This assumption — of which we are rarely conscious and which we almost never articulate – has serious consequences for our deen, our way of life. It reduces iman, our faith, to something that we might write on our identity papers, as we write our family name, place of birth, gender, and the like. But God has made it clear throughout His Book, and quite explicitly in this surah, that He does not judge our faith as it is written on our identity papers, but as it is impressed and imprinted on our bodies and minds through the manifold processes of our human effort in the whole of our lifetimes, be they short or long. He has promised that He will judge us by the best of what we tried to be and do, and that He will forgive us the rest. We depend on that promise, but we cannot make that promise come true simply by declaring that we are Muslims, and showing some level of attachment to certain of the symbols of being Muslim, such as diet and costume.  

 

The surah takes its name from the mention, in the middle of the surah, of the frailty of the spider’s web. I have explained elsewhere that the names of the surahs of the Qur’an are a convention that developed as a useful shorthand to refer to one surah rather than another. These names are not part of the Revelation and do not carry its authority – by contrast, the forms and order of words and passages within surahs and the arrangement of the surahs, do carry the authority of God because they were settled at the end of the lifetime of the Messenger of God, salla l-lahu `alayhi wa-sallam, under the supervision of Jibril, `alayhi s-salam. So we should not suppose that the titles indicate the theme(s), or indicate a special focus or perspective on the theme(s), of the surahs to which they are attached. However, because the reference to the spider’s web occurs in the middle of the surah, separating/connecting the two main sections (vv. 1-40, vv. 42-69), this title perhaps does have a significance that is worth dwelling upon.

 

A spider’s web (v. 41) is indeed a frail thing, and we can easily brush it aside. But a bird’s nest, or the nests that ants build, are also easily destroyed, and these could have served the purpose if the purpose was only to indicate frailty. The spider’s construction (bayt) is not made out of bits and pieces of material it gathers from the world around it (like a bird’s nest, for example). Rather, the spider builds its ‘house’ from material spun out from within itself. There are general patterns in the webs of different species of spiders, but no two individual webs are identical, albeit similar. Each web carries the impress of the individual effort of the spider that built it and is conditioned by the specificity of its circumstances (its ‘history and geography’, we could say). Thus, the bayt of the spider offers us a likeness of  the delusion of self-sufficiency which afflicts many of mankind (v. 39 mentions Korah, Pharaoh and Haman as famous examples of this delusion).

The spider is not the target of criticism. Like all non-human animate creatures, it is glorifying God in its effort of life, and this effort is its worship. It is not glorifying itself (like the humans mentioned by title or name, of whom God says: fa-’stakbaru fi l-ard). In reality, the material substances within the spider’s body, the inherited know-how individually applied as web-building competence, the material existence of the objects from which the spider suspends the master-thread around which it hangs the other threads, are all givens, preceding the spider’s constructive effort, as are the creatures for whose entrapment the particular web is particularly scaled. That is not to mention the existence of the universe and its adherence to principles of symmetry and geometry, to the ‘laws’ that constrain the relevant physics and chemistry of wetness and dryness, of toughness and flexibility, of lightness and stickiness, etc. The spider’s effort of construction is not self-dependent at all, though it might believe so if it were possible for a non-human creature to be Pharaonic in disposition.

 

Great pyramids to house the self-important dead and impress the living; hierarchies of wealth and status, ponderous and cruel machinations to manipulate and control the labour of others, to concentrate wealth and power – all these are causes and effects of the delusion of self-sufficiency, of the falsehood of self-dependence, of the self-centred belief that God has so endowed mankind that certain human beings (if they have the cultural ambition) can somehow be as if gods, despite their mortality, and that God is very impressed with them for this ambition. It is hard to think of any foolishness greater than the foolishness of trying to impress God, either with one’s sin or with one’s holiness. 

 

As God makes clear to us in this surah – and our present emergencies make clear to us in the planet-wide breakdown of systems that sustain life and what is so precious and necessary to us of variety and beauty ,and which we should wish to preserve or improve for future generations – this boastful human self-centredness is a life-destructive delusion. Any and all of our human efforts are dependent on given conditions and antecedent circumstances. We are obliged to acknowledge these givens with gratitude — the human arts and sciences that merely express ‘wonder’ do not count as gratitude. Meeting this obligation orients and scales our energies so that the harm we are capable of does not become attractive to us. If it does we come to believe the harm to be good (or necessary for a future good)  and commend it to others, or even coerce others also to believe that it is good. Refusing this obligation guarantees that we are drawn to what is harmful as if it were beneficial. Consequences follow. That is the sunnah of God, and the sunnah of God cannot be altered. The affirmation and declaration of faith must be tested and proven before it can be rewarded with the approval of God. If it were otherwise, we could not appreciate (the relative) freedom of thought and action that is the expression of our particular dignity and status in the creation. 

 

The delusion of self-dependence is persistent in human nature, and as believers we have a particular duty to be vigilant against it and to alert others to it by speech and example. Pharaoh and Korah and Haman were arrogant about their know-how (in respect of ordering a state and material resources, building complex structures, making money, manipulating the minds of others) and this arrogance made their ignorance and error incurable. God says: ‘So we took each one in his sin (dhanb): and of them was he over whom We sent a hurricane; and of them was he that was overwhelmed by the Shout; and of them was he whom We made the earth to swallow; and of them was he whom We drowned. It was not for God to wrong them, but they did wrong themselves.’