By Babatunde Jose
“Extol the limitless glory of the name of your Lord, the Most High, who creates and proportions well, who determines and guides, who brings forth the pasturage, then turns it to withered grass.” (Quran 87:1-5)
Al-A’La or The Most High is the 87th Sura of the Quran and to all intents and purposes it is mostly about the glorification of the creator and the unfathomable splendor of His Creations.
Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal relates on the authority of `Alī, the Prophet’s cousin and Companion, that the Prophet (SAW) loved this surah. The famous Hadith anthologist, Muslim, also relates that the Prophet (SAW) used to read this surah in `Īd prayers and also in Friday prayers.
The Prophet (SAW) is right to love this surah as it turns the whole universe into a temple whose four corners echo the praises and glorification of God, the Sublime.
The surah also includes the basic ingredients of the Islamic concept of life and existence: The oneness of the Creator; the reality of divine revelation; and the certainty of the life to come with the reward and punishment it involves.
Everything God has created is well proportioned and perfected. Every creature is assigned its own role and given guidance so that it may know its role and play it. It is told the purpose of its creation, given what it needs for sustenance and guided to it. This is clearly visible in everything around us, large or small, important, or trivial. For everything is well perfected and guided to fulfill the purpose of its creation. Furthermore, all things are also collectively perfected so that they may fulfill their role together.
A single atom is well balanced between its electrons and protons, to the same degree as the solar system, its sun, planets and satellites are well balanced. Each of the two knows the way it is assigned to travel and fulfills its role.
A single living cell is also perfect and well equipped to do everything it is asked to do, in the same measure as the most advanced and complex species. This perfect balance, in the individual and collective sense, is easily noticed in every one of the countless types of creation that fill the gap between the single atom and the solar system or between the single cell and the most advanced living creature.
This basic fact, evidenced by everything in the universe, is well recognized by the human heart as it contemplates what is in the universe. This sort of inspiration and recognition is within the reach of every man in every age, regardless of his standard of education. All that is required is an open mind which contemplates and responds. The results of study and research endorse, within their limited scope, this basic truth which applies to everything in the universe.
The American scientist, A. Cressy Morrison, says in his book Man Does Not Stand Alone:
“Birds have the homing instinct. The robin that nested at your door may go south in the autumn but will come back to his old nest the next spring. In September, flocks of many of our birds fly south, often over a thousand miles of open sea, but they do not lose their way. The bee finds its hive while the wind waving the grasses and trees blots out every visible guide to its whereabouts.
The tiny insects must have microscopic eyes, how perfect we do not know, and the hawks, the eagle and the condor must have telescopic vision. The owl can see the nice warm mouse as he runs in the cool grass on the blackest night.
The honey-bee workers make chambers of different sizes in the comb used for breeding. Small chambers are constructed for the workers, larger ones for the drones, and special chambers for the prospective queens.
The queen bee lays unfertilized eggs in the cells designed for males but lays fertilized eggs in the proper chambers for the female workers and the possible queens. The workers, who are the modified females, having long since anticipated the coming of the new generation, are also prepared to furnish food for the young bees by chewing and pre digesting honey and pollen. They discontinue the process of chewing, including the predigesting, at a certain stage of the development of the males and females, and feed only honey and pollen. The females so treated become the workers. For the females in the queen chambers the diet of chewed and pre-digested food is continued.
The dog with an inquiring nose can sense the animal that has passed. No instrument of human invention has added to our inferior sense of smell, and we hardly know where to begin to investigate its extension.
Taste also gives a very different sensation to each of us. How strange that these differences in perception are hereditary.
All animals hear sounds, many of which are outside our range of vibration, with an acuteness that far surpasses our limited sense of hearing.
One of the water spiders fashions a balloon-shaped nest of cobweb filaments and attaches it to some object under water. Then she ingeniously entangles an air bubble in the hairs of her under-body, carries it into the water, and releases it under the nest. This performance is repeated until the nest is inflated, when she proceeds to bring forth and raise her young safe from attack by air. Here we have a synthesis of the web, engineering, construction, and aeronautics. Chance perhaps, but that still leaves the spider unexplained.
The young salmon spends years at sea, then comes back to its own river, and what is more, it travels up the side of the river into which flows the tributary in which it was born. What brings them back so definitely? If a salmon going up a river is transferred to another tributary, it will at once realize it is not in the right tributary and will fight its way down to the mainstream and then turn up against the current to finish its destiny.
There is, however, a much more difficult reverse problem to solve in the case of the eel. These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from all the ponds and rivers everywhere, those from Europe across thousands of miles of ocean, all go to the abyssal depths south of Bermuda. There they breed and die. The little ones, with no apparent means of knowing anything except that they are in a wilderness of water, start back and find their way to the shore from which their parents came and then to every river, lake, and little pond, so that each body of water is always populated with eels. They have braved the mighty currents, storms, and tides, and have conquered the beating waves on every shore.
They can now grow and when they are mature, they will, by some mysterious law, go back through it all to complete the cycle. Where does the directing impulse originate? No American eel has ever been caught in European waters and no European eel has ever been caught in American waters. Nature has also delayed the maturity of the European eel by a year or more to make up for its much greater journey. Do atoms and molecules when combined in an eel have a sense of direction and willpower to exercise it?
Many animals are like a lobster, which, having lost a claw, will by some re-stimulation of the cells and the reactivation of the genes discover that a part of the body is missing and restore it. When the work is complete, the cells stop work, for in some way they know it is quitting time.
A fresh-water polyp divided into halves can reform itself out of one of these halves. Cut off an angle worm’s head and he will soon create a new one.
We can stimulate healing but when will our surgeons, if ever, know how to stimulate the cells to produce a new arm, flesh, bones, nails, and activating nerves? Incidentally medical science is getting near this.
An extraordinary fact throws some light on this mystery of recreation. If cells in the early stages of development are separated each can create a complete animal. Therefore, if the original cell divides into two and they are separated, two individuals will be developed. This may account for identical twins, but it means much more — each cell at first is in detail potentially a complete individual. There can be no doubt then, that you are you in every cell and fiber.
An acorn falls to the ground — its tough brown shell holds it safe. It rolls into some earthy crevice. In the spring the germ awakes, the shell bursts, food is provided by the egg-like kernel in which the genes were hidden. They send roots into the earth, and behold a sprout, a sapling, and in years a tree. The germ with its genes has multiplied by trillions and made the trunk, bark and every leaf and acorn identical with that of the oak which gave it birth. For hundreds of years, in each of the countless acorns is preserved the exact arrangement of atoms that produced the first oak tree millions of years ago.
In the melee of creation many creatures have come to exhibit a high degree of certain forms of instinct, intelligence, or what not. True, there must be a Creator who guides these and other creatures, large and small.
He is the One “Who hath created and further, given order and proportion; Who hath ordained laws. And granted guidance; (Quran 87: 2-3)
Barka Juma’at and a very happy weekend
