"Has there come upon man a span of time in which has was a thing unremembered?"
Quran 76: 1
I don't know if I particularly have anything profound to say about this brief verse, mainly because I'm still mulling it over. It is drawn from al-Insan, "The Man," the 76th surah. I mainly tagged it because it fell into my category of "Nasr, Are You Messing With Me?"
Here is his related commentary:
"In both vv. 1 and 2, man (insan) refers to Adam, all of humanity, or both. As translated the verse should be taken as a rhetorical question, either indicating that there has never been a time when human beings were not known to God or emphasizing that there was indeed a time when man was a things unknown, meaning nonexistent." (Nasr, Study Quran, p. 1452)
Obviously, I'm not critiquing Nasr here, because, by now, you have realized what a man crush I have on him. Rather, it's a reflection of the complexity of the Quran, and, for that matter, all faith. I remember when we Skyped with Seyyed Nasr in the spring we would ask him a question, and then he would pause and give a thoughtful, detailed and profound ten minute answer to eve
ry question. In today's age of surface level regurgitation of corporate slogans or buzzwords (we already have bets placed on how many times the word "pivot" is used in the first general faculty meeting) it was refreshing to hear a scholar work his way through a complex answer that sometimes ended with, essentially, "I'm not certain, exactly."
To me, and getting back to the passage, it is interesting, less in relation to Adam, but more generally to the existence of humankind. We've talked before about the notion that question of why good things happen to bad people or vice-versa are, at least from the Islamic perspective, pointless unless you think of the long endless existence of humans, including the time before birth, during "life," and then after death; that if you calculate everything up over these seemingly endless arc of time then everything balances out. At times over the years when I've taught sections on Hinduism I've had students ask if new souls were ever actually being created (as compared to being reborn) or were they operating from an initial great storehouse of souls, innumerable ones who had not even been born into the lowest possible life form yet. I didn't have a great answer for that question, and I've also asked some of my Hindu friends that same question and they didn't have a very good answer either. I guess you could ask yourself the same question in regards to Islam. Was there essentially a great spiritual big bang when all the souls were queued up, waiting for their time when they would be born and enjoy a fleeting time on earth, before passing back out of life?
Quran 76: 1
I don't know if I particularly have anything profound to say about this brief verse, mainly because I'm still mulling it over. It is drawn from al-Insan, "The Man," the 76th surah. I mainly tagged it because it fell into my category of "Nasr, Are You Messing With Me?"
Here is his related commentary:
"In both vv. 1 and 2, man (insan) refers to Adam, all of humanity, or both. As translated the verse should be taken as a rhetorical question, either indicating that there has never been a time when human beings were not known to God or emphasizing that there was indeed a time when man was a things unknown, meaning nonexistent." (Nasr, Study Quran, p. 1452)
Obviously, I'm not critiquing Nasr here, because, by now, you have realized what a man crush I have on him. Rather, it's a reflection of the complexity of the Quran, and, for that matter, all faith. I remember when we Skyped with Seyyed Nasr in the spring we would ask him a question, and then he would pause and give a thoughtful, detailed and profound ten minute answer to eve
ry question. In today's age of surface level regurgitation of corporate slogans or buzzwords (we already have bets placed on how many times the word "pivot" is used in the first general faculty meeting) it was refreshing to hear a scholar work his way through a complex answer that sometimes ended with, essentially, "I'm not certain, exactly."
To me, and getting back to the passage, it is interesting, less in relation to Adam, but more generally to the existence of humankind. We've talked before about the notion that question of why good things happen to bad people or vice-versa are, at least from the Islamic perspective, pointless unless you think of the long endless existence of humans, including the time before birth, during "life," and then after death; that if you calculate everything up over these seemingly endless arc of time then everything balances out. At times over the years when I've taught sections on Hinduism I've had students ask if new souls were ever actually being created (as compared to being reborn) or were they operating from an initial great storehouse of souls, innumerable ones who had not even been born into the lowest possible life form yet. I didn't have a great answer for that question, and I've also asked some of my Hindu friends that same question and they didn't have a very good answer either. I guess you could ask yourself the same question in regards to Islam. Was there essentially a great spiritual big bang when all the souls were queued up, waiting for their time when they would be born and enjoy a fleeting time on earth, before passing back out of life?
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