Surah 66

The Prohibition

1. O you prophet, why do you prohibit what God legitimised to you, seeking the contentment of your wives, and God is Forgiving Compassionate,
2. God has ordained to you [the people] the gift of your faith [we read “نِحلة إيمانكم”], God is your Master, is He the Omniscient the Sovereign,
3. And when the prophet confided to some of his wives a discourse, so when she divulged it, and God showed it to him: he recognised [we read “عَرَفَ”] some of it and denied some, so when he told her about it, she said: “who informed you of this?”, said he: “informed me the All Knowing the All Informed”,
4. If you both [wives] repent to God: your hearts have heeded; and if you show/protest to him [the prophet]: [know that] it is God his Master and Gabriel, and the righteous of the faithful ones, and the angels are after this backing [him] up,
5. Perhaps his Lord, if he divorced you, will swap for him wives better than you, Muslim, faithful, contemplative, repentant, abiders [in God], transcending [we read “سابحات”], returners [to their Lord], celibate,
[The interpretations that Islamic historians and interpreters have come up with regarding those verses, can best be called gossip,
Even if any of the stories they’ve told can be proven to be true: there’s no moral that can be learned from them …, except if pettiness and triviality are thought to be a purpose of the Book that descended from heaven …!

Indeed, all religious thought takes it as its duty to be stuck in a place and time of its choosing: for its god to be happy with it …
Time keeps running, however, and places are perhaps totally erased, but pagan thought clings to its phantoms, of the fear of anything that is real …

The worst of the exegeses available is a one highly regarded, which says that the prophet, after having fought a battle, brought a captive home and raped her, and that one of his wives got upset, so in order to please his wife he prohibited for himself to sleep with that captive again …, hence the verses came to rectify the situation by saying: this is halal to you, don’t forbid it just to please your wife …!

Let it be known, what these people describe is not the character of an ordinary ignorant person, let alone a prophet,
A prophet who once said: “I’ve been sent only to complete the high standards of morality”,
And this is a hadeeth that I do believe,
Unfortunately, Islamic authorities have preferred to stick to their pre-Islamic barbarity,
In recent times, in the wars of the Levant, and upon raiding one town, the raiders lined up the women of the raided ones, and in full view of their husbands: allocated them to the raiders …, in a show of Islamic shariah according to their heathen understanding …

The Qur’an has not legitimsed the rape of the captives of war, and nor even their enslavement,
Bring us the verses that you think did, and we’ll discuss them, and they have been read correctly on our Page and Website …

The Arab World, and indeed the wider Islamic, cannot continue to weep over the destiny that foreign powers have plotted for them,
If they don’t lift up their own intellectual, moral and legal standards: they will remain … they will remain a backward people, with the Super Powers fighting over their land and their oil wells, while they are fighting, raping, looting … in their race to the paradise of food and sex, believing these are god’s commandments …
They can blame themselves only for the ill reputation they have earned themselves and their prophet, and the hatred they have flared among non-Muslims to their Glorious Book,

And I say to them who continue their campaigns of disrespect to the prophet Muhammad, take a deep breath and open up your eyes,
You have hated Muhammad, and loved or perhaps worshipped his other comings, and you've hated Ali and loved or perhaps worshipped his other comings, when they delivered other messages that were delivered to them by Gabriel and Michael and their Brothers … as every Book, and indeed those very verses have testified …

If you worship one of them or one life of one of them, you hate the others,
Until you learn to love the message, that you don’t affix anything or anyone to God your Lord …

The story behind the lines of those verse is clear to the faithful,
The prophet had set himself on a road of celibacy and self-knowledge, going by the commandment of verse 33:52,
So the verses are encouraging him to continue on an arduous yet glorious road …, undisheartened and unintimidated by one of his wives, to whom he had confided, and who went and told the other one, in order for them both to pressure him to give up his spiritual pursuit …]

6. O you who believe, guard yourselves and your tribesmen from a fire, its fuel is people and stones, upon it are angels tough and resolute, they disobey not what God commanded them, they carry out what they are commanded,
7. O you who disbelieved, apologise not today, you are being rewarded by what you were doing,
[]

8. O you who believe, repent to God a tearful repentance [we read “نَضوحًا"], perhaps God overlooks your misdeeds, and ushers you in gardens, the days stream underneath them, the day when God disappoints not the prophet and those who believed with him, their light strives between their hands and by their right hands [alternatively by their faith], they say: “our Lord, fulfill our Light for us, forgive us, Thou art over all things Capable”,
9. O you prophet, make the disbelievers and the hypocrites work hard, be tough on them, their shelter is the inferno, and low-down is such a becoming,
[]

10. Has drawn God a model for those who disbelieved: Noah’s wife and Lott’s wife, they were under [the authority of] two abiders of our righteous abiders, they betrayed them, so nothing made them self-sufficient in anything from God, and it was said: “enter you both the fire with the enterers”,
11. And has drawn God a model to the ones who believed, the Pharaoh’s wife [Amen Hotep III and the mother of Joseph, they were both mentioned in the story of Joseph, on our Website], as she said: “my Lord, build for me in Thee a house in the garden, and rescue me from the Pharaoh and his work, and rescue me from the darkened people”,
[Sincere and selfless love, and total uninterest in worldly passions and ambitions: are always answered, without too much philosophic analyses, and certainly without ritualistic exhibitionist piety …

The following verse which terminates this Surah is about Mary the mother of the Messiah, from the tribe of Imran (Zimran), who inhabited the area of Syria known as Hawraan, as mentioned before,
She too has always had sincere and selfless love, she sets for herself high standards of self-conduct, in the Qur’an a whole Surah is dedicated to her, she cried when she fell pregnant with the Messiah, God’s Word, without having had a physical encounter with anyone, thinking it was her fault somehow, until John came to her and comforted her and gave her the glad tidings of mothering the Messiah, and dreams she had confirmed it to her …
She suffers a lot in her lives upon seeing the suffering of people,

The gap between the Creator and the creation in the distance in the physical world can be cut short by purity from worldly passions and ambitions …: hence the inspiration, which never ceases to flow anyway: can reach those great souls, unconditionally,

Three levels of awareness, or lack of it, are portrayed in those last three verses,

As for the immaculate conception, although very rare, it is not unique to a particular conception of God’s messenger, it has happened to many other messengers,
Hence, the expression “God’s son” should not be used in a physical and dual understanding,
All the creation are God’s children, as the Messiah himself often said, and let’s not forget the prayer that he taught, which starts with “our Father in the heavens …”,
Every time a created thing or a person is equated with God, whether metaphorically, physically or only verbally, as in the case of the Islamic witness (shahaadah) of God and His messenger …: affixation (ishraak) is at play, and a diversion from a true witness, and a road is open to bewilderment.]

12. And Mary the daughter of Imran, who fortressed her gap, so We inspired in it from Our Spirit, and she trusted the Word of God and His Books, and she became of the contemplative ones

Surah 67

The Kingdom

1. Bountiful is He in Whose Hand is the Kingdom, and Capable over all things is He,
2. [He] Who created death and lives, to try you [the people], which one of you is of a better deed, and is He the Exalted the Forgiving,
[If interpreters want to believe in a god who creates them to reward and punish them, based on this verse and similar verses … it is their choice …
They can only read such a logic in this verse: if their “deeds” aren’t so good …
Bad deeds conclude in false thinking and bad outcomes …
Good deeds bring on more knowledge, and widen one’s vision and compassion,
And God is Exalted Forgiving …
The next verses answer the question and remove the confusion …]

3. [He] Who created seven heavens in layers, you see in Compassion’s creation incoherence, hence return [your] vision: do you see any splitting?
4. Then return the vision two rounds, the vision flips back to you, failed, while He is Sorrowful,
[This is indeed a statement of Tawheed (Union),
Those who look at objects and people and say that they’ve completed their Tawheed, or those who forbid looking altogether, whether inwardly or outwardly: are all in a far distance …

Vision cannot grasp the complete horizon, while in a dual existence,
Words and deeds which express a close encounter also fail …
The awe of the vastness and incomprehensibleness: force the vision to return …
Hence the vision of the eye, the face, the tooth in the tooth, as once told in the Torah, and in the Qur'an, and indeed Arjuna's vision in the Ghita: are compassion,

Hence the knowledge of the Law, the Hand which holds the kingdom, is people’s best safety and refuge from the noise and glare of duality …]

5. And We have ornated the lower sky with lamps and made them a barrage against the demons, and We arranged for them the suffering of the blaze,
6. And for those who have distanced to their Lord: the suffering of the inferno and the worst becoming,
7. When they are thrown in it, they hear its gasping when it overflows,
[Indeed, the inferno, that is the dense physical existence, is none but an overflow of its higher essences in higher heavens …
By necessity: the dense world has consciousness in it …
Born in darkness: it has a penchant for chaos …
But Compassion encompasses everything …
The challenge people have to face in the inferno, which literally means the low world, also the Arabic word jahannam: is not to get sucked into darkness, and to be able to transcend it …

The path between the two worlds is open in both directions, consciousness can step up or down, by its choice of thoughts, emotions and deeds …
This has happened in many cycles of existence before … and not a cycle is like its predecessor, and what we see today of pre-ancient ruins are a testimony of previous very different modes of existence in the distance …]Top of Form

8. It [the inferno] all but falls apart from anger [the anger of warring tribes and people], every time a crowd is thrown in it, its guards ask them: “hasn’t a warner come to you?”,
9. They said: “yes, a warner did come to us and we falsified and said: ‘did not descend anything from God, you are but in a great bewilderment’”,
10. And they said: “if we were heeding or discerning, we wouldn’t have been in the dwellers of the blaze”,
11. Thus they admitted their mistake, stupor [we read “سُخفًا"] is to the dwellers of the blaze,
12. That those who fear their Lord in the unseen, for them is forgiveness and a great reward,
13. [Whether] you secret your say or declare it: is He the Knower of the identity in the chest,
14. Does He not know, Who has created? is He Clear Omniscient,
15. It is He Who made for you the land plane, so you walk on its shoulders, eat and drink from His providence, and to Him is [all] what spreads,
[The word “ألنشور” has been interpreted by Islamic scholars to mean the gathering at the end-of-days, but it actually means the opposite. Its root points to disperse or spread …]

16. Are you trusting that He Who is in the heaven won’t make the land cave in, and it’s hence sliding?
17. Are you trusting that He Who is in the heaven won’t send upon you wind, so you know how was My warning?
[Indeed, rulers’ self-conceit can reach levels which can only be described as stupid,
Incidentally, I read news that the American president told his “experts” to look into the idea of dropping an atomic bomb in the middle of a hurricane before it hits the US’s shores, thinking that this might just disperse it …!!
And in the middle of the hype about the G7, i.e. the countries which have classified themselves and their allies as the indisputable rulers of the world: the forests of the Amazon are burning under their watch …, in a world which justifies destruction for the purpose of a quick fix of an ailing economy …!!

Climate Change and intense natural disasters are all signs of a balance that has been disturbed by human activity. Nature will react to maintain life on the planet, whether world rulers understand this or not …
Ancient cultures perhaps without an exception, respected nature and its laws, too complex and delicate for human understanding, and knew that nature would punish them if they transgressed its laws and tampered with its balance …
But such understanding is considered primitive in today’s many people’s understanding, who believe that a couple of devices on earth and in the sky can monitor the world, and help them design its climate and the life in it …

Although all scientific endeavour is very encouraged, it’s the illusion of having understood things already, and the self-awarded permit to tamper with the world that will not go unnoticed by the laws of the world … ]

18. And those before them have [also] falsified, so how was My wrath?

19. Have they not seen the birds above them lined up and still? no one holds them except Compassion, is He of all things Seer,
[The sight of birds which form geometric patterns when they migrate awes the vision of people with a kernel …
The distances between them remain constant, if you try to mimic them with drones, very elaborate software will be required, based on elaborate mathematics and satellite geographic positioning with superhigh speed …
And indeed, as once said on this Page, mathematics is perhaps the closest knowledge that modern humans have taken to the unseen …

The senses that are based on non-sonorous sound and non-optical vision, which many breeds of birds, fish, insects … still have: can be revealed to humans again: if they can earn them …

In high stages of meditation: they are accessible, but to the minds busy and happy in pettiness: it is not possible …

It would’ve been more faithful, if Islamic scholars read and say: we don’t understand,
But they’re too quick to say this is teaching the laws of aerodynamics!
I tell them: the civilisations which have studied the laws of aerodynamics and applied them in the technology of air travel are a lot closer to faith than the ones which stayed back in their dark past …]

20. Or, who is that soldier of yours who makes you conquer without Compassion? indeed, distant ones are in a delusion,
[There are a number of examples when a battle was won by the side which was less equipped and outnumbered by the other …
The smallest factor, such as weather or an odd chain of coincidences can tip the balance, and reduce mighty armies to helpless crowds …
Superpowers nowadays are again on the road of amassing weapons in preparation for an Armageddon, but the armies and the weaponry will not be the determinants …
In ancient China, in the books which teach the art of war and strategy: this is briefly explained …
Western scholars have taken those books seriously and learned a few lessons from them, but the core knowledge in them is not accessible to mundane or religious philosophies …

The spirit of this verse confirms our reading of 59:6 and 59:7]

21. Or, who will provide you if He retracted His providence? nay, they squabble in arrogance and rejection,
22. Is he who walks overpainting [for the purpose of obscuring and covering] upon His Countenance more guided, or he who walks balanced upon a straight path?
[]

23. Say [addressing the messenger]: “it is He Who constructed you and made for you hearing and vision and hearts, [but] little do you appreciate”,
24. Say: “it is He Who dispersed you in the land, and to Him you are gathered”,
25. And they say: “when is this promise [due], if you were honest?”
26. Say: “that so, the knowledge is in God, and that I am but a clarifying warner”,

27. So when they saw Him, bad were the faces of those who distanced, and it was said: “this is Him, by Whom you’ve been calling [we read “تَدْعون”]”,
28. Say: “have you seen? if God exterminates me? and Who is with me? or [if] He mercified us? who would exempt the disbelievers from painful suffering?”,
29. Say: “He is Compassion, we trust in Him, upon Him we rely, and you shall know who is in a separating bewilderment”,
[These are declarations that are meant to break the narrowness of dogmatic religious declarations …, I’ll leave it to the reader to contemplate on them …, to witness firsthand in their own minds the utter vainness of all religious formulas, definitions and glorified words and expressions ...]

30. Say: “have you seen? if your water draws low, who will bring you water fresh and potable?”