First or Last,
God Is God All Right!
Dr. Pasha
(Bringing Islam to the World One Concept at a Time!
Taking the Qur'an to Every Home and Heart that Needs It --
And which One Does Not?)
I talked about this before. I want to talk about it again. Who knows what our last words will be on this earth.
The Qur'an says God Almighty is First as well as Last. I wish I could verbalize and say I know what that means. But I cannot and should not.
That is nowhere near my pay-grade.
Here is the Qur'an:
Huwal Awwalu Wal Aakkhir!
"He is the First and he is the Last."
Beginning is the end?
And the end is the beginning?
Just what are you talking about?
But the Qur'an is clear. As clear as it always is.
For, the Qur'an is Mubeen: plain, simple clear!
And then science knocks at the door. Science says some very mysterious things an ignoramus like me barely comprehends.
Science says things begin at the beginning -- a beginning that you often peg yourself.
And when the research process arrives at its final destination, it does so only to kick-start a whole new research cycle of data and theory and even more data and ever newer theory and so on -- forever.
I have elsewhere called it the Spiral of Science!
And science says reality is a constant flux. And it is infinite regress.
And first and last may all be nothing but a function of your own location and access and tools and opportunities, rather than the function of the nature of reality itself.
Reality stretches out from infinity to infinity.
One side of it negative, maybe, and the other side positive
And things in real world are not piled neatly one on top of the other. They are fused together -- one smoothly tapering into the other.
Not my idea this -- at least the later part of the thought expressed in the earlier sentence.
Nor does it really belong to Darwin or Spencer: wrongly considered to be the originators of the notion of evolution in reality.
But this brilliant idea was first clearly articulated by Ibn Khaldun of the Muslim Civilization of Andalusia -- Spain -- in his book Prolegomena to History.
The book is known in Arabic, the language in which Ibn Khaldun wrote it nearly 700 years ago (middle of 14th Century), as Muqaddimat Ibn Khaldun: Ibn Khaldun's Preface or Introduction to his main monumental work on History.
Ibn Khaldun, by the way, was the true father and originator of the modern sciences and disciplines of Demography, Sociology and Political Science -- hundreds of years prior to the likes of Western thinkers such as Durkheim, Weber, Rousseau and others.
So, I look at what Science says about beginning and end, and I also read what the Qur'an says about God Almighty being first and last, and I go:
"Allahu Akbar!
Subhanallah!
How beautiful it is! Science does get it right -- sometimes!
And science gets it right every time it approximates the Qur'an --
and approaches the Light of Allah!"
END
