The illusion of the world in the Koran: between earthly ordeal and quest for eternity
The Koran, the sacred text of Islam, is, for millions of women and men around the world, the uncreated and unalterable word of God. He exhorts man in many places not to let himself be deceived by the temptations and false pretenses of this world. It is true that man is unique in that he was, from his creation, invested with a divine mission: to be the vicar (ḫalīfa) of God on earth, as shown in surah “al-baqara” (the heifer), and the story it relates of God’s project presented to the angels:
“(remember) when your Lord said to the Angels: “I will place a vicar on earth”; “Will You place in it someone who will cause scandal and shed blood, while we glorify Your praise and proclaim Your holiness?” (The Lord) replied: “I know very well what you do not know.”1 »
This disconcerting dialogue sees on the one hand the angels expressing their concern and the risks of corruption which this man could be responsible for, and on the other hand God who opposes to them His knowledge of the invisible and the perfect wisdom of His decrees with this famous sapiential formula: innī a’lamu mā lā ta’lamūna (“I know very well what you don’t know”). The concern of the angels seems to find a first echo with the refusal of Iblīs (this is the Devil), and his act of “rebellion”, faced with the divine injunction to prostrate himself before Adam:
“(God) said (then): “What prevented you from prostrating yourself when I commanded you?” (Iblis) said: “I am better than him. You created me from fire and created him from clay.” » 2
Justifying his refusal to prostrate himself by the fact that he considered himself to come from a nobler and stronger material than clay, in this case fire, Iblīs symbolizes, in Muslim tradition, the paroxysm of inordinate ego and pride as well as the height of vanity in refusing to submit to the divine order. This insubordination led to him being designated by the Koran as a ‘aduww mubīna declared enemy with designs that could not be clearer: to deceive men to divert them from the path that leads to eternal happiness.
The tragically famous anā ḫayr minhu has been perpetuated in certain popular Arabic dialects and those of the Maghreb in particular, and we have often wondered about the permanence of this expression which gives the feeling that this rebellion is still and constantly renewed in the mouths of all these men.
How, then, can we not think of this human propensity to seek honors, to want to appear more beautiful and stronger than others, leading all these individuals to transform themselves into true social chameleons as if pretense had, of all people, been time, elevated to an art of know-how? We thought, at the beginning of our reflections, to use the word “vanity” as an almost perfect translation of the Arabic term ġurūr. We had, however, to acknowledge the real semantic and ideological differences between these two terms and what they respectively referred to.
From vanity in Ecclesiastes to ġurūr in the Koran, life on earth is therefore only illusion and deception. If vanity, from Latin vanitasdesignates the inanity of the world, the void even the wind, the ġurūr derived from the Arabic root “ ġ.rr » translates illusion and deception but also negligence or carelessness and therefore inexperience. Does this mean that the world, as Muslim thinkers conceived it, was strictly speaking “empty”, knowing that it constitutes an obligatory passage for accession to eternity as promised by the Koran? Rather, it is appropriate to consider the apprehension of the world from the angle of the benefit that man can derive from it for his salvation in the afterlife. Profit, by nature, is the fruit of hard work and pain that is translated by the word ‘amal (term common to Arabic and Hebrew).
It would be enough, therefore, to act, to work hard to hope to reap the fruits of one’s work; However, the here below is above all for the Muslim the place, not of divine punishment, but the place of the test and of his capacity to show that he can be worthy of paradise. He must, thus, avoid the pitfalls which stand in his way, first of which his nafstraditionally translated as “soul” and which refers either to the carnal or concupiscible soul, or to the “me”.
This nafs is sensitive to the attractions of here below; temptations and pleasures excite her and predispose her to all possible stratagems to satisfy her desires. This nafswhich we would need to define at greater length, must therefore be tamed by man so as not to allow himself to be led to eternal punishment. This interior and necessary struggle, which Muslim mysticism designates by the word mujāhada, is only one front among many others on which man must be present. We must, in fact, return to the Koran and what it reports about this promise of Iblīs made to God, when, banished and disgraced, he could not repress a violent feeling of revenge by affirming:
“by Your power I will make them all wander, except, among them, Your devoted servants. »3
From this promise designating man as the target of his vengeance, the Devil is, in addition to the here below, the other great “actor” of the illusion. Arabic has also translated this close complicity between demon and illusion by resorting to a change of vocalization which allows us to read the bare schema ” ġ.r.ū.r. » in two ways by changing the vocalization of the letter ġ leading the reader to choose, depending on the context, between gurūr Or ġarūr. THE gurūr is that which illusions and deceives and ġarūr is, in Muslim exegesis, the Devil.
Deceived by the incessant murmurings of Satan suggesting that he access a status and a situation even more advantageous than what the divine command had hitherto decreed, it was because he was deluded that Adam found himself fallen from paradise. for not having grasped the boundaries that exist between the true and the false, between reality and deception and it was very “naively” (that is to say without experience) that he succumbed to the temptation of his declared enemy.
It should be remembered here that this is not the first time that the Koran mentions, with regard to man, the negative consequences of his unfortunate “decisions”. There is another episode of Creation which can bear witness to this. This is the famous amāna (the Deposit) which God, according to Muslim tradition, offered to the heavens, the earth and the mountains, amāna which they refused to assume:
“We have offered the Deposit to the heavens and the earth and the mountains. They refused to do it and were afraid of it, while man did it, because he is unjust and ignorant. »4
These natural elements, symbols even of a power and a force far superior to man, refused what this being so frail and with such vile ancestry (created from mud, from a vile liquid, like the reports the Koran) did not hesitate to spontaneously accept. The preceding Koranic verse highlights a judgment already altered by an overly presumptuous vision of a man who is not aware of his limits, that is to say, who has not taken the measure of the task that faces him. was waiting and who, as a result, was unable to appreciate the reality of what his commitment or should we rather say his pact entailed. This human “impudence” was subtly described by Victor Hugo (1802-1885) in the Sea workers :
“of all the teeth of time, the one that works the hardest is the pickaxe of man. Man is a rodent. Everything beneath him is modified and altered, either for the better or for the worse. Here it disfigures, there it transfigures. (…) The scar of human work is visible on divine work. It seems that man is charged with a certain amount of completion. He appropriates creation to humanity. This is its function. He has the audacity; one could almost say, impiety. The collaboration is almost offensive. Man, this short-term living, this perpetually dying, undertakes the infinite. »5
It is indeed this question of the relationship of the “finitude” of man to eternity which constitutes one of the keys to reading and understanding the ġurūr. Time is indeed running out. The birth of life is only the prelude to inevitable death. Islam has never ceased to consecrate the preeminence of the afterlife over the here below, while inviting man not to totally neglect his life on earth, because after death, there exists a life where all veils will be lifted to reveal the truth and where deception and illusion will no longer have any right to exist. If we had to highlight a particular point to describe the ġurūrwe would say that the alteration of judgment crystallizes its functioning as a subtle psychological process of distortion of reality. Why talk about a “psychological process”?
Quite simply because the illusion acts deep within the being, in the sense that the individual himself is not “aware” that his appreciation of reality is altered. Reality, deception, illusion, all these notions raise a number of questions: what should we call “reality” or “truth”? What are the criteria that allow us to affirm that man is right or wrong?
Should we limit ourselves to a purely “binary” approach which would oppose, as is often the case in systems of thought governed by religious phenomena alone, good versus evil, or is there room for a “humanist dialectic” which would allow to put man at the heart of all these concerns in order to question the endogenous functionings which govern his perception of reality as well as his propensity to submit to a set of commandments, moreover divine for what interests us here, while ‘he must, to do this, overcome a multitude of obstacles?
The Koran warns men many times about the illusion of the world which, “helped” in this by the Devil, would lead them to misunderstand God by distancing themselves, in particular, from His commandments:
“Men!” Allah’s promise is truth. May the Immediate life not deceive you and may the Deceiver not deceive you about Allah! »6
As the verse shows, in the Muslim tradition, that which distances one from God is vain.
Notes:
1 Cor, 2, 30. We will use the translation of Régis Blachère, Le Coran, G.-P. Maisonneuve & Larose, 1980, translation with which we have nevertheless taken the liberty of modifying all or part of the passages which seemed a little “distant” from the meaning of the verse, taking care to rely on the exegeses of ‘al-Ṭabarī, al-Qurṭubī and Ibn Kaṯīr (references to come). Changes are noted in notes.
2 Cor, 7, 12. Let us point out that Blachère, in his translation, did not render the anā ḫayrun minhu by “I am better than him” but by “I am better than what You created”. Should we see, in Blachère, a desire to “stick” as closely as possible to the feeling of Iblīs who does not recognize in Adam any right to existence and who refuses to consider him as his alter ego ? The Arabic text, however, does not lend itself to any ambiguity, hence our choice not to keep this part of its translation for this verse.
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