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 the 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 Dew 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.
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 field, 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 1/4 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 in 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.
