A Brief Reflection on the Last Verses of the Surah Pilgrimage (22) and our Falling State in Overlooking the Immanence and Power of God in the World

"People, here is an illustration, so listen carefully: those you call on beside God could not, even if they combined all their forces, create a fly, and if a fly took something away from them, they would not be able to retrieve it. How feeble are the petitioners and how feeble are those they petition! They have no grasp of God’s true measure: God is truly most strong and mighty.” (22:74)

This example speaks to our time and all times.  What we praise as the highest has no power to create even a fly or to retrieve something that a fly takes from us.  We are now seduced by our own power, paradoxically, to think we are just robots who can create conscious robots who have reason and heart, who care and ponder their existence, who have a world and perceive their existence in the world, and have an existential longing for their Source.  We are seduced by our God given knowledge, but even if we put all our forces together we can’t create (not cloning) a fly, leave alone a human body/soul who understands Being and Love.   

I ask my students in class to tell me how they understand a room in a building.  After some reflections and discussion, they admit that they understand the building before the room and the campus before buildings and the city before the campus and the district before the city and …. the earth and heavens before this very room, pre-reflectively and pre-ontologically.  They understand the world before the objects in the world.  They understand Being before the world.  And for those whose heart is not hard and blind, we understand God before Being.   

But as soon as robotically we saw ourselves as subjects against the world of objects, as soon as we saw the world as the sum of parts, as soon as we reduced our existence to ONLY receiving sense data from external world and then processing the information inside us and then acting [which indeed happens in theoretical moments or breakdown cases]…as soon as we perceived our existence as “only the quantifiable is the real” and drew a rigid wall between sensible and nonsensible, we turned into robots.  We saw each other as labor and resources to utilize.  We created slavery and wage slavery. We created consumerism and objectification of the world.  We looked at the world as only ‘resources’.  We deforest our forests and tropical into papers and furniture.  We tortured our animals in animal factories and destroyed ourselves in obesity.  We brought the planet to the brink of sixth mass extinction and the domination of Anthropocene, and indeed to our self-destruction, as soon as we turned a blind eye to scriptures.  

In my reading of the Quran, in many places I am not inclined or have knowledge to unravel hermeneutical knots.  In reading the ending of surah Pilgrimage (22), I let my imagination and experience of verses, and God’s inspiration and my philosophical bent speak. So, the following are my thoughts on the last verses of the surah Pilgrimage (22):

“He will give a generous provision to those who migrated in God’s way and were killed or died. He is the Best Provider.  He will admit them to a place that will please them: God is all knowing and most forbearing.  So it will be. God will help those who retaliate against an aggressive act merely with its like and are then wronged again: God is pardoning and most forgiving.  So it will be, because God makes night pass into day, and day into night, and He is all hearing and all seeing.  So it will be, because it is God alone who is the Truth, and whatever else they invoke is sheer falsehood: it is God who is the Most High, the Most Great.” (22:58-62)

I was about to skip the above verses because our ears are not inclined to hear the truth about war and peace.  I have come to the conclusion that whoever rejects God [Tien, Tao, Nirvana, Brahman, Heavens, etc.] eventually falls into nihilism and hedonism and eventually will become unjust and imbalance in one’s soul and to others[1].  So, to stand for God is to stand for meaning, value, and truth.  It is a fact that God, Truth, and Justice are the same and any other lost or corrupted being who defy Truth and Justice is against God as well.  And the way it happens is not always clear and open, as Satan doesn’t appear as Satan but will put on the robe of Gospel of Prosperity and Saudi Arabia Sheikhs and Imams.  So, the name of God like any other value term can be used for covering up corruption and deceit.  One ought to be vigilant and careful, to constantly discern the wheat from the chaff.   

Let’s pay attention to the premises and conclusion of above verses:

Premise 1:  God makes night pass into day, and day into night, and He is all hearing and all seeing. 

Premise 2: it is God alone who is the Truth, and whatever else they invoke is sheer falsehood: it is God who is the Most High, the Most Great.”

Conclusion: “God will give a generous provision to those who migrated in God’s way and were killed or died. He is the Best Provider.  He will admit them to a place that will please them: God is all knowing and most forbearing.  So it will be. God will help those who retaliate against an aggressive act merely with its like and are then wronged again: God is pardoning and most forgiving.”

Do the premises support this conclusion?  God is the Truth and God holds the order of things, passing night to day, the rotation of earth around itself and the sun.  In the verses that follow, God elaborates on this notion:

“Have you [Prophet] not considered how God sends water down from the sky and the next morning the earth becomes green? God is truly most subtle, all aware; everything in the heavens and earth belongs to Him; God alone is self-sufficient, worthy of all praise.  Have you not considered how God has made everything on the earth of service to you? That ships sail the sea at His command? That He keeps the heavens from falling down on the earth without His permission? God is most compassionate and most merciful to mankind– it is He who gave you [people] life, will cause you to die, then will give you life again– but man is ungrateful.” (22:63-66)

The premises of the above argument allude to a fact that comes heavy to our ‘secular’ ears, because we assume laws of nature are ‘self-sufficient’ and work independent of God.  But God is the subtlest, and only God is ‘self-sufficient’.  Everything in the heaven and on the earth depends on God.  God can stop ships from moving on the sea; God keeps the heavens from falling down on the earth.  God has created life and death and will bring us back to life again in the second act of creation.  When I ponder that my breathing and speaking, my consciousness and feelings, my hopes and fears, my life and death, all and all are given to me by God, then I ask myself, what is that I seek to escape from?  It is like a pigeon tries to escape the pressure of air under its wings, which makes its flying possible.  It is like a flower wants to escape from soil and sunshine and becomes completely independent.  We have a name for it: a self-destructive cancer.

The so called “laws” of nature or universe are held by God.  Hume was insightful to realize that “causal relationship” in nature can’t be explained as “necessary” by empirical facts.  Kant was incomplete to see that “causal relationship” is one of synthetic a priori categories of reason embedded in us as the condition of understanding[2], because Kant couldn’t imagine that we are more than “reason” and can move into a domain (e.g., the domain of “heart”) to perceive causality in a different light—where everything beyond our imagination is possible in the ineffability of God’s love.  And calling God as the cause doesn’t suffice too, because everything plunges in God: don't forget God invented 'causality' and before causality comes being and before being comes God and our imagination or intuition enters a domain like moving from two dimensional to three dimensional or multidimensional space in which “before” and “after” or “past” or “future”, or “space and time” don’t make sense.  This is not the end of “experience” as Kant assumed but the end of what is sayable in factual or philosophical discourse.  However, it is said, shown, and experienced through scriptures, mythos, poetry, and the arts.

And from the fact that God is Truth and everything is in God’s hands, the conclusion follows that “God will give a generous provision to those who migrated in God’s way and were killed or died. He is the Best Provider.  He will admit them to a place that will please them: God is all knowing and most forbearing.  So it will be. God will help those who retaliate against an aggressive act merely with its like and are then wronged again: God is pardoning and most forgiving.”

Here the emphasis is on devotion to God and God’s cause.  This devotion encompasses all domains: philosophy, sciences, and self-defense.  The measure of this self-defense is “merely with its like”, not more and in other places God contends forgiveness is better than retaliation.  For example, in these verses:

“Far better and more lasting is what God will give to those who believe and trust in their Lord; who shun great sins and gross indecencies; who forgive when they are angry; respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of what We have provided for them; and defend themselves when they are oppressed. Let harm be requited by an equal harm, though anyone who forgives and puts things right will have his reward from God Himself—He does not like those who do wrong. There is no cause to act against anyone who defends himself after being wronged, but there is cause to act against those who oppress people and transgress in the land against all justice—they will have an agonizing torment—though if a person is patient and forgives, this is one of the greatest things. (42: 36-43)

So, from the premises that God is Truth and holds everything on the earth and heaven, it follows that we devote ourselves to God.  God delineates some aspects of this devotion in the next verses:

“We have appointed acts of devotion for every community to observe, so do not let them argue with you [Prophet] about this matter. Call them to your Lord– you are on the right path– and if they argue with you, say, ‘God is well aware of what you are doing.’  On the Day of Resurrection, God will judge between you regarding your differences.  Are you [Prophet] not aware that God knows all that is in the heavens and earth? All this is written in a Record; this is easy for God.” (22:67-70)

The Record is immanent.  This is the presence of God in the world.  God’s will is written in the nexus of events and in the nucleus of cells and in the particles of atoms and in the invisible immanent flow in which we and everything else float.  We can see and perceive just a small portion of reality with our eyes and senses.  However, we have the most precious gifts given to us by God: our reason and heart, both at work, one is obvious as it is the source of rational inference and the other is subtle and invisible as it is the divine love and essence (fitrat) in us.  As God has written the scroll of existence and life in the unfolding kernel of events, the outcome is obvious and easy for God to see.  This is not against our freedom of the will and for determinism.  God knows the outcome of our freedom of the will and the way particles act and will act, but in the process, in the Way, life flourishes and we get cultivated.  We are not lifeless not-conscious objects.  God is the greatest Teacher for those who can understand.

“Yet beside God they serve that for which He has sent no authority and of which they have no knowledge: the evildoers will have no one to help them.  [Prophet], you can see the hostility on the faces of the disbelievers when Our messages are recited clearly to them: it is almost as if they are going to attack those who recite Our messages to them. Say, ‘Shall I tell you what is far worse than what you feel now? The Fire that God has promised the disbelievers! What a dismal end!’  People, here is an illustration, so listen carefully: those you call on beside God could not, even if they combined all their forces, create a fly, and if a fly took something away from them, they would not be able to retrieve it. How feeble are the petitioners and how feeble are those they petition! They have no grasp of God’s true measure: God is truly most strong and mighty.” (22:71-74)

In explicating this passage, I repeat what I wrote above, because I think we should think about it more than once:

This example speaks to our time and all times.  What we praise as the highest has no power to create even a fly or to retrieve something that a fly takes from us.  We are now seduced by our own power, paradoxically, to think we are just robots who can create conscious robots who have reason and heart, who care and ponder their existence, who have a world and perceive their existence in the world, and have an existential longing for their Source.  We are seduced by our God given knowledge, but even if we put all our forces together we can’t create (not cloning) a fly, leave alone a human body/soul who understands Being and Love.   

I ask my students in class to tell me how they understand a room in a building.  After some reflections and discussion, they admit that they understand the building before the room and the campus before buildings and the city before the campus and the district before the city and …. the earth and heavens before this very room, pre-reflectively and pre-ontologically.  They understand the world before the objects in the world.  They understand Being before the world.  And for those whose heart is not hard and blind, we understand God before Being.   

But as soon as robotically we saw ourselves as subjects against the world of objects, as soon as we saw the world as the sum of parts, as soon as we reduced our existence to ONLY receiving sense data from external world and then processing the information inside us and then acting [which indeed happens in theoretical moments or breakdown cases]…as soon as we perceived our existence as “only the quantifiable is the real” and drew a rigid wall between sensible and nonsensible, we turned into robots.  We saw each other as labor and resources to utilize.  We created slavery and wage slavery. We created consumerism and objectification of the world.  We looked at the world as only ‘resources’.  We deforest our forests and tropical into papers and furniture.  We tortured our animals in animal factories and destroyed ourselves in obesity.  We brought the planet to the brink of sixth mass extinction and the domination of Anthropocene, and indeed to our self-destruction, as soon as we turned a blind eye to scriptures.   

“God chooses messengers from among the angels and from among men. God is all hearing, all seeing: He knows what lies before and behind them. All matters return to Him.  Believers, bow down, prostrate yourselves, worship your Lord, and do good so that you may succeed.  Strive hard for God as is His due: He has chosen you and placed no hardship in your religion, the faith of your forefather Abraham. God has called you Muslims [i.e. ‘devoted to God’] ––both in the past and in this [message]––so that the Messenger can bear witness about you and so that you can bear witness about other people. So keep up the prayer, give the prescribed alms, and seek refuge in God: He is your protector––an excellent protector and an excellent helper.” (22:75-78)        

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[1] One might ask “what about people like Chomsky?” I suggest to read my reflection about Chomskyean Nihilism:

http://philosophyweeklyreflections.blogspot.com/2016/10/reflections-on-chomskyan-nihilism-ilove.html

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/