Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 605
UNVEILING OF THE ‘UNSEEN'. BY THE QURAN - A HISTORIC PERSPECTIVE. H. UMAN KNOWLEDGE is surrounded on all sides by a limitless expanse of the 'unseen'. What man knows of his past, present and future is like a tiny spot of light no bigger than the pulsating tail of a firefly hung in the midst of a vast ocean of utter darkness. . Although he seems to have extended the horizon of his knowledge to the very edges of the universe with the help of astrophysics and higher mathematics, the factual evidence that has just started to reach him from the edge of the universe is through signals which were emitted around eighteen to twenty billion light years ago. What may have happened there since or what may be happening there now, is only a matter of conjecture. . Let alone the past and the future, even the knowledge of the present lies mostly beyond the scope of human awareness. What does man truly know of the events taking place beyond his house, his street, his township and the country where he resides? All the news media put together cannot convey to him even a billionth of what is going on in the world around him. But that is not all. What does man really know of the people he seems to know among his friends and closest relatives? To penetrate across the human visage and to read what actually lies behind, is sometimes a more difficult exercise than watching the surface of a muddy pond in an attempt to see what hides beneath. In both cases, one merely sees the images reflected on the surface, the difference being that ponds cannot act, they cannot pose, they cannot wilfully create unreal impressions. 567