The Merchant and His Marbles

[IAmZamzam]

I wrote this little fable yesterday and at first hesitated to post it because this is hardly the best analogy I’ve ever made. I originally meant for it to be about one of people’s favorite arguments against Islam, the idea that Muhammad just copied everything he wrote out of various earlier traditions. Somehow, though, the tale lost focus. For one thing it almost ended up becoming two separate parables, the first of them about the history of The Qur’an and the corruption of the previous scriptures. And even to the extent that I stayed on course I’m still not at all sure I managed to work in the whole “marbles” idea as well as I meant to when it comes to the latter half of the story. It ended up being sort of a square peg in a round hole. But as long as I still get the point across I suppose the story isn’t a complete waste, and a yarn of well over two thousand words may as well not be written entirely for naught. Who knows? You may like it.

THE MERCHANT AND HIS MARBLES

Once there was a very loyal and faithful servant who worked long extra hours for his master, diligently, patiently, even though he’d never met him. Some people wondered why. Some people even called him a fool. But he took comfort in the fact that he wasn’t the only one who remained loyal.

He was the only servant, however—in his country and his age, I mean—whom the master ended up personally addressing.

One day the master sent a messenger to speak to him. “Here,” the master said through the messenger, “I leave a gift for you. A bag of marbles. Let this be a sign that I have not forgotten my servants. In this bag there are a great many marbles, each of a different color.” The master explained the meanings behind each color, and how every one of the marbles was a symbol showing how his servants had honored him, and the ways in which they could continue to do so in the future. In some cases the marbles also indicated the master’s own wondrous traits (the color royal purple meaning how majestic he was, for instance)—or maybe some of the colors of the marbles represented stories from the past, or prophecies of what was still to come.

“Now go,” the master said, “and quickly show these marbles to all of my other servants, and tell them all about what has happened, and teach them what I have taught you. Let them make bags of their own with the same collections of marbles so that they can pore over these facts in their homes, and teach all of my lessons to their children, and begin a legacy, so that everyone can know about me.”

So was it done—at first. For a little while everyone did exactly what they were supposed to. They were careful to follow the master’s instructions to the letter, making exact duplicates of the original bags. Then gradually, over time, the situation began to change. Sometimes it was by sheer accident. A person might slip up and pass on to his children a bag with a marble in it which was robin’s egg blue, for example, instead of turquoise. An easy mistake to make. Or sometimes it was the result of a misunderstanding. A dying man might tell his son, “When you make your bag don’t forget to put in the majesty marble,” and the son would fail to remember that this was the father’s nickname for the royal purple marble and not the family’s own bright red one (red being another color which has often been historically associated with royalty). After that point the family descendants would always have a red marble in their bag, and the meaning of the collection might end up changing as well.

And then there were times when the reasons for the alterations, these corruptions in the marble collection, weren’t so innocent. People had their own ideas about what should go into the bag, you see. There are a few bad apples in every batch. A few liars and sneaks. Oh it’s not that these people believed they knew better than the master. In their arrogance they might even have been so completely and naturally certain of their own interpretation that they figured they must obviously be following the master’s original intentions by, say, deliberately putting into their bags a pine green marble instead of a bottle green one, or even replacing the color apricot with the color pewter.

One way or another changes to the formula did happen. At first it was only gradually, occasionally, subtly. But over the generations these changes accumulated, with a lot of different new marbles put in a lot of different bags, until a time came when nobody really knew what was what anymore. There were so many versions of what the marble collection was supposed to be (not to mention what each marble was supposed to mean in the first place: by this point those facts had largely been forgotten) that everyone was left scratching their heads as to what the first collection might have consisted of. Nobody knew; it’s not like it was still around anywhere.

But the master had come again anyway. He’d found another loyal servant and given this one a new bag of marbles with somewhat different contents tailored to this man’s own people. And what should happen but the whole miserable process started all over again! Flash forward many generations and these people too had reached a point where nobody knew what was what. Not a single person could have told you what the original bag of marbles had contained. The list had changed too many times. Humanity, it seems, isn’t very good at keeping its facts straight. Maybe following instructions just isn’t our thing.

This all went on and on until a grand total of four bags of marbles had been issued to four different specially selected servants. Finally the master found a fifth one—a merchant who actually didn’t understand much about marbles in general—and explained the situation to him. Through one of his messengers the master said, “Look, I know I’m probably looking pretty incompetent to some people right now but the fact of the matter is I’ve been expecting this to happen from the start—planning it, even. My reasons are many and complex and some of them are well beyond your understanding but in short this whole thing has allowed there to be many different peoples, many different traditions, which can be united as one—brought together by you. It’ll provide a lot of common ground for a lot of different folks. Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to hand you one bag containing the original sets from all of these previous four marble collections—or rather those marbles from them which people actually still need—along with a few brand new marbles besides, as a measure of extra mercy and because there are new messages I want to deliver. I want you to clear everything up—and this time I’ll go out of my way to make sure everyone gets it right, that it stays this way.”

Of course by “getting it right” he did not mean “accepting it as the truth”. Ever since that meeting, you see, people have found many reasons for not “getting it right” in that sense. Some of it has to do with slightly similar marble collections sometimes being discovered in other places that weren’t directly connected to the merchant, or to any of the owners of the previous marble bags. One highly telling such incident involves a time when a pair of archaeologists named Glenn and Flaco came across an ancient satchel of marbles while they were exploring a deep cave some distance away from where the merchant lived.

“This is interesting, Flaco,” Glenn said to his friend as he studied the find. “These marbles were used by the Cult of the Such-and-Such, two countries over from where the merchant lived. In theory he might conceivably have heard of them, I suppose. Just look at this fragment of the marble collection. It doesn’t match up exactly, mind you, but I still don’t think it’s a coincidence. See how many colors in a row are the same? Looks like we’ve found yet another one of these sources the merchant drew upon when building his collection. Amazing how many different places one man can get his ideas from.” He whistled. “Grant money, here we come.”

“So what?” Flaco said, sounding more bored than annoyed. “So it’s similar. I don’t see what your point is.” Flaco had no particular beliefs when it came to the subject of marbles but he also had never really understood the weird leaps of logic his fellow archaeologists always made on subjects like this. He had often wondered when he’d get an acceptable segue to discuss his misgivings. Perhaps this wasn’t the best time, during an important expedition—but if not now, when? “If you ask me, Glenn, that sounds like an post hoc ergo propter hoc. First A happened; afterward B happened; therefore A must have been the cause of B. Isn’t that how it goes?”

Glenn chuckled a little, more in genuine good humor than in condescension. “That’s as may be, Flaco,” he said, “but let’s face it, ancient history is built very largely on that fallacy. Oftentimes it’s all we’ve got to work with. We’re left grasping the dark. Even if I believed in these things, though, it wouldn’t matter. Dr. Overton does believe in the merchant, remember, but when speaking in his capacity as a scientist he’s still forbidden from openly considering the possibility in any document he writes. As science is about the empirically provable only he’s left without any choice. Let me tell you, I’d hate to be in his shoes.”

“We are in his shoes, Glenn, don’t you see??” Flaco said. “I’m getting really tired of always having to trace the course of dead people’s ‘influences’ when I would never dare make the same rudely presumptuous and logically faulty assumptions about the living. It feels disrespectful to the dead or something. Half the time it makes me have to play the hypocrite too, just like Overton, because I don’t believe many of the stupid things we purport either—the weak connections, the pure conjecture. Some of these connections really are close, sure. A reference in The Books of the Yada Yada recorded an even higher number of marbles than this as matching up to the ones in the merchant’s bag. But I still fail to see what any of it means. Suppose—just suppose, purely in theory, Glenn—that this guy really did have some man walk up to him and produce a bag of marbles out of nowhere just like he said? Would we honestly expect what was in that bag to bear no resemblance whatsoever to anything else in all the world? Are we to believe that before truth gets captured and placed in a bottle it’s already to be found in only one place? Fact gets scattered, Glenn—a piece of it here in one account, a bit of it there in another, some confined to canon, a little more escaping to what gets falsely declared ‘heresy’ or ‘apocrypha’. As students of history we should know that better than anyone. Marbles of all colors are the same way: they end up in all sorts of different places. So what exactly is the problem we have with what the merchant was saying? What makes a claim with all these parallels any less likely to be the real thing? If anything shouldn’t it be more likely?”

“What nonsense. Look, I know you’re much newer at this job than I am but there are a few things you definitely should already know by now. For one thing skepticism is a large and essential part—”

“Nonsense?! My how the meaning of the word ‘skepticism’ has changed since the ancient Greeks coined it! Tell me, what exactly was the merchant supposed to have done, come up with a combination of marbles that nobody but him could ever have possibly have thought of?? That was never the idea. That was never the claim. The marbles’ meanings were about preexisting subject matters, already well known to his audience. It would hardly be a fair thing to expect of him.

“Also, let’s face it, Glenn, this whole ‘they have it too, so he must have stolen it’ argument is completely tautological to begin with. So there are parallels between what this merchant did and a lot of other things a lot of other people did before him. We take that as evidence that he got it from them. But if there had been overlap with only one previous thing then we would have just said that he copied it all from that one source, wouldn’t we? In fact it would have fit Ockham’s Razor much better. And if there had been no parallels at all, with anything, then we would have just said he must have made it all up. His claim to have been working out of a pre-established tradition would have been obviously false, and nothing he did would’ve had any sort of historical precedent or historical basis. He can’t win, Glenn. There isn’t a single theoretically possible scenario which wouldn’t have been treated as evidence that the merchant wasn’t the real thing, and you know it. It’s our job as scientists to completely close our minds. You just said so yourself. I suppose that the empirical nature of our profession really is a good excuse for that on a purely professional level but the whole thing still makes me feel uneasy. It’s dangerous. It’s too easy to let it slip beyond the professional and into our real opinions. And that’s the difference between us, Glenn. People like Overton and me are only pretending.”

And, without another word, Flaco upped and left. In time he would probably calm down and return to the cave, or at least go on being a scientist, but all the same he was beginning to have second thoughts about being so very agnostic regarding the general subject of marbles. He had a lot of thinking to do.

APPENDIX:

I would like to close with this quotation from C.S. Lewis’s novel “The Screwtape Letters”:

Only the learned [now] read old books and we [demons who tempt people] have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating The Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the “present state of the question”. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to [Satan] and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that “history is bunk”.

[Muslim Woman]

:sl:

quite long . In'sha Allah will read later.

[Scimitar]

reading this story made my day. A little bit of philosophy, mixed with a timeless irony, coupled with a bitter sweet understanding of the championing of humanity... really enjoyed this. Yes, there are some lines that don't fall so well, and some paragraphs could be spaced better, and what not - but all that is minor wizzle, compared to the actual content. Could have been a little shorter, but then, it's always hard shortening written works.

Will you be doing a re-edit? I'd love to have this in my documents folder.

Scimi

[IAmZamzam]

I'm never particularly proud of anything I write but frankly I think it would sooner need a complete rewrite than a re-edit. I don't think either the prose or the analogy is anywhere near as good as I could have gotten them. I probably gave the impression, for example, that these parallels in "legend" and "apocrypha" are much bigger and more frequent than they really are. Most of the genuine ones are a lot vaguer than they're often made out by our attackers to be, and other examples are either the result of a complete misunderstanding or even involve the cart being before the horse (i.e. it was The Qu'ran which seems to have influenced the other story, which was partly composed afterward). The Islamic Awareness team has explained it all much better than I can. In fact you can make a much more convincing case that the "source" of the Harry Potter books is "The Lord of the Rings". I'm not kidding. But I suppose that as long as I explained the logical fallacies inherent in the argument itself well enough then the details of the editing and how well the "marbles" thing is presented don't matter so much. I did okay with that, didn't I?