Watching the Gods Play Chess

Now one will notice a phenomenon, because all of the prayers are based on the sun: the night prayer, when all the red is gone from the sun; the dawn prayer, when the first light of the sun comes; and then the next prayer. What one will notice as the sun is moving up in the sky — and for a teacher who is interested in doing this, it would be a really interesting exercise to give to some students, because it will teach them some very interesting things — is this. One of the interesting and fascinating things about human beings is that astronomy is really where we get our mathematics from. Early man became very fascinated with the sky, and began to examine and watch the sky, and watch the movements of the stars, and began to discern certain patterns; and over centuries an accumulation of knowledge occurs. This is what Richard Feynman mentioned — for those familiar with him, in Six Easy Pieces. He was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Cal Poly,^*** and got his Nobel Prize in quantum electrodynamics, whatever that may mean. But he said that for the physicists and the astronomers — it is true of them, and of others — what we are really like is people who are watching the gods on Mount Olympus play chess, and they do not let you in on the rules. So what one does — one has what, forty, fifty years of thinking in a lifetime — is to start watching the game, and to notice: oh, the bishop only moves that way, and the pawn moves this way, and the queen moves this way; and one starts discerning rules; and, he said, we begin to write those down. So we are discerning that there are patterns here, but we really have not been given a whole lot of information. And one of the things he says is that the problem with this is that every once in a while something like castling comes up, and you have to start all over again. What was that?

So what happened is that people became, for some reason, obsessed with the meridian point: determining when the sun reached that meridian point. Now in the Qurʾān it says that We gave you the sun and the stars, and one of the reasons the sun, according to the Qurʾān, was given to human beings was to allow you to measure your years and learn mathematics. That is literally in the Qurʾān: that one of the wisdoms behind it is to learn mathematics. Now, people will probably get a little upset if one starts bringing geometry into a world history class, or something like that; but the idea here is that what will happen — this is how the prayer is determined — is that one puts a stick in the ground, or uses one's own body. It really is fascinating, and it has been done with children at Muslim camps: they are fascinated by it, they really enjoy it, and it is a lot of fun.