Everything Living from Water

The second point Allah (swt) makes — and this was said fourteen hundred years ago — is wa jaʿalnā mina al-māʾi kulla shayʾin ḥayy: every living thing We have created from water. And now we know that some eighty-odd per cent of the human being is water, and so with all the other mammals and with everything else. And it will be remembered that the hadith mentions that there was nothing except the Throne of Allah, and that was upon water, and that upon air. So water is the life-giving factor, the life-giving substance, for everything. And that is what Allah (swt) mentions here.

Anyone who thinks about these things alone — that fourteen hundred years ago they should come from a man who had not read, who had not gone to a university, let alone been taught to read or write, who had taken no courses of that kind, and who says things of such depth and profundity. That is the second.