Principles from the Cow
God’s chapter The Cow is part of the first eight long Madinan chapters of the Qur’an, presented in conversation with the scriptural world of the Old Testament and its memory of Abraham, Moses, Israel and covenant. It was revealed largely during the Prophet Muhammad’s stay in Madinah, amid state-building and relations with tribes identifying as Jewish; by the seventh century, Talmudic Judaism had developed as a major interpretive tradition. Through Iblis and the Children of Israel, God offers a lesson for every community: supremacism and ego can displace the purpose of human stewardship and harden into harmful ideology.
God first presents the problem through Adam. When God says to the angels, “I am placing on earth a successor,” and then teaches Adam the names, the point is that human beings are given responsibility, knowledge and moral agency. When Adam slips, he turns back; when arrogance refuses correction, the result is rebellion. God then moves quickly from human beginnings to a community that received revelation and still failed its test. That is why God keeps returning to the Children of Israel: not to condemn a people forever, but to expose a pattern of conduct that any community can fall into.
God says: “O Children of Israel, remember My favour which I bestowed upon you, and fulfil My covenant and I shall fulfil your covenant, and fear Me alone” (Qur’an 2:40). He also says: “Do you order righteousness of the people and forget yourselves while you recite the Scripture? Will you not reason?” (2:44). Those verses place covenant and hypocrisy next to each other. The message is plain: a sacred inheritance is not a licence. It is a burden of responsibility.
That becomes even sharper in the story that gives the chapter its name. God says: “Indeed, Allah commands you to slaughter a cow” (2:67). Instead of obeying, they respond with delay, evasion and theatre: “Call upon your Lord to make clear to us what it is,” then what colour it is, then more detail again, until obedience is buried under endless qualification (2:68–71). The issue is not sincere questioning. The issue is questioning used as a shield against submission. The moral point is timeless: people often complicate what is morally obvious because clarity would require surrender.
God gives the key line for understanding land and covenant through Abraham. God says: “I am making you a leader for the people.” Abraham asks, “And of my descendants?” God replies, “My covenant does not include the wrongdoers” (Qur’an 2:124). That verse matters enormously. It means descent alone does not authorise possession. Lineage alone does not sanctify political power. Covenant is conditional on justice.
This is where the modern crisis in Palestine becomes morally legible. Gaza as it exists today was formed in 1948, when roughly 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled from the area that became Israel and about 300,000 were pushed into Gaza, making refugees about 80 per cent of Gaza’s population. Outside observers were already describing Gaza in the 1950s as a “concentration camp,” later echoed by Al Gore Sr. after visiting in 1967, and even by former Israeli National Security Council head Giora Eiland in 2004, who described Gaza as “a huge concentration camp.”
A second turning point came in the 2006 Palestinian elections. Hamas initially did not want to participate because it viewed the process as tied to Oslo, but after it won what Jimmy Carter described as free and fair elections, Israel, followed by the US and EU, imposed a severe blockade on Gaza. Israeli policy then aimed to keep Gaza on a “humanitarian minimum diet” and its economy on the edge of collapse in order to pressure the population politically.
Repeated Israeli military assaults followed, including Operation Cast Lead, Operation Pillar of Defense and Operation Protective Edge, before the destruction after October 7 dwarfed even those earlier wars. In the interview, figures were given of 18,000 homes destroyed or severely damaged in Protective Edge in 2014, compared with 325,000 homes destroyed since October 7, alongside 2.5 million tons of rubble then compared with 61 million tons now. The point is that Gaza was not suddenly destroyed in a vacuum, but subjected to a long process of confinement, degradation and repeated assault.
Current UN reporting shows that the crisis remains live and lethal. OCHA reported on 18 September 2026 that 21 people, including 12 children, were killed when a war-damaged residential building collapsed in Gaza City, and that more than 630 bodies and remains had been recovered from beneath destroyed buildings between November 2025 and September 2026, with over 8,000 people estimated missing under the rubble. The same report says Israeli restrictions on machinery, fuel, spare parts and construction materials are limiting rescue, repairs and wider humanitarian work.
The same report also documents the wider system of pressure in the West Bank. OCHA says that since the beginning of 2026, more than 1,600 settler attacks resulting in casualties, property damage or both were recorded across 275 Palestinian communities, while more than 4,300 Palestinians were displaced across the West Bank in 2026 due to demolitions, evictions, settler attacks and related restrictions. These are not abstractions. They describe a landscape in which land seizure, confinement and removal continue in practice.
This is why God’s warning about moral evasion feels current. Yet the warning must be applied universally: supremacism can arise in any community and sideline the purpose of human stewardship. A Muslim label, or association with the Qur’an and Sunnah, does not automatically constitute correct conduct; God’s guidance is meant to straighten character and conduct, so communities must be measured by what they do rather than by labels or identity.
In modern times, that supremacism has a name: Zionism. The issue is the political claim that Jews have a superior right to the land regardless of the people already on it, and that displacement and permanent control can be justified through history, chosenness or covenant. God’s standard in 2:124 cuts against that confusion: “My covenant does not include the wrongdoers.”
For a British audience, supporting Palestinian goods is therefore one small refusal of erasure: a practical way to stand with people whose labour, land and continuity are under assault, while refusing to let power define what is right.