The Mirror of the Excellences of Islam — Page 178
PREFACE FOOTNOTE 177 same way, some clear and manifest acts of God Almighty are witnesses over His hidden acts. AUTHOR'S MARGIN NOTE All the oaths taken by Allah in the Holy Quran are meant to cite things from His law of nature as witnesses in support of His command- ments or to manifest the truthfulness of the abstract and obtuse verities by citing the manifest and universally accepted. Therefore, in the Noble Quran, He has repeatedly presented His manifest acts to witness the hidden side of His actions in the form of an oath. We cannot say that God has taken an oath of something other than Himself, for He, in fact, swears by His own works and not by anything else—and His acts are nothing distinct and apart from Him. For example, His swearing by the heavens or the stars is not understood to be an oath of something other than Himself; rather, it is meant to point out that all the wisdom and workmanship of His hands found in the heavens and the stars is evidence to explain some of His other unseen acts. So, in fact, such oaths of Almighty God, which exist in the Quran as having been taken by God, are abounding with many deep spiritual secrets. And, as I have just explained, to give these expla- nations the form of an oath is to supply a type of witness which takes the place of an eyewitness. AUTHOR'S MARGIN NOTE The oaths taken by God Almighty in the Holy Quran where some of His creations are cited, there also lies the wisdom of drawing to the attention of man that all these Words and deeds flow from the same fountain. Similarly, some works of God Almighty serve as evidence for some of His other works so that, in order to explain the deep secrets of His spiritual realm, God recites evidence of the obvious phenomena of nature in the garb of an oath to make the law of nature—namely, the Book of God's Deeds bear witness to His Book of Words, and, thus, to furnish the sincere seeker with additional certainty of knowledge and belief through the accord prevailing between His Word and Deed. And this is a common practice of the Glorious God in the Noble Quran, that He frequently cites evidence of natural phenomena prevailing firmly