A Guarded Roof

The fifth is a discussion of the heavens: wa jaʿalnā al-samāʾa saqfan maḥfūẓan. We have made it a protecting roof, a protecting ceiling, a protection above our heads with all that is in it — with all that is in it, with its vast number of stars. From our point of view that is a roof for us; from the point of view of another star, of course, everything else is the same. But for us all of this is part of the adornment of the night, and of that ceiling or roof we look upon, in which are the sun and the moon and all the rest.

And what is of interest is that Allah (swt) then says wa huwa alladhī khalaqa al-layla wa-l-nahāra wa-l-shamsa wa-l-qamar: He created the night, the day, the sun and the moon. Kullun fī falakin yasbaḥūn: all of these, each in its own orbit. That is a remarkable thing — that we are in our orbit, moving about the sun, and we see these other planets as well; yet all these planets have their own orbit, and even the sun has its own. So Allah (swt) is making some very bold statements here from a human point of view. Allah, of course, knows everything.

The question in all of this is: who is to look after this? Whence does all of this come? Can they suppose that all of it is powered and governed by their Lāt and Manāt and ʿUzzā and all these idols they have? Or is it from the great Lord, the great Creator, in whom they used in fact to believe, though their attention was upon these small things?