Al-Baqara 1-7: The Qur'an and doubt

In this, unnumbered blog, we are into the second and longest sura, the cow (Al-Baqara).

Sardar says

The straightforward declaration that this is God's word recognises the human capacity to doubt. Throughout, the Qur'an takes doubt seriously. It is presented as a continuum which stretches from being an essential aid to belief all the way to a blinkered determination not to believe under any circumstances. Doubt is a function of our free will; we are free to accept or reject belief in God who speaks to us through the Qur'an. Repeatedly, the Qur'an engages with various kinds of doubt. It offers arguments to test our doubts and arrive, by a rational process, at conviction in the uniqueness of the Qur'an, the truth of its origin and the guidance it contains. For example, a little later in al-Baqara we read: "If you have doubts about the revelation we have sent down to our servant, then produce a single surah like it." (23) The distinctive use of Arabic language in the Qur'an, unlike any other Arabic text, makes it inimitable and is testimony to its authorship, to its being a work that in structure and scope is beyond human capability. The text itself, when examined, questioned by a doubting mind, leads to the conclusion its origin is not human but a revelation of the divine.

After such a paean to the open-minded virtues of the Qur'an, it seems almost cruel to quote the first verse of the sura. Still, sometimes you have to be cruel to be - well, sometimes you just have to be cruel.

This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear Allah.

Well there's a clear statement of the value of doubt. And trust me, the Qur'an is like that all the way through. The sheer mental effort involved in pretending it's some kind of invitation to a debate is impressive in itself.

He says that this is the Koran taking doubt seriously. Well, Ahab was serious about whales, but that's a limited comfort from the whales' point of view.

As must be immediately apparent to any genuinely disinterested observer, the verse clearly delineates an exclusion zone, within which there is no room for doubt. It doesn't say you can't dispute the meaning of the book, but once it's agreed what the book says, there's no room for doubt about that. Genuine, open ended, scientific, secular, Enlightenment doubt? No chance.

Bizarrely, he then claims that this sura is so sublime, so impossibly complex that it is in itself evidence of divine authorship.

The text itself, when examined, questioned by a doubting mind, leads to the conclusion its origin is not human but a revelation of the divine, he says. I'm looking forward to watching him trying to demonstrate that. I'm not the only one on his case, and he may be surprised to learn what happens when text is examined by some genuinely doubting minds.

The rest is mush. He's revealing at one moment, when he says The purpose of the Qur'an, we read, is to be a guidance to those described as muttaqi, often translated as God fearing. However, I prefer the translations that give this as 'God conscious'.

I bet you do. Unfortunately, there's no trace of that liberalism in any of the three translations offered in the Koran he himself links to. They render the text as those who fear Allah, those who ward off evil and those who guard against evil. It's nice that a few modern people translate God fearing as God conscious, but it clearly isn't the mainstream.

Otherwise, it's stuff about the relationship with God, not hugely different in tone or sentiment from the kind of thing you'd get in most Church of England pulpits on a Sunday morning. And if you can wade through it, it does yield us an insight.

For it shows up why the Sardars and Buntings of this world fail to understand doubt so completely. They've never lived in a world of radical doubt, a world where everything is genuinely up for grabs, where it takes the most concrete of evidence to reach the most tentative conclusion, and where paradigms can topple at any moment. They pile mush on mush to deduce more mush, and they genuinely can't see what a hash they're making, because the need to produce something rigorous never crosses their minds. They're so far from a modern understanding of doubt, they still haven't caught up with Socrates. They don't know that they don't know.