The Holy Quran with Five Volume Commentary (Vol 1) — Page lxxviii
GENERAL INTRODUCTION but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it. From this it appears that (a) Jesus who lived in a country where the fig tree was to be found in abundance, did not know when figs were in season; (b) he was, it seems, so devoid of good manners that instead of being sorry for his own mistake, he proceeded to curse a fruitless tree, saying, "No man eat fruit of thee hereafter. " We Muslims do not believe Jesus to be God. We regard him only as a Prophet of God. But even we cannot believe that he could have said what is here attributed to him. We cannot but be amazed at those who regard him as the son of God, and as the best exemplar of morals, and who yet tolerate these descriptions which attribute unmannerly conduct to him. They never stop to think whether such things could ever be said by Jesus and whether they were not wrongly attributed to him by others. Christian apologists today tend to explain away this passage. They suggest that the curse applies not to the fig tree but to the Jewish nation and only means that Jews hereafter will not be able to bring forth any fruit. The explanation is lame. Those who are conversant with ordinary literary forms cannot be impressed by such explanations. If the fig tree was to be used as metaphor, was it necessary that Jesus should have walked up to one, at a time when he was suffering from hunger? According to the passage in Mark, Jesus saw the fig tree full of leaves, and he decided to go near it, hoping he would find some fruit. It was after he had seen it closely and found nothing but leaves (the time of figs had not yet come) that he cursed the tree. Jesus, in short, goes to the tree to satisfy his hunger. The tree has leaves on it and Jesus hopes to find some fruit. The narrator adds that the time of figs had not yet come. All this shows that this incident was not meant as a metaphor. The narrator makes it quite clear that Jesus went to the tree because he was hungry, and was hoping to find some fruit. But the time of fruit had not yet come. It is possible that this particular tree was late in yielding fruit, or that it suffered from some disease and failed to yield fruit. Jesus, however, became annoyed and cursed the tree. If all this is correctly reported, have we not reason to ask whether those who curse inanimate objects like trees, rivers, mountains or stones, can be regarded as rational beings? Did the writer who attributed this to Jesus think that generations of readers who would come after would swallow this caricature of a sane and decent person like Jesus. Christian devotees may be fooled by such a narrative, but we Muslims cannot attribute these things to Jesus, not because he was in any way different from the other Prophets, but, because we do not expect such things from even ordinary decent and well-behaved persons. (ii) In Matthew (7:6) we have: lii