However, none of these movies properly – or accurately – explains radiation. Regardless of what you do and where you are on a typical day, you are being exposed to millions of particle showers – another term for radiation – at all times. Radiation is all around us, but we are not turning into monsters, giants, or any other kind of creature. We do not even sense most of the radiation unless the harmful effects reach the detectable level. In fact, radioactive isotopes (the sources of radiation) found in water, air, soil, and most places in the environment have been emitting radiation since the Big Bang ^[1], which occurred approximately 14 billion years ago.

Radiation can be emitted by both natural and man-made sources ^{[2, 3]}. There are generally two main types of natural radiation: radiation from natural sources, such as elements in the ground, is terrestrial, and radiation from outer space, such as charged particles and gamma rays, is cosmic. For example, at this very moment you are being bombarded with cosmic rays every few seconds. On the other hand, the main human-made source of radiation exposure is from medical sources like nuclear medicine, x-rays, computed tomography (CT) scans, etc.

There are various types of radiation emitted by the sun. The most widely recognized forms are visible light, infrared, ultraviolet (UV), x-ray, and gamma radiation. We can only see the visible light, which is defined as having a wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum between 400-700 nm (a nanometer, or nm, is approximately 10-9 meter). Some of the other kinds of light have greater wavelengths, and some have smaller. In short, visible light’s region is a very narrow part of the wide EM spectrum.

Why can our eyes see only within this limited range? There are several reasons ^[4]: solar emissions, low absorption in the atmosphere, the energy of chemical bonds, the optical properties of matter, black-body emissions, and so on. Unless all these reasons align into a specific rhythm, we cannot see the kind of light. There are many laws determining light, and the fact that we can see even some light is quite remarkable, and a sign of how perfectly calibrated the universe is.

Misfits of the standard model: Neutrinos

Following our discussion of radiation, I would like to focus on one particular type of radiation: neutrinos. Neutrinos are created in certain types of radioactive decay and nuclear reactions, such as those occurring in the sun. They are one of the most abundant particles in the universe; billions of them pass harmlessly through your body, unnoticed. David Griffiths, a physicist at Reed College, describes neutrinos in his book on particle physics ^[5]:

“…neutrinos interact extraordinarily weakly with matter; a neutrino of moderate energy could easily penetrate a thousand light years of lead. That’s a comforting realization when you learn that hundreds of billions of neutrinos per second pass through every square inch of your body, night and day, coming from the sun.”

In total, there are three kinds of neutrino flavors, as they are called. These are electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos. Each kind has a tiny mass. According to the Standard Model, there are three kinds of particles in the universe: “light-weight” leptons, “mid-weight” mesons, and “heavy-weight” baryons, such as protons and neutrons. Neutrinos are in the lepton family, which, in total, has only six particles; they have weak interactions within the universe. Neutrinos are neutral leptons since they are chargeless. Other leptons, electron, muon, and tau are called as charged leptons.

The Standard Model is one of the fundamental models in experimental high-energy physics explaining how the universe came into being. Well-known scientists are still improving the model to categorize particles properly in the universe with the aim of finding missing particles. The model explains very well the fundamental forces governing the world: strong nuclear forces, weak nuclear forces, gravitational force, and electroweak force. There were, frankly, two contradictions challenging the Standard Model until today: the Higgs mechanism ^[6] and the mass of neutrinos. The model predicted that Higgs boson ^[6] is the particle responsible for all the mass in the universe. CERN, the biggest particle accelerator^[7] on earth, announced in July 2012 that they had found a particle that behaves like the Standard Model predicted Higgs boson would. Scientists at CERN are still striving to understand the identity and features of this discovered particle. If they achieve that, they can unravel the mystery and origins of the universe a little bit more. At the end, only the mass of neutrinos will remain a controversial topic within the model.

The Standard Model predicted that neutrinos were chargeless and massless particles. However, cosmic, reactor, and accelerator neutrino experiments, which are the main three experiment types to track neutrinos, confirmed each other on the subject of neutrino oscillation. Neutrino oscillation, in short, means that they can change their flavors. For example, a tau neutrino can convert to an electron neutrino, and vice versa. This discovery shows that these particles can be chargeless but not massless. Each of them has to have small, different masses to be able to perform flavor conversions, according to the laws of physics. That is why these particles are usually called the misfits^[8] of the Standard Model.

Since each particle was produced with its antiparticle, according to Dirac’s theory of pairs^[9], neutrinos also have their antiparticles, so there are actually six types of neutrinos in the universe. Each antiparticle has exactly the same properties as the original particle, just with the opposite charge. What about the chargeless neutrinos? The difference between neutrinos and antineutrinos is their spin behavior, not their charge. They both have zero charge; however, antineutrinos have a right-handed spin and neutrinos have a left-handed spin.

If each particle has its own antiparticle in theory, there should be the same amount of particles and antiparticles in the universe. However, experimental results show that there are more particles than antiparticles. There are a lot of scientists explaining this dilemma by accepting a parallel universe in which there are more antiparticles than particles, so the total would still be the same. In return, some others are trying to clarify this contradiction by accepting that more particles were created at the beginning of the universe, approximately 14 billion years ago.

Acknowledgment: This article is produced at Mergeous ^[10], an online article and project development service for authors and publishers dedicated to the advancement of technologies in the merging realms of science and religion.

References

[1] Kaya, A. 2009. “The Expansion of the Universe and the Big Bang: A Qur’anic Perspective,” The Fountain Magazine, Issue 68.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation
[3] http://www.chem.duke.edu/jds/cruise_chem/nuclear/exposure.html
[4] Why can we see visible light? 2007. Physics Education, 42(1), pp. 37-40.
[5] David Griffiths, Introduction to Elementary Particles.
[6] Kara, Cihan. 2013. “Will CERN Reveal the Origin of the Universe or Cause the End,” The Fountain Magazine, Issue 92.
[7] http://home.web.cern.ch/
[8] Symmetry Magazine, A Joint Fermilab/SLAC Publication, Spring 2013.
[9] Mahmood B. S. 2009. “The Holy Qur’an and Dirac’s Theory of Pairs,” The Fountain Magazine, Issue 68.
[10] Mergeous, Online article and project development platform, http://www.mergeous.com

“The most beautiful system [the universe] could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” (Isaac Newton)

The Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics, and the theory of relativity took the modern community to the boundary of the two realms of physical and metaphysical existence. Nevertheless, the nature of the fundamental physical dimensions still remains an open question resting on the related areas of science

The fundamental concepts of Newtonian physics are Time, Length, Mass, and Electric Charge by means of which all the other classical physical quantities such as velocity, force, momentum, energy, current, electric field, magnetic flux, etc. can be derived and expressed as their combinations. Classical physics stands on the assumption that material, having two basic intrinsic properties of mass and charge, and immaterial phenomena are all contained in an absolute space and an ever-flowing absolute time. These four physical dimensions, without asking the nature of them, provide a practical framework for a description of the gravitational and electromagnetic forces and thus a description of the physical world and an interpretation of the events occurring in it up to a certain degree. However, the Newtonian picture of the universe is neither adequate for a deeper understanding of the corporeal reality nor appropriate for linking that reality to the ones possessing higher degrees of the Universal Existence.

Starting from late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Newtonian picture of the world has been changed due to two revolutionary theories, which have been proved both experimentally and theoretically that they are superior to and not compatible with the classical descriptions and assumptions. They are the relativity theory and the quantum mechanics. In physics, a field is a physical quantity associated with each point of Space-Time. For example, the Newtonian gravitational field is a vector field specifying its value at a point in Space-Time, which requires three numbers, the components of the gravitational field vector at that point. Quantum field theory constructing quantum mechanical models of systems classically parameterized by an indefinitely big number of degrees of freedom, namely fields, is the natural and quantitative language of particle physics. The current set of fundamental fields and their dynamics are summarized in a theory called the Standard Model. All particles and their interactions observed to date can be described almost entirely by the Standard Model although most particle physicists believe that it is an incomplete description of nature, and that a more fundamental theory, the Theory of Everything, awaits discovery. Figure 1 represents an overview of the various families of elementary and composite particles, and the theories describing their interactions.

The relativistic quantum field theory of the subatomic world does not only include the strong and weak nuclear forces in addition to the electromagnetic and gravitational interactions of the classical picture, but also provokes some ideas about the nature of the fundamental concepts of the classical physics. Symmetry of a physical system is a physical or mathematical feature of the system that is preserved under some change. The Standard Model says, for instance, that the electric charge is the generator of the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism. U(1), the unitary group of rank 1, is the simplest internal symmetry group of the Standard Model. It can be visualized as the rotational symmetry of a circle about a perpendicular axis passing through the center of the circle. It represents a continuous symmetry because a circle can be rotated by an angle and remains unchanged. It is an internal symmetry since this circle does not lie in the physical space but in the complex plane of mathematics. More abstractly and more generally, a charge is any generator of a continuous symmetry of the physical system under study. When a physical system has a symmetry of some sort, Noether’s theorem implies the existence of a conserved current. The thing that flows in the current is the charge; the charge is the generator of the symmetry group. This converts our classical concrete idea of electric charge into a mathematical abstraction. Conservation of energy and conservations of linear and angular momenta are nothing but the applications of Noether’s theorem to the translational symmetry in time and translational and rotational symmetries in space, respectively.

Classically, which is equivalent to macroscopically, mass is associated with matter and can be defined as a quantitative measure of an object’s resistance to the change of its speed. But in the Standard Model of the subatomic scale, the mass of the elementary particles are explained by the Higgs mechanism which refers specifically to the generation of masses for the W and Z bosons through electroweak symmetry breaking. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is currently searching for Higgs bosons, and attempting to understand the electroweak Higgs mechanism. The Higgs mechanism is the process that gives mass to elementary particles. In 1905, Einstein proposed mass-energy equivalence (E=mc2) in his paper entitled “Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy-content?” In relativity, all of the energy that moves with an object (that is, all the energy which is present in the object’s rest frame) contributes to the total mass of the body, which measures how much it resists acceleration.

When we come to the remaining two fundamental concepts of Newtonian physics, we see that Time and Length, which we know instinctively, are no exceptions. The modern physics challenges our classical understandings of them too. Relativity theory argues that Time and Space are of equal ontological status; the reality is the 4-dimensional unity of Space-Time. Physics could no longer be understood as Space by itself, and Time by itself. It also states that simultaneity is relative, so there is no objective way to define a “Now” that would be the same for all states of motion which substantially affects the idea of causality. In addition, this Space-Time is not flat but rather curved due to the material and energy contained in it and not static but dynamic. Time and Space are neither uniform nor absolute.

The missing part of the so-called Theory of Everything is the quantum gravity, which attempts to develop scientific models that unify quantum mechanics describing three of the four known fundamental interactions with general relativity describing the fourth, gravity. The following quotation is from one of the leading quantum gravity researcher, Carlo Rovelli, stated in 1997:

“I believe that we are going through a period of profound confusion, in which we lack a general coherent picture of the physical world capable of embracing what or at least most of what, we have learned about it. The fundamental scientific view of the world of the present time is characterized by an astonishing amount of perplexity, and disagreement, about what time, space, matter, and causality are. But if a new synthesis is to be reached, I believe that philosophical thinking will be once more one of its ingredients. Due to the vastness of the problem involved, the generality and accuracy of philosophical thinking and its capacity to clarify conceptual premises are probably necessary to help physics out of a situation in which we have learned so much about the world, but no longer know what matter, time, space, and causality are.“

Lee Smolin, another theoretical physicist named as #21 on Foreign Policy Magazine’s 2008 list of Top 100 Public Intellectuals, stated the following in 2001:

“Atoms do fall, so the relationship between gravity and the quantum is not a problem for nature. If it is a problem for us, it must be because somewhere in our thinking there is at least one, and possibly several, wrong assumptions. At the very least, these assumptions involve our concept of space and time and the connection between the observer and the observed.”

It is true that quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity were born and are growing in the nontraditional atmosphere of the scientific enterprise. Thus, they can be considered as sharing the reductionist character of the Newtonian physics by having no direct reference to the hierarchy of physical and metaphysical existence. Nevertheless, we consider them as an improvement since they took the modern scientific community to the boundary of the two realms, by asking the old question of ancients about the nature of the fundamental physical dimensions. The mystery of them is still an open question resting, we believe, on the related areas of science and metaphysics.

It wasn’t…

Worse than that, in the third grade we had to learn about “conversion of units.” I figured it was good source of test problems. So I couldn’t escape from learning it. I admit it was difficult in the beginning. “The strange rule” said if we are to measure with a bigger scale, then we had to divide the number by ten and vice versa. Why was 120 cm equal to 1.2 m? If we knew that it was 120 already why did we bother to say it was also 1.2 in another unit? I got confused whether I should multiply the number by ten or divide by ten? (At least it was easy to multiply or divide by ten instead of another number, so I kept silent.)

In time, I realized that people used the unit to measure almost anything. Length is measured in meters, mass is in kilograms, time is in seconds. Wherever there was quantity, there was also a base-unit associated with it. Of course I never asked what a “second” was, because our teacher said everyone accepted this unit of time. Since it was a world-accepted “standard measure,” I subconsciously got the impression that the universe had a clock* and that people calibrated their time accordingly. In the same way, one kilogram was an absolute quantity in my mind by which every other mass can be measured.

As we grew up, more and more types of measures and units entered our lives: Volt, Joule, Ampere, Newton, and many others. Dealing with the “old” units of length and time was a piece of cake then. However, my faith in “standard measures” as universal remained unchanged until high school.

I was quite surprised in high school when our chemistry teacher told us that our very fundamental units of measures were actually not absolute. They were not fundamental in the sense that they, too, were defined in terms of other quantities. In fact, there is a history of “what to define as a unit” and “how to measure it.”

Let’s take time, for instance. We measure years by days and days by hours. Have we ever thought about why a year is 365 days and one day is 24 hours? Can’t we divide a year into 400 days or a day into 25 hours? Is this an artificial choice or a natural timing? It all depends on how we define a year and a day. We can identify a year by a full rotation of the earth around the sun. Also we can distinguish the beginning of day and night clearly. These are definite intervals of time dictated through our observations, and so there is not much choice other than setting one year at 365 days. Is there a similar fact behind the relation of day to hours? Not at all! It was in ancient Egypt, around 2000 BC, that days for the first time were sliced into 24 pieces of time. In the age of Babylonians, however, a day was designed to be 60 hours. Perhaps the reason for such division of the day (into 24 or 60) hours was that 24 or 60 are nice numbers which are divisible by many integers; the same reason why a full-angle is 360 degrees instead of 2π.

In the Middle Ages, for Muslims, measurement of astronomical phenomena was a very serious affair. They were very concerned about accurate timing. Determining the changing time of the five daily prayers and the beginning and ending of the month of Ramadan was more than a custom, it was a religious duty. And such calculations required high precision. This precision was exemplified in year 1000 AD by the Muslim scholar al-Biruni who gave the times of the new moons in terms of days, hours, minutes, seconds, thirds, and fourths after noon Sunday.

In the West, the first accurate time measurements were made by Roger Bacon in thirteenth century. In 1657, Christian Huygens invented the pendulum clock, which uses swinging weights to keep time. Later, Hyugens and William Clement refined the design so that clocks were accurate up to seconds. Another problem with older clocks was that although they worked fine in the local region, they lost accuracy at different parts of the globe and were thus unsuitable for navigation. The reason for the lack of accuracy was that earth’s rotation around the sun on its axis (which definitely affects the period of the pendulums) was not uniform. Several adjustments were made in the nineteenth century for better accuracy by improving the design to compensate for thermal expansion of the metal rods and air drag, which globalized the measurement of time. In 1956, the “second” was redefined in terms of the earth’s revolution around the sun, according to data gathered in year 1900. As the scientists were not completely satisfied, they re-defined the second (as the atomic second) a decade later. In 1967, the Thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures defined a second of atomic time in the International System of Units as:

The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.

Measuring the length was another important task for ancient peoples. Among the earlier civilizations, the most accurate system was developed by Indus Valley Civilization. While their contemporaries were using parts of the body for measurement, as early as 2600 BC, the Indus civilization had a much finer unit system that accounted even for millimeters. Most societies continued to use their own length scale until eighteenth century.

As early as seventeenth century, with the advances in the accurate measurement of time, pendulum motion was suggested to measure standard length. In the eighteenth century, there were two main approaches for measuring the standard unit of length. One suggested defining the meter as the length of a pendulum with a half-period of one second. The other suggested defining the meter as one ten-millionth of the length of the Earth’s meridian along a quadrant, which is the distance from the equator to the North Pole. In 1791, the French Academy of Sciences selected the choice based on the meridian. After several changes in the definition in 1960, the International Bureau of Weight and Measure organized the 11th CGPM (General Conference on Weights and Measure), during which the meter was redefined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum. The final decision came from the 17th CGPM as: “a meter is defined as 1/299,792,458 of a light-second.”

Figure 1. Historical International Prototype Meter bar, made of an alloy of platinum and iridium, was the standard from 1889 to 1960.

As for the measurement of mass, the situation is even more complicated since scientists cannot even agree on what mass is. There are mainly two different understandings of mass based on its features. One is called inertial mass (related to the quantity of a material); the other is gravitational mass (related to gravitational pull and acceleration). Whether these two concepts are equivalent or not is still in debate though in modern theories like Einstein’s general relativity, these two definitions are equivalent. We can, therefore, leave these philosophical discussions about the concept of mass to the scientists and go back to its measurement.

Just like the measurement of time and length, scientific mass measurement gained a boost after the French Revolution. At first, a gram, defined as the absolute mass of 1 cm3 of water at 0o C, was chosen as the standard. In 1799, scientists made a slight modification to the unit of mass by re-setting the definition at 4oC since it is the temperature at which water is most stable. Later, officials noticed that this unit was too small to be a standard of everyday commercial materials, which usually appear in large amounts. In 1889, the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK), made of an alloy of 90% platinum and 10% iridium (by weight), was designed to define the standard mass (Figure 2). After the first production, several more stable replicas of IPK have been produced to replace the older ones. Today every government who subscribes to this standard must have an exact copy of IPK, and these replicas must be returned to Paris periodically as they may get rusted or dirty with time.

Figure 2. Shown above is a computer-generated image of the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK). The IPK is made of a platinum-iridium alloy and is stored in a vault at the BIPM in Sèvres, France.

These facts may sound very odd to some, as it did to me when I first heard of them. I asked myself: If all these measures are defined in terms of something else, what is the point of defining them in the first place? For example, if we can agree to use the second as some interval of time, why do we bother to count the number of oscillations of Cesium. The answer is: We cannot agree unless we use a reference time which is geography-free, climate-free, and politics-free. Only then we will be sure that I, here in Western Pennsylvania, a person on the top of Everest, or a person in a submarine under the Pacific Ocean will call the same interval of time a “second.” In other words, the oscillation of the cesium isotope was believed to be free from all possible deficiencies that are results of physical location (Australia or America), environmental change (the Amazon Forests or the Sahara Desert), and politics.

In short, sand-clocks for measuring time (think of what kind of sand in what shape of glass tube) or the arm of a king as a length unit (imagine a king who seized the throne at 13 and died at 60), or weighing with iron cylinders (common in small grocery stores in some countries) is too unreliable, too unstable, too local, and of course, inaccurate to create a standard. Especially in this age of globalization, a consensus on measurement is absolutely necessary.

It seems a bit ironic that a simple-looking concept of science, measurement, could cause such controversy. A simple way to keep track of numbers that belong to different kind of quantities evolved into an area of serious research through time. Perhaps then, I should have not worried that much about my bad math grades on a subject which troubled the scientist themselves. After all, my grades were just my teacher’s own measurement.**

O. S. Caglayan has a PhD in mathematics. He is a freelance writer. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

* This famous quotation attributed to Newton was opposed by Leibnizian view of time: “The universe is the clock.” The scientist as philosopher, Friedel Weinert, Springer; 1 edition (May 27, 2004)

** The author is indebted to his dear elementary school teacher Muazzez Ozalp for instilling in him the love of science.

References

1. G. J. Toomer. Ptolemey’s Almagest (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998)
2. The History of Time (Leofranc Holfrod-Strevens).
3. al-Biruni (1879). The chronology of ancient nations: an English version of the Arabic text “Vestiges of the Past”. London: W.H. Allen, 147-149. OCLC 9986841.
4. Matthew Bennett, Michael F. Schatz, Heidi Rockwood and Kurt Wiesenfeld, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 2002 458, 563-579.
5. Ian Whitelaw. A Measure of All Things: The Story of Man and Measurement, St. Martin’s Press, 2007.
6. http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/meter.html
7. www.bipm.org/eng/home

The words khalq (creation) and khuluq (nature) are derived from the same root word. Khalq relates to the external form or appearance, the visible, material, and experienced dimension of existence; khuluq is concerned with the spiritual dimension, meaning, or content. An individual cannot be judged or known by his or her outer appearance, for one’s real identity lies in one’s character, temperament, and natural disposition. However many different images one may project; one’s true character or temperament eventually will reveal itself. How meaningful are the following words of an Arab poet of the pre-Islamic Age of Ignorance:

If a man has a bad quality, sooner or later it will reveal itself;

Let him continue to think that it can remain hidden.

In other words, the outer appearance is deceiving, for one’s natural disposition removes or corrects all deceptions and thereby reveals one’s true nature. Since one may acquire a second nature through education and habituation, moralists divide nature into good and bad. In the present context, we use “nature” to mean “good nature.”

The most correct standard of a good spiritual life, one that Sufism uses to describe or qualify a person, is good nature. One who has taken a few steps forward in good nature may be regarded as advanced in the spiritual life. Although miracles, dazzling stations, and superhuman actions may be acceptable when they issue from good nature, they are worthless if not combined with good nature.

When asked which believer was better on account of his or her belief, the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, answered: “The one who is better in conduct or nature.” This is natural, because God praises and consoles His most distinguished servant the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, not with His extraordinary favors but with his laudable virtues and praiseworthy qualities, declaring: You stand on an exalted standard of character (68:4). His nature was the aim and fruit of his creation. Since the Prophet’s conduct embodied Islam and the Quran, when his wife Aisha, may God be pleased with her, was asked about his conduct by Sa’id ibn Hisham, she answered: “Do you not read the Quran? His conduct is (the embodiment of) the Quran.”

The verse: You stand on an exalted standard of character (68:4) shows that the incomparable conduct of the Prophet was based on the Quran. In addition to his outer and inner faculties and senses, and the material and immaterial aspects of his creation and character, the Prophet was endowed with all potentialities needed to be the most forward and greatest representative of human virtue. Developing these potentials to the highest degree possible, he attained the highest degree of human perfection.

Not content with this state, as is declared in the verse: Surely, in the Messenger of God you have a good example for him who hopes for God and the Last Day, and remembers God much (33:21), he established the most excellent example for his followers and thereby gradually transformed them into the most virtuous community of all time. With such sayings as: “The most perfect in belief among the believers are the most perfect in conduct” ; “A man can cross with good conduct the distances which he cannot with acts of worship and adoration” ; and: “The first virtue to be weighed in the Balance (in the other world) is good conduct,” and by employing the perfect, fruitful principles he brought to perfect humanity, he guided his followers to the realms where angels move.

The signs of good nature have been summarized as follows: a person possessing this quality does not hurt anybody by either word or deed, overlooks those who hurt him or her and forgets the evils done, and returns evil with good. The Prophet, upon him be peace and blessings, who is praised with the verse: You stand on an exalted standard of character (68:4), is the most excellent example of these virtues. He was not offended by the one who stood before him and told him to be just, by the one who pulled his robe from the back and hurt him, by the one who threw dust on his head and insulted him, or by the one who slandered his innocent and beloved wife Aisha. In fact, he visited each of these individuals when they became ill and followed their funeral processions. He did so because good nature was a dimension of his blessed existence.

Many people seem to be good natured, mild-mannered, and humanitarian, although good conduct and mildness are no more than affectations. When they experience a little irritation, anger, or harsh treatment, their true nature will be revealed. One who has good nature does not change his or her manners even when in a hellish state, but remains mild and shows no harshness. A heart open to good nature is like a very broad space in which one can bury one’s anger and rage. As for those intolerant and impatient ones who display bad conduct, they are, like Cain, more stupid than the raven, and can find no place to bury their anger, hatred, and ill feelings.

Let us conclude this discussion with the following couplet:

It is by good nature that a man can be perfected;

It is by good nature that the order of the world is maintained.

Notes

1. Sulayman ibn Ash’as al-Sijistani Abu Dawud, Sunan Abi Dawud, 4 vols. (Beirut, n.d.), 14; Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 2:250.
2. Muslim, “Musafirin,” 139.
3. Abu Dawud, Sunan, 14; Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 2:250.
4. Al-Haythami, Majma’ al-Zawa’id, 8:24.
5. ‘Ala al-Din ‘Ali al-Muttaqi al-Hindi, Kanz al-’Ummal fi Sunan al-Aqwal wa al-Af ‘al, 8 vols. (Beirut: 1985), hadith no. 5160.
6. Al-Bukhari, “Adab,” 95; Muslim, “Zakat,” 142.
7. Al-Bukhari, “Khumus,” 19; Muslim, “Zakat,” 142.
8. Al-Bukhari, “Shahada,” 15; Muslim, “Tawba,” 56.
9. Abu Dawud, “Jana’iz,” 1.