The Sciences are the evidence of the theme and Divine Origin of Grand Qur’ān

Introduction

The Divine Discourse, Grand Qur’ān is a completely interwoven text as a coherent unity. The entire text and all its topics and sub-topics revolve around its main theme.

The major portion of the Discourse comprises of narrative, expository and informative text.

Narrative is Factual Recount: Narrative texts have to do with real-world events and time. The purposes of narrative may be to inform—correct misconceptions and distortions of history; to persuade and to change attitudes/social opinions. Narrative writing uses time as its deep structure. The main structural components of a narrative are the orientation, the complication and the resolution. Language features of narrative text are distinct from other types. The major chunk of the text of Grand Qur’ān comprises of narrative.

Expository texts are which identify and characterize phenomenon. They may be objective or subjective. They may be analytical (starting from a concept and then characterizing its parts; e.g. definitions) or synthetic [recounting characteristics and ending with a appropriate concept or conclusion; e.g. summaries They are characterized by state/stative verbs and epistemic modals or by verbs indicating typical activities or qualities.

Informative/Explanatory text:

• Attempts to make the reader understand rather than to persuade him or her to accept a certain point of view.

• Provides information about causes, contexts, and consequences of processes, phenomena, states of affairs, objects, and terminology.

• Supports the writer's thesis with evidence and supporting detail.

These types of texts are simultaneously used as argumentative to prove and establish the theme of the Grand Qur’ān. Argumentative texts depart from the assumption that receiver's beliefs must be changed.

Various sciences, almost all that are relevant to human being, that are mentioned in Qur’ān aim not at teaching sciences in detail but as material evidence and argument to convincingly prove the theses statement of Grand Qur’ān.

What is a thesis statement

A worth reading book is that which has a unity and an organization of parts. That lacking it would be a mess, non-scholarly work relatively unreadable and annoying to the reader. The reader must be able to tell what the whole book is about, simply and briefly in a single sentence or at most few sentences. What a book is about means to discover its theme or main point.

Intelligibility of the book is the source for the accomplishment of communication. The objective of communication is achieved when the reader comprehends the underlying, over all meaning of the message conveyed through a dynamic process of text building.

What is stated above about a book—in academic parlance—it is portrayed by terms cohesion and coherence in a discourse. A discourse is unified when all of its contents relate directly to its thesis statement; and the discourse is well developed when it has given sufficient information to the reader to make him feel that the thesis has sufficiently been discussed. The discourse is coherent when all of its contents are written clearly, logically and in a manner that is easy to follow.

All those believers and non-believers who openly or subtly alleged that Grand Qur’ān lacks cohesion and coherence—unity and organization seem to be ignorant of basic academic manners of reading a book. They naively overlooked and ignored the fact that unity of a book revolves around its main theme. They never realized the Theme of Grand Qur’ān, which is also mentioned in it in just two sentences—

The first sentence of the theme statement is an elliptical sentence because the predicate of genus negation particle is elided. Any of the epithets mentioned for Allah the Exalted in the Divine Discourse can be estimated as its elided predicate. It can be: Allemun, the source of knowledge, the setter of sciences, whereby the sentence would mean that none at all of those considered as gods is the setter of sciences except Allah the Exalted.

The second largest chunk of the text of Grand Qur’ān is about sciences which is used to prove the thesis statement.

The knowledge about the matter is verifiable in time and space. Anything said by someone or a book regarding physical matters could be subjected to verification in time and space about its truth to an exact detail. The statements about scientific facts are in itself the falsification test of a book that mentions it.

If the scientific information mentioned in Grand Qur’ān stands the verification test, provided it is of such nature that it could not be considered as the personal knowledge of a human being living in 7th century when this book was published for the first time, it will prove its infallibility. This verification test is the key to decide about the veracity of thesis statement.

Interestingly, it is specifically mentioned in the Grand Qur’ān:

It was promised to the non-believers that henceforth the revelation of the Book tangible realities will be shown to their eyes. Please just reflect on this statement. Whatever has been seen in the horizons and human body and then shown to common people ever since the introduction of Qur’ān, it were the non-believers. Not a single believer has seen and shown to humanity any secret of the universe and human body. Contribution of the Muslim scholars and scientists remained restricted to basic thoughts about various sciences. Thus this statement is valid and proved by our experience until now.

The scientists consider it a strange anomaly with the Islamic scholars that they never made the leap of discovering the telescope, despite their knowledge of optometry, and the fact that they used observation tubes to scrutinize a section of sky without light interference. Their work included ideas about lenses and parabolic mirrors, but never made the mental leap into making a telescope.

What could be the plausible reason? The reason is that the Setter of Sciences has stated He will show the realities of the Universe to the eyes of non-believers of Qur’ān. Why this seemingly discriminatory attitude?

I leave it for the believers of the Qur’ān in the Academic study circle to ponder and answer the question if they have critically read and understood the Qur’ān.

The Ayah states the purpose of showing the tangible realities of universe and human to non-believers is that the fact of Qur’ān being infallible becomes self evident for them.

Why a first time observation of hitherto unseen thing manifests that the Qur’ān is a statement of proven fact? This is possible only if the same thing finds verbal mirroring of it in the Qur’aan. Verbal specification and visual observation are two aspects of identification of a tangible fact of real existence. The visual observation of an earlier unseen fact will manifest a book written earlier in time as the Book of Facts which contains its verbal presentation. This will establish that the Book really contains verbal statements of scientific facts and is not conjectural, hypothetical, presumptive or a science fiction in its contents.

Believing people start calling it a miracle of Qur’ān whenever a scientific fact is shown by the scientists and organization like NASA. And then the non-believing scholars start consuming their energies to disprove the claim of believers. Both naively ignore the fact that if it were to become a miracle in 21st century what was the benefit of its mention for the readers of earlier centuries?

And further what they naively ignore is the fact about the audience of the book. The humanity is its audience which has men of ordinary prudence like me and intellectuals, philosophers and scientists. And it is understood that a good author is he who writes according to the intellectual level of his audience.

The author is always superior in knowledge than the reader. Therefore, the author can meaningfully communicate only when he is conscious of the intellectual level of his audience and his message is geared to be consonant with the audience's prior knowledge and assumptions. It is the audience in relation to whom will depend the main idea, validation and support, word choice, sentence structure, writing plan - form, and writing relationship: what tone of voice comes to you as a reader.

There are many factors that show the inimitability of Grand Qur’ān. One is the word choice in expository and informative segments of the text that have equal appeal and perceptive value for an ordinary person of little knowledge and for a scholar and scientist.

It is almost an admitted fact that succinctness is one of the par excellence features of Grand Qur’ān. A certain arrangement of words in any language has in it certain semantic density of information. The greater the semantic density of information in relation to quantity of letters and words is what we call succinctness. Greater the semantic density in a sentence, it will meet greater number of intellectual levels of its reader. Also greater the semantic density, easier is it for understanding and comprehending by everyone with equal satisfaction of intellect.

Let me clarify this point by an example of a sentence in Grand Qur’ān:

• It is a fact that only such people reasonably-rationally answer/respond who listen comprehensibly.  [Ref 6:36]

It is a simple sentence understandable by everyone. But for people, like learned Paul Broca, an anatomist celebrated for his discovery of the speech production center of the brain, and for acousticians and speech experts, these four words embed much more information which is neither portrayed in any translation nor explained in exegeses. The verb: in common parlance and understanding denotes answering, either affirmatively or negatively. It stems from Root:  ج و ب  which signifies to cut a portion from the whole of something;; to make hole or tore something; perforate, pierce, carve or to excavate. And Form-X of verbs adds reflexive causitive meanings of self assigning a task.

What happens when we wish to answer a question or what is done by Google and computer when we post a question to it? We cut relevant portion from our memory and Google and Computer cuts it from its memory to display it on screen.

When we cut relevant part from memory which we intend to express as answer, it is also firstly displayed on an invisible screen which is our rib cage. and a system in it instantly becomes operative to transform it into sound by vocal cords to make it reach our mouth from where we emit it syllable by syllable for the auditory faculty of questioner.  

In the same sentence the answering capability is restricted only to those who listen. Verbal information is saved in the memory only when we consciously and attentively listen and comprehend the message. It enables analysis-perception and safe storage. It happens only if the listener has such intention and desire. Therefore, listening is but translating and interpreting the articulated sounds-verbal narration whereby one can answer accordingly. Otherwise it is mere "hearing sound-noise" or a momentary storage in the memory of Ears only to get lost in few seconds.

It is thus evident that what seemed a simple statement, it is in fact a picturesque portrayal of a scientific phenomenon. 

We will therefore study the scientific references by deriving a visual image mirrored in statement after analyzing it following the academic rules of translating and interpreting a source act. Then we will match it with the image seen and shown by scientists.

We will study the references in the sequence they are mentioned in Qur’ān. We will be surprised that the first reference is such which can be captioned as Man and the Universe; Why is the Universe the way it is.