al-Ṣaffāt

اِنَّا زَيَّنَّا السَّمَآءَ الدُّنْيَا بِزِينَةٍ الْكَوَاكِبِ

وَحِفْظاً مِن كُلّ‌ِ شَيْطَانٍ مَّارِدٍ

6. “Verily We have adorned the lower heaven with the adornment of the stars.”

7. “And to preserve against every rebel Satan;”

The adornment of the heaven of the world is a reflection of the Lordship of Allah. The man’s willing to adornment and beauty is among his natural inclinations, and the Qur’an has verified it. This holy verse says:

Verily, a look at the sky at night, when it is dark and the stars are seen, will show man a very beautiful scenery that it fascinates him to itself. As if they speak with us by dumb language and reiterate the secrets of Divine creation. It seems all of them were poets and constantly made the most beautiful amatory and gnostic poems. Their nictitating express some secrets that exist nowhere but between a lover and a beloved.

Truly the scenery of the stars of the sky is so beautiful that never the eyes become tired from seeing them, on the contrary, they send out fatigue from the man’s body, although in our Age when the citizens of large cities are living in the smoke of the factories, and the like, and naturally they have a dark and black sky, these interesting subjects are not so meaningful. But the villagers can still observe the concept of this verse of the Qur’an which says that the lower heaven is adorned with the adornment of the bright stars.

It is interesting that, in this verse, He says:

While the hypothesis which dominated the thoughts of the scholars at that time said that only the higher sky was the sky of stars and planets: (according to hypothesis of Ptolemy, the eighth sky). But as we know, the nullification of this hypothesis has been proved and that the Qur’an did not follow the wrong famous hypotheses of that time is itself a living miracle delivered by this heavenly Book. Another interesting point is that from the view point of the modern science it is certain that the beautiful nictitating act of stars is as a reason of the air which has covered all around the earth and makes them to do so, and this meaning completely fits with the Qur’anic phrase /as-sama’-ud-duniya/ (the lower heaven).

But outside the atmosphere of the earth, the stars gaze and they lack sparkle. The next verse refers to the protection of the sky from the penetration of Satans. It implicitly says that Allah preserves the heaven from every corrupt Satan who is far from any benevolence. It says:

The Arabic word /marid/ is derived from /mard/ which originally means ‘a high land empty of any kind of plant’. A tree that is bare of its leaves, in Arabic, is called /’amrad/, that is why for the young man on whose face has grown no hair this word is usually used. Here, in this verse, the purpose of /marid/ is the one who has no benevolence, or, in other words, ‘has nothing’. We know that one of the ways of protecting the sky from Satans is by a group of stars called in Arabic /šuhub/ which will be dealt with in later verses.