If only because it is so often turned into a children’s story, a children’s play, or even, latterly, a delightful children’s museum,1 the story of Noah—the ark with the animals marching in two by two, the forty days and forty nights of rain, and the lovely rainbow when the rain stops—may be the most familiar single episode in the entire Bible. Yet in both the Bible and the Qur’an, Noah stands at the center of a story told effectively for adults only. In either account, God is a terrifying figure, not a consoling one, and yet He is terrifying for reasons that differ strikingly from one scripture to the other.
In the Qur’an, Allah mentions Noah again and again, often quite briefly, but His two longer accounts are particularly revealing. One occurs at Sura 71, the sura (chapter) named for Noah. In its entirety, this short sura—the story of a Noah without an ark—reads as follows:
We sent Noah to his people:
“Warn your people before there comes to them a painful torment.”
He said: “My people, I am to you a manifest warner, that you worship God, fear Him and obey me, and He will forgive you your sins and defer you to a stated term. When God’s term arrives it cannot be deferred, if only you knew.”
He said: “My Lord, I call on my people, night and day, but my call only makes them flee further away.
“Whenever I call them together that You may forgive them, they place their fingers in their ears, wrap themselves up in their garments, grow headstrong and swell in arrogance.
“So I invited them openly.
“Then I addressed them in public.
“Then I spoke to them in faint tones.
“I said: ‘Ask your Lord to forgive you, for He is All-Forgiving, and He will let flow the sky in torrents upon you, furnish you with wealth and progeny, provide you with gardens, and cause rivers to flow for you.
“ ‘Why are you not in awe of God’s majesty, though He created you at every stage?
“ ‘Do you not see how God created seven heavens, piled one upon another, setting the moon among them as an illumination and the sun a glowing lamp?
“ ‘God it was Who caused you to sprout from the earth—and what sprouting! Then He shall resurrect you therein—and what a raising He shall raise you! God it was Who levelled out the earth for you, that you may travel its diverse roads.’ ”
Noah said: “My Lord, they have disobeyed me and followed one whose wealth and progeny only increases him in loss.”
And they practiced utmost guile.
They said: “Do not abandon your gods. Do not abandon Wadd, nor Suwā’, Yaghuth, Yā’uq, nor Nasr.”
Many have they led astray. Lord, increase the wicked in error!
Because of their sins, they were made to drown and herded into a Fire, finding none to come to their aid save God.
Noah said: “My Lord, leave no habitations on earth for the unbelievers. If You let them be, they will lead Your servants astray, and will beget nothing but the dissolute and the blaspheming. My Lord, forgive me, and forgive my parents, as also any who enters my house as a believer. And forgive believing men and believing women and increase not the wicked save in perdition.” (Qur’an 71:1–28)
The story of Noah that Allah tells here finds its strongest biblical echoes not in the Genesis saga of Noah (Genesis 6–9) but in the stories of the various prophets of Israel. The Hebrew word for “prophet” is nabi’; Arabic, belonging to the same language family, uses the same word. Muhammad is the nabi’ whom Allah sends to the people of Mecca, just as in the story just quoted Noah is the nabi’ whom Allah sends to “his [Noah’s] people.” Noah, like Muhammad, warns his polytheistic people that they must convert to the worship of the one true God or suffer grave consequences. The biblical prophets warn the Israelites that if they abandon the worship of the one true God, they will suffer comparable consequences; often enough, the biblical prophets condemn Israel because the nation has in fact been guilty of just this desertion.
In short, the Noah of Qur’an 71 is less like the Noah of Genesis—who, within the Bible, is not a prophet at all—than he is like the prophet Jeremiah:
In the days of King Josiah, Yahweh said to me [Jeremiah], “Have you seen what disloyal Israel has done? How she has made her way up every high hill and to every green tree, and played the whore there? I thought, ‘After doing all this she will come back to me.’ But she did not come back. Her faithless sister Judah saw this. She also saw that I had repudiated disloyal Israel for all her adulteries and given her her divorce papers. Her faithless sister Judah, however, was not afraid: she too went and played the whore. And with her shameless whoring, she polluted the country; she committed adultery with stones and pieces of wood. Worse than all this: Judah, her faithless sister, has come back to me not in sincerity, but only in pretense, Yahweh declares.”
And Yahweh said to me, “Disloyal Israel is upright, compared with faithless Judah. So go and shout words toward the north, and say:
Come back, disloyal Israel,
Yahweh declares,
I shall frown on you no more,
since I am merciful,
Yahweh declares.
I shall not keep my anger for ever.
Only acknowledge your guilt:
how you have rebelled against Yahweh your God,
how you have prostituted yourself with the Strangers
under every green tree
and have not listened to my voice,
Yahweh declares.” (Jeremiah 3:6–13)
For the prophets of Ancient Israel, monotheism was like wedded monogamy, and polytheism was like the promiscuity of a wife who turns herself into a whore and sleeps with many men (= many gods). Beginning with Moses, Yahweh had warned Israel that though He had brought her out of exile and bondage and into this quasi-marital covenant with Himself, He would divorce her and send her back into bondage and exile if she were ever unfaithful to Him. That threat, though luridly evoked elsewhere in Jeremiah, is not mentioned in this passage, but it hovers in the background.
Yet Yahweh is merciful, just as Allah is merciful in Qur’an 71. He is a husband who yearns for reconciliation with His wife if she will but admit the truth that “you have prostituted yourself with the Strangers.” If she will go that far, He will graciously forgive her and take her back as His wife. Yet she will not. In an adjacent passage, Yahweh laments in fury:
“Does a nation change its gods?
—and these are not gods at all!
Yet my people have exchanged their Glory [Yahweh]
for the Useless One! [Baal]
You heavens, stand aghast at this,
horrified, utterly appalled,
Yahweh declares.
For my people have committed two crimes:
they have abandoned me,
the fountain of living water,
and dug water-tanks for themselves,
cracked water-tanks
that hold no water.” (Jeremiah 2:11–13)
The water tanks that hold no water are the gods that are no gods. True, the qur’anic and the biblical passages are as different as espousal and divorce are different. Through Noah, God warns Noah’s people about what will happen unless they convert from worshipping Wadd, Suwā’, Yaghuth, Ya’uq, and Nasr to worshipping God. Through Jeremiah, Yahweh warns Israel of what will happen if and when they stop worshipping Him and start worshipping Baal or other gods “that are not gods at all.” In the first case, conversion is demanded; in the second, it is condemned. Yet in both passages, a warning is delivered, submission to the same God is at issue, and in both passages the warning is ignored. Noah’s people continue in the worship of Wadd and company; Israel continues to choose “the Useless One” over “their [the Israelites’] Glory”—namely, the Glory of their God.
In both instances the deity then inflicts catastrophic mass punishment on the peoples that have rejected Him. In the Book of Jeremiah, true to His early word, Yahweh sends an invader who destroys Jerusalem and carries Jeremiah’s people into a new exile and a new bondage. In Qur’an 71, Allah drowns Noah’s people and then sends them to burn forever in hell: “they were made to drown and herded into a Fire.” In other words, they died by drowning and then were punished in the fire of hell forever. Strikingly, there is no ark in this version of Noah’s story, and there are no survivors except, apparently, Noah himself.
Such is the master plot of prophecy. A people—either by failing to convert (Qur’an) or refusing to stay converted (Bible)—is worshipping one or more false gods rather than the one true God. God sends His prophet to preach the truth, often paying major attention to the kings or leaders of the people, and to warn that unless the people hears and accepts the truth, God will punish them severely. A minority of the people, at most, heeds the prophet; more, or sometimes all, ignore, reject, or even attack him. The prophet assures them that God is merciful and will forgive even those who have sinned against Him if they will only repent and turn (or return) to Him. They do not repent, all but (at most) a tiny faithful remnant; they do not turn (or return) to Him; and God, as He had threatened, sends disaster upon them.
This plot is repeatedly re-enacted in the Bible and repeatedly recalled in the Qur’an, but it is not the plot of the biblical Noah story. In the latter story (Genesis 6–9), Yahweh proclaims disaster not at the end of the story but at the beginning. The story begins with Yahweh alone on stage, talking to Himself, as He does at the beginning of Genesis. Only after announcing His resolve to Himself does He announce it to Noah.
Yahweh regretted having made human beings on earth and was grieved at heart. And Yahweh said, “I shall rid the surface of the earth of the human beings whom I created—human and animal, the creeping things and the birds of heaven—for I regret having made them.”
God said to Noah, “I have decided that the end has come for all living things, for the earth is full of lawlessness because of human beings….For my part I am going to send the flood, the waters, on earth, to destroy all living things having the breath of life under heaven; everything on earth is to perish. But with you I shall establish my covenant and you will go aboard the ark, yourself, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives along with you. From all living creatures, from all living things, you must take two of each kind aboard the ark, to save their lives with yours; they must be a male and a female.” (Genesis 6:6–7, 13, 17–19)
You may have noticed that the deity’s name changes from “Yahweh” to “God” in the passage just quoted. The Noah story as we have it in the received text of the Book of Genesis began as two stories, one of which knew the deity as Yahweh and the other as Elohim (“God” in Hebrew). Further complicating the textual situation, the redactor who combined the two has made his own editorial additions or enhancements to the story. As a result, the story of the building of the ark—the ship on which the designated survivors are to ride out the catastrophic flood—is repetitive and sometimes confusing. The great flood does come, however, as a welling up of the waters beneath the earth and a raining down of the waters above the earth. World genocide does follow. Then, at last, the waters recede, the survivors disembark, and life resumes.
Back on dry land, Noah—who has spoken not a word to this point in the story—offers Yahweh the burnt sacrifice of several animals, still never speaking a word.
Yahweh smelt the pleasing smell and said to himself, “Never again will I curse the earth because of human beings, because their heart contrives evil from their infancy. Never again will I strike down every living thing as I have done.” (8:21)
Once again, we encounter the mysteriously omniscient biblical narrator who knows what Yahweh says to Himself or, as the King James Version has it, says “in his heart.” But how secure is this resolution of restraint? At Genesis 9:12−15, we read a declaration similar in intent but ominously different in its wording:
“And this,” God said, “is the sign of the covenant which I now make between myself and you and every living creature with you for all ages to come: I now set my bow in the clouds and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I gather the clouds over the earth and the bow appears in the clouds, I shall recall the covenant between myself and you and every living creature, in a word all living things, and never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all living things.” (9:12–15)
As Yahweh, the deity promises never again to destroy the world. As Elohim, He promises only never to destroy it again by water. This is the distinction that enlivens a couplet heard in two exegetically alert Negro spirituals: “I Got a Home in That Rock” and “Mary, Don’t You Weep”:
God gave Noah the rainbow sign:
No more water, the fire next time.
The Fire Next Time is the title of a manifesto that the late, gifted black writer James Baldwin published to electrifying effect amid the 1960s groundswell of activism on behalf of racial justice. Interpretive alertness in the reading of scripture is not what people love most about Negro spirituals. For that matter, it’s not what I love most about them. But whoever came up with “No more water, the fire next time” was both an exegete and a social prophet.
But back to Genesis:
What was the “lawlessness” that so troubled Yahweh Elohim that He had to destroy almost all life? We don’t know. At this point in His story, as the Bible tells it, He has given no laws to the humans whom He expelled from Eden and who, it seems, have now greatly increased in number. No laws, no lawlessness, one might think. But what does this passage say about the mind of Yahweh Elohim? Does He only think to impose laws after seeing an action performed that He wants to forbid? The Noah story ends with an act of lawgiving, but the law is one that Yahweh Elohim might better have given in an earlier generation to Cain and Abel, or even to Adam and Eve:
“Every living thing that moves will be yours to eat, no less than the foliage of the plants. I give you everything, with this exception: you must not eat flesh with life, that is to say blood, in it. And I shall demand account of your life-blood, too. I shall demand it of every animal, and of man. Of man as regards his fellow-man, I shall demand account for human life.
He who sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed,
For in the image of God
was man created.” (9:3–6)
Serious as it is, this question of lawlessness and lawfulness is not the only question about God that Genesis 6–9 leaves hanging in the air.
At the start of the story, we read: “But Noah won Yahweh’s favor” (6:8). Why? What had he done to win Yahweh’s favor? How does anyone win Yahweh’s favor? It happens, apparently, but we don’t know how or why it happens, and the fact that we don’t raises the possibility that Yahweh is capricious enough to have chosen Noah at random, for no reason. If His character is such that He might save for no reason, might He not also destroy for no reason? As I said at the start of this chapter, God—Yahweh Elohim in the biblical account and Allah in the qur’anic account—is terrifying in both but for different reasons in each.
And what of the uncounted dead in the biblical version? Was there anything the drowned human beings, not to speak of the drowned animals, might have done to placate Yahweh and save their lives? Could they somehow have averted this genocide? All we know is that they, unlike those addressed by Noah in Qur’an 71 or by Jeremiah in the Book of Jeremiah, were given no opportunity to repent of whatever wrong they may have done and throw themselves on the mercy of the merciful Yahweh Elohim. No, Yahweh Elohim takes mankind by surprise, and in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus underscores this very point with regard to the judgment that he himself will one day render as the “Son of Man”:
As it was in Noah’s day, so will it be when the Son of man comes. For in those days before the Flood people were eating, drinking, taking wives, taking husbands, right up to the day Noah went into the ark, and they suspected nothing till the Flood came and swept them all away. This is what it will be like when the Son of man comes. (Matthew 24:37−39)
In the Genesis account, Yahweh Elohim’s motivations seem only lightly touched by morality and totally untouched by religious orthodoxy—that is, by anything like worshipping the right god rather than the wrong god or gods. Yahweh Elohim in Genesis 6–9 does not demand that human beings be monotheists rather than polytheists, or Yahwists rather than Baalists, or Muslims rather than Waddists, Suwā’ists, etc. Horrifying as the “convert or die” ultimatum of Qur’an 71 may be, it is vastly preferable to mass death inflicted without warning and without any ethical or confessional ground whatsoever. Better a grim choice than none at all.
After lingering this long over the Noah story as told in the Book of Genesis, it is time to look at the second, longer, and particularly revealing Noah story that Allah tells at Qur’an 11:25−49:
We sent Noah to his people, saying: “I am come to you as a clear warner. You are not to worship anything but God. I fear for you the torment of a grievous Day.”
The chieftains of those who disbelieved among his people said: “We do not see you as anything but a human being like us. We do not see that any have followed you except our riff-raff, as it seems. We do not see that you have any advantage over us. Rather, we think you are liars.”
He said: “My people, tell me this. If I am certain of my Lord, and He has brought me a mercy from Him which was hidden from you, are we to force you to accept it when you are averse to it?
“My people, I ask you no money for it: my wage falls only on God. I am not about to drive away those who believed: they shall encounter their Lord. But I see you are a people that do not understand.
“My people, who will take my side against God if I drive them away? Will you not recollect? I do not say to you that I possess the treasures of God. I do not know the Unseen, nor do I say I am an angel, nor do I tell those whom your eyes despise that God will not bring them good, for God knows best what is in their hearts. If I did so I would indeed be wicked.”
They said: “O Noah, you have argued with us: indeed, you have exceeded the limit in argument. So now bring upon us what you threaten us with, if you are truthful.”
He said: “It is God Who will bring it upon you, if He wills. Nor can you escape it. My counsel, should I wish to counsel you, will be of no benefit to you if God desires to confound you. He is your Lord, and to Him you shall return.”
Or do they say: “He fabricated it?” Say: ‘If I fabricated it, upon me falls my sinful act, and I am quit of your sinning.’ ”
It was revealed to Noah: “None shall believe from your people except those who have already believed, so do not feel sad because of what they do. Build the Ark where We can see you and with Our inspiration, and do not plead with me regarding those who are wicked. They shall be drowned.”
Noah then builds the Ark. Whenever a group of notables of his people passed by, they would mock him.
He said: “If you mock us, we mock you as you mock. You will surely know upon whom shall fall a torment that will abase him, upon whom shall fall an everlasting torment.”
And so it came to pass that when Our command went out, and water gushed forth to the surface, We said: “Load up on board two of every kind, and your family—except for those foretold—and those who believed.” But the believers with him were few.
He said: “Go on board. In the name of God may it sail and anchor! My Lord is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each.”
And so it sailed with them amidst waves like mountains. Noah called out to his son, who had kept away: “My son, embark with us and do not remain among the unbelievers.”
He said: “I shall find refuge on a mountain which shall protect me from the waters.”
He said: “Today there is no protector from the command of God, except him to whom God shows mercy.”
Then the waves came between them and he was among those who were drowned.
It was said: “O earth, swallow your waters! O sky, desist!” The waters subsided, the judgement was passed. The Ark settled upon Mount Judi and it was proclaimed: “Away with the wicked!”
Noah then called out to his Lord, saying: “Lord, my son is of my family. Your promise is the truth, and you are the fairest of judges.”
He said: “O Noah, he is not of your family. It is an act unrighteous. So ask Me not for that of which you have no knowledge. I counsel you not to be foolish.”
He said: “My Lord, I seek refuge in You lest I be one who asks You for what I have no knowledge of! If you do not forgive me and show me mercy, I shall surely be lost.”
It was said: “O Noah, disembark in Our peace, and with Our blessings upon you and upon the nations with you. Other nations We shall grant prosperity, and then there shall touch them from Us a torment most painful.”
These are reports of the Unseen which We reveal to you. You knew them not, neither you nor your people, beforehand. So be patient: the final outcome will vindicate the pious.
In idiomatic American English, the phrase “prophet of doom” is roughly synonymous with “crank,” if not also with “hoax.” The prophet of doom, we are to understand, usually turns out to be prophesying a doom that never comes. Cooler heads supposedly know enough not to be alarmed by such prophets. But, of course, sometimes doom does come, and then the prophets once dismissed as cranks are belatedly honored as brave visionaries, even saviors of their peoples.
At the opening of this second telling of the Noah story, as in Qur’an 71, Allah presents Noah as a prophet warning “his people” of “the torment of a grievous day” unless they convert to the worship of Allah alone. But there is a rhetorical difference in how the two accounts portray Prophet Noah in action. In Qur’an 71, Noah offers a positive incentive for why his people should worship only Allah. Allah rules over all of nature, he argues; the false gods, by implication, lack this enriching power. Accordingly, in Qur’an 71, if the people will but beg Allah’s forgiveness for the sin of worshipping Wadd, Suwā’, and the other false gods mentioned, then the true God “will let flow the sky in torrents upon you, furnish you with wealth and progeny, provide you with gardens, and cause rivers to flow for you” (71:11–12). In Qur’an 11, Noah offers only the negative incentive of avoiding the “grievous Day.” This is not only the day of the punitive flood that Noah knows of and his hearers do not, but also the day of final judgment that will consign the drowned disbelievers to “the Fire.”
In this second version of the Qur’an’s Noah story, Allah stresses the importance of accepting the messenger as well as the message. The “chieftains of those who disbelieved among his people” reject Noah’s claim to his exalted calling: “We do not see you as anything but a human being like us,” attracting only “our riff-raff” as followers. The socially leveling power of submission to Allah, its capacity to trivialize differences of wealth and station, lives and breathes in this verse and those that follow.
The notables insult Noah and his lowly followers: “we think you are liars.” Noah is certain of his divine vocation: “I am certain of my Lord,” and “He has brought me a Mercy from Him.” That is, Noah knows in his heart that in the catastrophe that impends, he will be spared. What can he do? “Are we to force you to accept it when you are averse to it?”
This Noah will not and truly cannot do. The Study Quran in its comment on this verse (11:28) quotes what has become in recent years one of the more frequently cited single verses in the Qur’an—namely, Qur’an 2:256, “There is no compulsion in religion. Right guidance has been distinguished from error.”
Yet Allah allows himself what he denies Noah or other mere prophets. According to an old nautical saw, “The ship that does not answer to the rudder will answer to the rock.” Noah’s people are like the ship: if they do not answer to his prophetic warning (the rudder), then they will answer to Allah’s punitive flood (the rock). Their error—and their suffering—at that point will confirm Noah’s truth; he can provide no earlier confirmation; all he can offer is his own good faith.
In the verses that follow (11:29–31), Noah, by arguing earnestly for his own prophetic legitimacy, argues simultaneously for the reality of both the peril of divine punishment and the availability of divine mercy. The depth of his feeling resounds in the thrice repeated “My people!” In delivering his warning message, he is not after their money: “I ask not of you any wealth in return for it; my reward lies only with God.” And, by at least a difference in emphasis from Qur’an 71, he does not promise wealth or arcane knowledge if they accept his message: “I do not say to you that I possess the treasures of God. I do not know the Unseen, not do I say I am an angel….” His critics are right: he is only a fellow human being—a man like themselves, not an angel—but he does not scorn the “riff-raff” of believers whom they scorn, for Allah accepts those who submit to him, as these humble followers have done, and who is Noah to reject those whom Allah has accepted?
At this point, Noah’s opponents, misconstruing the messenger as a magician, the agent of the very doom that he prophesies, challenge him to “bring it on”: “So now bring upon us what you threaten us with, if you are truthful” (11:32). Noah clarifies resolutely but with a touch of menace:
He said: “It is God Who will bring it upon you, if He wills. Nor can you escape it. My counsel, should I wish to counsel you, will be of no benefit to you if God desires to confound you. He is your Lord, and to Him you shall return.” (11:33–34)
Then, at this point in Qur’an 11, there comes one of those moments in which Allah interrupts himself to speak privately, as it were, to Muhammad but also past Muhammad pointedly to us who are overhearing his advice to his prophet. Allah says:
Or do they say: “He fabricated it”? Say: “If I fabricated it, upon me falls my sinful act, and I am quit of your sinning.” (11:35)
To paraphrase only very lightly, what Allah says, speaking past Muhammad to us, is: “Do you think Muhammad made all this up? If so, so much the worse for him. But if not, so much the worse for you.”
Past this point, narrative momentum picks up. God tells Noah the bad news that he will be able to save from the flood only the few whom he has already converted to the worship of the true God. His stern counsel to Muhammad is that he should
“not feel sad because of what they do. Build the Ark where We can see you and with Our inspiration, and do not plead with Me regarding those who are wicked. They shall be drowned.” (11:36–37)
In the Bible, Jeremiah gives full-throated expression to his distress at the disaster that, in Yahweh’s name and at Yahweh’s command, he has prophesied for Israel. To whom are all the questions in the following verses addressed if not to the deity who is poised to bring disaster upon his people Israel?
Incurable sorrow overtakes me,
my heart fails me….
The wound of the daughter of my people wounds me too,
all looks dark to me, terror grips me.
Is there no balm in Gilead any more?
Is there no doctor there?
Then why is there no progress
in the cure of the daughter of my people?
Who will turn my head into a fountain,
and my eyes into a spring of tears,
that I can weep day and night
over the slain of the daughter of my people? (Jeremiah 8:18, 21−23)
In the Qur’an, Noah directs no such laments, no “Jeremiads,” at God as the floodwaters engulf his people, with the exception of one hesitant moment that we shall consider just below.
Noah builds the ark and loads on it his family, the animals two by two, and the few believers among his people. His opponents scoff. Noah replies, in effect, that he who scoffs last scoffs best. Shortly, the waters gush forth. Mountainous waves begin to heave. But at this juncture, Allah tells a story within the story that has no parallel in the Bible.
The ark has set sail when Noah sees that his son has “kept away.” He is still ashore. Noah cries out: “My son, embark with us and do not remain among the unbelievers” (11:42). But the unbelieving son thinks he can save himself by riding out the flood on a mountaintop. The floodwaters rise; the son drowns. Presently Allah orders the floodwaters to recede, taking the corpses of the drowned with them. (“And it was proclaimed: ‘Away with the wicked.’ ”) And then Allah tells the story of a subtle confrontation between Himself and his prophet.
Noah’s disbelieving son is dead and gone, but Noah, evidently still thinking about him, dares to speak of him to Allah: “Lord, my son is of my family.” As a flat declarative sentence, this observation says almost nothing. But imagine an actor putting into these halting, perhaps choked out words the emotion of a father reeling from such a loss: “Lord…my son…A member of my own family…”
Is Noah not asking Allah to answer the questions, How is my son? What has happened to him? What will happen to him? But as if suddenly aware of the huge risk he has run in asking Allah to stoop to fill in these emotional and informational blanks, Noah hurries on to a sentence of preemptive praise: “Your promise is the truth, and you are the fairest of judges.”
As Allah continues the story, he has had no difficulty reading between Noah’s lines. He rebukes Noah, but gently:
He said: “O Noah, he is not of your family. It is an act unrighteous. So ask Me not for that of which you have no knowledge. I counsel you not to be foolish.” (11:46)
Noah is duly contrite, and the Noah story concludes with Allah’s qualified blessing on the new community that Noah, his family, and the survivors from the drowned town, with the salvaged animals, will build:
“O Noah, disembark in Our peace, and with Our blessings upon you and upon the nations with you. Other nations We shall grant prosperity, and then there shall touch them from Us a torment most painful.” (11:48)
The reference to future torment reflects Allah’s knowledge that the message of Islam will be forgotten eventually so that He will have to send new messengers threatening new peoples with new punishments unless they renounce their new false gods and worship him.
This is to conclude the main Noah story, but the story-within-a-story calls for a further word of commentary. When Allah tells Noah that his son “is not of your family,” he speaks past Prophet Noah to and about the future Muslim ’ummah or worldwide religious “people” (the meaning of the Arabic word). Theirs was and is not to be a community based on genealogy or consanguinity but on a shared commitment to submit to Allah as the only God and to accept Prophet Muhammad as truly His messenger.
For Christian readers, Qur’an 11:46, “he is not of your family,” might well evoke several echoes from the New Testament. Most sharply, there is Mark 3:31–35:
Now his mother and his brothers arrived and, standing outside, sent in a message asking for him. A crowd was sitting round him at the time the message was passed to him, “Look, your mother and brothers and sisters are outside asking for you.” He replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking at those sitting in a circle round him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. Anyone who does the will of God, that person is my brother and sister and mother.”
Paul, preaching Christianity years after Jesus’s death, in an arc between Jerusalem and Rome, took Jesus’s transfer of filial identity to the “family” of his followers and used it to transform God’s covenant with Abraham into a covenant with all humanity as Abraham’s spiritual descendants:
There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female—for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And simply by being Christ’s, you are that progeny of Abraham, the heirs named in the promise. (Galatians 3:28–29; The New Jerusalem Bible italicizes progeny to signal Paul’s allusion to Genesis 12:7, where Yahweh’s promise to Abraham is made equally to his progeny.)2
Christianity and Islam, as world communities, are alike in being conceived not as natural communities but as intentional communities. It is obviously the case on a planet with 2 billion Christians and 1.5 billion Muslims that millions are “born into” one community or the other with, effectively, little choice about the matter. And yet neither world religious community began as birth-based, and neither has entirely forgotten its origins. The unique strength of such intentional communities is that anyone can join them; anyone can convert to them, for they are Abraham’s spiritual progeny. The unique weakness is that anyone can quit them; anyone can apostatize. Birth-based communities cannot grow so easily, but neither can they shrink so easily. Thus, a Jew who is not a Judaist—not a practitioner of Judaism—is still a Jew. There’s the difference.
As noted above, nothing in Genesis 6–9, the biblical Noah story, corresponds to the story of Noah’s recalcitrant son. However, I cannot resist mentioning, as a minor comic interlude, Noah’s recalcitrant wife in the late medieval mystery play Noyes Fludd. In this anonymous and slightly irreverent work of popular drama, Noah’s wife is certainly not a disbeliever. She believes not only in God but also in Jesus and all the saints as well. And she has no doubt, either, that the Great Flood is coming. All the same, she absolutely will not come on board the ark unless she can bring her lady friends—her “gossips,” as she calls them—with her. They are good women. She will not have them swept away in the flood.
To me, the work seems droller and wittier in the rhyming, rollicking Middle English than in any modernization.3 For fun, however, here is one exchange between Noah and Mrs. Noah in my own rough-and-ready modernization:
NOAH.
Wife, come in. Why stand you there?
You’re always forward, that I swear.
Come, in God’s name; high time it were
For fear lest we drown.
NOAH’S WIFE.
Well, sir, set up your sail
And row on out, hearty and hale,
For without any fail
I will not out of this town.
Unless I have my gossips, every last one,
One foot further I’m not a-goin’.
They shall not drown, by Saint John,
If I can save their life.
They loved me full well, by Christ.
Either them on your ship you hoist,
Or else row on out, Noah, in high haste,
And get you a new wife.
If accommodation is occasionally made in the Tanakh, notably in the Book of Jonah, for levity of this sort, I detect none in either the New Testament or the Qur’an, and this second qur’anic account of the Noah story ends on an exceptionally sober and far-reaching note. In Qur’an 11:49, the last verse in our second long excerpt, above, Allah once again speaks directly to Muhammad, and what he says is a kind of enlargement on Qur’an 11:35, quoted earlier, where the charge of fabrication is addressed and refuted. In 11:49, God takes explicit note of the fact that there are elements in the story as just told that Muhammad could not possibly have known beforehand, or picked up from stories in general circulation:
These are reports of the Unseen which We reveal to you. You knew them not, neither you nor your people, beforehand. So be patient: the final outcome will vindicate the pious. (11:49, emphasis added)
In Christendom, East and West, from the early Middle Ages through to the seventeenth century, the mildest among the sundry hostile characterizations of Muhammad (heretic, demoniac, maniac, Anti-Christ) was that he was a mere impostor—a false prophet whose alleged revelations were all indeed fabrications.
Qur’an 11:35, where Muhammad’s opponents call him a fabricator, parallels very closely Qur’an 11:27, where Noah’s opponents call him a liar. In Qur’an 11:49, Allah prepares Muhammad to respond to Meccan skepticism of this sort by turning the table on his critics. Regarding completely unprecedented elements in the Noah story as God has just told it to Muhammad, Allah says, in effect, that Muhammad should argue that this very novelty proves the authenticity of the revelation. In modern American slang, one way to underscore the authenticity of a report is to say of it, “You can’t make this stuff up.” Such is Allah’s advice to Muhammad: Muhammad could neither have made such stuff up nor imbibed it from any human source. Yet Allah braces Muhammad against charges that will indeed be made. “So be patient,” Allah says to him, for “the final outcome will vindicate the pious.”
Allah makes his most far-reaching correction of the Jewish and Christian scriptures not through even significant details like the story of Noah’s recalcitrant son but through two much broader, structural revisions.
First, Allah takes a crucial set of the major figures in the earlier scriptures—figures who, if we were to take those scriptures on their own terms, would fall into a variety of different categories: patriarchs, priests, Levites, judges, kings, generals, counselors, prophets, seers, scribes, and others—and recasts them all as prophets sent by Allah to warn their respective peoples of the punishment that will befall them unless they worship Him alone. To take the Old Testament at face value, Abraham is not a prophet. To take the New Testament at face value, Jesus is not a prophet. But for Allah in the Qur’an, this is evidently just where the early scriptures in the faulty form in which they survive have gone astray. Allah’s retelling of these stories makes His claim clear: These figures were prophets, and Allah explains to Muhammad just how they were prophets.
Second, in thus fitting the biblical stories as Jews and Christians know them to this prophetic model, Allah makes them all congruent with the story of the very prophet he is addressing—Muhammad, “the Seal of the Prophets,” the last prophet that the world will ever need. As in the Noah accounts reviewed in this chapter, so at other points in the Qur’an, as we shall see, Allah turns repeatedly to address Muhammad as the last and best of his prophets. And because the Qur’an is to be recited, Allah, when speaking to Muhammad, is also speaking about Muhammad to us. But as this happens, something easily missed but even more powerful is simultaneously under way. Allah is revising the portrayal of himself as extant in the earlier scriptures. No longer reckless, unpredictable, barely moral, highly emotional, the deity who addresses Muhammad is, yes, ferociously severe but predictably, consistently so, severe on terms that do not change and are revealed from the start. Yes, He is fully prepared to consign recalcitrant human beings to “the Fire” forever, a severity that Yahweh never contemplates. Yet he is also eager—not merely willing—to be merciful to all those willing to accept Him as God and to recognize His nabi’ as both a true messenger and, in the case of Muhammad, the final, definitive messenger.