Tag: muhammad

Surah 33: The Militia, Part 4

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What’s a prophet to do? Muhammad’s success is catching up to him. Everyone wants to watch him in order to imitate him. Everyone wants to watch him in order to criticize him. And that “everyone” is growing more and more as his mission draws converts, and his commands to emmigrate bring them close. His totalitarian reach is also catching up to him. Access to God means that everyone has a question for him. His centralized power makes him a target for challenge and usurpation. His increasing command of wealth and military are attracting pretenders.

And he has a growing number of pretty wives.

So what’s a prophet to do? Set up walls, screens, and veils. Ensure the privacy and exclusivity of Muhammad and Muhammad’s. This week we’re closing out this surah with the ayat that seek to protect Muhammad’s privacy primarily as concerns the outlets of his wives.

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Surah 33: The Militia, Part 3

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Quite a number of hadith exist to try and pin down the revelation of a specific ayah or surah to a distinct occasion within Muhammad’s biography. Often not much gets added by this, and indeed sometimes the connection of the circumstance to the ayah is laughable. But there is a circumstance behind the revelation of Surah al-Aḥzab, “The Militia,” and not one that you need to go to the hadith to find. Muhammad has married his adopted son’s ex-wife. This is a completed event, something that has already happened, and the Quran is now speaking up on the issues raised by the marriage. We have already dealt with how this surah has redefined relationships of adoption and incest. Today we’ll look at the event itself.

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Surah 33: The Militia, Part 1

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There is a lot of history behind today’s surah, al-Aḥzaab, “The Confederates” or “The Militia.” When a surah dates to the times of Mecca, despite the twelve-year range of Muhammad’s ministry in that city, there are fewer events to map Quranic statements to. When Muhammad transplanted his ministry to the next city north, Yathrib, life picked up its pace and lots of activity unfolded. (It’s really important that you remember Yathrib and Medina are different names for the same city.) Muhammad went from a preacher whose only power was in words, to the absolute head of a political state. The morality he preached shifted from general values of humility and charity to specific legalities and situational edicts. The God-wrought justice he preached grew to include to some more immediate, earthly, man-wrought justice. The contrast is even echoed in his family life: he went from the nuclear family of a monogamous marriage to a rather complicated set of polygamous relationships.

Within today’s surah we get a pie-slice of some of the most polarizing facets of Muhammad’s life: his preaching on hypocrites, his treatment of his enemies, his personal exceptionalism, his women, his expectations of Muslim women, his consolidation of absolute power. I’ve rather been dreading this surah, so buckle in for 73 ayat of controversy.

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Surah 24: The Light, Part 3

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“The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it,”

Gospel according to John 1:5

I imagine light is an obvious metaphor for religions to employ. Maybe it isn’t, maybe my world is just too inundated with Christianity and Star Wars for me to not assume that everyone gets “light” as a symbol for goodness, awareness, and hope. In Islam, light is also a big symbol, and one we haven’t yet stopped to examine. The name of this surah is an-nuur, “The Light,” and within its content it gives a little sermon that visualizes God as a light and light-giver. For a religion that has stayed so successfully aniconic as Islam, it is almost radical to have a sermon that visualizes God as anything. So today let’s close out this surah’s material by examining its sermon about God as a light, and what life is like without that light, with closing words about some final material concerning the peoples’ obligations towards Muhammad.

unsplash-logoAmna Akram
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Surah 21: The Prophets, Part 1

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A frustrating thing about Arabic is its plurals. English has a few words that change radically from their singular to plural forms: mouse to mice, loaf to loaves, tooth to teeth. In Arabic, about 41% of the mainstream nouns change radically to become plural (and adjectives do this too, wah!). The word for “prophet” in Arabic is nabii, but to become plural it becomes anbiyaa’. And that’s the title of today’s surah: The Prophets.

Who are the prophets? You might laugh that we are asking that at this point in the Quran, which has spent so much time listing and describing and enjoining and praising and validating the prophets. Yet here we are again, meeting the prophets. As usual it is in the context of establishing Muhammad as the latest iteration of a legacy of God reaching out to mankind. There is an economy of message in returning to this topic today. With a sweeping look at the prophetic line, the surah is able to reprove multiple points in its opponents’ theologies, assert its own theology, and set up its lore of inspirational figures.

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