Prophet Adam, the first human and first prophet

Every prophet has a distinctive personality, story, struggle and temperament. The cause of all of them is to explain to people the wisdom of their existence and creation on earth and to make them conscious of not being servants to anyone but God. In this respect there is no difference among them.

The human being, that is, the child of Adam, by nature is far more inclined than is supposed to make servants of others than God and to serve others than God. This is an inclination that has not changed in the child of Adam despite the call and struggle of all the prophets who have come and gone. Indeed, that is the very reason so many prophets came.

That the human being, created by God in the most honorable rank, wrongs himself and oppresses himself by worshipping servants, objects, names or phenomena that can bring him neither benefit nor harm, stems, in a single word, from ignorance. And no matter how much knowledge the human being acquires, there can be emotions, conjectures and factors that lead him astray in this ignorance, and thus servitude to a servant becomes a universal problem of humanity.

The prophets are a grace, a favor, a bounty of God to humanity. Because, in the best language possible, in the human being's own language, as one from among himself, with a clear expression that leaves no opportunity for any other misunderstanding, they remind the human being, who so easily tends to lose his way, over and over, of the truth that he so easily tends to forget. As a human being on the path of that truth, they teach and set an example in the most concrete way, walking while laying down signposts that can be followed.

The prophets are chosen, in the Qur'an's expression, as "some from among us," so that the path of guidance may be found and walked in this world. They do not leave the book alone and depart; they bring it together with life, concretely, and by carrying out its application within the very flow of life, they teach a way, a manner, a style, or, in a broader concept, wisdom. None of them is a prophet from birth. They are educated while growing up as beings of flesh and bone within a society, and there are prophets who made mistakes beforehand. Prophet Moses, for example, caused the death of a man, even if by accident.

Prophet Adam, in addition to being the first prophet, is also the first human being. In his creation all the potentials of humanity are loaded. Although created from earth, the spirit of God was breathed into him. Most importantly, he was taught the names. The nature of this attribute is open to every philosophical consideration. Even the question of whether he was taught to give names to things, or whether he was taught the names already existing, loaded into the nature of things themselves, is exciting on its own. Because how the languages that later diversified relate to the names that Adam learned is a sufficiently mind-stimulating question.

Prophet Adam is also the first human being to commit a sin. Because of this sin, which he committed by falling prey to Satan's whispering, he was sent down to earth, together with both Eve and Satan, from the Paradise in which he had been placed.

This event, seen as the reason for humanity's being moved from Paradise to earth, in all its dimensions, has been an important subject of consciousness-building for Muslims as much as it has been from the standpoint of Christian and Jewish theology and anthropology. In Christian and Jewish theology, for example, it is told that Satan deceived Prophet Adam through Eve, and a serious anti-woman discourse is fed from this. Yet in no account of the Qur'an is it said that the first person deceived was Eve. The one who fell for Satan's whispering and was deceived is directly Adam.

In an article titled "Eve: The Islamic Image of Woman" by Jane I. Smith and Yvonne Y. Haddad, professors at Harvard University, which I translated into Turkish years ago and which was published in the Journal of Islamic Research (1992, Vol. 6, no. 1), this subject was told comparatively in all its details, while the report that Eve was created from Adam's rib was also questioned in a way that upsets set habits. Smith and Haddad demonstrate, with a serious etymological analysis, that this report does not appear in the Qur'an in any way at all, but rather occurs in hadiths under the influence of Isra'iliyyat.

The stories about the creation of Prophet Adam are the most fundamental source for an Islamic anthropology. The anthropology that Muhammad Iqbal and Ali Shariati tried to develop starting from Prophet Adam has been very valuable attempts to determine Islam's position against the prevailing influence of humanist discourses in the modern period.

In fact, taken as a whole, one feels in the Qur'an the striking power of a realism that would bring a humanist down from the clouds where he flies, to the earth. The human being is ungrateful, knows very little, knows nothing other than what God has taught, is hasty, forgetful, heedless, ignorant, etc. Yet the human being has nonetheless been charged on earth with a heavy trust, and the way is open up to the stations that the spirit God breathed into the clay can bear.

The reactions and debates in recent days about Sezen Aksu's song "Harika Bir Şey Yaşamak" ("Living Something Wonderful"), perceived as an insult to Prophet Adam and Eve, have taken, truly, an interesting turn. The interesting thing I could observe is actually the clear difference between the reactions on social media and the assessments in the many WhatsApp groups that I was able to follow in particular. In these groups, made up entirely of people from conservative, Islamic circles, there is a very strong conviction that Sezen Aksu did not say these words with the intention of insulting, and that, although the wording is of course wrong, it does not deserve so much reaction. The sin that Prophet Adam committed in his pre-prophethood state has always been, throughout history, the imaginal source of many literatures and poems or the subject of mystical and philosophical evaluations. There is certainly a grammar of its own in the literary or artistic imagination on this matter. Provided, of course, that nothing can justify an explicit insult to a prophet or to the sacred of Islam or of any religion...

It must also be mentioned that the great majority of those who share this conviction also remember favorably Sezen Aksu's magnificent compositions in the past, on the words of Yunus Emre, Mevlânâ and Âşık Daimi in the album "Işık Doğudan Yükselir" ("Light Rises from the East"). Truly, it is impossible to forget that this album came like a sweet breeze to Türkiye's wounded spiritual climate in the dark atmosphere of the nineties.

"The fire of love has come, my heart blazes

What does one who has love do with shame, with honor

They say to you, O Yunus, do not speak

Or shall I die if I do not speak

God, there is no god but God, but God

God, there is no god but God, but God"