Hikma › Topics › Quran verses about the universe

Quran verses about the universe

How the Qur'an talks about scale, order, and where a person fits

The Qur'an is comfortable with a big universe. It sends the reader outside to look at the sky and treats what is found there as evidence rather than decoration. The instruction in Surah al-Mulk is to look, and then to look again, until your sight will return to you humbled and exhausted. Exhaustion is the expected result of honest attention, and it is counted here as a success.

Modern numbers can make the sky feel like a place where people do not matter. The Qur'an arrives at the same scale and draws a steadier conclusion from it. It states plainly that the making of the heavens and the earth is far greater than the creation of humankind, and it says this to an audience inclined to assume the account was mainly about them. Smallness, in these passages, is a measurement, and a measurement is allowed to be humbling without being an insult.

What holds the passages together is regularity. The bodies overhead keep fixed paths, each swimming in an orbit, on a reckoning exact enough that a calendar can be built on it. The Qur'an reads that reliability as the mark of a God who has not stepped away from what he made, and it never separates the mechanics from the care. The heavens hold because they are held.

These verses also reward a slow reader, because most of them close by naming who they are for: people of understanding, people who reflect, people who look. One passage says the sky was set with constellations and made it beautiful for those who behold it, which places the beholder inside the design instead of outside admiring it. Attention is part of what the sky is for.

If the scale unsettles more than it settles, the verses on creation take up how things began, and the ones on nature stay nearer to ground level, with rain and birds and the ordinary world. Our principles explain how Hikma reads and renders passages like these.

  • 67:3 — the one who created seven heavens in layers. You will see no flaw in the creation of the Most Merciful. Look again — do you see any cracks?
  • 67:4 — Then look again, and again — your sight will return to you humbled and exhausted.
  • 3:190 — Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the alternation of night and day, there are signs for those of understanding.
  • 40:57 — The creation of the heavens and the earth is far greater than the creation of humankind, but most people do not know.
  • 21:33 — And it is he who created the night and the day, the sun and the moon — each swimming in an orbit.
  • 55:5 — The sun and the moon move by precise reckoning.
  • 13:2 — God it is who raised the heavens without pillars that you can see, then settled upon the throne, and made the sun and the moon of service — each running its course for an appointed term. He directs the affair and lays out the signs in detail, so that you may be certain of meeting your Lord.
  • 15:16 — And we have set constellations in the sky and made it beautiful for those who behold it,
  • 35:41 — Indeed, God holds the heavens and the earth so they do not pass away. And were they to pass away, no one could hold them after him. Indeed, he is forbearing, forgiving.

Browse all topics · Reflect with Hikma · Get the Hikma app