A Brief Reflection on the Creative Force of God's Words in the Surah The Prophets
In the surah, The Prophets,
we have a brief story and conceptual reference to prophets. I wish to elaborate on two notions in this
reflection: 1) the creative process; 2) the concept of two short passages. And in the next reflection, God willing, I
will discuss these two aspects in the role and effect of the prophets mentioned
in the surah.
Consider this fact: God created
these verses in the Quran and inspired the prophet Muhmmad to recite them. Through these very created words, God
cultivated the prophet and through him and his creative actions, God sought and
seeks to guide Arabs and other nations.
The Quran was sent in the course of twenty-three years and established a
religion which has now (as of 2010) 1.6 billion followers and according to
Pew’s report up to 2050 it will increase to 2.8 billion[1]. I would like to reflect on God’s creativity
in reciting the Quran to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel in the parts that I
haven’t discussed before in the surah The Prophets. After expressing signs of God’s creation: all
living beings were created from water and the sun and the moon each floats in
its orbits by God’s command, God speaks directly to Muhammad:
“We have not granted everlasting
life to any other human being before you either [Muhammad]– if you die, will [the
disbelievers] live forever? Every soul
is certain to taste death: We test you all through the bad and the good, and to
Us you will all return. When the
disbelievers see you, they laugh at you: ‘Is this the one who talks about your
gods?’ They reject any talk of the Lord of Mercy.” (21:34-36)
Imagine the prophet burning in faith in God and in dark moments of doubt
in Mecca before his later migration to Yathrib, which was and is
called Medina (the City [of Muhammad]) afterward, and before his final
victory against the polytheists of Mecca.
God makes things clear to him with authority and Truth. This “authority” is not based on whim and
self-deception. We are all able to
discern a writing or piece of art whose “authority” comes from “oneness” of thoughts-words-action,
on one hand, and body-heart-soul, on the other, in the transparency and honesty
of absorption in the work of art. The
creative force of God’s words come from the fact that God doesn’t need to
fashion God for anyone or to hide the truth.
You wonder your life and existence here on this planet. God says, “I am telling you the Truth. I created you and we test you with the good
and the bad, while you are alive on the earth and then you will die and come
back to us.” We can’ fathom this: If I die and turn into dust, how can I “return”
to God? We try to explain it by the
terms “soul” or “spirit”—they might convey some truths; nonetheless, I am not
establishing any truth on them but on a simple fact, about which I was ignorant
before: for God, anything is possible. God
showed it to me: nature bends to and abides with God’s will; God’s angels and
spirit are present in each moment of life on the earth and they literally guide
the course of events, not on whims, but as teachers guide students through their
inquisitive nature and unique capacities to learn. Moreover, it is intelligible that in our
little worldly affairs, we can register the whole lifelong on a little chip,
and my life story can be replayed again and again after I am gone, as well God
can register everything I do, good and bad, and bring my self-soul-body into
existence again after I am dead. (Pay
attention the Quran affirms bodily resurrection without denying that we may
have a soul too—these are not incompatible).
God is not hiding anything from us, nor “exploiting” us—these are
tendencies of limited abusive beings like us.
God doesn’t need us. God has
created us and in worshiping God we sustain our existence here and in the world
to come, as fire sustains itself in its fuel.
The fire that escapes its fuel to achieve complete “autonomy” or to lose
itself to “will-to-power”—will die.
The Truth is said clearly in its creative force, to calm the prophet’s
heart with Truth, not lie, and to show the path to all humanity, who are unable
to see the unseen, the noumenon, nor can they infer everything unseen by the
seen and phenomenal. This is the
creative power of Truth, where the style and substance, the form and content,
merge into each other. An honest and
skilled work of art has its own unique language inseparable from its
truth.
But I couldn’t hear this truth.
It was heavy to my ears. I didn’t
believe in unseen and the possibility that our bodies after death and turning
into dust can come back to life again.
Now I believe, after God guided me and showed me to me in agony of who I
had become and how I lost my way. And in
mercy, God showed me God’s power and control of all events. It was startling to me and I couldn’t believe
it. I couldn’t believe that God gently
but explicitly told me “you are falling.” I was still deluded and in my self-complacency.
It took ten years to go through gestalt switch gradually, encountered with my
own vices and to examine it translucently to see how I have been falling—I can
never ever show my gratitude to God enough.
This mercy changed my perspective completely about life and God, as well
as philosophy. I was an atheist who was
following my research project in philosophy on Nietzsche and Foucault. But I was not atheist in soul and completely
corrupted with disbelief. I was yearning
and asking God to guide me, in my innermost conscience. There ought to be an inclination in one’s
soul seeded by God to heed and thus to “hear” the message, because, as
Heidegger puts it, “our hearing itself is a responding”. If one completely buries this inclination and
yearning, there is no possibility for him or her to hear the message. Even if God calls and shows God’s signs to
one who has killed in oneself the yearning for the divine, he or she would ignore
and call those signs as delusional and will reject them, because, again, hearing
the message itself is a responding. I
couldn’t hear before, but I can hear now that “every
soul is certain to taste death: We test you all through the bad and the good,
and to Us you will all return. When the
disbelievers see you [the prophet], they laugh at you: ‘Is this the one who
talks about your gods?’ They reject any talk of the Lord of Mercy.” Now, it makes sense to me that we will all
return to God. I am sure that it will
happen because I had a brief glance from the tip of phenomenal iceberg to its vast
unseen and hidden body, and philosophically it makes sense too as we are
gradually waking up from the arrogance of autonomy and the metaphysical
futility of materialism and physicalism.
Getting back to the creativity of words, imagine Muhammad is being told
the message above. Imagine the act of
creation: in one stroke, God creates words, verses, reveals the future, shows
how things work in Truth, teaches Muhammad and strengthens his faith to step in
the difficult path of establishing the religion. The act of creation unfolds faith and is
unfolded within faith. And God knows the
best how to weigh words in their profound meaningful authority, because God has
created everything and knows us the best:
“Man was created hasty: I will show
you My signs soon, so do not ask Me to hasten them. They say, ‘When will this promise be fulfilled, if what you say is
true?’ If the disbelievers only knew,
the time will arrive when they will not be able to ward off the Fire from their faces or their
backs, and they will get no help. It
will come upon them suddenly and stupefy them; they will be powerless to push
it away; they will not be reprieved. Messengers
before you [Muhammad] were also ridiculed, but those who mocked them were
overwhelmed in the end by the very thing they had mocked. Say, ‘Who could protect you night and day from
the Lord of Mercy?’ Yet they turn away when their Lord is mentioned. Do they have gods who can defend them against
Us? Their gods have no power to help themselves, nor can they be protected from
Us. We have allowed these sinners and
their forefathers to enjoy life for a long time. But do they not see how We are
shrinking their borders? Is it they who will prevail? Say, ‘I warn you only through the
Revelation.’ The deaf will not hear the warning call, yet if a mere breath of
your Lord’s punishment touches them, they will be sure to cry, ‘Woe to us! We
were wrong!’ We will set up scales of
justice for the Day of Resurrection so that no one can be wronged in the least,
and if there should be even the weight of a mustard seed, We shall bring it
out– We take excellent account.” (21:37-47)
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