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The information the Qur'an provides on this subject mainly
deals with the solar system. References are however made
to phenomena that go beyond the solar system itself: they
have been discovered in recent times. There are two very
important verses on the orbits of the Sun and Moon:
--sura 21, verse 33:
"(God is) the One Who created the night,and day, the sun
and the moon. Each one is travelling in an orbit with its
own motion."
--sura 36, verse 40:
"The sun must not catch up the moon, nor does the night
outstrip the day. Each one is travelling in an orbit with
its own motion."
Here an essential fact is clearly stated: the existence
of the Sun's and Moon's orbits, plus a reference is made
to the traveling of these bodies in space with their own
motion. A negative fact also emerges from a reading of these
verses: it is shown that the Sun moves in an orbit, but
no indication is given as to what this orbit might be in
relation to the Earth. At the time of the Qur'anic Revelation,
it was thought that the Sun moved while the Earth stood
still. This was the system of geocentrism that had held
away since the time of Ptolemy, Second century B.C., and
was to continue to do so until Copernicus in the Sixteenth
century A.D. Although people supported this concept at the
time of Muhammad, it does not appear anywhere in the Qur'an,
either here or elsewhere.
The Existence of the Moon's
and the Sun's Orbits.
The Arabic word falak has here been translated by the word
'orbit'; many French translators of the Qur'an attach to
it the meaning of a 'sphere'. This is indeed its initial
sense. Hamidullah translates it by the word 'orbit'. The
word caused concern to older translators of tne Qur'an who
were unable to imagine the circular course of the Moon and
the Sun and therefore retained images of their course through
space that were either more or less correct, or hopelessly
wrong.
Si Hamza Boubekeur in his translation of the Qur'an cites
the diversity of interpretations given to it: "A sort of
axle, like an iron rod, that a mill turns around; a celestial
sphere, orbit, sign of the zodiac, speed, wave . . .", but
he adds the following observation made by Tabari, the famous
Tenth century commentator:
"It is our duty to keep silent when we do not know." (XVII,
15).
This shows just how incapable men were of understanding
this concept of the Sun's and Moon's orbit. It is obvious
that if the word had expressed an astronomical concept common
in Muhammad's day, it would not have been so difficult to
interpret these verses. A new concept therefore existed
in the Qur'an that was not to be explained until centuries
later.
1. The Moon's Orbit.
Today, the concept is
widely spread that the Moon is a satellite of the Earth
around which it revolves in periods of twenty-nine days.
A correction must however be made to the absolutely circular
form of its orbit, since modern astronomy ascribes a certain
eccentricity to this, so that the distance between the Earth
and the Moon (240,000 miles) is only the average distance.
We have seen above how the Qur'an underlined the usefulness
of observing the Moon's movements in calculating time (sura
10, verse 5, quoted at the beginning of this chapter.) This
system has often been criticized for being archaic, impractical
and unscientific in comparison to our system based on the
Earth's rotation around the Sun, expressed today in the
Julian calendar.
This criticism calls
for the following two remarks:
a) Nearly fourteen centuries ago, the Qur'an was directed
at the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula who were used
to the lunar calculation of time. It was advisable to address
them in the only language they could understand and not
to upset the habits they had of locating spatial and temporal
reference-marks which were nevertheless quite efficient.
It is known how well-versed men living in the desert are
in the observation of the sky; they navigated according
to the stars and told the time according to the phases of
the Moon. Those were the simplest and most reliable means
available to them.
b) Apart from the specialists in this, most people are unaware
of the perfect correlation between the Julian and the lunar
calendar: 235 lunar months correspond exactly to 19 Julian
years of 365.25 days. Then length of our year of 365 days
is not perfect because it has to be rectified every four
years (with a leap year): With the lunar calendar, the same
phenomena occur every 19 years (Julian). This is the Metonic
cycle, named after the Greek astronomer Meton, who discovered
this exact correlation between solar and lunar time in the
Fifth century B.C.
2. The Sun.
It is more difficult to conceive of the Sun's orbit because
we are so used to seeing our solar system organized around
it. To understand the verse from the Qur'an, the position
of the Sun in our galaxy must be considered. and we must
therefore call on modern scientific ideas. Our galaxy includes
a very large number of stars spaced so as to form a disc
that is denser at the centre than at the rim. The Sun occupies
a position in it which is far removed from the centre of
the disc. The galaxy revolves on its own axis which is its
centre with the result that the Sun revolves around the
same centre in a circular orbit. Modern astronomy has worked
out the details of this. In 1917, Shapley estimated the
distance between the Sun and the centre of our galaxy at
10 kiloparsecs i.e., in miles, circa the figure 2 followed
by 17 zeros. To complete one revolution on its own axis,
the galaxy and Sun take roughly 250 million years. The Sun
travels at roughly 150 miles per second n the completion
of this. The above is the orbital movement of the Sun that
was already referred to by the Qur'an fourteen centuries
ago. The demonstration of the existence and details of this
is one of the achievements of modern astronomy.
Reference to the
Movement of the Moon and the Sun
in Space With Their Own Motion.
This concept does not appear in those tranislations of the
Qur'an that have been made by men of letters. Since the
latter know nothing about astronomy, they have translated
the Arabic word that expresses this movemcnt by one of the
meanings the word has: 'to swirn'. They have done this in
both the French translations and the, otherwise remarkable,
English translation by Yusuf Ali. The Arabic word referring
to a movement with a self-propelled motion is the verb sabaha
(yasbahuna in the text of the two verses). All the senses
of the verb imply a movement that is associated with a motion
that comes from the body in question. If the movement takes
place in water, it is 'to swim'; It is 'to move by the action
of one's own legs' if it takes place on land. For a movement
that occurs in space, it is difficult to see how else this
meaning implied in the word could be rendered other than
by employing its original sense. Thus there seems to have
been no mistranslation, for the following reasons:
--The Moon completes its rotating motion on its own axis
at the same time as it revolves around the Earth, i.e. 29.5
days (approx.), so that it always has the same side facing
us.
--The Sun takes roughly 25 days to revolve on its own axis.
There are certain differences in its rotation at its equator
and poles, (we shall not go into them here) but as a whole,
the Sun is animated by a rotating motion.It appears therefore
that a verbal nuance in the Qur'an refers to the Sun and
Moon's own motion. These motions of the two celestial bodies
are confirmed by the data of modern science, and it is inconceivable
that a man living in the Seventh century A.D.--however knowledgeable
he might have been in his day (and this was certainly not
true in Muhammad's case)--could have imagined them. This
view is sometimes contested by examples from great thinkers
of antiquity who indisputably predicted certain data that
modern science has verified. They could hardly have relied
on scientific deduction however; their method of procedure
was more one of philosophical reasoning. Thus the case of
the Pythagoreans is often advanced. In the Sixth century
B.C., they defended the theory of the rotation of the Earth
on its own axis and the movement of the planets around the
Sun. This theory was to be confirmed by modern sciece. By
comparing it with the case of the Pythagoreans,it easy to
put forward the hypothesis of Muhammad as being a brilliant
thinker, who was supposed to have imagined all on his on
his own what modern science was to discover centuries later.
In so doing however, people quite simply forget to mention
the other aspect of what these geniuses of philosophical
reasoning produced, i.e. the colossal blunders that litter
their work. it must be remembered for example, that the
pythagoreans also defended the theory whereby the Sun was
fixed in space; they made it the centre of the world and
only conceived of a celestial order that was centered on
it.
It is quite common in the works of the great philosophers
of antiquity to find a mixture of valid and invalid ideas
about the Universe. The brilliance of these human works
comes from the advanced ideas they contain, but they should
not make us over look the mistaken concepts which have also
been left to us. From a strictly scientific point of view,
this is what distinguished them from the Qur'an. In the
latter, many subjects are referred to that have a bearing
on modern knowledge without one of them containing a statement
that contradicts what has been established by present-day
science.
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. 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.
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