The Lamp and the Borrowed Light

Tonight, if the sky is clear, go outside and look up at the moon.

It is glowing. Anyone can see that. It hangs there pouring out a cool silver light, and for thousands of years every human being who looked at it drew the obvious conclusion. The moon is a light. It makes its own.

They were wrong, and they stayed wrong for a very long time. Serious European scientists still held that view only a few hundred years ago. The moon, they said, shines.

It does not. The moon is a rock. A big, grey, dead, dusty rock with no fire in it anywhere. Every scrap of light you see coming off the moon started at the sun, crossed millions of kilometres, hit that rock and bounced. You are looking at a mirror, not a lamp.

Two lights, two words

Now open chapter 25, verse 61.

It speaks of the One who placed the constellations in the sky, and who put in it a siraj and a moon that is munir.

Two different words for two different objects. That is the whole point.

Siraj means a torch, a blazing lamp, a thing that burns and makes its own light. That is the word used for the sun.

Munir comes from nur, and nur is light that is given off from something else. Reflected light. Borrowed light. That is the word used for the moon.

The Qur’an does this again and again. Chapter 10, verse 5 calls the sun diya and the moon nur. Diya is the harsh, hot light of a thing that is burning. Nur is the soft, cool kind that has come off a surface.

Chapter 71, verses 15 and 16, in the words of Prophet Nuh (Noah), does the same. The moon is placed in the heavens as a nur, and the sun as a siraj.

Never once does it swap them. Never once is the sun called a borrowed light, and never once is the moon called a torch. Across an entire book, in a culture that believed the exact opposite, the vocabulary never slips.

And the stars get their own word again. Chapter 86, verse 3 describes the night star as thaqib, which means something that pierces, something that bores through. A star burns so hard its light drills all the way through the dark to get to you.

The sun that was not supposed to move

When Dr Zakir Naik was in school, back in the early 1980s, his textbook said the sun was stationary. Fixed. The planets went round it, and it sat there like a nail in a board.

That is what schoolchildren were taught, and it is wrong twice over.

The sun spins. It turns on its own axis, and one full turn takes roughly twenty five days. We know because we can watch sunspots crawl across its face and come back round the other side.

Chapter 21, verse 33 says Allah created the night and the day, and the sun and the moon, each one floating in an orbit.

The Arabic verb there is yasbahun, from the root sabaha. This is not a lazy word for being carried along. Sabaha is the word you use for a body that is moving by its own effort. If you use that word for a man crossing a floor, nobody thinks you mean he is being dragged. You mean he is walking, or running, or swimming across it.

So the verse is not saying the sun is being pushed around a track. It is saying the sun travels and turns as it goes.

Nothing ever crashes

Chapter 36, verse 40 says it is not for the sun to catch up with the moon, nor for the night to outrun the day, and each of them is swimming in its own orbit.

Think about what that is describing. Objects moving at colossal speeds, past and around each other, for billions of years, and none of them collide. Each one keeps to its own path.

And the sun’s path goes somewhere. It is not looping in a neat circle forever. The whole solar system is travelling through the galaxy toward a point in the constellation of Hercules, a point astronomers call the solar apex. It moves at roughly twelve miles every second, and it has been doing it since long before you were born and will keep doing it long after.

You are, at this exact moment, sitting still in a chair and hurtling through the Milky Way. Both things are true.

One day the lamp goes out

There is one more line, and it is a sobering one.

Chapter 36, verse 38 says the sun runs its course to a mustaqarr.

That word can be read two ways, and Arabic is comfortable with both. It can mean a place appointed for it. It can also mean a time appointed for it. A destination, or a deadline.

Both readings turn out to be true.

The sun is heading toward a place, which we just talked about. And the sun has a deadline, because the sun is a fire, and fires are not eternal. It is burning hydrogen at a rate that is hard to imagine, and at some point the fuel runs low and the reaction stops. Scientists reckon that gives it a few billion more years.

A few billion years is a long time. You do not need to worry about tomorrow.

But it is not forever, and the difference between a very long time and forever is the whole of everything. The sun is a lamp somebody lit. Lamps get lit by somebody, and lamps eventually go out.

Which is a strange, quiet thing to say about the sun in a desert, to people who worshipped it.