Of Solomon and the Ant

[ by Charles Cameron — King Solomon’s battle order in the Qur’an, the speech of ants, science confirms scripture, two possible directions of scriptural interpretation ]

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If I might connect two recent strands of my thinking here on Zenpundit:

1.

One thing I have been puzzling over is the relationship between highly charged metaphysical realities in battle, and the physical personnel and materiel of war, in posts such as Quantity and Quality: angelic hosts at Badr and / or Armageddon and More “night watch” than “guardian angels” perhaps.

This Qur’anic passage, 27.16-19 which I shall quote in the Marmaduke Pickthall version, presents an interesting “battle order” in this regard:

And Solomon was David’s heir. And he said: O mankind! Lo! we have been taught the language of birds, and have been given (abundance) of all things. This surely is evident favour. And there were gathered together unto Solomon his armies of the jinn and humankind, and of the birds, and they were set in battle order; Till, when they reached the Valley of the Ants, an ant exclaimed: O ants! Enter your dwellings lest Solomon and his armies crush you, unperceiving. And (Solomon) smiled, laughing at her speech, and said: My Lord, arouse me to be thankful for Thy favour wherewith Thou hast favoured me and my parents, and to do good that shall be pleasing unto Thee, and include me in (the number of) Thy righteous slaves.

How’s that? “Armies of the jinn and humankind, and of the birds, and they were set in battle order…”

Note also the Jewish folk-tale concerning King Solomon and the ant… and Rumi’s telling, illustrated above from Walters manuscript W.626

2.

I have also been talking about mapping the conceptual way-stations that are found in conversations leading to radicalization – but that’s really just a target of opportunity for me, I am interested in mapping concepts in general. Here again, that Qur’anic passage is of interest.

That’s because it “maps” – in a very double-quote-ish way – to recent findings in science, as exemplified by:

Francesca Barbero, Jeremy A Thomas, Simona Bonelli, Emilio Balletto, Karsten Schönrogge, Queen Ants Make Distinctive Sounds That Are Mimicked by a Butterfly Social Parasite, in Science, Vol. 323 no. 5915 pp. 782-785 (2009).

Ants, it appears, talk among themselves, but the voices of their queens are distinctive: and the Maculinea rebeli butterfly larvae can mimic the speech of a Myrmica schencki queen. As reporter Jeremy Hance discussing this study puts it:

While ant vocalizations had not been as widely studied as their chemical communications, the researchers believed this might hold the key to the butterfly’s success. They recorded the vocalizations of both the ant workers and the queens, and discovered significant differences in the queens’ “dominant frequency and overall acoustics”. When the queen’s vocalizations were replayed, worker ants would gather around the caller and guard it. The researchers found that this was “consistent with the exalted status and protection afforded to queens in the hierarchy of a colony”.

Researchers then turned to the parasitical butterfly larvae, whose vocalizations were mimics of their hosts’. However, the scientists discovered that the sounds were 23 to 27 percent closer to the queens’ over the workers’, thus providing them with first-class treatment. While the butterfly larvae may use chemical resemblance to infiltrate the colony, once inside the colony it is the mimicked vocalizations that allow it to rise to the top, often at the expense of its hosts’ offspring.

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