What It Means - Day 239

"Truly We have created everything according to a measure."
Quran 54:49

I culled out this very brief passage, which I may actually examine again at length, but for now I mainly wanted to use it as a vehicle to show the complexity of Islamic theological debate. It's drawn from the 54th surah, al-Qamar, here rendered as "The Moon." Maybe in some ways this is the opposite of yesterday's blog posting on the purchase and refurbishment of our new mosque. Yesterday was the practical side of any faith organization, the "why aren't the lights working?" side of things. Of course, there's also the other side, the wildly philosophical side of things. Clearly I have a major man-crush on Seyyed Nasr (in fact I just emailed him on Friday, more on that later, maybe) and I wanted to cull out a couple pages from his Study Quran. These two pages plus of micro-print are an attempt, and I'm sure what Nasr would characterize as an unfairly brief attempt, to sort out the meaning of one brief sentence. As Nasr tells us, "This verse can be understand as a straight-forward affirmation of God's creation of all things." I guess it wasn't really all that straight-forward after all. It's a section of commentary that I love, and which I revisit quite a bit, not simply because it deals with an issue that I find central to Islam (the question of human free will) but also because I'm drawn to the complexity of the debating claims. Certainly gives non-Muslims a clearer view of the faith, which is sometimes considered to be very simplistic and literal, when clearly nothing could be further from the truth.  Like I said, I'll doubtless revisit this again and, briefly, lay out some of the arguments in regards to the issue of free will, and talk about the one that I find most convincing (or at least the one that makes the most sense to me).

The commentary of this one brief sentence begins in the lower right of the right page . . .

. . . and then carries all the way through the next two pages.