Surah al-A`raf (The Elevated Places) 7 : 191

Overview (Verse 191 - 192)

The Qur’ān argues with those who advocated the earlier form of naive paganism and clear ignorance. It addresses their minds so that they can abandon unbecoming naivety and wake up to the truth. It comments on that form of jāhiliyyah and how paganism creeps into human beings by saying: “Do they associate with Him those that can create nothing, while they themselves have been created, and neither can they give them any support nor can they even help themselves.” (Verses 191-192)

It is only the Creator who deserves to be worshipped. The partners they associate with God can create nothing. Indeed, they themselves are created. How can they be raised to the status of deities? How come they assign to those deities a portion of themselves and their children? Power and authority are amongst the most essential attributes of Godhead. The One who can support His servants and protect them with His power is the One who deserves to be worshipped. All their alleged deities are powerless and without authority. How can they give them support when they cannot even help themselves? How are they to be treated as partners with God?

Hence, humanity today stands in the same old position and needs to be addressed by the Qur’ān anew. It needs someone to rescue it from its new jāhiliyyah, and present Islam to it; someone to take it from darkness into light and to save its hearts and minds from the new paganism and idolatry. This religion saved it the first time and it can certainly save it from the new folly into which it has sunk.

The way this Qur’ānic verse is phrased suggests that it also serves as a strong reproach to them for having adopted human deities: “Do they associate with Him those that can create nothing, while they themselves have been created, and neither can they give them any support nor can they even help themselves.” (Verses 191-192)

The Arabic text uses the plural form that refers only to a group which includes human beings. This suggests that there are some human beings who are considered or treated as gods. It has never been suggested that, in their pagan days, the Arabs used to have human deities whom they treated as gods or to whom they offered worship. They only gave them the position of deities in the sense that they accepted the social laws they had enacted for them and accepted their arbitration in their own quarrels, which meant that they gave them the status of Godhead. The Qur’ān refers to all this as associating partners with God. It equates it with idolatry that offers worship to statues and idols. Indeed, Islam treats both forms of paganism in the same way, just as the Qur’ān considers those who accepted the laws and verdicts given to them by rabbis and priests as polytheists, associating partners with God. They definitely did not believe that those rabbis and priests were gods or deities, and they did not offer any act of worship to them. Nevertheless, all such attitudes deviate from the concept of God’s oneness, which is the cornerstone of the divine faith. That concept takes its clearest form in the declaration that “there is no deity other than God.” This endorses what we have already stated, that the new forms of jāhiliyyah are just as idolatrous as its old form.