cannot make do withouth the hadith nor vice versa, they are the two stilts/crutches/legs on which Islam stands or falls (I don’t mean it pejoratively). We also require to make the important observation that “hadith” should not be taken to merely mean that which is found in designated hadith colections. They also include the sirah-maghazi lilterature, the biographical literature of Muhammed, and other genres ilke legal writings. Muslims could say very little about Muhammed’s life without the Hadith. They could also say very little about how they were to lead their own religious lives without them. That’s quire broad brush, but its only meant in the way of introduction.

How hadith were verified and the obvious problems

Hadith came to be associated with their own chain of transmission. The criteria used for verifying hadith were related to the reliability of the transmitter (s), and the orthodox-ness of the text itself.

At the very onset we are going to point out the obvious problems with this model of verification, even though the religious reasons for employing it are understandable. Even if it is true that the hadith had been put to writing at an early stage (and we know that there was severe opposition to this), the exercise of verification is being done only in the third Islamic century, so the verification itself is retroactive.

Personal reliability is established from criteria piety. Dr. Little notes that pious persons are not above lying for reasons of misplaced piety, we know that all sorts of things have been done in the name of piety. Who is to judge as to whether personal piety is superficial or not, and who is to ascertain to what extent a particular religious piety translates into standard norms of morality that look down upon lying, for instance. Neither can be taken a priori. Further if only the orthodox hadith are accepted then one os presuming both the orthodoxy of the Qur’an as well as a certain interpretation of it as orthodox, a priori. What if a reliable person transmitted an unorthodox passage- there’s no answer to this sort of question in such a model.

This means that the following is required in order to fabricate a hadith. Working forward, I think its not hard for a political-military machine to prevail upon its intelligentsiae to propose certain advantageous viewpoints, thereby also prevailing upon and winning over the populace in their regard. This is taught in schools, taken down in lecture notes and so on, much in the same way that left wing agendas like gender ideology and atheism might be propagated as gospel in many American centres of learning. There comes a point when the actual beginnings become clouded, like the involvement of so called “eugenists” like Margaret Sanger, such that they become lionized. This happens all the time, we have people idoising monsters like Lenin and Stalin and persons in countries as far away as India naming their children after them. Obviously if Lenin had transmitted a hadith, these persons would consider him “reliable”, even excessively so.

Working backwards, the same principle could come into effect, but in this case, a historical person needed to have done enough, or to have have had little enough, or the right enough parts of their life preserved so as to give the impression of reliability or piety.

As Motzki therefore states, this “leads inevitably to the question of the origin of isnads, that is, of when it became a custom for transmitters to name their source or informant” (xxiv), and he notes “the division of the Muslim community after the murder of Uthman…”

Issues with Isnads

An isnad, which is a chain of transmission is required when a document is transmitted orally, whether through time or space. This is similar to evidence collected at a crime scene- it is necessary to have documentation of the transferrence from the site to the forensic lab. This means that narrations with longer chains in time circulated orally for longer than those with shorter chains of perhaps on one or two transmitters. If the same tradition then, is received with both the types of isnads, then we can infer that any additional material in the one with the longer isnad is likely to have been added later, because we would know that the shorter version was circulating earlier.

At the point at which the material is written down, there is no longer any need for extending the chain, just like once the sample reaches the lab.

Why is there branching in the chains?

Now these chains, as it turns out, tend to branch out in time. This is again a sign of oral transmission, usually when one person x is reciting to several listeners u/v/w, all of whom are going to say to their own listeners: “I heard from x, that the Prophet said…”, but their students a/b/c, if they are merely lay persons, will merely say “u/v/w heard from x, that the Prophet said…”, without necessarily adding their own names a/b/c to the chain. Anyway, that was to demonstrate how branching takes place in the chains, its not just a case of multiple lay listeners involved in an oral transmission, rather it occurs, or should occur when some among the listeners become independent religious authority figures.

Western scholars have in recent times been employing a rather revolutionary method of analysing hadith which is the “isnad cum matin” (ICM) analysis, pioneered by Harald Motski among others, perhaps Juynboll and Schacht. In short, hadith, in the extant form we have today appear in several versions, all with their own isnad. The analysis involves analysing the complex inter-relation between the isnads, textual and form criticism of the variations in the text and the inter-relation between the two.

What happens with the Gospels?

The Gospels don’t have “isnads” because they are not orally transmitted. hadith only isnads upto the point that they get written down. Ideally an event is recorded by the person that sees that event and that’s it, that’s the book. I think the reason that the hadith do not find their way into a book at the outset is because Muhammed never asks his followers to do anything of the sort. In fact the Qur’an has a verse which explicity advises against the collection of any hadith: Surah 45:6 reads “These are the verses of Allah which We recite to you in truth. Then in what statement after Allah and His verses will they believe?”. Arabic readers will read statement of English as “hadithun” and memorise it as such too. Other verses emphasize the self-sufficiency of the Qur’an like 6:114, 29:51, 39:27 and 25:30. On top of that there is a hadith in which Muhammed advises the Muslims not to collect hadith!:

“Abu Sa’id Khudri reported that Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) said: Do not take down anything from me, and he who took down anything from me except the Qur’an, he should efface that and narrate from me, for there is no harm in it and he who attributed any falsehood to me-and Hammam said: I think he also said:” deliberately” -he should in fact find his abode in the Hell-Fire.” (Muslim 3004, Bk.55h.92, Eng.bk.42,h.7147)

If you compare this to the Gospels, the reliability is based perhaps mainly upon the fact that the reading of the letters and Gospels was public, as well as the rituals and liturgical practices associated with them. Christians had a much smaller corpus of material to deal with, because the Old Testament was already standardised in the Jewish community and more or less invariate and inviolate at this point, and further, individual Churches might not have been using all of the Gospels, and certainly not all of the epistles in the earlier centuries. The addressees were simply reading the Letters of Paul that had been addressed to them, for example, and presumably circulating them among some of the other churches regionally to begin with. The Gospels and especially the Epistles perhaps, are really not amenable to memorization, being quite complex and not in verse, so they were always circulated written, and this is perhaps what protexted the the most. SO although we cannot perhaps prove who the author of Mark was by pointing to a passage in Mark that said “Mark wrote this”, the whole of Mark which we have today, would have to be circulating in toto from the early church in order for it to gain acceptance.

You could say that Luke gives a pretty good “isnad”: “many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, ³ I, too, decided, as one having a grasp of everything from the start, to write a well-ordered account”. He’s citing eye-witneses and obviously he would not have believed someone he knew to be unreliable. He’s only writing a few decades after Jesus so this is only been handed down once at the most if that.

Perhaps the question is how many handles does a particular mode os transmission offer for manipulation. With the Gospels, since there is pretty good evidence that from the earliest times Jesus was being worshipped even in the pre-Pauline churches like Rome, Corinth and Phillipi, material pertaining to Jesus’ divinity would have to have been accepted quite early anyway. But what of the apparent distinction of John from the others? So there is a Church worshipping Christ, and a Gospel is written, in which there is material that has not been heard yet, but only enhances the divine claims of Jesus. This would seem acceptable to the community given that John died late and perhaps a student wrote for him, if not John himself. In a sense there are two Gospels: the Synoptic and the Johanine, one early, one late, nothing affecting doctrine.

The hadith have a different type of problem. The Gospels and Acts (as do most of the books of the OT as a very rough average) have around a thousand verses each, that number halving in the largest two epistles. Each is transmitted in toto, akin to a hadith collection from as early as we know. They were arguably never intended to be otherwise, since they are in narrative style. The hadith are 100s of 1000s of verses transmitted not just individually, but each with several versions, each with varying numbers of elements. So the handles are different.

Christians (like myself) keep getting asked “why do you not condemn Israel’s action in Palestine, you only condemn Muslims acts of violence, that’s hypocritical!”

We’re used to hearing Muslims ask why when a Muslim gets killed then Christianity is not criticised, or in this case, I’m being asked why I’m not raising my voice against the Israeli action in Gaza.

I explain in the post that Gaza is not as simple as Muslims would like it to be. But they expect everyone to have the same opinion as them, else there is something wrong with that person.

I hate political discussion, it always make people heated up and run around in circles. That’s why I avoid it and stick to theology. When we have a Muslim extremist attack, it’s an opportunity to examine Islamic theology, that’s why I raise it up.

Well let me lay out some reasons mainly for my personal silence over the Gaza issue. First of all my heart goes out to all the innocents that suffer, caught up in mindless conflict.

But the bottom line of what I will try to say here is that we are not going to get everyone to agree with everyone else on the issue, because it is far too complicated both from a religious and political point of view.

It’s not fair to expect others to automatically see things from our perspective and then get frustrated when they do not. Humans can barely do this at the best of times anyway.

These are the bare points that must be taken into consideration, in my view:

1. The issue of Palestinians having lived there and having been displaced after the Balfour declaration.

2. The issue of Israelites’ ancestral homeland

3. The issue of Israelites not having a different home and their historical persecution globally, as they have never been a military power since the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome.

4. The issue of the Jewish religious mandate in Jerusalem. A religious person would take this into account. Arguably you can find that mandate even in the Quran in chapter 5.

5. The issue of the poor humanitarian conditions in Gaza and the West Bank.

6. The issue of indoctrinated hatred and religious extremism from childhood in these territories.

7. The issue of the impracticability of an Israeli pull out or of a two-state solution. If Israel pull out we’ll have a military Hamas state which then becomes an existential threat to Israel.

How exactly do we find a straight line through all of these? The worst anyone can do is to villify someone who doesn’t agree with a simplistic view of “Israel must leave” a though its like dealing with a noisy customer at the restaurant.

Where is the Islamic religion prior to Islam

Why does the Muslim faith in its present form, with the focus on Mecca, the rituals involved with the Meccan pilgrimage, and the imitation of the life of Mohammed not arise until the late date of the 6^th century AD?

“Our knowledge of pre-Islamic Arabian paganism, like our knowledge of the life of Muhammad, is largely mediated by literature that postdates the Qur’an by at least a century. The best-known source on pre-Islamic Arabian religion is a work called the Book of Idols (Kitāb al-as.nām), which purports to describe the deities that were venerated by pagan Arabs and the cults and sanctuaries devoted to them. Many of the reports contained in the work are traced back to the early scholar Hishām al-Kalbī (or ibn al-Kalbī, d. 821–2 CE or slightly earlier), although the present form of the text would appear to have been compiled, and supplemented by additional material, at a later time. Although it is tempting to treat the resulting work as a repository of reliable facts, the Book of Idols is in fact recognisably shaped by later Islamic concerns and furthermore draws on established motifs of Jewish and Christian anti-pagan polemics. Even the most basic information about where and by whom a certain deity was allegedly venerated has been found to display considerable proliferation, lack of consistency and variant detail’.” Nicolai Sinai p.65,66 Introduction to the Qur’an

The Relationship of Abraham and Ishmael to Mecca and the Ka’ba

(separate article)

It is important to establish the connection (or lack of one, as we assert) between Abraham and Mecca, because without that, the alternative is that Mecca was historically nothing more than a site of pagan worship, contrary to the Muslim claim.

The Circumambulation of the Kaaba

Once a year, tribes from all around the Arabian peninsula would converge on Mecca to perform the Hajj. Guillaume in his translation of Ibn Ishaq, an early biographer of Muhammad, says the Kaaba itself was addressed using a feminine grammatical form. Circumambulation was often performed naked by men and almost naked by women. It is thought this is linked to ancient fertility rites. (Rice, Edward (May 1978). Eastern Definitions: A Short Encyclopedia of Religions of the Orient. New York: Doubleday. p. 433.)

Ibn Ishaq states: “Outsiders used to circumambulate the temple naked, both men and women. The B. Amir b. Sa’sa’a an d’Akk among those who did thus. When a woman went round naked she would put one hand behind and one hand in the front. (Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah – The Life of Muhammad Translated by A. Guillaume. Oxford University Press.1955  pp. 88–9)

These are clearly the supposed instructions given to Mohammed by God himself in the Qur’an:

“And [mention, O Muhammad], when We showed Abraham the site of the House (i.e., the Ka’bah), [saying], “Do not associate anything with Me and purify My House for those who circumambulate it, and those who stand [in prayer], and those who bow and prostrate.” [Q al-Hajj 22:26]

“And [mention] when We made the House a place of return for the people and [a place of] security. And take, [O believers], from the standing place of Abraham a place of prayer. And We charged Abraham and Ishmael, [saying], ‘Purify My House for those who circumambulate it, and those who are staying [there] for worship, and those who bow and prostrate [in prayer].’” [Q Al-Baqarah 2:125]

 

The Black Stone and Meteorite worship

Meteorite worship in the ancient world

It is clear that there were many stone-cults, or cults of meteor worship in the ancient world. Most of the Arab arguments are that the Kaaba was initially a temple for Allah which had been replaced with other Gods including Hubal, either that, or that other Gods been added on to a pre-existent Allah in the Kaaba and worshipped alongside him there. Many of these arguments are hard to disprove or to prove, but points to consider include:

The ancient civilizations of the occident are no exception, and there are several examples of the worship of meteorites in Greco-Roman tradition.

Mircea Eliade, an expert in religious history, claims that the Palladion of Troy, the Artemis of Ephesos, as well as the Cone of Elagabalus in Emesa, were actually meteorites – stones that had fallen from the sky, objects from heaven, believed to contain supernatural powers.

Richard Norton mentions the sacred stone in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, a rock that was said to have been thrown to Earth by the Supreme Being, Kronos, marking the “omphalos”, the navel of the world.

The Roman historian, Titus Livius, tells the story of the meteorite of Pessinunt, Phrygia, a conical object known as the Needle of Cybele, the goddess of fertility. After the Romans had conquered Phrygia, the meteorite was conveyed in a gigantic procession to Rome, where it was worshiped for another 500 years.

Even in the monotheistic religions of Judaeo-Christian tradition we find traces of an ancient meteorite cult. In the Hebrew language, meteorites were called “betyls”, an equivalent to the Greek “baitylia”, meaning “the residence of God”. In the Bible, we find a story where Jacob, the ancestor of the Israelites, beds his head on such a betyl-stone in the desert. In his sleep, he has an impressive vision of a stairway to heaven leading directly to the throne of God. 

The Hadschar might be a true betyl, a real meteorite, since it is said to have a black crust and a light-gray interior. It’s a pity that scientists haven’t solved the mystery surrounding this sacred stone, but for normal religious reasons it has not been allowed. Wouldn’t it be great to know that there is at least one ancient betyl left, and that it is still venerated after more than perhaps 2,000 years?

This is what the Hadith state

“Ibn ‘Abbaas said: The Messenger of Allah said concerning the Black Stone: “By Allah, Allah will raise it on the Day of Resurrection with two eyes with which to see and a tongue with which to speak, and it will testify for those who touched it with due respect.” (Classed as saheeh by al-Albaani in Saheeh at-Tirmidhi (961) The commentators on al-Musnad said: Its isnaad is qawiy (strong) (2796))

“Ibn ‘Umar used to push his way through the crowd to reach the two corners [of the Ka‘bah, the Yemeni Corner and the Black Stone Corner], in a manner that I never saw from any of the other Companions of the Prophet. I said: O Abu ‘Abd ar-Rahman, why do you push your way through the crowd to reach the two corners in a manner that I never saw from any of the other Companions of the Prophet? He said: The reason I do that is that I heard the Messenger of Allah say: “Touching them is an expiation for sins.” (Classed as Saheeh by al-Albani in Saheeh at-Tirmidhi 959)

It was narrated that Ibn ‘Umar said: I heard the Messenger of Allah say: “Touching them both [the Black Stone and al-Rukn al-Yamani] is an expiation for sins.” (classed as hasan by al-Tirmidhi (959) and as saheeh by al-Haakim (1/664). Al-Dhahabi agreed with him).

It was narrated that Ibn ‘Abbaas said: The Messenger of Allaah said concerning the Stone: “By Allah, Allah will bring it forth on the Day of Resurrection, and it will have two eyes with which it will see and a tongue with which it will speak, and it will testify in favour of those who touched it in sincerity.”  (hasan by al-Tirmidhi (961), and as qawiy (strong) by al-Haafiz ibn Hajar in Fath al-Baari, 3/462, Ibn Maajah, 2944)  

Mohammad’s Black Stone-related habits (repeat):

It was narrated from Jaabir ibn ‘Abd-Allah that when the Messenger of Allah came to Makkah, he came to the Black Stone and touched it, then he walked to the right of it and ran three times and walked four times [around the Ka’bah]. (Muslim, 1218).

 It was narrated that Ibn ‘Abbaas said: The Messenger of Allah said: “The Black Stone came down from Paradise.” (classed as sahih by al-Tirmidhi, 877; al-Nasaa’i, 2935).

It was narrated that Ibn ‘Abbaas said: The Messenger of Allah said: “When the Black Stone came down from Paradise, it was whiter than milk, but the sins of the sons of Adam made it black.” (Narrated by al-Tirmidhi, 877; Ahmad, 2792. Classed as saheeh by Ibn Khuzaymah, 4/219. Al-Haafiz ibn Hajar classed it as qawiy (strong) in Fath al-Baari, 3/462).

“it was narrated from Jaabir ibn ‘Abd-Allaah that when the Messenger of Allaah came to Makkaah, he came to the Black Stone and touched it, then he walked to the right of it and ran three times and walked four times [around the Ka’bah].  (narrated by Muslim, 1218).

 It was narrated that ‘Umar came to the Black Stone and kissed it, then he said: “I know that you are only a stone which can neither bring benefit nor cause harm. Were it not that I had seen the Prophet kiss you, I would not have kissed you.”  (Narrated by al-Bukhaari, 1520; Muslim, 1720)

“It was narrated that Naafi’ said: I saw Ibn ‘Umar touch the Stone with his hand then he kissed his hand. I said, I have never ceased to do this since I saw the Messenger of Allaah do it.” (Narrated by Muslim, 1268)

“It was narrated that Abu Tufayl  said: I saw the Messenger of Allaah performing Tawaaf around the House, touching the corner [where the Stone is] with a crooked staff which he had with him, then kissing the staff.” (Narrated by Muslim, 1275).

 “It was narrated that Ibn ‘Abbaas said: The Messenger of Allaah performed Tawaaf on his camel, and every time he came to the corner [where the Stone is] he would point to it and say “Allaahu akbar.””(Narrated by al-Bukhaari, 4987).

Muhammad thought that the Black Stone spoke to him?

“Jabir b. Samura reported Allah’s Messenger as saying: I recognise the stone in Mecca which used to pay me salutations before my advent as a Prophet and I recognise that even now”

Sahih Muslim 2277 (Book 43, Hadith 2)

The Black Stone issue is really one of those deciding factors when it comes to the issue of the authenticity of Islam. There are many other hadith related to it which are just as problematic, but this is the only one I know of where Muhammed speaks of it pre-Islam.

To state the problem in short:

It is vastly more likely that the Black Stone is related to meteorite worship, which is a well documented phenomenon in pagan cultures (just Google it), rather than anything to do with monotheism.

Some Muslims really believe that this particular meteorite (if that’s what it is) actually is a specimen from Janna that travelled to Earth. Is it possible that materials in Janna are also composed of the same atoms and molecules as here on Earth and there is a route to travel between the two? Is Janna a rocky planet that surrounds the Earth?

Safa and Marwah– running between the hills

The Tafsir-i-Raufi and Tafsir Fatah al-Aziz relate that in former times two pillars were erected on these two hills to commemorate the judgment of God upon two notable sinners, Asaf, a man, and Naila, a woman, who had committed adultery in the holy Kasbah. When the people fell into idolatry they worshipped these as images of God. (Wherry, A Comprehensive Commentary on the Qur’an, Vol. 1, p.347)

“Narrated ‘Asim: I asked Anas bin Malik: “Did you use to dislike to perform Tawaf between Safa and Marwa?” He said, “Yes, as it was of the ceremonies of the days of the Pre-lslamic period of ignorance, till Allah revealed: ‘Verily! (The two mountains) As-Safa and Al-Marwa are among the symbols of Allah. It is therefore no sin for him who performs the pilgrimage to the Ka’ba, or performs ‘Umra, to perform Tawaf between them.’ ” (2.158)” – Sahih Bukhari 2:26:710

It seems that Muhammed is having to reassure his followers that it is not a sin to run between the hills, and the obvious conclusion seems to be that this is because it was a practise of the previous religion:

“Safa and Marwa are among the waymarks of God; so whosoever makes the Pilgrimage to the House, or the Visitation, it is no fault in him to circumambulate them; and whoso volunteers good, God is All-grateful, All-knowing” (Q 2:158)

The Original Deities and the Crescent Moon

There seems to be little doubt about the existence of the cult of Hubal in pre-Islamic Kaaba. The attestation for this is from early Islamic historians:

Al-Azraqi was a 9th-century Islamic commentator and historian, and author of the Kitab Akhbar Makka (Book of reports about Makka). He is from a family who lived in Makka for hundreds of years. He gave information on the design and layout of the pre-Islamic Ka’aba at Makka after its rebuilding following a fire in 603 AD until its possession by Mohammed in 630 AD. The contents included a statue of Hubal, the principal male deity of Makka, and a number of other pagan items, which were destroyed in 630 as idolatrous.

Hugo Winckler in the early twentieth century speculated that Hubal was a lunar deity, a view that was repeated by other scholars. This was derived from Ditlef Nielsen’s theory that South Arabian mythology was based on a trinity of Moon-father, Sun-mother and the evening star (the planet Venus) envisaged as their son. More recent scholars have rejected this view, partly because it is speculation but also because they believe a Nabataean origin would have made the context of South Arabian beliefs irrelevant.

Hugo Winckler, Arabisch, Semitisch, Orientalisch: Kulturgeschichtlich-Mythologische Untersuchung, 1901, W. Peiser: Berlin, p. 83.

T. Fahd, Le Panthéon De L’Arabie Centrale A La Veille De L’Hégire, 1968, op. cit., pp. 102-103; T. Fahd, “Une Pratique Cléromantique A La Kaʿba Preislamique”, Semitica, 1958, op. cit., pp. 75-76.

Origins of Hubal

There may be some foundation of truth in the story that Amr travelled in Syria and had brought back from there the cults of the goddesses Al-ʻUzzāʼ and Manāt, and had combined it with that of Hubal, the idol of the Khuza’a. According to Al-Azraqi, the image was brought to Mecca “from the land of Hit in Mesopotamia” (Hīt in modern Iraq). Philip K. Hitti, who relates the name Hubal to an Aramaic word for spirit, suggests that the worship of Hubal was imported to Mecca from the north of Arabia, possibly from Moab or Mesopotamia. Hubal may have been the combination of Hu, meaning “spirit” or “god”, and the Moab god Baal meaning “master” or “lord”. Outside South Arabia, Hubal’s name appears just once, in a Nabataean inscription; there Hubal is mentioned along with the gods Dushara (ذو الشراة) and Manawatu — the latter, as Manat, was also popular in Mecca. On the basis of such slender evidence, it has been suggested that Hubal “may actually have been a Nabataean”. There are also inscriptions in which the word Hubal appears to be part of personal names, translatable as “Son of Hubal” or “made by Hubal”.Al-lat stood in al-Ta’if, and was more recent than Manah. She was a cubic rock beside which a certain Jew used to prepare his barley porridge (sawiq). Her custody was in the hands of the banu-‘Attab ibn-Malik of the Thayif, who had built an edifice over her. […]She is the idol which God mentioned when He said, “Have you seen Al-lat and al-‘Uzza (Surah 53:19)?

1. Isaac Rabinowitz, Aramaic Inscriptions of the Fifth Century, JNES, XV, 1956, pp.1-9;

• Another Aramaic Record of the North Arabian goddess Han’Llat, JNES, XVIII, 1959, pp.154-55;

• Edward Linski, The Goddess Atirat in Ancient Arabia, in Babylon and in Ugarit: Her Relation to the Moon-god and the Sun-goddess, Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica, 3:101-9;

• H.J.Drivers, Iconography and Character of the Arab Goddess Allat, found in Études Preliminaries Aux Religions Orientales Dans L’Empire Roman, ed. Maarten J. Verseren, Leiden, Brill, 1978, pp.331-51).

• G. Caton Thompson The Tombs and Moon Temple of Hureidha

http://www.bible.ca/islam/islam-moon-god-hubal.htm is an informative website on the subject, and also an interest article in the Encyclopedia Britannica:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/31651/Arabian-religion

Miscellaneous Superstitions

Narrated Abu Talha: I heard Allah’s Messenger saying; “Angels (of Mercy) do not enter a house wherein there is a dog or a picture of a living creature (a human being or an animal). (Bukhari 3225)

Introduction: the Relevance?

Muslims, at least in the modern era, hold to the belief in the perfection of the prophets, and the usual reason that is given is that if they are not perfect, then how can we trust their revelations. This gives them the mandate for what Christians would see as the near- idolization of Muhammad. Christians however do not hold dogmatically to any such criterion with regards to their prophets, since they would believe that the prophets are on a path to holiness just like any other huan being. The guarantor of the authenticity revelation is God, not the instrument and he is sufficient guarantor. God guarantees the perfection of the revelation, not of the prophet. There is at least one Biblical prophet who seemingly falls outside of grace.

However Christians could not accept that a prophet could be susceptible to the demonic in the matter of revelation. This is once again due to what we have just said: When it comes to the revelation itself, God is the guarantor of its authenticity. This means that either the prophet cannot give false Scripture, or his saying are not recorded at all. The People of God are not deluded as to what is and what is not from God in the matter of their Scriptures, at any time, for the purpose of faith and morals.

This brings us to the problem, which we can now enumerate:

1. If we have a prophet who cannot tell true Scripture from false, at least partly due to the fact that he is susceptible to delusions, then what is the premise for the authenticy of the Scripture? The reason that saying “God guarantees it” does not work, because the “satanic verses” incident privides an example where this “guarantee” did not work, or in other words, there was not guarantee. Muhammad stated the words of the angel as Scripture, and here lies the problem. The entire incident is then airbrushed from the Qur’an, but we will show how it can be reconstructed from the Qur’an itself, using the external sources. This is because remnants of the incident remain, which aids our critical examination.
2. The other examples of Muhammed being bewitched serve only to further strenghten the positive case we are making, that it is entirely likely that this is not an isolated incident and we cannot affirm with any confidence that there are not several other verses that are not from a source of darkness rather than one of light, in the Quran itself, if not all of it, since Muhammed himself believed that the primary source too was demonic until someone not present told him that it was probably an angel.
3. Muhammed also believed that he had a demon which had converted to Islam which advised him. Again, the concern here is that in the belief that the demon is “converted”, Muhammad is completely open to channeling instruction from the dark side. Muhammad seemingly makes the naive assumption that religious “conversion” of the manner that we undergo in the physical world is a phenomenon in the spiritual realm too, in other words, he treats both realms as epistemically equivalent.
4. Finally, when Muhammad did receive his “revelations”, rather than showing signs of spiritual ecstacy which one would expect in the presence of the Holy as we see in the Bible, we see signs of extreme bodily disturbance and possible epileptic activity instead.

The “Satanic Verses” Incident

A look at the only known accepted occurence of a Satanic sequence in a religion

The phrase “satanic verses” in relation to the Qur’an has come to relate to a couple of verses that are thought (or alleged) to relate to an incident in the life of Mohammed. The full description of that event is found in other writings, as is the case for most aspects of his life. There are essentially two Qur’anic verses in view. The first:

“…God abrogates (fayansakhu -root: ن س خ; one other occ. as abrogating in 2:106) the interjections of Satan and confirms his own revelations” (Q 22:52)

This seems to imply that Satan is able to trick Muhammed into accepting some of his own sayings as divine, and at some later point these interjection which are accepted as “Qur’an” and then “abrogated” by Allah. The reason we would read the verse in this manner is that “abrogation” is classically used in the Qur’an to denote actual scripture that has been changed.

The second verse is thought to be a remnant of the actual verse that was originally a Satanic interjection, later edited or redacted:

“Have ye thought upon Al-Lat and Al-‘Uzza And another, the third (Yusuf Ali adds “(goddess)”), Manat (Muhammad Sarwar adds “(whom you considered as God’s daughters)”, Mohsin Khan adds “(another idol of the pagan Arabs)”)?” (Q 53:19,20 AH writes “the names of Arabian goddeses)

In it’s current form, the Qur’an seemingly criticizes the pagans for assigning daughters to Allah instead of sons, and asserts that they are made-up false beliefs, in line with Islamic thought:

“What, have you males, and He females? That were indeed an unjust division. They are naught but names yourselves have named, and your fathers; God has sent down no authority touching them. They follow only surmise, and what the souls desire; and yet guidance has come to them from their Lord.” (Q 19:21-23)

However as we shall see the traditions hold that the original text did not read in this manner, rather it read:

“and he (the Prophet) said [ fa-qāla]: “Indeed, they are from among the high gharānīq! And, indeed, their intercession is to be hoped for! [inna-hunna la-min al-gharānīq al-‘ulā wa-inna shafā‘atahum (sic) la-turtajā]””

This has therefore come to be called the “Gharaniq” verse, now absent from the Qur’an and present only in these writings. Indeed this sequence is unique in being the only passage in any religious tradition to have been accepted by it, for a time, to have been ascribed to an authentic verbatim Satanic corruption. There is nothing like it in the whole world, this combination of surah 53;19,20 and the alleged second half of the quote, now allegedly separated from the original.

How Strong is the Evidence for it?

We begin by looking at the evidence for the incident in question. In short, there are no less than 50 “traditions” that relate the inident, and they are all from early Islamic sources, as we read in the section by Shahab Ahmad, who presents his analysis of the fifty riwayahs of this incident, which is parallel records by different narrators of it. In his detailed and scholarly analysis, Dr. Ahmad could not emphasize more strongly just how widespread the acceptance of the verity of this incident was among the early Muslim community, All the early biographies and commentaries form the first two Islamic centuries included it:

“The foregoing analysis of the fifty riwāyahs that narrate the Satanic verses incident was carried out (…) It has emerged in the most emphatic terms that the Satanic verses incident constituted an absolutely standard element in the memory of the early Muslim community on the life of its founder.

We have repeatedly dated reports of the Satanic verses incident as being in circulation among individuals involved in the historical memory projects of sīrah-maghāzī (early biographical accounts of Mohammed) and tafsīr (commentaries) in the late first and early second centuries of Islam. Simply, the Satanic verses incident was ubiquitous in the earliest period of systematic collection and organization of historical memory materials on the life of Muḥammad in the genres of sīrah-maghāzī and tafsīr, where it was transmitted, like all other narratives, bi-al-ma‘nā and by incomplete isnāds.

Reports of the Satanic verses incident were recorded by virtually every compiler of a major biography of Muḥammad in the first two centuries of Islam: ‘Urwah b. al-Zubayr (23–94), Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (51–124), Mūsā b. ‘Uqbah (85–141), Ibn Isḥāq (85–151), Abū Ma‘shar (d. 170), Yūnus b. Bukayr (d. 199), and al-Wāqidī (130–207)…”

Dr. Ahmad then goes on to detail the names of the books of those biographers in which the incident is found:

“Each of the foregoing scholars incorporated the incident into the framework of a larger narrative of the life of the Prophet—that is, into a Kitāb al-maghāzī or a Kitāb al-sīrah. Riwāyah 1 was recorded in Salamah b. al-Faḍl’s Rayy recension of the Sīrah of Ibn Isḥāq; Riwāyah 2 in the Kitāb al-maghāzī of Abū Ma‘shar; Riwāyah 3 in the Kitāb al-mubtada’ of al-Wāqidī (from whom it was taken by Muḥammad Ibn Sa‘d, 168–230, into his biography of the Prophet); Riwāyah 7 in the Kitāb al-maghāzī of Yūnus b. Bukayr; Riwāyah 8 in Abū al-Aswad’s Egyptian recension of the Kitāb al-maghāzī of ‘Urwah; Riwāyah 9 in the Kitāb al-maghāzī of Mūsā b. ‘Uqbah; and Riwāyah 15, most probably, in the Kitāb al-maghāzī of al-Zuhrī, from whom it was cited by al-Wāqidī in his Kitāb al-mubtada’. Within this narrative, the incident is consistently related to the return of some of the refugees of Abyssinia.”

He then lists the commentators as well:

“Similarly, the first- and second-century authors of tafsīr works whom we know to have recorded the incident include almost every prominent early mufassir: Abū al-‘Āliyah (d. 93), Sa‘īd b. Jubayr (23–95), Mujāhid b. Jabr (d. 102), al-Ḍaḥḥāk (d. 105), ‘Ikrimah (d. 107), Muḥammad b. Ka‘b al-Quraẓī (40–108), al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (21–110), Qatādah (60–117), Abū Ṣāliḥ (d. 110/120), ‘Aṭiyyah al-‘Awfī (d. 111/127), al-Suddī (d. 128), al-Kalbī (d. 146), Muqātil b. Sulaymān (80–150), Ibn Jurayj (d. 150), Ma‘mar b. Rāshid (d. 154), and Yaḥyā b. Sallām al-Baṣrī (124–200). Six of these—‘Ikrimah, Sa‘īd b. Jubayr, Abū Ṣālih, ‘Aṭiyyah al-‘Awfī, al-Kalbī, and Ibn Jurayj—transmitted the incident on the authority of ‘Abd Allāh Ibn ‘Abbās (d. 68), with remarkably consistent hermeneutical content.”

He lists the verses from the Qur’an that this incident is linked to and then goes on to also point out that every major Islamic intellectual centre by the second Islamic century, and lists them too:

“In other words, the Satanic verses incident constituted a standard element in first- and second-century Qur’ānic exegesis, in which discourse it was invariably associated with the Revelation of Qur’ān 53:19 al-Najm and 22:52 al-Ḥajj and, sometimes, with the exegesis of Qur’ān 17:73 al-Isrā’, Qur’ān 39:45 al-Zumar, and Qur’ān 109 al-Kāfirūn. Not only did the incident form a standard element in the discourses of late first- / early second-century sīrah-maghāzī and tafsīr, but also the isnāds show that, by the end of the second century, accounts of the Satanic verses were being transmitted in almost every important intellectual center in the second-century Islamic world from the Hijaz to Syria to Iraq to Transoxania to North Africa: Madīna, Mecca, Baṣrah, Kūfah, Baghdād, Miṣṣīṣah, Rayy, Balkh, amarqand, Marw, Ṣan‘ā, Fustāt, and Qayrawān.”

Finally he describes how the incident does not find it’s way into the later canonical hadith literature:

“Despite this universal transmission of the narratives of the Satanic verses incident in the genres of sīrah-maghāzī and tafsīr, it is striking that the incident did not constitute a standard element in the third major historical memory discourse on the life of Muḥammad—that of Ḥadīṭh. As we have seen, the incident is not included in any of the Ḥadīth collections that came to be invested with canonical authority. The only Ḥadīth collections in which the incident is recorded are noncanonical: the Musnad of al-Bazzār, the Mu‘jam alkabīr of al-Ṭabarānī, and the Mukhtārah of al-Ḍiyā’ al-Maqdisī…”

Content of the verses

He then specifies the exactly language of the text, which specifies in the vast majority that these Satanic verses were actually enunciated from Muhammad’s own mouth:

“All the first- and early second-century reports are agreed that the Prophet uttered the Satanic verses (even the maverick Riwāyāhs 49 and 50 from al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī agree that the Prophet uttered the gharānīq phrase). The two riwāyahs that are ambiguous as to the question are clearly later adjustments of early reports made so as to deflect what became the doctrinally problematic content of the narrative (Riwāyahs 9 and 10 in relation to Riwāyah 8, and Riwāyah 26 in relation to Riwāyah 25). The majority of reports explicitly mention that the Prophet uttered the verses. This is done either by straightforward use of the verbs takallama or qāla; or through the unambiguous  phrases alqā al-shayṭān ‘alā lisāni-hi (“Satan cast upon his tongue”), alqā al-shayṭān ‘alay-hi (“Satan cast upon him”), ajrā alshayṭān ‘alā lisāni-hi (“Satan caused to run upon his tongue”), ujriya ‘alā lisāni-hi (“it was caused to run upon his tongue”), alqā al-shayṭān fī fī-hi (“Satan cast into his mouth”); or through a correction scene in which Jibrīl points out the Prophet’s error, sometimes after the Prophet recites the verses back to Jibrīl. In three reports, Riwāyahs 12, 21, and 25,617 the fact of the Prophet uttering the verses is not stated explicitly, but is clearly implied by the context. On the question of why the Prophet uttered the verses, the accounts differ.”

The Motive for the “Concession” to the Meccan Pagans

All of the reports contained in sīrah-maghāzī works, either explicitly or by contextualization (i.e., mention of the refugees in Abyssinia), present the incident as taking place in a climate of persecution by Quraysh (Riwāyahs 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15). In three of these reports—Riwāyahs 1, 2, and 3 (all from Muḥammad b. Ka‘bal-Quraẓī)—the Prophet is portrayed as desiring a reconciliation with Quraysh; and in two reports—Riwāyah 1 (from al-Quraẓī) and Riwāyah 12 (al-Suyūṭī’s citation of Mūsā b. ‘Uqbah ← al-Zuhrī)— the Prophet is presented as desiring a respite from, or an end to, the persecution. In Riwāyah 1, the Prophet desires that Divine Revelation be the instrument by which this be effected. In Riwāyahs 2 and 3, the Prophet desires that God not send down a Revelation that will further estrange Quraysh.

In these riwāyahs, the fact of the Prophet’s taking words suggested to him by Satan as being Divine Revelation is presented as arising directly from the Prophet’s misplaced desire, which, in turn, is clearly influenced by the harsh circumstances. In this interpretation, the verb tamannā in Qur’ān 22:52 is glossed by the narrative as “desire,” and the verse reads: “We have not sent, before you, a Messenger or a Prophet but that when he desired, Satan cast something into his desire.” Another background motif to the incident is the one given in Riwāyahs 8 (from ‘Urwah . al-Zubayr); 12 and 13 (from Mūsā b. ‘Uqbah);618 16, 17, 18, and 19 (Abū al-‘Āliyah); and 21 (al-Suddī)—namely, Quraysh’s offer of a rec-onciliation with, or even active support for, the Prophet on the condition that he speak well of their gods. In all of these reports except Riwāyah 21, this offer takes place in a stated context of persecution; in other words, if the Prophet agrees to praise the deities of Quraysh, the persecution will stop. In all these riwāyahs, the Prophet’s uttering the verses is presented as a response to the offer from Quraysh. Whereas Riwāyahs 12 and 13 gloss tamannā as “desire,” Riwāyahs 16 to 19 and 21 do not provide any gloss for the verb.

Muhammad Caught Unawares

In none of the above reports is Muḥammad presented as deliberately doing something that he knows to be against the terms of his Prophetic mission; rather, Muḥammad is portrayed as being under pressure, confused, and unaware of the import of his act. This point is driven home by the correction process. In those reports where Jibrīl corrects the Prophet (Riwāyahs 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 22, 23, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42, and 47), it is evident that the Prophet is not aware of having done anything wrong until he is corrected. In Riwāyahs 7 and 8, however, the Prophet is presented as already being distressed before the correction takes place. This motif conveys the idea that the Prophet has sensed that something has gone wrong, although he is still not sure what exactly it is. When he is corrected, he acknowledges his error and laments it in touchingly self-critical terms, most strikingly in Riwāyah 8: “I have obeyed Satan, and spoken his words, and he has become a partner in God’s matter with me [wa-sharika-nīfī amr Allāh].” In the shorter Riwāyahs 16 to 20 from Abū al-‘Āliyah there is no correction scene, and the impression is that the Prophet  realizes on his own that he has erred. This suggests a lesser degree of confusion on the part of the Prophet about the nature of his  Prophetic  mission than is indicated in those reports where the Prophet is corrected by Jibrīl. (…)

These riwāyahs, and the fact that the incident itself did not find its way into the canonical Ḥadīth collections, provide a telling illustration of the discomfort of Ḥadīth scholars in the period circa 150 onwards with the memory of the Satanic verses incident as contained in the sīrah-maghāzī and tafsīr discourses of the late first and early second centuries.

(entire foregoing passage is a direct excerpt from Al Shabab Shahab Ahmed (2018), Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in early Islam, Harvard University Press, 158-165)

Al- Shabab goes on to relate how in a more advanced Islamic society form the third Islamic century onward when the Hadith did begin to be compiled, the priority shifted to portraying the prophet in a light that would be amenable as a basis for Islamic law modelled upon him:

“The Ḥadīth scholars were concerned with prescribing the specific content of Islam and, as such, the project of Ḥadīth fused with the authoritative and prescriptive project of the elaboration of Islamic law. To both these ultimately integrated fields, Ḥadīth and law, the memory of the life and personality of the Prophet existed primarily to provide Prophetic statements and acts on the basis of which to lay down in detail the specific legal, praxial, and creedal rules by which the members of the community should live. These normative Prophetic statements and acts covered almost every sector of quotidian life, from prayer ritual to personal sanitation, to social comportment, to dietary law, to commercial practices. However—and this is the crucial point—this project did not merely require a particular method suited to its authoritative-prescriptive purpose; it also required a particular type of Prophet suited to its authoritative and prescriptive purpose. Given the centrality of the authoritative persona of the Prophet to the logic of the Ḥadīth movement, it is obvious that the idea of an infallible or impeccable Prophet whose words and deeds might reliably be taken to establish a model for detailed pious mimesis must have possessed a particular appeal for the ahl al-ḥadīth. As Annemarie Schimmel has noted, “The absolute obedience owed to the Prophet is meaningful only if Muhammad was free from any faults and could thus constitute an immaculate model even for the most insignificant details of life.”5 Consequently, the image of Muḥammad contained in the Satanic verses incident, that of a Prophet who fell victim to Satan and erred in the transmission of Divine Revelation, was entirely dissonant with and, indeed, constituted a normative challenge to the Ḥadīth movement.” (267-268)

The pagans are not happy with a certain surah that mocks them

Then those who had gone (to Abyssinia) the first time returned before (the departure of) Ja‘far b. Abī Ṭālib and his companions. This was when God sent down the sūrah in which He states, “By the star when it sets.” The Mushrikūn had said: “If only this man would speak favourably of our gods [yadhkuru ālihata-nā bi-khayr], we would secure him [aqrarnā-hu] and his companions. He does not speak of any of the Jews and Christians who oppose his religion with the abuse and invective [al-shatm wa-al-sharr] with which he speaks of our gods.”

Satan makes changes– The Satanic Verses

When God sent down the sūrah in which He mentions, “By the star,”he (the Prophet) recited [qara’a], “Have you seen al-Lāt, al-‘Uzzā and Manāt, the third, the other?” At this point, Satan cast into it (Sūrat al- Najm) [alqā al-shayṭānu fī-hā ‘inda dhālika] a mention of the evil ones [dhikr al-ṭawāghīt], and he (the Prophet) said [ fa-qāla]: “Indeed, they are from among the high gharānīq! And, indeed, their intercession is to be hoped for! [inna-hunna la-min al-gharānīq al-‘ulā wa-inna shafā‘atahum (sic) la-turtajā]”; that was the rhyming phrases [saj‘] of Satan and was an instance of his sedition [min fitnati-hi].

The Meccan pagans Rejoice and Join Muslims in Prostration

Those two phrases [hātāni al-kalimatāni] became lodged in the heart of every Mushrik; their tongues were debased by them, they rejoiced at them [dhallat bi-hā alsinatu-hum wa-istabsharū bi-hā] and said:“Muḥammad has returned to his original religion and the religion of his tribe [qad raja‘a Muḥammad ilā dīni-hi al-awwal wa-dīn qawmi-hi].” And when the Messenger of God reached the end of the sūrah in which there is mention of “the Star” he made the sajdah and all the Muslims and Mushrikūn present made the sajdah along with him, except for al-Walīd b. al-Mughīrah who was an old man and who raised some dirt on his palm and made the sajdah on it. Both the parties were astonished at their joint sajdah [ fa-‘aja ba alfarīqān kilā-humā min jamā‘ati-him fī al-sujūd] following the sajdah of the Messenger of God.

The Muslims were astonished at the Mushrikūn having made the sajdah when they were in a state of Unbelief [‘alā ghayr īmān wa-lā yaqīn], the Muslims not having heard that which Satan cast onto the tongues (or into the ears ‘alā ādhān ) of the Mushrikūn [lam yakun al-muslimūn sami‘ū alladhī alqā al-shayṭān ‘alā alsinat al-mushrikīn]. As for the Mushrikūn, their minds were set at ease in regard to the Prophet and his Companions when they heard what Satan cast into the umniyyah of the Prophet [lammā sami‘ū alladhī alqā al-shayṭān fī umniyyat al-nabī]. Satan told them that the Messenger of God had recited  them (the Satanic verses) when in sajdah, so they made the sajdah in veneration of their gods. That phrase circulated among the people, and Satan spread it until it reached Abyssinia.

Muhammad and Jibril finally realize there’s a problem

When ‘Uthmān b. Maẓ‘ūn and ‘Abd Allāh b. Mas‘ūd and those Meccans who were with them heard that the people had accepted Islam and prayed alongside the Messenger of God, and when news reached them of the sajdah of al-Walīd b. al-Mughīrah on the dirt on his palm, they came quickly. The Messenger of God was greatly distressed by this [wa-kabura dhālika ‘alā rasūl Allāh]. In the evening, Jibrīl came to him. He (the Prophet) complained to him [ fa-shakā ilay-hi], so he (Jibrīl) ordered him (to recite the sūrah) and he (the Prophet) recited to him [ fa-qara’a ‘alay-hi]. When he (the Prophet) reached them (the Satanic verses) [ falammā balagha-hā], OR: when he (Jibrīl) heard [sami‘a] (the Satanic verses), Jibrī l absolved himself of responsibility for them [tabarra’a min-hā] and said: “God protect me from these! My Lord did not send them down, nor your Lord command me with them! [ma‘ādh Allāh min hātayni mā anzala-humā rabb-ī wa-lā amara-nī bi-himā rabbu-ka].” When the Messenger of God saw this, he was greatly disturbed [shaqqa ‘alay-hi] and said: “I have obeyed Satan, and spoken his words, and he has become a partner in God’s matter with me [aṭa‘tu al-shayṭāna wa-takallamtu bi-kalāmi-hi wa-sharika-nī fī amr Allāh].”

Allah resolves the error by “sending down” Q 22:52

So God removed that which Satan cast [ fa-nasakha Allāhu ‘azza wajalla ā alqā al-shayṭān] and sent down upon him: “We have not sent before you a Messenger or a Prophet but that when he tamannā, Satan cast something into his umniyyah; then God removes that which Satan casts and establishes His Signs clearly—and God is All-Knowing, All- Wise—to make that which Satan cast a trial for those in whose hearts is sickness, and for those whose hearts are hardened. Indeed, the Wrongdoers are in far dissension.” And when God absolved him [barra’a-hu Allāh] of Satan’s rhyming phrases and of his sedition, the Mushrikūn reverted to their errant state and their hostility. The news reached those Muslims who had been in Abyssinia and who were now approaching Mecca. They were now unable to return because of the severity of the suffering they would encounter, and were hungry and afraid. They were afraid that if they entered Mecca they would be attacked. So no man entered Mecca unless he had protection.”

(Al- Shabab 108-111)

The other scholarly work on the topic is an article by John Burton (1970), “Those Are the High-Flying Cranes”, Journal of Semitic Studies, 15 (2): 246–264

The Commentators: At- Tabari

When the Messenger of God saw how his tribe turned their backs on him and was grieved to see them shunning the message he had brought to them from God, he longed in his soul that something would come to him from God which would reconcile him with his tribe. With his love for his tribe and his eagerness for their welfare it would have delighted him if some of the difficulties which they made for him could have been smoothed out, and he debated within himself and fervently desired such an outcome. Then God revealed:

By the Star when it sets, your comrade does not err, nor is he deceived; nor does he speak out of (his own) desire . . .

and when he came to the words:

Have you thought upon al-Lat and al-‘Uzza and Manat, the third, the other?

Satan cast on his tongue, because of his inner debates and what he desired to bring to his people, the words:

These are the high-flying cranes; verily their intercession is accepted with approval. (Al-Tabari, p. 108)

The polytheists were delighted that Muhammad had at last approved of their gods. To return the kindness, they “prostrated themselves because of the reference to their gods which they had heard, so that there was no one in the mosque, believer or unbeliever, who did not prostrate himself” (p. 109).

Muhammad’s friendly relations with the polytheists were short-lived, however, for he soon learned that his verses praising pagan idols came not from God, but from Satan. Saddened to recognize his treachery against Allah, Muhammad lamented: “I have fabricated things against God and have imputed to Him words which He has not spoken” (p. 111). Yet “Gabriel” comforted Muhammad, informing him that all prophets fall for Satan’s tricks from time to time. This staggering and unbelievable claim even found its way into the Qur’an:

“And We did not send before you any apostle or prophet, but when he desired, the Shaitan made a suggestion respecting his desire; but Allah annuls that which the Shaitan casts, then does Allah establish His communications, and Allah is Knowing, Wise.” (Surah 22:52)

The History of al-Tabari, Volume VI: Muhammad at Mecca, W. Montgomery Watt and M. V. McDonald, trs. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

Other instances where Muhammed Succumbs to Demonic Influence

Muhammad is deluded by witchcraft into thinking that he did things that he did not, like sex:

“Narrated `Aisha: that Allah’s Messenger was affected by magic, so much that he used to think that he had done something which in fact, he did not do, and he invoked his Lord (for a remedy). Then (one day) he said, “O `Aisha!) Do you know that Allah has advised me as to the problem I consulted Him about?” `Aisha said, “O Allah’s Messenger ! What’s that?” He said, “Two men came to me and one of them sat at my head and the other at my feet, and one of them asked his companion, ‘What is wrong with this man?’ The latter replied, ‘He is under the effect of magic.’ The former asked, ‘Who has worked magic on him?’ The latter replied, ‘Labid bin Al-A’sam.’ The former asked, ‘With what did he work the magic?’ The latter replied, ‘With a comb and the hair, which are stuck to the comb, and the skin of pollen of a date-palm tree.’ The former asked, ‘Where is that?’ The latter replied, ‘It is in Dharwan.’ Dharwan was a well in the dwelling place of the (tribe of) Bani Zuraiq. Allah’s Messenger went to that well and returned to `Aisha, saying, ‘By Allah, the water (of the well) was as red as the infusion of Hinna, (1) and the date-palm trees look like the heads of devils.’ `Aisha added, Allah’s Messenger came to me and informed me about the well. I asked the Prophet, ‘O Allah’s Messenger, why didn’t you take out the skin of pollen?’ He said, ‘As for me, Allah has cured me and I hated to draw the attention of the people to such evil (which they might learn and harm others with).’ ” Narrated Hisham’s father: `Aisha said, “Allah’s Messenger was bewitched, so he invoked Allah repeatedly requesting Him to cure him from that magic).” Hisham then narrated the above narration. (See Hadith No. 658, vol 7)” (Sahih Bukhari 6391)

This is a similar hadith which adds the details that the delusion is of a sexual nature:

“Magic was worked on Allah’s Messenger so that he used to think that he had sexual relations with his wives while he actually had not (Sufyan said: That is the hardest kind of magic as it has such an effect). Then one day he said, “O `Aisha do you know that Allah has instructed me concerning the matter I asked Him about? Two men came to me and one of them sat near my head and the other sat near my feet. The one near my head asked the other. What is wrong with this man?’ The latter replied the is under the effect of magic The first one asked, Who has worked magic on him?’ The other replied Labid bin Al-A’sam, a man from Bani Zuraiq who was an ally of the Jews and was a hypocrite.’ The first one asked, What material did he use)?’ The other replied, ‘A comb and the hair stuck to it.’ The first one asked, ‘Where (is that)?’ The other replied. ‘In a skin of pollen of a male date palm tree kept under a stone in the well of Dharwan’ ” So the Prophet went to that well and took out those things and said “That was the well which was shown to me (in a dream) Its water looked like the infusion of Henna leaves and its date-palm trees looked like the heads of devils.” The Prophet added, “Then that thing was taken out’ I said (to the Prophet “Why do you not treat yourself with Nashra?” He said, “Allah has cured me; I dislike to let evil spread among my people.” (Bukhari 5765 Book 76, Hadith 79 Vol. 7, Book 71, Hadith 660)

“A Jewish man cast a spell on the Prophet , and he fell ill as a result of it, for several days. Then Jibra’il, peace be upon him, came to him and said: ‘A Jewish man has put a spell on you. In such and such a well there is a knot that he tied for you.’ The Messenger of Allah sent them to take it out and bring it to him. Then the Messenger of Allah got up as if he had been released from some bonds. No mention of that was made to that Jew, and he did not see that in his face at all.” (Sunan An-Nasa’i 4080)

Comparing Biblical Angelic Greetings with Muhammad’s

It is useful to make a short study of Biblical angelic encounters in order to appreciate what Jews and Christians would immediately recognize from their perspective as aberrations in the Muhammad’s own claimed encounter.

The Elegance of Biblical Angelic Greetings

Angels are respectful in the Bible, it is made clear who they are, usually (probably in all cases) they introduce themselves. Making an introduction is a basic and universal sign of acting in good faith, no matter which planet you come from, as we can see in even in a secular production like Star Wars, for example. If the person is afraid, they put them at ease, they always leave a good impression upon the person, and have the effect of strengthening that person emotionally and spiritually. By definition they are emissaries of the Most High God, so they do a proper and responsible job of representing Him. They are the best ambassadors in the Universe, let us say. The second issue here is the manner in which God deals with his chosen prophets. God primarily speaks with his “navi” directly, not through an angel. The anonymous cave angel model is completely alien to the Biblical notions of revelation.

Are there any outliers to this biblical model? When an angel comes in isolation, as to Mary and Zechariah, they are very clear who they are, and also this is in the inter-Testamental period, when prophecy has ceased for many centuries. Mary, Joseph, Zechariah are at this point being given private revelation and guidance, not something that they are told to go out and proclaim, nor even write down as the prophets of old were. In the case of the major prophets and patriarchs, they have all seen or heard from God directly at some stage, so when the angel is sent, it is as a continuing revelation, based upon the surety of that initial interaction. Muslims sometimes ask about other angelic encounters in the Bible like those to Lot, Hagar, Balaam. Lot is not regarded as a prophet at all in the Biblical sense, nor Hagar. Balaam is a non-Israelite, he is not counted among the prophets of Israel, he is opposed by God through an intentionally negative encounter with the angel and he dies a sinner, he does not have an exalted death. Apart from the well- known divine encounters and visions given to the other prophets which I will not recount here for brevity, we can also see the Lord speak directly to David in 1 Sam 23:2, 1 Sam 30:8, 2 Sam 5:19.

DANIEL
“He said to me, “Daniel, you are a man who is highly precious. Consider carefully the words that I am about to say to you. Stand up, for I have now been sent to you.” And when he had said this to me, I stood up trembling. “Do not be afraid, Daniel,” he said, “for from the first day that you purposed to understand and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them” (Daniel 10:11,12)

ZECHARIAH

“When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him. 13 But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard…” (Luke1:12,13)

THE SPEPHERDS

^“ In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people” (Lk. 2:8-10)

MARY

“The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God…” (Luke 1:28,29)

CORNELIUS, ROMAN CENTURION

“he had a vision in which he clearly saw an angel of God coming in and saying to him, “Cornelius.” He stared at him in terror and said, “What is it, Lord?” He answered, “Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God” (Acts10:3)

GOD SPEAKING TO DIRECTLY EVEN IN THE QURAN

Allah of the Qur’an speaks DIRECTLY to Adam (2:33), to Musa (7:143), to Isa (5:116) in passages that seemingly give a nod to the Biblical accounts.

Features of Muhammed’s Claimed Angelic Encounter

No Witnesses

No one saw the angel in the cave (at the initial encounter, nor at subsequent encounters which where supposedly at least annual at Ramadan); No one saw an angel the time Muhammed revealed verses “impromptu”; Lastly, never does Muhammed state “I heard the voice of Allah revealing such-and-such verse”. Given that this is the primary source for all of Islam, I would flag this up as a significant concern.

No Introduction from the Angel

The angel does not introduce himself to Mohammed in the Quran at all! He merely says one word “Recite! (meaning “Qur’an!”). This is the back-narrative of that first encounter in the Cave of Hira where it all allegedly began, and how the angel came to be associated with the angel Gabriel of the Bible, when Mohammed’s uncle Waraq bin Nawfal suggests it to him. It is a singularly terrifying encounter, which leaves Mohammed despondent, with both physical and emotional impaction.

Was Muhammed Tortured?- Left Terrified and Intractably Suicidal

When Muhammad first sees the creature in the cave (or claims to), the negativity does not just stop with the encounter, it just continues to have negative effects upon him of the worst kind. After being squeezed and really roughed up and shouted at, he runs in terror and of all things asks his wife to protect him. Then he becomes suicidal and three times attempts to throw himself off a cliff. Now without presuming the impossibility of angels producing such an effect upon those that God favours, a Jew or Christian would immediately see this as an aberration from the Biblical tradition. The forces of light do not cause spiritual disturbance, and we have already given examples of the Biblical encounters.

Muhammed asking his wife to cover him is is seen in multiple sound narrations. Covering oneself under a blanket which Muhammad employs is thought to be a pagan method of divination at the time, as well as a means of protection, which of course is absurd, there is no reason a spirit being is stopped by a piece of cloth.

“Narrated ‘Aisha: The commencement of the Divine Inspiration to Allah’s Apostle was in the form of good righteous (true) dreams in his sleep. He never had a dream but that it came true like bright day light. He used to go in seclusion (the cave of) Hira where he used to worship (Allah Alone) continuously for many (days) nights. He used to take with him the journey food for that (stay) and then come back to (his wife) Khadija to take his food like-wise again for another period to stay, till suddenly the Truth descended upon him while he was in the cave of Hira.

The angel came to him in it and asked him to read. The Prophet replied, “I do not know how to read.” (The Prophet added), “The angel caught me (forcefully) and pressed me so hard that I could not bear it anymore. He then released me and again asked me to read, and I replied, “I do not know how to read,” whereupon he caught me again and pressed me a second time till I could not bear it anymore. He then released me and asked me again to read, but again I replied, “I do not know how to read (or, what shall I read?).” Thereupon he caught me for the third time and pressed me and then released me and said, “Read: In the Name of your Lord, Who has created (all that exists). Has created man from a clot. Read and Your Lord is Most Generous…up to….. ..that which he knew not.” (96.15)

Then Allah’s Apostle returned with the Inspiration, his neck muscles twitching with terror till he entered upon Khadija and said, “Cover me! Cover me!” They covered him till his fear was over and then he said, “O Khadija, what is wrong with me?” Then he told her everything that had happened and said, ‘I fear that something may happen to me.” Khadija said, ‘Never! But have the glad tidings, for by Allah, Allah will never disgrace you as you keep good relations with your Kith and kin, speak the truth, help the poor and the destitute, serve your guest generously and assist the deserving, calamity-afflicted ones.”

Khadija then accompanied him to (her cousin) Waraqa bin Naufal bin Asad bin ‘Abdul ‘Uzza bin Qusai. Waraqa was the son of her paternal uncle, i.e., her father’s brother, who during the Pre-Islamic Period became a Christian and used to write the Arabic writing and used to write of the Gospels in Arabic as much as Allah wished him to write. He was an old man and had lost his eyesight. Khadija said to him, “O my cousin! Listen to the story of your nephew.” Waraqa asked, “O my nephew! What have you seen?” The Prophet described whatever he had seen. Waraqa said, “This is the same Namus (i.e., Gabriel, the Angel who keeps the secrets) whom Allah had sent to Moses. I wish I were young and could live up to the time when your people would turn you out.” Allah’s Apostle asked, “Will they turn me out?” Waraqa replied in the affirmative and said: “Never did a man come with something similar to what you have brought but was treated with hostility. If I should remain alive till the day when you will be turned out then I would support you strongly.” 

But after a few days Waraqa died and the Divine Inspiration was also paused for a while and the Prophet became so sad as we have heard that he intended several times to throw himself from the tops of high mountains and every time he went up the top of a mountain in order to throw himself down, Gabriel would appear before him and say, “O Muhammad! You are indeed Allah’s Messenger in truth” whereupon his heart would become quiet and he would calm down and would return home. And whenever the period of the coming of the inspiration used to become long, he would do as before, but when he used to reach the top of a mountain, Gabriel would appear before him and say to him what he had said before. (Ibn `Abbas said regarding the meaning of: ‘He it is that Cleaves the daybreak (from the darkness)’ (6.96) that Al-Asbah. means the light of the sun during the day and the light of the moon at night). Sahih al-Bukhari 6982

This is also narrated as “wrap me/ in garments” (Bukhari 4, 3238, 4957, 4954, 4922, 4925, 4926, Muslim 161a, 161d, Tirmidhi 3325)

What’s more in many of these, Muhammed claims to have seen Gabriel sitting on a chair/Throne (kursi), the same word usd for Allah’s seating (Bukhari 4, 4925, 4926, 3238, 4954 and Tirmidhi 3325, and Muslim 161a,d)

…This terrifying encounter is also documented in the earliest biographical record of Muhammad. Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah, p. 106:

“…So I read it, and he (Gabriel) departed from me. And I awoke from my sleep, and it was as though these words were written on my heart. Now none of God’s creatures was more horrible to me than a poet or a man possessed: I could not even look at them. I thought, “Woe is me poet or possessed – Never shall Quraysh say this of me! I will go to the top of the mountain and throw myself down that I may kill myself and gain rest.”

Az-Zuhri (died 124 AH/741-2 CE), also referred to as Ibn Shihab  credited with pioneering the development of sīra maghazi and hadith literature relates:  

“There was a gap for a time in the revelation to the Messenger of God and he was very sorrowful.  He started going early to the tops of the mountains to throw himself down from them.  But whenever he reached the summit of a mountain, Gabriel would appear to him and say, “Thou are the Prophet of God.” 

According to these narratives, following the terrifying and violent encounter with the spirit-being, Muhammad became suicidal. He believed he was possessed by a demon. When Jesus drove out the demons out of a man, they entered into swine and the swine jumped off a cliff (Matthew 8:32).

Muhammad’s Condition looked disturbing

There are only a few reports of anyone witnessing Muhammed in the process of receiving “revelations”. They sound like epileptic fits:

Snorting like a camel, Cold sweat

Would that I see revelation coming to the Messenger of Allah. He (Hadrat ‘Umar) said: Would it please you to see the Messenger of Allah receiving the revelations ‘Umar lifted a corner of the cloth and I looked at him and he was emitting a sound of snorting. He (the narrator) said: I thought it was the sound of a camel.” (Sahih Muslim 1180a)

Narrated Aisha: Verily I saw the Prophet being inspired divinely on a very cold day and noticed the sweat dropping from his forehead (as the Inspiration was over)”. (Sahih al-Bukhari 2)

This is just Muhammed describing what it’s like to his wife Aisha:

It was narrated that Aishah said: “Al-Harith bin Hisham asked the Messenger of Allah: ‘How does the Revelation come to you?‘ He said: ‘Like the ringing of a bell, and when it departs I remember what he (the Angel) said, and this is the hardest on me. And sometimes he (the Angel) comes to me in the form of a man and gives it to me.'” (Sunan an-Nasa’i 933)

All this for “Revelations” of stories that already common knowledge!

“Jibril” in the Quran- is it even an Angel?

The Quran does not even state that Jibreel (Gabriel) was an angel.  Jibreel is mentioned only three times by name. That Jibril is the “ruh qudsi (holy spirit)” is inferred from the fact that the both him and the latter are said to have brought down revelations. Surah al-Baqara 2:97 “Say: Whoever is the enemy of Jibreel– for surely he revealed it to your heart by Allah’s command, verifying that which is before it and guidance and good news for the believers.”; 16:102 says that it is the “holy spirit” (ruh qudsi) which brought down the Qur’an.

Here we see that Jibril is mentioned apart from the other angels: ‘Whoever is an enemy of Allah, His angels and His messengers, and Gabriel and Michael; Allah is indeed the enemy to the disbelievers.’ (al-Baqara 2:98) And If you both turn to Allah, then indeed your hearts are already inclined; and if you back up each other against him, then surely Allah it is who is his Guardian, and Jibreel and -the believers that do good, and the angels after that are the aiders.”(Q 66:4)

However the actual encounter of the alleged angel with Mohammed is not documented in the Qur’an, but it is only found in the Hadith. And in those hadith, the being does not give a name. There are various other Hadith like the one where Jibril is trying to kill Pharoah under the sea before Allah’s mercy can reach him and another where Muhammed claims that a stranger he meets is him.

Muhammad thought Demons can give good advice

“Abdullah b. Mas’ud reported that Allah’s Messenger said: There is none amongst you with whom is not an attache from amongst the jinn (devil). They (the Companions) said: Allah’s Messenger, with you too? Thereupon he said: Yes, but Allah helps me against him and so I am safe from his hand and he does not command me but for good.” (Muslim 2814a, also Miskat al-Masabih 67 graded sahih by Zubair al- Aliza’i)

Conclusion

The conclusions are pretty much enumerated in the introduction, I might repeat the points here, because they are extremely important to understand, once I have completed editing:

Islam is the greatest TM intellectual tradition in history, and to it will be interesting to inquire as to whether and how it dealt with the problems we have been describing. (fn-the only other extant TM traditions are Judaism and some modern versions of Hinduism. Judaic theology today has developed into mystical kabbalistic thought which we cannot really engage in a logical argument, and Hindu theology is notoriously difficult to pin down, so we shall avoid discussion of both those here).

“Attribute” is the First Question of Theology

Let us first attempt to see for ourselves how theological language might evolve from an initial simple God- concept. The first thing we might ask is how do we describe God. That is after all, the central aim of all theology. We describe him by his attributes, of course, after all that is literally what it means to describe something. So if we were not to presume any theological position in our inquiry, we would attribute things like life, love, goodness, beauty, truth, wisdom, mercy, kindness, strength and power, and would seem to cover most of the essentials for a reasonably satisfactory picture of a powerful being. What next, are we done? Well, either there is nothing else to say, or if we do want to write a second sentence in our theology book, it needs to address the first sentence- that dose it mean for God to have attributes. We started with one thing- God, and our first sentence introduced another thing- “attribute”. We’ve nothing else to discuss except those two concepts, and we’ve nothing to discuss about those two concepts apart from their relation to each other. So what could the possible relation be between God and his attributes? We’ve only a few possibilities, either they are abstract and unreal? If real then are they within him or without him as though in orbit, or the balls of a juggler. If they they are within God then are they the same thing with God, or different from him? Finally are they the same with one another or different from each other.

Summarizing Islam’s Tawhid Models

Most modern Muslims I have tried questioning regarding this seem say that the attributes of God are unreal or abstract, which then obviates all the other questions: “They’re just what Allah is like, you are not your attributes are you?” Well, are you? The first centuries of Islam were actually filled with intense theological effort, debate and controversy regarding this very issue of the attributes of God and their relation to him. The greatest Muslim thinkers fell into various camps regarding this issue, resulting in the main schools of Islamic thought (madhab). That modern position I just describe, that of the denial of the relevance of the question, would fall into one of the lines of thought that we will shortly describe. My contention here, as we examine these differing views is that every one of the schools, with the exception of the Mu’tazalis that make positive assertions about this relation are left with the problem of multiple eternal entities. The Mu’tazalis, one the other hand, held that the attributes are one and the same with God. This position has since been largely abandoned, quite likely because, as we shall see, its resemblance to Christianity is too close for comfort. This is a list of all the versions of how Islam understands monotheism:

1. The Mu’tazalis characteristically held that the attributes of God are identical with his essence. There are some variations of this which we shall see later in the discussion.
2. Others grouped God’s attribtues into those of the Essence, and those that were not (or attributes of action). God’s Essence is God, so what is not his Essence is not God. Since it is also eternal, this posed the problem of arriving at a minimum of two eternal entities, likely more.
3. There are different versions of which attributes belong to which group. Major controversy over the categorization of word, speech, will, and also “eternity”. Some thinkers take the latter group to be created (including speech) and some accord two wills to God, one in each category.
4. Others made a distinction between the essence of God and the attributes themselves.
5. Others consider the reality of the body parts that the Qur’an assigns to God like hand, feet, face, fingers, eyes literally and as part of God’s essence.
6. Finally some (predominantly Shi’a but also others) adopted a Neo-Platonic model and posit that God does not have any attributes at all. His attributes are in a different entity altogether (called the “First Intellect).

Examining the Primary Muslim Sources

We now look at the primary Muslim sources themselves and we shall see how the controversies in early Islamic history paralleled the controversies in early Christianity. For example, those schools that hold that the attributes are “neither God nor apart from him” are parallel to Christian Modalism in making the distinctions lack reality, those that hold that the attributes are separate from the essence or that the attributes of action are separate from those of essence, and even more literally in Shi’i neo- Platonism can be seen to parallel Christian Emanationism or Subordinationism and so on.

The earliest scholars of Islam acknowledge the difficulty in explaining the reality of God’s attributes without introducing a notion of multiplicity in the deity, and multiple alternatives are proposed to avoid this problem, either that they are that they are the same as God’s essence, or the same as each other, or that they are only applicable to God in a manner of negation or even in a metaphorical manner, and some say that these questions should not even be asked.

Later thinkers from other schools begin to make a distinction between the attributes that relate to the divine essence and those that relate merely to his relation to creatures. The question is raised as to the reality of these attributes which only arise in interaction and not in essence: nothing is contingent in God, so can we really say that he has contingent attributes at all, or is this mere words with not referent in reality, rather only meant to denote perceived effects of God in creation. This is important, because in this some of the prime virtues of God risk being relegated to non-being, which would mean that he hasn’t got them.

Significantly, even the Will of God is called into question because after all God wills interaction with creatures and creation itself, so some place this aspect of willing in the second category, the attributes of action rather than of essence. Others held that there are two types of will in God and still others held that willing is not one of God’s attributes at all. The controversy over the speech of God is part of this and led to a bitter controversy as to whether the Qur’an itself, which is in some sense the word of Allah is created or eternal. “Knowledge” is taken to be an attribute of the essence of God by Ghazali who comes much later. Al-Kindi takes a similar view to the Mu’tazalites, he is taken to be the first genuine systematic philosopher in Islam.

Mu’tazalites: Similarity with Trinitarian Christianity

First we look at how the Mu’tazalis identify the attributes of God with his essence itself:

“According to the traditional account, the founder of the Mu’tazilite school was Wasil b. ‘Ata’ (d.748), originally a pupil of al-Hasan al-Bari, who was a central figure in the history of Islamic jurisprudence, asceticism, and theological dogma (45)…Jahm b.Safwan (d.745), a contemporary of Wasil, and founder of the rival Jahmite school, appears to have held the view that God’s attributes are identical with His essence, another cornerstone of Mu’tazilite doctrine and the key to their claim to be the only true Muwah-hidun, (confessors of divine unity, a name also applied to Jahm and his followers)…. Jahm and Wasil, the founders of the two earliest schools of systematic theology, dealt with roughly the same cluster of theological problems that split the Muslim community asunder as early as the beginning of the eighth century.” (Fakhry, 47)

The more abstract theological assumptions of the Mu’tazilah revolved round their second major thesis, the unqualified unity of God (tauhid), which was aimed primarily at the Manichaeans on the one hand and the anthropomorphists and other Attributists (Sifatiyah) on the other (…) Thus the references in Koran (75:22) to the possibility of seeing God, or His face (55:27), as well as His “sitting upon the throne” (7:54,20:5), are either taken at their face value, without much ado, or the logical inference is made that God is possessed of corporeal and other characteristics which He shares with man. (Fakhry, 57)

The less extreme literalists and Traditionists were content to assert that God was endowed with a series of attributes, distinct from His essence, which were essential reduced in time to the seven attributes of power, knowledge, life, will, hearing, sight, and speech, stated to subsist eternally in God. To these, other active attributes such as creation, justice, munificence, etc., were added.

The Mu’tazilah, despite the allegation of their adversaries that they were out to strip God of all positive characteristics, appear to have simply sought to safeguard the unity and simplicity of God. The thesis of a series of positive attributes distinct from His essence and inhering eternally in Him tended to jeopardize this in so far as it involved, according to them, a plurality of eternal entities other than He.” (Fakhry, 58 quoting Al-Shahrastani, al-Milal, p. 30.)

Fakhry quotes Ash’ari writing about the Mu’tazalis. This is because there are few extant writings of the Mu’tazalis themselves and the evidence for their thought comes from these secondary sources, often their contemporary opponents like Ash’ari and Shahrastani:

“Even the chief antagonists of the Mu’tazilah, al-Ash’ari; brings out vividly, in his account of their view of the unity of God, their preoccupation with safeguarding His otherness and His transcendence above everything else:

“The Mu’tazilites are unanimous that God is unlike anything else and that He hears and sees and is neither body, ghost, corpse, form, flesh, blood, substance, nor accident and that He is devoid of color, taste, smell, tactual traits, heat, cold, moistness, dryness, height, width, or depth…,and that He is indivisible…and is not circumscribed by place or subject to time…and that none of the attributes of the creature which involve contingency can be applied to Him…,and that He cannot be perceived by the senses or assimilated to mankind at all…,and that He has always been the First, prior to all contingent things…and has always been knowing, powerful, and living and will always be so. Sight cannot perceive Him…and the imagination cannot encompass Him…the only eternal Being, beside whom there is no other eternal being, and no God or associate to share His realm with Him.” (Fakhry, 58,59, quoting Al-Ash’ari, Maqalat, pp. 156-57)

Fakhry describes how the Mu’tazalis found it useful to incorporate classical Greek thought into their theological pursuit:

In rationalizing their view of the unity of God, the Mu’tazilite doctors were apparently influenced by the Aristotelian concept of God as the pure actuality of thought, in whom essence and attribute, thought and the object of thought, are identified, as well as by the Plotinian view that God, who transcends thought and being altogether, can only be known negatively. Curiously enough, however, this view is attributed in the Arabic sources to a more ancient Greek authority than either Aristotle or Plotinus, namely, Empedocles, generally credited by Muslim authors with the doctrine of the unity of essence and attribute in God.” (59, Fakhry quoting Sa’id, Tabaqat al-Umam, p. 6; al-Shahrastani, al-Milal, p. 317)

Peter Adamson describes how the thought of al-Kindi (800-870CE), an early scholar and theologian of Islam aligned closely with the Mu’tazalites:

“Generalizations about Mu‘tazilite doctrines must be made with caution, since even restricting our attention to those who worked before or during al-Kindi’s time, there is a wide array of various views held by thinkers associated with the Mu‘tazilite tradition. Still, the rough outlines of a shared theory of language emerge from later reports of their doctrines. This theory was put forward primarily in the service of a negative theology that originated with the putative founder of Mu‘tazilism, Wasil ibn Ata. According to al-Shahrastani, Wasil argued that to posit an eternal divine attribute would be to assert the existence of a second God. (Adamson, 50: ref- Al-Shahrastani, Kitab al-Milal wa al-nihal, edited by ‘A. al-Wakil in two volumes (Cairo, 1968), p. 46.12-13. See further Nader, Le système philosophique des Mu‘tazila, pp. 49-50.)

“ Ab‚ al-Hudhayl affirms both that God’s attributes are the same as Him (al-sifat… hiya al-bari’) (ref: al-Ash’ari Maqalat, 177.14-15 [VE XXI.62] and, that His attributes are not distinct from one another (Al-Ash‘ari 177.15-16 [VE XXI.62]: “If someone asked (Abu Hudhayl): ‘is [God’s] knowledge [God’s] power?’ He said, ‘it is false to say that it is [His] power, and false to say that it is other than [His] power.’” See also 484.15-485.6 [VE XXI.64].) Ab‚ al-Hudhayl and other Mu‘tazilites also suggest that, unlike created things, God may have attributes by virtue of His “essence”(dhat) (ref: For this position in al-Nazzam see al-Ash‘ari, Maqalat 486.10-14 [VE XXII.173]. For Abbad ibn Sulayman, see 165.14ff [VE XXV.27], and also Daiber, Das theologisch-philosophische System des Mu‘ammar, pp. 203ff. Similarly Dirar says that God is “knowing” and so on “through Himself” (li-nafsihi): al-Ash‘ari Maqalat, 281.14.) (Adamson, 53)

“Usually al-Kindi defines essential properties as follows: a thing is essentially F if it would be destroyed by becoming not-F” (…) Mu‘ammar ibn ‘Abbad al-Sulami is said to have held that God has a word “not in truth (fi al-haqiyya) but only metaphorically (‘ala al-majaz),” and the same contrast was used by the early theologian Jahm ibn Safwan. In part al-Kindi’s solution to the problem of divine attributes agrees with the Mu‘tazila, by associating the attributes with God’s “self” or “essence” (dhat). (Adamson 55, see fn.34,35)

“This treatment of divine attributes shows al-Kindi responding to the Mu‘tazila and even agreeing  with them in spirit. Yet it also shows him giving arguments based on the tradition of falsafa rather than kalam, and expanding on that tradition with a theory of his own devising.” (p57)

Note that in addition to these sources and Ash’ari’s Maqalat, we can see Mut’azali teaching also quoted by al-Ghazali in the section to follow a bit later on.

Non-Reality of Attributes

However they also felt the need to explain just what the attributes meant, and they offered four possible explanations:

In rejecting the thesis of a series of eternal attributes inherent in God, the Mu’tazilah hoped to vindicate His absolute unity. The Koranic view of a personal Deity of such overwhelming concreteness, however, made it virtually impossible to give up altogether the positive attributes of God, especially that of power. Recognizing this difficulty, many Mu’tazilite scholars sought earnestly to rationalize the divine attributes in a manner which, while it safeguarded God’s unity, did not at the same time jeopardize the fullness of His Godhead. Four different attempts to wrestle with this problem are distinguished by al-Ash’ari in his account of Mu’tazilite doctrine:

• Some held, he states, that in saying that God has knowledge, power, or life, etc., we simply assert that He is knowing, powerful, living, etc. and that consequently He is not ignorant, impotent, or dead, etc., since this would not become Him. This is reported as the view of al-Nazzam (ref: Al-Baghdadi, Usul al-Din, p. 91, and Maqalat, p. 486.) and the majority of the Mu’tazilah of both the Schools of Baghdad and Basra.
• Others are said to have interpreted the statements that God has knowledge or power as referring not to the two attributes of knowledge or power as applied to God, but to the objects thereof.
• Some, who included the famous Abu’l-Hudhail and his followers, conceded the fact that God has power, knowledge, life, etc., but only in the sense that His knowledge, power, etc. are identical with Him (ref: Usul, p.91; al-Shahrastani, al-Milal, p. 34; and al-Khayyat, Kitab al-Intisar, p. 59)
• Finally, some contested the very legitimacy of stating the question in these terms and held that it is equally wrong to say that God has power, knowledge, life, etc., or that He does not. This appears to have been the view of another leading doctor, ‘Abbad b. Sulayman, and his followers.

(Fakhry, 59, quoting Al-Ash’ari, Maqalat, pp. 177 f.; also pp. 483 ff.; and Wensinck, Muslim Creed, pp. 75 f.)

At the same time, other theologians were attempting to offer further clarifications and perspectives on the problem:

Other theologians, prompted by the desire to overcome the difficulty of predicating positive attributes of God, resorted to other dialectical devices. Thus Ibn al-Ayadi, a contemporary of al-Ash’ari, argued that attributes are to be predicated of God only figuratively or metaphorically. (ref: al-Ash’ari Maqalat p.184) Another notorious but subtle dialectician, Abu’I-Husain al-Salihr (ninth century), maintained that there is nothing more to the statement that God is knowing, powerful, living, etc. than the recognition that He is distinct from other beings so qualified or the confirmation of the substance of the koranic verse that “He is unlike anything else” (Koran 42:11), a thesis which reduced the attributes of God to empty verbal utterances (Fakhry, 60)

Later Mu‘tazilites agreed, often providing additional arguments for the point, that God’s oneness prevents our positing real and distinct divine attributes. So far, this seems not unlike what we find in al-Kindi. But what do the Mu‘tazila mean when they say that there are no such divine attributes? Later, hostile authors like al- Shahrastani are quick to accuse the Mu‘tazila of ta‘til, the rejection of the attributes authorized by the Qur’an (p51 Adamson)

Priority, Distinction, Createdness of Attributes- late Mu’tazali, Ash’ari, Hanafi

Some theologians begin to teach that the attributes as not something in God but rather mere “effects” (of God) in creatures. This begins to corrode the reality of the attributes altogether, since it implies they inhere in contingent things only, and are thereby contingent themselves. This is the reason we will often hear Muslims ask about the attribute of creation, the first of such attributes, when challenged about the possibility of love in TM “well God was eternally creator, was he not, although he did not create? So why could he also not have the ability to love although there was no one to love?” Well not according to these thinkers, creation for them is a contingent attribute, which is how a Christian would reply anyway, though not with regards to love:

Later doctors, such as al-Juba’i (d. 915), the famous teacher of al-Ash’ari, while asserting the attributes of God, simply reduced them to corollaries or, if our authorities are correct, effects of the essence of God, and denied that some of those attributes (such as hearing and seeing) could be predicated of God unless they are in an active relationship with their object or subject matter (i.e., the thing heard or seen) (ref: al-Ash’arT, Maqalat 175 f. 492, 522; also al-Baghdadr, Usul al-Din, p.92)

This original view would have rendered the attributes of God purely contingent accidents of His essence, dependent as they were held to be on their contingent object…(Fakhry, 60)

“A leading Mu’tazilite doctor, Abu Hashim (d.933), son of al-Juba’i, refined his father’s view by declaring the attributes of God to be states or conditions (singular: hal) of His essence, which are neither existent nor non-existent, or even knowable except through the entity to which they belong, but are nevertheless that which sets one entity apart from another. However, unlike other exponents of this view, Abu Hashim appears to have assigned a certain priority to some attributes, such as life, over others, such as knowledge, power or will, which were stated to be concomitant conditions or effects of life (ref. al- Shahrastani either Nihayat or Usul al-Din (I couldn’t follow which ibid. it referred to, p132)

It is not clear what Abu Hashim and others such as the Ash’arite al-Baqillani might have gained from this peculiar thesis, except possibly the recognition of the priority of essence over attribute in God, in the first instance, and the priority of certain essential attributes over others, in the second instance …

…Even when applied to God, the concept of eternity (qidam) was viewed with suspicion by some Mu’tazilite scholars, who were anxious to remove the barest hint of plurality in God. Thus Abu’l-Hudhail retained the concept and subsumed it under the same category as the other attributes, which he identified, as we have seen, with the essence of God. Mu’ammar made its application to God conditional upon the inception of contingent entities (huduth), whereas others challenged the validity of this approach to the problem and even denied that God could in any way be described as eternal (Ref: Al-Ash’ari, Maqalat, p. 18o.)

However, with regard to the other attributes of God, the Mu’tazilites made a distinction between essential and active attributes (…) Active attributes, on the other hand, such as love, will, munificence, speech (p.61) mercy, justice, and creation, could be affirmed or denied of God (Maqalat 187,508f.) This amounted to the admission that the latter class of attributes, which are in some relation to their object, are not essential to our conception of God, nor do they belong eternally to Him, as the former class does, but are merely accidental or contingent.

The two attributes over which the fiercest controversy raged in theological and philosophical circles were will and speech. In view of the logical correlation between the divine will and its contingent or created object, a number of Mu’tazilites, particularly the Basrah section of the school, with Abu’l-Hudhail at its head, declared the divine will to be a contingent accident (hadith), and as such to inhere in no substratum, since it could not without logical inconsistency be said to inhere in God Himself (ref: Al-Baghdadi, Usuul al-Din, pp. 90 f., 1o3; al-Ash’ari, Maqalat, pp. 189 f., 510). The head of the Baghdad section, Bishr b. al-Mu’tamir, and his followers, however, distinguished between an essential and an active will in God (Al-Ash’ari, Maqiilat, p. 190.), thereby emphasizing the bipolarity of this elusive concept in its double relation to God on the one hand and to the creature on the other. Others, such as al-Nazzam and al-Ka’bi, went one step further and denied altogether that this attribute could apply to God (Fakhry 61,62).

From the Ash’ari school, represented by thinkers like Juwayni and Ghazali are less literalist and so leaves out the body parts of the former school. Further the attributes are “not the essence”, rather “additional to it”. Ghazali mentions the Mu’tazalite teaching regarding the attributes including knowledge being no different from the essence with the exception of the will and the speech which are actually created attributes. Although the attributes are not the essence, yet they are said to subsist in the essence “whether in a receptacle or not”. Ghazali states all God’s attributes are eternal while expressing there being some “disagreement” in this respect with regards to the attributes related to action like creating, providing, misguiding:

“The seven attributes (earlier he has enumerated these as knowing, powerful, living, willing, hearing, seeing and speaking- my addition), which we established are not the essence. Rather, they are additional to the essence. According to us, the maker of the world (Exalted is he) is a knower with knowledge, living with life, powerful with power, and so on with respect to all the attributes. The Muʿtazilites and the philosophers deny this. They say: “The Eternal is one essence, and it is not possible to posit several eternal essences. The proof for these attributes establishes only that He is a knower, powerful, and living, and not [that there are attributes of] knowledge, life, and power.

Let us focus on the attribute of knowledge, so that we do not have to repeat the discussion for all the attributes. They maintain that being a knower is a state of the essence and is not an attribute. The Muʿtazilites, however, make an exception for two attributes. They say that God is a willer with will that is additional to the essence, and He is a sayer with speech that is additional to the essence, that He creates will not in any receptacle, and that He creates speech in a corporeal body, and hence He is considered a sayer through this speech. The philosophers, on the other hand, extend their inference to the case of the will. As for speech, they say He is a sayer in the sense that He creates in the soul of the prophet a hearing of arranged sounds, either while he is asleep or while he is awake. These sounds have no existence outside the soul, but only in the hearing of the prophet.” (Ghazali,184,185)
“we claim that all of these attributes subsist in God’s essence, that none of them could subsist in something other than his essence, whether the attribute is in a receptacle or not…all the divine attributes are eternal” (Ghazali, 194)
“the names that are derived for God from these attributes are true of him eternally- pre-eternally and post-eternally. He is eternally living, knowing, powerful, hearing, seeing and speaking. As for the names that are derived for him from acts such as “the provider”, “the creator”, “the exalter”, and “the debaser”, there is disagreement whether they are true of him eternally or not” (Ghazali, 213)

Literalism- Body Parts as Attributes

Of the Sunni schools, the Hanbalis, prominent among whom are Ahman b.Hanbal & Abu Ya’la place attributes like living, knowing, power, willing, perceiving (sight), speaking, hearing, willing, hands, face, feet and shin within the attributes of Essence, while those of judging, providing, forgiving, punishing, fashioning rewarding, honoring, creating are placed among the attributes of action. Here’s the only quote I can find at the moment, although its admittedly not very specific on the matter:

“God hears and does not doubt, sees and does not doubt, knows and is not ignorant, is generous and not stingy, Clement and not rushed, preserving and not for getting, near and not inobservant. He moves, speaks, looks, laughs, joys, and loves. He loves and hates, detests and is pleased. He is angered and displaced, has mercy and forgives. He makes destitute, gives, and withholds. He descends every night to the lowest heaven however he wills. He is the Hearing and the Observing (Q 42:11) The servants hearts are between two of the most Merciful’s fingers. He turns them over as he wills and fills them with whatever he desires. He created Adam with his Hand in his Image. The heavens and the earth and on the day of resurrection in his Hand. He will put his Foot in the Fire, causing it to recoil. He will remove a number from the fire with his Hand. The people of Paraside will look at his Face, see Him, and honour him” (Ahman b. Hanbal (d.855) Creed no.1, tr. Christopher Melchert).

Agnosticians: Hanafi-Maturidis, Ash’aris?

The Hanafi-Maturidi thinkers al Nasafi are again similar in their distribution of attributes. They are non-comittal as to whether the attributes are God or not and make the classic agnostic assertion “they are not he and not other than he”. They hold that the attributes of action are eternal:

“The names and attributes of God  are not He and not other than He…the attributes of God’ actions (…) – are all eternal and everlasting. They are not He and not other than He.” (Abu Mu’in al-Nasafi, Bahr al-kalam (1995), 90-91)

The Neo-Platonists- Shi’as

Not only are the Shi’as non insignificant numbers in the Islamic world today, in early Islam their numbers were much higher. Significantly, Shi’as adopt a Neo-Platonic model

Summarizing the Difficulties of Islamic TM

The harmonization we found in Christianity is simply not possible in TM models like Islam, where the attributes of essence cannot be harmonized with those of action, nor can attributes of essence like the Word, Knowledge (or love, which is not of the essence in Islam) be harmonized with each other or with the Divine essence itself. Thus there remain not just one but three levels of distinctions in the Nature of God in this form of TM: The distinction between the attributes of action and essence, the distinction between the individual attributes themselves, and also a distinction between the attributes and the essence. In summary, TM theology leaves open the question of distinctions that are attributable to the divine essence, because in the absence of plurality of Persons, there is simply no harmonization tool available to it, as we will describe in the section on Christianity which follows. What Christianity does is that it makes it possible that distinctions in God are made possible by relations between the persons rather than divisions within the substance. Those distinctions are not to do with anthropomorphic qualities, rather with the qualities that make God Eternal.

Trinitarian thinking does not Encounter these Issues

How does this relate to the Trinitarian distinctions? Because there is love between the persons and love is the basis for the personal relations, the actions which require interactions do not require to be external to God, because interaction is the essence of God himself. So already we can see that the necessity of the distinction between attributes of essence and action are being obviated. Attributes like mercy, forgiveness and the ability to create pose specific problems, however with love what we have been able to do it to ascribe at least one essential attribute to God and that one attribute is an interaction, or an interactive attribute. If we were to make the simple assumption that in God every attribute is the same as itself, that would mean that every attribute in God is the same as the power of the personal interaction which we have referred to as “love”. Because each of the persons are equal and consubstantial, they all possess that attribute in an identical manner without dividing or differentiating it “between” themselves”. Thus we have a God whose essence is an interaction and we have no need to make a substantial distinction between the two in order for God to have the capacity to interact. This itself is an incredible situation- if we do not presume the necessity of creation, we have just described a fully independent and active deity, simple in form with no complexity and therefore seemingly a perfect model for monotheism. The problems of describing the attributes related to created things, beginning with creation itself can be relegated to “non-essential” and are not a challenge or a defeater to the viability of the monotheistic model. God has one attribute, the attribute of Divinity itself, which is impossible for us to comprehend, leave alone divide. Trinitarianism obviates the need for any division in God, because distinction is provided for by the Persons.

Only Christianity truly says anything about God at all

Christianity requires the acceptance of only ONE fact about the Nature of God, and a further fact that relates to his interaction with Creation. With regards to the former, that one God can be tri-personal, and with regards to the latter, that God can become his creation. Every other belief of Christianity is an entailment of these two. And yet, out of all the world religions, only Christianity truly says something about God at all.

Some religions might appear simple when in fact they merely achieve an illusion of simplicity by providing no facts about the Nature of God. For example, the only positive assertion that Islam makes with regards to the Nature of God is that there is indeed a God. With regards to God’s interaction with Creation, all Islam says is that God forgives sin. There is no indication as to whether this requires a real personal interaction with Creation in order that this be brought about. There is quite a lot of disagreement among Muslims as to whether or not God can even enter creation in the first place. With regards to describing God, all the assertions are in the form of superlatives like mercy, strength and knowledge, all of which in turn, are necessitated by the absurdity of their absence- how could God possibly be weak, irate and “thick”? Elaborating on these superlatives is merely devotional writing, and and entailment of the felt-duty to say positive things about God. Agnosticism with regards to the Nature of God and his mode of interaction with us is perfectly understandable. However agnosticism cannot assert that it is “better” than any other position, the arguments can only be based upon personal incredulity.

Introduction- the significance

The debate over Allah’s body/body parts raged in early Islam and still remains unresolved, largely due to a number of scriptural passages and texts seeming affirm this. One of the main conerns was that this would seem to contradict the Qur’anic teaching related to God’s transcendence that “nothing is comparable to/ there is nothing like God”. The opposite of transcendance is called “immanence”, which merely means the literal presence of God within creation. Muslims typically worry that immanence and transcendence might not mix, that they might be mutually exclusive states.

These questions are significant in polemics, where Muslims might want to use the argument against immanence to disprove the Incarnation. However there are several Qur’anic verses and traditions to the contrary, as we shall see. Nor does the Qur’an have any clear statement against immanence, nor also against one other property- omnipotence. Just as with immancence, omnipresence also increases the prior probability of an Incarnation- if God is already everywhere, he could also be somewhere, and this too is typically denied by Muslims polemicists.

Another reason for the Muslim concerns might be a certain degree of embarrasment: were God truly able to “come a-knocking”, it is hard to see why he does not do so for Muhammed, only the Biblical prophets and Jesus, as we shall also see.

However there is a deeper significance to Allah’s literal absence from the physical realm, one that is related to the very relevance of Islam’s Allah, and both in Heaven and on Earth. Islam does not require the real presence of the deity within the physical realm because the only interaction that is believed with dogmatic necessity is that with the book. There is no dogma of grace as with Christianity where there is a direct interaction of the deity with the human soul leading to its transformation, and nor is there a doctrine of theosis and so on. The Incarnation of Christ is just one more level of interaction of the deity with the fleshly realm, for a deity who already has an intimate interaction with the people in the Old Testament “dwelling with his people” and the Holy Spirit who already indwells the prophets. In Islam the onus is upon the believers themselves once again, to believe or not to believe, to repent or not to repent and so on.

Does Allah have a literal Body/ Body Parts?

In this article we look at the problematic implications of the famous “Shin-Allah” verse of the Qur’an 68:42 as well as related verse and traditions, identify potential problematic implications and provide a simple Christian interpretation of these themes. The question of whether or not Allah has literal body parts has been a major issue of debate with Islam from the earliest times, while in Christianity this is hardly a problem, because the real Humanity of Christ defines it anyway. That is to say, if Jesus is a real Man, he has a literal Body.

Allah to bare his Shin and Shape on the Day

The Shin of Allah

Verse 68:42 of the Qur’an seemingly indicates that Judgement Day will be ushered in by the event of Allah baring his shin to everyone. Although it does not say “my shin”, it is hard to see who else’s shin it could possibly be referring to as the “curtain-raiser” as it were, inducing prostation from his loyal followers:

“(Remember) the Day when the Shin shall be laid bare (i.e. the Day of Resurrection) and they shall be called to prostrate (to Allah), but they (hypocrites) shall not be able to do so” (Q 68:42)

In any case, the related hadith is quite specific that it is indeed Allah’s own shin in view here:

“We said, “O Allah’s Messenger! Shall we see our Lord on the Day of Resurrection?” He said, “Do you have any difficulty in seeing the sun and the moon when the sky is clear?” We said, “No.” He said, “So you will have no difficulty in seeing your Lord on that Day as you have no difficulty in seeing the sun and the moon (in a clear sky)…

…Then the Almighty will come to them in a shape other than the one which they saw the first time, and He will say, ‘I am your Lord,’ and they will say, ‘You are not our Lord.’ And none will speak: to Him then but the Prophets, and then it will be said to them, ‘Do you know any sign by which you can recognize Him?’ They will say. ‘The Shin,’ and so Allah will then uncover His Shin whereupon every believer will prostrate before Him…” (excerpt, Bukhari 7439)

As we can see in the above and following, the concern revolves around correctly identifying God. Apparently on Judgement Day when all of Mankind is gathered before God, Islam is still concerned about who is convening the gathering.

Issues with the translation

There should be no confusion about the fact that the literal meaning is shin. That means, as with everything else, that whether it is a metaphor or not depends upon the context. This is the lexical entry for it: http://lexicon.quranic-research.net/data/12_s/253_swq.html.

The Lane lexicon mentions ” كَشَفَ عَنْ سَاقِهِ [lit. He uncovered his shank; meaning † he prepared himself for difficulty] (…) Thus, the saying يَوْمَ يُكْشَفُ عَنْ سَاقٍ, (Ṣ, Ḳ, TA,) in the Ḳur [lxviii. 42], (Ṣ, TA,) [lit. On a day when a shank shall be uncovered,] means † on a day when difficulty, or calamity, shall be disclosed. (I’Ab, Mujáhid, Ṣ, Ḳ, TA.)”

We can see that the lexicon is employing the Qur’anic usage here, which means that it is probably incorporating the views of commentators like Ibn Kathir. Thus the lexicon is probably limited to Islamic sources in this case and would the case in many cases, since pre-Islamic Arabic literature of even grammar is quite sparse. This is the limitation of the lexicon in such cases of difficult translations, it is going to use Muslims scholars. The commentators go with the metaphoric translation for the baring of the shin beign linked to calamities in general. The problem with this is that it doesn’t take into account that the verse is linked to the “authentic” hadithic narrations where the shin is linked to the very identity of Allah. Ibn Kathir himself narrates a hadith which itself does not sound metaphoric at all. Here is the section from his commentary on the verse:

“The Day when the Shin shall be laid bare and they shall be called to prostrate themselves, but they shall not be able to do so.) meaning, the Day of Judgement and the horrors, earthquakes, trials, tests and great matters that will occur during it. Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Sa`id Al-Khudri said that he heard the Prophet saying, “Our Lord will reveal His Shin, and every believing male and female will prostrate to Him. The only people who will remain standing are those who prostrated in the worldly life only to be seen and heard (showing off). This type of person will try to prostrate at that time, but his back will made to be one stiff plate (the bone will not bend or flex).” This Hadith was recorded in the Two Sahihs and other books from different routes of transmission with various wordings. It is a long Hadith that is very popular.”

The rest of Allah’s Shape

Here not only the shin, but the whole shape is used for identification:

“Narrated Abu Huraira (…) he who used to worship the sun, will follow it, and he who used to worship the moon will follow it, and he who used to worship false deities will follow them; and then only this nation (i.e., Muslims) will remain, including their hypocrites. Allah will come to them in a shape other than they know and will say, ‘I am your Lord.’ They will say, ‘We seek refuge with Allah from you. This is our place; (we will not follow you) till our Lord comes to us, and when our Lord comes to us, we will recognize Him. Then Allah will come to then in a shape they know and will say, “I am your Lord.’ They will say, ‘(No doubt) You are our Lord,’ and they will follow Him…” (Bukhari 6573)

Here, we are given identifiers over and above what we have in the Qur’an, where we only find the shin. Apparently here Muslims will identify Allah because he is a two/more-eyed man. They will apparently have difficulty differentiating him from a miserable-sounding hen-toed, woolly-haired, one-eye-blind monstrosity:

“Narrated Ubadah ibn as-Samit: The Prophet said: I have told you so much about the Dajjal (Antichrist) that I am afraid you may not understand. The Antichrist is short, hen-toed, woolly-haired, one-eyed, an eye-sightless, and neither protruding nor deep-seated. If you are confused about him, know that your Lord is not one-eyed.” (Grade Sahih, Sunan abi Dawud 4320)

Man- made in the Image of God

A single Qur’anic verse of somewhat obscure meaning seems to imply man is created in the image of God. Others have famously used this to signify what is called the “fitrah”. The Arabic reads “fitrata l-lahi allati fatara l-nasa”- which would seem to literally translate “the nature (?) of God in which he has created man”. The actual meaning of fitrah in the verse is difficult to ascertain, because every one of the times that the f-t-r root appears in the Qur’an, it is related to the act of creating, the noun form fitrata appearing only once in the entire book. As it is, the syntax of the verse would necessitate that there is something pertaining to God upon which hsi creation of man is based.

The commentators have to do a bit more work to extract the current Muslim understanding of “fitrah” from this verse, a concept that was elucidated by a much later commentator, none other than ibn Taymiyya himself, something that does note emerge from a surface reading of the text:

“So set thy purpose (O Muhammad) for religion as a man by nature upright – the nature (framed) of Allah, in which He hath created man. There is no altering (the laws of) Allah’s creation. That is the right religion, but most men know not -” (Q 30:30, Pickthall)

We even have hadith saying that men were created in the image of God anyway, which lends support to the claim of Allah having these human body parts. This is still a remarkable hadith, given that we are told repeatedly in the Qur’an that nothing is comparable to Allah:

“Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, “Allah created Adam in His picture, sixty cubits (about 30 meters) in height. When He created him, He said (to him), “Go and greet that group of angels sitting there, and listen what they will say in reply to you, for that will be your greeting and the greeting of your offspring.” Adam (went and) said, ‘As-Salamu alaikum (Peace be upon you).’ They replied, ‘AsSalamu-‘Alaika wa Rahmatullah (Peace and Allah’s Mercy be on you) So they increased ‘Wa Rahmatullah’ The Prophet added ‘So whoever will enter Paradise, will be of the shape and picture of Adam Since then the creation of Adam’s (offspring) (i.e. stature of human beings is being diminished continuously) to the present time.” (Bukhari 6227, repeated in Muslim 2841)

There extremely strong attestation of the literal meaning of this in other hadith such as:

“When any one of you fights with his brother, he should avoid his face for Allah created Adam in His own image” (Muslim 2612e)

“Suwaid b. Muqarrin reported that he had a slave-girl and a person (one of the members of the family) slapped her, whereupon Suwaid said to him: Don’t you know that it is forbidden (to strike the) face. He said: You see I was the seventh one amongst my brothers during the lifetime of Allah’s Messenger, and we had but only one servant. One of us got enraged and slapped him. Thereupon Allah’s Messenger commanded us to set him free.” (Muslim 1658d)

and there are still others:

“Ibn Abi ‘Aasim narrated in al-Sunnah (517) that Ibn ‘Umar said: The Messenger of Allaah said: “Do not say ‘May Allaah deform your face’ [a form of cursing in Arabic], for the son of Adam was created in the image of the Most Merciful.” Shaykh ‘Abd-Allaah ibn al-Ghunaymaan said: “This hadeeth is saheeh and was classed as such by the imams and by Imam Ahmad and Ishaaq ibn Raahawayh. Those who classed it as da’eef have no evidence, except for the view of Ibn Khuzaymah, but those who classed it as saheeh are more knowledgeable than him. 

Ibn Abi ‘Aasim also narrated (516) that Abu Hurayrah said: The Messenger of Allaah said: “When any one of you fights let him avoid the face, for Allaah created Adam in the image of His Face.” Shaykh al-Albaani said: its isnaad is saheeh.”

Al-Tirmidhi (3234) narrated from Ibn ‘Abbaas that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “My Lord came to me in the most beautiful image and said, ‘O Muhammad.’ I said, ‘Here I am at Your service, my Lord.’ He said, ‘What are the chiefs (angels) on high disputing about…’” Classed as saheeh by al-Albaani in Saheeh al-Tirmidhi. 

Whence this Memory?- “Prequel Life”

In the hadith above we (Bukhari 7439) we saw: “Then the Almighty will come to them in a shape other than the one which they saw the first time…‘Do you know any sign by which you can recognize Him?’ They will say. ‘The Shin,’. Once again we see “shape other than they know… shape they know” in Bukhari 6573.

This indicates there was a previous encounter, prior to the final one on Judgement Day. Muslims believe this is a memory from a “prequel” to this life (as seen in DIsney movies Soul and Boss Baby), a state even prior to conception in the mother’s womb (this should make all abortion illegal in Islam, although this is not universally taught). According to this interpretation, Allah extracts souls from the loins of Adam, and makes this covenant with them.

“Prequel-Life” is not the surface interpretation of the text

The two Qur’anic verses from which all this takes off neither mention nor necessitate any such “prequel” state. The first is the so called “Ayat al-Mithaq” or “verse of the covenant”, a word which does not actually occur verse itself. However in it the “descendants” are “taken” not only “from the loins” of Adam, but also of his descendants or “children”. This is just a description of normal human descent, where offspring comes from the parents. The supposed “covenant” could then have taken place at any time in history, for example in the manner that God spoke to the Israelites through Moses. As it stands, this conversation actually comes at the end of a long section that is about the “people of Moses” and Allah’s supposed dealings with them, and so could be seen as referring to an earlier time:

“And [mention] when your Lord took from the children of Adam – from their loins – their descendants and made them testify of themselves, [saying to them], “Am I not your Lord?” They said, “Yes, we have testified.” [This] – lest you should say on the day of Resurrection, “Indeed, we were of this unaware.” (Q 7:172, SI)

The second is the “fitrah” verse, Q 30:30 which we discuss later, but the surface translation of which would be “merely” that God created man in his own image, a well-known Biblical allusion.

Hadith/ Commentators favour “Prequel Life”

In fact, the “prequel-life” interpretation is universally attested to in the early reports. So even though to my knowledge none of these reports go back to Muhammed himself, literally all of the sahaba/ tabie’en (first and second generation followersof Muhammad), the early “Salaf” hold to this view. Al-Tabari, hailed by many as the greatest early commentator meticulously documents no less than 40 traditions related to the matter complete with their chains of transmission (isnads) and has no hesitation in considering this tradition mutawattur (universally attested and beyond question). This is an example of one such tradition as narrated by none other than Ubayy Ibn Ka’ab:

“God gathered all human beings, divided them into different groups, granted them human form and the faculty of speech, made them enter into a covenant, and then making them witnesses against themselves He asked them: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ They replied: ‘Assuredly you are Our Lord.’ Then God told them: ‘I call upon the sky and the earth and your own progenitor, Adam, to be witness against you lest you should say on the Day of Judgement that you were ignorant of this. Know well that no one other than Me deserves to he worshipped and no one other than Me is your Lord. So do not ascribe any partner to Me. I shall send to you My Messengers who will remind you of this covenant which you made with Me. I shall send down to you My Books.’ In reply all said: ‘We witness that You are Our Lord and our Deity. We have no lord or deity other than You.’ (Ahmad b. Hanbal, Musnad, vol. 5, p. 135 – Ed.)

On the other hand the Mu’tazali with their emphasis on reason, deny such a literalist view, as does Ar-Razi and Zamakshari. On the other hand, an important later commentator, Ibn Taymiyya, although he is usually aligned with the traditions, in this case goes agains them uncharacteristically and supports a metaphorical take on the issue.

Lastly, I was greatly helped in this issue by a video from the Exploring Qur’an and Bible channel, which I will link below.

“Prequel-Life/Memory” struggles to be coherent

If we reflect on all the cognitive ramifications of such a complex term as “testifying to God”, we can appreciate why it seems out of place at a time even before life has actually begun. Decisions like these require informed consent, which a person can only give at the age of accountability, something attained after a minimum period of life experience. In fact many will require their entire adult lives to come to a realization of the importance of spiritual matters. On the other hand here it is as though there were an age of accountability prior to the actual age of accountability. Again, the reason a “testimony” regarding religion might be required in the first place, would be some challenge or doubt with regards to the existence of God or his authority. But these are things that we encounter in our earthly life anyway, why go through it all a second time?

Thus it is hard to see how such an event, whereby we see God and then immediately forget that we did see him, could have any impact upon how we are judged. Is God really going to challenge atheists based on something that they were not supposed to remember anyway? What exactly does this add to a spiritual model in which we learn about God from scirptures, traditions, prophets and so on?

Christianity never felt the need for such a state, nor is there Biblical precedent for it. The reason we feel a yearning for God could be merely intellectual, because it stands to reason and thus appeals to our intellect, or spiritual, because the omnipresent God enkindles a yearning in our soul for our benefit, and in this very life (this is called “prevenient grace”, or that our souls naturally are drawn to the one that created them, because it is in their very nature, of which we know scan little, but that God permeates our very being, and we have no existence other than “in him”. Think of how an orphan child longs to find their biological parents because he feels organically connected to them, or the awarenes of having shared an intimate physical association with them in the earliest time of their life. Either way, “prequel life” would seem redundant and mythological.

Listen to King David describe this intimacy with God in our creation:

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.My frame was not hidden from you  when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” (Ps.139:13-16)

Or with Jeremiah:

“before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (1:5)

Allah with a literal Body cannot be Transcendent

These verses and traditions also require that Allah have human-type body/ body parts. Clearly the hadith 7439 and speak of a “shape they knew from the first time they saw him”, plus man is made in his image, and then there is the hadith of the one-eyed man. The Athari school, possibly the oldest school of Islamic thought has no problem takingsuch a literalist view. A God who has a body has a shape, and is therefore limited to the space delineated by that shape.

Even if it is held that God only presents the optical illusion of such a shape to us for our sake, but the question would still remain- the reason that Allah is using the metaphor of the shin must be to indicate that he has a shin, what could Allah be telling us by this? A body part cannot be a metaphor for the absence of body parts, there has to be a point to a metaphor, while in this case it is statedly linked ot identity and so it could not be a metaphor.

The Qur’an asserts that nothing is “comparable” to God, but clearly this “comparability” could not be related to a lack of body parts, rather that the body parts themselves possess some incomparable excellence. This goes in line with other verses where Allah seems to move through time and space, first building the earth, then turning toward the heavens in order to create them, then in further apparent sequential act, proceeding to establish himself over his Throne. There are huge discussions in the Islamic world about the whole “where is Allah” question which we will not go into, but which derive from these very descriptions.

Confusion about who’s in charge in the after-life?

It does not make sense that there will be confusion about who is in charge of things when we wake up from death, and it is hard to see how the one that is calling the shots could be anyone but God in the after-life. Muslim theology paints a picture of the lost souls standing at a street corner cold and still confused an bewildered in death even as they were in life, watching the shadows go by that are still vying for their attention. like the one-eye-blind, hen-toed man with woolly hair.

Summary: the Problem of Q 68:42, and a simple Christian Interpretation of the Theme

In Summary, we are led to believe that on the Day of Judgement, Muslims will be able to know exactly what’s going on and whom to bow down to because they will recognise God’s shape and shin. This is because they have seen them before in their “prequel life”. We can summarise the problems with such a belief:

1. This is the problem of Q 68:42: If Allah is providing body parts and shape as his positive identifiers, then they are his identity, not metaphors. Try using a metaphor on your drving lisence, for example. But a God who has a shape is delimited by that shape. Such a God can therefore not be transcendent. There are further correlates to this form since we are also told that man is made in God’s image, and body parts like the human face are directly linked to their likeness to God.
2. There cannot be any theological significance to the supposed “prequel- life”, is the mainstream Islamic interpretation of Q 7:172 and 30:30. Further, the verses themselves does no necessitate such an interpretation. Something has seemingly gone awry in the vaunted Islamic traditions, or someone has taken too many artistic liberties here.
3. Finally, a Christian interpretation of these themes seems a much easier fit: Chrsitians believe that they will see the form of the Man-God Jesus on Judement Day, and they have seen in before, in his earthly sojourn. Thus both the transcendence and physicality of God is married in Christianity, whereas in Islam they remain the subject of a perpetual and age-old debate. The most probable reason is that some of the themes are taken from pre-Islamic Christian and Jewish tradition anyway.

Does Allah enter into creation?

No he does not

Although the affirmation is rather weak, this is still an important contradiction because most modern Muslims hold almost dogmatically to the absenteeism of Allah in creation. Below is the only verse from which this might be derived. there are seemingly two obvious motivations for this position. The first being that the possibility of God being able to enter creation might be seen to be allowing too much for the possibility of the truth of the Incarnation. The second is that this offers some explanation for the Muslims as to why God never speaks directly to Muhammed.

Nothing in this verse is a positive assertion about God not being able to enter creation. It is about speaking to God. It clearly leaves open the possibility that God be in creation and wearing a veil in it:

“It belongs not to any mortal that God should speak to him, except by revelation, or from behind a veil, or that He should send a messenger and he reveal whatsoever He will, by His leave; surely He is All-high, All-wise.” (Q 42:51)

Yes he does

There are many places in the Quran and the Hadith which require God to be present in creation.

Firstly, the creation account implies that Allah needs to be in creation, since following creating he “ascends the Throne”. Clearly he had to start somewhere in order to ascend it. He asserts that he created Adam “with his own two hands”. Whatever “hands” is meant to represent, it is hard to see how it does not represent contact.

God is said to speak “directly” with Moses, which is a unique gift that he is given (we can even ignore the fact that this is an obvious reflection of God speaking “face-to-face” with Moses). This is also confirmed in a famous hadith about intercession on Judgement Day, to be unique to Musa:

“and Messengers We have already told thee of before, and Messengers We have not told thee of; and unto Moses God spoke directly” (Q 4:164)

In this surah, the very fact that Allah has destroyed the mountain is here implying that it is his presence which has brought about the effect of destruction. Allah is not saying that he cannot be here, only that he cannot be seen, which was Moses’ request:

“And when Moses came to Our appointed time and his Lord spoke with him, he said, ‘Oh my Lord, show me, that I may behold Thee!’ Said He, ‘Thou shalt not see Me; but behold the mountain — if it stays fast in its place, then thou shalt see Me.’ And when his Lord revealed Him to the mountain He made it crumble to dust; and Moses fell down swooning. So when he awoke, he said, ‘Glory be to Thee! I repent to Thee; I am the first of the believers.'” (Q 7:143)

Further, only two verses later as if to cement the point made above, we receive proof that Allah is not necessarily universally corrosive as he calmly writes on stone tablets:

“Said He, ‘Moses, I have chosen thee above all men for My Messages and My Utterance; take what I have given thee, and be of the thankful.’ And We wrote for him on the Tablets of everything an admonition, and a distinguishing of everything: ‘So take it forcefully, and command thy people to take the fairest of it. I shall show you the habitation of the ungodly.” (Q 7:144,145)

Then we have other places where Allah is clearly in creation like:

“When he came to it, a voice cried from the right of the watercourse, in the sacred hollow, coming from the tree: ‘Moses, I am God, the Lord of all Being.'”(Q 28:30)

And again from the fire:

So, when he came to it, he was called: ‘Blessed is he who is in the fire, and he who is about it. Glory be to God, the Lord of all Being! Moses, behold, it is I, God, the All-mighty, the All-wise.” (Q 27:8,9)

The hadith (ibn Kathir, Qurtubi) both acknowledge that Allah is in the fire and does enter into creation. Further there is the hadith that states that Allah “descends” into the lowest Heaven in the last third of the night.

Here Allah is “with them”:
““God has numbered it, and they have forgotten it. God is witness over everything. Hast thou not seen that God knows whatsoever is in the heavens, and whatsoever is in the earth? Three men conspire not secretly together, but He is the fourth of them, neither five men, but He is the sixth of them, neither fewer than that, neither more, but He is with them, wherever they may be; then He shall tell them what they have done, on the Day of Resurrection. Surely God has knowledge of everything.” (Q 58:7)“

Allah does NOT encounter Mohammed nor any Muslim

In the Hebrew Bible, a prophet is a “navi” which we see used only a handful of times in the Qur’an as the Arabic “nabi”. Rather, the preominant term used in association with Mohammed in the Qur’an is rasool, which is essentially a messenger. Rasool is a generic term that can for example can also be used for the king’s messenger or emissary. Mark Drury charts out the  essential difference for us:

“the separation between heaven earth… pervades the Qur’an’s descriptions of revelation, which is by a process of “sending down” (v. anzala, n. tanzil). In the Biblical understanding, the prophet enters the divine council, coming into the presence of YHWH, where a meeting of human and divine takes place, and then YHWH speaks through the mouth of the prophet, as mediated divine speech. However in the Qur’an a portion of pre-existing “scripture” (Q:32:2) is “sent down” to the messenger, after which it can be recited by him repeatedly. Allah does not speak it through the mouth of a human being in an act of prophecy. In the Qur’anic understanding there is an inviolable separation, to a physical mediation…” (Drury, Biblical Reflexes of th[e Qur’an)

This is also the reason in the Quran the only interaction that Mohammed has with anything remotely divine is his meeting with the alleged angel in the cave. This even though throughout the history of the Jews, God speaks directly to the prophets, and all this acknowledged in the Quran!  It is only the new religion that has an absentee God who does not even speak to his favorite prophet, he “sends verses” down upon him through angels.

Proximity is metaphoricized to denote literal Abscence

Muslim will concede is that “Allah is present by his knowledge”, the meaning of which is given by “Allah knows everything that happens on the Earth”. This is of course, confirmation that Allah is not present on the Earth.

For example:

Q 50:16 says “we are closer to you than your jugular vein”

Allah is trying to tell people to be careful of what they think, because he will know. Muslims never treat this as meaning that Allah is literally inside a persons body or that he indwells a person. Translator Mohsin Khan actually even adds parenthetically “by his knowledge”:

“And the companions of the thicket and the people of Tubba’. All denied the messengers, so My threat was justly fulfilled. Did We fail in the first creation? But they are in confusion over a new creation. And We have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to him than [his] jugular vein” (Q 50:14-16).

Or again here we see “he is with them”:

“God has numbered it, and they have forgotten it. God is witness over everything. Hast thou not seen that God knows whatsoever is in the heavens, and whatsoever is in the earth? Three men conspire not secretly together, but He is the fourth of them, neither five men, but He is the sixth of them, neither fewer than that, neither more, but He is with them, wherever they may be; then He shall tell them what they have done, on the Day of Resurrection. Surely God has knowledge of everything.” (Q 58:7)

Or famously here, Allah’s voice is in the bush:

Q: “Is God present on Earth?”

A: Always the same Muslim answer here: “by his knowledge” or sometimes “by his attributes, like seeing and hearing” (because Allah is said to be “all-seeing, all-hearing).

Q: (Second challenge): “does that mean that God is present?”

A: Repeated as above: “yes, by his knowledge and attributes”.

Q: “are God’s attributes Allah?”

A: “No”

Conclusion: ”If what is present is not Allah then Allah is not present”.

We can see that there is an obvious sharp shift in the manner of communication from Allah to Mohammed as compared to the Biblical prophets when even in the Quran the mode of Biblical communication is somewhat preserved in the case of Biblical:

“When he came to it, a voice cried from the right of the watercourse, in the sacred hollow, coming from the tree: ‘Moses, I am God, the Lord of all Being.'”(Q 28:30)

And again from the fire:

“So, when he came to it, he was called: ‘Blessed is he who is in the fire, and he who is about it. Glory be to God, the Lord of all Being! Moses, behold, it is I, God, the All-mighty, the All-wise.” (Q 27:8,9)

The account is retold, it is said that “when Moses came to it (the fire) a voice was heard” or even in some cases para-Christian retellings like the story of Alexander the Great (Dhu’l- Qurnain in the Qur’an), but never from the point of Mohammed’s own revelation (even here we see a possible exception (Q 60:3,4) although in rather suspicious circumstances when Mohammed is having a domestic issue with his wives and claims that Allah “informed him” of something that is said behind his back).

Compare this with the sustained proximity of God with his creature that is present throughout the Bible from the beginning of the Old Testament and we can see the obvious deficiency made manifest in Islam. In Islam Allah does not encounter nor speak to Muhammad nor any Muslims after him. He only speaks to Biblical figures that Islam claims to be Muslim.

The effects of the disjunction of God from his attributes is seemingly given its extreme expression in the religion of Islam. The Qur’an consistently asserts that God is “all-seeing, all-hearing”, and there is also a sequence in which God’s “voice” is heard “from the bush” by Moses. It is clear that this “quality” or “attribute” of “hearing/ seeing/ speaking” itself is on the Earth. At the same time it is the mainstream Islamic contention that God does not himself walk the Earth, there is no “real Presence” of God here. This implies a disconnect between God and his attributes (of voice, seeing, hearing) i.e. that God is not joined to his own attributes, for if God were truly joined to these attributes described, then he would be on Earth too (think diagrammatically of a table sat upon the earth, with the legs as the attributes and the table-top as representing God himself who is not those attributes).

Allah is NOT in Janna anyway

“Above the throne”- means not on Earth/ Heaven

Christians take it for granted that Heaven is synonymous with the presence of God. The Islamic conception of Heaven is however closer to that of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ and Mormons’ concepts of a sensuous Heaven without God.

The only clue Muslims have as to the location of Allah is given in this verse which we have already seen:

“Lo! your Lord is Allah Who created the heavens and the earth in six Days, then mounted He the Throne” (Q7:34)

This means that when Muslims use “Most High” in relation to Allah they are not using this merely as a title of purity rather also locatively in that he is above every location, even the Heavens.

“Do you feel secure that He, Who is over the heaven, will not cause the earth to sink with you …?” [Q 67:16]

“Allah, it is He Who has created the heavens and the earth, and all that is between them in six days. Then He rose over (istawa) the Throne (in a manner that suits His Majesty).(Q 32:4 also 10:3)

“Islamqa.com” the official Salafist site states:

“The salaf (pious predecessors) agreed that Allah is above heaven, as is reported by scholars such as al-Dhahabi in his book Al-‘Aluw li’l-‘Aliy al-Ghaffar.” The theology that has been worked out seems to be based upon the notion that Allah cannot be confined into a physical space, and therefore also not in Muslim Janna which is a physical space full of sensual pleasures. They therefore “locate” Allah not “in” but rather “above the heavens”: as sort of “Out of sight is out of mind”, solution…

Will Muslims see Allah in Jannah?

Will Muslims see God in Heaven? There are various hadith that state that the believers will indeed be given to gaze upon their Lord in some manner in Janna, and the islamqa website here: https://islamqa.info/en/answers/14525/will-the-believers-see-their-lord-in-paradise lists these with the conclusion that all that is certain is that the believers will be able to see God at Friday prayers while as to whether this will be case at other times is not certain, but not ruled out either.

One verse confirms that no eyes can see him, but Muslims might want to interpret this as being the case only in earthly life:

“Vision perceives Him not, but He perceives [all] vision; and He is the Subtle, the Acquainted (Aware)” (Q 6:103)

This verse might be taken to mean that Muslims will have a view of God’s Face:

“do not drive away those who call upon the Lord morning and evening, seeking nothing but his Face (wajhahu- his face)” (Q 6:52a)

9:72 is never even translated as “the pleasure in the presence of God”, rather this is meant to convey the joy of having God’s approval…being in God’s good books, to be approved by God, in the manner of saying “they enjoyed the king’s good favour”. That is how this word “ridwana” is translated every single other occasion in the Qur’an even when it is used in the exact same context eg. in 9:21 of the same chapter. This “ridwana” of Allah can be contrasted with the “bliss” “naimun” (ن ع م n-a-m root) that is derived from the gardens. In 47:28 we see “That is because they followed what angered Allah and disliked [what earns] His pleasure, so He rendered worthless their deeds”, it is obvious that this is seeking the approval of Allah. This is how the word is translated each of its 13 occurences in the Qur’an.

“God has promised the believers, men and women, gardens underneath which rivers flow, forever therein to dwell, and goodly dwelling-places in the Gardens of Eden; and greater, God’s good pleasure (wa-ridwana); that is the mighty triumph.” (Q 9:72)

This probably comes closest:

“Indeed, the righteous will be among gardens and rivers, in a seat of honor near a mighty (muq’tadirin) king (malīkin)” (Q 54:54,55)

Allah is not mentioned, and there is no definite article, rather “a king”. Allah is called “sovereign” in other verses “el-malikin” with the definite article, and it is one of his 99 names. Ibn Kathir indicates it does refer to Allah:

“… Allah said, (in a seat of truth,) in the Dwelling of Allah’s honor, encompassed by His pleasure, favors, bounties, generosity and compassion, (near the Muqtadir King.) meaning with the Magnificent King Who created everything and measured its destiny; He is able to grant them whatever they wish and ask for. Imam Ahmad recorded that `Abdullah bin `Amr said that the Prophet said, (Verily, the just will be with Allah on podiums of light, to the right of Ar-Rahman, and both of His Hands are right. They are those who are just and fair in their judgement and with their families and those whom they are responsible for.) Muslim and An-Nasa’i also recorded this Hadith.“

Now this is Judgement Day, not Heaven, since it is referring to “the Day”, and besides it would be absurd for faces to he distorted in Heaven. But it’s a very important verse because it gets used in apologetics all over the place, by leaving out the last phrase (which is v.24). The following verse too:

“some faces on that Day shall be radiant (nadirah) looking (nazirtun) at their Lord and some will be distorted (basiratun)” (Q 75:22-24)

“No indeed; but upon that day they shall be veiled from their Lord” (Q 83:15)

Similarly, surahs 2:223, 9:77, 50:20-22 all speak of Muslims “meeting” Allah, seemingly mainly in the context of Judgement.

“O Man! Thou art laboring unto thy Lord laboriously, and thou shalt encounter Him.” (Q 84:6)

There is a hadith which speaks of the delight of the vision of God, even though this sentiment is entirely missing in the Qur’an itself:

(Suhaib reported the Apostle saying: When those deserving of Paradise would enter Paradise, the Blessed and the Exalted would ask: Do you wish Me to give you anything more? They would say: Hast Thou not brightened our faces? Hast Thou not made us enter Paradise and saved us from Fire? He (the narrator) said: He (God) would lift the veil, and of things given to them nothing would he dearer to them than the sight of their Lord, the Mighty and the Glorious -Muslim 181a)

The hadith (Bukhari 7439 and 6573) assert that at least for the purposes of Resurrection Day, Muslims will be able to see Allah “as you see the Sun and the Moon in a clear sky” so that they can recognize his “Shin and shape”. The question then probably is one of whether this vision will be one of the pleasures of Jannah or not. The Qur’an, in sharp contrast to the Bible, is quite reserved about this and the concept is not really present, whereas a hadithic tradition does develop that takes more interest in it.

Worshipping Allah in Janna?

Further there is no particular verse which really describes the worship of God in Heaven as is described in the Christian texts like Revelations, or the great prophetic visions like that of Isaiah and Ezekiel, or in the Psalms.

Surah 10:10 states that the “call” of those entering Heaven will be “Exalted are You, O Allah ,” and that their “last call” (whatever that means) will be “Praise to Allah , Lord of the worlds!”

The angels do it, though, they never tire of worshipping Allah nor are they ever disobedient. Humans on the other hand look forward to several pleasures in addition to Allah. In modern language, the Janna experience would be advertised as “Allah+” as we see in the next section.

The first mention is:

“And when thy Lord said to the angels, ‘I am setting in the earth a viceroy (khalifatan).’ They said, ‘What, wilt Thou set therein one who will do corruption there, and shed blood, while We proclaim (nusabbihu) Thy praise (bihamdika) and call Thee Holy (nuqaddisu) ?’ He said, ‘Assuredly I know that you know not.'” (Q 2:30)

Allah CANNOT do Anything

The fact that the Allah as seen in Islam is conferred various limitations lends further credence to the theory of his irrelevance and likelihood of non-existence. The Allah of Islam is not the Judaic monotheistic deity which manifests with the “Shekinah” glory on Earth, nor the monotheistic Christian deity who is Incarnated in the Flesh. Both clearly interact with creation (there are numerous instances of this in the Old Testament, of course, the entire Torah is the story of this very interaction).

There is no action of Allah upon the Soul

Muslim believer “Repents” and God forgives. In Islam this is the end of the story, everything that needed to be accomplished has been accomplished at this point and therefore all the drastic action of God arriving on Earth, and dying for us in order to achieve a radical inner purity of the our souls, we could not possibly achieve of our own, is made redundant: “just repenting” has achieved all of that. The Incarnation and Death of Christ is seen in Christianity as that Grace through which we are able to stop sinning entirely, being “made new”, “in Christ”, however in Islam all of this is achieved through “just repenting”. Islamic apologists will argue that the same can be said of Jews, they did not require anyone to die for their sins either, which specific point is addressed in the article on Atonement ().

Once this is done, all that is left is for Mohammed to intercede (That Muhammad is the only intercessor for man is made abundantly clear passages like the lengthy hadith 7510 in Bukhari” and others, covered in the relevant article ().

There is no concept in Islam of God “regenerating” the soul of a person from within through a direct action in the soul. The closest that the Qur’an comes to the “new creation” concept of the Bible is 30:27 “And He is the One Who originates the creation then will resurrect it—which is even easier for Him.¹ To Him belong the finest attributes in the heavens and the earth. And He is the Almighty, All-Wise.”

Apart from being vaguely reminiscent of the Biblical verse, there is no real correlation of this verse to anything else that is happening in the rest of the Qur’an.

The whole concept of divine action in the life of the Human being is removed from Islam, with the denial of Christ. The full discussion of this is the article on the atoning Sacrifice of Jesus, to purify us of our sins.

But Allah also Does Enter Creation?

This is covered in the contradictions article. Let us examine this well-known hadith:

“Allah descends every night to the lowest heaven when one-third of the first part of the night is over and says: I am the Lord; I am the Lord: who is there to supplicate Me so that I answer him? Who is there to beg of Me so that I grant him? Who is there to beg forgiveness from Me so that I forgive him? He continues like this till the day breaks.” (Sahih Muslim 753b)

We know what the “lowest heaven” is, because it is the place that Allah adorns with the stars (Q 41:12). Thus it effectively, in modern cosmology, would represent the physical universe. To an ancient Arab, it would merely represent a dome above him, nearest to the earth that somehow held these “lamps”.

First, it does not seem likely the Qur’anic author is not aware that half the part of the earth that shroud in night is continually revolving 360⁰ around the Earth, like the visor on a bike helmet. That visor would then represent the shape of Allah himself. Thus given that it’s night somewhere on earth at every moment in time, Allah must be descended at every moment in time, he can never leave nor can he go out of orbit. In a flat-Earth perspective we do not have this problem because there is either night or day over the whole earth simultaneously.

Similarly, when Allah “turns and ascends over the throne” (Q 7:54, 13:2) at the end of creation. It seem as though Allah had descended for the purpose of creation, and therefore at the end of it requires to retrace his steps, much like what is occurring in the hadith.

Again we see in 89:22

IN CONCLUSION, for this hadith to work in a spherical earth scenario, “Allah” requires to himself be in fixed orbit around the globe. Not only does this imply a divine geocentricism “God orbiting the Earth”, it also means that God can never leave the Universe. The fact that he “descends” implies that he has abandoned the higher post, but he can never go back, because it is never not night somewhere on Earth.

Either God did not take the spherical Earth situation into consideration when descending, or more likely, as I would strongly contend, Muhammed had not considered the global day-night cycle when writing this verse.

This is not a problem in Christianity where the belief in divine omnipresence is non-controversial. As King David says in the Psalms:

Psalm 139:8 “If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”

Muslim Response:

The obvious Muslims response, would be that these are metaphorical, and it only means that Allah is more attentive to the prayers of those praying in the last third of the night, given the level of difficulty and devotion that this involves, this kind of prayer can be seen as meritorious. This metaphorical interpretation is not available to some major Islamic schools like the Atharis.

Further, my intention here is a critique of the authorship of the text. I do not get the sense either in the Qur’an nor in the hadith that anything related to Allah is intended as metaphor or non-literal. It is very obvious when Jesus is speaking in parables, however Muhammed seems to really mean it when he says things like the satans were “eavesdropping on the divine councils”, or that Allah “shot stars” at them or “ascended over the throne” following creation, phrases that are very familiar to Muslims.

Allah coming to the lowest heaven in the last third of the night”. If the helmet is the globe then the visor represents Allah in the lowest heaven rotating around the earth around its hinges at the very healthy rate of around the world every 24 hours. Obviously the speed diminishes as you go toward the poles at which positions the job is much less taxing- “it is easier for Allah” (Q 30:27). Of course it would have been easiest for Allah had the earth been flat and not rotating at all, as should be obvious.

This is the closest that Allah comes to alighting upon solid ground in the Qur’an. However the mountain crumbles when he touches it, this was an unsuccessful landing. Appatently Allah does not reveal himself to Moses, he “reveals himself to the mountain”. So the answer is still “no”, I’m saying:

“And when Moses came to Our appointed time and his Lord spoke with him, he said, ‘Oh my Lord, show me, that I may behold Thee!’ Said He, ‘Thou shalt not see Me; but behold the mountain — if it stays fast in its place, then thou shalt see Me.’ And when his Lord revealed Him to the mountain He made it crumble to dust; and Moses fell down swooning…'” (Q7:143)

There are some traditions in which Allah approaches the Earth yet never quite: “touches base”:

“Allah descends every night to the lowest heaven when one-third of the first part of the night is over and says: I am the Lord; I am the Lord: who is there to supplicate Me so that I answer him? Who is there to beg of Me so that I grant him? Who is there to beg forgiveness from Me so that I forgive him? He continues like this till the day breaks” (Muslim 758b).

Contrasting with the Biblical Vision and Presence of God

This is in stark contrast to the transcendent God of the Bible where the anthropomorphisms are obvious, or manifestations for the benefit of man, while in truth it is maintained that “no man can see God and live”  and as Moses tells the Israelites “you heard his Voice in the Fire but you did not see his Form” (Deut.14:12). Thus even when we are told that on the mountain when Moses, Aaron, Nathan, Abihu and the seventy elders “beheld God” (Ex 24:11), and that “Under his feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness.” (v.10), we can surmise that this is a vision given to them, rather than God’s true glory. The New Testament leaves us in no doubt regarding this where the transcendent God is described in words and verses that far exceed not only the Qur’an but anything that has every been written about God, whether in the words of Jesus “no one has seen God except the Son…” or in those of St. Paul “we shall see Him (God) as he is…”

Contrast with the Biblical verses that speak of being with God

The Bible, in sharp contrast is suffused with verses about the delight of being in the Presence of God which far outshine all other descriptions of the pleasures of Heaven which I quote some here. This is not even to mention the numerous Biblical verses equally beautiful that speak God dwelling with his people, about his love for his people, the glorious visions of God in his Temple…these are too many to mention here. It is staggering and hugely significant that Mohamed “corrects” these by omitting all trace of them. Again, in sharp contrast with the the Qur’an, verses about sensual enjoyments are quite hard to come by. If you want to read the verses promising sexual pleasures in the Qur’an alone, go to Is Islam Misogynistic?, and its a whole section on there.

1John 3:2 “Beloved, now are we the children of God, and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

Revelation 22:4 “They will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads.”

Revelation 1:7 “Behold he comes with clouds, and every eye shall see him.”

1Cor.13:12 “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

Exodus 33:11, also Num.12:8 – Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend.

Psalm 4:6 “Many ask, “Who can show us the good?” Shine the light of Your face upon us, O LORD.”

Psalm 5:7 “But as for me, I will come into thy house in the multitude of thy mercy: and in thy fear will I worship toward thy holy temple.

Psalm 11:7 “For the LORD is righteous; He loves justice. The upright will see His face.”

Psalm 16:11 “Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.”

“As for me, I will behold your face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with your likeness.” (Ps.17:5)

“One thing I have asked of the LORD; this is what I desire: to dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the LORD and seek Him in His temple” (Psalm 27:4)

Psalm 36:8,9 “They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house; and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures…”

Psalm 65:4 “Blessed is the man whom thou choosest, and causest to approach unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts: we shall be satisfied with the goodness of thy house, even of thy holy temple.”

Psalm 140:13 “Surely the righteous will praise Your name; the upright will dwell in Your presence.”

Job 19:26 “Even after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.”

Conclusion

These issues are always complicated when it comes to Islam, because the hadith writers, one gets the strong feeling, and there are several examples of this, are copying Christian themes in order to strengthen their own theological positions, which would be easy since Christian ideas are quite widespread in the world at this point. If we focus on the Qur’anic text primarily and what it its primary thrust, we must conclude that Janna is primarily focused upon material pleasures like a millionaires’ playground, or like the cavorting that the pagan pantheons engage in in their version of bliss. We can state this much with confidence because we do not see the sentiment of desiring to gaze upon the Face of God expressed in the text at all, as something that in itself blissful and eternally so, nor do we see the sentiment of worshipping God and ministering to him expressed.

Whether this might be pleasurable or not is up for debate (outside Christianity), however what does not seem to require debate is that Janna is just not God-focussed in the Qur’an. Further there is a very strong orthodox view that God is not really present in Heaven at all, he is above it, and this too is taken from a Qur’anic premise. Thus if there is indeed to be any sighting of God, as believers are informed in lately arriving hadith, it could not be a “presence” rather only some form of image like pie in the sky. It is quite unsurprising that this is touted as being extremely pleasurable, however the situation remains that heaven is full of competing pleasures at this point and God one of them, who is not really present and likely only available for viewing intermittently.