Is there life on other planets? Will we be able to communicate with them? Will we live in harmony together? Will we ever meet? These are some of the questions that spring to mind when we ponder over extraterrestrial life.
The human imagination soars when watching record-breaking blockbusters like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, Alien and Avatar. Best-selling authors such as Erich Von Daniken attempt to prove the existence of aliens based on ancient artefacts and texts of earlier civilisations. The world-wide web is awash with accounts of UFO and alien sightings.
NASA has sent the space probes, Voyagers 1 and 2, as ambassadors for humanity. They each carry a golden record that contains pictures and sounds of Earth in 51 languages, along with maps giving the location of Earth. The record is intended as an interstellar message to alien civilizations. Today, the spacecraft are already over 17 billion km away from earth and still zooming at 20 times the speed of a bullet towards interstellar space.
Scientists around the world are spending millions of dollars searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life in space exploration programs like SETI. Even a superficial study of our preoccupation with aliens will show that we appear to have an instinctive urge to resolve the question ‘Is there life out there?’
Over 1400 years ago, in the vast desert of Arabia, an astonishing text made its appearance. Known as the Holy Qur’an, it prophetically answered the question which no one was asking then, but in the space age is agitating the minds of billions.
In a chapter aptly called Mutual Consultation in which is written:
“And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth,
and of whatever living creatures (da'bbah) He has spread forth in both.
And He has the power to gather them together when He will so please” [42:30]
“Da'bbah covers all animals which creep or move along the surface of the earth. It does not apply to animals which fly or swim. It is certainly not applicable to any form of spiritual life. In Arabic a ghost will never be referred to as da'bbah, nor an angel for that matter.
The second part of the same verse speaks not only of the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but it categorically declares that it does exist - a claim which even the most modern scientific researchers have not been able to make so far with any measure of certainty.
Yet, this is not all that this verse reveals. Wonder upon wonder is added when we read at the end of this verse, that He (Allah) will bring together the life in the heavenly bodies and the life on earth when He so pleases. ...Only the future will tell how and when this contact will take place, but the very fact that more than fourteen hundred years ago such a possibility was even predicted is miraculous in itself.
This revelation of the Quran was made at a time when cosmology as a science was not yet born. A different age of conjectural visualization prevailed which had to go a long way before it could contemplate the existence of extraterrestrial life. Even today such claims are only found in science fiction.”
[Extracts from Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth by Mirza Tahir Ahmad, Chapter: The Quran and Extraterrestrial Life]
Click here to read Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge and Truth
Zubair Ahmed - Founder of THE AHMADIYYA POST
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