Chapter 2: Surat Al-Baqarah (The Cow), verses 163-164
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Translation:
Your God is one God. There is no god but Him. He is the Compassionate, the Merciful. In the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of night and day; in the ships that sail the ocean with cargoes beneficial to man; in the water which God sends down from the sky and with which He revives the earth after its death, dispersing over it all manner of beasts; in the movement of the winds, and in the clouds that are driven between earth and sky: surely in these there are signs for people who understand.
(163-164)
Tafsir
(Commentary):
Mankind has only
one God: He is the only worthy focus of man’s attention. Our very existence on
earth, and all the benefits we derive from the world around us, are
manifestations of His unbounded grace and mercy. In return, we should become
God’s devoted servants, living for Him, dying for Him, and setting all our
hopes on winning His eternal favor. Man owes everything to God. If he becomes
conscious of this, God will mean everything to him, as a mother means everything
to her baby child.
To find our
way to God, we have only to look at the universe—a magnificent display of His
ineffable creativity spread out before us. And then we must appreciate the
absolute harmony in the functioning of all the various and contrasting species
that exist in our world. If they work together as one, it is because all must
have been created and must still be controlled by One Being. Any other scheme of
things would have produced chaos. Then the fact that everything benefits the
rest of the universe, in some manner or the other, shows that all things were
designed according to a definite and conscious plan. Everything in the universe,
in fact, has been designed to answer to man’s needs. Even before an individual
has been born into the world, all his requirements have already been taken care
of. The very wind that encompasses man shows him how entirely his life rests in
his Creator’s hands.
Animate
creatures of every variety flourish in this world, all sustained by related
forms of the same food and drink. Apparently lifeless objects are invested with
life and a natural process of re-creation shows that death is a purely temporary
phase in this world. That has ever been the pattern in this existence: death is
always followed by new life. All of these are clues to the omnipresence of a
great and merciful deity. Signs such as these, scattered throughout the
universe, are magnificent indicators of the immanence of the Creator: of His
existence; of His Oneness; of His being as amalgam of all the qualities of
perfection.
The universe
make all these things plain no such a vast scale that no one with any vision
should ever fail to see God; no one with intelligence should be unable to
discover Him. It should be clear even to the least intellectually endowed that
God’s blessings are infinite. But to be able to arrive at the truth, one has
to be sincere in one’s search for it, and one has to be capable of rising
above self-interest before drawing one’s conclusions. It is only those who
give deep thought to God’s signs who can fathom them. This can be achieved
only by total absorption, not in externals, but in the search for the inner
reality that lies beneath the outward surface of things.