THE BOOK OF GUIDANCE

The Book of Guidance ~ 95 ~ THE BOOK OF GUIDANCE Read in the name of your Lord who created-created man from clots of congealed blood. Read! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, who by the pen, taught man what he did not know. Indeed, man transgresses in thinking himself selfsufficient. For to your Lord all things return. (The Qur’an 96:1-8) These verses of the Qur’an were the first to be revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. They tell us what God’s purpose was in choosing this particular way of sending His revelations through His messengers, namely, to inform man of what would otherwise have been impossible for him to learn on his own. For example, man leads his life in the present world for a fixed period of time, then passes away. During his life-span he appears to be free. This gives rise to two kinds of misunderstandings. One is that man’s life is nothing but what it appears to be from birth