@ReasonOnFaith No. First, you have to be humble about this and admit that your premise is faulty.
— Farhan Iqbal (@FarhanIqbal1)
I strongly take issue with your characterization of this being a matter of humble vs not humble.
Can metaphor exist in a divine religious scripture? Sure.
If you showed me a verse that said something like, “And when you feel Allah’s love, you will know it because your heart will soar with happiness and contentment”, I can totally get behind that as metaphor.
In my opinion, you abuse the concept of a metaphor when anything that reads very plainly at face value, you tell us not to. Especially when the earliest exegetes of the Qur’an made no such claims about this verse, and desperate attempts to “metaphor”-it-away came on the scene in an era where the implications of scientific error became unmistakable.
But if you’re going to pull the metaphor card on everything that is completely nonsensical without it (especially when the supposed metaphor has no discernible value other than gibberish), I believe that you are making a desperate attempt to hold on to your beliefs instead of honestly appraising the evidence and saying, “Indeed, this makes little sense.”
You’re taking the position that effectively, your beliefs are unfalsifiable. Nothing that looks odd will you even consider the more obvious explanation for that is staring you in the face. To me, that is the height of not approaching the subject with humility.
Ask yourself; are you truly willing to consider and explore the possibility that what you’ve been taught is not true? It is that spirit of inquiry, regardless of the uncomfortable consequences, that I took in evaluating my previous beliefs and a conviction that I continue to hold and aspire to stay true to today and into the future.
Consider the comment below from an Ahmadi Muslim. Here, I can appreciate his willingness to say in effect, “we’re willing to look at the words, the Arabic, the translations” etc.
Consider the following comment exchange on a YouTube video on the topic of Atheism by the charismatic Ahmadi Muslim duo at Rational Religion.
When effectively cornered, it appears that your only options become:
- “Oh, it’s metaphor” or
- An honest engagement with the implications that this verse may not be divinely authored.
If it’s metaphor, then the onus is on you to explain:
- What the metaphor is.
- Why this metaphor has some lesson or value to humanity that required a metaphor over plain speech.
- How you can justify that your explanation of this as metaphor is borne out by the text, the context, the hadith, the exegesis of the time even remotely looking it is as metaphor.
- How you can justify that the earliest exegetes closest to Muhammad in time (and in understanding of classical Arabic), could have understood the words and meaning of this verse incorrectly.
Invariably, your approach at making such a case is going to be a stretch. But I’d encourage you to try anyways.
And when we see the scriptural gymnastics required to make that case, all of us can assess for ourselves what is the most likely explanation for why this verse is the way it is.