“God Knows Best”

I run into the phrase “God knows best” all the time in medieval Arabic writing. I’ve been reading through a work from the early 13th century A.D., recently translated under the title A Lonely Wayfarers Guide to Pilgrimage (how could I possibly resist a title like that?). The author—’Ali ibn Abi Bakr al-Harawi—goes through every city he knows and names  important pilgrimage sites. He often employs this phrase, such as in the following example:

Shahshabu is a village in one of the districts of Famiya… It also contains Alexander’s tomb. It is said that his entrails are there and that his body is in the lighthouse of Alexandria. It is also said that he died in Babylonia. God knows best.

There were lots of competing claims for where someone was buried. The head of Husayn was said to be in both Cairo and Damascus. Alexander the Great had competing claims (and still does today). Our author reports them and adds “God knows best.” That might sound like a shrug of the shoulders, sort of like our “God knows.” Actually the phrase can be given a little finer of a point if we examine the passage in the Qur’an from which it was drawn.

The phrase was drawn from sura 18 (The Cave), which begins with a recounting of the widespread Christian story of the Sleepers of the Cave. The number of these young men was obviously in question in the versions of the story circulating in Arabia, and the Qur’an lists some contradictory versions:

Some say, ‘The sleepers were three, and their dog made four,’ others say, ‘They were five, and the dog made six’—guessing in the dark—and some say, ‘They were seven and the dog made eight.’ Say Prophet, ‘My Lord knows best how many they were.’ Only a few have real knowledge about them, so do not argue, but stick to what is clear, and do not ask any of these people about them. [18.22, translation by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem]

Note that the prescribed statement in the case of a historically unknown fact is “My Lord knows best how many they were.” The standard “God knows best” is just an abridgement of this formula. Notice that it’s quite a bit more than a shrug of the shoulders.. or a medieval version of “God knows.” It’s rather the invoking of a category for a variety of disputed knowledge. It’s an acknowledgment that, as interesting as the question might be, there’s no way to resolve the claims and counter-claims attached to this question. Furthermore it’s not a matter about which a serious person should argue. The proper procedure for the medieval historian is simply to list the various versions and to acknowledge that there’s no way to know the truth of the matter. The phrase “God knows best” is thus a shorthand explanation for why the options have been listed and why the author has withdrawn from the task of discovering the truth of the matter. A strength of Arabic historical writing is its ability to let ambiguity and uncertainty have a positive place, and this is an example of that.

If I could draw one further lesson from this it is the need to know the Qur’an backwards and forwards. I’ve read it several times, but to have its phrases really embedded in one’s head is the best foundation for reading medieval Arabic literature.