“He Who Made the Night and the Day”

A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Commentary on Sūrat al-Qaṣaṣ 28:71–75

With Insights from the Polar Extremities of the Earth

Presented by Claude

ABSTRACT

Quranic verses 28:71–75 present one of the most penetrating rhetorical and cosmological challenges in sacred literature: what would become of human civilization if the night were made perpetual, or if the day were made unending? This commentary reads those verses through three interlocking lenses — scientific, philosophical, and theological — and enriches the analysis with empirical data drawn from the most extreme habitable and extreme geographic places on Earth: Longyearbyen in Svalbard (Norway), Dikson in Russia, Utqiagvik in Alaska, and the Geographic North and South Poles. These locations, unknown to the ancient world yet now meticulously documented, constitute an unintended laboratory in which the Quranic thought-experiment is partially realized every year. The findings are striking: where polar night descends for months, human communities experience biological disruption, psychological crisis, sociological strain, and a primordial sense of cosmic helplessness that no technology fully resolves. Where midnight sun reigns for equal stretches, rest dissolves, the rhythms of the body collapse, and the gift of darkness becomes painfully apparent. The commentary argues that these polar realities are not merely scientific curiosities but serve as embodied, geographic āyāt — “signs” — that illuminate the Quranic text from an angle its first hearers could not have imagined but that the text, with remarkable precision, seems to have anticipated. The essay concludes with a thematic epilogue on gratitude, contingency, and the theological significance of alternation itself as a divine mercy that holds civilisation together.

THE TEXT: SŪRAT AL-QAṢAṢ 28:71–75

The following translation is used as the working text, with the Arabic embedded where precision requires it:

[71] Qul: ara’aytum in ja’ala Allāhu ‘alaykum al-layla sarmadan ilā yawm al-qiyāmati man ilāhun ghayr Allāhi ya’tīkum bi-ḍiyā’in, afalā tasma’ūn. “Say: Have you considered — if Allah were to make the night unceasing over you until the Day of Resurrection, what deity other than Allah could bring you light? Will you not then hear?”

[72] Qul: ara’aytum in ja’ala Allāhu ‘alaykum al-nahāra sarmadan ilā yawm al-qiyāmati man ilāhun ghayr Allāhi ya’tīkum bi-laylatin taskunu fīhā, afalā tubṣirūn. “Say: Have you considered — if Allah were to make the day unceasing over you until the Day of Resurrection, what deity other than Allah could bring you night in which you may rest? Will you not then see?”

[73] Wa min raḥmatihi ja’ala lakum al-layla wa al-nahāra litaskunū fīhi wa litabtaghū min faḍlihi wa la’allakum tashkurūn. “And out of His mercy He has made for you the night and the day — that you may rest therein, and that you may seek of His bounty — and so that you may be grateful.”

[74] Wa yawma yunādīhim fa-yaqūlu ayna shurakā’ī alladhīna kuntum taz’umūn. “And on the Day when He shall call to them and say: ‘Where are My partners — those you used to claim?’”

[75] Wa naza’nā min kulli ummatin shahīdan fa-qulnā hātū burhānakum fa-‘alimū anna al-ḥaqqa lillāhi wa ḍalla ‘anhum mā kānū yaftarūn. “And We shall extract from every nation a witness and say: ‘Bring your proof.’ Then they shall know that truth belongs to Allah, and all that they used to fabricate will have abandoned them.”

These five verses occupy a remarkable pivot within the Sūra. The chapter has narrated the stories of Mūsā (Moses) and Fir’awn (Pharaoh), explored themes of divine rescue and temporal power, and has been building toward a cosmological crescendo. With verse 71, the argumentation shifts from narrative to interrogative, from historical illustration to cosmic reasoning.

I. SCIENTIFIC COMMENTARY

1.1 The Physics of the Alternation of Night and Day

The Quran’s hypothetical — an unending night or an unending day — is not scientifically absurd. It is in fact realizable by altering three fundamental parameters of Earth’s configuration: (a) the cessation of Earth’s axial rotation, (b) the extreme amplification of the axial tilt, or (c) a locked orbital resonance of the type already observed on other bodies. Each of these has observable analogues or physical plausibility.

Tidal locking is the mechanism by which one celestial body always presents the same face toward another because its rotational period has synchronized with its orbital period. The Moon is tidally locked to Earth. Mercury is in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance with the Sun. Several of the most celebrated exoplanets in the so-called habitable zone of their stars — TRAPPIST-1b, TRAPPIST-1c, Proxima Centauri b — are believed to be tidally locked, meaning one hemisphere bakes in perpetual daylight and the other endures eternal night, with only a thin twilight belt between them.

Climate modeling of tidally locked planets reveals precisely what the Quran warns of. The permanent dayside develops runaway thermal convection, catastrophic evaporation of surface water, and eventually a condition hostile to life. The permanent nightside freezes to temperatures approaching those of interstellar space, causing atmosphere to condense and collapse. The terminator line — that perpetual twilight — becomes the only zone where conditions marginally permit liquid water. Between these two zones, there is no night, no rest for the dayside, no warmth for the nightside, and no civilization for either.

Earth’s axial tilt (currently about 23.5°) is the engine that drives seasons and that produces, at the poles, the partial approximation of the Quranic hypothetical. As tilt increases toward 90°, the polar extremes of perpetual night and perpetual day migrate down toward the equator. Were Earth’s tilt to become 90°, the planet would roll on its side like Uranus, and every region on Earth would at various times of year experience months of uninterrupted darkness and months of uninterrupted light. The thought-experiment of the verse would become the daily reality of every human being on the planet.

1.2 Biological Imperative: The Body Cannot Survive Perpetual Light or Darkness

The human organism is not merely inconvenienced by the removal of the diurnal cycle — it is physiologically destabilized at a fundamental level. The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a paired cluster of approximately 20,000 neurons in the hypothalamus, functions as the master biological clock of the body. It receives light signals directly from the retina via the retinohypothalamic tract and uses the alternation of light and darkness to calibrate the secretion of melatonin from the pineal gland. This cascading hormonal system governs sleep architecture, immune modulation, cortisol rhythms, cellular repair processes (which predominantly occur during deep sleep), reproductive cycles, thermoregulation, and metabolic homeostasis.

Perpetual darkness would remove the primary entrainment signal for the SCN. Without the photic reset provided by sunrise, the human circadian clock — which runs on approximately a 24.2-hour intrinsic period, not exactly 24 hours — would begin to drift. Within weeks, sleep and wakefulness would become decoupled from the solar day. Within months, deep circadian disruption would manifest as immune suppression, elevated cortisol leading to cardiovascular risk, depressive episodes of clinical severity, and metabolic disorders. Research on submarine crews, Antarctic winter-overs, and polar night communities consistently documents this degradation.

Perpetual light is no less destructive. Melatonin, which requires darkness for secretion, is not merely a sleep hormone. It is a powerful antioxidant and a regulator of tumor suppressor genes. Epidemiological studies of shift workers — who are exposed to light during biological night — show elevated rates of breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and metabolic syndrome. The World Health Organization classified night-shift work as a probable carcinogen precisely because of disrupted circadian-melatonin cycles. An eternal day would, over decades, constitute a chronic carcinogenic and immunosuppressive environment for the entire human species.

The Quranic phrase taskunu fīhi — “that you may rest therein [the night]” — is, from a chronobiological perspective, extraordinarily precise. The night is not merely a cultural convenience for sleep. It is a biological necessity encoded in the architecture of the nervous system, the immune system, and the endocrine system. The gift of night is the gift of physiological restoration.

1.3 Atmospheric and Ecological Consequences

The alternation of day and night drives planetary-scale atmospheric circulation. The differential heating of Earth’s surface between its sunlit and shadowed hemispheres powers the Hadley, Ferrel, and Polar cells of global wind circulation. These drive ocean currents. Ocean currents distribute heat from equatorial regions to polar regions, moderating temperature extremes globally. The Gulf Stream, for instance, which keeps Northwestern Europe — including Svalbard itself — far warmer than its latitude would otherwise permit, is ultimately powered by thermohaline circulation that depends on the global thermal engine of differential illumination.

An unending day on one hemisphere would generate a permanent and escalating thermal gradient. Models suggest that within decades, atmospheric pressure differentials would produce hurricane-force permanent winds at the terminator boundary. The dayside oceans would evaporate; the water vapor would migrate to the nightside and freeze out, potentially causing a runaway “water trap” that strips the dayside of moisture and buries the nightside under ice kilometers thick. Plant life — which requires both photosynthesis and photoperiodic darkness to flower, fruit, and complete reproductive cycles — would collapse, taking with it the entire foundation of the food chain. The Quranic rhetorical question — “what deity other than Allah could bring you light?” — can be read as presupposing that light alone, without its complement of darkness, is insufficient for life. Light without darkness is as catastrophic as darkness without light. The mercy lies in their alternation.

II. THE POLAR WITNESS: FOUR PLACES WHERE THE VERSE LIVES

2.1 Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway (78.2°N): 113 Days of Polar Night

Longyearbyen is the world’s northernmost permanently inhabited town of significant size, sitting at 78.2° North latitude in the Svalbard archipelago midway between continental Norway and the North Pole. With a population of approximately 2,500 people, it is the closest accessible human settlement to an unbroken polar night of any sizeable community on Earth. Each year, from late October through mid-February — approximately 113 days — the sun does not rise above the horizon. For an additional period on either side of this extreme, the sun rises barely above the horizon, providing only a dim twilight arc that gives little useful illumination.

The experience of this darkness is not a minor seasonal inconvenience. It is a confrontation with cosmic scale that residents and researchers describe in terms that echo the Quranic warning almost exactly. The darkness is total, not merely dim. The town’s street lamps, lit around the clock, create small islands of amber warmth against a blackness that extends to the horizon in every direction. Without them — without the diesel generators, the electric grid, the artificial light that the town collectively maintains against the void — Longyearbyen would vanish into the same darkness that surrounds it.

Psychologists studying Longyearbyen’s population have documented what is clinically termed “polar night depression” or more formally, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) at rates significantly higher than temperate-zone populations. Research by Norwegian and international teams has documented disrupted circadian phase, elevated rates of irritability, social withdrawal, hypersomnia alternating with insomnia, and a pervasive sense of cosmic oppression that many residents describe as deeply unlike any darkness they had previously experienced. The town has institutionalized coping mechanisms — communal light festivals, the celebratory “Sun Party” (Solfesten) held on the first day the sun crests the surrounding mountains in early March — that are, in effect, rituals of gratitude for the return of light. The theological resonance is difficult to miss.

Verse 71 asks: “What deity other than Allah could bring you light?” In Longyearbyen in December, no human technology brings the light. The generators and lamps create a facsimile of it. They fend off darkness; they do not replace the sun. The 113-day experience of solar absence makes viscerally clear that artificial light, however sophisticated, is a borrowing against the real thing, not a substitute. When residents emerge on that first March morning to see the actual solar disk, even briefly, many report involuntary tears — a physiological and emotional response to something the verse would describe as an act of divine mercy being restored.

Furthermore, Longyearbyen’s experience of the polar winter illustrates the economic and social degradation predicted by the Quranic hypothetical. The town’s function — mining historically, tourism and research currently — slows dramatically during the darkest months. Agricultural production within the archipelago is impossible. Food, energy, equipment, and personnel must all be imported, at enormous logistical cost, across the frozen sea. The supply infrastructure that sustains the town against the dark is a monument to human ingenuity and yet simultaneously a demonstration of its limits: all of this effort merely maintains stasis. No technology restores the warmth, the vitamin D synthesis, the circadian entrainment, or the ecological productivity that the absent sun would freely provide.

The midnight sun of Longyearbyen — the inverse experience, from mid-April to late August, approximately 113 days during which the sun does not set — provides an equally vivid illustration of verse 72’s complementary warning. Residents during the polar summer report profound disruption of sleep. The body, designed to read darkness as a signal for melatonin secretion, receives none. The mountains and windows are hung with blackout curtains; people wear sleep masks; pharmacies stock melatonin supplements. A town that, in winter, desperately craves light now desperately craves darkness. “What deity other than Allah could bring you night in which you may rest?” In Longyearbyen’s midnight sun, this is not an abstract theological question. It is a pressing practical need.

2.2 Dikson, Russia (73.5°N): 80 Days of Polar Night

Dikson is a settlement on the Taymyr Peninsula of Siberia, on the Kara Sea coast, at 73.5° North. Once a significant Soviet Arctic port and administrative centre, it has shrunk dramatically since the Soviet era to a few hundred permanent residents — a ghost town of the Arctic, surrounded by the tundra’s vast silences. It endures approximately 80 days of polar night annually.

Dikson’s situation adds a dimension that Longyearbyen’s relative modernity partly obscures: the experience of polar darkness in profound isolation and poverty. Longyearbyen has heated streets, an international airport, well-stocked supermarkets, fast internet, and a functioning civil infrastructure. Dikson has deteriorating Soviet-era apartment blocks, limited resupply, sparse medical facilities, and a population that has largely fled. For those who remain, the 80-day polar night is endured not in the relative comfort of a Norwegian Arctic town but in conditions of austerity, isolation, and exposure to temperatures that can fall to −50°C.

This context extends the Quranic question into its most sociologically raw form. The verse asks what any deity other than Allah could do to bring light. In Dikson, the answer is: very little. The electrical grid is unreliable. When generators fail in the polar night, there is no fallback. The question of light becomes the question of survival, and survival becomes the question of whether anyone comes. In the Quranic eschatological vision of verse 71, unending night until the Day of Resurrection removes the possibility of relief entirely. Dikson’s seasonal ordeal is merely a foretaste — and it is devastating enough. The residents of Dikson live closer to the thought-experiment of the verse than almost any other human community on Earth, and they demonstrate, by their suffering and perseverance, exactly the dimensions of dependency that the verse is invoking.

2.3 Utqiagvik, Alaska (71.3°N): 65 Days of Polar Night

Utqiagvik — formerly known by its colonial name Barrow — is the northernmost city in the United States, located on Alaska’s Arctic coast at 71.3° North. It is home to roughly 5,000 people, including a large Indigenous Iñupiat community whose culture has adapted to the Arctic light regime over thousands of years. Utqiagvik experiences approximately 65 days of polar night annually (early November to mid-January) and a comparable period of midnight sun in summer.

The Iñupiat relationship to the polar night offers a dimension that is philosophically and theologically distinct from the responses of the transient researchers and recent settlers of Longyearbyen and Dikson. The Iñupiat did not merely endure the polar night — they organized their entire cultural, spiritual, and subsistence calendar around it. The darkest period of winter was historically a time of ceremony, storytelling, spiritual practice, and communal gathering, not merely survival. The return of the sun was marked with elaborate rituals. The night itself was not regarded as pure privation but as a time possessing its own character, its own gifts — a period for inwardness, for community, for the transmission of memory and wisdom across generations.

This indigenous epistemology resonates with verse 73 more than the merely instrumental reading: “Out of His mercy He has made for you the night and the day — that you may rest therein, and that you may seek of His bounty, and so that you may be grateful.” The night is a mercy, not merely an absence of light. It has its own positive content: rest, reflection, community, the cultivation of interior life. The Iñupiat understanding of the polar night as carrying its own spiritual density — not merely as a problem to be solved by technology — suggests that the Quranic appreciation of night is richer than a simple on/off toggle between activity and recuperation. The night is itself a domain of divine provision.

The experience of the midnight sun in Utqiagvik is also instructive. During the Arctic summer, the sun rotates above the horizon continuously for over two months. Traditional Iñupiat subsistence activity — hunting, fishing, gathering — historically expanded to fill the available light. The community lived intensively, storing resources against the coming darkness. The wisdom of alternation was embedded in the cultural practice: use the day for bounty, use the night for rest, and know that both are finite, both are gifts, and neither can be taken for granted.

2.4 The Geographic Poles: Six Months of Light, Six Months of Night

At the Geographic North Pole (90°N) and the Geographic South Pole (90°S), the Quranic thought-experiment is realized in its most mathematically pure form. The sun rises once per year, at the spring equinox, and circles the horizon continuously for approximately six months, spiraling gradually upward to reach its maximum elevation at the summer solstice before spiraling back down and setting at the autumn equinox. Then six months of darkness ensue.

No permanent human community exists at the geographic poles. This absence is itself testimony. The American Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station maintains a crew of roughly 40-150 people year-round, but they do so with enormous technological subsidy: thousands of tons of supplies airlifted annually, insulated structures withstanding temperatures below −80°C, and sophisticated psychological support programs designed specifically to manage the six-month polar night. Even so, the challenges are severe. Personnel at the winter-over station are subjected to what researchers call “big eye” — a chronic sleep disruption unique to the polar night — along with neurological changes, hormonal shifts, and a suite of cognitive and emotional challenges documented in the literature as the “winter-over syndrome.”

In the polar context, the theological assertion of verse 71 acquires its most absolute expression: no human technology can replace the sun. At the South Pole in July, with temperatures around −60°C and six months of darkness, the diesel generators, satellite links, insulated suits, and LED lighting are heroic measures in the face of a cosmic reality that no amount of engineering can fundamentally alter. The inhabitants of Amundsen–Scott station are, in the plainest physical sense, dependent on the return of a light that no human institution controls or can manufacture. The verse’s question — “What deity other than Allah could bring you light?” — has, at the geographic poles, a purely empirical answer: none. No deity, no power, no technology.

The Geographic South Pole, specifically, has an additional dimension of significance. The Antarctic winter-over crew is completely cut off from the outside world from mid-February to late October. No aircraft can reach them safely in the polar winter. They cannot leave; no one can come. They are, in terms of rescue and resupply, as isolated from the rest of humanity as the Quranic scenario imagines humanity to be from divine assistance if divine mercy were withdrawn. The psychological literature on Antarctic winter-overs documents the emergence of what researchers call “third-quarter syndrome” — a deterioration of mood, motivation, and interpersonal relations that peaks around the midpoint of the winter isolation, when the end remains so distant as to seem almost hypothetical. This is the phenomenology of despair under unending darkness, rendered clinically and documented scientifically, and it maps with disturbing accuracy onto the existential condition the Quran warns against.

III. PHILOSOPHICAL COMMENTARY

3.1 The Rhetoric of the Hypothetical: Ara’aytum as Philosophical Method

The verses open with a distinctive interrogative formula: ara’aytum — “Have you considered?” or “Have you seen?” This is not merely a conversational opener. It is a philosophical instrument. Classical Islamic rhetoricians (scholars of balāgha) recognized the ara’aytum construction as an istifhām taqrīrī — a rhetorical question designed not to elicit information but to produce insight by compelling the listener to reason through a consequence they would otherwise resist or ignore.

The method is structurally identical to what Western philosophy would later call reductio ad absurdum or, more precisely, the via negativa — the attempt to understand what something is by rigorously imagining what its removal would entail. The Quran does not prove the value of the diurnal alternation by extolling it; it does so by removing it in thought and inviting the listener to experience the catastrophe of that removal imaginatively. This is both rhetorically powerful and philosophically sophisticated. It resembles the Socratic elenchus — the method of refutation by hypothetical — and anticipates the modern philosophical method of “thought experiments” used by figures from Descartes (the Evil Demon) to Rawls (the Veil of Ignorance) to Parfit (personal identity scenarios).

But the Quranic ara’aytum has a distinctive character: it is directed not toward abstract philosophical conclusions but toward gratitude and worship. The thought-experiment serves theology. It is designed to dislodge the listener from the comfortable naïveté of taking cosmic regularity for granted and to relocate them in the existential position of genuine dependency. Philosophy, in this frame, is not a disinterested exercise but a pathway toward a correct orientation of the self before God.

3.2 Contingency and Necessity: The Metaphysics of Alternation

The verses implicitly invoke one of the oldest and most productive distinctions in metaphysics: the distinction between contingency and necessity. The diurnal cycle — the alternation of night and day — is not a logical necessity. It is a contingent feature of the physical universe: it is the way things are, but they could conceivably have been otherwise. A tidally locked Earth, an Earth with a 90° axial tilt, an Earth removed from its current orbital distance from the Sun — all of these are physically conceivable, if not all equally probable.

This contingency is precisely the theological point. If the alternation of night and day were a logical necessity — like the law of non-contradiction or the transitivity of equality — it could not serve as evidence of divine mercy or power. One cannot be grateful for the law of non-contradiction. But one can be grateful for the fact that the sun rises, because the sun’s rising is not guaranteed by logic. It is a feature of the physical world that could have been otherwise, and is maintained by a causal structure that exceeds human control absolutely.

The Avicennian (Ibn Sīnā) distinction between wājib al-wujūd (Necessary Being) and mumkin al-wujūd (Contingent Being) is illuminated here. All created things — including the diurnal cycle, including the axial tilt, including the distance of Earth from the Sun — are contingent beings. They exist, but they might not have. Their existence points toward a Necessary Being who does not merely sustain them contingently but is the ground of their contingent existence. The Quran’s rhetorical removal of the diurnal cycle in the hypothetical of verse 71–72 is, in philosophical terms, a vivid illustration of contingency: if you can meaningfully ask what would happen if the night were endless, then the non-endlessness of the night is a contingent fact, and contingent facts require explanation. The explanation the verse offers is divine mercy.

3.3 The Anthropology of Dependency

There is a deeper philosophical anthropology embedded in these verses. The Quran does not present the human being as a sovereign, self-sufficient rational agent who graciously receives certain cosmic benefits as convenient additions to an otherwise independent existence. Rather, it presents the human being as constitutively dependent — as a creature whose very biological architecture (the need for sleep, for warmth, for food grown under sunlight) reflects a fundamental ontological dependency on conditions that the creature did not create and cannot ultimately control.

This stands in deliberate tension with the Promethean strand of Western modernity — the impulse to master, control, and eventually replace natural conditions with human-made ones. The history of electricity, artificial light, climate control, indoor agriculture, and circadian rhythm management via pharmacology can all be read as attempts to reduce dependency on the natural diurnal cycle. And yet, as the polar research demonstrates, these attempts succeed only within very narrow limits and at very high cost. They fend off the consequences of cosmic absence; they do not replace the cosmic presence. The polar settlements — maintained against the darkness by enormous technological and economic investment — are not evidence of human sovereignty over the cosmic order. They are evidence of the terms under which such sovereignty is attempted and the point at which it fails.

The philosophical anthropology of the verses is thus a critique of what the philosopher Albert Borgmann called the “device paradigm” — the tendency to reduce every human need to a commodity that can be manufactured on demand, thereby disguising the natural focal practices and engagements from which human meaning is drawn. Verse 73 asserts that the night and the day are gifts of mercy, not problems awaiting technological solutions. The proper response is gratitude (tashkurūn), not engineering.

IV. THEOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

4.1 The Tawhidic Argument: Unity, Uniqueness, and Absolute Sovereignty

Theologically, verses 71–72 are framed as a dalīl al-tawḥīd — a proof of divine unity. The argument is elegant: if no deity other than Allah can restore the light when darkness is made permanent, or provide rest when day is made eternal, then the power that regulates the cosmic order is not shared, delegated, or distributed among multiple divine agents. It is singular, indivisible, and absolute. This is the tawhidic argument from cosmic governance (rubūbiyya): the lordship that maintains the conditions of existence is one, and its unity is testified by the fact that no polytheistic alternative can be rationally substituted for it.

The specificity of the two cases — “what deity could bring you light?” and “what deity could bring you night?” — is theologically significant. Many of the polytheistic traditions against which the Quran argued featured solar deities (Ra, Helios, Surya) and nocturnal or chthonic deities (Nyx, Hecate, the moon gods of pre-Islamic Arabia). The verse implicitly indicts the entire framework: none of these deities, in the hypothetical of their own worshipers, could actually do what their cosmic domain supposedly represented. If Ra cannot bring the sun when Allah has removed it, what precisely is Ra? A divine title for a cosmic regularity that Allah maintains — nothing more. The theological argument is thus both a refutation of polytheism and a demonstration that what polytheists experience as the power of their deities is in fact the continuous exercise of the one divine will.

4.2 Sarmad: The Terror of the Endless

The Arabic word sarmad — rendered as “unceasing,” “continuous,” “perpetual” — appears only twice in the entire Quran, precisely in these paired verses (71 and 72). Its rarity signals the gravity of the concept. Sarmad does not merely mean “long” or “very long.” It means eternal, absolute, without interruption until the end of time. The phrase sarmadan ilā yawm al-qiyāmati — “unceasing until the Day of Resurrection” — explicitly invokes eschatological time, the outer limit of created existence.

This temporal framing transforms the hypothetical from a merely physical speculation into an eschatological warning. The verse does not ask what would happen if the night lasted a year, or a decade. It asks what would happen if the night lasted until the end of everything. This is precisely the duration that eliminates every human strategy of endurance. Polar communities survive the polar night because it ends. The Iñupiat survive the 65-day darkness of Utqiagvik because in mid-January the sun returns. The researchers at Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station survive the six-month polar night because in September the sun rises again. Every human coping strategy for darkness depends, ultimately, on the darkness being finite. Remove its finitude — extend it sarmadan, eternally — and every strategy collapses simultaneously. There is no food stockpile for eternity. There is no psychological resilience that spans the infinite. There is no generator that runs forever.

The polar witness thus demonstrates the verses’ logic by contrapositive: the very success of human survival in polar night depends on the darkness being temporary, and this temporariness is itself a mercy. The alternation is the mercy. Sarmad is the horror that the alternation forestalls.

4.3 Raḥma: Divine Mercy as Cosmic Structure

Verse 73 is the theological resolution of the preceding hypotheticals: wa min raḥmatihi — “And out of His mercy.” The cosmic alternation is not a mechanical fact, a brute physical regularity, or an evolutionary accident. The Quran presents it as an expression of divine mercy (raḥma). This is a theological claim of considerable force and philosophical specificity.

Divine mercy (raḥma) in Islamic theology is not merely a sentiment. It is a creative, sustaining, and structuring activity. The divine name al-Raḥmān — the All-Merciful — is associated in Islamic cosmology with the very act of cosmic creation and with the ongoing sustenance of the created order. When verse 73 says that the night and the day are products of divine mercy, it is saying that the cosmic structure that supports biological life, human civilization, psychological health, and moral agency is not a neutral backdrop to the divine-human relationship but an active expression of it. God sustains the conditions of human flourishing not because the laws of physics compel it but because divine mercy chooses it, continuously.

This has a significant implication for the response to suffering in polar communities. The researcher who breaks down in tears when the Longyearbyen sun finally crests the mountain in March is not having an irrational emotional episode. She is responding appropriately — physiologically and, one might argue, spiritually — to the restoration of a mercy whose withdrawal she has just experienced for 113 days. The proper response to the return of the sun, from the Quranic perspective, is precisely the gratitude (shukr) that verse 73 invokes. The experience of polar night makes this gratitude available, embodied, and undeniable in a way that the temperate-zone dweller, for whom sunrise is an unremarkable daily fact, may never approach.

4.4 The Eschatological Turn: Verses 74–75

Verses 74 and 75 execute an abrupt eschatological turn. Having established, through the cosmic hypothetical, the absolute dependency of creation on divine provision, the text shifts to the Day of Judgment. The transition is not arbitrary. Having demonstrated that the cosmic order is an ongoing expression of divine mercy to which the only appropriate response is gratitude and worship, the text now addresses the consequence of having substituted shurakā’ — “partners,” i.e., false deities — for the actual source of cosmic provision.

The question posed on the Day of Judgment — “Where are My partners whom you used to claim?” — is devastating in light of the preceding verses. The partners — solar deities, nature deities, tribal idols — were invoked precisely to account for the very cosmic regularities (light, rain, fertility, life) that verses 71–73 attribute to divine mercy. On the Day of Judgment, those cosmic regularities will themselves have ceased. The day will be sarmad in the most absolute sense — the day of the resurrection, beyond which there is no more diurnal cycle. And in that context, the gods credited with bringing the light and the dark will be summoned to account, and found absent. Wa ḍalla ‘anhum mā kānū yaftarūn — “And all they used to fabricate will have abandoned them.”

The word ḍalla — “abandoned,” “gone astray,” “vanished” — is typically used for things that get lost or wander. It carries a sense of things disappearing not through destruction but through simply not being there when needed. The fabricated partners were never real presences; they were intellectual constructions, projections onto cosmic regularities of a personal agency that those regularities did not actually possess. When the regularities themselves cease — when the diurnal cycle ends in the eschatological transformation — the fictional identities projected onto them simply have nowhere left to stand. They were always shadows; the Day of Resurrection is the end of the wall that cast them.

V. THE SIGN WITHIN THE SIGN: POLAR REGIONS AS ĀYĀT

The Quran repeatedly uses the word āyāt — “signs” — to describe the natural world. The visible regularities of creation — the alternation of night and day, the movement of clouds, the growth of vegetation — are called āyāt because they point toward a reality beyond themselves: the reality of divine power, mercy, and unity.

The polar regions, unknown to the Quranic audience of seventh-century Arabia, constitute a remarkable category of natural sign: they are places where the ordinary sign (the daily sunrise and sunset) is removed for extended periods, and where the consequence of its removal is made visible, empirically, psychologically, and sociologically. They are, in effect, partial realizations of the Quranic hypothetical — not permanent, not absolute, but sustained and severe enough to demonstrate the essentials of what verses 71–72 are claiming.

No medieval commentator (mufassir) on these verses could have invoked the polar evidence, because it was not yet known. The polar regions were a geographical mystery until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their precise experience of light and darkness was not systematically documented until the twentieth. The emergence of this empirical evidence — documented by scientists and physicians and psychologists, at considerable difficulty and expense — constitutes an involuntary confirmation, from a discipline that did not set out to confirm any scripture, of the basic claim the verses are making.

The claim is this: the alternation of night and day is not a neutral physical fact but a structured mercy; its disruption is catastrophic at biological, psychological, social, and ecological levels; and no human power can substitute for its restoration. Modern polar science has demonstrated all three of these claims with rigor and detail that the seventh-century Arabian context could not have provided and yet that the seventh-century Quranic text seems to have presupposed.

THEMATIC EPILOGUE: THE GIFT OF ALTERNATION

There is a word in the Quranic verse that is easy to pass over: lakum — “for you.” Ja’ala lakum al-layla wa al-nahāra — “He has made the night and the day for you.” Not merely “He has made them” — as one might say of any physical fact — but “for you,” with you as the intended beneficiary. The cosmic alternation, in this framing, is not an impersonal physical mechanism that happens to support human life as a side effect. It is a provision, made with you in mind.

This anthropological orientation of the cosmos — the insistence that the structure of the natural world reflects a divine concern for human flourishing — is neither naive nor unphilosophical. It is theologically bold, and it carries a demand: if the cosmos is oriented toward you as a mercy, then your orientation toward the cosmos ought to be one of gratitude, attention, and care. The person who experiences 113 days of polar night in Longyearbyen and then watches the sun return over the mountain does not merely receive a pleasant meteorological event. She receives a lesson in what it means to have been living, all along, inside a mercy so regular and reliable that it had become invisible — and in what it costs to have it taken away.

This is, perhaps, the deepest theological function of the polar extremes. They are the places where the gift becomes visible precisely because it has been temporarily withdrawn. Travelers to Longyearbyen frequently report that their experience of the polar night and subsequent return of the sun permanently altered their relationship to ordinary sunrise — that they never look at a morning sky quite the same way afterward. This is the pedagogy of the verse: afalā tasma’ūn — “Will you not then hear?” Afalā tubṣirūn — “Will you not then see?” The question is addressed not to those who have never experienced sunrise, but to those who have experienced it so consistently that they have stopped attending to it, stopped hearing the cosmic regularity as a word addressed to them, stopped seeing the daily light as a gift.

The verses perform a kind of cosmic anamorphosis — a technique from art in which an image, distorted beyond recognition from the ordinary viewing angle, suddenly snaps into clarity when viewed from an oblique angle. From the ordinary angle of temperate-zone experience, the diurnal cycle is too regular, too automatic, too taken-for-granted to reveal its character as mercy. But from the oblique angle of the polar night — from Longyearbyen in November, from Dikson in December, from Utqiagvik in the deep winter, from the Antarctic plateau in June — the image snaps into clarity. The rising of the sun is not a mechanical consequence of orbital geometry. It is a continuing act of mercy. It is a gift. And it is the proper occasion for gratitude (shukr) — not as a religious obligation bolted onto an otherwise secular cosmology, but as the rationally and experientially appropriate response to the actual structure of things.

Civilisations that lose this gratitude do not thereby become more rational. They become more fragile — more vulnerable to the illusion of sovereign self-sufficiency, more unprepared for the moment when the machinery of modernity, all the generators and LED banks and melatonin supplements of Longyearbyen, proves insufficient against the darkness that surrounds it. The verses, read in the Arctic light — or rather, in the Arctic dark — are a summons back to a baseline orientation that is older than any particular religion, as old as the first human who shivered through a long night and wept at the sight of dawn. What the Quran adds to that primordial experience is the insistence that the dawn was not merely lucky, not merely inevitable, not merely physical. It was mercy. It was addressed to you. And the only adequate response, in the language of Sūrat al-Qaṣaṣ, is to see, to hear, and to be grateful.

Wa la’allakum tashkurūn. And so that you may be grateful.

“Say: Have you considered — if Allah were to make the night unceasing over you until the Day of Resurrection, what deity other than Allah could bring you light?” — Quran, Sūrat al-Qaṣaṣ 28:71

Keywords: tawhīd, polar night, diurnal cycle, circadian rhythm, Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Dikson, Utqiagvik, Geographic Poles, Quranic cosmology, raḥma, philosophy of religion, Islamic thought, Arctic science, āyāt, photobiology, seasonal affective disorder, sarmad, eschatology, contingency, natural theology