1 Adam and His Wife

Who is God? When the question is engaged philosophically or theologically, an answer may begin almost anywhere. But when the question is engaged scripturally, answers must always begin with (and largely stay with) what the scripture tells us about God. This limitation is something like the border of a tennis court. Arbitrary as it is, we may accept it and even recognize that without it, the game would lose much of its excitement and delight. Of course, tennis players do not live their entire lives on the tennis court, and there will be times in this book when, as it were, we take a “time out” and allow our discussion to wander beyond a strictly limited comparison of the respective texts of the Bible and the Qur’an. The rules of the game require only that we serve notice when we do so.*

The Bible and the Qur’an tell us many things about God, and in many regards they agree, but their agreement does not always leap to the eye because, in literary terms, their respective procedures are so different. The Bible tells an epic story beginning with the creation of the world, including the creation of time, and ending with the end of the world, and the end of time. Allah, speaking in the Qur’an, knows this story well, for He claims it without hesitation as His story, and His manner of speaking implies that Muhammad, to whom He imparts His revelation, also knows at least its main characters and episodes. Where the Qur’an coincides with the Bible, then, it unfolds not as a full retelling of the Bible story, as if that story had never been told before, but rather as a set of selective corrections and expansions of an already received account.

Where more correction is called for, Allah has more to say in the Qur’an. Where less correction is called for, He has less to say. His correction is never merely textual, of course, but always and only substantive. He is not preparing a revised edition of the text of the Bible but rather correcting the content of the Bible by revising the story that the Bible tells in the course of delivering His new, perfected scripture.

Creation does not contain its Creator. About that, the Bible and the Qur’an are in agreement. There is no greater reality such as might contain both Him and it. Time is not such a reality; it does not contain God. Space does not contain Him either. He is not a part of the space-time world, for He has made that world. But God has made His human creature a part of His world, and the human part of God’s world began to go wrong almost immediately. About this part of the Bible story, Allah has a good deal to say. Indeed, the subject comes up again and again in the Qur’an, and Allah’s corrected versions of the story of what went wrong, though consistent one with another, add different, sometimes complementary, sometimes striking details to the overall revision.

Who is God? To a significant extent, both the Bible and the Qur’an tell us who God is by telling us who or what He is not. Agreeing, as just noted, that God is not the world that He created, the two scriptures nonetheless disagree about the relationship that exists between the Creator and His human creature. This they do, above all, in their respective tellings of the story “Of Man’s first disobedience,” to quote the immortal first words of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In telling that story, Allah effectively reveals Himself in His distinctive relationship to humankind, just as Yahweh does in the biblical Book of Genesis, traditionally understood. Nuances of difference in the narration of humanity’s primal act of disobedience thus become nuances of difference in the two scriptures’ respective characterizations of God Himself.

An important Qur’anic telling of this primal story comes in Qur’an 7:10–27, which begins as follows:

We established you firmly upon the earth. We provided you with livelihoods therein—little thanks did you render. We created you, We gave you form, and then We told the angels: “Bow down before Adam.” They bowed, all except Satan, who was not among those who bowed. (Qur’an 7:10–11)

The biblical account of the creation of the world and the disobedience of the first humans is told in Genesis 1–3, the Bible’s very beginning. Genesis 1, in which Elohim creates the world in six days, climaxing with the creation of the first human couple, corresponds essentially to Allah’s “We have indeed established you upon the earth and placed means of livelihood for you therein,” but Genesis 1 is not addressed to “you,” and it describes a Creator who proceeds without expecting any acknowledgment other than obedience to His one and only command: “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28).

And yet as Genesis 2 opens, the earth is strangely devoid of humans, animals, and even plants. It is as if the world of Genesis 1 has been half-uncreated, and God is starting over, this time as Yahweh, beginning at midpoint with the first man rather than ending with him. After fashioning him from dust and puddle water, Yahweh plants a garden, then creates the animals, allowing his still unnamed human creature to name them, and finally issues this command:

“You are free to eat of all the trees in the garden. But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you are not to eat; for, the day you eat of that, you are doomed to die.” (Genesis 2:16−17)

Implied in this command is that so long as the man abstains from that one tree, he will not die. And indeed, at the end of Genesis 3, we learn that the garden contains a “tree of life,” whose fruit confers immortality on those who eat it. This is among the trees whose fruit, as the biblical story of man’s first disobedience opens, the man is perfectly free to eat.

What is omitted from Genesis 2 is something that shapes Qur’an 7 from the outset—namely, the presence and involvement of the angels and, above all, of the toweringly important Satan. Their inclusion has the effect, corroborated in other subtle ways, of shifting the scene of the action from earth to heaven, where Allah is attended by His angels. In Qur’an 7, Allah resumes the story, now referring to Himself in the third person:

He {Allah} said: “What prevented you from bowing down when I commanded you?”

He said: “I am better than he. You created me of fire but him You created of clay.”

He said: “Descend from it. It is not fit for you to wax proud in it. Depart! You have been disgraced.” (Qur’an 7:12–13)

Qur’an 7 contains no reference to the creation of Adam from clay, though this detail is mentioned elsewhere in the Qur’an, as is another crucial detail:

Remember when your Lord said to the angels: “I am creating a human being from clay. When I give him the right shape and breathe into him of My spirit, bow down prostrate before him.” (Qur’an 38:71–72, emphasis added)

Adam’s body may be made of clay and Satan’s of fire, but the first man breathes with the breath of Allah, and perhaps he deserves angelic homage for that reason. (But perhaps not: see Qur’an 2:30−33, as discussed below.)

Grudgingly, Satan concedes Allah’s point, but he strikes a stunning bargain with Allah:

He said: “Defer my judgement until the Day when they are resurrected.”

He said: “You shall be so deferred.”

He said: “Inasmuch as You have led me astray, I shall lie in wait for them along Your straight path. Then I shall assail them from their front and from their backs, from their right and from their left. Nor will You find most of them to be thankful.”

He said: “Be gone, accursed and outcast! As for those among them who follow you, I shall fill hell with you all! And you, Adam, dwell with your wife in the Garden, and eat wherever you wish, but do not come near that tree or else you will be sinners.” (Qur’an 7:14–19)

In the Book of Job, Yahweh licenses Satan to torment Job so as to prove to Yahweh’s greater satisfaction that even under torture, Job will never curse his Creator. Here, Allah licenses Satan to tempt Adam and his descendants from all sides, luring them off “Your straight path,” which is Islam, from the moment of human creation until the end of time.

Just as Allah’s garden is a heavenly garden, while Yahweh’s garden, watered by the Tigris and Euphrates, is on earth (Genesis 2:8), so Yahweh’s story unfolds in earthly time, while Allah’s reckons with eternity from the very start. The deferral that Satan requests and receives is a reprieve that runs from the beginning of human history with the creation of Adam to its end on the (capitalized) “Day” when the dead will all rise and be either rewarded with heaven or punished with hell. Fiery indeed, Satan is now ultimately destined for hell, the abode of fire and eternal torment that Allah inflicts on all who do not accept His mercy and submit to Him, but Allah has granted the rebel angel an extraordinary stay of execution.

The Book of Genesis, narrated by a voice never identified in the work itself, proceeds step by step as in a novel, a play, or an art film, building a certain suspense as it goes. Allah, by contrast, delivers what we might better call an account than a counternarrative. While a conventional narrator would not want to “give the story away” by revealing the ending prematurely, Allah has no such concern. It is the point of the story that matters to Him, not the preservation or enhancement of any mere narrative suspense.

And there are other differences. In Genesis 2, when Yahweh commands the man not to eat the forbidden fruit, He says nothing about a Serpent who may tempt to disobedience. In Qur’an 7, by contrast, Adam has heard Allah grant Satan his immense historical reprieve, and he has heard Satan proclaim his diabolical intent to use this very reprieve to tempt human beings like Adam himself. Adam has thus been more than amply warned of what lies ahead when Allah issues his prohibition: “And you, Adam, dwell with your wife in the Garden, and eat wherever you wish, but do not come near that tree or else you will be sinners.” In Genesis, the comparable prohibition is conveyed to the man alone, and the Serpent, perhaps for that reason, tempts Eve (though she does seem to know of Yahweh’s prohibition). In the Qur’an, by contrast, Allah gives the command quite explicitly to both Adam and his wife, even though she is a woman whose name He never speaks.

And now comes the temptation itself:

And Satan whispered to them to open their eyes to what had been concealed from them of their shame.

He said: “Your Lord forbade you to approach this tree only because you would become angels or turn immortal.”

And he swore to them: “I offer you good advice.” Thus did he deceive them with florid speech. When they tasted the tree, their shame was visible to them, and they went about sewing leaves of the Garden upon themselves.

Their Lord called out to them: “Did I not forbid you that tree? Did I not tell you that Satan was your undisguised enemy?”

They said: “Our Lord, we wronged ourselves. If You do not forgive us and be merciful towards us. We shall surely be lost.” (7:20–23)

A deep structural similarity clearly links the Bible and the Qur’an in the telling of this shared story. Allah refers to “what had been concealed from them of their shame.” Genesis 2:25 reads: “Now, both of them were naked, the man and his wife, but they felt no shame before each other.” In both scriptures, the first couple is deceived by a subtle, confiding, insinuating enemy. In both, they eat from the forbidden tree. In both, a sharp change of attitude toward their own bodies occurs when they do so. Genesis 3:7: “Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realised that they were naked. So they sewed fig-leaves together to make themselves loin-cloths.” These parallels are significant and undeniable.

And yet there are intriguing differences as well. In Qur’an 7 as elsewhere in the Qur’an, though later human reproduction is clearly anticipated, Allah never requires it personally of Adam and his wife. In Genesis 1:28, by contrast, Elohim commands the first couple directly, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” And in Genesis 2:18, when Yahweh Elohim1 says, “It is not right that the man should be alone,” and creates the first woman from a rib of the man, the man welcomes her with what can certainly be read as poetic passion, “This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” And then he, who has named all the other living creatures, each by its kind, but has no proper name himself, says of her: “She is to be called Woman, because she was taken from Man” (2:23). To this, the anonymous narrator of Genesis adds a telling aside: “This is why a man leaves his father and mother and becomes attached to his wife, and they become one flesh” (2:24).

These passages, especially the reference to “one flesh,” suggested to early Christian interpreters, notably to Saint Augustine, that the first couple had been ordered to have—and did have—sexual relations even before eating the forbidden fruit. But in that case, how could they have only “realized that they were naked” after eating the fruit?

For Augustine, in The City of God, the answer lay in what this realization actually stood for—namely, not sexuality per se but rather sexual passion. It was the brutal intrusion of lust into their reproductive lives that turned their sin of disobedience into “the Fall of Man.” Before the Fall, reason had ruled passion. Afterward, passion, uncontrollable passion, ran roughshod over reason. For the Augustine of the Confessions, this was all a matter of painful personal experience. Before the Fall, Augustine maintained, Adam’s penis would have become reliably erect when and only when Adam was obeying Elohim’s command to be fruitful and multiply. No erectile dysfunction would ever complicate his devout obedience. No unwanted erections would complicate his life at other times as Augustine’s own had so often done. His life was a kind of Platonic dream come true.

This is the interpretation that stands behind John Milton’s evocation of innocent sexual bliss in the Garden of Eden:

…other Rites

Observing none, but adoration pure

Which God likes best, into thir inmost bower

Handed they went; and eas’d the putting off

These troublesom disguises which wee wear,

Strait side by side were laid, nor turnd I weene

Adam from his fair Spouse, nor Eve the Rites

Mysterious of connubial Love refus’d:

Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk

Of puritie and place and innocence,

Defaming as impure what God declares

Pure, and commands to som, leaves free to all.

(Paradise Lost, Book Four, lines 736–747)2

As Adam and Eve embrace, Satan is spying on them, a scene that William Blake illustrated with pen and watercolor in 1807 and entitled, Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve.3 The amorous first couple is shown lying nude, “strait side by side” (that is, their bodies pressed close), gorgeous in their physical perfection, and kissing. Satan, with a scaly Serpent coiled around his winged body, hovers above, watching them almost longingly.

There is little or nothing in the Qur’an to invite interpretation along these Augustinian or Miltonian/Blakean lines. Allah’s reference to the nakedness of Adam and his wife seems quite strongly to imply that the first couple were celibate until after their sin. What they discovered in the aftermath of their disobedience—to quote The Study Quran—was “that which was hidden from them of their nakedness.” The Study Quran cites an early (eighth-century) commentator, Wahb ibn Munabbih, who proposed that “Adam and Eve were initially cloaked in light, so that their private parts were concealed from them,” a concealment that presumably precluded sexual relations. The Book of Genesis leaves us to guess just what the Serpent, whom Jewish and Christian tradition as early as the first century CE identified with Satan, hoped to achieve by his temptation. Allah makes it clear that what Satan consciously sought was precisely the arousal of shame and indecent interest in his target humans.

And yet, in the Qur’an, the seductive malice of Satan is never such as to compromise the final responsibility of each man or woman for him- or herself. For Augustine, mankind’s Original Sin left the human race inherently so damaged, so prey to blind passion, that sin was virtually inevitable, thus creating the universal need for the salvation that only Christ could provide. But in Qur’an 15:42-43, Allah puts Satan firmly in his place:

“Over my servants you shall have no authority except those who follow you, lured away.”

Hell is their appointed place, all of them.

Muhammad Asad translates the same verses to a somewhat sharper interpretive point:

Verily, thou shalt have no power over My creatures—unless it be such as are [already] lost in grievous error and follow thee [of their own will]: and for all such, behold, hell is the promised goal.

Allah’s first two creatures are now aware of their complementary nakedness, and from their coupling, human history will commence, but their nudity does not mean that they are bereft of reason or responsibility. They are not, in the Christian sense of the word, “fallen.” They have been displaced but not spiritually deformed.

What is the meaning of nudity? Its meaning varies from culture to culture, from age to age within cultures, and from stage to stage within the life of any individual human being. In all cultures, the nudity of an infant has a meaning different from the nudity of an adult. In Western culture, heir to both the Hellenic artistic tradition, with its celebration of bodily beauty, and the very different Hebraic tradition, a recurrent dream has been of a variously Edenic (biblical) or Arcadian (classical) experience of mutual nudity that could be at once both fully sexual and serenely innocent. John Milton epitomizes this yearning.

And yet nudity can be a terrible humiliation. Enemies are stripped naked in war. (Readers may think of Iraqi prisoners naked, mocked, and abused in America’s Abu Ghraib prison.) Even in peacetime, prisoners may be clothed or stripped at the will of the warden. When Allah speaks of human nudity, he sees it surely with reason as a cause more often of sorrow than of joy, implying in the following verses that clothing, after all, is a great blessing, a blessing that, until the moment of their disobedience, the first couple may never have lacked:

He said: “Descend, enemies one to another! On earth you shall have a dwelling place and livelihood for a while.”

He said: “In it you shall live; in it you shall die; from it you shall be brought forth.”

O Children of Adam, We have sent down upon you a garment to hide your shame, and as adornment. But the garment of piety—that is best. These are some of God’s revelations; perhaps they will remember.

O Children of Adam, let not Satan seduce you as he drove out your two parents from the Garden. He stripped them of their garments to show them their shame. He and his clan can see you from where you cannot see them.

We have assigned the devils as masters of those who do not believe. (7:24–27)

When Allah says that Satan “stripped them of their garments to show them their shame,” He may mean either that Satan tore off the leaves they were using to cover themselves or that he deprived them of the concealing spiritual clothing that until then had hidden their private parts and precluded all sexual awareness. Even in the Book of Genesis, once the original innocent nudity has been lost, clothing quickly seems to become a blessing or at least the mitigation of a curse. When we read that Yahweh “made tunics of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21), just before banishing them forever, the wording implies that He dressed the bewildered two as if they were little children being introduced for the very first time to the use of actual clothing. By this point in Genesis no less than in the Qur’an, nakedness seems to bespeak vulnerability and deprivation rather than security or luxury. But in the Qur’an, much more explicitly and menacingly than in Genesis, the vulnerability of nakedness is specifically associated with humiliation at the hands of a cruel and cunning enemy.

In Italian Renaissance painting, nude figures presented in forced or antic poses are referred to by the suggestive term ignudo, which once seemed to me to differ from the standard term nudo in the way that ignoble (ignobile in Italian) differs from noble (nobile). In Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, there are twenty ignudi, all of surpassing physical beauty but all with facial expressions of pensive sadness. Why? Perhaps, I thought, because by being exhibited in such oddly contorted poses, they are captives of a sort, coerced into performing an ignominious nude entertainment. Art historians may have good reason to scorn so presumptuous a projection upon Michelangelo’s sanctified masterpiece. An Italian friend has also corrected my reading of the nudo/ignudo difference.4 I share this amateur’s reflection nonetheless to underscore the inherent ambivalence of human nudity. It may legitimately bear a score of different meanings—or none at all.

But Qur’an 7:10–27 is, in any case, about very much more than nudity. When Allah says to Adam and his wife, “Descend, enemies one to another!” he may well seem to announce the birth of marital strife in the world. But because Allah is so often speaking simultaneously to Muhammad and to all mankind, the war between the sexes may be no more than a microcosm for war in all its terrible forms. At Qur’an 2:30, opening one of the other Qur’anic accounts of creation, the angels object, when required to pay homage to Adam as Allah’s “deputy,” and predict that humankind will bring bloody violence upon the earth:

And remember when God said to the angels: “I shall appoint a deputy on earth,” and they answered: “Will you place therein one who sows discord and sheds blood while we chant Your praises and proclaim Your holiness?”

The angels are right, of course, about human violence. Allah replies to them that He has imparted knowledge to Adam beyond their ken, but He does not attempt to deny their prediction that human history will be a trail of tears and blood.

In Qur’an 7:24–27, Allah predicts that Adam and Eve, now that Satan has bared their private parts, will have “livelihood for a while,” but then they shall die and be “brought forth.” That is, they shall be brought forth from their graves on the “Day” referred to in Satan’s initial request for reprieve—namely, Judgment Day, when the dead shall rise and come before Allah for their final reckoning. Allah ends this passage urging all mankind to don the raiment of reverent submission to Him for protection against Satan and his “tribe” of lesser devils.

Easily missed in this passage is the extent to which it conveys a message of mercy. True, Adam and his wife must “descend” from the heavenly garden, but because they have promptly and plainly admitted and repented of their sin, merciful Allah does not condemn them to eternal punishment in hell. In the Qur’an, Adam does not blame his wife the way he does in Genesis. The two of them confess together, neither blaming the other, and neither attempts to blame Satan. Accepting their repentance as sincere, Allah simply precipitates them into earthly existence where, after living a normal human lifetime and dying at its end, they will await His Last Judgment as indeed will all their descendants. They have every prospect, in other words, of eventually ascending to the heavenly garden from which He has sent them down. In effect, He has forgiven them this first sin. True, they must pay a price, but as they begin the life that awaits them down on earth, He has given them pardon and an immediate second chance.

In Qur’an 7:22, already quoted, when Allah remonstrates with Adam and Eve, “Did I not tell you that Satan was your undisguised enemy?” they might have replied, “No, you did not,” for in this passage, though they have overheard Satan’s initial declaration of enmity, Allah Himself has not warned them in His own words. In a complementary passage, however, Qur’an 20:117–119, Allah’s warning is quite explicit:

We said: “O Adam, this person is an enemy to you and your wife. Let him not drive you both out of the Garden, else you will be wretched. It is granted to you that you will not go hungry therein, nor naked. Nor will you be thirsty therein, nor swelter.”

Though Allah never characterizes Himself as in a paternal, much less a maternal, relationship with His human creatures, His manner here is nonetheless like that of a parent who reminds the kids how good they have it here at home and urges them not to turn themselves heedlessly into runaways. And here, once again, we see the association of clothing with comfort and of nakedness with exposure.

In the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve receive no warning to beware the Serpent and, after their sin, have no prospect of ever returning to the Garden of Eden. Yahweh has posted giant winged creatures with flaming swords to bar the way back, and He makes no reference, as He sentences them, to any afterlife, whether of compensating reward or further punishment. And this is just the beginning. Seething with anger, Yahweh announces that He will impose on Eve and her daughters the terrible pain of childbirth as part of her punishment. As for Adam, he is to suffer, for himself and all his descendants, a life sentence at hard labor followed by the death penalty:

“Accursed be the soil because of you!

Painfully will you get your food from it

as long as you live.

It will yield you brambles and thistles,

as you eat the produce of the land.

By the sweat of your face

will you earn your food,

until you return to the ground,

as you were taken from it.

For dust you are

and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:17–19)

The Genesis narrator not only makes no reference to any afterlife but also holds out no other prospect of a restored relationship between creature and Creator. The human couple will proceed to reproduce, and Yahweh will, in fact, involve Himself in the lives of their offspring, but for all they know at the moment of their expulsion, He is done with them forever.

And, indeed, in a purely literary way, He might be said to leave them behind. A distinctive narrative feature of the Tanakh as the epic of Israel is that of multiple beginnings and endings. A story begins with Adam, then stops. Generations pass quickly until a second story begins with Noah, then stops. Further generations pass swiftly until a third story begins with Abraham, then stops; and so forth.

By contrast with the Adam and Eve of Genesis, sentenced as they are to true and final death without any prospect of restoration or afterlife, Adam and his wife in the Qur’an are effectively immortal, as are all their descendants. In Qur’an 7:10–27, had the first couple not sinned, they might not only have lived forever in the heavenly garden with Allah but might never have reproduced at all. But once they have sinned, their new existential condition becomes no worse than the normal condition for all the “Children of Adam”—namely, birth, earthly death, then a final divine judgment, and afterward either eternal reward in the heavenly garden or eternal punishment in hell. When Satan tempts them, he falsely implies that Allah fears lest His human creatures might “become angels or turn immortal.” But in fact, as Allah well knows, Adam and his wife are already destined to be immortal. Their immortality, however, is not in itself either a reward or a punishment; it is simply a part of the common human condition.

If Yahweh intended ever to forgive His sinful human creatures, why could He not have forgiven them immediately? This was the conundrum, the great unanswered question, that drove Milton to write Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Those two titles are, in fact, a brilliant, four-word summary of the vast Christian epic, according to which Christ, at long last, does restore to humanity the immortality that it lost through the “Original Sin” of Adam and Eve and does reopen the Gate of Paradise that the flaming sword of Yahweh had seemed to close forever.

How did this come about? In the lengthy concluding portion of Paradise Lost, Michael the Archangel explains to Adam, just before the first couple’s expulsion from Paradise, how the Lord God will, in the fullness of time, enable the forgiveness of all human sins through the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Adam, for all the sorrow that attends his and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise, is awestruck before this vision of how the Lord will in the end draw good from evil and, with Eve, he departs Paradise in a state of reverent resignation. Paradise Lost ends with the lines:

They looking back, all th’ Eastern side beheld

Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,

Wav’d over by that flaming Brand, the Gate

With dreadful Faces throng’d and fierie Armes:

Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;

The World was all before them, where to choose

Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitarie way.5

Thus does Milton finally accomplish what in the prologue to Paradise Lost he had called on his “heavenly Muse” to assist him in undertaking:

…What in me is dark

Illumin, what is low raise and support;

That to the highth of this great Argument

I may assert Eternal Providence,

And justifie the wayes of God to men.6

The power of Milton’s poetry is undeniable, but equally undeniable is the enormity of the theological task he undertakes. How can it have been just for Yahweh not to forgive His human creatures immediately, as Allah does, but only after centuries and only by way of the agonizing death of His only begotten Son?

What must strike us is the fact that Milton’s epic is shaped by the same solution that shapes the Qur’an. Critics have endlessly pointed out that in Milton’s Christian epic, the most compellingly realized character is Satan. But it served Milton’s ultimate theological purpose well to make Satan as powerful as he did, for the more powerful Satan becomes, relative to God, the more easily God can be justified in taking so roundabout and costly a path to forgiveness. It took God so long, in other words, because, thanks to the power of Satan, He had a great deal to overcome. Satan thus helps Milton to “justifie the wayes of God to men.”

Similarly in the Qur’an, the presence of Satan as a hugely powerful and omnipresent figure, an alternate source of Power, justifies the ways of Allah to men. It enables Him to be, in a similar way, a better and indeed an entirely good and ethical deity. When things go wrong, even stupendously wrong, Allah need never be even partly responsible. Between them, diabolical Satan and susceptible humankind are always available to blame. Satan will be as frequently and powerfully active in the New Testament as in the Qur’an, but he is only infrequently and weakly so in the Old Testament. As a result, Elohim or Yahweh must assume responsibility for evil as well as good in this earliest and longest of the three scriptural classics.

Thus, in Deuteronomy 32:39, Yahweh says:

See now that I, I am he,

and beside me there is no other god.

It is I who deal death and life;

when I have struck, it is I who heal

(no one can rescue anyone from me).

And in Isaiah 45:6–7, Yahweh declares even more resoundingly:

I am Yahweh, and there is no other,

I form the light and I create the darkness,

I make well-being, and I create disaster,

I, Yahweh, do all these things.

In Genesis 2–3, the tempting Serpent is one of the creatures that Yahweh has created and placed in the garden. Does this not make Yahweh ultimately responsible for Adam and Eve’s sin? Why would it not? If Yahweh knew that the Serpent would tempt them, did He not have a duty to warn them? Or was He surprised by what His snaky creature did? How much, in fact, does Yahweh know in the Book of Genesis? Is He omniscient from the start, or is He surprised by the consequences of His own actions? Christian theologians and Rabbinic sages have suffered over these questions for two millennia. Thanks to the presence of Satan in the qur’anic version, their Islamic counterparts suffer rather less. In the Qur’an, Allah does not have to ask, as Yahweh does at Genesis 3:11 (and not rhetorically), “Who told you that you were naked?”

In the Old Testament, Yahweh’s unpredictability—His propensity for sometimes causing weal and sometimes woe—can make Him seem more godlike by being less knowable. He may seem less godlike when His knowledge seems only partial, but then, at such moments, He becomes even more unpredictable. Allah, by contrast, is never surprised by anything that anyone says or does or anything that happens and is far more dependably and predictably ethical and, above all, merciful. Allah is forceful, yes, but always to the same point and in the same way, and His rage is never so hot, as we shall see in the later chapters of this book, as to incinerate His mercy.

What is most shocking about the qur’anic creation story is the fact that Allah so readily grants Satan a reprieve that so jeopardizes humankind. And yet just such a reprieve appears briefly in the Gospel and is reprised at great and poetic length in Book Three of Paradise Regained. This second, shorter portion of Milton’s two-part epic is a poetic expansion of the Gospel account of how the devil tempted Jesus for forty days in the desert. Thrice Satan sought to subvert Christ, the second time with a daring temptation to power. In Luke’s version:

Then leading him to a height, the devil showed him in a moment of time all the kings of the world and said to him, “I will give you all this power and their splendor, for it has been handed over to me, for me to give it to anyone I choose. Do homage, then, to me, and it shall all be yours.” (4:5–8, emphasis added)

Milton seizes on the phrase “for it has been handed over to me,” so reminiscent of Allah’s license granted to Satan, and expands it into the third of the four books that constitute Paradise Regained. Book Three includes a sweeping geographical survey of the ancient world, all of which Satan claims to control diabolically from below. The “fiend,” as Milton often calls him, concludes this survey by accurately depicting Judaea as a tiny pawn in the ongoing titanic struggle between two great empires—the Persian (Parthian) Empire in the east and the Roman in the west. He warns Christ that even if all Samaria and all Judaea should acclaim Him as Messiah and King of the Jews, His kingdom will not be secure unless He can have subdued one of these two empires in advance. Like a nineteenth-century European imperialist contemplating the partition of Africa, Satan shrewdly counsels Christ to pick off Persia (Parthia) first:

one of these

Thou must make sure thy own, the Parthian first

By my advice, as nearer and of late

Found able by invasion to annoy

Thy country, and captive lead away her Kings…7 (362–366)

The Prince of Darkness is evidently, to a disturbing degree, the world’s ultimate, if secret, powerbroker, and he can make Christ the emperor of Persia if Christ will but bow down to him. Satan knows that his power is not infinite and fears that in Christ he has met his match. But he is determined to delay his defeat as long as possible, and his resources are immense. Thereon hangs the tale in the New Testament (and in Milton’s epic expansion of it) and in the Qur’an alike. Whatever may be said in theological terms of this enlargement of Satan’s role, it is a brilliant literary turn. Temporarily checked only to win dramatically in the end, God becomes interesting in a new way. What is largely an inner conflict in the Old Testament becomes an outer conflict in both the New Testament and the Qur’an.

Half a millennium before the imparting of the Qur’an, a first-century, anonymous, extra-biblical Jewish work entitled Life of Adam and Eve told a story of rebellious angels expelled from heaven to hell for refusing to bow down before Adam. This work survives in two distinct and overlapping versions, one in Greek, the other in Latin; scholars believe a lost Hebrew original stands behind both. That the story of an angelic rebellion is attested as early as the first century does not mean that it may not have been current in the Middle East a good deal earlier and in other ancient venues than Palestine. Because, as already argued, the story answered some besetting questions, it was to make its way far and wide, living on in Jewish and Christian tradition alike through the Middle Ages down to its inclusion as context for Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

While at first glance the inclusion of Qur’an 7 and complementary passages in the Qur’an might seem merely to have continued and further extended the central legend of the Life of Adam and Eve, there is one key regard in which the Qur’an delivers here its sharpest correction of all. In the legend’s central scene, as recounted in the Life, Adam speaks first, addressing Satan (“the devil” in the passage below):

“What have I done to you, and what is my blame with you? Since you are neither harmed nor hurt by us, why do you pursue us?”

The devil replied, “Adam, what are you telling me? It is because of you that I have been thrown out of there. When you were created, I was cast out from the presence of God and was sent out from the fellowship of the angels. When God blew into you the breath of life and your countenance and likeness were made in the image of God, Michael [the Archangel] brought you and made (us) worship you in the sight of God, and the LORD God said, ‘Behold Adam! I have made you in our image and likeness.’ And Michael went out and called all the angels, saying ‘Worship the image of the Lord God, as the LORD God has instructed.’ And Michael himself worshiped first, and called me and said, ‘Worship the image of God, Yahweh.’ And I answered, ‘I do not worship Adam.’ And when Michael kept forcing me to worship, I said to him, ‘Why do you compel me? I will not worship one inferior and subsequent to me. I am prior to him in creation; before he was made, I was already made. He ought to worship me.’…And the LORD God was angry with me and sent me with my angels out from our glory….And we were pained to see you in such bliss of delights. So with deceit I assailed your wife and made you to be expelled through her from the joys of your bliss, as I have been expelled from my glory.”8

The italicized phrases breath of life and image of God in the passage just quoted fuse allusions to, respectively, Genesis 2:7 (the creation of the first man) and Genesis 1:26 (the earlier creation of the first couple). In this relatively short passage, there are no fewer than four references to Adam being the image or the image and likeness of God.

Though the focus here is on the exalted character of Adam, the biblical passages in question are also legitimately read as characterizations of, respectively, Yahweh and Elohim. It is Elohim who says, at Genesis 1:26−27,

“Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that creep along the ground.”

God created man in the image of himself,

in the image of God he created him,

male and female he created them.

Few sentences in the entire Bible have been more aggressively parsed than these. Does Elohim create the male; and when the text reads, “in the image of God he created him,” should we understand that it is only the male who is His image, despite the immediately following line? Or when the text reads “God created man,” should we understand the creation of humankind, in which case the image is the species rather than the specimen and includes all the men and all the women who will ever live? From such questions are entire biblical theologies and biblical anthropologies spun out. Minimally, it seems beyond debate that this verse asserts that somehow Elohim may be known, however indirectly, through His human image and likeness.

A less abstract, more intimately physical connection between Yahweh Elohim and the first man is then asserted at Genesis 2:7:

Yahweh God shaped man from the soil of the ground and blew the breath of life into his nostrils, and man became a living being.

But because breath and spirit are the same word in Hebrew, Yahweh Elohim (“Yahweh God,” in the translation just quoted) breathes not just His physical life but also His spiritual life into His first human creature. And as there is thus something divine about the human spirit, so the study of mankind is at least a prologue to the study of God. Jesus will say boldly (John 14:9): “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” But what, for Christians, is true of the Son of God par excellence is true to some extent of all human beings, according to Genesis 2:7—the more so for both Jews and Christians, once both began routinely to address their Creator as “Father.”

Muslims take no such liberty. Nowhere in the Qur’an and scarcely anywhere else in Muslim tradition is any hint asserted of a familial relationship between deity and humanity. In Qur’an 7:10–27 and parallel accounts elsewhere in the Qur’an, Allah does order Satan to bow down to Adam, but He never presents Adam as an image of Himself. To appreciate the Qur’an, it is essential to hear the silence in that abstention, a silence that brings to my mind a poem, “God’s Brother,” by the American poet and playwright Dan O’Brien:

We walked downhill

from school; he was

older than I

was by ages. The hill

was a runnel of shade

and the great trees discarded

their leprous bark down

along the asphalt, curling

and trod into dust. I told him

of a boy who’d misbehaved

at school again. What

makes you think

you’re better than he is?

he asked me.

We walked

in silence after that, wet leaves

under our feet like water…

Then as if to remind us both

he said, You’re not God,

you know.9

A psychologically legitimate way for non-Muslims to engage the austerity of the Qur’an is to hear it saying, in myriad ways and yet simply: “You’re not God, you know.” You’re not God. You’re not God’s son. You’re not God’s daughter. You’re not God’s brother or sister. Only God is God: lā ’ilāha ’illā ’allāh. Thus, in the Qur’an’s corrected version, Allah’s ground for commanding the angels’ obeisance is decidedly not that Adam, much less Adam’s wife, is somehow an image of God, deserving angelic respect or homage for that reason.

Is there any reason at all for Allah’s commanding that obeisance other than sheer authority and prerogative? Allah, responding to the angels’ complaint in Qur’an 2 that mankind will be corrupt and shed blood, insists:

“I know what you do not.”

He taught Adam the names of all things. Then He displayed them to the angels and said: “Tell me the names of these things, if you are truthful.”

They said: “Glory be to You! We have no knowledge except what You taught us. You! You are All-Knowing, All-Wise.”

God said: “O Adam, reveal to them their names.” When Adam revealed their names, God said: “Did I not tell you that I know the Unseen of the heavens and the earth? That I know what you make public and what you hide?” (Qur’an 2:30–33)

So it is because of the divine knowledge that Allah has imparted to him that Adam, God’s “deputy,” deserves angelic homage. In the Qur’an as also in the Old Testament, things and their names seem so intimately related that to know a thing’s name means to know the thing itself and even to control it. Thus, to know all names here is tantamount to knowing all things—to knowing everything.10 Adam, by his humble repentance, becomes the first Muslim. By his possession of divinely imparted knowledge, he becomes for his descendants the first messenger. But even as the first messenger, he is not the image or likeness of God.

But now what of Qur’an 38:72, quoted earlier, where Allah proposes to “give [Adam] the right shape and breathe into him of My spirit”? Does Allah’s spirit within Adam not confer upon him a dignity that deserves angelic homage, however great or small his knowledge of “the names”? According to The Study Quran, one twelfth-century commentator, Rūzbihān al-Baqlī, did effectively defend that interpretation, but he is an exception to the rule:

Insisting upon God’s complete transcendence and the createdness of anything outside of God, most commentators seek to read I breathed into him of My Spirit figuratively. Some gloss My Spirit as “My Power”…or say that this is not God’s Spirit, but that God refers to it as such as a means of honoring Adam….11

In the practice of Islam, the Arabic word shirk names the cardinal sin of associating anything or anybody so closely with Allah as to compromise His tawhid, or unity. Whatever the text of the Qur’an might seem to say, pious Muslims cannot believe that Allah would ever have required shirk of any creature, angels included.

For much of modern literary criticism, the intrusion of a religious consideration like this upon the criticism, let alone the alleged original composition, of a work of literature is anachronistic and artistically objectionable. Yet Erich Auerbach, one of the greatest of all modern critics, made the appreciation of what he called “figural interpretation” central to his interpretation of all literature. The seventh chapter of Auerbach’s masterpiece, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, consists of a meditation on scenes from the twelfth-century French liturgical drama or “mystery play” Le Jeu d’Adam, also known as Le Mystère d’Adam. In one of these scenes, Adam, immediately after eating the forbidden fruit, turns to Eve and delivers a speech mingling frantic grief and desperate hope:

Through your advice I have been brought to evil, from a great height I have fallen into great depth. I shall not be raised from it by man born of woman, unless it be God in His Majesty. What am I saying, alas? Why did I name Him? He help me? I have angered Him. No one will help me now except the Son who will come forth from Mary. To no one can I turn for protection, since in God we kept no faith. Now then let everything be according to God’s will! There is no counsel but to die.12

Auerbach notes that from this speech, it is clear that Adam “has advance knowledge of all of Christian world history,” but he cautions:

One must, then, be very much on one’s guard against taking such violations of chronology, where the future seems to reach back into the present, as nothing more than evidence of a kind of medieval naïveté….Everything in the dramatic play which grew out of the liturgy during the Middle Ages is part of one—and always of the same—context: of one great drama whose beginning is God’s creation of the world, whose climax is Christ’s Incarnation and Passion, and whose expected conclusion will be Christ’s second coming and the Last Judgment.13

A literary appreciation of the Qur’an requires what Auerbach insists that the proper appreciation of this mystery play requires—namely, a recognition that when “the future seems to reach back into the present,” we are not confronted with mere naïveté but with a figural interpretation of history as “one great drama whose beginning is God’s creation of the world, whose climax is” not Christ’s Incarnation and Passion but God’s revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad, “and whose expected conclusion will be” not Christ’s second coming but Muhammad’s second coming (accompanied by Christ, actually, in developed Muslim tradition) “and the Last Judgment.”

In a figural interpretation of history, Auerbach writes,

every occurrence, in all its everyday reality, is simultaneously a part in a world-historical context through which each part is related to every other, and thus is likewise to be regarded as being of all times or above all time.14

In the chapters that follow, the Qur’an’s corrections of the successive biblical episodes to be revisited will consistently be, in something like the sense that Auerbach captures, a succession of figural interpretations.

As regards the story of Adam and Eve, the story we have just been considering, if we regard “every occurrence, in all its everyday reality, [as] simultaneously a part of [the Muslim] world-historical context,” then we may locate ourselves imaginatively within this context. We are not representations of Allah, to be sure, but we are, for all that, His representatives or deputies in the world, equipped for our sacred mission by the knowledge that He first imparted to our forefather, Adam. Satan is our enemy, coming at us from all sides and at any moment, but we have all the power we need to resist his deceptions and stay on the “straight path.” If we do succumb, we know that just as Allah gave Adam and Eve their second chance, He will give us ours. Allah is like that: He can be counted on. He is not colorfully or dramatically unpredictable. He is not like you or me nor even, quite, like Yahweh. Agony awaits us if we defy Him, but He is on our side if we will let Him be. At Qur’an 50:16, He says:

We created man and know what his soul murmurs to him,

But We are nearer to him than his jugular vein.

Finally, at the end of the story and the end of time, what awaits us, as it awaited Adam and Eve even after their sin, is our return to the garden, the heavenly garden of paradise where it all began.