7. Inventing Evil (1)

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It almost seems like God is setting Himself up for blame when He claims to be the Creator of everything. What, everything? The bad as well as the good? I dealt with benefit and harm as natural events that elicit positive or negative reactions from us, and suggested that our feelings are unreliable guides to what those happenings actually mean. They might hurt us now, but work to our ultimate benefit, or might please us now, yet be the seal on our spiritual doom. We have no way of knowing until the Day of Judgement.

But what about the unnatural wickedness that is so human and so common, the malice, callousness, arrogance, and sheer stupidity that cause suffering, of course, but more importantly, produce moral outrage? As the Creator of all, does not God create that evil too? And then, to compound this Divine complicity in vice, He presumes to condemn and punish what He made and foreordained! This makes God not only the Creator of crime but also an Almighty hypocrite, torturing us for things that began with Him!

If someone were to ask, ‘Did this really happen?’, the answer is, ‘Not only did it really happen,* it happens every day, to everyone, male and female.’ (In the translation above, I have used “him” as the referring pronoun, just as in Arabic, but this can be understood as a default, unisex pronoun for both Arabic and English.) At every human birth, all these elements are present. And every day of our lives, we find our angelic forces eager to serve us, and our satanic party unwilling.

* ‘Really’ is often understood to mean ‘literally’. A literal reading of the Qur’an would have us ‘see’ a God with two physical hands (infinitely large? and why only two?), a face (with a nose? a beard?), and other attributes mentioned earlier in Chapter 4. A symbolic reading of the same references would displace ‘really’ to a greater realm in which two hands and a face mean more than what we understand by a physical, literal conception of them. Terms such as “Two Hands” and “Face of GOD” are vehicles that let us embark at one point, in our mundane, literal mode of thought, and disembark us at another, higher point of awareness that is no longer obsessed with literal readings. The purpose of the ‘ride’ is to get our feelings to take us to where our thoughts do not normally go by themselves, particularly if we are used to thinking in concrete images, as most of us do.

Take, for example, the idea of ‘create’ – Truly I am going to create a human out of clay. For thousands of years now, theologians’ first impressions of this story depicted an instantaneous, full-blown production process, contracting months of work, like that of an expert sculptor on a single piece of sculpture, into a matter of, say, minutes or seconds. In view of what we have learned in the meantime from scientific fields such as archeology, paleontology, geology, biology, chemistry, and astronomy, we turn back to the Qur’an with fresh eyes and find plenty of evidence that, yes, the modern scientific view of creation as a long, continuous process (e.g., in Q39:6 and Q71:14) has plenty of scriptural support, and that our previous, automatic interpretation of how things work is not the only one. Creation literally occurred – but not as we have been imagining it – and is occurring now, around and in us, all the time. Our view of creation has expanded (as in Q51:47) and in many ways become more real.

Another example is the reference to a human, indicating a single individual. But the same word, in the same indefinite form, can mean humans (Q5:18) or even humanity (Q30:20). And so there is not one but several possible literal readings, including Truly I am fashioning the human race from clay. The events are cast in the past for the sake of narrative clarity, but there is no reason to think that they happened only once, given that the Arabic word for the act of creation is in fact a verbal noun indicating an identity or constant state of affairs (literally translated as . . . [I am] a Creator of . . .). Once again, further study expands our narrow view of what is literal into a broader conception of reality.

By the same light, therefore, we can enlarge our understanding of the dialogue in Q38:71-80 to speech in the greater sense of expressions of attitudes, relationships, and spiritual realities. Most of us are familiar with the idea of ‘body language’ – transmission of nonverbal meanings that are usually more revealing and reliable than the words accompanying them. We have a preview of the greater reality inherent in body language in this remarkable passage:

And this is relevant as well:

Such verses demonstrate that what is often considered to be literal is merely a scaled-down rendering of a complex, abstract, or otherwise inaccessible truth. What is ‘really’ happening may be too great for us to comprehend other than in terms that are derived from our everyday experiences. The Qur’an is constantly trying (figuratively, of course) to widen our spatiotemporal frame of reference and get us to embrace what is literally too much for our poor minds to take in without some metaphorical aid.

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