The naked, naked ape

In The Fig (Tree), chapter 95 of the Quran, appears a line:

“We have indeed created man in the best of moulds.”*

Now for a long time, it seemed to me to be a patronizing statement. Well, surely we’ve read and we know that human beings are on the top rung of all creatures – animate and inanimate.

We just are the best, so we don’t even have to think about it. What about homo sapiens having “the best of moulds?” The best of structures? This line, to me, is about the anatomy of humans, so, how do we have the best of structures?

For a looooong time, I have envied birds and other pretty thangs. Surely, a dancing peacock is a heavenly being (except for those feet it regrets)… and there are other absolutely flawless beauty queens in the nature. They can fly, which I so envy. Some of them can sing and do marvelous things.

Look at us. We are naked apes. We don’t even have lovely, foxy fur.  

Strangely, I have now found my answer from the world of business. We have the best of moulds because we are born as naked apes with little inherent capabilities with no multicolored feathers and honeyed throats and an inability to fly! Our handicaps make us the best!...

I never doubted the extraordinary capabilities of the mind and of the eye in particular. Countless times, I experimented how the eyes measure speeding cars and constantly feeds the info to my mind. How the body automatically stiffens up and relaxes as we get on and off from a staircase. The blessing of fever. The taste that the nose has. The many talents of the body that we use every living second of our lives.

Still I did not have a unified theory. Then the understanding came. It came, after all, from the world of business. It came, to be specific, from the evolution of advertising agencies.


* See this page for three variations of translations.