يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلنَّاسُ إِنَّا خَلَقْنَـٰكُم مِّن ذَكَرٍۢ وَأُنثَىٰ وَجَعَلْنَـٰكُمْ شُعُوبًۭا وَقَبَآئِلَ لِتَعَارَفُوٓا۟ ۚ إِنَّ أَكْرَمَكُمْ عِندَ ٱللَّهِ أَتْقَىٰكُمْ ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ عَلِيمٌ خَبِيرٌۭ ١٣
O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may know one another. Surely the most noble of you with God is the one most conscious/aware (of Him). God is All-Knowing, All-Aware.
I have wondered, often with great unease and confusion, what to make of various collectivities, large and small, i find around me. Individuals live lives that are intertwined with lives of other people – family, village, town, clan, guild, team, band and so on. meaningful human endeavors often involve other people and relations (at the most basic level, i need to eat to live and i count on a form of life where there is some arrangement and cooperation that allows food to be grown and bought and sold, some arrangement for its procurement and preparation and so on). Its simply true that human life is unavoidably social. Even when i choose to be alone, I choose to be alone in a house that others have built, with systems that others cooperated to build, i wear clothes others have made, i read things written on paper made by others and written by others and so on). As much as i may detest or love it, I am someone’s child and someone’s neigbor, client, student, teacher, co-worker, uncle, aunt and so on. I realize that i plug into various collectivities simultaneously and others do too. Sometimes people call that having multiple identities at the same time [here i am a father, there a co-worker or a resident of this or that city or town etc.]. The existence of sociality and therefore of collectivities that take on particular forms [of life] or arrangements in which individuals live and act and experience is indubitable. Because of this inevitable sociality and collectivist context of much of ‘meaningful’ human experience, there is a possibility that I come to not only relate with other human beings in terms of those collectivities but to assign differential value/worth/goodness to them. I can start to see one collectivity or social arrangement as ‘better’ than another and insofar as i see myself as a member of that arrangement, i’d see my own worth (positive or negative) in terms of that collectivity. Human beings are never without some sense of value (good and bad) and never without some collective arrangements of which they (and others) are a part. to recognize this much is not to exalt “community” over the individual. its simply to recognize that individuals value (or see less valuable) certain forms of life not just some discreet choices unrelated to some larger social arrangement. I value, for instance, those who play tennis as part of an arrangment where various ways of physical exertion are systematized in sports and some choose to excel at certain forms and not others and where some decide to build tennis rackets and balls and stadiums and tournaments where excellence in that form can be displayed and appreciated and so on. I cannot value the act of an individual hitting soft round object with a certain tool across some piece of earth. I need a collectivity to exist for whom there is, by mutual agreement, a sport called tennis and certain ways of organizing the hitting of balls across a net are meaningful and excellent (and others not) and so on. my experience of value and meaning in a given context already includes the standards that the collective has decided for value/worth or excellence or nobility. Now, not only do i see some tennis players as better or worse than other tennis players, I also judge collectivities as better (those who play or like tennis) or worse (those lethargic, inferior brutes! who neither play nor life or understand tennis or football or jet-making or organizing into large powerful militaries or build tall sky scrapers or write shakesperean tragedies and so on). We make differential forms of, and standards for recognizing, “value/worth/nobility” within particular collectivities grounds for assigning different values to/across collectivities. To simplify, someone can say, for instance: I love tennis, i find it valuable and meaningful and beautiful. We [those who love and play tennis] are good people for appreciating this sport and excelling in it. Those who don’t like or play tennis are not appreciating something beautiful and good and instead using their time and energy on something I don’t find worth my time and energy and attention. Its better, more noble, to be a tennis player/lover than to spend time being, for instance, an interior-designer. one can expand to bigger collectivities but it works in roughly this way within the mind. This value-judgment is discomforting and people respond to it by denying they are judging etc. But, in my view, the judgment is there and what to make of it, how to respond to it, is something revelation makes a claim about in the verse above. It claims that the reality of social collectivities (and each person’s inevitable enmeshment in one or more of these) is NOT the basis for value/worth. Underneath the various collectivities, there stands the individual human beings, equal in being created exactly like any other human beings. There is, in the verse, a reminder of the pre-cultural creation of each human being by the maker. Second, there is an affirmation of the human experience of social collectivities that reason understands already. Third, an alternative is offered to human tendencies (without attending to revelation) to assign differential value to each person on the basis of their being a member of one or more of those collectivities. The differences in the collectivities are given a rationale – they are created so that we may know one another. To me, it is a claim that if I were to look at any given collective or group, I can and should see/know/understand all the things that they value i.e. that i will find somethings of real value that are the goals or ideals of that collective or group or that are manifested in what each person in the collective does or the collective does altogether. Or alternatively, i’ll be able to (and should) understand (even if i am not a member of that collective) what is valuable and devalued in that collective and can learn, by looking at them, what is and isn’t valuable to me. Instead of seeing what i find valuable in the collective as a feature of that collective or of the individuals in that collective and considering them noble on that account, I am told that the right response for each individual is to differentiate themselves from others in their own minds (and think of distinctions among others) not in terms of those inevitable collectivities that they find themselves and others a part of but INSTEAD in terms of how aware anything noble or valuable makes them (or others) of the One whose excellences and nobilities and perfections those are. Just like things like trees and birds and water are valuable for revelation as signs that make me see who my sustainer is, to see His face, to see Him being glorified and praised as deserving of praise as the owner of all praiseworthy beauties and perfections, in the same way the goods and excellences that characterize collectivities and human actions as parts of those collectivities, are to be known and understood as means for becoming aware of God. All that i can know as good and perfect and valuable about others is NOT grounds for thinking how good others are and what I know about others as different from what I, without getting to know others, think is good about me is NOT for thinking how good I am and how bad others are. The faculty of discrimination I have as a human being should instead be used towards thinking how aware I am, or anyone else is, that the perfections they manifest and seek, are God’s perfections. A person is meaningfully different from any other not on account of which collective they are or are not a part of at any given time but how aware they are that they are exactly the same human beings and the only variable that is relevant, revelation claims, is how aware they are that all they know as good and worthy belongs to God and is from His knowledge [including my awareness of those valueable and excellent things].
The Quran as Revelation 