Following the Signs of the Universe

Āyāt are clues to be decoded

An āyah is a sign: a clue left to be deciphered and then put to use, not a line to be read past and assented to. To follow the signs is to work out what each one points to and to harness what it yields. The Qur’an itself names the opposite response, the person who meets a plain sign and waves it away:

اقْتَرَبَتِ السَّاعَةُ وَانْشَقَّ الْقَمَرُوَإِن يَرَوْا آيَةً يُعْرِضُوا وَيَقُولُوا سِحْرٌ مُسْتَمِرٌّ"The Hour has drawn near, and the moon was split. Yet if they see a sign, they turn away and say, ‘Passing magic.’" (Sūrah al-Qamar 54:1-2)

To be shown a sign and call it "the same old magic" is exactly the failure the verse indicts. Following the āyāt is the reverse: reading the sign, decoding it, and using it in the world.

The prophets trained civilisations to read the signs

His argument is that whole civilisations were once trained by their prophets to read these signs and to harness what they found, and that the evidence is left in stone. The reading of these ruins is his own; the stones themselves are simply very hard to explain.

• Baalbek (Lebanon): the "Stone of the Pregnant Woman" and its neighbours, single cut blocks about 68 feet long, 40 feet high and 40 feet wide, weighing around 700 tons and set some 10 feet into the ground; in 2014 an even larger block was found still in the quarry beneath it. By the rate soil is reckoned to build up, roughly an inch every 80 to 100 years, that depth of burial points to an immense age.
• Petra (southern Jordan): Al-Khazneh, a facade about 127 feet high, not built up but carved down into the mountain face, with a doorway some 50 feet tall.
• The pyramids: some 3,500 of them scattered across the planet, aligned to the cardinal directions and, he notes, falling along a single line, a technology that then seems to stop everywhere at once.

The peoples who built such things, on his reading, later turned against their prophets and were destroyed. When the Prophet ﷺ passed the ruins of Thamūd at al-Ḥijr (Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ) on the way to Tabūk, he did not treat it as sightseeing:

Do not enter upon these people who were punished, unless you are weeping. If you are not weeping, do not enter upon them, lest what befell them befall you. (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3381)

He was also reported to have told them not to drink from that place’s water, but to use it only for wuḍūʾ and not to cook with it. The ruins are not a monument to admire but the wreckage of a people who had the knowledge and lost the fear.

Miracles as harnessed knowledge, not parlour tricks

Read this way, the miracles of the prophets are not arbitrary wonders but applied knowledge of the āyāt, each one a use of a law of creation:

• Mūsā (عليه السلام): the staff, and the hand drawn from the side that shines white.
• ʿĪsā ibn Maryam (عليه السلام): healing the blind and the sick, and raising the dead.
• Ibrāhīm (عليه السلام): the folding of distance itself. The two angel-messengers reach him, and then Lūt (عليه السلام), across a great distance in moments; in the talk this is called "warping space," so that the place one must reach is brought near.

The point is not the spectacle but the source: each prophet was reading and using what Allah had placed in the universe, the very thing يَتْلُو عَلَيْهِمْ آيَاتِهِ describes.

The companions could read the heavens

The clearest case he gives is ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAbbās (رضي الله عنه), called the scholar of the Qur’an. Asked about the opening of Sūrah al-Takwīr:

إِذَا الشَّمْسُ كُوِّرَتْوَإِذَا النُّجُومُ انْكَدَرَتْ"When the sun is wound round, and when the stars fall, losing their light." (Sūrah al-Takwīr 81:1-2)

Asked what it means for the sun to be "wound round," Ibn ʿAbbās (رضي الله عنه) took a turban and unwound it. The tafsir carried under his name, Tanwīr al-Miqbās, glosses كُوِّرَتْ this way: the sun is turned around as one turns a turban, then cast into the veil of light. Fourteen centuries before any telescope, that is a plain account of how a star dies, wound in on itself and collapsing, the process a modern slide labels "a black hole devouring a passing star."

In the same spirit, ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (رضي الله عنه) is related to have traced the water of the Flood to a source in the heavens, which sits with the Qur’an’s own description of that event:

فَفَتَحْنَا أَبْوَابَ السَّمَاءِ بِمَاءٍ مُنْهَمِرٍ"So We opened the gates of the heaven with water pouring down." (Sūrah al-Qamar 54:11)

His analogy for how this was possible is Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell: Faraday, no mathematician, read nature directly and saw what was there; Maxwell then wrote it in equations. You do not have to be the mathematician to be the Faraday. Ibn ʿAbbās (رضي الله عنه), he says, was our Faraday, and then far past him: Faraday could not even begin to fathom what Ibn ʿAbbās reached, who read the universe straight through the Book and the hadith, with no instrument at all.

Seven heavens, nested like a ring in a desert

The Prophet ﷺ described the heavens not as one sphere but as seven, each set within the next. Set against the one above it, he said, each heaven is like a ring cast down in an open desert, and between them is a way through, a circular door. The geometry is exact: a ring is the smallest circle we can picture, a desert an almost limitless expanse, so each heaven is vanishingly small beside the one that contains it. (See our Hadith collections.)

Modern physics arrives at strikingly similar pictures. A spinning black hole, in the equations, does not collapse to a point but to a ring, held open by its own rotation; the physicist Michio Kaku describes passing through such a ring into another universe, "like floors of an apartment building." Under the immense gravity of what lies above it, our universe takes the form of a hypersphere, a four-dimensional extension of a sphere, the very shape one would need in order to pass beyond its edge. Whatever energy escapes such an object is named, after another Englishman, "Hawking radiation."

The claim is not that the hadith is a physics paper. It is that the same shape, a ring, a door, nested worlds, was set out plainly to people who then set it down, while others spent centuries reaching it the long way.

Outer space and inner space: the one couplet

Across the Qur’an the same two things are paired again and again: the far horizons and the self within.

سَنُرِيهِمْ آيَاتِنَا فِي الْآفَاقِ وَفِي أَنفُسِهِمْ حَتَّىٰ يَتَبَيَّنَ لَهُمْ أَنَّهُ الْحَقُّ"We will show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth." (Fuṣṣilat 41:53)

وَفِي الْأَرْضِ آيَاتٌ لِلْمُوقِنِينَوَفِي أَنفُسِكُمْ ۚ أَفَلَا تُبْصِرُونَ"And on the earth are signs for those of certainty, and within yourselves. Then will you not see?" (Sūrah al-Dhāriyāt 51:20-21)

In the talk a non-Muslim physicist, played on screen, names the two greatest mysteries in all of science, and they are exactly this pair. The first is outer space: what happened before creation, what "banged," whether there is a multiverse. The second is inner space: what lies behind the eyes, a brain of some hundred billion neurons, as many as the stars of the Milky Way, each wired to ten thousand others. Of all the couplets a scripture could keep, the Qur’an keeps pairing the horizons with the self, the precise pair that the whole enterprise of science circled back to at the end.

The same physicist recalls a hearing on a super-collider, cancelled after someone asked whether it would "find God." He wishes he had answered: whatever signs or symbols you ascribe to your deity, this machine takes us as close as is humanly possible to His greatest creation, its birth, a "Genesis machine" that would recreate, in miniature, the first event. If your Book already holds those āyāt, he says, then we are on the same mission. The point lands the other way round: the āyāt were ours first.

The duty we dropped

The call to look out into the heavens and in at the self is not incidental. He counts it repeated many times over the Qur’an, on the order of seventeen, and reads following these signs not as an optional refinement but as a standing charge on the Ummah, put in the talk in its bluntest form: every Muslim was meant to have a "space program." Whether one takes that as a duty or a metaphor, the direction is the same: the study of creation was our work, not a luxury.

And when the reading of the signs meets the second function, purification (وَيُزَكِّيهِمْ), the result is not private but civilisational. One man, Ibrāhīm (عليه السلام), and the map of those who trace their faith to him now covers much of the earth. That is what following the āyāt looks like when it is carried through, the first function joined to the second, laid out in the companion study of the code.

His indictment is that the work is now being done by others, the research papers, the telescopes, the machines, and much of the Muslim world does none of it. They are, in his phrase, picking up breadcrumbs that were laid for us to follow first.

Why this, at a gathering for Palestine

He interrupts himself to say it plainly: this is not a science lecture, he is there for Palestine, and the two are the same subject. The cosmology is the diagnosis. A people who once held the code to the universe traded it for petty politics and an inferiority before those who took up the work, and their standing in the world fell with it. Palestine, he says, is the beginning of the end, the visible edge of that long surrender.

The remedy he names is the plainest one. Open the Book. Read it as it was meant to be read, which is to say follow it, in the horizons and within the self, and then present it to the world without apology. Do that, he argues, and the rest, the standing, the strength, the means, follows the knowledge back to its owner.