A Book of Signs

When the talk finished, people lined up at the microphones.

They asked about all sorts of things. Whether Islam teaches rebirth. What Islam says about organ donation. How to talk to somebody who does not believe in God at all. Why the Prophet came when he did and not earlier.

Then a woman stood up who was not a Muslim and had never heard any of this before, and she asked the question that mattered most.

She said: if more than a thousand verses of this book are about science, then what is the book actually for?

Good question. Best one of the night. And the answer is where this whole journey has been heading.

Signs, not science

The Qur’an is not a book of science. Spell that word out. S, c, i, e, n, c, e.

It is a book of signs. S, i, g, n, s.

The Arabic word for a verse is ayah, and ayah means a sign. Something that points. A signpost on a road is not the destination, and it would be a strange traveller who stopped at the signpost and set up a tent there.

So every single thing in this book, the split of the heavens, the roots under the mountains, the leech shaped embryo, the female bee, is a finger pointing in one direction. There is one God. He made all of this. Worship Him alone and nothing else beside Him.

That is the message. Everything else is a sign pointing at it.

If you finish these ten chapters thinking “wow, science” and nothing more, you have stood at the signpost and pitched your tent.

The same verse, two readers

Here is what makes a book of signs different from a textbook.

A textbook says one thing to everybody. That is its job. But a verse of the Qur’an can be read by a shepherd in the year 700 and by an astronomer in the year 2000 and give each of them something real, and neither of them is reading it wrong.

Take the verse about the sun as a blazing lamp and the moon as a light. A farmer hears it and thinks about the sun that dries his dates and the moon that lets him find his way home, and he thanks God for both. An astrophysicist hears the same words and notices that the Arabic separates a source of light from a reflector, and sits up straight.

Same sentence. Both got fed. That is what a sign does. It works at whatever depth you bring to it.

And the Qur’an is not mainly a book about the sky and the sea anyway. It is a book about how to live. What to do with money, how to treat parents, what to say when you are angry, how to run a marriage, what to do with an orphan’s property, when to forgive. Over a billion people use it as their manual for daily life. The science is one small window in a very large house.

The first word

There is a detail about how it all started that people skip past.

The very first word revealed to Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, in a cave, with no warning, was not pray. It was not fast, or give money, or go to Makkah.

It was Iqra.

Read. Recite. Proclaim.

The opening command of the entire religion is an instruction to read, given to a man who could not.

So when somebody says religion and knowledge are enemies, hold that word up. The first thing God said to the last Prophet was read.

Dr Naik makes a hard point about this, and he makes it to Muslims rather than anyone else. If your first command is read, then every Muslim who is not learning is disobeying an order. He mentions Kerala in India, where the literacy rate is close to a hundred percent among Muslims and non Muslims alike, and points out that this is what it should look like everywhere.

What a little science does to a person

Francis Bacon said something that has aged extremely well.

A little knowledge of science, he said, makes a man an atheist. A deep knowledge of it makes him a believer in God.

You can watch that happen. A student learns a few mechanisms, sees that rain does not need a rain god and lightning does not need a lightning god, and concludes that God was a story people told before they had instruments.

But keep going. Keep going until you are looking at the fine tuning of physical constants, or at the information packed into a single cell, or at the fact that the universe is intelligible at all, that a monkey’s brain on a wet rock can work out the laws that govern galaxies. The further in you go, the harder it is to call it an accident.

Science did not kill God. Science killed a lot of wrong ideas about God, which is a service, not an attack.

What to do with all this

So here is where we land.

Somebody asked Dr Naik how a person can accept a verse before science has caught up to it. He gave the honest answer. Sometimes you cannot. The Qur’an says there is healing in honey, and for centuries all anyone could do was take that on trust, and only recently did we find the antiseptic properties and the vitamin K and the rest.

The Qur’an points. Science walks over and checks. The checking takes time, sometimes a thousand years of it.

And in all that time, with every instrument we have built and every layer we have peeled back, not one established scientific fact has managed to contradict it.

Go and look up at the sky tonight.

You know now that the light on the moon is borrowed, that the sky above it is holding back things that would kill you, that the air is full of dust waiting to become rain, and that under your feet the mountains are pegged into the ground like a tent in a storm.

None of that is a coincidence and none of it built itself.

Every one of those things is a sign, and a sign has somebody who put it there.