THE WORD OF GOD

THE WORD OF GOD It is He who made the sun radiate a brilliant light and the moon shed its lustre, and ordained for it stages so that you may learn to count out the years and [to make other such] reckoning of time. God has not created all these without a purpose. He makes plain His revelations to men of understanding. 10: 5 In the alternation of night and day, and in all that God has created in the heavens and the earth, there are signs for a God-fearing people. 10: 6 The sun is at the most appropriate distance from our earth. That is why it has been a treasure-like source of light and heat for us. If a difference were to occur in this alignment, the sun would not be the sun for us: it would become the fire of hell. Instead of being the messenger of life, it would be the messenger of death. The moon rotates in its orbit in a precise, mathematical way. In spite of its being devoid of its own light, it not only gives us cool light, reflected from the sun, but also provides us with a natural calendar of months and days. These astronomical signs prove that there is strong purposefulness in the universe, and the fate of the purposeful universe cannot be purposeless. Then, the appearance of day after night indicates, in the language of symbolism, the moral fact that, according to the law prevailing in this world of ours, light should prevail after the reign of darkness; the brightness of light should follow upon darkness. Where, before, human rights had been trampled upon, there will now ensue a system whereby rights will be honoured. Divine justice will dominate in place of human arrogance. Such a time is destined to come, when the prevalence of evil will come to an end and the recognition of truth will prevail everywhere. T HE Quran is the book of God. It has been preserved in its entirety since its revelation to the Prophet of Islam between 610 and 632 A.D. It is a book that brings glad tidings to mankind, along with divine admonition, and stresses the importance of man’s discovery of the Truth on a spiritual and intellectual level. Translated from Arabic and commentary by Maulana Wahiduddin Khan