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. Blachère, 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.
