Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 352
LIFE IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF QURANIC REVELATIONS – A BRIEF INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. The following verse from. Surah. Al-Inshiqāq addressing humans, promises them that theirs is a continuous journey of moving on from stage to stage: لَتَرْكَبُنَّ طَبَقًا عَنْ طَبَقٍ * 84:20. That you shall assuredly pass on from one stage to another. ³. This is the all-embracing plan of Creation. At different stages of evolution, the processes that governed and shaped life were different but their direction remained the same always pointing at man. . This is an important topic which has been the subject of much debate amongst various scientists and religious scholars who seek to unravel the mysteries of the origin of life. Various scenarios have been proposed and experiments carried out which attempt to simulate the conditions resulting in the creation of organisms billions of years ago from an entirely lifeless earth. To that we shall return later. . Presently we propose to confine ourselves to a brief account of the Quranic concept of how life originated and evolved on earth. Some observations relevant to this subject have been gathered from various verses of the Holy Quran. . This serves the double purpose of illustrating the role of the. Quran in transferring parts of the 'unknown' to the realm of the known and to assist the specialists in this field of knowledge to benefit from Quranic guidance. . We shall begin by noting that many a time when the. Quran speaks of some earlier forms of creation, it refers to them as the creation of man while whatever was created at that time had no semblance to him. In fact, all the landmarks of creation have been likewise referred to, as human creations because right from the beginning it was 341