However, the great influence of the positivist and materialist school of thought on the sciences and thence on the generations of recent centuries makes it necessary to discuss arguments for the existence of God. This way of thinking reduces existence to what can be directly perceived and thereby blinds itself to the invisible dimensions of existence, which are much more vast than the visible. Since we must strive to remove the veil drawn by materialism and positivism, we will review briefly some of the traditional demonstrations of the necessary existence of God.

Before doing so, it is worth reflecting upon the simple historical fact that, since the very beginning of human life, the overwhelming majority of mankind have believed in the existence of God. This belief alone is enough to establish God’s existence. Those who do not believe in Him cannot claim that they are superior in intelligence to those who do. Among those who believe are innovative scientists, scholars, researchers and, most importantly, saints and Prophets, who are, as it were, the experts in the field. Also worth mentioning here is the fact that people usually confuse non-acceptance of something’s existence with the acceptance of its non-existence. While the former is only a negation or a rejection, the latter is a judgement needing proof. No one in the world has ever been able to prove the non-existence of God and cannot do so. Whereas there are countless arguments to prove His existence. This point may be clarified through the following comparison.

Suppose there is a big palace with a thousand entrances, nine hundred and ninety-nine of which are open and one appears to be closed. No one could reasonably claim that the palace cannot be entered. The attitude of unbelievers is like that of one who, in order to assert that entrance to the palace is impossible, confines his (and others’) attention only to the door which is seemingly closed.

The doors to God’s existence are open to everybody, provided that they sincerely intend to enter through them. Some of those doors-the demonstrations for God’s existence-are as follows.

1. Contingent nature of the creation

Whether as a whole or separately, all things are contingent, that is, it is equally possible for something to come into existence or not. Also, it is possible for any thing to come into existence at any time, in any place and in any form and with any character.

We see that nothing or no-one in the world, whether conscious or unconscious, living or non-living, has any role to determine the way, and the date and place of its coming into existence, and its character and features. So, there must be some power that chooses between the existence and non-existence of any particular thing and gives it its distinguishing, individual characteristics. This power must be infinite, have absolute will and all-comprehensive knowledge. Necessarily, this power is God.

2. Finite nature of things

Everything in the universe is changeable. Anything changeable is contained by time and space; it has a beginning and end. Anything which has a beginning needs a beginningless one who brings it into existence. For the one who has a beginning cannot be the originator of things, since such a one will, evidently, need another originator. As an unending regress through the originator of each originator, is unacceptable, reason demands one who is infinitely self-existent and self-subsistent, who undergoes no change, namely God.

3. Life

Life is a riddle but transparent. It is a riddle in that scientists, who cannot explain it with material causes. It is transparent because it shows or reflects a creative power. Through both its transparency and its being a riddle, life declares: ‘The one who creates me is God.’

4. Orderliness in creation

From tiniest particles to huge spheres and galaxies, everything in the universe and the universe as a whole display a magnificent harmony and order. Not only in things themselves but also between all things there is a harmonious relation, so much so that as the existence of a single part necessitates the existence of the whole, so also the whole requires the existence of all its parts for its existence. The deformation of a single cell may lead to the death of a whole body; similarly a single pomegranate demands for its existence the collaborative and co-operative existence of air, water, earth, and the sun and a well-balanced co-operation between them. This harmony and co-operativeness in the universe point to a creator of order, who knows everything in all its relations and with all its characteristics, and who is able to put everything in order. That creator of order is God.

5. Artistry in creation

The whole of the creation exhibits an overwhelming artistry of dazzling worth. Yet it is brought into being, as we see it, easily and in a very short time. Furthermore, creation is divided into countless families, genera and species and even more smaller groups, and each of these in great abundance. Despite the variety and abundance, only orderliness and art and ease. This shows the existence of One with an absolute power and knowledge.

6. Finality in creation

Nothing in the universe is for nothing, pointless. As ecology in particular shows, everything in creation, no matter how apparently insignificant, has a very significant role in existence and serves a certain purpose. The chain of creation up to man, the last link in creation, is evidently directed to a final purpose. Since this requires a wise one who pursues certain purposes in creation, and since nothing in the world-except for man-has the consciousness to pursue those purposes, the wisdom and purposiveness in creation necessarily point to God.

7. Mercy and providence

All living and even non-living beings are in continuous need of many things, even a small portion of which they are unable to supply by themselves. For example, the operation and maintenance of the universe demand the existence of certain universal laws, such as growth, reproduction, gravitation and repulsion. However, these laws, which we call ‘natural laws,’ have no external, visible or material existence; they exist nominally. Something with a nominal existence only, which has no knowledge and consciousness, can evidently not be responsible for a miraculous creation, which requires and absolute knowledge, wisdom, and power of choice and preference. So, one who has all these attributes has established these ‘natural laws’ and uses them as veils before His operations for a certain purpose.

Also, plants need air, water, heat and light for their life, none of which they are able to meet by themselves. As for the needs of man, they are too many to enumerate. Fortunately, all his essential needs, from the very beginning of his earthly existence in his mother’s womb to his death, are met beyond his own capacity and intervention. When he enters into the world, he finds everything prepared to meet all the needs of his senses and intellectual and spiritual faculties. This clearly shows that one who is infinitely merciful and knowledgeable provides for all created beings in the most extraordinary way and causes all things to collaborate to that end.

8. Mutual helping in the universe

As is mentioned above, all things in the universe, including those remotest from each other, run to the help of one another. This mutual helping in the universe is so comprehensive that, for example, as almost all things including air, water, fire, earth, the sun and skies, help man in tie extraordinarily pre-arranged manner, so also the cells, members and systems of his body cooperate for the maintenance of his life. Earth, air, water and heat and bacteria in earth co-operate for the life of plants. This co-operation and mutual helping, observed among unconscious beings but displaying knowledge and conscious purpose, show the existence of one who arranges them in that miraculous way.

9. Cleanliness in the universe

Until recently, when human beings began to over-pollute air, water and earth, the natural world has been continually cleansed and purified. Even now, it still preserves its original purity in many regions, mostly where the ways of modern have not yet taken hold. Have you ever considered why nature is so clean, why forests, for example, are so clean although many animals die there every day? Have you ever considered if the flies born in a single season of summer were all to survive, the face of the earth would be covered with many layers of fly bodies? Have you ever reflected on the fact that nothing is wasted in nature? Every dying is the beginning of a new birth. For example, a dead body is decomposed and integrated into earth. Elements die to be revived in plants; plants die in the stomachs of animals and human beings to be promoted to the higher rank of life.

This cycle of death and revival is one of the factors which maintain the cleanliness and purity of the universe. As well as bacteria and insects, the winds and rain, and black holes in the heavens, and oxygen in organic bodies, all serve to sustain the purity in the universe. This purity points to one who is all-wholly one, whose attributes include cleanliness and purity.

10. Countenances

Thousands of millions of human beings have lived since man’s first appearance on the earth. Despite their common origin-a sperm and ovum, which are formed from the same sort of foods taken by parents-and although they have all been composed of the same kind of structures or elements or organisms, every human being has an individual countenance distinguishing him or her from the others. This obviously shows one with an absolutely free choice and all-encompassing knowledge, and He is God.

11. Divine teaching and directing

For man to direct himself in life and distinguish between what is good or bad for him needs a minimum of around fifteen years. However, many animals can do this very soon after they come into the world. A duckling, for example, can swim as soon as it hatches. Ants start to dig nests into the earth when they get out of their cocoons. It does not need a long time for bees and spiders to learn how to make their honeycombs and webs respectively, which are each marvels of handiwork beyond the capacity of man. Who teaches young eels born in the waters of Europe to find their way to their home in the Pacific? Is the migration of birds not still a mystery for man? How can you explain all these astounding facts other than by attributing them to the teaching or directing of one who knows everything and has arranged the universe with all creatures in it in a way that enables every creature, big or small to direct ifs life?

12. The spirit and the conscience

Despite enormous advances in the sciences, man is unable to explain life. Life is the gift of the Ever-Living One, Who ‘breathes’ a spirit into each embryo. We know little concerning the nature of the spirit and its relation with the body but our ignorance of its nature does not mean it does not exist. The spirit is seat to the world to be perfected and acquire a state appropriate for the other life.

The conscience of man is the centre of his inclinations towards wise choices between right and wrong and everybody can feel this conscience on some occasions. So, the spirit and conscience are a strong argument for the existence of One God.

13. Man’s innate dispositions and history of mankind

Man is innately disposed to good and beauty and averse to evil and ugliness. He is also inclined to virtues and moral values. Therefore, unless corrupted by external factors and conditions, he seeks the good and moral values which are universal. The values man naturally seeks are the same virtues and morality which the Divine inspired religions have promulgated. As history witnesses, mankind have never lived without a religion. Just as no other system has so far been able to supersede religion in the life of mankind, so too it has always been the Prophets and religious people who have been most influential in the life of mankind and left indelible marks on it. This is another irrefutable proof for the existence of One God.

14. Human intuition

Man feels many intuitions and emotions which are a sort of messages from immaterial realms. Among them, the intuition of eternity arouses in man a desire for eternity, for the fulfilment of which he strives in diverse ways. However, this desire can only be realized through belief in and worship of the Eternal One Who inspired this intuition and desire in man. It is in the satisfaction of this desire for eternity that true human happiness lies.

15. Consensus

If a few liars who we have never heard to tell the truth come to us at different times and report the same news, we may well find ourselves, having no truthful report on the same matter, believing them. But when tens of thousands of Prophets, men who never told a lie during their lives, and hundreds of thousands of saints, and millions of believers who have adopted truthfulness as one of the most essential pillars of belief, have all agreed on the existence of God, is it at all reasonable to reject their unanimous testimony in preference for the individual reports of a few liars?

16. The Holy Qur’an and other Scriptures

The proofs for the Divine origin of the Qur’an are also proofs for the existence of God. (Of the Divine authorship of the Qur’an, you may wish to consult our article in Questions This Modern Age Puts to Islam, 1, London, 1995). The Qur’an teaches with great emphasis and focus, as indeed does the Bible in its uncorupted parts, the existence of One God.

17. The prophets

Tens of thousands of Prophets came and guided mankind to truth. All of them were justly renowned for their truthfulness and other praiseworthy virtues. All of them without exception gave priority in their missions to preaching the existence and Oneness of God.

Project Phoenix, launched by NASA in 1992, is an effort to pick up artificial radio signals from space; the project is also known as SETI-search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Davies does give some historical and technical information about SETI in this book. However, most of it is taken up with (a) arguments for and against the expectation that there are life-forms somewhere else than earth; and (b) discussion of how our worldviews would be affected by the discovery of alien intelligence or alien life.

The book is preceded by a long text from De Rerum Natura by Lucretius who, along with many ancients, believed that neither earth nor life upon it are unique. All beings belong to a kind; they come into being as the result of random associations of free-moving atoms. Therefore: life on earth must be one of a kind; the universal stuff of existence must have associated itself into other living forms.

Believers have also proposed existences in other realms. Why would God have created so many other worlds if they are uninhabited? Could the infinite majesty of God be content with the worship of only the conscious inhabitants of the earth? A Muslim thinker of this century argued that celestial bodies may be the dwellings or vehicles of angels and other spirit beings fulfilling God s commands and glorifying Him.

Would extra-terrestrial life be like the terrestrial one we know? The panspermia theory (pp.13-14) holds that the ‘seeds of life’ were blown about in space after the ‘big bang,’ landing here and there, and successfully on earth. Subsequent bombardments by inter-stellar material could also carry these ‘seeds’ around the universe. Thus, potential for life may lie buried belo

Davies regards science-fictional accounts of aliens as re-workings, in contemporary terms, of the supernatural beings that feature in the religious and pseudo-religious heritage of most human societies. That heritage is fiction undisciplined by reference to what is really, objectively, in the world. Scientific speculation, on the other hand, Davies regards as a quest for the reality independent of humans, waiting to be discovered by them. The laws of physics are not fictions; they are statements in the language of mathematics, as exact as we can make them, of what really is there. Do these laws require that there should be, or only that there could be, life-forms elsewhere than on earth? Alternatively, do they tell us that life on earth is an incident so utterly improbable that, even with billions of light-years and possible locations, no amount of re-shuffling of molecules could ever result in another, similar incident?

Attempts to tackle these questions turn upon our general worldview of what life is. Davies gives some attention to three such worldviews: (i) [life] was a miracle; (ii) it was stupendously improbable accident; and (iii) it was an inevitable consequence of the outworking of the laws of physics and chemistry, given the right conditions (p.15). He favours the third position on the basis of three philosophical principles: uniformity-the laws of nature are the same everywhere; they produced life on earth, they can do so elsewhere; plenitude-what can exist according to the laws of nature will exist, given the right conditions. For example, if physicists are able to describe the existence of a certain sort of particle within a mathematical scheme, they will (and do) find it to actually exist; mediocrity (or the Copernican principle, supportive of uniformity) the earth enjoys no privileged status; it is a typical planet in a typical star system in a typical galaxy.

The discovery of an alien microbe with chemistry different from ours would demolish, Davies thinks, the view that life is an accident. Life (already improbable) could not happen twice within the portion of the universe visible from earth (an immense region but finite owing to the constraint of the speed of light). Similarly, he argues, the view of life as a Divine miracle which privileges the earth and its human inhabitants, would be demolished. If, however, the alien microbe shared enough features of earth chemistry, both these views could survive: believers would invoke the unquestionable omnipotence of God and non-believers some version of the panspermia theory.

Davies devotes a whole chapter (pp.41-58) to the anthropic principle. This principle is in effect a version, palatable to modern scientific culture, of the argument for design. It holds that the universe runs according to specific laws and values (the so-called constants in nature) whose outcome is human consciousness capable of decoding those specific laws. Just any laws of nature will not result in conscious life; only these actual laws of this actual universe. Rigorously argued, the anthropic principle denies the possibility of conscious life elsewhere in the universe.

Diverging from the anthropic argument, Davies proposes that the coming-to-be of consciousness is a general law of nature-not a law expressible mathematically, nevertheless a real, reliable propensity. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. He explains by analogy: individual water molecules are not ‘wet’; the property of ‘wetness’ is a real, emergent phenomenon that comes-to-be from the association of water molecules. The observed tendency in nature towards increasing complexity emerges in life which, with more of the same increasing complexity, emerges in consciousness.

Davies is at pains to stress that he does not claim that the universe exists for human beings, only that they belong to it and it to them. He is glad to restore to human beings not a position of unique privilege but one of significance. The universe is a process of cosmic self-awareness; therefore, the emergence of consciousness elsewhere than on earth is to be expected to happen, not randomly, but as something really probable given conditions in which the laws of nature can operate.

Believers may find this conclusion comfortingly like the often-repeated saying that God is a hidden treasure that longed to be known; His coming-to-be known is the reason that existence exists. But Davies is not seeking, nor expressing, any religious sentiment-unless the plea for ‘significance’ is reckoned a religious aspiration. His argument relates to only that part of human consciousness manifested in modem-scientific curiosity about the structures of the material universe.

But human consciousness is more and other than this. It belongs to the inwardness of individual life, shaped by its experiences and reflections, of which the quest for scientific laws is (by volume) an almost negligibly small fragment. Further, consciousness is experienced by each person from within as responsibility, as questioning and answering about what he or she wills to do. This responsibility is more familiarly known as conscience. Its quest is not for scientific knowledge only but for value generally, and moral value in particular. Just as the language of science (i.e. descriptive language) is a very small part of the full potential of human language, so too the consciousness which Davies describes as an emergent property of intelligent life is a very small part of full human consciousness.

The Qur’an criticizes those who want the issue of their lives settled once-for-all after they have said that they believe or do not believe. They fear the trials of experience and thought, action and imagination, through which their individual will to achieve value is proven. All religions have a cosmology, a view of how the universe came to be. But the objective of this cosmology (certainly in the Qur’an) is not to equip human beings with intellectual power in the universe but to locate them (individually) with a purpose and meaningfulness within it. That purpose and meaningfulness are, in Davies’ sense, emergent qualities, and their emergence depends emphatically on the will to achieve value as well as the will to achieve knowledge-the latter being best addressed as a part of the former. Our mortality guarantees the suspensefulness of the search for value, and challenges us to believe that there is a yet higher consciousness, a further emergence, elsewhere than in this earthly life.

God is left out of modem-scientific speculation. Recourse to the concept of Divine Will is unhelpful for knowledge about the operations of the universe if, as is the case, knowledge is defined as a predictive (then manipulative) power to intervene in those operations. That definition of knowledge is simply inadequate to what human beings come to know of themselves and of there being a world to know themselves in.

Because scientific knowledge is too narrowly conceived, it may be that SETI scientists will no more recognize the communications of aliens than we can ordinarily recognize the presence of angels. By Divine permission, angels or spirit beings can make themselves known to humans-in visions of some kind. No doubt, with the same permission, aliens too, if they exist, can make themselves known to us. Project Phoenix could be rather an expensive way to be waiting for such a miracle.

Islam is a religion that encompasses the secular with the spiritual, the mundane with the celestial. It includes a code for the whole of human life.

Man is the vicegerent of God on earth: Behold! thy Lord said to the angels: I will create a vicegerent on earth (2.30); and He fashioned man in due proportion and breathed into him something of His spirit.

Not only Adam was honoured by Allah, but his descendants also, provided they trod on the right path.

We have honoured the descendants of Adam, provided them with transport on land and sea; given them for sustenance things good and pure; and conferred on them special favours above a great part of our creation. (17.70)

Human life begins at the time of ensoulment, which is stated in the sayings of the Prophet, upon him be peace, to be the 120th day from the moment of conception. (Bukhari, 1958 edn, vol. 4, p.135). Prior to that moment the embryo has a sanctity, but not reaching that of a full human being. Life ends with the departure of the soul (or spirit), a process which cannot be identified by mortals except by the accompanying signs, the most important of which is the cessation of respiration and circulation. The sanctity of the human body, however, is not lessened by the departure of soul and declaration of death. The human body whether living or dead should be respected.

The Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace, rebuked a man who broke a bone of a deceased man which he found in a cemetery. The Prophet said: The sin of breaking the bones of a dead man is equal to the sin of breaking the bones of a living man (Abu Dawud, n.d., vol.3, p.212-13; Ibn Hanbal, n.d., vol.6, p.58).

The dead body should be prepared for burial as soon as possible, in order to avoid putrefaction which occurs rapidly in hot climates. Cremation is not allowed.

Due respect and reverence should be given to the funeral. The Prophet himself stood in veneration for the passing funeral of a Jew at a time when Jews were his bitter enemies, One of the Companions of the Prophet exclaimed: It is the funeral of a Jew! The Prophet answered: Is it not a human soul? (Bukhari, vol.2, p. 107).

Historical background

Organ transplantation is not a twentieth century innovation. It was known in some form even in prehistoric eras.

Ancient Hindu surgeons described methods for repairing defects of the nose and ears using autograft from neighbouring skin, a technique which remains in use to the present day. Susruta Sanhita, an old Indian medical document written in 700 EC described elegantly the procedure which was emulated by the Italian Tagliacozzi of the 16th century and by British surgeons working in India late in the 17th and 18 th centuries (Bollinger and Shekel, 1986, pp. 370-80).

Tooth transplantation was practised in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, pre-Columbian North and South America. Arab surgeons were experts at this technique a thousand years ago (Guthrie, 1946, p. 12; Peer, 1955).

During the time of the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace, one of his Companions called Qatada Ibn Nu‘man lost an eye during the battle of Uhud. The Prophet put it back in place and it became the better of his two eyes (Hawwa, 1971, vol.2, p. 197). In the Battle of Badr, the Prophet replaced the arm of Mu‘awath ibn ‘Afra and the hand of Habib ibn Yasaf (Al-Shibani, n.d., vol.1, p. 244; al-Khafaji, n.d., vol.3, p. 111).

Muslim jurists sanctioned transplantation of teeth and bones which has long been practised by Muslim surgeons.

Imam Nawawi (631-671/1233-1272) discussed fully the subject of bone and tooth transplantation in his comprehensive reference textbook of jurisprudence al-Majmu‘ (n.d., vol.1, p.293) and in his concise textbook Minhaj al-Talibin (1978 edn, vol.1, p. 190). Imam al-Shirbini commented on this subject in his book Mughni al-Muhtaj (n.d., vol.19, p.191). Zakaria al-Qazwini (600-682/1203-1283) advocated the use of porcine bone grafts as they take much better than other xenografts and function more efficiently (1978 edn, p.422), despite the fact that Muslims consider the pig and its produces untouchable. Jurists allowed the use of porcine material in medicine provided there was no other adequate alternative or equivalent.

Some Islamic principles and rules related to organ transplantation

1. Islam considers disease as a natural phenomenon. It is not caused by demons, stars or evil spirits. Indeed, disease is not even caused by the wrath of God, nor by any celestial creature. Diseases and ailments are a type of tribulation which expiates sins. Those who forebear and endure in dignity are rewarded in this world and on the Day of Judgement.
2. Man should seek a remedy for his ailment. The Prophet, upon him be peace, told Muslims to seek remedy and treatment (Ibn Qayyim, 1970, vol.3, p.78). He ordered his cousin Sa‘d ibn Abi Waqqas to seek the medical advice of Al-Harith ibn Khaledah, a renowned physician of his time (ibid.). Further, the Prophet declared that there is a cure for every illness, though we may not know it at the time (Bukhari, 1958 edn, vol.7. 148-82).
3. We are encouraged to search for such a cure (Muslim, 1972 edn, vol.14, pp.191-200). New modalities of treatment should be searched for and applied if proved successful.
4. The Prophet ordered Muslims to be compassionate to every human being. He also said: All mankind is the family (‘iyal) of God; those who best serve their family are best loved by God.
5. The human being should always keep his dignity even in disease and misfortune. The human body, living or dead, should be respected.
6. However, doing a necessary post-mortem examination or donating organ from a cadaver does not mean mutilation of the corpse or an act of disrespect. The harm, if any, of removing any organ from a deceased person should be weighed against the benefit obtained, and the improved life provided, for the recipient. In short, the principle of saving human life takes precedence over whatever assumed harm might befall the corpse.
7. In the case of a living donor, the principle of doing no harm is invoked. The donor cannot give a vital organs risking his life. That would be an act of homicide or suicide, both of which are considered among the most detestable crimes in Islam. Donation of an organ whose loss would usually cause little harm or minimal increased risk to the health or life of the donor is acceptable. It invokes the principle of accepting the lesser harm when faced with two evils. The harm done by the disease, which can kill a human life, is not to be compared to the harm incurred by donation.
8. Organ transplantation is a new modality of treatment that can save many human lives and improve the quality of life for many others. As noted above Islam encourages searching for cures and urges Muslims not to despair, for there is certainly a cure for every ailment, albeit we may not know it as yet.
9. Donation of organs is an act of charity, benevolence, altruism and love for mankind. God loves those who love fellow humans and try to mitigate their hardships and relieve their misfortunes.
10. Good intention: any action carried out with good intention and which aims to help others is respected and indeed encouraged, provided no harm is done.
11. The human body is the property of God, but man is entrusted with his body, as well as with other things. He should use it in the way prescribed by God as revealed by His Messengers. Any misuse will be judged by God on the Day of Judgement, and transgressors will get their punishment. Suicide is equated in Islam with homicide. Even cremation of the corpse is not allowed. The only accepted, dignified way is burial of the corpse, which should be done as soon as possible.
12. Donation of organs is not an act of transgression against the body. On the contrary, it is an act of charity and benevolence to other fellow humans, which God loves and encourages.
13. The human organs are not a commodity. They should be donated freely in expression of altruistic feelings of brotherhood and love for fellow humans.

Fatwas regarding organ transplantation

Muslim surgeons have long practised autograft transplantation which they learned from other nations, especially Indians. They practised tooth and bone grafting from both animal and human sources (i.e. xenograft, and homografts), after obtaining the consent of the jurists. In the twentieth century, the Muslim jurists sanctioned blood transfusion, though blood is considered as najas i.e. unclean. The fatwa of the Grand Mufti of Egypt (No. 1065, June 9th, 1959) is an example of Islamic jurists’ attitude to new modalities of treatment (Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyya, 1982, vol.7, p.2495).

The majority of Muslim scholars and jurists belonging to various schools of Islamic law invoked the principle of the precedence of saving human life over any other argument. Sheikh Hassan Ma’mun (The Grand Mufti of Egypt) also sanctioned corneal transplants from cadavers of unidentified persons and from those who agree to donate after their death (No. 1087, April 14th, 1959; ibid., p.2552). His successor, Sheikh Huraidi extended the fatwa to other organs in 1966 (No. 993; ibid., vol.6, pp. 2278-82).

Sheikh Khatir, the new Grand Mufti of Egypt, issued a fatwa allowing harvesting of skin from unidentified corpses in 1973 (ibid., vol.7, 2505-7).

Grand Mufti Jad al-Haq sanctioned donation of organs from the living provided no harm is done and provided the gift is made freely in good faith, for the sake of God and care of mankind. He also sanctioned taking organs from cadavers provided there is a legal testament or consent of the relatives. In case of unidentified corpses, an order from the Magistrate should be obtained prior to harvesting organs (No. 1323, December 5, 1979; ibid., vol.10, pp. 3702-15).

The Saudi Grand Ulema Fatwa No. 99, 1982 addressed the subject of autografts which were unanimously sanctioned. It also sanctioned, by majority, donation of organs both by the living and by the dead by legal testament or consent of relatives (Majallat al-Majma‘ 1987, vol 1, p.37).

In Kuwait, Law No. 7 (1983) reiterated the previous fatwas and pointed out that the living donor should be over 18 in order for his informed consent to be legally acceptable.

The subject of brain death was not addressed in any of these fatwas but discussed for the first time in the Second International Conference of Islamic Jurists held in Jeddah, in 1985. No decree was passed then, until further studies and consultations had been done. In the Third International Con¬ference of Islamic Jurists held in Am¬man in 1986, the historical Resolution No. 5 was passed by majority, which equated brain death to cardiac and res¬piratory death (Jeddah Fiqh Academy, 1988, p.34).

In strict Islamic teachings, death is the departure of the soul, but since this cannot be identified the signs of it are accepted.

This 1986 decree paved the way for extension of organ transplant projects previously limited to living donors. Campaigns for organ donations from brain dead persons were launched both in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. We note, sadly, that the high incidence of motor vehicle accidents in the Gulf area provides many cases of brain death.

While this tragedy should be averted by issuing and enforcing stricter traffic laws and by other means, it is also quite proper that organs from suitable cadavers should be used for the living.

The Islamic League conference of jurists, (Makkah, December 1987) decree No. 2, 10th session, did not equate cardiac death with brain death. In fact, it did not recognize brain death as death. However it sanctioned all the previous fatwas on organ transplantation. This decree has received little attention in the media, and the authorities in Saudi Arabia seem to ignore it. Cardiac and kidney transplants from brain dead individuals continue without any hindrance from the jurists.

The most detailed fatwa on organ transplantation was that of the Fourth International Conference of Islamic Jurists held in Jeddah, February 1988 (Resolution No. 1). It endorsed all previous fatwas on organ transplantation, clearly rejected any trading or trafficking in organs and stressed the principle of altruism (ibid., pp.55-8).

Jurists have begun to discuss new subjects related to organ transplantation, namely a) transplantation of nervous tissues as a mode of treating Parkinsonism or other ailments; b) transplantation from anencephalics, c) transplantation of tissues from embryos aborted spontaneously, medically or electively; and d) pre-embryos remaining from IVF projects (Fiqh Academy, Kuwait, 1989).

The Sixth International Conference of Islamic Jurists addressed these issues in March 14-20, 1990. In sum, while the frontiers in medical technology continue to be pushed back, Islamic jurists are keeping abreast of the changes and applying established Islamic principles to guide Muslims in new circumstances as good illustration as any of the continued health and vitality of Islam as a code for the whole of human life.

REFERENCES

• ABU DAWUD (n.d.) Sunan Abu Dawuii, Homs, Syria.
• BOLUNGER, R. & Stickel, D.(1986) ‘Historical aspects of transplantalion’, in Sabisron, D. ed., Textbook of Surgery, 13th edn, London.
• AL-BUKHARI (1958 edn) Sahih al-Bukhari, Cairo.
• DAR AL-‘IFTA AL-MISRIYA (1982) al-Fatawa al-islamiyya, The Supreme Islamic Council, Ministry of Endowments, Cairo.
• FIQH, ACADEMY JEDDAH (1987) Majalat al-majma‘ al-fiqhi (Journal of Fiqh Academy).
• FIQH ACADEMY JEDDAH (1988) Book of Decrees.
• FIQH ACADEMY KUWAIT (1989*) Seminar on New Issues in Organ Transplantation, Fiqh Academy and Islamic Organization of Medical Sciences, Kuwait. [*Awaiting publication.]
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I was in a country which Taha had never visited and yet his memory was closer to me than it had been for years. Perhaps it was my new solitude, perhaps he came to me in dreams I could not recall. Or was my mind reeling from the newness surrounding me? I was in London for a one year contract with the BBC World Service. Each day as I read the news in Arabic, my voice, cool and distant, reached my husband in Kuwait, and my parents who were looking after my daughters in Khartoum.

Now I was older than Taha had been when he died. At that time he was ten years older than me and like my other brothers he had humoured me and spoiled me. When he died, my mind bent a little and has never straightened since. How could a young mind absorb the sudden death of a brother on the day of his wedding? It seemed at first to be a ghastly mistake, but that was an illusion, a mirage. The Angel of Death makes no mistakes, he is a reliable servant who never fails to keep his appointment at the predetermined time and place. Taha had no premonition of his own death. He was fidgety, impatient but not for that, not for the end coming so soon. It was too painful to think of what must have been his own shock, his own useless struggle against the inevitable. Nor did anyone else have foreknowledge. How could we, when we were steeped in wedding preparations and our house was full of relatives helping with the wedding meal? From the misty windows I saw the words ‘Gulf Air’ written in Arabic and English on the doors of the airline’s office and imagined myself one day buying a ticket to go to Hamid in Kuwait. It seemed that the fate of our generation is separation, from our country or our family. We are ready to go anywhere in search of the work we cannot find at home. Hamid says that there are many Sudanese in Kuwait and he hopes that in the next year or so the girls and I will join him. Every week, I talk to him on the telephone, long leisurely conversations. We run up huge telephone bills but seem to be unable to ration our talks. He tells me amusing stories of the emirs whose horses he cures. In Sudan, cattle die from starvation or disease all the time, cattle which are the livelihood of many people. But one of the country’s few veterinary surgeons is away, working with animals whose purpose is only to amuse. Why? So that his daughters can have a good education, so that he can keep up with the latest research in his field. So that he can justify the years of his life spent in education by earning the salary he deserves. And I thought of Taha’s short life and wondered.

In Regent Street the conductor had to shake himself from his lethargy and prevent more people from boarding the bus. The progress of the bus was slow in contrast to the shoppers who swarmed around in the brightly lit streets. Every shop window boasted an innovative display and there were new decorative lights in addition to the street lights. Lights twined around the short trees on the pavements, on wires stretched across the street. Festive December lights. Blue, red, green lights, more elaborate than the crude strings of bulbs that we use in Khartoum to decorate the wedding house. But the lights for Taha’s wedding had not shone as they were meant to on that night. By night time he was already buried and we were mourning not celebrating. Over the period of mourning, the wedding dinner was gradually eaten by visitors. The women indoors, sitting on mattresses spread on the floors, the men on wobbling metal chairs in a tent pitched in front of our house, the dust of the street under their feet. But they drank water and tea and not the sweet orange squash my mother and her friends had prepared by boiling small oranges with sugar. That went to a neighbour who was bold enough to ask about it. Her children carried the sweet liquid from our house in large plastic bottles, their eyes bright, their lips moist with expectation.

When Taha died I felt raw and I remained transparent for a long time. Death had come so close to me that I was almost exhilarated; I could see clearly that not only life but the world was transient. But with time my heart hardened and I became immersed in the cares of day to day life. I had become detached from this vulnerable feeling and it was good to recapture it now and grieve once again.

Taha’s life. I was not there for a large part of it but I remember the time he got engaged and my own secret feelings of jealousy towards his fiance. Muddled feelings of admiration and a desire to please. She was a university student and to my young eyes she seemed so articulate and self-assured. I remember visiting her room in the universiey hostels while Taha waited for us outside by the gate, hands in his pockets, maxing patterns in the dust with his feet. Her room was in lively disarray with clothes and shoes scattered about and colourful posters on the wall. It was full of chatting room-mates and friends who kept coming in and out to eat the last biscuits in the open packet on the desk, borrow the prayer mat or dab their eyes with kohl from a silver flask. They scrutinized my face for any likeness to Taha, laughed at jokes I could not understand, while I sat nervously on the edge of a bed, smiling and unable to speak. Later, with Taha, we went to a concert in the football grounds where a group of students sang. I felt very moved by a song in the form of a letter written by a political prisoner to his mother. Taha’s bride afterwards wrote the words out for me, humming the tune, looking radiant, and Taha remarked how elegant her handwriting was.

In the shop windows dummies posed, aloof strangers in the frenzied life of Oxford street. Wools, rich silks and satin dresses. ‘Taha, shall I wear tonight the pink or the green?’, I asked him ‘See, I look like-like a watermelon in this green’. His room was an extension of the house where a verandah used to be, a window from the hall still looked into it, the door is made of shutters. He never slept in his room. In the early evening we all dragged our beds outdoors so that the sheets are cool when it’s time to gaze up at the stars. If it rained Taha did not care, he covered his head with the sheet and continued to sleep. When the dust came thick, I shook his shoulder to wake him up to go indoors and he shouted at me to leave him alone. In the morning his hair was covered with dust, sand in his ears, his eyelashes. He sneezed and blamed me for not insisting, for failing to get him to move inside. I see him now: he smiles at me in my green dress, his suitcase half-filled lies open on the floor, he leans against the shutters holding them shut with his weight. Through them filter the hisses and smells of frying, the clinking of empty water glasses scented with incense and the thud of a hammer on a slab of ice, the angry splinters flying in the air, disintegrating, melting in surrender when they greet the warm floor. Someone is calling for the bridegroom, an aunt cups a hand round her mouth, tongue strong and dancing from side to side she trills joy cry. When others join her the sound rises in waves to fill the whole house. Is it a tape or is someone singing this ridiculous song, Our bridegroom like honey. Where can you ever find another like him? He tells me words I know to be absurd but want to believe. Tonight you will look more beautiful than the bride.

The bus headed north, and we passed Regents Park and the Central Mosque; all was peaceful and dark after the congestion of the shopping centre. I was glad that there were no more coloured lights for they are cheerful and false. I had held others like them before in my hands wiping the dust off each bulb and saying to Taha, ‘How could you have taken them from the electrician when they were so dusty?’ And he had helped me clean them with an orange cloth that he used for the car because he was in a hurry to set them up all around the outside of the house. I had teased him saying that the colours were not in an ordered pattern. We laughed together trying to make sense of their order but they were random, chaotic. Then Hamid who was his friend arrived and said he would help him set them up. I asked Taha to get me a present from Nairobi where he was going for his honeymoon and Hamid had looked directly at me, laughed in his easy way and said without hiding his envy, ‘He is not going to have time to get you any presents.’ At that time, Hamid and I were not even engaged and I felt shy from his words and walked away from his gaze.

It was the lights which killed Taha. The haphazard, worn strings of lights, that had been hired out for years to house after wedding house. A bare live wire carelessly touched. A rushed drive to the hospital where I watched a stray cat twist and rub its thin body around the legs of our bridegroom’s death bed. And in the crowded corridors, people squatted on the floor and the screams for Taha were absorbed by the dirty walls, and listless flies, and by the generous who had room and tears for a stranger they had never met before.

My mother, always a believing woman, wailed and wept but did not pour dirt on her head or tear her clothes like some ignorant women do. She just kept saying again and again, ‘I wish I never lived to see this day.’ Hamid maybe had the greatest shock for he was with Taha when he was setting up the lights. Later, he told me that when they buried Taha he had stayed at the graveside after the other men had gone. He had prayed to strengthen his friend’s soul at its crucial moment of questioning. The moment in the grave, in the interspace between death and eternity when the Angels ask the soul, ‘Who is your Lord?’ and there must be no wavering in the reply, no saying ‘I don’t know’. The answer must come swiftly with confidence and it was for this assurance, in the middle of what must have been Taha’s fear, that Hamid prayed.

I had been in London for nearly seven months and had told no one about Taha. I felt that it would sound distasteful or like a bad joke, but electricity had killed others in Khartoum too, though I did not know them personally. A young boy once urinated at the foot of a lamp light which had a base from which wires stuck out exposed. And a girl in my school was cleaning a fridge, squatting barefoot in a puddle of melted ice with the electric socket too close. The girl’s younger sister was in my class and the whole class, forty girls, went in the school bus to visit the family at home. On the way we sang songs as if we were on a school picnic and I cannot help but remember that day with pleasure.

With time, the relationship between my family and Taha’s bride soured. Carefully prepared dishes ceased to pass between my mother and hers. In the two ‘Id festivals, when we celebrated first the end of the fasting month of Ramadan and then the Feast of Sacrifice, our families no longer visited. Out of a sense of duty, my parents had proposed that she marry another of my brothers but she and her family refused. Instead, she married one of her cousins who was not very educated, not as much as Taha at any rate. Sometimes, I would see her in the streets of Khartoum with her children and we would only greet each other if our eyes met.

In Taha’s memory, my father built a small school in his home village on the Blue Nile. One classroom built of mud to teach young children to read and write. The best charity for the dead is something continuous that goes on yielding benefit over time. But, like other schools it kept running into difficulties; no books, costly paper, poor attendance when children were sometimes kept at home to help their parents. Yet my father persevered and the school had become something of a hobby for him in his retirement. It is also a good excuse for him to travel frequently from the capital to the village and visit his old friends and family. What my mother did for Taha was more simple. She bought a zeer, a large clay pot and had it fastened to a tree in front of our house. The zeer held water, keeping it cool and it was covered by a round piece of wood on which stood a tin mug for drinking. Early in the morning, I would fill with water from the fridge and throughout the day passers-by, he and thirsty from the glaring sun could drink, resting in the shade the tree. In London, I came across the same idea, memorial benches, inscribed with names, placed in gardens and parks where people could rest. My mother would never believe that anyone would voluntarily sit in the sun but then she had never seen cold, dark evenings like these.

It was time for me to get off as the bus had long passed Lords, Swiss Cottage and Golders Green. There were only a few passengers left. After dropping me off the bus would turn around to resume its cycle. And my grief for Taha comes in cycles as well, over the years, rising and falling back. Like the appearance of the West Indian conductor, it is difficult to predict. Perhaps he will be on the bus tomorrow evening. ‘Like them Christmas lights?’ he will ask, and, grateful to see a familiar face amidst the alien darkness and damp, I will say, ‘Yes, I admire the coloured lights.’

By answering this argument we shall show that we do indeed accept the same biological facts, but do not agree about the ‘laws’ which try to explain them, nor about the limits and qualifications for the operation of those ‘laws’.

Unlike other Scriptures which claim Divine authority, there is no proposition in the Qur’an which can be contradicted by established scientific knowledge as untrue. The Qur’an does not underestimate the importance of reflection and argument, but it does indicate that our suppositions about the origin of creation cannot explain the reality of it: we simply were not present there.

I called them not to witness the creation of the heavens and the earth, nor their own creation: Nor is it for Me to take as helpers such as lead (men) astray (al-Kahf 18.51).

This verse should not be interpreted to mean ‘Do not ask questions or do not research’, for the Qur’an encourages scientific research explicitly. It is, rather, a warning about those who vainly claim to explain the phenomena which happen outside the normal course of events and cannot be described in terms of material causes and effects. Since the creation is the great, inclusive miracle, human beings can neither imitate it (that is, they cannot create out of nothing) nor explain it. To attribute the creation to God makes everything plausible and saves scientific inquiry from fruitless uncertainties and insecure speculations. To understand the basic principles of the reality of creation is most important. If they are properly understood, useful and worthwhile aspects of the theory of evolution can be sifted out from pretentious and false interpretations of it. For, in every idea, even if it is against common sense in general, there are some elements of truth. The biological facts, rightly so called, such as variation, adaptation, natural selection and mutation, in evolution theory, should be differentiated from the ideological and metaphysical baggage they have accumulated.

In our approach, evolution may be described as the changes and variations in the form of creatures, especially in living beings, and the genetic and environmental factors associated with those changes. We do not assert that living beings are fixed and unchangeable in their forms. To claim that would imply a limitation upon the knowledge and power of God which is contradictory to His Names, the All-Knowing and the All-Powerful. The creation reflects His Names through its novelty within renewal, its prolific variety amid abundance. Individual diversity is programmed into the genetic mechanisms which, as they unfold and evolve under the prompting of environmental factors, display (for our admiration and understanding) the action in the world of Divine grace and power. The many hundreds of apples on a single tree are not identical, nor are they identical over different seasons-they are only similar. Thus, the first emphasis in our definition of the concept of evolution is change which is vital for the maintenance of ecological diversity and balance.

To paraphrase the Qur’an: God imposes the law of change and evolution as a basic principle in the universe. In the enforcement of this law, He creates pairs and opposites which, interacting according to subtle purposes, are placed in the core of every being. Thus, the change-dependent evolution and the dynamic balance in the universe, have been realized through the intersection of the opposites continually since the outset of creation. There are many verses in the Qur’an (for example in Chapter 55, al-Rahman) which indicate change and balance.

The ideologues of evolution theory, however, ignore the Divine wisdom, measure and purpose in the universe, claiming that the change they observe is an effect of coincidences-random variations, aimless mutations.

In the light of recent findings, we know the apparent causes of change to be mutations, which are the hereditary alternations in the genetic information; the differentiation of an isolated population from its ancestor through multiplying inside the population; adaptation and so-called ‘natural selection’, that is the decrease or extinction of generations which are weak and unable to reproduce in their immediate environment.

Believers in the One God affirm that everything, from subatomic particles to galaxies, is created by Him, that He is Omniscient and Omnipotent, and everything acts under His will and command. Causes are created by God in the appropriate time and space and the appropriate order and combination as a sort of veil for His dignity and might. He only says ‘Be!’, and all the material causes, such as heat, moisture, air, chemical elements, radiation, etc., are. If such causes are seen in this way, if their being brought together into an order is understood to be a response to their need (their prayer) to participate in a collaborative universe-and if their being causes is confirmed by observations and experiments-then, we may regard causes as a useful way to explain biological phenomena.

We know that diversity in a species is realized through mutations in the genetic program, arranged by Divine wisdom, not by coincidence. The evolutionist idea that the mutations are arbitrary, that useful changes can occur by sheer chance and lead to the development of a living being, or that a lot of random mutations can accumulate to enable a sudden leap from one species to another, has not been confirmed by experiments and observations. To accept that the mutations are arbitrary interferences in the genetic order is like accepting that a rocket can be generated out of a sound aircraft by raking it randomly with machine-gun fire. Certainly, computer-aided probability calculations show that it is impossible for thousands of random mutations to accumulate on a living being and change it into another species. Any such change is manifestly against that organism’s survival and would have to overwhelm it suddenly, not gradually.

Some bacteria can be given the ability to synthesize insulin by means of genetic engineering. This is a kind of planned mutation. Such a transfer of ability is, though remarkable, a relatively small change: it is, in any case, only possible because of the relevant ability being present in the genetic material being transferred. It is sheer arrogance to claim that living beings having millions of such able genes have evolved from each other by arbitrary, random mutations.

Adaptation is a biological manifestation of the flexibility coded into the genetic programs of living organisms; it carries the potential, within the limits of the species, for the organism to survive in changing conditions and to sustain that survival through reproduction.

When environmental conditions change, responsive adaptations occur- e.g. change of colour or density of hair, size of ears-in proportion to the flexibility of the organism’s genetic potential. If the organism cannot adapt adequately, the species does not mutate into some new species, it goes extinct. That is what happened, we presume, to dinosaurs and dodos.

The diversity of various human races can also be explained by the flexibility of their genetic potentials in response to different geographical, climatic and environmental conditions, provided, as before, that the changes are contained within species boundaries. Intermarriages between the various races add to the diversity within the species boundaries, they do not yield another species. The working of genetic potential can also be seen in the way that insects adapt to pesticides, and certain bacteria acquire a nearly invincible resistance to particular antibiotics. Insects or bacteria become more resistant, but they do not become different species. Their potential for adaptation is understood, by believers, as a power to survive given to them by Divine Wisdom.

We do not wholly reject the concept of natural selection. However, it is necessary to criticize the extreme interpretation evolutionists make of it. First of all, there is not an absolute ‘cruel competition’ in nature which the strong dominate absolutely, nor a pitiless ‘selection’ process of exterminating rivals in the struggle for food (survival). Rather, there is a dynamic balance among the great variety of creatures which is characterized, overall, by mutual collaboration and solidarity. The killing of weak creatures by the stronger ones is not random, nor characterized by a drive to exterminate and monopolize resources for survival. On the contrary, it is, overall, purposive and beneficial. Predators prey, generally, on weak and sick animals, and this ‘selects’ the fit and healthy for survival and, quite probably, prevents epidemics within and between species. Also, it is manifestly obvious that the apparent ‘competition’ in nature is the outward face of a subtle and complex feeding chain which is vital for the overall balance of the ecosystem, providing niches for great numbers of species, not least those which feed on the left-overs of others thus cleansing and purifying the food-chain.

Another factor affecting natural selection is the difference in rates of breeding. One bacterium multiplies by millions in one day, a fly by thousands in two days. Vertebrates, except fish and amphibians on the other hand, breed far more slowly. From the base of the food pyramid to the top, the production of food increases in quality but decreases in mass, and consequently a lot of tiny living organisms are the food of larger ones. The difference in breeding rates among members of the same species causes rapid multiplying of a certain group, but not the change of its species. An organism with many young has more opportunity to survive in changing environmental conditions, because when the number of its young increases, so too do the combinations of genetic characters. Even after drastic environmental changes, a few may survive.

The concepts used by evolutionists used to explain biological realities have a merely nominal reality, they are far from being ultimate causes. Attributing reality or, worse, Divine power to concepts which can be useful only for building mental models, and ignoring the knowledge, might and eternal wisdom of the Creator, means binding our hearts and minds to nature, like nature-worshippers and polytheists generally.

Cosmology is the study of how the universe we live in came into being, why it looks and behaves as it does, and what its ultimate fate is. Building on the work of Albert Einstein, cosmologists have come up with a new account of the origin of the universe, the so-called big-bang cosmology. Over the past three decades a series of observational developments and refinements to the theory have led to its wider acceptance. For the present, there are no fundamental challenges to the big bang theory, although there are certainly unresolved issues with the theory itself. Astronomers are not sure, for example, how the galaxies were formed, but it is questionable whether there is a reason not to think the process did not occur within the framework of the big bang. Indeed, the predictions of the theory have survived all tests to date.

Nevertheless, we should always bear in mind that present-day science is not the last word, and perhaps Einstein’s theories, and the big-bang cosmology, will in turn be superseded.

Our present knowledge of the universe is restricted to a handful of observational facts. The expansion of the universe, indicated by the law relating the red shift in light from astronomical objects to their distance, was dis¬covered by Edwin Hubble in the early part of this century. The existence of the microwave background radiation corresponding to a temperature of 2.7K, and the cosmological abundance of helium are more recent discoveries. Together, these three observations suggest that the universe was born in a hot fireball from a very dense state-the big bang. Not just matter was created in the big bang, but space-time as well. There was nothing outside for the big bang to explode into-and this nothing means not even empty space.

Cosmologists today do not claim to know exactly what made the universe explode into existence from a state of zero volume and infinite density-a space-time singularity-but they do claim to be able to describe in great detail how a hot fireball of matter and radiation has evolved from a fraction of a second after the instant of creation over about 15 billion years to produce the cool, dark spread of empty space, dotted with galaxies made up of stars, gas, dust and planets, that we see about us now.

The laws of nature as we currently understand them allow us to trace the observed expansion of the universe back billions of years to what would be a true beginning, a moment when the universe was infinitely hot and dense. Although, theorists are now pushing back their speculations about what happened in the first 10-35 seconds after the big bang, with less confidence, the modern cosmological world view begins at a time when the universe had cooled to only 1012K, about 10-5 seconds after the instant creation. At these extreme conditions, the laws of physics as deduced here on earth can be applied to produce the story of everything that ha happened since. At a temperature of 1012K, particles and radiation would be interchangeable, as the mass equivalent of energy in the radiation would be ample to produce particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons, not out of thin air but out of thick radiation, in line with the rules E=mc2 for a particle of mass m and E=hv for radiation with frequency v (h is Planck’s constant). Here higher black body temperature of radiation corresponds to bigger v, that is bigger energy E, and therefore to more massive particle equivalents.

So, one-hundred-thousandth of a second after it began, the universe would have been a seething mass of particles and radiation, a swirling soup in which particle/antiparticle pairs were constantly being created out of energetic photons, and constantly annihilating with one another to produce other energetic photons. Overall though, the total mass/energy of the whole system was constant. For every E/c2 of mass created or destroyed an exactly equivalent E/h of radiation is destroyed or created.

Things began to get more orderly at 1011, still within the first 0.1 seconds after the big bang, as the universe expanded so that the density of radiation at any point was no longer enough to produce the more exotic particles. Only electron/positron pairs, and the massless photons and neutrino/antineutrino pairs, were light enough to have a continuing involvement in the matter/radiation balance.

About 14 seconds after the big bang, the temperature of the universe had dropped to around 3xl09K, and even electrons and positrons needed too much energy for the weakening radiation to create them. As the universe con¬tinued to expand and cool, creation became slower than annihilation, and almost all the particles and antiparticles disappeared. But for some unknown reason, a small proportion of electrons, protons and neutrons were left over. It is this early excess of matter over an¬timatter that survived to form light atomic nuclei a few minutes later, then (after about a million years) to form atoms and, still later, to be cooked to heavier elements in stars, ultimately to provide the material out of which life would arise. The reason for this predominance of matter over antimatter remains a mystery and has been a source of concern to modern cosmology. It is, nevertheless, one of the key initial conditions that determined the future development of the universe.

As the temperature dropped to 109K-about 70 times the temperature in the heart of the sun today-many protons and neutrons fused into helium nuclei, and by the end of first four minutes no free neutrons were left. Some 75% of the mass of the visible universe had been processed into protons plus electrons (ultimately to be bound into hydrogen atoms) while rather more than 25% mass of the universe had been processed into helium. The abundance of these elements in the universe is detectable today, and provides a constraint on the range of allowable models.

Another 700,000 years later, the expanding universe cooled to the point where electrons can bind to helium and hydrogen nuclei to make atoms, at a temperature of around 5000K. This signalled the end of the last remaining links between matter and radiation on a cosmic scale. Although free electrons and atomic nuclei, being electrically charged, interact strongly with radiation, electrically neutral atoms do not. From then on, the background radiation had nothing left to do but spread thinner in the expanding and cooling universe, to become the faint hiss we now detect at temperature equivalent of 2.7K. The very high degree of uniformity of the microwave background today is a strong indication that uniform, isotropic models provide a good description of the universe.

After the first thousand million years or so, with matter firmly established and radiation playing only a minor and decreasing role, the story of the universe can be taken up in terms of gravity, left as the dominating force because of its long range and its independence of electric charge. Gravitational forces then shaped the galaxies by holding stars and planets together.

However, our grasp of the conditions that prevailed in the early universe does not translate into a full understanding of how galaxies formed. Many scientists believe that the hydrogen and helium gases that filled the universe must have been pulled into concentrations by gravity. But there are problems with this explanation: for, what could cause large, diffuse gas clouds to collapse, even with the aid of gravity, while the universe as a whole is expanding?

Having established that the universe began in a hot big bang, and being tolerably happy with a rough understanding of how galaxies formed, the truly cosmological question remaining for astronomers to puzzle over is whether the universe is open (will it expand forever) or closed (will it one day collapse into a new fireball)?

The answer lies in its density. The symbol used for the mass density of the universe is Omega. If Omega, is less than 1, the universe will expand forever, so that, eventually, all the galaxies and stars will grow dark and cold. The alternative to this ‘big chill’ is a ‘big crunch.’ If Omega is more than 1, gravity will eventually reverse the expansion, and all matter and energy will be reunited. For the present, since we are not sure how galaxies formed, the value of Omega is uncertain-most astronomers put it somewhere between 0.1 and 1.

While eternal expansion is the generally favoured hypothesis; there may be enough of the unseen matter in the universe to produce a gravitational pull capable of halting the expansion and eventually producing a recollapse. Though the case is not yet proven, one current idea is that neutrinos, once believed to be massless particles, may have a rest mass less than 1/10000 of an electron. As neutrinos are thought to be as numerous as photons, their aggregate mass could suffice to close the universe. The fact that we cannot see enough matter to close the universe does not mean that it is not there.

During the next decade, as techniques for measuring the mass of the universe improve, we may learn whether the present expansion is headed toward a big chill or a big crunch. What happens then? Just as we do not know how everything could appear from nothing in the big bang if space-time did not exist, we do not know what happens to the universe at this stage; the laws of physics are inadequate to describe such extreme conditions. If there is ever to be a solution to the mystery of the origin and end of the universe, it must await a substantial increase in our understanding of the quantum nature of gravity-the big bang account of creation has forged an unlikely marriage between cosmology, the science of the very large, and particle physics, the science of the very small.

In any event, the universe we inhabit seems to be very improbable. Random processes and statistical fluctuations on cosmological time scales could easily have made it quite inhospitable to life. Are we just lucky? Or is there some deep significance to the fact that we live in a universe just right for us?

For all its violence-including the possibility of a black hole resident at the centre of our own galaxy-the universe seems to be an ideal place for man. Everywhere we look in the universe, from far flung galaxies to the deepest recesses of the atom, we encounter order. The laws of physics can explain beautifully the analytic structure of nature, the behaviour of individual particles and fields, but tell us nothing about the collective, collaborative organization of matter: that is, how the world is put together.

Why is the world the way it is and not otherwise? This is not the type of question scientists normally ask. The customary approach to scientific inquiry is to discuss what we see, not what we might see. Nevertheless, the universe is such a remarkable place, and we, as observers, are perhaps the most remarkable feature, it seems worth while ascertaining just how probable or improbable the present arrangement is.

For example, we do not understand why the fundamental constants of nature have the values they do. Einstein captured its essence when he said: ‘What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.’ Very slight changes in the physical constants of nature could have made the universe unfold in a completely different manner.

Most of the features of the everyday world and the astronomical scene are determined by a few basic physical laws and constants, such as the masses of the elementary particles and the relative strengths of the basic forces that operate between them. In many cases, a rather delicate balance seems to prevail. For example, if the nuclear forces were slightly stronger then they actually are, compared with electromagnetism, the di-proton-an atomic nucleus containing just two protons and no other particle-would be stable; ordinary hydrogen would not exist, and stars would evolve very differently. If nuclear forces were slightly weaker, no chemical elements other than hydrogen would be stable, and chemistry would be dull indeed. In either case, we would not be here to ponder such matters.

Or suppose the constant of gravity were stronger and the gravitational force were, say 1030 times weaker than the electromagnetic force instead of a factor of 1040 weaker. Then we would have a small-scale, speeded-up universe, in which stars-gravitationally bound fusion redactors-had only 10-15 times the sun’s mass, and lived for about a year. This might not allow time for complex systems-such as life forms-to evolve. The question-Was the relative strength of electromagnetic force over the gravitational force there from the beginning of time or is it an accident of today? -remains intractable.

These mysteries are heightened when we reflect how surprising it is that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. Life as we know it would be impossible if any of several physical quantities had slightly different values. The best known of these quantities is the energy of one of the excited states of the carbon-12 nucleus. There is an essential step in the chain of nuclear reactions that build up heavy elements in stars. In this step, two helium nuclei join together to form the unstable nucleus of beryllium-8, which sometimes before fissioning absorbs another helium nucleus, forming carbon-12 in this excited state. The carbon-12 nucleus then emits a photon and decays into the stable state of lowest energy. In subsequent nuclear reactions carbon is built up into oxygen and nitrogen and the other heavy elements necessary for life. If the energy of the excited state of carbon-12 were just a little higher, the rate of its formation would be much less, so that almost all the beryllium-8 nuclei would fission into helium nuclei before carbon could be formed. The universe would then consist almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, without the ingredients for life.

Moreover, if the proton and neutron masses were equal, then neutrons and protons could not bind to form deuterium and heavy nuclei, and nuclear burning in stars and, consequently, life would be impossible.

The most ubiquitous examples of orderliness in the universe are the stars. They represent an extreme departure from thermodynamic equilibrium because they burn brightly in a cold, dark space. The source of starlight is the nuclear furnace at the core of the star, where the chief nuclear reaction is the fusion of hydrogen to helium. This is a downhill process, leading to nuclei of greater stability, and the cost paid for achieving it is the redistribution of nuclear energy into the surrounding space in the form of heat and light. This particular orderliness, and with it most familiar examples of terrestrial organization, leads to the question: Is the present structure of the universe-which is made mainly of hydrogen and not helium or heavier elements-just luck, a coincidence? Because, if the universe were made of, say, iron (the most stable element) there would be no stars like the sun.

Also, the structure of our world depends vitally not only on the availability of free hydrogen, but also on the reasonably smooth distribution of the primeval matter. If the big bang had only coughed out black holes-the ultimate triumph of gravity-in which everything is completely obliterated and disappears, no life would have been possible.

Can all these peculiar ‘coincidences’ be understood in terms of some self-evolutionary mechanism?

In its standard form, the big bang theory assumes that all parts of the universe began expanding simultaneously. Observations confirmed this assumption and showed that the expansion is remarkably uniform in all directions. This would seem to imply a collaboration between widely separated regions of the cosmos to expand at the same rate everywhere. Such highly organized behaviour leads us to ask how all the different parts of the universe could synchronize the beginning of their expansion?

Where does the energy that makes the universe expand come from? What could be a permanent, decidedly nonzero source of energy in the universe, with cosmic consequences? Could it be vacuum-as the source of everything yet itself nothing? This is one of the hottest topics in contemporary physics and lies at the heart of perhaps the most important new concept in cosmology of the past decade. If it is correct, could the creation of being out of nothingness occur without the mediation of a Creator?

There are many such peculiar ‘coincidences’ in the universe. Is it just our luck that they have worked out that way, or is there a deeper explanation? One understanding would be that the world is the way it is because it is the creation of a Creator who wills it to be capable of fruitful process: His command, when He desires a thing, is to say to it ‘Be!’, and it is (Ya Sin, 36.82). Without an Organizer, chaos can never be transformed into cosmos. This explanation is not a temporary sop to satisfy our curiosity about phenomena for which we cannot yet work out a satisfactory physical explanation; rather, it is a step guiding us towards a better understanding of the real world.

That does not mean that these mysteries constitute a barrier beyond which science cannot pass. As in the past, we may reasonably expect that, in the future, deeper understanding will be achieved and a more profound pattern discerned at the basis of physical reality, in a new, perhaps new kind, of explanatory theory. It may be some version of supergravity or it may be the novel theory of ‘superstrings’. Or some other theory that we have not yet thought of.

However, we should bear in mind that both our growing knowledge about the universe, and the need, alongside it, to revise it continually, is clear evidence for the inconclusiveness of science and the limitation of its methods.

In addition, the finititude of man’s existence (in this very small part of a vast universe) and the limitations of his senses mean that all our efforts must be considered ‘relative.’ The results of pure and experimental sciences are a limited portion of reality as man can grasp it from his location in the universe and within the very limited time allotted to him, and not the truth itself. There is of course, a great difference between being aware of things and knowing their actual truth. The former is limited to sensible events only, while the latter lies beyond the capacity of our senses.

No inquiry into the nature of creation or any part of it can be closed and concluded. The patterns of God in creation are infinite: there will always be more of them to discover. As we strive to do so, understand more and more about nature, the scientist’s sense of wonder will not diminish but become sharper, more narrowly focused on the mysteries that still remain. The worth of science lies in its commitment to understanding the Divine handiwork. The comprehensibility of the reality around us is among the greatest of God’s favours to us. Einstein remarked this: ‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.’

The Qur’an contains many scientifically accurate statements, some of them still relevant to cosmology; it does not contain any statements which are in conflict with the findings of man’s scientific research nor open to criticism from modern science. Many of its verses allude to, and urge, reflection upon the reality around us as a form of worship, as a way to draw nearer to the Creator. I shall conclude by citing (in translation) a verse which draws our attention to the fact that, in a general sense, the future will be the age of knowledge and information, and that as a natural consequence of this, it will be an age of faith and belief:

Soon We shall show them Our signs on the furthest horizons, and in their own souls, until it becomes manifest to them that this is truth. Is it not enough that your Lord witnesses all things? (Fussilat, 41.53)

USEFUL READING

• GRIBBIN, J. (1982) Cosmology today: A New Scientist Guide
• JAMES, P. et al. (1994) ‘The Evolution of the Universe’, Scientific American, October
• SIMSEK, U. (1986) Big Bang-Kainatin Dogusu, Yeni Asya, Istanbul
• NURBAKI, H. (1989) Verses from the Glorious Qur’an and the Facts of Science, Turkish Foundation for Religion Publications

An interesting scientific medical study, published in the British Medical Journal (No 6993, 10 June 1995), proved beyond any doubt the benefit of giving a new-born child sugar, in order to reduce the feeling of any painful procedure like heel pricking for a blood sample or before circumcision.

The study, entitled ‘The analgesic (pain killing) effect of sucrose in full term infants: a randomised controlled trial’, was done by Nora Haouari, Christopher Wood, Gillian Griffiths and Malcolm Levene in the post-natal ward in the Leeds General Infirmary in England.

60 healthy infants of gestational age 37-42 weeks and postnatal age of 1-6 days, were randomized to receive 2ml of one of the four solutions: 12.5% sucrose, 25% sucrose, 50% sucrose, and sterile water (control).

The first group of 30 babies received sugar syrup before a routine blood test (heel pricking, which is usually painful) done to detect jaundice. The other 30 babies were given only sterile water as a control group.

Placing 2ml of a 25% or 50% sucrose solution on the tongue before pricking the heel significantly reduced crying time, compared to babies who got water. Also, their heart rate returned to normal more quickly. The stronger sugar solution had the greater effect, crying being reduced further with increasing concentration of sucrose. From which we may conclude that sucrose (sugar) placed on the tongue may be a useful and safe form of analgesia for use with new born infants.

Blass and Hoffmeyer also showed that 12% solution of inter-oral sucrose significantly reduced the duration of crying in new-born babies subjected to heel pricking or circumcision. This study was reported in The Independent newspaper (Friday 9 June 1995) as well as in the British Medical Journal article.

The practice of the Prophet, upon him be peace, is recorded in the collections of his sayings and reports about him, of which the most revered are the two Sahih collections of Bukhari and Muslim:

Abu Burdah reported from Abu Musa, who said: ‘I had a new-born baby; I took him to the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, who called him Ibrahim. The Prophet chewed a date then he took it and rubbed the inside of the baby’s mouth with it.’

There are many other reported incidents like this one.

The date contains a very high percentage of sugar (70-80%); it has both fructose and glucose which have high calorific values, it is easily and quickly digestible, and very helpful to the brain. The date contains 2.2% protein, vitamin A, vitamins Bl, B2 and nicotruic acid (against Pellagra); it has traces of minerals needed for the body such as potassium, sodium, calcium, iron, manganese, copper. Potassium, of which percentage is very high, has been found to be very effective for cases of haemorrhage, such as the occasions of birth or circumcision.

We may note that the Sunnah also commends dates for the breaking of the fast in Ramadan. Dates should be eaten, if available, before the sunset prayer-this is medically and nutritionally the best way and the Sunnah.

The great worth of dates is also indicated in a famous and beautiful passage of the Qur’an, surah Maryam, verses 25-6:

And shake towards you the trunk of the palm-tree and it will drop on you fresh ripe dates. So eat and drink and be comforted.

This was the prescription of God, the Creator, for the blessed Virgin Mary at the time of the birth of Jesus, the blessed Prophet of God. It was a prescription to make the delivery easy and comfortable.

As in the example we have briefly recorded in this article, we believe further research will confirm for those who still doubt the full worth and truth, the wisdom, of the teachings of Qur’an and Sunnah.

We shall show them our signs on the furthest horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth. Is it not sufficient that your Lord is witness over all things? (Fussilat, 41.53)

As the authors of the medical study referred to intend trying new sugary or sweet substances, we shall recommend that they try dates for the newborn for the relief of pain.

Finally, we hope Muslim medical scientists and researchers lake this new discovery on board, and that many more ideas and practices in the teachings of Islam needing investigative research and objective, scientific study will get the attention they deserve.

The environmental crisis humanity faces at this stage in their development is an outward manifestation of the internal crisis arising from the break with traditional beliefs and values, and their surrender to the disease of ‘problem denial’ characteristic of modern urban, industrialized societies. This state of mental and spiritual sickness takes man down a vicious and destructive spiral. Human-centred, short-term gain and economic surplus-oriented societies have led people to put their trust in science and technology to solve their problems, regardless of the cost to ‘others’. This way of life is not sustainable and creates new and worsening problems, doing perhaps inevitable long term damage to ‘other’ people, other species, the environment as a whole.

Industrialization has led to a simplified, throw-it-away world view which encourages people to dominate and manipulate all available resources in a frantic race for growth in levels of self-indulgence. The causes of environmental overload or degradation are pollution of water, air and land, and depletion of resources. Urbanization and industrialization where large amounts of pollutants are concentrated in small volumes of air, water and land have led to the overloading and disruption of the natural dilution, breakdown and recycling of the chemicals essential for life. The effluent of fertilizers, pesticides, toxic heavy metals, and (partly or wholly) treated industrial waste, is allowed to run off into lakes and streams. The effects are already very tangible: nauseating smells and tastes, smog causing reduced atmospheric visibility, corrosion of metal work, erosion of buildings; reduced tree and crop production; a decrease in biodiversity-each year at least 51,000 species in all become extinct, often as direct consequence of human activity; serious damage to human health-as in the spread of infectious diseases, irritation and diseases of the respiratory system, genetic and reproductive defects, and cancers (for example of skin and liver).

The scale and rate of environmental degradation demand serious and urgent reform. We desperately need to change our attitudes and concepts conform more with the laws of nature as ordained by God. Only if we do it so can we hope for true success in this world and the Hereafter.

As noted, excessive and wasteful use of material resources is a major factor in environmental degradation. We have three types of material resources. First, deep-mined non-renewable (exhaustible) resources such as petroleum, coal, natural gas, and minerals such as copper, aluminium, iron, and uranium which are purified from ores supplied by the earth’s crust. Fossil fuels are finite and could be exhausted quite quickly at present rates of consumption; further, when burned, these fuels are converted to waste heat and exhaust gases which are serious pollutants.

Second, there are perpetual resources, namely solar energy, wind power, geothermal energy, and flowing water. These must become our main future sources of energy.

Third, the potentially renewable resources so-called because, they can be replaced through natural processes on a human life-time scale. Examples are trees in forests, grasses, wild animals, fresh surface water, in lakes and streams, and most ground water, the earth’s most valuable resource. If these resources are used at a rate that does not reduce their availability, they can yield a sustainable source of energy. However, when the natural replacement rate is exceeded, then the supply is depleted and environmental degradation results. Some examples are typified by the covering of productive land with water, concrete, asphalt, or buildings to such an extent that crop growth declines and wildlife habitats are lost. Excessive removal of fresh water from aquifers and from surface waters leads to water scarcity. Deforestation without adequate replanting causes destruction of wildlife habitats where timber-growth cannot be sustained.

Alarmingly, nearly half of the world’s original expanse of tropical forests have been cleared. Each year, about 171,000 km2 of tropical forest are destroyed. These losses reduce biodiversity because niches for thousands of plants and animals are destroyed with the trees.

Around 35% of the world’s coastal and inland wetlands have been drained, built upon, or seriously polluted (e.g. the ‘Golden Horn’ in Istanbul). Most of our wastes accumulate in the oceans. Oil slicks, floating plastic debris, polluted estuaries and beaches, contaminated fish, are just a few of the ugly scenes that result. However, man’s carelessness not only affects other species: world-wide, an estimated 16 million people lose their homes and land due to environmental degradation alone.

Resource depletion or scarcity can be absolute or relative. Absolute scarcity occurs when supplies of a resource .are insufficient or too expensive to meet present or anticipated future demands. For example, the world’s finite supplies of petroleum oil may be used up within the next 50 years decades at present rates of consumption. Relative scarcity occurs as a result of unbalanced and inequitable distribution of a resource which, if equitably distributed would meet the demand of everyone in need.

Relative scarcity dominates the world scene at present: industrialized economies of the West, the United States especially consume a huge disproportionate share of material and energy resources at the expense of other nations. This further widens the gap between the rich and the poor countries. It is a fact that the rate of damage inflicted upon the environment, and hence the damage to the stability and security of others’ lives, has been greater in this past century than since the beginning of man’s history. The Muslim World today, once the pioneer of true civilization is being steadily corrupted by serving the lifestyle of the Western powers. The balanced, traditional lifestyle which conforms with the law of God and hence is more environment-friendly nature is being eroded at alarming speed. The Muslims and other victims of modern civilization lack control over their lives, once self-sustaining, and are forced into the global ‘cash economy’ manipulated by a small, cynical elite who gamble, quite literally, with commodity and stock prices without the least concern for the millions of human lives disrupted and destroyed as a result.

Mankind are heading toward an abyss of anxiety and insecurity while the natural world deteriorates around them. Unless we make a concerted and sustained effort to recover the fitrah state, a life-style that accords with the balance and order of creation, destruction and disorder on a hitherto unimagined scale await us in this life and, in the next, the torment of knowing we failed our responsibility. For in that life we shall be questioned in detail about what we did in this; each of our senses and limbs and organs will bear witness against us; and we will account even for every drop of water we used well or wasted.

Their need is most dire whose minds have strayed the furthest.

A needy conscience is healthy: its need is faith in Him,

Minds lost in bewildering ways are recovered in search of Him.

Abstract knowledge cannot, nor formal reasoning,

Nor subtle logic, content the human need for faith.

Scholars, scientists, philosophers-disputing, deviant

Voices, so void of meaning while so full of words,

Knowing nothing revealed about the other world,

Ignorant of the beginnings of things-have understood

So little, yet have, by conjectures and frail hypotheses,

Snared and confounded whole nations of human beings.

This is truth: every colour and sound is a message from Him.

The subjection of existence to man is a portion of His wisdom.

Existence originates in or radiates from His Light

Who initiates all things. Only souls who apprehend this

Are contented, and only the contented reach Him.

Though the insightless are blind to Him, His sight reaches,

And His presence is, everywhere. And this is truth:

That man most deeply feels His relatedness to all being.

Those with senses alert to Him know how near He is.

The universe is a fountain overflowing with the meanings

Of His Names, with diverse, prolific harmonies

Of God and man, continually played and resonant.

Realizing this, the human mind is wed to the human heart

And nightly finds a different path to take its way to God.

The spirit that thus leaps over the hurdles of matter,

To enter upon this realm, finds the true identity

At last of man, conjoined fulfillment of self and soul.

For example, the cells of a body are supplied with the sustenance they need without willful questing; the young of living creatures are nourished with an extraordinarily wonderful food first in their mothers’ wombs and then after their birth. It is impossible for either to obtain the least of their needs through their own power and faculties. Consider your own case: with respect to your inner and external senses and organs, what innumerable needs you have, none of which you can provide by yourself although they are indispensable to your life.

Who created the sun and hung it above you as a source of light and colour and warmth? Can you give existence to a single flower, which you need to satisfy your sense of smell? Do you have any part in the creation of a single molecule of air, which is so vital for you? Who established the relation between your body and senses and the world around you? You see that human intervention in the natural world can destroy the ecological balance in it so as to make it lethal to you, even though human beings are the most conscious and knowledgeable of creatures.

Have you ever pondered how much a single apple really costs? For an apple to come into being is it not absolutely necessary to have the harmonious and justly proportioned collaboration of the sun (the source of heat and light), of the air, of moisture, of soil, with the seed of the apple tree? Seeing that you-even though you are one of the most powerful and knowledgeable of creatures-are unable to create even a particle of earth, a molecule of air, a beam of light and a tiny seed, do you not also see, and see clearly, that concepts like chance, necessity or ‘natural causes’, to which people import creativity, although these are altogether lacking in consciousness or power or knowledge or free will, cannot really be the originators of those things?

Also, you see that everything is interconnected to everything in the universe; all things are interrelated to a single thing, which is, in turn, interrelated to all things. The whole of the universe needs every single part of it for its existence; the deformation of a single cell in your body can lead to the death of the whole body. So, are all of these factors not enough to explain the existence and Unity of One, Who is absolutely Knowledgeable and absolutely Powerful. Who created the whole of the universe, as well as each tiny particle in it? Who created each single cell of our body, as well as the whole of it?

Thus, the provision of your needs and the needs of all creature indicates a most Compassionate, All-Generous and Sustaining One, Who directs each thing to a final point of perfection particular to itself. How else can you explain all these acts, each and all fully realized, of innumerable purposive consequences within an infinite compassion and miraculous orderliness? Is your need to understand satisfied by appeals to blind and deaf nature, to unconscious forces, aimless chance, lifeless causes?