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h alone, and whoever ended up better off would adopt the other side’s mode of worship permanently. S
ra 109 came as a rejection of this proposal, making its own wager: Mu
ammad will never leave his superior, true d
n, and this particular group of unbelievers will never abandon their inferior, false d
n. Premodern commentators who situated the s
ra in its historical setting did not see the verses as suggesting that all “religions” were equal roads to the same truth, contrary to the hopes of modern readers with interest in interfaith dialogue. Rather, it was a prediction that came true, as the unbelievers to whom it referred never accepted Mu
ammad’s prophethood. If we choose to uphold the occasion of the s
ra’s revelation and its original audience as the keys to its message, we lose our reading of the 109th s
ra as a statement of liberal religious pluralism, and what strikes us as the clear “literal” meaning is complicated by history.
34
Verse 20:102 describes the criminals who will be gathered on the Day as “blue-eyed.” In Mediterranean antiquity’s medical theories of the body, external bodily traits were regarded as clues to a person’s inner character, and even the great Imm Shfi’ followed Hellenic physiognomy in his confidence that people with blue eyes were idiots.35 For their racialized understandings of the Qur’n, however, Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan are popularly imagined as heretical deviants whose theodicy of blue-eyed “white devils” distorts the Qur’n’s true message of racial egalitarianism. The irony is that in the case of 20:102, these “heretics” find themselves closer to a plain-sense reading, which pits them against “orthodox” scholars who would rather explain the verse away. When it comes to 20:102, Nation of Islam exegetes appear to be the only scriptural literalists in town.
The Qur’n features prominently in popular “Islam was the world’s first feminism” narratives: As the pamphlets tell us, people in pre-Islamic Mecca used to bury newborn girls alive, and the Qur’n emphatically condemns this practice (16:58–59, 81:8–90). Numerous Muslim commentators have used these verses as evidence that the Qur’n’s divine author sought to advance the status of females. At no point, however, does the Qur’n clearly link its condemnation of female infanticide to a critique of misogyny or affirmation of gender equality. While noting that parents are often disappointed at the birth of a girl and joyous for a boy, the Qur’n does not challenge this attitude except to say that murdering your daughter is the wrong choice. Rather than express a concern with sexism, the Qur’n associates the killing of newborn babies with idolatry and the fear of poverty. If that’s feminist, then the Christian Right’s antiabortion stance is feminist. Moreover, the Qur’
