From the Narrow Desert: Islam

Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts

Sunday, April 2, 2023

The Quran as a synthesis of Old and New Testament ideas

Islam seems so Old Testament sometimes, that it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking it is essentially a 7th-century revival of the religion of Moses and Joshua, a throwback to pre-Christian (and pre-Talmudic) times. In fact, though, some of the central concepts of Islam are distinctively Christian rather than Mosaic. Here I want to look at some of the main Old and New Testament currents in the thought of the Quran. I refer to books of scripture rather than to religions because both Christianity and Islam have long histories and many sects, embracing a variety of ideas and emphases. I will also be looking only at central concepts, not surface-level details like circumcision and not eating pork. As a final caveat, I should note that I haven't actually read the Quran in nearly 15 years and will be going by memory here.

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Old Testament ideas in the Quran

1. Monoloatry. The exclusive worship of one God is the primary religious duty. Idolatry and the worship of other gods are the primary sins. This is absolutely central to both the Old Testament and the Quran but is not mentioned at all in any of the Gospels. It became an issue again when Paul took Christianity to the Greeks and Romans, but Paul clearly got it from the Old Testament, not from anything that Jesus taught.

2. Theocracy. God's law is to be enforced, and those who offend him are to be punished, typically with either exile or death. Living under Sharia would be very similar to living under the Mosaic theocracy. Jesus, though, even though as the Messiah he was expected to reestablish a theocracy, explicitly refused to do so. Later Christian history would feature such things as the Inquisition, of course, but this does not come from the New Testament.

3. Jihad. God's people are literally at war with those who serve other gods and should try to exterminate them and their religion. This is central to the Torah and the Deuteronomistic History, and of course to the Quran as well. The jihad concept is largely absent from the New Testament, except as an occasional metaphor, and Jesus sometimes taught the direct opposite: resist not evil, turn the other cheek, etc.

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New Testament ideas in the Quran

1. Belief. Of course everyone with a religious message hopes that that message will be believed, but the New Testament and Quran stand out for their extreme emphasis on the moral duty to believe in God and his messengers. The Gospel of John alone uses the word believe twice as many times as the entire Old Testament and says "This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent." The Quran constantly inveighs against "those who take God's messengers for liars." The Old Testament, for all its holy wars, contains not a single reference to "unbelievers" or "infidels"; rather, the enemy are the uncircumcised.

2. Heaven and hell. There is no real afterlife in the Old Testament -- only sheol, which seems sometimes to be something like the Homeric afterlife (an undifferentiated realm of half-conscious shades) and sometimes just a name for "the grave." God's rewards and punishments were expected to come in this life -- either one's own life or that of his descendants. Heaven and hell were introduced by Jesus and are a major theme of the Quran as well. (The Quranic paradise has often been characterized as crudely materialistic -- "gardens beneath which rivers flow" -- but I'm not sure that is fair. Christians have used similar metaphors to describe Heaven, and there is no obvious reason to assume Muhammad was being literal.)

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The central synthesis

The fundamental Islamic credo -- "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet" -- neatly encapsulates the synthesis of Old and New Testament ideas. For Moses, the central religious duty is to worship one God exclusively. For Jesus, it is to believe in God and his messengers. For Muhammad, these are combined into a duty to believe in one God exclusively -- to deny the existence of any other gods -- and to believe in his messenger.

Of course, modern Christianity attempts, like Islam, to embrace both the Old and the New Testaments, and this has often led to a very Islam-like stance: that one's duty is to believe and obey human religious authorities and deny the existence of all gods but one.

Thursday, March 23, 2023

Aladdin's three elder brothers

One of my very young students told me this untranslatable Chinese joke today:

Q: 我問你，阿拉丁有幾個哥哥？
A: 三個：阿拉甲、阿拉乙、阿拉丙。

Q: Let me ask you, how many elder brothers does Aladdin have?
A: Three: Alajia, Alayi, and Alabing.

The joke is that Aladdin is transliterated as 阿拉丁 (ālādīng). Some of you might recognize that last character from my February 21 post "Tintin T. rex, Timey-wimey T. rex, . . . collect them all!":

Belgian comic-book character Tintin is called 丁丁 in Chinese.

Tin is not a possible syllable in Chinese, and Ting sounds like a girl's name, so the best they could do was Ding-ding. You know, like a bell. A tin bell. Like a tinker would make.

The character 丁 is the fourth Celestial Stem, and as such is used to translate the letter D when used in an ordinal sense -- that is, when A, B, C, and D are used in the sense of "one, two, three, four," as in an outline or on a multiple-choice test. For example, Serie D football is rendered 丁級 in Chinese. So if you wanted to go Backstroke of the West on poor Tintin and translate his Chinese translation back into English, he'd be called DD.

As you have probably guessed by now, the first three Celestial Stems are 甲 (jiǎ), 乙 (yǐ), and 丙 (bǐng) -- the final characters in the names of Aladdin's three elder brothers. By coincidence, the first part of Aladdin's Chinese name is 阿拉, which is also how the divine name Allah is transliterated. So Aladdin sounds like Allah-D in Chinese, and his three brothers are Allah-A, Allah-B, and Allah-C.

This calls to mind the Satanic Verses -- no, not the Salman Rushdie novel which occasioned the St. Valentine's Day fatwa, but the verses themselves: a false revelation given to Muhammad by Satan, in which it was implied that there were three divine beings in addition to Allah -- although in this case they would be sisters rather than brothers: the pre-Islamic Arabian goddesses al-Lat, al-'Uzza, and Manat.

Or: God-A, God-B, God-C, and God-D -- Allah, Brahman, Christ, and Zeus? God-B also makes me think of William S. Godbe (1833-1902), the Mormon schismatic who founded a Spiritualist-influenced sect and tried to make contact with Joseph Smith and others through séances.

Anyway, I mention the joke here because it syncs with my recent Tintin post -- both focusing on the use of 丁 both as the equivalent of D and as an element in transliterated foreign names. We'll see if the sync fairies decide to go anywhere with it.

Monday, January 17, 2022

Five cornerstones

I recently received another batch of emails from a correspondent who keeps encountering repetitions of the number 5 (55, 555, etc.). This made me think of the Five Pillars of Islam, one of which is praying five times a day. Looking this up led to the discovery that, despite the universal translation pillars, the literal meaning of the first word in the expression arkān al-Islām is "corners" or "cornerstones." Well, one can see why the translation has been fudged! A building can be supported by any number of pillars, but cornerstones by their very nature come in sets of four, not five. What kind of structure would have five cornerstones? A pentagonal one -- or a pyramid.

I decided the pyramid was the best way of conceptualizing the Five Cornerstones of Islam: four on the ground, with the fifth -- or, rather, the first, "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet" -- at the apex. I wondered, though, if the Benben stone at the top of a pyramid could really properly be called a cornerstone.

Since I've been on a Tarot kick recently (oh, there's a new post up about the Visconti-Sforza Emperor cards), I also of course noticed the coincidental similarity of arkān, "cornerstones," to the Tarot term arcana, "secrets, mysteries." I realized that the Tarot also has a five-fold structure, with the four Minor Arcana suits (derived from cards used by the Muslim Mamluks) corresponding to the four lower cornerstones of the pyramid, and the Major Arcana to to the capstone.

I have been slowly reading Fundamental Symbols, a collection of René Guénon essays translated into English. Just a day after looking up the Five Pillars of Islam and having the thoughts described above, I turned the page in this book and found that the next essay was called "The Cornerstone." Guénon takes the text "The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner" (Ps. 118:22, Matt. 21:42, Mark 12:10, Luke 20:17, Acts 4:11, 1 Pet. 2:7) and notes how strange the usual interpretation of it is. If we take "cornerstone" in its usual sense, as one of the four stones placed at the corners of the foundation, then there is no one unique "head of the corner" corresponding to Christ. Furthermore, the foundational cornerstones are the very first stones laid in the construction process, so how could any of them first be rejected by the builders only later to be incorporated into the building after all? Guénon makes a very strong case that Christ is actually being compared to the keystone, placed at the apex ("corner") of a domed building. This is initially rejected by the builders because it is not square in shape and is thus not suitable for use in the rectilinear lower part of the building. This very shape which caused it to be rejected at first, though, makes it uniquely suitable for use as a capstone. The parallel to my own thoughts about the Shahada as the capstone of Islam is obvious.

As I read further in this essay (I still haven't finished it), I was amazed to find this additional parallel to my thoughts of the day before:

We find other interesting information in the meanings of the Arabic word rukn, 'angle' or 'corner'. This word, because it designates the extremities of a thing, that is, its most remote and hence most hidden parts (recondita and abscondita as one might say in Latin), sometimes takes a sense of 'secret' or of 'mystery'; and in this respect, its plural, arkān, is comparable to the Latin arcanum which likewise has this same sense, and which it strikingly resembles; moreover, in the language of the Hermeticists at least, the use of the term 'arcane' was certainly influenced by the Arabic word in question.

Do the five arkān of Islam, then, correspond to the arcana of the Tarot? Most of the mappings are surprisingly straightforward. I have already said that the Major Arcana correspond to the capstone and thus to the Shahada. Of the four suits of the Minor Arcana, Coins obviously maps to almsgiving, Cups to fasting, and Wands (the pilgrim's staff) to the hajj. That leaves Swords and prayer, which are not obviously related. However, I remembered that earlier in the Guénon book I have been reading, there was an essay on "The Sword of Islam," so I went back and skimmed that. Guénon mentions that the khatīb -- the person who delivers a sermon during Friday prayers -- traditionally holds a sword in his hands. "The sword of the khatīb," he writes, "symbolizes above all the power of the word, as should be obvious to anyone."