Why did Allah assign angels to record our deeds, when He could've done so Himself?

The problem

The Qur'an tells us:

"And indeed, [appointed] over you are keepers, noble and recording- they know whatever you do." [Sura Al-'Infitar, 82:10-12]

A commonly heard concern about this is, why did Allah need to appoint angels to record our deeds? Clearly, as the Qur'an repeatedly emphasizes, He has intimate knowledge of our every thought and action. So isn't it redundant, then, to post additional record-keepers on our shoulders?

I think this is an interesting discussion, because it serves to flesh out some principles about Allah's actions.

The basic response is as follows.

Allah as a "motivational creator"

A lot of the times, Allah creates things not in the way that's the most "efficient" in terms of resource, but in a way that would serve to make a spiritual point. A good example of this is how He chose to create humans. From a purely "efficiency" perspective, creating Adam de novo from dust, and then making all of humanity from the initial couple seems more trouble than its worth. If Allah wanted, He could definitely have had us naturally evolve from apes. The reason He chose to create us supernaturally, however, was so His Prophet (peace be upon him) could make this point after the conquest of Makka:

“O you people! Verily Allah has removed the slogans of Jahiliyyah from you, and its reverence of its forefathers. So, now there are two types of men: A man who is righteous, has Taqwa and honorable before Allah, and a wicked man, who is miserable and insignificant to Allah. People are children of Adam and Allah created Adam from the dust.” [Tirmidhi, English reference- Volume 5, Book 44, Hadith 3270]

In other words, this mode of creation allows Allah to make a moral point to people: don't be racists. Racism, on Adamic creation, is not only immoral, but also unscientific: contrary to reality, since our stock is the same. Also see Qur'an, 49:13.

Similarly, in many other cases, Allah sets things up so He can make arguments on their basis. Adam was created from dust, and not from light, not because dust is easier to create from- but because it serves to underscore our lowly status as creation. We as humans can draw significant psychological motivation from that fact. In the same way, Allah brought His Prophet up to Him on the night of ascent to reveal the commands of prayer. Again, this seems superfluous- He already had a streamlined Jibreel-based system set up to deliver revelations to the Prophet- but the action makes perfect sense when we realize this was done to emphasize the gravity and importance of prayer.

In the same way, while awareness of Allah should be motivation enough for us to do good deeds and stay away from bad deeds, the idea that we have angels literally atop our shoulders, breathing down our necks as it were, busily taking note of every single action we commit and reporting to Allah- that serves as far greater psychological motivation. That's the reason the angels are posted, not because this is how Allah "comes to know" about our actions- but because this setup serves as additional motivation for us to watch what we are doing.

I kind of want to substantiate this by talking about a real life example about the specific ways religion motivates us.

So let's talk about Balinese water temples.

The rice terraces in Bali



Pictured above are rice terraces in Bali. All of the quotes in this section are from David Sloan Wilson's book Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, pp. 132-138 in the EPUB version. He bases his analysis on the work done by the anthropologist J. Stephen Lapsing, in his book Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali.

Apparently rice is an exceptionally difficult crop to grow, especially in terms of water management- paddies need to be efficiently irrigated and drained at precise times in the planting cycle. Describing the overall structure of the rice terraces, Wilson writes:

The rain that falls on the mountain tumbles down to the sea in rivers that cut deeply into the soft volcanic rock. To use the water for irrigation, the Balinese have created a vast system of aqueducts, often running through tunnels a kilometer or more in length, that shunt the water from the rivers to the rice terraces, also sculpted by human labor from the steep mountain slopes.

Balinese rice farmers have fine-tuned this whole process to maximum efficiency. To understand what a marvel of pre-industrial engineering this is, consider these three facts: "First, the Dutch, who conquered Bali in the nineteenth century and whose own country is a miracle of hydraulic engineering, could find little to improve in Balinese rice production other than to tax it." Second, recent attempts at "modernizing" this system with pesticides, fertilizers or other interventions have been runaway failures. Third, and perhaps most impressively, computer simulation models of the system showed that it was "close to optimal at solving the trade-off between water use and pest control".

Here's the thing, though. This system really shouldn't work, at least not as well as it does.

"The goddess makes the waters flow..."

This is because maintenance of a system such as this requires collaboration among thousands of people. For the water to be distributed efficiently and equitably, a farmer upstream the irrigation branch cannot misuse the water- that would deprive those down the river from him. At each branch of the irrigation system, fates of several groups of farmers are joined by their shared use of the water. The functionality of the system, therefore, depends massively on honest collaboration among all those who use the water.

I'm massively underplaying how complex this problem is, because water management is just a part of the problem. There's also pest control, which also requires large-scale collaboration among hundreds if not thousands of individuals.

Without a strong central government or policing system, there's no reason this should work. And yet, Balinese rice farmers don't have a system of that scale. How does this system operate as smoothly as it does?

The answer, in one word, is religion. At the summit of the mountain, there's an immense temple dedicated to the worship of the goddess of the waters. The farmers' "overflowing belief" in the authority of this goddess, and her high priest, is what leads them to maintain the rules of charity and collaboration as well as they do.

Now this in itself is an interesting story about the secular utility of religion, but there's one more layer to it. The Balinese irrigation system depends not only on just belief in the water goddess itself, but also plenty of other, smaller temple deities that are placed at every branch. The farmers fed by the water from a branch form the congregation of that temple. So it's not only the more "distant" water goddess that the farmers are held accountable to, but also to the smaller-scale temples (and deities) immediately upstream of them.

The general idea, to the extent I can place it, seems to be that with deities "watching over them" right at the point where they receive the water, the farmers are even more motivated to cooperate.

In other words, the fact that the water deities are proximate, not distant- the fact they're placed in charge of upstream irrigation branches- serves as important motivation for the rice farmers. Circling back to our initial discussion: accountability to a proximate spiritual agent- angels on our shoulders, in this case- does lead to a greater psychological motivation to do good.

That's essentially why Allah set things up the way they are.

Final thoughts

An interesting point to emerge from this discussion is, angels in Islam seem to be doing the same explanatory work that minor (in some cases major?) deities perform in polytheism. I've heard some arguments about polytheism providing a better explanation for some aspects of reality. This tiny demonstration shows that, while Islam is an extremely strict monotheistic religion, the concept of angels do provide explanatory resources for phenomena thought to fit better with polytheism (like the dappled nature of the world, say). What's different, then, between (at least some forms of) polytheism and Islam is not the belief in a multiplicity of powerful, honorable spiritual beings, perhaps not even in the roles they serve in their respective theologies- but the response that's expected of us towards these "lesser" beings (honor and respect, not worship).

These strands can perhaps be fleshed out into a robust yet spiritually engaging Islamic Angelology.