Islamic Scientific Schools

In the Name of Allah — the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. There is a place in the universe where the sky ends. Not in the sense of an edge, but in the sense of a boundary past which nothing returns — not light, not matter, not even a message. Astronomers call it a black hole, and it is the most extreme object physics has ever described: a region where so much mass has been packed into so little space that gravity wins completely. This post is about what happens to the biggest stars when the burning stops — and about the monsters that sit, quiet and unseen, at the centre of almost every galaxy, including our own. First the phenomenon as science understands it, then the argument for how it relates to the Qur'anic narrative. 1. The darkest objects in the universe A black hole is not a hole in the ordinary sense, and it is not black in the ordinary sense either. It is a region of space where gravity has become so strong that the speed needed to escape it is greater than the ...

In the Name of Allah — the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. The climate is the weather remembered over decades. A hot day is weather. A decade in which the hot days come earlier, stay longer and break records that stood for a century is climate. And the climate of the Earth is changing, in a direction and at a speed that the instruments have now measured for more than a hundred years. This post does what the first four posts in this series did for earthquakes, for astronomy, for the oceans and for the living soil: first the phenomenon as science understands it, then the argument for how it relates to the Qur'anic narrative. 1. The air we live in The atmosphere is a thin skin. If the Earth were an apple, the air would be thinner than the apple's skin — about a hundred kilometres of gas wrapped around a planet 12,742 kilometres across, and most of its mass sits in the lowest ten kilometres, the layer we live and breathe in. It is mostly nitrogen (about 78 percent) and oxyge...

In the Name of Allah — the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. Look down at the ground beneath your feet and it seems the least interesting thing in the world. It is brown, it is still, and when it is dry it cracks and crumbles to dust. Nothing in it appears to move. Yet that handful of soil is the most crowded place on the planet. A single teaspoon of it can hold more living things than there are people on Earth. And when rain falls on dry earth, that apparently dead ground wakes up — first in minutes, then in hours, then in days — until the cracked surface turns green. This post does what the first three posts in this series did for earthquakes, for astronomy and for the oceans: first the phenomenon as science understands it, then the argument for how it relates to the Qur'anic narrative. 1. A teaspoon of soil Soil is not dirt. Dirt is what you wash off your hands; soil is a living system, and it is built in layers. At the top is the litter: fallen leaves, dead stems, the rema...