The World is Scripture

The Qur’anic perspective makes us rethink our assumptions about the sacred and the mundane. Faith is not blind or disconnected from how we understand the universe. Modern science may help us discern patterns, make sound predictions, and make use of nature, but it is not a tool to understand the world due to its naturalistic and materialistic limitations. The breakthrough of the Qur’an is to show us how the universe itself is scripture, expressing meaningful messages about its Eternal Maker.

We wake up in the morning, and the sun is shining. The sunshine nourishes us, both physically and emotionally. Does the sun know our need, and rise and set for us? We wash our face with water. Water not only cleanses us, but it also nurtures us as well as all the plants and other living beings. How, and why, does this inanimate liquid provide sustenance for life? We eat, and we are energized. How is it that inanimate food molecules and our body harmonize and cooperate to give us energy? We care for our children, whom we love despite all the burdens of parenting. What makes us take on such a burden, and even celebrate it? Answering such questions about existence is a profound human need.

Similarly, we wonder about the fact that what we consider bad and good are enmeshed within each other in the world. The memory that served us so well begins to fail us with old age, and the people we love the most sometimes become our biggest challenge. What do we make of all this? Transience also poses a vexing question. The beauty and abundance of life seem to be deeply contradicted by the transience that engulfs all life sooner or later. We feel haunted by the impending decay of life.

Science on its own does not offer us an understanding or an explanation for such questions and enigmas. In fact, modern science is often used to claim that the universe is governed by impersonal laws and unconscious natural factors that possess no knowledge or compassion, but that through some unknown means work in our favor.³ One reason such a worldview is considered objective and true is because modern science has been successful in making predictions and providing remedies. The earlier excerpt regarding the endocrine system, for instance, contains empirical data that can be used to predict bone growth and suggest medical remedies for its failure. Such usefulness of modern science is often seen as a proof of its naturalistic claims. Yet, utility does not necessarily indicate understanding. 

The contemporary religious scholar and philosopher Jacob Needleman offers a helpful metaphor for clarifying the difference between utility and truth:

Imagine that a certain man comes upon a gun. He has never before seen or heard of such a thing. Nor, we must imagine, does he have any need to kill for food or defense. He picks up the gun, turns it around, knocks it against a stone. What is this object? He takes it home and experiments with it. To his delight he finds that when he holds it by the barrel he can crush things and break them better than with his wooden mallet. To him, the gun is a hammer. That is his idea, his theory, so to say, and his theory works. When others ask him what that strange object is, he can prove his answer through the test of experience.⁴

In this parable, the man never discovered “the proper nature” of the gun because he never asked a question regarding its true nature. This is why, “when an idea or theory ‘works’ it always does so relative to what we are asking of reality. If we have narrow intentions, our discoveries—no matter how ingenious—can never be bigger than those intentions.”⁵ Modern science is built on experiment and provides utility, but that does not justify the materialistic and naturalistic claims about reality with which it is usually associated.⁶

The Qur’an offers us a way to see how things in the universe are not acting on their own. It shows how both the growth and the decay in the world is pointing to an infinite reality.⁷ And it does so constantly calling us to observe, reflect, question and use both our faculty of reason and our heart. 

According to the Qur’an, the universe is speaking. It is a collection of signs pointing beyond the flux of this finite world to an infinite source of power and beauty. A flower that blossoms and withers away carries a message: through its burst into life, its orderly structure, its beauty, and its death, it is talking about its Eternal Maker, the source of life, power, and beauty. The universe is speaking of the One who speaks through scripture. 

Let us consider a parable from a noteworthy Quranic exegete and theologian, Said Nursi, who talks about both the universe and scripture as forms of divine speech. In the parable, two people enter a royal competition in which the task is to write the best commentary on an important Arabic text that was written in beautiful calligraphy with precious jewelery. One contestant is an expert chemist and engineer who does not know any Arabic and does not even realize this is a text. He focuses on analyzing the chemistry of the paper, the ink, and the shapes and patterns on the page. The other man, who is familiar with Arabic, recognizes that it is an extremely important text, and writes a report explaining its profound meanings. When the two bring their work before the king, he sees that the first man has worked very hard but missed the entire point. Thus, the king rebukes him for demeaning a profound text by reducing it to meaningless shapes.⁸

The text in the parable represents the universe, and the two men represent two ways of interpreting the universe. The chemist represents the materialist-naturalist approach, often adopted by modern science and by many of us in our superficial mode of looking at the world. We treat the world as an entity that simply exists on its own and has no meaning beyond itself—as does the chemist, who looks at a page of writing and sees only ink and shapes. This approach yields the idea that the world is without purpose and is therefore pointless. The second man in the parable represents the Qur’anic, or believer’s, approach to the universe. The Qur’an shows that the universe itself is a meaningful text or speech that points beyond itself to its Eternal Maker, just as the script on the paper points to  meaning beyond  ink and shapes. Thus the universe is perceived for what it is, i.e. sacred scripture, revealing the beautiful qualities (al-asmā' al-ĥusnā) of its Maker.⁹The question, therefore, is not whether or not we should study the universe, but whether we are willing to consider those dimensions of the universe that  point to the unseen beyond. And it is through the signs (āyāt) of the Qur’an, that we can understand the universe as scripture or divine speech.

For a very brief example of how the Qur’an teaches us to read the universe, consider these verses:

Behold, in the heavens as well as on earth there are indeed signs for all who are willing to believe. And, in your own nature. And in [that of] all the animals which He scatters [over the earth] there are signs for people who are endowed with inner certainty. And in the succession of night and day, and in the means of subsistence which God sends down from the skies, giving life thereby to the earth after it had been lifeless, and in the change of the winds. These signs of God do We convey unto you, setting forth the truth. In what other tiding, if not in God’s signs, will they, then, believe? (Qur’an 45:3–6)