Two Edges of the Day

"I thought you fell off the edge of the earth" is an expression I am fond of. It couldn't be more pictorial and embodiment of its figurative meaning. Now, imagine sitting, not at the edge of the planet but, at the edge of a cliff, your legs hanging down, watching the light of the day break into the darkness... All shades of night blue, red and yellow display their glorious beauty, leaving you in awe. And the sun enters the scene, spreading bouquets of energy for the day...

And imagine sitting on the opposite side of the same cliff towards the evening. Watching the fade of the sunlight through countless tones of yellow and red, you feel the loss of a loved one, engulfed in feelings of abandonement and solitude. And the night sets all around. As if peeking at an endless ocean through the window of a ship cabin, you watch the endless heavens. The sound of the crickets bring you back to the now and here. You are alone atop a lonely cliff surrounded by nothing but darkness. Scared by the uncertainty, longing for company, you take out the Quran from your backpack, turn on your led light and read:

                I swear by the early hours of the day, And the night when it covers with darkness.
                Your Lord has not forsaken you, nor has He become displeased.
                And surely what comes after is better for you than that which has gone before.
                And soon will your Lord give you so that you shall be well pleased.
                Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter? 

                And found you lost, and guided (you)? And found you poor, and made you rich?
                So, as for the orphan, do not oppress, And as for him who asks, do not repel,
                And as for the favor of your Lord, do announce.
                                                                                                                                Chapter 93

With a careful look, the triplets in this chapter and the correspondance among them draw your attention:

First triplet: 

- Your Lord has not forsaken you, nor has He become displeased.

- And surely what comes after is better for you than that which has gone before.
- And soon will your Lord give you so that you shall be well pleased.

Second triplet:

+ Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter?
+ And found you lost, and guided (you)? 

+ And found you poor, and made you rich?

Third triplet:

* So, as for the orphan, do not oppress, 

* And as for him who asks, do not repel,
* And as for the favor of your Lord, do announce.

It is interesting that the first lines of these triplets can be combined into a different group. The same can be done for the second and the third lines. As you will see, although the main addressee in these verses is the prophet Muhammad, the underlying lessons can be generalized.

First combination:

- Your Lord has not forsaken you, nor has He become displeased.

+ Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter?

* So, as for the orphan, do not oppress, 

This first combination of verses is about the psychology of an orphan and how to treat them. However, God is not just telling His messenger what to do, but also reminding the way He treated Muhammad pbuh when he was still an orphan child. To grasp the lesson here, it is necessary to remember a few things. An orphan is someone who, in their babyhood or childhood, lost either of the parents or both of them. So, mentally and psychologically, the notion of a stable home and a safe ground is absent in their world. To avoid the feeling of not having a safe ground, they have a subconscious urge to make themselves loved. They are more likely to blame themselves for the things that don't work in a friendship or in the family life. For a person of such sensitivity, even the silence of a close person can be worrisome or even devastating, although the same situation may not mean anything to other people. So, one has to be more careful when dealing with the orphans. 

Second combination:

- And surely what comes after is better for you than that which has gone before.

+ And found you lost, and guided (you)? 

* And as for him who asks, do not repel,

This second combination of verses is about someone who is in search of truth and a safe ground. The more you search after the truth the closer you get to it; or perhaps the broader is your comprehension of the great truth in your existence and in the existence of the universe. This quest takes you through life experiences with many people. You ask them, you share with them, you discuss with them. Not too many of these people, though, are apt to this quest. So, you may feel thrown here and there in your journey to truth. But in the end, when you look back, you feel wholeheartedly that it was all worth it. With this lesson in your mind, if someone who is in search of truth comes to you, treat them in the best manner possible, for you have been treated by your Lord in the best way possible in your own search for truth.

Third combination:

- And soon will your Lord give you so that you shall be well pleased.

+ And found you poor, and made you rich?

* And as for the favor of your Lord, do announce.

In this last combination, we see someone who is needy and is in search of the means to meet those needs. Being needy and staying so for a long time impacts a person not only physically but also psychologically. There are two ways to look at this. 

For the first, imagine yourself fasting on hot, long summer days. You feel a hunger and a thirst that feels unquenchable. But, when the time to break the fast comes, you quickly feel satisfied. Similarly, in these verses, the All Wise Creator reminds us that our needs that may seem mountainous, but they are not really so. The Devil, however, pushes us to the opposite conviction so as to cause deviation in our actions. So, it is essential to keep in mind that our needs are important and essential for us, but the extent and magnitude of our needs are not as large as we feel.

For the second perspective, just look at these verses as they are. God tells that He is going to give so abundantly so that you are going to be well pleased. As a proof, He tells His grace in the past. So, clearly and most certainly, He is going to do it again. And when that day comes, He wants you to do what you naturally would do: announce your happiness to everybody. After so much time of poverty and uncertainty, when you find abundance and safety, you feel joy and happiness to the smallest bit of your existence, and you feel like telling about it. In this joy, it is important not to forget the fact that it is God who gave you those means. So, you should tell about His grace and wisdom, and you should help others so that they can also feel the same experience and see God's grace.

In all these three situations, whether you want to survive the crushing weight of time or you want to empathize with the others or you just want to contemplate the journey you had in you life, watching the sunrise and the sunset in solitude can be helpful by virtue of the feelings they evoke in the spirit. 

All Your Fault - 3

Allah tells in the Quran that if this had been the word of someone other than Him, there would be discrepancies in it (4/82). This statement is at the same time a criterion for extracting meanings from the Quran that are not explicitly mentioned in it. That is, anything you claim in the name of God must be consistent with the entirety of the Quran. Only by looking at a single verse and claiming something based on that is not enough to authenticate that meaning. Worse, without looking at any Quranic verse and claiming something in the name of God just because it sounds logical or because it is how it should be in your opinion is completely baseless. So, trying to resolve a complication must involve ideas that are consistent with the entirety of the Quran.

Coming to our issue about who to blame for all the evils befalling a person, telling spiritual words and escaping rational inquiry is unacceptable, because in nowhere Allah approves of such practice. On the contrary, He constantly  invites both the believers and the disbelievers to think rationally. Accordingly, what is done in the second episode is finding an explanation to the verse 4/79 that is consistent with the entirety of the Quran and is compatible with the reason and heart. Once this basis is established, the four explanations that are provided in the first episode can be used as supplementary comments on the issue. 

The conclusion we arrived at about 4/79 was that all events can be perceived as good, if the subject person can see the hand of God or feel His company throughout the events. And this perception of good is through God. Once that tie is severed or if seeing the hand of God or feeling His company is difficult for the person, than an atmosphere of solitude settles on the psyche of the individual, which multiplies the burden; and this state is from the self. As you see, according to this interpretation, there is no blame on the individual about the evils ailing them. However, they are alerted about the different perspectives, which have the potential to burden them psychologically, and are invited to the ones related to God. 

This change of perspective, it should be noted, may not be that easy, though. The intensity of the situation and the emergency of the needs may hinder rational approaches. This is why the believers are described as those who suggest each other the truth and patience (3/200, 103/3). This kind of mutual support has the dimension of spirituality in it, which can fill in the time gap necessary to calm down and rationalize the events.

The last point we left the discussion was that why the Islamic scholars could not, or did not, think about this solution, when it is not that revolutionary or novel. To see this, we are going to compare the two readings of the same verse, i.e. the classical one and the one presented in this series.

According to the classical reading, as God is talking to the prophet, He suddenly interrupts the talk and tells a word of wisdom, which is "anything good is from Him, anything bad is from the self". Then, God continues His talk with the prophet. About this, the scholars say that, it cannot be the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) who is blamed of mistakes, because he is the messenger of God, and is supported by God in his actions. Furthermore, if the prophet is faulty in some of his deeds or interactions with people, then this becomes a flaw in the representation of the divine mission. If the teacher is faulty, how can you expect the students to be perfect? Accordingly, it doesn't make sense that God addresses the prophet Muhammad in this verse, where He exclusively connects the mistakes of a person and the evils befalling them. Then, God must be giving his messenger a lesson to be conveyed to every single person: your mistakes are the root cause of the misfortunes troubling you. And this message is not an announcement to a group of people. It is an individual address, where the second singular person is used. 

Now let's see the meaning of 4/79 through the perspective we formed in the previous episode. Since in the previous verse, God explicitly tells that all that is good or evil in our perspective comes from Him, this verse must be talking about how we perceive things. Therefore, the intention here is not to burden someone with the responsibility of evils befalling them. Rather, the attention is drawn to the role of self in how we perceive things. And so, God admonishes us to look at life events through His light so that we can see the goodness. This reminder is done in the second singular person to the prophet Muhammad, because he, too, is a human being and he is also subject all human conditions including the psychological and neurological aspects. So, he, too, must be reminded of this fact so that he can become a perfect role model for the people. After all, a messenger who is not subject to the same challenges as his people could not become a true example and teacher. The fact that God addresses in this verse individually is a way of saying "look at me! you are not alone here and I am with you; focus on your duty and never mind what is not in your hand but is in my hand."

If you compare the two interpretations, first of all, we saw that the first one leads to a discrepancy (first episode) but the second doesn't (second episode). Beyond that, the first one, which is the classical interpretation by the scholars, portray a figure of Muhammad that is free of humanly weaknesses. He is described as a perfect being, free of mistakes. The second interpretation, on the other hand, considers the prophet Muhammad as a human being with all the associated weaknesses and challenges. Accordingly, unless he is explicitly informed by God about something or supported through a special treatment, prophet Muhammad can exhibit the same states any other human can, such as happened when his wife Khadijah died or towards the end of the battle of Uhud.

The second observation above is a red line for the scholars. When the discussion is about whether the prophet is human-like or god-like, the scholars clearly take the position on the human side. But when you follow logically through this, they start perfecting the prophet so much so that he becomes super-human. That is, the messengers of God are flawless and perfect individuals so that they can be excellent examples to the people. Otherwise, if the messengers have mistakes and weaknesses, their messengership would become flawed and the disbelievers would have an excuse not to believe. As a side note, this is the same reason that some scholars reject the fact that Moses (pbuh) had a speaking defect; but this is not the topic here. In short, the underlying reason for the classical interpretation of 4/79 is the scholars' axiom of perfection regarding the messengers of God.   

Just to remind, the understanding proposed in this series does not necessarily say that the prophet is making mistakes that cause troubles for him later; rather,  it says that the prophet's perception of events and the subsequent emotional states can become a challenge for him, regardless of him having done any mistake. So, this discussion is not really about a prophet who has his own mistakes, but who must monitor the way he considers the life events. 

Of course, when you put it this way, you may hear sharp criticism from the scholars to defend their position, and they list cases from the Quran where God criticizes the prophets for their mistakes, including Muhammad (pbuh). But when you want to progress on that fact, the scholars return to their classical discourse: "the mistakes of the prophets are mistakes for their level, but not like what we consider as mistake for ourselves. Their mistakes would be virtuous acts for us. So, you cannot really build a conclusion on their being mistaken. Such effort itself would be a mistake." Why are they so sensitive on the issue? What aren't they comfortable with a messenger figure who is not necessarily as perfect as they think? After all, mistake-free messengers cannot be perfect examples for the mistake-prone people. Why is it so hard to accept the fact that the messengers have their own humanly weaknesses and challenges, unless supported by a divine intervention?

Here are a few ideas I have as an answer. One, when you open the door to accepting the prophet as a human being like us, then some can proceed to producing no matter what about the prophet, thereby unjustly undermining the foundaitons of faith. In order to avoid such baseless and disrespectful actions, the scholars may have chosen to elevate the prophet's status.

Another reason for perfecting the prophet could be the interaction with the members of the other faiths where the messenger has already been perfected above human levels. For example, if you are in a psychology to compete with a Christian, for who Jesus is a divine figure free of mistakes and deficiencies, how can you do so with the figure of a prophet who is only human? But this mindset is clearly misguided.

Last but not the least, when the Islamic scholars were building a body of jurisdiction that deals with virtually all aspects of life, they needed a hierarchy of knowledge. In this hierarcy, Quran was at the top, naturally. Second in the line was the prophet Muhammad, again naturally. So, in order to defend a jurisdiction on the status of a given action, you need unshakeable grounds. So, bringing the actions of the prophet to question by virtue of being a human does not serve to that end. But of course, this kind of tendency emerged after some time following the death of the prophet, when the mentioned efforts became most prevalent.

God knows best.

LINKS FOR FURTHER READING:

Chosen from among us Humans

Adjusting your Voice

Peace on the Messenger

Theory of Everything in the Quran

Not Before You My Dear

To Praise or not to Praise the Messenger

First Believers to the Prophets