In the Western world one often hears that science and religion stand opposed as adversaries. The one is said to be the path to truth, the other merely the path of faith. Science is said to advance, while faith lags behind and rather holds progress back. Among Muslims there is an opposing endeavour: to search every verse for a scientific miracle and thereby to seek, as it were, to prove Islam. Prayer becomes a means of preventing arthrosis, fasting a programme of cellular cleansing, and to every ʿibāda one pins its measurable benefit. However well meant this is, it strips worship of its true core. For we do not pray because it helps the joints, but because Allah taʿālā has commanded it of us. The benefit may be there, but it is not the reason.
Between these two errors stands a small, scarcely noticed incident from the life of the Prophet ﷺ. When his son Ibrāhīm died in childhood, the sun was eclipsed that same day. For the people the conclusion lay close at hand: that heaven itself was mourning the son of the Messenger of Allah. An impostor would have seized this moment and declared the darkened sun a sign of his own greatness. The truthful Prophet ﷺ, however, did the opposite. He said:
إِنَّ الشَّمْسَ وَالْقَمَرَ آيَتَانِ مِنْ آيَاتِ اللَّهِ، لَا يَنْكَسِفَانِ لِمَوْتِ أَحَدٍ وَلَا لِحَيَاتِهِ.
Truly, the sun and the moon are two signs among the signs of Allah. They do not eclipse for the death or the life of anyone.
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 1043, Book 16, Hadith 4 · Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 915, Book 10, Hadith 31
Within this one sentence lie hundreds of wisdoms. Today we wish to devote ourselves to just a single aspect of it. There is a domain of guidance, of Hudā and Hidāya: who the human being is, what he lives for, what constitutes the meaning and worth of his existence. This is the domain of revelation, as Allah has given it to us in the Quran and through His Messenger ﷺ. And there is the domain of nature and its laws: how the universe moves, how the body functions, why a sun is eclipsed.
Both are to be examined with the intellect, but in different ways. With revelation, it falls to the intellect to understand and to apply it. With nature, it is to observe, to form conjectures, to investigate, to test by experiment and to intervene and give shape. This is why the truthful Prophet ﷺ did not draw the solar eclipse into revelation. He let it be what it is: a process within creation, which the human being is to understand as such, without artificially relating it to revelation or to the meaning of man, as the astrologers wrongly do.
These two domains never contradict one another. They are two perspectives on the same reality, and they bear one another up. The Hadith that Allah has sent down a cure for every illness is revelation:
مَا أَنْزَلَ اللَّهُ دَاءً إِلَّا أَنْزَلَ لَهُ شِفَاءً
Allah has not sent down a disease without also sending down a cure for it.
Sahih al-Bukhari 5678, Book 76, Hadith 1
To seek this cure, to research it and to discover it, is science, and in doing so the Muslim is driven by revelation. Administering the medicine is science; the supplication that accompanies it is revelation. Whoever does only the one neglects the other.
As healthcare professionals we experience this every day. In science we regard the human body as a biological organism, a structure of cells, organs and feedback loops, which we research and treat. Out of Īmān we regard the same body as a servant of Allah, as creation, as a being brought into existence for the test and for worship. Whoever studies creation understands the creation of Allah better.
The Quran calls upon us again and again to look closely:
إِنَّ فِي خَلْقِ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ وَاخْتِلَافِ اللَّيْلِ وَالنَّهَارِ لَآيَاتٍ لِّأُولِي الْأَلْبَابِ
Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of the night and the day are signs for those of understanding.
Surah Ali 'Imran 3:190
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the same word stands both for the verses of the Quran and for the signs in nature: āyāt. The One who revealed the verses of the Quran and made of them a book of guidance is also the Author of nature. He has written its order and its laws like signs meant to bring us to wonder, just as the Quran does in many places. The former are the signs of revelation, the latter the signs within creation. Both stem from the same One, and both invite us to look and to reflect.
The Ḥakīm unites these two aspects within his character. He understands the āyāt in the Book of Allah and the āyāt in His creation, and joins the two into an inseparable whole.
