Monthly Archives: June 2019

Explaining A Novel To Pakistani Intelligence-By Muhammad Hanif

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(Must read article by Muhammad Hanif. It is hard to decide whether to laugh or shake your head ! f. Sheikh)

Fear is a line in your head,” my dear friend Sabeen Mahmud used to say. “You have to decide which side you want to be on.” Mahmud paid the maximum price for her fearlessness. In 2015, she organized a public discussion in Karachi about the disappearances of political activists—she was an activist herself—knowing it was a subject the Pakistani media was afraid to touch. After leaving the event, she was shot dead. 

The assassin was sentenced to death after a summary trial, but the shot that killed Mahmud still reverberates: her murder marked the beginning of an unprecedented assault on freedom of speech in Pakistan. The Pakistani media is now enduring its darkest phase yet. Major General Asif Ghafoor, the head of the Pakistan Army’s public relations department, has been circulating the online profiles of journalists he judges to be involved in antistate activities. In a press conference last December, he issued a heartfelt plea: if journalists filed positive stories for just six months, Pakistan would become a great nation. Mostly, Pakistani journalists obliged. Writers who were once bold and boisterous, taking on military dictators and civilian rulers and extremist organizations, have now become patriotic—or have found themselves out of work. Without jobs, some of the country’s top columnists and prime-time TV journalists are learning to start their own YouTube channels. Others receive threats from anonymous entities claiming to represent the state intelligence services.

Against this backdrop, I was relieved when an inspector from an intelligence agency called me, introduced himself, and said that he wanted to debrief me about my recent visit to Bangladesh. (Relieved because the caller had a name, a number, and a purpose.) The occasion for the call was my participation in a literary festival in Dhaka for the launch of my new novel, Red Birds. Usually Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and their civilian cousins in radical organizations are more obsessed with managing the news cycle than monitoring the activities of fiction writers, but the inspector had received an inquiry from his higher-ups and wanted to meet me. After consulting some journalist colleagues, I agreed to meet him in a public place.

The inspector arrived with one of his senior colleagues. The encounter was part journalistic interview, part interrogation. How did I know the Dhaka festival director? Was she married? Could I find out? Was my own marriage arranged? Did I own my house? How many children and how old? To my surprise, they also wanted to talk about the book. They asked for a copy; I politely suggested that they buy it and put it on their expense account. Okay, they said, but can you please tell us what happens? Like many novelists, I find it difficult to sum up the plot of my story in a few sentences. I started haltingly, and they seemed to like the premise: an American pilot lands in a desert and is rescued by a refugee child. The refugee must be Afghan? they asked, and I nodded enthusiastically. For the next half hour my interrogators and I were writing this novel together. I realized that I was telling an entirely different story for their consumption: omitting certain things, embellishing other parts. I was determined not to reveal that at the heart of the novel is a boy who has gone missing, a case of enforced disappearance. (Six years ago I had reported on missing activists in Pakistan and was warned by friends not to go there. And then there was Sabeen Mahmud.) I made the story sound patriotic; I made it about the positive image of Pakistan. I don’t know if they believed any of it, but I was sure that they would never bother to read it. I was relieved, for once, not to receive any interest in my journalism. A lot of what I write would fail the patriotism test. 

 

I learned this trick of weaving fiction around fact a decade ago. My first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, grew out of my frustrated attempts to investigate the plane crash that killed General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s military dictator, and half a dozen top generals, along with the US ambassador to Pakistan. Thirty-one people died in total. There had been two official inquiries into the crash, and it was said that sabotage was involved, but no culprits were ever found. When I tried, years after the event, to talk to some of the players who were around at the time of the crash and to research the very little that had been written about it, I soon realized that I was not going to find out the truth. There were cover-ups to cover the cover-ups. It became obvious that nobody (including the Americans, who had lost a rising star in the State Department) was interested in finding out whodunit. They all seemed to be saying, Good riddance—now let’s get on with our lives. Failing to find any facts, I decided to solve the assassination through fiction; in the absence of an identified killer in real life, I came up with a character who raises his hand and says: I did it. As with many novels that start on a whim, this little conceit took on a life of its own. My novel borrowed the many bizarre conspiracy theories about the plane crash, embellished them, and added counterparts of my own invention. It included some political jokes and some real-life characters who were still in power. I threw in a mango-eating crow and a poison-tipped sword for good measure. I had assumed that if you said on the cover that the book was a work of fiction, people would read it as a work of fiction. But many readers in Pakistan have come to me and asked how I uncovered it all. It’s almost frightening to think that people read a work of fiction full of fantastical happenings as a piece of history. A retired spy chief once cornered me at a party and said, “Son, you have written a brilliant book, but who were your sources.

Full article.

 

Holdout for perfect partner or settle for good enough?

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(Interesting article by Aaron Be-Ze’ev for young ones looking for partner as well as for married ones! f.sheikh)

‘I want a man who’s kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?’ 
Zsa Zsa Gabor, actress and socialite (1917-2016)

The search for ‘the one and only’ romantic partner, our second half who will love us forever and a day, and will light an eternal fire in our loving heart, has been a frustrating undertaking for many people. But why? Could the goal be unrealistic? Can we improve our strategy, and our chances, or should we give up the search?

The search for ‘The One’ can indeed feel futile. You might test what can feel like endless candidates and not find anyone you really like. You can travel great distances but never reach the Promised Land. Even when this land seems to be found, there is no lifetime guarantee, and the expiration date of this happy kingdom might be brief. Breakups, not long-term relationships, appear to be the norm. In many societies, about half of all marriages end in divorce, and lots of the remaining half have at some point seriously considered it.

In light of these difficulties, doubts have been raised concerning the value of this kind of search. One person might dismiss the quest altogether. ‘Done with trying to find a woman for life. Much easier to just hook up for a good short time. Avoid all the other personal drama!’ as one man told me. Another stops the search early, after finding profound love and connection when very young. ‘I’ve never regretted not ordering the fish when my steak arrived cooked and seasoned to my liking,’ said a woman who married her first lover. Yet others say they’ve found The One yet continue sampling what’s out there. ‘I want both – a long, profound love and a series of short, intense romantic-sexual experiences. Lust and profound love are both meaningful and satisfying for me,’ another woman explains.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the third option is preferable for most singles, at least in the United States: the eighth annual ‘Singles in America’ (2018) study from the dating site Match, supervised by the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and the evolutionary biologist Justin Garcia, both of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington, indicates that 69 per cent of today’s singles are looking for a serious, long, romantic relationship at the same time, nonetheless, as they are experiencing diverse, brief types of superficial, sexual relationships. For instance, many singles, especially women, have dated multiple people simultaneously. Most heterosexual singles would be open to a threesome, the report reveals, and one in four would have sex with a robot.

It is likely that these attitudes will continue after meeting the person who seems to be The One. In a 1996 study of sexual exclusivity among dating, cohabiting and married women, the sociologist Renata Forste at Brigham Young University in Utah and the public-health scientist Koray Tanfer in Seattle found that, if a woman has a history of multiple sex partners, the likelihood of her having a secondary sex partner during a current relationship greatly increases. It seems that personality tendencies and sexual habits are the main factors here. These findings do not reject the value of the search for The One, but rather suggests that this person, once found, might not be all alone.

Despite these kinds of caveats, when it comes of finding The One, strategy counts, starting with the very definition of ‘perfect’. One dictionary definition is flawless: being entirely without fault or defect. The other is most suitable: being as good as possible, and completely appropriate. While the first meaning focuses on eliminating the negative, the second centres on finding as much positive as one can.

Clearly, the search for the flawless person is an exercise in utter futility. Through this lens, the beloved is seen as a kind of icon, without relation to the partner. Here, one looks at qualities that stand on their own, such as intelligence, appearance, humour or wealth. This sort of measure has two advantages – it is easy to use, and most people would agree about the assessments. It’s an approach that takes a static view, in which romantic love is essentially fixed – and that’s something we know doesn’t work well in the real world.

On the other hand, looking for the most suitable person under a given set of circumstances might allow you to build an intimate connection, and could yield a flourishing partnership. This view emphasises the uniqueness of the relationship; it sees the beloved’s most important qualities in relationship to the partner, and offers a dynamic kind of romantic love over time. Such love involves intrinsic development that includes bringing out the best in each other. The suitability scale is much more complex, since it depends on personal and environmental factors about which we do not have full knowledge.

The view is supported by the philosopher Iddo Landau of the University of Haifa in Israel and the author of Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World(2017). He distinguishes between two life strategies: aspiring to be the best, and aspiring to improve. The first can lead us down an endless, unproductive path of frustrated competition, while the second brings meaningful development over time. The same type of distinction applies to romantic love. If romantic meaning mainly concerns achieving the best, lovers will always be restless, consumed with concern about missing the perfect person, or perhaps the younger, the richer or the more beautiful one. If, however, romantic flourishing mainly involves improvement, achieving it lies much more in our hands.

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Social Media & Constructive National Discussion On Issues

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(Great article in Quartz on how social media can play an important role in national ,and even global, constructive discussion on pressing issues by better moderating the Trending News and separating real from conspiratorial manipulated content. The good news is that the social media has the tools to do it by adjusting its algorithms and flagging questionable content. f. sheikh)

 

This week Jürgen Habermas, one of the world’s most famous living philosophers, turned 90. A week before, Congress hosted yet another hearing investigating tech platforms Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple.

What does one event have to do with the other?

In 2006, long before social media echo chambers were a worldwide phenomenon, Habermas warned that “the rise of millions of fragmented chat rooms across the world” would lead to “a huge number of isolated issue publics”—micro public spheres that threaten the shared national conversations that are essential to democracy.

Habermas’s philosophies and the antitrust investigations both point to a fundamental issue we face today: the concept of a public sphere, and what tech companies and the government can and should do to protect democracy.

Facebook, like Twitter and Google, represents the modern version of the public sphere that Habermas and other democracy theorists have called for. With more of our lives lived online, we’ve stopped prioritizing physical spaces, and therefore lost shared spaces spaces for public discourse.

The internet has largely satisfied a human desire for connection, but it doesn’t necessarily cultivate a democratic exchange of information.

Democratic discourse depends on a shared understanding of what matters, what the facts are, and which sources and speakers are reliable.

Trend setting

Before its untimely dismissal, Facebook’s “Trending” feature lived in the small white box on the upper right-hand corner of your home page, allegedly listing the news stories most widely shared and discussed across Facebook’s ecosystem.

Although problematic in its application, this tool had the potential for an entirely citizen-driven solution to an age-old problem of the public sphere: determining what issues deserve our attention, and how much of it.

Features like Trending in theory help support and maintain the social media space as a venue for public conversation in democratic discourse—if platforms can stick to implementing them the way they were initially advertised.

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The Mathematical Surprises Within The Qur’anic Verses-By Azeem Farooki

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Lecture by Farooki Sahib at The New City Jewish Center  “The Learning Collaborative Class – May 28, 2019”

Topic – Mathematical surprises within the 6236 verses of the Qur’an and reminders in the verses for humanity to observe natural phenomenon.

Introduction

Prophet of Islam Muhammad Ibn Abdullah was born in Makkah, KSA in 570. His mother was Amina and father was Abdullah who died before Prophet’s birth. He came under the care of his paternal grandfather Abdul Muttalib. At the age of 6 he lost his mother and at 8 his grandfather died. He was entrusted to his uncle Abu Talib who had become the new head of the clan of Hashim within the ruling tribe of Quraish of Makkah. He was illiterate, could not read or write. When he was 22, he was employed by a local business woman, Khadija bint Khuwaylid, to look after her business by travelling in caravans from Makkah to Palestine. She was impressed by his honesty and proposed marriage, he was 25 and she was 40 years old and had two sons and four daughters, both sons died in infancy.

The marriage brought financial stability to the bridegroom who was deeply distressed with the local lawlessness and immoral behavior of his tribal society. He started going for spiritual retreats to a solitary place as was the custom of his tribe. Ramadan was the traditional month of retreat and it was one night he was meditating in the cave when Angel Gabriel came to him in the form of a man and asked him to recite five verses. He was told that he was selected to be the Messenger of God.

Thus began the series of visits and recitals by the Angel Gabriel for the next 23 years until the entire Qur’an in Arabic of 6236 Verses was received by the Prophet. It was revealed incrementally over a period of 23 years, beginning 609 CE, when the Prophet was 40, and concluding in 632 CE, the year of his death at the age of 62. 80% of Qur’an, 4613 Verses, was revealed during 610 – 622 in Makkah and remainder 20% of Qur’an, 1623 Verses, in Medina from 622 – 632.

The Verses are not in chronological order or organized around subject or topic. Why, we don’t know. It is exactly as Prophet was told to recite by Angel Gabriel.

The Five Pillars of Islam are the five obligations that every Muslim must satisfy in order to live a decent life and develop a family. Carrying out these obligations provides the framework of the daily activities in a Muslim society. They are:

• Shahada: Reciting the Muslim profession of faith.

There is one God and Muhammad is his messenger.

• Salah: Performing ritual prayers five times a day.

• Zakat: Paying charity tax to benefit the poor and the needy.

• Sawm: Fasting during the month of Ramadan.

• Hajj: Pilgrimage to Mecca only if financially and physically capable.

The classical Arabic language cannot be translated in English. A single word can yield many concepts as there is no third person pronoun suited to refer to the supreme Allah (God, Lord, Master) beyond human concepts.

Qur’anic text has a nonlinear structure; due to which they have no beginning, middle, or end and no chronological order.

The Qur’an literally means “the recitation”. It is the continuation and revival of the previous revealed books Torah and Bible. It is a book of guidance and signs and not a textbook of science.

Qur’an says Prophet Muhammad was selected to present and confirm the monotheistic teachings of Islam, preached previously by prophets selected by God. So it is the culmination of a series of divine messages revealed to Adam, Moses, David, Jesus and ending with Prophet Muhammad. (Peace be upon all of them).

The 6236 Verses (Ayats) are arranged in 114 units called Suras (Chapters) of varying length and touching upon all aspects of human existence. The first Sura called Fatihah has 7 Verses and it is recited daily in the 17 compulsory and many supplemental prayers performed 5 times a day. Several of Prophet’s companions served as scribes and recorded the revelations as soon as they heard. The timing of the revelation was unpredictable and the companions of the Prophet either memorized the Verses or wrote them down.

Shortly after Prophet’s death, the Qur’an was compiled by the first Caliph Abu Bakr (632-634). The process was carefully supervised and certified by companions who had either memorized or written down the revelations and finally seven copies were made and sent to the Muslim countries by the third Caliph Usman ibn Affan (579-656). Two copies still exist: one in Top Kapi Palace Museum, Istanbul, Turkey and the second in Ganja Museum, Azerbaijan. The Qur’an we read today is exactly the same, word by word, that was revealed to the Prophet 1440 years ago.

Qur’an offers historical accounts of events, the law and commandments, the wisdom and nature of the spiritual world. It is acclaimed as the finest work in classical Arabic literature as the word of God. During prayers, the Qur’an is recited only in Arabic. During the month of Ramadan, Muslims typically complete the recitation of the whole Qur’an, during the supplemental prayers. Those who memorize the entire Qur’an are known as Hafiz. Hadees are words and actions of the Prophet, oral and written traditions, supplementing the Qur’an. From an Islamic theological perspective, God created a community of men and women to whom he speaks in a manner that would have a universal and eternal significance for people of other times and places.

Listed below are some verses of Qur’an for guidance and information:

Chapter 2, Verse 185: This is a book of guidance for mankind.

Chapter 2, Verse 126. Say, We believe in God, and the revelation given to us and to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, and Jacob and their tribes and descendants, and that which has been given to Moses and Jesus: and all Prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them. And it is to Him we surrender ourselves in Islam.

Chapter 3, Verse 84. Say, We believe in God and what has been revealed to us and what was revealed to Abraham, Ismael, Isaac, Jacob, and the 12 Tribes, and in the Books given to Moses, Jesus, and the Prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between one and another among them, and to God do we bow our will in Islam.

Chapter 4, Verse 29. O you believe do not kill yourself as suicide is forbidden.

Chapter 4, Verse 163. Surely, We have sent to you the Revelation, like we had sent it to Noah and the prophets after him. We sent revelation to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob, and the tribes (the 12 sons of Jacob); to Jesus and Job, Jonah, Aaron, and Solomon and to David we gave the Psalms (Zaboor) a book of divine wisdom.

Chapter 5, Verse 69. Surely those who believe in Qur’an and those who follow the Jewish scriptures and the Sabians and the Christians – any who believe in Allah and the Last Day and people who work towards righteousness – Upon these shall be no fear and they shall not be in pain.

Chapter 11, Verse 1: This is a Book, the Verses are perfected in knowledge, and then explained in detail from One Allah, Who is All-Wise and Well-Acquainted with all things.

Chapter 29, Verse 46. You do not argue with People of the Books (Jews and Christians) except with better ways – reasons and facts. Say to them we believe in the revelation that came down to us and also that came to you as God and your God is one and the same.

Chapter 49, Verse 13. O mankind, We have created you from a single pair of male and female, and made you into nations and tribes that you may know each another. Surely, the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one who is most deeply conscious of Him. Behold, God is all knowing and well aware.

Qur’an has unique mathematical information that only came to light with our ability today to develop tools to count and keep track of individual words in a book as this book was composed over a period of 23 years and 1440 years ago. Currently, this subject is being researched, but I am able to glean information from several videos and articles available on various websites which leads to the obvious conclusion: The 6236 Verses must be divinely revealed, as it is simply impossible for a human mind to invent and recite them over a period of 23 years and keep track of the content of the book and its words.

It is interesting when the Qur’an provides information, it often tells the reader, “You did not know this before.” Indeed, there is no scripture that exists which makes that claim.

Qur’an mentions one thing is equal to another, e.g. man is equal to women. The word “man” (Rajul in Arabic) appears 24 times and the word “woman” (Imra in Arabic) also appears 24 times in the entire 6236 verses of the Qur’an.

This mathematical equality also happens with several words appearing in equal numbers in the entire 6236 verses of the Qur’an. For example:

· Adam 25 Jesus 25

· Material world 115 After world 115

· Angels 88 Satan 88

· Death 145 Life 145

· Hardship 114 Patience 114

· Charity 32 Blessing 32

· Benefit 50 Loss 50

· Faith 25 Infidelity 25

The words Adam and Jesus appear in the Quran 25 times each and they do not always occur together. Some chapters mention Jesus but not Adam and some chapters mention Adam but not Jesus.

It turns out that when the two names occur together in Chapter 3, Verse 59, it is the 7th time. Now after this mention they do not converge until the 19th chapter of Quran. This is the 19th time each name is mentioned. We know that each name is mentioned 25 times in the Quran, It is interesting that the numbers 7 and 19 are playing a role here.

Let’s do an exercise. Write the numbers is sequence 1, 2, 3, all the way to 25 in left to right English way and then write below 25, 24, 23 all the way to 1 in right to left Arabic way. You will find that 19 and 7 are in the same column and 7 and 19 are in the same column. This means the 7th time Jesus is mentioned in the Quran it is the 19th time from the rear of the Quran. And the 19th time Jesus is mentioned in the Quran it is 7th time from the rear of the Quran.

This applies to Adam in the same way.

Now let us take a look at how many Verses transpire from the 7th mention of Adam to the 19th mention of Adam so we going thru many passages, all the way to Chapter 19 where Adam is mentioned and the total number of Verses in this stretch is 1957. That number is a multiple of 19 as 19 x 103 = 1957

Now count the Verses where Jesus is mentioned for the first 19 times, we find that the total of those Verses is also 1957.

You might say that it is just coincidence but we have to remind ourselves that coincidences like this is not easy to come by because 1957 is a four digit number and there are 9000 four digit numbers from 1000 to 9999. So if you put all these number in a bag again it is not likely you will pick up 1957 again. If you pick up 1957 by the first contrivance, it is not likely that by a simple contrivance you pick this number again. So what we see is adding all the Verse numbers where Jesus is mentioned for the first 19 times, we come up with 1957 which is multiple of 19 x 103.

We find such patterns in the Quran and we cannot say that it is a coincidence and you need to be mathematically inclined to see the depth of this with the number 19 and number 7. They are recurring in the Quran. Both 19 and 7 are coinciding, so actually they add another level of complexity. No one knows the significance of number 19 but it is mentioned in the 74th Chapter, Verse 30 which speaks about Hell and says there 19 Angels guarding Hell. But why 19, the next Verse says God has mentioned this number to strengthen the faith of the believer and give certainty to the people of the scripture before this and one wonders how the number 19 strengthens the faith of the believer. But we find now there are such intricate pattern of number 19 in the Quran that this does actually strengthen the faith of the believer in our modern times.

There is one more pattern to talk about.

That is the Chapter 108. There are ten words in this Chapter. It is the shortest Chapter of Quran comprises 42 letters a product of 7 x 6 = 42. Now of the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet 17 are used in this Sura and 11 are not used. Both 17 and 11 are Prime Numbers. There are 10 words and one letter Alif is used 10 times and other 10 letters are used only once. There is a symphony of numbers.

The words Prayer, Month and Day appear in the Qur’an exactly as we know:

Prayer 5 times Month 12 times Day 365 times

The words Sea and Land appear in the Qur’an 45 times:

Sea appears 32 times and Land appears 13 times

The significance of the word Sea and Land appearing 45 times provide the exact percentages of the Sea to Land ratios recently confirmed by science:

Sea + Land = 32+13 = 45

% Sea = 32/45 x 100 % 71.11 Recently confirmed by science

% Land = 13/45 x 100 % 28.88 Recently confirmed by science

Universe came into being by a Big Bang model and is expanding:

Chapter 21, Verse 30. Heavens & Earth were joined but We parted them

Chapter 51, Verse 47. We created the domain of space

Chapter 36, Verse 40. It is not permitted that Sun to catch the Moon, nor can the Night outstrip the Day. Each just swims along in its own orbit according to Law.

Chapter 39, Verse 21. Allah sends down rain from the sky and leads it through springs in the earth underground water.

Chapter 25, Verse 53. It is He who has let free two bodies of flowing water, one palatable and sweet, and the other salty and bitter and yet He has made a barrier between them that is forbidden to be passed.

Chapter 25, Verse 54. It is He who has created every living thing from water.

Creation of human life

Chapter 80, Verse 18-20. From a drop of sperm He created human and proportioned him. Then He eases the way for him.

Chapter 53, Verse 45-46. He has created both sexes, male and female from a drop of semen which has been ejected.

Qur’an also describes the developmental stages of a human being in the mother’s womb when bones develop first, muscles form and wrap around them.

Chapter 39, Verse 6. He created you stage by stage in your mothers’ wombs in three fold darkness.

1. Darkness of the abdomen 2. Darkness of the womb

3. Darkness of the placenta

Chapter 23, Verse 14. We then formed the drop into a clot and formed the clot into a lump and formed the lump into bones and clothed the bones in flesh; and then brought him into being as another creature.

Chapter 24, Verse 45. Allah created every living creature from water. Some of them go on their bellies, some of them on two legs, and some on four. Allah creates whatever He wills. Allah has power over all things.

Chapter 21, Verse 30. Do those who disbelieve do not see that the heavens and earth were sewn together and then We unstitched them and that We made from water every living thing? So will they not believe?

Chapter 25, Verse 54. And it is He who created human beings from water and then gave them relations by blood and marriage. Your Lord is all powerful.

The identity is in the fingerprint: While it is stated in the Qur’an that Allah can bring man back to life after death, the fingerprints are emphasized:

Chapter 75, Verse 1- 4. Yes, We are able to put together in perfect order the very tips of his fingers.

Chapter 36, Verse 36. Glory is to Him who created all the pairs from what the earth produces and from themselves and from things unknown to them.

Chapter 16, Verse 8. And He creates other things that you do not now.

Before the development of microscope we were not aware of the existence of life forms too small to see for the naked eye.

Chapter 34, Verse 3. He is the knower of the Unseen, Whom not even the weight of the smallest particle eludes, either in the heavens or in the earth: nor is there anything smaller or larger than that which is not a clear book.

Chapter 10, Verse 61. Not even the smallest speck eludes your Lord, either on earth or in heaven.

Chapter 16, Verse 68-69. The Qur’an mentions that the female bee leaves its home to gather food. This was not known 1440 years ago. People believed male bees leave home to gather food.

Chapter 21, Verse 33. It is He who created the Night and the Day, and the sun and the moon: all the celestial bodies swim along, each in its rounded course.

The Qur’an affirms that the sun is turning and rotating as it travels. Only recently science discovered that, sun rotates around its axis, and proved as the Qur’an stated 1440 years ago, that sun indeed turns as it travels through space.

Arabic word Sabaha describes it perfectly that Sun moves as a result of its own motion. Several videos are available on Internet with references regarding this topic. We are encouraged to observe and seek knowledge throughout our life.

Chapter 20, Verse 114. O my Lord, advance me in my knowledge.

After the death of the Prophet, Qur’an was the last word on any matter but determining what the Qur’an meant was not always easy and is still not.

Chapter 33, Verse 40. Muhammed is not the father of any of your men, but the Messenger of God and the seal of the Prophets: and God is, about everything, All-Knowing.

Exegesis (critical explanation or interpretation of a text), or Hermeneutics (the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation) has not been easy but always quite challenging to scriptures, including the Qur’an.

Number of times 25 Prophets are mentioned in the Qur’an

1. Adam 25 Times

2. Enoch (Idris) 2

3. Noah (Nuh) 43

4. Eber (Hud) 7

5. Salih (Salah) 9

7. Lot (Lut) 27

6. Abraham (Ibrahim) 69

8. Ishmael (Ismael) 12

9. Isaac (Ishaq) 17

10. Jacob (Yaqub) 27

11. Joseph (Yusuf) 11

12. Job (Ayyub) 4

13. Ezikiel (Zulkifl) 2

14. Jethro (Shuab) 10

15. Moses (Musa) 136

16. Aaron (Harun) 20

17. David (Dawud) 16

18. Solomon (Suleiman) 17

19. Jonah (Yunus) 4

20. Elijah (Ilyas) 2

21. Elisha (Alyasa) 2

22. Zechariah (Zakariya) 7

23. John the Baptist (Yahya) 5

24. Jesus (Isa) 25 (and 48 times in third person)

25. Mohammad 4

Compiled by Azeem Farooki

For The Learning Collaborative program hosted by The New City Jewish Center

Acknowledgement: Information in this article is extracted from Internet and history books, errors are unintentional.