The
Sequence of Day and Night
At a time when it was held that the Earth was
the centre of the world and that the Sun moved in relation to it, how could any
one have failed to refer to the Sun's movement when talking of the sequence of
night and day?
This is not however referred to in the Qur'an and the
subject is dealt with as follows:
--sura 7, verse 54: "(God) covers the day with the night
which is in haste to follow it..."
--sura 36, verse 37: "And a sign for
them (human beings) is the night. We strip it of the day and they
are in darkness."
--sura 31, verse 29: "Hast thou not seen how God merges
the night into the day and merges the day into the
night."
--sura 39,
verse 5:
"...He coils the night upon the day and He coils the day upon the
night."
The first verse cited requires no comment.
The second
simply provides an image. It is mainly the third and fourth verses quoted
above that provide interesting material on the process of
interpenetration and especially of winding the night
upon the day and the day upon the night.
(sura 39, verse
5)
'To
coil' or 'to wind' seems, as in the French translation by R. Blachere, to be
the best way of translating the Arabic verb kawwara. The original meaning
of the verb is to 'coil' a turban around the
head; the notion of coiling is preserved in all the other senses of the word.
What actually happens however, in space? American
astronauts have seen and photographed what happens
from their spaceships, especially at a great distance
from Earth, e.g. from the Moon.
They saw
how the Sun permanently lights up (except in the case of an eclipse) the half of the Earth's surface that is facing
it, while the other half of the globe is in darkness.
The Earth turns on its own axis and the lighting
remains the same, so that an area in the form of a
half-sphere makes one revolution around the Earth in
twenty-four hours while the other half-sphere, that has remained in darkness, makes the same revolution in the
same time.
This perpetual rotation of night
and day is quite clearly described in the Qur'an. It
is easy for the human understanding to grasp this
notion nowadays because we have the idea of the Sun's
(relative) immobility and the Earth's rotation.
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This process of perpetual coiling, including the
interpenetration of one sector by another is
expressed in the Qur'an just as if the concept of the
Earth's roundness had already been conceived at the time - which was obviously not the
case.
Further to the above reflections on the sequence of day
and night, one must also mention, with a quotation of
some verses from the Qur'an, the idea that there is
more than one Orient and one Occident. This is of
purely descriptive interest because these phenomena
rely on the most commonplace observations. The
idea is mentioned here with the aim of reproducing as faithfully as possible all
that the Qur'an has to say on this subject.
The following are
examples:
--In sura 70 verse 40, the
expression 'Lord of Orients and Occidents'.
--In sura 55, verse 17, the expression 'Lord
of the two Orients and the two Occidents'.
--In sura 43, verse 38, a reference to the
'distance between the two Orients', an image intended to express the immense
size of the distance separating the two points.
Anyone who carefully watches the sunrise and sunset knows
that the Sun rises at different point of the Orient and sets
at different points of the Occident, according to
season. Bearings taken on each of the horizons define
the extreme limits that mark the two Orients and
Occidents, and between these there are points marked
off throughout the year.
The phenomenon described here is rather commonplace, but what mainly
deserves attention in this chapter are the other
topics dealt with, where the description of
astronomical phenomena referred to in the Qur'an is
in keeping with modern data.
This is no less than a reminder to (all) the worlds. And you shall
certainly know the truth of it (all) after a
while.(38:87-88).
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