A Brief Reflection on the Interrelation Between Forgetfulness, Consistency, Temperateness, Ignorance, and Falling Astray 

I have been tracking the theme of “forgetfulness” and “remembering” in the surah Ta Ha (20) up to now.  We see the same theme in the next passage:

“[Prophet], do not rush to recite before the revelation is fully complete [Muhammad, when repeating to Gabriel each revelation, after the angel delivered it, sometimes in his eagerness started repeating even before Gabriel had finished revealing.  See also 75: 16–19.] but say, ‘Lord, increase me in knowledge!’  We also commanded Adam before you, but he forgot and We found him lacking in constancy.  When We said to the angels, ‘Bow down before Adam,’ they did. But Iblis refused, so We said, ‘Adam, this is your enemy, yours and your wife’s: do not let him drive you out of the garden and make you miserable.  In the garden you will never go hungry, feel naked, be thirsty, or suffer the heat of the sun.’  But Satan whispered to Adam, saying, ‘Adam, shall I show you the tree of immortality and power that never decays?’ and they both ate from it. They became conscious of their nakedness and began to cover themselves with leaves from the garden. Adam disobeyed his Lord and was led astray– later his Lord brought him close, accepted his repentance, and guided him– God said, ‘Get out of the garden as each other’s enemy.’” (20:114-122)

Gabriel asks Muhammad “don’t rush to recite before the revelation is fully complete, but say, ‘Lord, increase me in knowledge!’”  What does this “but” mean here?  Repetition and recitation the message of God is utterly pivotal, but increasing “knowledge”, not blind repetition and imitation, but understanding the message is more important.  So, Gabriel advises Muhammad to seek knowledge and depth rather than simple repetition. 

This point becomes clearer, when after inviting the prophet to supplicate God to increase his knowledge, God narrates the story of Adam and Iblis: “We also commanded Adam before you, but he forgot and We found him lacking in constancy.”  There ought to be a relation between increasing knowledge, not being forgetful, and having and showing constancy.  What is this relation?  What God-given knowledge did Adam forget?  As we saw before, God taught all the names to Adam and demonstrated his knowledge before Angels and jinns (and according to the Quran Iblis is a jinn).  God asked Adam to tell them the names of all things, and afterward God asked them to bow down to Adam, with revering God’s command with understanding.  I can imagine this fragile mortal being made of clay, Adam, in front of agile creatures made of light and fire, and possibly immortal, couldn’t fathom why they should have bowed down to Adam.  But God gave them a clue: knowledge.  This knowledge is not only a book knowledge: it is understanding Being and God-consciousness.  Adam knows the name of all things, which means God can increase Adam’s knowledge.  Angels and jinns don’t have that knowledge.  So, the omnipotent God teaches us that greatness is not in power and immortality but in having God-consciousness (taqwa), increasing one’s knowledge, to understand and abide by God’s commands.  Adam’s lack of constancy implies two things: first, his knowledge was not deep enough to abide by God’s commands with understanding; second, this lack of knowledge caused him to forget the commands of God.  There is a relation between “forgetfulness” and “lack of knowledge”.  So, Gabriel advises the prophet not to rush to repeat the revelations from God, but asks God to increase his knowledge so that he doesn’t forget the message, as Adam did.  And this chain cycle of lack of knowledge and God-consciousness, forgetfulness, and not abiding by God’s command, manifests itself again in what comes next:    

“When We said to the angels, ‘Bow down before Adam,’ they did. But Iblis refused, so We said, ‘Adam, this is your enemy, yours and your wife’s: do not let him drive you out of the garden and make you miserable.  In the garden you will never go hungry, feel naked, be thirsty, or suffer the heat of the sun.’  But Satan whispered to Adam, saying, ‘Adam, shall I show you the tree of immortality and power that never decays?’ and they both ate from it. They became conscious of their nakedness and began to cover themselves with leaves from the garden. Adam disobeyed his Lord and was led astray– later his Lord brought him close, accepted his repentance, and guided him– God said, ‘Get out of the garden as each other’s enemy.’”

Iblis disobeys God out of desire for power and self-complacency, which is a manifestation of lack of knowledge: lack of God-consciousness and understanding the poverty of our existence.  And Iblis deceives Adam by craving for power and immortality as well.  Indeed, the tree is not the tree of knowledge, but death, shame, and desire for power.  God exhorts Adam and Eve that if you eat from this tree you will die, live miserably, and feel naked.  There ought to be a relation between “desire for power and immortality”, “death”, “living miserably”, and “being conscious of their nakedness”.  What is this relationship?  After eating from the tree, indeed Adam and Eve died on the earth, and Caine killed his brother Abel.  As well human beings experienced will to power, pleasure, and shame, especially from sexual nakedness, which indicates excess of desire and transgressing boundaries.  In “A Brief Reflection on the Story of the Fall and Ascent in the Quran”, I elaborated on the notion of “garment” in the Quran and how now Satan tries to take our cloth off our bodies and to push us to follow our own shallow desires by shamelessness.  So, the primordial shame, according to the Quran, ought to be healed not by shamelessness and nudity, but by the garment of God-consciousness: “Children of Adam, We have given you garments to cover your nakedness and as adornment for you; the garment of God-consciousness is the best of all garments– this is one of God’s signs, so that people may take heed.” (7:26)

http://philosophyweeklyreflections.blogspot.com/2016/11/a-brief-reflection-on-story-of-fall-and.html

Thus, the common thread between thirst for power and shame of nakedness is excess in desire.  By eating from the tree, Adam and Eve introduced evil of excess of desire for power and pleasure into their soul.  And this all happened for “lack of knowledge” in understanding the wisdom of God’s commands.      

In the above verses, one may summarize, Gabriel admonishes: look the Prophet, I am conveying God’s command and wisdom to you, don’t rush to repeat the verses but supplicate to God to increase-your knowledge-so-that-you-don’t-follow-your-own-desires-and-forget-God-and-God’s commands-and-go-astray.  Because God taught all the names to Adam too and he lacked constancy and deep understanding and knowledge, forgot the message, disobeyed God, and fell astray. 

A Brief Reflection on What We Can Know/Do and What We Can't in the Surah Night Journey (17)

We can understand God, the ineffable, as we can understand Being, unsurmountable.  Our capacity in understanding God as the source of Being is the inner light granted to us, but it can easily be covered up by arrogance.  When I didn’t believe in God, and studied different philosophies and scientific discourses, I found them all insufficient: it came so obvious to me that Russell, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Goodman, Popper, Kuhn, Heidegger, Foucault,…were all saying that we can’t fathom it, but it never meant to me that reason or sciences and philosophy were vain.  On the contrary, in the spirit of Socrates, we approximate truth but never achieve it: “this never achieving Truth” is the condition of possibility of humanly understanding the “truth”, for us truth is always partial, not complete. 

When I started reading scriptures and especially the Quran, I realized that revelation is an essential part of truth that we can’t achieve on our own.  Our arrogance, our delusion that we CAN achieve the whole truth by our own reason alone, leads us astray.  Nonetheless, we can use our reason, if directed by God’s grace, to the straight path, without getting lost.

When I was disconnected from God’s revelations, I was considering ideologies and sciences for the way out, but these ideologies can never tell us what course of action to take ethically.  Their ethics is always groundless and this is the place that our whims, desires, and arrogance take hold in us.

The Quran, first and foremost, reminds us of God—take no other god: science, any ideology, or any idol as one’s god.  I didn’t understand this point, and so, I easily disconnected from the Quran.  It seemed to me God is too demanding and authoritative to remind us again and again that if we worship any other god but God, we will be punished and suffer.  My arrogance was a hindrance.  I assume the arrogance of Russell and Chomsky, Marx, Sartre, and Foucault, and the like was the major obstacle for them.  The arrogance comes from a deep disbelief that draws a veil on our heart not to connect to revelations.  We needed historical proof, we needed “evidence”—that why if we worship any god-idol-ideology-science but God, we will fall.  In both ontogenetic (my individual) and phylogenetic (our species) senses—if these terms are applicable to our self-understanding—we can potentially see now why, if we are willing and our arrogance again doesn’t draw a veil on our eyes and hearts.  

Without revelations, we can’t find our way about.  We end up in canceric growth, quantification of the world based on utility, and hedonism.  We see ourselves as random events on this planet, who has no ontogenetic spiritual path but to increase itself in phylogenetic sense: survival.  We shall die from inside (our essence) and simultaneously we shall disconnect from outside (the universe and God)—the arrogance will appropriate everything for the self and pleasure.  In almost two centuries we have seen the ramification of secular ideology.

In reading the surah “Night Journey”, I am now in a different mindset.  I hear the message differently.  Revelations don’t tell us the mystery of the scientific working of the world, it is our tasks to look for proximate and ultimate causes---with constant remembrance of and asking guidance from the ineffable God and unsurmountable Being.  What we CAN know for sure is what course of action to take based on spiritual-ethical directions given to us by revelations: 

“Set up no other god beside God, or you will end up disgraced and forsaken.  Your Lord has commanded that you should worship none but God, and that you be kind to your parents. If either or both of them reach old age with you, say no word that shows impatience with them, and do not be harsh with them, but speak to them respectfully and lower your wing in humility towards them in kindness and say, ‘Lord, have mercy on them, just as they cared for me when I was little.’  Your Lord knows best what is in your heart. If you are good, God is most forgiving to those who return to Him.  Give relatives their due, and the needy, and travellers– do not squander your wealth wastefully: those who squander are the brothers of Satan, and Satan is most ungrateful to his Lord– but if, while seeking some bounty that you expect from your Lord, you turn them down, then at least speak some word of comfort to them.  Do not be tight-fisted, nor so open-handed that you end up blamed and overwhelmed with regret.  Your Lord gives abundantly to whoever He will, and sparingly to whoever He will: He knows and observes His servants thoroughly.

Do not kill your children for fear of poverty (a) ––We shall provide for them and for you––killing them is a great sin.  And do not go anywhere near adultery: it is an outrage, and an evil path.  Do not take life, which God has made sacred, except by right: if anyone is killed wrongfully, We have given authority to the defender of his rights, but he should not be excessive in taking life, for he is already aided [by God].  Do not go near the orphan’s property, except with the best [intentions], until he reaches the age of maturity. Honor your pledges: you will be questioned about your pledges.  Give full measure when you measure, and weigh with accurate scales: that is better and fairer in the end.  Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these.   Do not strut arrogantly about the earth: you cannot break it open, nor match the mountains in height.  The evil of all these actions is hateful to your Lord.” (17:22-38)

(a): “When the sun is shrouded in darkness, when the stars are dimmed, when the mountains are set in motion, when pregnant camels are abandoned, when wild beasts are herded together, when the seas boil over, when souls are sorted into classes, when the baby girl buried alive is asked for what sin she was killed, when the records of deeds are spread open, when the sky is stripped away, when Hell is made to blaze and Paradise brought near: then every soul will know what it has brought about.” (81:1-14)