The Universe: Quran

The Universe in Light of the Quraan

• The spinning of the earth

"He (God) coils the night onto the day and coils the day onto the night."
[Qur'an-Zumar 39:5]

The use of the word "coils" was once thought to be a purely poetic one, but today's astronomical arabic word knowledge confirms that the word "coils" is scientifically very accurate in describing the spinning movement of the earth.

"And made the moon a light in their midst and made the sun as
a (Glorious) lamp." [Qur'an-Mursalat 77:16]

At the time of revelation of the Qur'an, it was a commonly held belief that the earth stood still and that the sun orbited around us. After all it seemed logical. Man's ego was bigger than the universe or so he thought. It was easier to believe that he lived in the centre of the Universe.

It was not until 1543, that the Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus publishes De Revolutionibus, in which he states that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. Just pause and look at the time interval when that piece of information was in the Holy Qur'an.

Hostility to science generally and astronomy particularly was the misfortune of the Catholic Church in the early 16th and 17th century. In 1633 Galileo was forced to kneel in front of the Inquisition and recant his belief in the Copernican planetary system. He was condemned to life imprisonment, ostensibly for having disobeyed "...not to defend or teach the Copernican doctrine...".

"Consider those (stars) that rise only to set. And move (in their orbits) with steady motion. And float (through space) with floating serene. And yet overtake (one another) with swift overtaking. And thus fulfill the (Creator's) behest!" [Qur'an-Nazi'at 79:1-5]

It is only on the scale of the galaxy that this verse comes to light! A galaxy is composed of millions and millions of stars. A galaxy like ours, the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy and rotates.

THE MILKY WAY GALAXY

The Milky Way Galaxy has three major components:

A thin disk consisting of young and intermediate age stars - this disk also contains gas and is actively forming new stars. Dust in the disk makes it appear orange in the picture. Dust absorbs blue light more than red light and thus makes stars appear reddish. Our Galaxy has spiral arms in its disk - these spiral arms are regions of active star formation.

A bar of older stars (white in the picture).

An extended dark halo whose composition is unknown. Since the matter in the halo does not consist of luminous stars, it does not show up in the image. The existence of the dark halo is inferred from its gravitational pull on the visible matter.

The stars do move in an orbit and with steady motion too as they float through space. They do overtake one another because in any spiral structure that is rotating, the outer arms will move at a faster rate than the inner sections and will thereby overtake the stars on the interior in their motion. The spiral nature of our galaxy was only discovered in this century since its spiral nature is not easily evident to us as we reside inside.

There is order, cosmos…not chaos in this tremendous universe. The moon and earth float in orbits and they are predictable in their behaviour. It has been shown that if one planet was removed from our system, our solar system is no longer stable. Comets are predictable and they return as expected bound by the laws of Physics, God's laws. Man can never truly invent, he can only discover. The Universe is predictable in its behavior because Allah has subjugated its constituents and they obey him scrupulously, unlike man who has been granted will.

• The eleven planets

Consisting of the Sun, a family of nine known planets, sixty seven (67) satellites (moons) of the planets, millions of asteroids, and billions of comets, our Solar System is an oasis of light, heat, and life.

The inner solar system contains the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
The planets of the outer solar system are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
When Joseph said unto his father:

"O my father! Lo! I saw in a dream eleven planets and the sun and the moon, I saw them prostrating themselves unto me."
[Qur'an-Yusuf 12:4]

What about the Tenth Planet and Eleventh Planet?

Astronomers may have found hints of a massive, distant, still unseen object at the edge of the solar system - perhaps a 10th planet, perhaps a failed companion star - that appears to be shoving comets toward the inner solar system.

Two teams of scientists - one in England, one at University of Louisiana at Lafayette - independently report this conclusion based on the highly elliptical orbits of so-called "long-period comets" that originate from an icy cloud of debris far, far beyond Pluto.

As the planet - estimated to have a mass between one and 10 Jupiter's - orbits, its gravitational wake disturbs the icy debris of the outer solar system, causing some of it to plunge toward the sun as comets.

No one has yet directly observed a 10th planet, and there could still be another cause for the cluster of comets.

What's surprising is just how far out there this supposed planet is. Both Murray and the University of Louisiana physicists put the planet in an orbit about 3 trillion miles - or half a light-year - from the sun. The nearest star is four light -years away.

To put this distance in perspective, consider a miniaturized version of the solar system in which Earth is one inch from the sun. On this scale, Pluto, the ninth planet would be a bit more than a yard from the sun. The new planet, by contrast, would be a half - mile distant.

At that great distance, the 10th planet would be too dim to see by current telescopes, although there is some hope that if it exists, the next generation of space-based infrared telescopes might be able to pick it up soon. As for the 11th planet, next generations will probably have the chance to discover it as well, as the Qur'an predicts it. And Allah knows best.

Astronomy

Discoveries of Muslim scholars

Expanding universe

Why is the Universe Expanding

"And the firmament (sky) We constructed with power and skill
and verily We are expanding it."
[Qur'an-Zariyat 51:47]

From the expansion of the Universe...

The ideas have emerged from over two thousand years of observation have had to be radically revised. In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the Universe, we now find ourselves orbiting around an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. And our galaxy itself is just one of billions of galaxies, in a Universe that is limitless and expanding. This was discovered in 1926 by Edwin Hubble.But this is far from the end of a long history of inquiry. Huge questions remain to be answered, before we can hope to have a complete picture of the Universe we live in. The expansion of the Universe is one of the most imposing discoveries of modern science. Today it is a firmly established concept and the only debate centres around the way this is taking place.

The expansion was first suggested by the General Theory of Relativity and is backed up by physics in the examination of the galactic spectrum. The regular movement towards the red section of the spectrum may be explained by the distancing of one galaxy from another. Thus the size of the Universe is probably constantly increasing and this increase will become bigger the further away the galaxies are from us. The speeds at which these celestial bodies are moving may, in the course of this perpetual expansion, go from fractions of the speed of light to speeds faster than this. Besides indicating that the Universe is expanding much faster than in the past, the chance discovery of the most distant supernova has revived a discarded theory of Albert Einstein suggesting the pervasive existence of mysterious "dark energy". Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope found the exploding star about 10 billion light-years from Earth. The discovery bolsters the startling notion that the Universe has recently begun speeding up its expansion, which scientists first speculated three years ago based on the unusually dim light from other distant supernovas. "It shows that the expanding of the Universe is really speeding up and not slowing down as conventional astronomers had thought for 70 years," said University of Chicago astronomer Michael Turner. The new stellar explosion has helped astronomers understand how the Universe expands, "much the same way a parent follows a child's growth spurts by marking a doorway," said Hubble scientist Adam Riess, lead researcher in the new study.The Universe slowed down its expansion for a time and then began a period of accelerated growth, Riess said.

" Do the unbelievers not realize that the heavens and the earth used to be one solid mass that we exploded into existence? And from water we made all living things. Would they believe? "
[Qur'an-Anbiyaa 21:30]

...to the Big Bang

Now if all these galaxies are moving away from each other, where did they come from?

In 1927, the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître was the first to propose that the Universe began with the explosion of a primeval atom. His proposal came after observing the red shift in distant nebulas by astronomers to a model of the Universe based on relativity. Years later, Edwin Hubble found experimental evidence to help justify Lemaître's theory. He found that distant galaxies in every direction are going away from us with speeds proportional to their distance.

The theory of Big Bang states that the Universe came into being as an extremely small volume full of energy which gave the Universe a very high temperature. As the Universe expanded so the fundamental atomic particles were formed as a mixture dominated by hydrogen with some helium and almost nothing else.

According to the big bang, the Universe was created sometime between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago from a cosmic explosion that hurled matter and in all directions.

Astronomy

Muslim Navigators

Muslim Navigators

" And His are the ships sailing smoothly through the seas, lofty as mountains." [Qur'an-Rahman 55:24]

Muslim civilization always has been moving. Both the Arabs and the conquerors from Central Asia were originally nomadic and inherited a tradition of travel. Students and scholars went on long journeys to sit at the feet of famous teachers, for the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him); himself encouraged travel even "as far as China" for learning. The wealth of cities depended upon trade. And the Faith of Islam asked of the faithful the most powerful of all reasons for travel, the Pilgrimage. So Muslims traveled the length and width of the vast Islamic Empires and beyond, especially for trade purposes. Muslims traveled by land and by sea and through their trips they began an "Age of Travel and Exploration" far beyond their homelands.

• Equipement of sea travel

" We have honoured the sons of Adam, provided them with transport on land and sea..."[Qur'an-Al 'Isrâ 17:70]

Muslim sailors used equipment to help them on their journeys. The astrolabe was used to read the position of the stars and planets. In this way, they could read their position on the sea in terms of latitude. These astrolabes were a great scientific achievement of the Muslims. In the fourteenth century the Muslims also used the compass which was first invented by the Chinese. This also helped them travel even without the sun or stars to guide them. And of course the Muslims made maps of the safest journeys. These maps were often kept secret from others by the ship captains who were competing for trade routes.

The dhow is a sailing vessel that is still used in the Indian Ocean today. It utilized the winds of the monsoons to go north in the summer and south in the winter. Dhows went up and down the coast of East Africa, and from the Red Sea to the "Spice Islands" of Indonesia, and to Southeast Asia. The dhow shown here is a small one and is still used along the coast. The Muslims built large "oceangoing dhows" that could carry a crew of twenty or more and a lot of cargo and supplies. The oceangoing dhow called the "baghlah" is no longer built. It was the traditional deep-sea dhow; it had a high cabin in the back, with five windows and a poop deck like European galleons (former large trading ship).

• Muslim explorers and mapmakers influenced Christopher Columbus

The Muslims were masters of the sea. They had maps, equipment and experience that were far beyond what was available in Europe.One of the most famous gegrapher is Al-Idrisi who made a globe or sphere of silver weighing 400 kilograms for the Christian King Roger II of Sicily. Some scholars regard him as the greatest geographer and mapmaker of the Middle Ages. He put together a geographical encyclopedia with many maps.

Furthermore, the Muslims controlled most of the trade routes from the Eastern Mediterranean to China, India and the Spice Islands of Southeast Asia. Because of these factors, European traders had to look for new ways of competing in trade. Moreover, Muslim geographers had proposed that the earth was round, and even estimated fairly accurately its size, and measured its longitude and latitude hundreds of years before. It is also even claimed that they had discovered America before Columbus. Christopher Columbus would have known about this from living among sailors in Spanish and Italian ports. Perhaps he even heard stories of earlier adventures across the Sea of Darkness.In one of his letters, Columbus named Averroes who helped him guess the existence of the new world.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail on three small ships from Spain with a Muslim navigator (a person who has skills in getting from place to place), an Arab translator, maps, and equipment. His goal was to sail across the Atlantic and reach China and India. Of course he was mistaken about the size of the earth and the existence of the Americas to block his way. But his trip was the beginning of new ways for Europeans to look at the world.

" When distress seizes you at sea, those that ye call upon, besides Himself, leave you in lurch! But when He brings you back safe to land, ye turn away (from Him). Most ungrateful man!" [Qur'an-Al 'Isrâ 17:67]

• Muslim Navigators

Ibn Battuta (1305 - 1369?) was perhaps the greatest traveler of the Middle Ages, having traveled about 75,000 miles in 29 years! He is especially important to history because of his written reports of his travels. From these records we can learn about the cultures that he visited. The book about his travels is the only historical source of information about many of the places he visited which included the East African coast, the Empire of Mali in West Africa, Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, India, China, Spain, and many, many more! As a Muslim, he took advantage of the generosity shown to pilgrims and travelers in the Empire. He was often given gifts (of horses, gold, and even slaves) and stayed for free in dormitories, private homes, and even in the palaces of Muslim rulers. For seven years he worked for the Sultan in Delhi, India. On his travels he met several Sultans who welcomed him into their company. His descriptions are filled with adventures and stories.

Leo Africanus (Hasan a-Wazan) was a traveler and mapmaker who lived from 1485-1554. He was captured by Christian pirates and presented to the Pope as a slave. He later was commissioned to write about and make maps of his travels in West Africa. His description of Timbuktu (now in the country of Mali) tells of the city famous for trade of African products and for scholarship with a thriving trade in books. (source:"Leo Africanus: Description of Timbuktu" Washington State University.)

Prominent Arab figures who excelled in philosophy, arts and sciences played a substantial role in enriching civilization and Ibn al-Haitham is one of those outstanding characters who thought he can control the geography of Egypt by controling the Nile river floods. He worked as a clerk for some caliphs. Working in a governmental job did not suit his bent, so he devoted his time and efforts to his own scientific studies. He was renowned for his knowledge of the sciences and philosophy, even when he was still young.

Oceanography

THE WORLD OCEAN

THE WORLD OCEAN

"How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean." Arthur C. Clarke

For centuries, people have been challenged by the mysteries that lie beneath the blue depths of our ocean planet. Very little was known about the ocean until late in the nineteenth century. Myths and misconceptions abounded. We thought that the seafloor was flat and that it was the same age as the continents. How different a picture we now have of the ocean as the sea has begun to yield its secrets!

Today's scientists have overcome many of the challenges of the deep by using more sophisticated tools. They can send manned submersibles and sampling devices to plumb the ocean depths, taking photographs and samples of animal life and sediment to bring back to the surface for further study. Even space technology enters the picture.

" Why am I doing this? Only the tiny sea of my cells replies, reminding me that I am the sea and the sea is in me." Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The world ocean contains about 97 percent of all the water on the earth. Most of the remaining water is frozen in glaciers and icecaps. The rest is in lakes and rivers, underground, and in the air. Each of the oceans, Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, makes a contribution to the entire global system and cover 71 percent of the earth's surface. The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean by far covering about 70 million square miles (181 million square kilometers), nearly a third of the earth's surface. Also, the world ocean has an average depth of 12,200 feet (3,730 meters), but parts of the ocean plunge much deeper. The deepest areas occur in trenches, long narrow valleys on the sea floor. The deepest known spot is in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, near the island of Guam. It lies 36,198 feet (11,033 meters) below sea level. If the world's highest mountain, 29,035-foot (8,850-meter) Mount Everest, were placed in that spot, more than 1 mile (1.6 kms) of water would cover the mountaintop.

• The wealth of ocean

" Nor are the two bodies of flowing water alike,the one palatable, sweet, and pleasant to drink, and the other, salt and bitter.Yet from each (kind of water) do ye eat flesh fresh and tender, and ye extract ornaments to wear ;and thou seest the ships therein that plough the waves, that ye may seek (thus) of the bounty of God that ye may be grateful."

Indeed God provides through the ocean many major resources. They include food, medicines, energy ,and minerals.

Food from the ocean consists mainly of fish and shellfish. The worldwide commercial fish and shellfish catch from the ocean totals about 200 billion pounds (90 billion kilograms) annually. Most of the catch comes from coastal waters. People eat about 60 percent of the fish and shellfish directly. Processors use the rest of the catch to make such products as fish oil and fish meal, which is added to livestock feed and pet food.

Medicines have been produced from many forms of marine life. For example, plantlike organisms called red algae provide an anticoagulant, a drug that keeps blood from clotting. A species of marine snail produces a substance that relaxes muscles. Sea life has also been valuable in medical research. The blood of horseshoe crabs contains a substance used to test for various infections. The substance can also be used to determine the purity of many drugs. Researchers study giant nerve cells from lobsters, squids, and marine worms to learn more about nerve functions in people.

Energy from the ocean has several forms. Petroleum and natural gas are the ocean's most valuable energy resources. Offshore wells tap deposits of oil and gas beneath the sea floor. In the late 1990's, offshore wells produced about 30 percent of the world's oil and gas. Scientists estimate that from 63 billion barrels to as much as 530 billion barrels of oil lie undiscovered beneath the ocean. Equally huge amounts of untapped gas accompany the oil. As gas and oil reserves on land are used up or become too difficult and expensive to obtain, finding and recovering undersea deposits will become increasingly important.
The ocean tides also provide energy. Tidal power facilities use the energy in the rise and fall of the tides to produce electricity. The first tidal power plant opened in 1966 on the Rance River near St.-Malo, France.

Minerals recovered from the ocean include sand and gravel mined from the sea floor and used to make construction materials. Some sands also have value because they are rich in phosphorite and other chemicals. Seawater itself contains such important minerals as bromide, manganese, and salt. The minerals can be removed by letting the seawater evaporate in large shallow basins under sunlight. The evaporation leaves the minerals behind. Other methods to remove minerals from seawater include chemical and electrochemical processes.
The mineral wealth of the ocean extends to the deep-sea floor. Deposits near undersea hot springs contain copper, iron, and zinc. Manganese deposits lie on the ocean bottom in lumps called nodules. The nodules also contain cobalt, copper, and nickel. Scientists are trying to develop ways to gather the nodules and bring them to the surface. Possible gathering techniques include using buckets that run on conveyor belts between a ship and the sea floor and operating a device that works like a giant vacuum cleaner.

Oceanography