A Period of Twenty-Five Years

DECEMBER 30 Your Skin Will Speak Out... Man’s skin, according to the Qur’an, will testify against him on the Day of Judgement: ‘On the Day when Allah’s opponents are gathered together they will be driven into the Fire. So that when they reach it, their ears, their eyes and their very skins will testify to their deeds. “Why did you speak against us?” they will say to their skins, and their skins will reply: “Allah, who gives speech to all things, has made us speak. It was He who in the beginning created you, and to Him you shall all return. You did not hide yourselves, so that your eyes and ears and skins could not observe you. Yet you thought that Allah did not know much of what you did. It is this illusion concerning your Lord that has ruined you, so that you are now among the lost”’ (41:19-23). Until recently the idea of skin being capable of ‘speaking’ was very difficult for man to understand. Recent progress in scientific research, however, has made it much easier to see how this will happen. A UPI report published in The Times of India (May 30, 1984) disclosed this startling discovery: ‘Skin speech— communicating through vibrations on the skin’—offers promise as a future alternative to hearing aids or surgical implants for those with impaired hearing, a speech and hearing scientist has said. Dr. Arlene Carney, audiologist at the University of Illinois, said that ‘skin speech’ involves the use of tactile devices that electronically create speech patterns in vibrations on the skin. ‘Patients receiving the experimental therapy learn to interpret the vibrations and sort them into speech patterns,’ said Dr. Carney. It is well-known that words emitted through the mouth are preserved in the atmosphere in the form of sound waves. This sound actually originates in vibrations, much the same as the vibrations that cause skin speech, which are transmitted in the form of wave motions through a material medium such as air. These waves remain in the atmosphere. Though they cannot be seen, they do not disappear. They are there, and, were the apparatus available, could be played back like a tape on which sounds have been recorded. If this is true of vibrations that cause sound speech, then it is also clearly true of the vibrations that cause skin speech. These vibrations are likewise preserved in the atmosphere. Man, who even in this world possesses the ability to play back sounds recorded on a disc or tape,