The Last Messenger

In the Name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful

Extract from QUR’AANIC STUDIES – A Modern Tafsir PART I:

35. Wa-in kana kabura AAalayka iAAraduhum fa-ini istataAAta an tabtaghiya nafaqan fee al-ardi aw sullaman fee alssama-i fata/tiyahum bi-ayatin walaw shaa Allahu lajamaAAahum AAala alhuda fala takoonanna mina aljahileena

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6:35. And if their aversion is hard on you, then, if you can, seek an opening deep into the earth or a ladder [link] up into the heavens, and then bring them a sign. And if Allah had so willed, He would certainly have gathered them all on guidance. Be not then of those who are ignorant.⁶

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6. This is an obvious reprimand from Allah to His Messenger. HE has put this on record here to let mankind know that His Messengers too are His creatures, and not His partners in Creation. The Messengers too, being human, were prone to errors. What this Verse reveals to us is that the Prophet (peace be upon him) ardently desired Allah to give him a sign to show to his people to convince them of his being His accredited Messenger. But Allah had other plans. HE did not want His last Messenger to mankind to be recognised based on any obvious sign like those given to his predecessors, Jesus and Moses. Those signs, in any case, had yielded little results. HE, in His Wisdom, knew that His last Messenger was being sent at the threshold of an era of proliferation of knowledge. Allah now wanted His last Messenger to be recognised based on the intellect He had granted mankind. HE wanted the people to use this intellect, and the knowledge they are now getting, to scrutinise the character of the person sent as the last Messenger and to scrutinise the Message he was conveying to them. Allah here reminds His Messenger that He knows what to do to guide His creatures. Nothing – not even the ardent personal desire of His Messenger – can come in the way of His plans.

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Mohammad Shafi

Friday, the 8^th of March 2019.

Signs Galore

In the Name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful

Extract from QUR’AANIC STUDIES – A Modern Tafsir PART II:

93. Waquli alhamdu lillahi sayureekum ayatihi fataAArifoonaha wama rabbuka bighafilin AAammataAAmaloona

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27:93. And say, “The praise is for Allah! He will soon show you His signs, and then you shall recognise them.”¹⁶ And your Lord is not unaware of what you do.

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16. Allah Ta’ala has surely shown many signs since the revelation of the Qur’aan that prove it to be genuinely divine. Refer the numerous posts under the Signs category in my blog RabbunAllah. And the discovery of such signs is a continuing process.

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Mohammad Shafi

Friday, the 12^th of October 2018.

Evidences Galore of Divine Existence

In the Name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful

Extract from Chapter 47 of QUR’AANIC STUDIES – A Modern Tafsir PART II:

24. Afala yatadabbaroona alqur-ana am AAala quloobin aqfaluha

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24. Why do they not, then, ponder over this Qur’aan? Or are there locks upon their minds to keep it [Qur’aan] out? ³

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3. Pease view this video in this context – or another. There are many more such videos available on youtube.com. You may also go through my article wherein it is explained how the Qur’aan virtually mentions blood circulation by means of which human body is grown and maintained. The Qur’aan discloses this hundreds of years before scientists discovered it!

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Mohammad Shafi

Friday, the 18^th of May 2018.

Signs

In the Name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful

Extract from Chapter 2 of QUR’AANIC STUDIES – A Modern Tafsir:

164. Inna fee khalqi alssamawati waal-ardi waikhtilafi allayli waalnnahari waalfulki allatee tajree fee albahri bima yanfaAAu alnnasa wama anzala Allahu mina alssama-i min ma-in faahya bihi al-arda baAAda mawtiha wabaththa feeha min kulli dabbatin watasreefi alrriyahi waalssahabi almusakhkhari bayna alssama-i waal-ardi laayatin liqawmin yaAAqiloona

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164. Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, in the contrast between the day and the night, in the ship that sails on the sea with things beneficial to mankind, in what Allah sends down of water from the sky bringing the earth back to life after it was dead, in every kind of animals dispersed therein, in the winds changing their directions, and in the clouds under divine control between the sky and the earth, are compelling signs for people who make use of their intelligence.^{264 to 268}

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264. A study of the Qur'aan reveals that the Messengers, who came before Muhammad (peace be upon him and upon them all), were given some extraordinary signs to convince people of the existence of an absolute solitary Power controlling the entire Universe and also to convince them of the Messengers being the really authorised ones from that Power. The earlier Messengers came when the level of general knowledge among the people was low. Their (people's) knowledge therefore needed to be supplemented by divinely given 'miracles'. But the last Messenger, Muhammad, came at the threshold of an era in which human knowledge would proliferate. The proliferation of human knowledge, combined with the divinely endowed human intelligence, became sufficient for people to recognise the Absolute Solitary Power. The supplement of 'miracles' was no more needed. The people are now in a position to recognize the Power from the signs that abound in Nature.

265. This divine exhortation made in this Verse for study of Natural phenomena, moreover, imbibed the scientific spirit, of reason and research, in the minds of the believers. Consequently, a number of thinkers in various fields like medicine, mathematics, physics, astronomy, literature etc. arose in the Muslim world, who were instrumental in laying the foundation of the scientific renaissance that the world is witnessing today. It was from the works of those great Muslim scientists and thinkers of the middle Ages that the Western world got the basics to develop from. And it makes one sad to think that while the Westerners built the scientific edifice of the modern world on the foundation laid by the Muslims, the Muslim world itself lost the scientific spirit with the weakening of their Faith in the Qur'aan!

266. 'The creation of the heavens and the earth' is the first Aayat (Sign) referred to in this divine Verse. And we have already seen in Chapter Notes 20 and 21 how the seven layers of the earth's atmosphere have been meticulously and correctly designed to act as a protective shield and a provider of sustenance for all living creatures on the earth. Only an unreasonable fool would dismiss this wonderfully exquisite arrangement as a mere accident of nature. And then we have this mind-boggling spectacle of innumerable heavenly bodies floating in their respective orbits with such mathematical precision that they never bump into one another accidentally. We cannot but marvel at the Power Who no doubt made all this possible – consciously and purposefully. It would be irrational and unscientific for anyone to think of it as a mere accident in nature.

267. As regards the other Signs mentioned in the Verse, the night, following the day in every 24-hour cycle in time, is an obvious provision made for rest, without which human life is impossible to be sustained. Further, had it not been for the facility of navigation by sea, transport of tonnes and tonnes of merchandise from one part of the world to another wouldn't have been easy. Had it not been for the periodic rains, there wouldn't be the recurring stock of vegetable products necessary for sustenance of any kind of life on earth. One who ponders deeply can easily detect that some Extraordinarily Intelligent Power is guiding the directions of the cloud-bearing winds to bring rains to regions, as desired by that Unseen Power. The sprouting of vegetation on dry earth after a rainfall, moreover, provides an indication that human life could likewise be resurrected even after death.

268. With my limited knowledge, I have barely touched on the immense significance of the Signs mentioned in this Verse. Persons with adequate knowledge and resources could write volumes and volumes on the significance – and on the sciences – of these Signs. All these Signs, however, unmistakably point to the Hidden Hand of the Supremely Super Power.

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Mohammad Shafi

Friday, the 27^th of April 2018.

Proofs of Qur'aan being Divine

In the Name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful

Muslims say Qur’aan is from Allah, the sole Creator of the entire Universe and of everything therein. Should they deny the divinity, they cease to be Muslims.

But are they all convinced of the divinity? Most, I am afraid, are not! Were they all so convinced, one would find no Muslim lying, stealing, abusing, deceiving, backbiting, and indulging in any act of omission or commission considered a vice, an obscenity, or a dereliction of duty, in the Qur’aan.

Muslims, so convinced and so pious, are so few that their percentage may be less than 1, even!

Improvement of the status of Muslims among the world communities would be directly proportional to increase in that percentage.

The YouTube video, Miracles of the Qur’aan, may, I feel, help increase that abysmally low percentage, inshaAllah!

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Mohammad Shafi

Friday, the 6^th of October 2017.

Divine Punishment

In the Name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful

The ancient tribe of Thamood did not believe that one of their own brethren, Salih, was Allah’s Messenger sent to them. And they asked for a Sign. They were given a she-camel and were warned of divine punishment in case they harmed her. But they did harm her! The extract below, from Chapter 26 of QUR’AANIC STUDIES – A Modern Tafsir, discusses the punishment meted out to the tribe and the lesson to be learnt therefrom by the modern man:

158. Faakhathahumu alAAathabu inna fee thalika laayatan wama kana aktharuhum mu/mineena

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158. And then the punishment befell them. There is indeed in this a sign, and most of them believed not.⁶

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6. The ancient tribe of Thamood was given the sign of the she-camel. And yet most of the tribe did not believe. Other pre-historic tribes too were given such signs, and most of them, likewise, believed not. They were deficient in knowledge as compared to the peoples of this historic age. Allah Almighty had therefore given signs to His Messengers sent to those peoples so that they could thereby recognize the Messengers as authentically from Allah. But no such extraordinary or miraculous sign was given to Muhammad (peace on him), His Messenger sent for this historic age, claims to the contrary prevalent among some misguided sections of Muslims notwithstanding. Nothing in the Qur’aan supports such claims. The Qur’aan, on the contrary, urges the believers to look around them and to ponder over the innumerable natural phenomena contrived specifically for sustenance of human and other lives on this planet. The provision of absolutely essential things like free air and almost-free water, the occurrence of day and night continually succeeding each other, the deliberate tilt of earth’s axis at a particular angle to cause seasonal changes, the mind-boggling orbital movements of trillions and trillions of the heavenly bodies in a perfect mathematically correct balance of centripetal and centrifugal forces without bumping into one another, and innumerable such phenomena in nature provide signs galore, for those who reflect, of a super-intellectual Being in perfect control. The miraculous signs of old are now redundant and superfluous.

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Mohammad Shafi

Friday, the 23^rd of June 2017.

Ponder, Muslims!

In the Name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful

Extract from Chapter 23 of QUR’AANIC STUDIES – A Modern Tafsir:

105. Alam takun ayatee tutla AAalaykum fakuntum biha tukaththiboona

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105. Were not My Verses/signs recited to you and you rejected them? ¹⁵

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15. This is how Allah Almighty shall address those consigned to Hell-fire on the Day of Judgment. Muslims should ponder deeply, gravely and fearing whether they would be among those so addressed. Are they sure they do not reject the Qur’aanic Verses? Is not non-compliance of those Verses virtually and factually tantamount to their rejection?

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May we have the wisdom to understand properly and then comply with Qur’aanic Verses, Allah!

Mohammad Shafi

Friday, the 21^st of April 2017.