A Brief Reflection on the Pending Suffering and Contentment in the Surah Ta Ha

After discussing the significance of knowledge and its relation to abiding God’s commands, the surah Ta Ha ends with three points: 1) it shows what will happen to those who don’t heed or reflect on revelations; 2) it shows that there is only one genuine way to “contentment” and it is prayers and respond to our longing for God; 3) and it prioritizes the miracle of the Quran as a rational discourse, constancy, and confirming the revelations before it to any other miraculous sign from God.  I will briefly reflect on each one of these points:

Warning of Suffering as the Outcome of Internal Discordance and Discontentment

“Whoever follows My guidance, when it comes to you [people], will not go astray nor fall into misery, but whoever turns away from it will have a life of great hardship. We shall bring him blind to the Assembly on the Day of Resurrection and he will say, ‘Lord, why did You bring me here blind? I was sighted before!’  God will say, ‘This is how it is: You ignored Our revelations when they came to you, so today you will be ignored.’  This is how We reward those who go too far, and who do not believe in their Lord’s revelations.  The greatest and most enduring punishment is in the Hereafter.  Do they not draw a lesson from the many generations We destroyed before them, through whose dwelling places they now walk? There truly are signs in this for anyone with understanding!” (20: 123-128)

I have been wondering for a long time why the Quran repeats its warning about the Day of Judgement and the pending suffering for those who don’t believe in God, who don’t care about people and don’t do good things that is not only centered on their immediate desires and benefits.  After I went through my own life-experiences and studying philosophy, not merely as an intellectual curiosity, but as a therapeutic spiritual practice, I found all these theories, as imaginative and helpful as they are, can’t reconnect me to my divine source and quench my spiritual thirst.  Human wisdom per se cannot save us, without divine grace.  The suffering of the Day of Judgement for disbelievers and wrongdoers, I came to understand with my flesh, is the consequence of an internal corruption, subtle and imperceptible as it might be.  It is the result of not heeding the divine message and guidance that have been echoing from the dawn of history—I realized it, in horror of what if it is too late, if I find myself immersed in hedonism or lost in nihilism.  Then I have gone too far and have forgotten my source too long, corrupted my existence in vanity—when I reacted harshly to religious excess and bigotry and threw the baby out with the bathwater.   And then I looked back and understood why the Quran, the last revelation, according to the Quran and to the testimony of history, repeatedly warns us of the Day of Judgement.  This is the last reminder; thus to be remembered.

What is the kernel of this last message?  Beside wisdom and law verses, it is a constant reminder that this world of ours is not the only world and we are not to be scattered into nothing after enjoying ourselves for a short period of life on the earth.  It was so difficult for me to accept and digest this.  Now that I read the Quran in a different light, I can see that this skepticism is repeatedly addressed in the Quran.  The Quran reminds us that for God it is easy to bring us and our deeds registered in our body/soul back to life.  I couldn’t reconcile myself with this constant reminder in the Quran that we will suffer in the world to come for our disbelief and evil deeds—and even I found it offensive.  Now it makes much sense to me: it will happen, we will come back to life in absolute awe, fear, and trembling.  The mountains will be blasted to dust and the earth will become an open plane.  The universe is not created in vain and our soul by God’s command is immortal, and we are to see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears, or feel with our whole body and soul the result of our disconnect from or connection to our Source, in a record in which all our actions without exception are registered, like our fingertips.  God created the universe to show the truth to all of God’s creatures so that they arrive at loving-worshiping God with understanding.  The Day of Judgement is the Day of Truly Loving God, not only out of fear, but out of experiencing the loss of forgetfulness or the gain of remembering God with an intense level of understanding.  The truth will be revealed to us and depending on the degrees of separation and hence body/soul corruption, we will end up in hell or heaven.  This will certainly happen. 

You may ask, “how do you know?”  This is my task: to make it clear to my children and to all how through converging all threads, from intuition, everyday struggles, the kind of actions we weave together in response to the whirlwind of our desires, the host of false identities which permeates into our flesh and conscience, the effect of every thought, word, and deed on our bodies, the effect of every single deed on others and the world, how every single event and action will be registered in every cell of our bodies, how to attend and remember God in good faith or false righteous indignation, how to abuse the name of God, how to forget the purpose and meaning of life in nihilism, or to be ensnared by false prophets and all-knowers, how to fall into the principle of pleasure or making ideologies of worldly heavens, and how God revealed God’s grace to awaken me in fear and trembling and touched my soul to say all these things…so that to remember revelations and to say with absolute certainty: “This will certainly happen.”    

As an atheist, I believed and lived my materialistic view in a kind of hedonism and scientific-philosophical-political devotion.  So, I might have tried to do some good, but as I always identified my life with a transient matter coalesced into life by accidental interaction of dead particles to be evaporated into nothing soon, I found the only consolation by thinking that no one will remember me in a hundred years or so, dependent on the illusion of one’s “legacy” in this futile life.  It took a life, and seeing the effects of disbelief and evil deeds with my own eyes and with the grace of God, that I awakened startlingly from my materialistic slumber.  I explored the existential effect of atheistic philosophies of Russell, Quine, Dennett, Chomsky, etc. on the one hand, and Marx, Nietzsche, Mill, Sartre, and Foucault, and the same, on the other[1].  But because of my constant yearning for God in misery, God clearly showed my state of falling to me and shook me in perplexity and awe to see with my own eyes that everything is in God’s hands, what I found later repeatedly asserted by revelations and especially in the Quran:

“They ask you [Prophet] about the mountains: say, ‘[On that Day] my Lord will blast them into dust and leave a flat plain, with no peak or trough to be seen.  On that Day, people will follow the summoner from whom there is no escape; every voice will be hushed for the Lord of Mercy; only whispers will be heard. 109On that Day, intercession will be useless except from those to whom the Lord of Mercy has granted permission and whose words He approves– He knows what is before and behind them, though they do not comprehend Him– and [all] faces will be humbled before the Living, Ever Watchful One. Those burdened with evil deeds will despair, but whoever has done righteous deeds and believed need have no fear of injustice or deprivation.’ We have sent the Quran down in the Arabic tongue and given all kinds of warnings in it, so that they may beware or take heed– exalted be God, the one who is truly in control.” (20:105-114) 

The inner wisdom of this event has unfolded in our historical-existential longing and in the whole body of revelations.  I was wondering in perplexity in the desert of my existence asking myself: “Why am I here?  I know I exist and I will die.  But why?  How can I reconcile the magic of my existence with the agony of my death destiny?  Why do we die?”  How many entertainments, drugs, theories did I use to normalize death?  Everyone desires dignity and facing one’s death in content and courage, but no pretention of courage and knowledge and no theoretical explanation can give us “content” and “connection” in the face of death, but the praise of God.  The next passage in the surah Ta Ha reveals this:

“If it were not for a preordained Word from your Lord [Prophet], they would already have been destroyed. Their time has been set, so [Prophet] be patient with what they say– celebrate the praise of your Lord, before the rising and setting of the sun, celebrate His praise during the night, and at the beginning and end of the day, so that you may find contentment– and do not gaze longingly at what We have given some of them to enjoy, the finery of this present life: We test them through this, but the provision of your Lord is better and more lasting. Order your people to pray, and pray steadfastly yourself. We are not asking you to give Us provision; We provide for you, and the rewards of the Hereafter belong to the devout.” (20:129-132)

This point comes heavy to our secular and atheistic ears.  We are enchanted with scientism, which is indeed a distortion of science into sheer materialism and reducing everything into deterministic behavior of dead particles.  According to atheistic scientists, life is an accidence or inevitable outcome of chaos—depending on how one interprets the behavior of these dead particle.  Genuine science of the future will question materialism and reductionism altogether, as Chomsky, Nagel, and Heidegger do from different points of view.  Genuine science one day will heed existential analysis of human beings by Heidegger and his holistic phenomenology of Being-in-the-world and human thinking as clearing (Lichtung) of Being.  Genuine science will one day transcend its one dimensional foundational thesis that “only the quantifiable is real”.

In his review to Dennett’s last book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, Nagel wrote:

“There is no reason to go through such mental contortions in the name of science. The spectacular progress of the physical sciences since the seventeenth century was made possible by the exclusion of the mental from their purview. To say that there is more to reality than physics can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it is an acknowledgment that we are nowhere near a theory of everything, and that science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain. It should not disturb us that this may have radical consequences, especially for Dennett’s favorite natural science, biology: the theory of evolution, which in its current form is a purely physical theory, may have to incorporate nonphysical factors to account for consciousness, if consciousness is not, as he thinks, an illusion. Materialism remains a widespread view, but science does not progress by tailoring the data to fit a prevailing theory.”

We don't need to be philosopher to understand this: what we know about the phenomenal world is only the tip of iceberg.   Assuming scientific image is perfect and reveals the whole truth as it-is-in-itself is not scientific and doesn't fit in scientific image, simply because human comprehension of the world and existence hasn't ended yet. We can't take any piece of latest scientific discovery as the ultimate, nor can we take a metaphysical generalization such as materialism and physicalism as "scientific" and bring faith in it, as religious scientism does. We have done this constantly in the course of history and we failed and again Dennett urges us philosophically fall into the same pitfall and declare that everything can be explained by materialistic reductionism. Beside the fact that both materialism and reductionism methodologically and philosophically are deeply questionable. Read Nagel, Chomsky, and Heidegger, etc.

Thanks God, I have been in constant existential awe in my life, not to be lulled by scientism or postmodernism.  No human wisdom, scientific explanation, or spiritual practice could quench my existential thirst.  Nothing could grab or satisfy me.  Only the grace of God saved me.  And this awaking was like remembering the primordial memory of a forgotten love.  I realized this love was deeply rooted in my heart.  All the scientific and existential questions and inquisitiveness, all the moral dilemmas, the desire for justice and pangs of conscience are arrows of longing for God.  The disconnection between my soul and God was and is hell. 

Hence, the more we distance ourselves from God or the Nameless, which means not remembering God, the more we fall in agony and seek healing in wrong places, in hedonism, materialism or physicalism, in nature worship, shamanism, humanly fashioned spiritual practices—as wise and practical as they may sound, they can never substitute revelations.  God sent us revelations to show us the way and warned us that disconnection from God will make us incompatible and incommensurable with God in the world to come.  Revelations tell us that whatever we do, we do to ourselves, every thought, word, and action affects our body and memory, our consciousness and unconsciousness.  Depending on seeing myself as an accident or connected to God, I choose different ways to live.  In response to my longing for the source of my existence and the nihilistic pity that life is just a meaningless moment, I sought to maximize my pleasure in this passing world, as I used to say: “I live only one life, or I come to life only one time.”  I didn’t become a sadistic and murderous character.  Pursuing sciences and philosophy is a divine practice.  However, I was reckless and followed my lowest desires, when I had a choice not to—because this was the only life, an accidental meaningless mirage, so why not to?  I see this deviation and falling state in all atheistic philosophers, in Russell, Mill, Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, and Chomsky even if they manage to live a life of inquiry.  The conscience and devotion that urged them to proceed can’t be explained by their own materialistic or atheistic philosophies.  They couldn’t see that our devotion and conscience are God given gifts.  It is obvious that anyone who thinks conscience and devotion are tools of biological evolution and survival in this contingent life is prone to be reckless and follows one’s lowest desire, when the going gets tough.  And in most cases, the divine hold of conscience in us is so strong that potentially we are ready to devote our life to a cause, as so many atheists do, but spiritually we are hollowed in the oblivion of God.       

“The disbelievers say, ‘Why does he not bring us a sign from his Lord?’ Have they not been given clear proof confirming what was in the earlier scriptures? If We had destroyed them through punishment before this Messenger came, they would have said, ‘Lord, if only You had sent us a messenger, we could have followed Your revelations before we suffered humiliation and disgrace!’ [Prophet], say, ‘We are all waiting, so you carry on waiting: you will come to learn who has followed the even path, and been rightly guided.’” (20:133-135)

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[1] I found a real fresh air in Heidegger’s philosophy and can’t categorize him under atheism as some do.  He has really transformed Western philosophy and it is too soon to fathom the effect of his philosophy.  To some extent, Heidegger helped me experience a paradigm shift and to leap out of the tight straightjacket of materialism, subjectivism, reductionism, relativism, and nihilism.  But he fell and didn’t surrender to divine wisdom and revelations and sought to arrive at the Truth through narrow spring of historical-essential-thinking-Being.  Heidegger was a bridge to take me to a leap from Being to be rescued by the grace of God.