What If We Have Doubts on Quran?
You claim that the Quran never contradicts itself. Well, consider the following.
My well-educated friend resumed his arguments:
The verse: ‘Let him who will, believe in it, him who will deny it’ (The Cave, 29) is contradicted by another: ‘Yet you cannot will except by the Will of God’ (Man, 30). The Quran says that guilty men will be questioned on Judgment Day:
“That which they assert will be taken down. They shall be questioned.” Ornament, 19
“It is an admonition to you and to your people. You shall be questioned all.” Ornament, 44
Yet, elsewhere it has this to say:
“The wrong-doers shall not be questioned about their sins.” The Story, 78
The wrong-doers, according to the Quran, will be known by their looks, and ‘they shall be seized by their forelocks and their feet’. The Merciful, 41
At one place, the Quran makes it known that on the Day of Judgment, no one will bind the guilty for punishment:
“No one will be bound as he will bind.” The Dawn, 26
According to my understanding, this means that every evil-doer will undertake his punishment. The Quran says: ‘Your own soul shall on this Day call you to account.’ The Night Journey, 14
In another place, however, we find this verse: “then fasten him with a chain seventy cubits long.” The Inevitable, 32
I began to counter his doubts:
What you have pointed out are not contradictions. Let us examine them together. ‘Let him who will, believe in it, and who will deny it’ is an unambiguous verse indicating man’s freedom of choice. ‘This freedom, however, was not forcibly won from God. He gave it to us out of His own Will. This fact is pointed out in the second verse you quoted: ‘Yet, you cannot will, except by the Will of God.’
Man’s freedom falls within and not against God’s Will. It can be exercised in a manner that contradicts what pleases God — as when we choose to disbelieve — but it cannot go against His Will. It is always exercised within that Will even if it contravened divine pleasure. This is a very fine point that we tackled in our discussion of free Will and predestination. We said there that predestination by God is the same as the freedom of the human Will, for God destines man to that which exactly corresponds to the content of his intention and heart. This means that He wants for man what man intentionally and freely wants for himself. Man is predestined to what he has voluntarily chosen. There is no compulsion, duality, or contradiction in this.
Predestination is free Will. This is indeed, one of the most difficult points in any attempt to solve the riddle of predestination and freedom of the Will. What you describe as a contradiction is, ironically, the unraveling of this mystery.
As for the verses about the judgment of evil-doers, each one of them concerns a different group of persons. Some will be questioned and their testimony heard; others, whose myriad sins show on their faces, will be known by their looks and seized by their forelocks and feet. There will also be the hardened disbelievers against whom their own hands and feet will testify:
“On that Day we shall seal their mouths. Their hands will speak, and their very feet will testify to their misdeeds.’’ Ya-Sin, 65
Certain wrong-doers will call their own souls to account for tormenting them with sorrowful regrets and chastening them with grief. Those will be the ones whom no one binds but themselves. There will be, finally, those master criminals and tyrants who will even go to the extent of lying to God as they are brought before him and swear falsely in that dire situation:
“On the Day when God restores them all to life, they will swear to Him as they now swear to you, and they will fancy that they have some standing. Surely they are the liars.” She That Disputeth, 18
It is this group that will be put in long chains and dragged to Hell with the faces of its members looking shamefully down.
It may be added here that Abu Hamed el-Ghazali interprets the chains spoken of in the Quran as the ‘chains of causes’ on which the criminals relied instead of God.
My friend proceeded to ask me again: I would like to know your view on that ‘Divine Knowledge’ mentioned in such verses as the following :
“God alone has knowledge of the Hour of Doom. He sends down the rain and knows what every womb conceals. No mortal knows what he will earn tomorrow, no mortal knows where he will die.” Loqman, 34
The Quran affirms that such knowledge is God’s alone and is not given to anyone else: ‘He has the keys of all that is hidden. None knows them but He.’ (Cattle, 59). Yet, any physician nowadays can know not only what is hidden in every womb but also whether that embryo is male or female.
Scientists, moreover, are able to send down ‘artificial rain’ by certain chemical processes.
The Quran, I replied, did not mention ‘rain’ — as you allude in your last remark — but ‘gaith’ or a heavy, intense flood of rain that is sufficient to change the condition of an entire nation and save it by transforming its barrenness to fertility and prosperity (hence the Arabic ‘gaith’ which literally means ‘that which rescues’). Any scientific process cannot bring down rain in such profusions.
On the other hand, God’s knowledge of what is concealed in wombs is a total, comprehensive prescience and is not merely limited to the future baby’s sex. It is the knowledge that concerns the destiny of that new creature, what he or she will be, what he or she will do in the world, and what his or her history from birth to death will be like. This, certainly, is knowledge beyond the scope of any physician.
My friend resumed his questioning: What about that ‘Chair of God’ which, you say, is vast enough to contain or comprehend the heavens and the earth? And what about ‘God’s Throne’ which, according to your description, is ‘carried by eight’?
Your own mind, my friend, an insignificant human as you are in comparison to the universe, can comprehend the heavens and the earth. How can you, then, imagine that God’s Chair will be incapable of containing them? The earth, the sun, the planets, the stars, and the galaxies are ‘carried’ in space by God’s Power; how can you find it strange, therefore, that the Throne is described as being ‘carried’.
What is, then, the Chair and the Throne?
Tell me what the electron is and then I shall tell you what the Chair is. Tell me what is electricity, what is gravity, what is time? In fact, you are not entitled to ask me about the nature of God’s Chair or Throne because you do not know the essence of any single thing. The world is full of mysteries and those two belong to them.
Very well, I wish you can so skilfully argue for the Quran’s story about the ant that talked to warn off the rest of her race from the coming of Solomon’s army:
“an ant said to her sisters: ‘Go into your dwellings, ants, lest Solomon and his warriors should crush you without knowing it.” The Ant, 18
If you had read even a little in entomology, you would not have asked about this phenomenon. Entomology literally teems with elaborate studies of ant and bee ‘languages’. That the ants have a language is now a certain fact. It would have been impossible to distribute functions in a cell comprising hundreds of thousands of ants, to organize them, and to propagate orders and instructions among that huge mass without a means of communication or a language. There is nothing contradictory in that an ant recognized Solomon.
Didn’t Man know the existence of God?
Let me further enquire how is it possible that God wipes out what is written in His Tablet of Fate? It is said in the Quran: ‘God confirms or abrogates what He pleases. His is the Eternal Book’. (Thunder, 39) Can your God make mistakes just as we do in our arithmetic calculations and go about blotting out and confirming? Or is it that He corrects himself as we, poor humans, do?
God abrogates misdeeds by inspiring man with good actions. He says in His Book: ‘Good deeds make amends for sins.’ (Houd, 114). This is why he describes His good servants thus: “and We enjoined on them charity, prayer, and almsgiving.” The Prophets, 73
In this way, we can understand how God abrogates without really blotting out in the bungling sense you implied.
What do you say about this verse: ‘I created mankind and the Jinn so that they might worship me.’ (The Winds, 56)? Is the Almighty in such dire need of our worship?
On the contrary, we are the ones who desperately need to worship him. I ask you, do you adore beautiful women under orders? Don’t you find a particular pleasure in such love?
Aren’t you transported into ecstasies when you taste your beloved’s beauty? It is thus with God who is more Beautiful than any beautiful being we know or can imagine. If you knew His Majesty, Beauty, and Exaltedness, you would worship him, finding in such reverence the zenith of elation and ecstasy.
Worship, as we see it, can only be based on knowledge.
God can only be worshipped by being known. Knowledge of God is the end of all kinds of knowledge and the crowning of a long line of ‘knowing’ that starts from birth. After he is born, the first thing a baby knows is his mother’s breast; it is his first pleasure. The child, then, gets acquainted with his parents, his family, his community, and his environment. He starts to exploit that environment for his use, turning it into another new ‘breast’ supplying him with wealth, riches, and pleasures. He extracts gold and diamonds from the earth, pearls from the sea, fruits from nature. Such is his second source of pleasure in life after his mother’s breast.
He then moves from knowing his earthly environment to explore the heavens. He sets foot on the moon and launches his probes to Mars in a journey to the unknown, thus enjoying an even more intense pleasure: that of discovering the universe itself.
That ‘navigator’ into space turns, however, to ask himself, “Who am I that I have come to know all this?”
He thus starts a new journey of knowledge with himself as a target this time. He sets out to know himself, controls his capacities, and exercises them for his good and the benefit of others. This is the third kind of pleasure.
Following that, the summit of knowledge after acquaintance with the self is knowledge of God who created that self. With this final sort of knowledge, Man reaches the culmination of happiness for he comes to meet the Perfect, the Transcendent, the truly Beautiful above any beauty.
This is the pilgrimage of the worshippers to the worshipped on the road of reverence. It is all happiness. If there are hardships in life, it is because pricks must bleed the fingers of the rose pluckers. He who aspires to the summits of the infinite must toil to attain them. More great and wonderful is the attainment by the worshipper to the knowledge of his God and the falling of the veils from his eyes. The mystic, clothed in rags, says, ‘we live in such bliss that kings would fight us with swords for it if they but know how it is.’
This is the sweetness of sincere worship; it is the worshippers’ share. But God is in no need of such worship or of the entire creation. We do not adore him because we are urged to do so but because we know His Beauty and Grandeur.
We do not find humiliation or subjection in worshipping Him but liberation and honor. We are liberated from all the enslavements of the world, from desires, appetites, ambitions, and money. As we come to fear God, we are no longer frightened by anyone else and we cower before no creature. Fear of God is courage, worshipping Him is freedom, humility before Him is dignity, and knowing Him is a certainty.
Such is the nature of worship. We harvest its profits and pleasures. God is in no need of anything. He created us so that He may give and not take from us. He created us to invest us with some of his perfections. He is the All-Hearing and the All-Seeing, and He gave us hearing and sight. He is the All-Knowing and the All-Cognizant, and He gave us the mind to take from His Knowledge and the senses to take from His Cognizance.
In a Divine Utterance, God says to His favored servant:
“My creature, obey me and I shall make you divinely-aided saying to a thing ‘Be’ and it becomes.”
Wasn’t that what occurred to Jesus, peace be upon him? He resurrected the dead, created clay birds that came to life, and healed the blind and the leper — all by God’s permission and aid.
Slavery to God, then, is the exact opposite of enslavement in the human sense. In the latter, it means that the master exploits the slave’s powers. In the former, however, it is quite the contrary: it is the Master who bestows endless gifts on His slave and invests him with infinite perfections.
When God says, ‘I created mankind and the Jinn so that they might worship me’, this means in reality that HE created men and Jinn only to grant and bestow on them love, goodness, dignity, and honor and to invest them with glory and vicegerency on earth.
The Lord God, the Absolute, has no need whatsoever for our worship. We need such worship and all the boundless honor, goodness, and gifts it confers.
He, of His Grace, permitted us to stand before His Presence at any time we wish without any previous appointment. He allowed us to stay in His presence as long as we desire and to call on Him as much as we can. This is realized as soon as we spread the prayer mat and open our prayer-s with Allahu Akbar (God is Greater). We are, then, in His presence and can ask Him what we like.
Show me any king into whose chamber we can enter without previous notice and stay in his audience as long as we wish.
It is honor sufficient for me that I am a creature Welcomed without dates by my Master. Exalted He is in His Glorious Holiness, But I meet Him whenever I like.
‘Do you think that an artifact which is presented to its maker five times a day for inspection can malfunction?’ He is referring, of course, to the five daily prayers.
These are but few, deep meanings of that verse that aroused your doubts:
“I created mankind and the Jinn in order that they might worship me.”
If you contemplated it carefully, it would have only aroused amazement and wonder in you.