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In His Name, be He glorified! And there is nothing but it glorifies Him with praise.(17:44)

[Part of a letter sent to the well-known student of his. (*)]

Fifthly: You wrote in one of your letters to me that you wanted to share my feelings here, so listen now to one thousandth of them.

One night at the height of a hundred-storey building in my tree-house at the top of a cedar tree, I looked at the beautiful face of the heavens gilded with stars and saw an elevated light of miraculousness and brilliant secret of eloquence in the All-Wise Qur’an’s oath of, So verily I call to witness the planets * That recede, go forth, or hide.(81:15- 16)

This verse, which refers to the planets and their being concealed and spread abroad, displays to the gaze of observers an elevated embroidery full of art and an exalted, instructive tapestry.

The planets emerge from the sphere of the sun, their commander, and entering that of the fixed stars, display fresh embroideries and instances of art in the skies. Sometimes they come shoulder to shoulder with another star like themselves and display a beautiful situation. At other times they enter among the small stars and assume the position of commander. Especially in this season after evening, Venus on the horizon, and before the early dawn one of its shining companions, display a truly graceful and lovely scene. Later, after carrying out their duties as inspectors and acting as shuttles in the tapestries of art, they return, and entering the dazzling sphere of the sun, hide themselves.

Now they demonstrate as brilliantly as the sun the majestic dominicality and glittering divine sovereignty of the One who spins this earth of ours and the planets described in the above verse with perfect order in space, each like a ship or aeroplane. See that majestic dominion which has under its sway ships and aeroplanes a thousand times larger than the earth, and that travel thousands of times faster.

You can see from this what an elevated happiness, what a great honour, it is to be connected to such a Monarch through worship and belief, and to be his guest.

Then I looked at the moon and saw a shining light of miraculousless in the verse,And the moon, We have measured for her mansions till she returns like the old lower part of a date stalk.(36:39)Indeed, the determining, rotating, regulating, and illuminating of the moon, and its positioning in regard to the earth and the sun with precise reckoning is so wonderful, so astonishing, that nothing at all could be difficult for the All-Powerful One who orders and determines it thus. It instructs all beings with intelligence who behold it, conveying to them the idea that the One who makes it thus can surely do everything.

It follows the sun and does not deviate from its path even for a second, or lag behind one iota in its duties. It makes those who observe it carefully exclaim: “Glory be to the One whose art bewilders the mind!” Especially when like at the end of May it comes into conjunction with the Pleiades in the shape of a fine crescent, appearing as the curved white branch of a date-palm, and the Pleiades appear as a bunch of grapes, it conjures up in the imagination the existence of a huge luminous tree behind the veil of the green heavens. As if the pointed tip of one of the tree’s branches had pierced the veil and stuck out its head together with its bunch of grapes and become the Pleiades and the crescent moon, and the other stars had become the fruits of that hidden tree. See the subtlety and eloquence of the metaphor of: “Like the old lower part of a date stalk.”

Then this verse occurred to me,He it is who has made the earth submissive to you, so traverse you its tracts,(67:15)which suggests that the earth is a mastered ship or mount. From this I saw myself high up in a huge ship speeding through space. I recited the verse,Glory be to Him Whom has subjected these to us, for we could never have accomplished this,(43:13)which it is Sunna to recite when mounting such means of transport as horses or ships. (*)

I saw that with its motion the globe of the earth had assumed the position of a projector showing images as in the cinema; it brought into movement all the heavens and began to mobilize all the stars like a magnificent army. It shows such lofty scenes that it intoxicates those who think and fills them with wonder. “Glory be to God!”, I exclaimed, “what numerous, vast, strange, wonderful, and elevated works are performed at so little expense!” Two subtle points concerning belief occurred to me after this:

The First: A few days ago I was asked a question by a guest: the gist of it, which inferred doubt, was this: Paradise and Hell are a great distance away. Through divine grace, the people of Paradise will pass through the resurrection like lightning or as swiftly as Buraq, and enter Paradise. But the people of Hell, how will they go, with their ponderous bodies, loaded down with the heavy burdens of their sins? How will they travel?

What occurred to me was this: if for example all nations are invited to a general congress in America and each boards a huge boat and goes there, in the same way, the globe, which travels the long distance of twenty-five thousand years in one year in the vast ocean of the universe, will take on its people, travel to the field of the resurrection, and disembark them.

Furthermore, the Hell at the centre of the earth is indicated by the fact that the earth’s temperature increases one degree every thirty- three metres. That Hell will pour its fire into the Greater Hell, whose temperature of two hundred thousand degrees is similar to that described in Hadith and according to Hadiths will carry out some of the duties of the Greater Hell in this world and the Intermediate Realm. (*)

Then at a divine command, the earth will be transformed into a better, eternal form, and will become one of the habitations of the hereafter.

The Second Point which comes to mind: it is the custom of the All-Powerful Maker, the All-Wise Creator, the Single One of Unity, in order to demonstrate the perfection of His power and beauty of His wisdom and proofs of His unit y, to perform many works with very little and to have large duties carried out by small things.

As I have said in some of the Words, if all things are attributed to a single being, they become so easy as to be necessary. Whereas if they are attributed to numerous makers and causes, as many difficulties arise as to make them impossible. For a single person like an officer or master builder easily positions numerous soldiers or numerous stones with a single act, a single movement, and obtains a result. But if, in order to obtain those positions and results, it is referred to the soldiers in the army or the stones of the dome, which is without support, they could be achieved only with truly numerous acts, numerous difficulties, and great confusion.

And so, if such acts as the whirling and rotations, the circulation and revolutions, and the glorification-scattering promenading and excursions of the four seasons and day and night in the universe are ascribed to unity, then by impelling a single globe with a single command, a Single Being can obtain those elevated situations and exalted results. He can display the wonders of art in the alternation of the seasons, and the marvels of wisdom in the revolutions of day and night, and the graceful spectacles in the apparent motions of the stars, sun, and moon. For the army of all beings is His. If He wishes, He may appoint a soldier like the earth to be commander of all the stars, make the mighty sun a lamp furnishing heat and light for his people, and the four seasons, which are tablets of the inscriptions of His power, as shuttles, and night and day, which are pages for the writings of His wisdom, He can make into bows. By showing each day the moon in a different shape, He makes it a calendar for reckoning time. And just as He makes the stars adorned, elegant, shining lanterns in the hands of the angels, dancing in ecstasy, so too He demonstrates many instances of wisdom that look to the earth.

If these situations are not sought from One Being whose command, order, law, and regulation address all beings, then all the suns and stars would have to cut an infinite distance each day with actual motion and infinite speed.

It is because of the infinite ease in unity and infinite difficult y in multiplicit y that businessmen and industrialists give a unity to multiplicity and so make things easy; that is, they form companies.

In Short: There are infinite difficulties in the way of misguidance, and infinite ease in the way of unity.

The Eternal One, He is the Eternal One!

Said Nursî

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