format_quote Originally Posted by Commentary
Koranic commentary tells the story of how Allah made great schools of fish appear on Saturday and disappear before nightfall, to test the Jews' faith and obedience to His commandments. This was too much to bear for the Jews, and they found ways of getting around the divine prohibition against fishing on Saturday. Ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad and one of the first Koran commentators, wrote that one Jew secretly caught a fish on Saturday, tied it with a string, and threw it back into the water after tying the string to a stake in the ground. The next day, he pulled the fish in and ate it. When he saw that he was not punished, he repeated his actions on the following Saturday, and on the Saturday after that. Eventually, the neighbors noticed the smell of the fish from his cooking, and began following his example. For a long time they ate in secret, and Allah did not hasten to punish them, but when they began to fish openly and sell their prohibited catches in the markets, they were punished.
Al-Tabari mentions another tactic used by Jews to circumvent the prohibition. One Jew who craved fish dug a pit with a channel leading from it to the sea. On Saturday, he opened the channel so the waves would wash the fish into the pit. On Sunday, the man cooked the fish. The aroma of the cooking fish reached the neighbors, who followed his example, and it soon became common for the Jews to eat fish caught on Saturday. When the sages warned them, they claimed they were fishing on Sunday, when they removed the fish from the pit, and not on Saturday, when they opened the channel.[31]
Not all the Jews acted in the same way. The Koran commentators identify three groups in this context: some of the Jews sinned and violated the divine precept not to fish on Saturday; some warned the sinners of Allah's punishment and forbade them from continuing to do so. The others held their tongues; although they did not eat the fish that the sinners caught on Saturday, they also did not forbid the sinners from sinning.[32]
In such a situation, when the sinners refused to stop sinning, those who followed the divine precept decided that they were unwilling to live in the same village with the sinners and built a wall between them. One day, the sinners were not seen leaving their gate. Those who observed the divine precept climbed the wall and went to check the houses, and found them locked. When they opened the doors, they found that everyone – men, women, and children – were turned into apes. "They locked their houses at night, when people lock themselves in, and awoke as apes."[33] The 13th century Andalusian Koran commentator, Al-Qurtubi,[34] said that the apes identified their human relatives, approached them, smelled their clothes and cried. The humans, in contrast, could not identify their relatives, but told them: "'Didn't we forbid you [from violating the word of God]?' The apes nodded their heads in assent." According to some commentators, the young people of the village became apes while the elderly became pigs.[35]
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