Just Waiting

Within the past year, one of my husband’s co-workers came up to him jocularly and held up five fingers. Ticking off each finger, he took inventory of my husband’s status. “Well my boy, you’ve got a job, you’ve got a wife, you’ve got a house, you’ve got a dog…” With a loaded silence and stare he then tapped the remaining finger. Well, he can now tap that finger off too, for I am pregnant. At this point, I am very pregnant, with a due date around Easter. The situation is a simultaneous surprise and long-anticipated event. Indeed, it is a surprise precisely because it has been long-anticipated.

I have always been one to shy away from rigid, long-term commitments in expectation of this change. I grew up in the gravitational well of American evangelical fundamentalism and have been told what to expect. But I don’t agree with all I was told, and I don’t know what to expect. As I try to get some vision on what my future might look like, I have to also wrestle with my patterns of hesitancy and acquiescence, and my disagreements with some contexts of my upbringing that will soon have to be proven through application.

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Surah 43: The Golden Ornaments

Does God lead through action, or inaction? How does He direct people? That is a question at the heart of the conflict between the pagans and Muhammad in this surah. The pagans have a way of life that has been formed and tested through survival in the harsh peninsula. They’ve learned their way of life through the lessons and lives of survivors, and worship the gods that they believe have aided in that survival. And of the Arabs, the Quraysh not only survived, but thrived. Isn’t the fact of this success a sign that God approves of them? Wouldn’t a moral God operating a moral world have warned them off bad ideas with bad results, rather than the success they’ve come into? Meanwhile, Muhammad is telling them to abandon these proven traditions. Their success doesn’t mean anything, the Quran insists, and it is not a sign of God’s approval. The Quran’s view is of a God who is active in guiding His people, who sends prophets and scriptures, and does not just let men feel out truth through trial and error. And if you don’t feel God’s punishment Today then that is a mercy, for you’ll get your punishment Tomorrow.

This surah is a little bit longer than the last, but take a read.

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Modest Mystique

“What I looked for in a wife,” as told by a grown man to a group of young teenage girls. There is something rather wince worthy about having older men tell young girls what qualities they should adopt to be attractive in his eyes, but I’m afraid as a young Christian teenage girl, one is rather inundated with such speeches. And while some points about maintaining one’s female attractiveness are rather self-serving for men to preach, I will defend that four out of every five points are usually universal human values. Good work ethic, a habit of self-care, cleanliness, empathy for other people –qualities that are universally good whether applied to a man or woman. And in some sense it’s a practical strategy to try and harness a teenage girl’s excitement for romance to motivate them towards thoughtful self-improvement. Surely there are better ways of doing that than having a grown man teach it to them, but it’s what happens.

There was one man whose version of this lecture I heard many times. I didn’t mind it so much from him, because of his list of ten things, nine were of that general good character type. But then, at the very end, was his last point: that she must be mysterious.

Mysterious? Since when was mystery a virtue?

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Surah 24: The Light, Part 2

So last surah I looked at the laws dealing with extra-marital marriage and prosecution of adultery. These two sections of the surah were not only contained in a close space to each other, but were obviously related to specific historical events involving the community of believers. Beyond that first section of surah there are still many more moral commands to be described. They seem much more general and sedate than the first material, though perhaps one could argue that they are still related to the topic. Having forbidden extra-marital sex, categorized it as legally punishable, and declared its practitioners to be outside the community, the surah does still have a few comments related to marriage in the community. Then there are also some rules concerning personal boundaries like the domestic privacy rights and the proper modes of dress.

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There is in the middle of all this a sermon on light and darkness, and a final set of commands about honoring Muhammad, but I’m going to make that its own post next week. Today, we are just going to finish looking at these more personal obligations, seeing where they hold up to their claims of clarity and what sort of society they anticipate creating.

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Surah 19: Mary, Part 1

Christian Advent is upon us! For those of us who observe the rituals of advent, it is a season of reading the messianic prophecies and the stories of Jesus’ birth. The season mostly draws from Luke’s version of the Nativity, which focuses on Elizabeth/Zechariah and Mary. How perfect could the timing be that just as I’m celebrating the Christian Advent season, I’m also reading Ṣurat Maryam? We have met the Quran’s versions of Zechariah and Mary before in Surah 3: Family of Imran. That surah covered the origin story of Mary and John the Baptist, but jumped clear over all parts of the Nativity by skipping from the annunciation to Jesus’ assumption. Today’s surah will cover, amongst other things, the Nativity.

File:García del Barco - Triptych of the Nativity - Google Art Project.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
…but not this.
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