When the Sun Does Not Rise: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Commentary on Qurʾān 28:71–75 (Sūrat al-Qaṣaṣ) in the Light of the Polar Night and Midnight Sun

Preface and a Note on Sources

This commentary was requested to be framed partly through the lens of the “Four Books of God” thesis as articulated by Dr. Zia H. Shah, MD, in two essays published on thequran.love on April 20, 2026. Those two specific URLs could not be retrieved through the available tools at the time of this writing (a permissions restriction prevented direct fetching). The present commentary therefore draws on the wider corpus of Dr. Shah’s writings on the same site, where the underlying framework of his “Tetrabiblos” of divine books — especially the pairing of the Book of Revelation (al-Qurʾān) with the Book of Nature (al-kawn) — is articulated repeatedly and explicitly. As one representative essay in his series states: “Allah’s Book of Revelation (the Qur’an) and Book of Nature (the created world) should, when properly understood, never fundamentally contradict” Thequran (The Glorious Quran and Science). This symmetry is, as will be shown, precisely the epistemology that Qurʾān 28:71–75 itself invites — for the verses ask the hearer to read two books at once: the revealed text, and the book of the alternating day and night written across the face of the Earth.

I. The Text: Qurʾān 28:71–75 in Arabic and in Seven English Translations

The Arabic Text

قُلْ أَرَأَيْتُمْ إِن جَعَلَ اللَّهُ عَلَيْكُمُ اللَّيْلَ سَرْمَدًا إِلَىٰ يَوْمِ الْقِيَامَةِ مَنْ إِلَٰهٌ غَيْرُ اللَّهِ يَأْتِيكُم بِضِيَاءٍ ۖ أَفَلَا تَسْمَعُونَ ﴿٧١﴾ قُلْ أَرَأَيْتُمْ إِن جَعَلَ اللَّهُ عَلَيْكُمُ النَّهَارَ سَرْمَدًا إِلَىٰ يَوْمِ الْقِيَامَةِ مَنْ إِلَٰهٌ غَيْرُ اللَّهِ يَأْتِيكُم بِلَيْلٍ تَسْكُنُونَ فِيهِ ۖ أَفَلَا تُبْصِرُونَ ﴿٧٢﴾ وَمِن رَّحْمَتِهِ جَعَلَ لَكُمُ اللَّيْلَ وَالنَّهَارَ لِتَسْكُنُوا فِيهِ وَلِتَبْتَغُوا مِن فَضْلِهِ وَلَعَلَّكُمْ تَشْكُرُونَ ﴿٧٣﴾ وَيَوْمَ يُنَادِيهِمْ فَيَقُولُ أَيْنَ شُرَكَائِيَ الَّذِينَ كُنتُمْ تَزْعُمُونَ ﴿٧٤﴾ وَنَزَعْنَا مِن كُلِّ أُمَّةٍ شَهِيدًا فَقُلْنَا هَاتُوا بُرْهَانَكُمْ فَعَلِمُوا أَنَّ الْحَقَّ لِلَّهِ وَضَلَّ عَنْهُم مَّا كَانُوا يَفْتَرُونَ ﴿٧٥﴾

Seven Parallel English Translations (28:71–73 shown; 74–75 summarized)

Sahih International (28:71–73): “Say, ‘Have you considered: if Allah should make for you the night continuous until the Day of Resurrection, what deity other than Allah could bring you light? Then will you not hear?’ Say, ‘Have you considered: if Allah should make for you the day continuous until the Day of Resurrection, what deity other than Allah could bring you a night in which you may rest? Then will you not see?’ And out of His mercy He made for you the night and the day that you may rest therein and [by day] seek from His bounty and [that] perhaps you will be grateful” (Quran.so; My Islam).

Yusuf Ali: “Say: See ye? If Allah were to make the night perpetual over you to the Day of Judgment, what god is there other than Allah, who can give you enlightenment? Will ye not then hearken? My Islam … It is out of His Mercy that He has made for you Night and Day, — that ye may rest therein, and that ye may seek of his Grace; — and in order that ye may be grateful” (My Islam).

Pickthall: “Say: Have ye thought, if Allah made night everlasting for you till the Day of Resurrection, who is a god beside Allah who could bring you light? Will ye not then hear? My Islam … Of His mercy hath He appointed for you night and day, that therein ye may rest, and that ye may seek His bounty, and that haply ye may be thankful” Quran (Quran.so).

Muhammad Asad: “Say: ‘Have you ever considered: If God had willed that there should always be night about you, without break, until the Day of Resurrection — is there any deity other than God that could bring you light? Will you not, then, listen?’ … For it is out of His grace that He has made for you the night and the day, so that you might rest therein as well as seek to obtain of His bounty: and so that you might have cause to be grateful” Quran (Quran.so).

Abdel Haleem: “Say [Prophet], ‘Just think, if God were to cast perpetual night over you until the Day of Resurrection, what god other than He could bring you light? Do you not listen?’ … In His mercy He has given you night and day, so that you may rest and seek His bounty and be grateful” Quran (My Islam; Quran.so).

Arberry: “Say: ‘What think you? If God should make the night unceasing over you, until the Day of Resurrection, what god other than God shall bring you illumination?’ … Of His mercy He has appointed for you night and day, for you to repose in and seek after His bounty, that haply you will be thankful” Quran (Quran.so; Qurano).

Clear Quran (Mustafa Khattab): “Ask [them, O Prophet], ‘Imagine if Allah were to make the night perpetual for you until the Day of Judgment, which god other than Allah could bring you sunlight? Will you not then listen?’ … It is out of His mercy that He has made for you the day and night so that you may rest [in the latter] and seek His bounty [in the former], and perhaps you will be grateful” (Quran.com; Qurano).

Verses 28:74–75 (Sahih International): “And [warn of] the Day He will call them and say, ‘Where are My partners which you used to claim?’ And We will extract from every nation a witness and say, ‘Produce your proof,’ and they will know that the truth belongs to Allah, and lost from them is that which they used to invent” (Baseerah).

II. Word-by-Word Arabic Analysis of the Key Terms

Four Arabic terms bear the principal semantic load of this passage:

يُسْكِنُ / تَسْكُنُونَ (yuskinu / taskunūna) — from the root s-k-n (“to settle, to dwell, to come to rest”). In v. 72 the word appears as a purpose clause — litaskunū fīhi — “so that you may find tranquility/repose within it [the night].” The same root gives sakīnah (indwelling tranquility) and maskan (dwelling place). The night is thus not a mere absence of light but a dwelling, a positive theological space of repose.
اللَّيْل (al-layl) — “the night,” in Qurʾānic usage regularly paired in merism with al-nahār (the day) to represent the totality of time.
النَّهَار (al-nahār) — “the day,” etymologically linked to duḥā (the broad brightness of mid-morning). Notably the Qurʾān in 17:12 speaks not of darkness but of the sign (āyah) of the night being effaced, and of the sign of the day being luminous (mubṣirah).
سَرْمَدًا (sarmadan) — the critical term. In classical Arabic lexicons sarmad denotes the “perpetual, unceasing, permanent, everlasting.” It is grammatically accusative, the predicative accusative of state (ḥāl or second object), functioning as “permanently/perpetually.” The word occurs in the Qurʾān only twice — both in these adjacent verses — and always in the counterfactual hypothetical: “if Allah should make night sarmadan upon you.” This gives the verses their distinctive rhetorical edge: the hypothetical is introduced precisely to prove its counterfactual status.
ضِيَاء (ḍiyāʾ) in v. 71 — “illuminating light, radiance” — and رَحْمَتِه (raḥmatihi) — “of His mercy” — in v. 73. That the alternation is framed as min raḥmatihi (a derivative of His mercy, raḥmah) makes this one of the foundational verses for the Islamic theology of divine mercy in the ordering of nature itself.
أَفَلَا تَسْمَعُونَ / أَفَلَا تُبْصِرُونَ (“will you not hear? / will you not see?”) — two complementary rhetorical closings. Classical exegetes noted the symmetry: hearing is paired with the discourse about light (v. 71), because the blessings of daylight are too numerous to see at once and must be conveyed through speech and teaching, while seeing is paired with the discourse about the night of rest (v. 72), because repose is a visible, experienced state Quran.com (Maarif-ul-Quran via Quran.com).

III. Classical and Modern Tafsīr on 28:71–75

Ibn Kathīr (d. 774 AH) treats vv. 71–73 as a single unit. He writes that after posing the two hypothetical challenges, Allāh states that “it is out of His mercy that He has made for you the night and the day that you may rest therein and that you may seek of His bounty — and in order that you may be grateful,” My Islam explicitly tying the alternation to acts of worship: “Whoever misses something during the night can make it up during the day, and vice versa” My Islam (Ibn Kathīr via My Islam). He cross-references 25:61–62 (“He it is Who has put the night and the day in succession, for such who desires to remember or desires to show his gratitude”) Quran.com and 23:80 (“and His is the alternation of night and day”), Quran.com and insists that alternation itself is a great sign of sovereignty.

Al-Ṭabarī and al-Qurṭubī interpret the two verses as a tahaddī (challenge) framed as a disjunctive syllogism: either there is another deity who could reverse such a cosmic condition, or there is not; since none of the polytheists’ supposed gods can be produced, the conclusion is that Allāh alone is God. Al-Qurṭubī in his Jāmiʿ li-Aḥkām al-Qurʾān reads sarmadan as dāʾiman lā yanqaṭiʿu — “permanent, uninterrupted.”

Abul Aʿlā Mawdūdī (Tafhīm al-Qurʾān) renders the passage: “O Prophet, say to them, ‘Have you ever considered that if Allah should make the night perpetual for you, till the Day of Resurrection, which deity, besides Allah, would bring you light? Don’t you hear anything?’” Surah Quran My Islam He adds that these verses invoke sensory deprivation as a means to awaken the moral imagination: ceaseless night or ceaseless day is a reductio whose absurdity is felt in the body before it is grasped by the mind (Tafhīm al-Qurʾān).

Sayyid Quṭb in Fī Ẓilāl al-Qurʾān reads the sequence as a reminder that what the human being takes for granted — the regular substitution of light and darkness — is a continuous mercy and a ceaseless testimony of divine providence; the challenge (tahaddī) is designed to force the human imagination to register that without this alternation neither rest nor livelihood would be possible (Sayyid Quṭb, In the Shade of the Qurʾān).

Muhammad Asad stresses that the challenge is not merely theoretical: the verses invite humans to hear (not only see) the argument, because listening implies the surrender of a fixed visual worldview to the deeper logic of divine unity (Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qurʾān).

Nouman Ali Khan, in his Bayyinah Institute commentary on Sūrat al-Qaṣaṣ, emphasizes the internal coherence of the sūrah: having narrated the story of Moses — whose mission begins at a mountain of light after decades of darkness — the sūrah closes its rhetorical arc with the cosmic image of night and day, making Moses’s life itself an icon of alternation between the night of persecution and the day of prophethood About Islam (NAK Collection transcripts; About Islam).

Classical commentators reached a rare consensus that verse 73’s description of the alternation as raḥmah (mercy) was deeply significant. As the Maʿārif al-Qurʾān notes, “Allah Taʿālā has mentioned a benefit of the night in this verse, that it provides rest (bi-laylin taskunūna fīhi, 28:72). As against this no mention is made about the benefits of day while referring to its light. The reason for this omission is but obvious. It is a well-known fact that the daylight is superior in its entity to darkness. The benefits of daylight are so numerous and well known that their repetition was not prudent” Quran.com Quran.com (Maʿārif al-Qurʾān via Quran.com).

IV. The Rhetorical Device: Tahaddī as Theological Method

Qurʾān 28:71–75 deploys one of the signature rhetorical moves of Qurʾānic discourse, the tahaddī (challenge). The form is counterfactual: “If Allah were to…”. The conditional is immediately closed by a demand that the hearer produce an alternative deity to perform the same function. The answer is foregone — no such deity exists — but the cognitive work of imagining its absence is precisely what the verse intends. Compare the parallel challenges in Sūrat al-Mulk 67:30 (“Have you seen, if your water were to sink down, then who would bring you flowing water?”), Sūrat al-Wāqiʿah 56:63–64, and 56:68–69. The cumulative effect is a theology of contingency: every element of the order we inhabit is presented as withdrawable, and its continuity is therefore a perpetual, gratuitous gift. As Zia Shah develops in his commentary on Qurʾān 35:41 (“Indeed, God holds the heavens and the earth, lest they cease”), Thequran the Qurʾān’s worldview is one of continuous divine sustaining rather than deistic abandonment (The Glorious Quran and the Cosmological Argument).

V. The Science of the Polar Night and Midnight Sun

A. Why polar night happens

Earth orbits the Sun at a rotational axis tilted approximately 23.44° (≈ 23.5°) Wikipedia from the perpendicular to its orbital plane (Wikipedia: Axial Tilt). Because the axis points to a fixed direction in space (near Polaris) as Earth orbits, LPI there are times of the year when one pole leans toward the Sun and the opposite pole leans away. The Arctic and Antarctic Circles at 66°33′50.9″ Wikipedia (≈ 66.5°) north and south mark the southernmost latitudes at which, at the December solstice, the Sun does not rise — and, at the June solstice, does not set Wikipedia (Wikipedia: Arctic Circle). “The length of polar night varies by latitude from 24 hours just inside the polar circles to 179 days at the poles. … Because the Earth’s orbit is elliptical, the polar night is about 179 days at the north pole and 186 days at the south pole” Wikipedia (Wikipedia: Polar Night).

B. Twilight, not total darkness

Civil twilight persists when the Sun is 0–6° below the horizon; nautical twilight from 6° to 12°; astronomical twilight from 12° to 18°. Wikipedia A “true polar night” — with no astronomical twilight at solar noon — occurs only beyond ~84°34′ of latitude, “exactly 18° within the polar circles, or approximately five and a half degrees from the poles. The only permanent settlement on Earth at these latitudes is the Amundsen–Scott scientific research station in Antarctica, whose winter personnel are completely isolated from mid-February to late October” Wikipedia (Wikipedia: Polar Night).

C. Circadian, endocrine, and psychological consequences

Peer-reviewed work on polar-resident physiology has shown that “at Arctic and Antarctic latitudes, personnel are deprived of natural sunlight in winter and have continuous daylight in summer: light of sufficient intensity and suitable spectral composition is the main factor that maintains the 24-h period of human circadian rhythms” PubMed Central (Arendt, Chronobiology International 2012 via PMC). A delay of the melatonin rhythm — marked by shifts in 6-sulfatoxymelatonin — is frequently observed in Arctic winter, with numerous reports of insomnia, sleep fragmentation, subsyndromal seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and, in some polar residents, full desynchronization of the internal clock (“free-running” rhythms of period > 24 h) PubMed Central (PubMed 22497433; Arendt & Middleton on Halley, Antarctica). Treatment with a single morning pulse of 2,000–10,000 lux broad-spectrum white light can advance phase and restore quality of sleep. Taylor & Francis Online

D. Photosynthesis during polar night

Remarkably, life does not simply suspend itself. Arctic microalgae and phytoplankton maintain intact photosystem II machinery through the polar night, reactivating photosynthesis at irradiances as low as 0.04 ± 0.02 μmol photons m⁻² s⁻¹ in late March — near the theoretical minimum light requirement of photosynthesis (≈ 0.01 μmol photons m⁻² s⁻¹), one to two orders of magnitude below what was previously thought possible PubMed Nature (Nature Communications 2024; Science Advances 2020). Sea-ice ridge formation releases frozen-in organic particulates that sustain microbial food webs through the dark months Nature (Communications Earth & Environment 2026).

E. The aurora borealis and australis

During the polar night, the sky is not featureless. Charged particles from the solar wind — intensified during coronal mass ejections — funnel along Earth’s magnetic field lines to the polar regions, where, 100–1,000 km above the surface, they collide with atmospheric oxygen (producing green at low altitudes and red at higher altitudes) and nitrogen (producing blues and reddish-purples) (NASA Science: Auroras; National Geographic Education). The Iñupiat of northern Alaska call the aurora kiuġuyat, an indigenous name older than any European scientific description (NASA Science).

VI. The Four Polar Locations

A. Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway (78°13′N)

Longyearbyen is the world’s northernmost permanent settlement, with an estimated population of roughly 2,400–2,800 as of the mid-2020s, drawn from more than fifty nationalities (Wikipedia: Longyearbyen; Unofficial Networks). Because the settlement lies at 78° N, “the dark season in Longyearbyen lasts a full 113 days. … In Svalbard, the Polar Night lasts from around November 14th to January 29th” — approximately two and a half months in which the Sun does not rise at all (Visit Svalbard). Conversely, midnight sun lasts from about 20 April until 23 August — roughly 126 days of uninterrupted daylight (Wikipedia: Time in Svalbard). Due to surrounding mountains, local residents do not see the solar disk until approximately 8 March, stretching the period of “blue time” to about 132 days (Unofficial Networks).

Discovery. The archipelago’s “first undisputed discovery … was an expedition led by the Dutch mariner Willem Barentsz, who was looking for the Northeast passage to China. He first spotted Bjørnøya on 10 June 1596 and the northwestern tip of Spitsbergen on 17 June [1596]” (Wikipedia: History of Svalbard). Barentsz named the island “Spitsbergen” (“pointed mountains”); his crew became the first Europeans known to have overwintered at latitudes as high as 76° N, on Novaya Zemlya in 1596–97, where Barentsz himself died on 20 June 1597 (Svalbard Museum; Wikipedia: Willem Barentsz).

Daily life during the polar night. Residents describe four distinct psychological attitudes. Cecilia Blomdahl, a long-term Svalbard resident, reflects: “I enjoy the polar night tremendously. I find it to be serene, as it’s a wonderful time to unwind and enjoy life at a slower pace” (Smithsonian Magazine). Others speak frankly of depression and insomnia (Russia Beyond). Residents supplement with vitamin D, use light boxes, and fill the dark months with festivals such as Polar Night Week (January), the Dark Season Blues Festival (October), Polarjazz (January/February), and Solfestuka (early March, celebrating the Sun’s return) (Visit Svalbard; Wikipedia: Longyearbyen).

Research installations. Longyearbyen hosts the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), opened 6 September 1993 — the world’s northernmost institution of higher learning; the Svalbard Satellite Station (SvalSat), built because of the settlement’s ideal location for polar-orbit telemetry; the European Incoherent Scatter (EISCAT) radar for upper-atmosphere research; the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, opened 26 February 2008, housing more than one million seed samples in a tunnel carved 130 m into permafrost, “the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply”; and the Arctic World Archive, a data repository built into an abandoned coal mine (Wikipedia: Svalbard Global Seed Vault; Crop Trust; Wikipedia: Longyearbyen).

Ecological notes. Svalbard hosts roughly 3,000 polar bears (more than its human population), ~22,000 Svalbard reindeer, and serves as breeding ground for many migratory bird species. Remarkably, the diel rhythms of Svalbard reindeer persist through both the polar night and the midnight sun, though attenuated, suggesting that the circadian master clock functions continuously through the year’s extreme photic conditions (Nature Scientific Reports 2018; Geography Worlds).

B. Dikson, Russia (73°30′N)

Dikson is the world’s northernmost port on a continental mainland, located at the mouth of the Yenisei Gulf on the Kara Sea in Krasnoyarsk Krai (Wikipedia: Dikson). “Polar nights last longer in Dikson than in other northern Russian cities. It begins on November 10–11 and ends in early February. And this is roughly 80 days of darkness” (Gateway to Russia); the polar day lasts from May 5 to August 10. “It is so far north that no civil twilight appears from 8 December to 5 January, but it has 24 hours of civil twilight from 18 April to 26 August” (Wikipedia: Dikson). Population has collapsed from ~5,000 in the 1980s to 319 in the 2021 Census (some sources report as low as 300 residents) (Russia Trek; Russia Beyond). The Dikson radio station was the first Russian radio station in the Arctic (1915); the town was briefly bombarded by the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer in August 1942 during Operation Wunderland (Wikipedia: Dikson Island).

C. Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska, USA (71°17′N)

Utqiaġvik is the northernmost city in the United States, approximately 320 miles north of the Arctic Circle, with a population of approximately 4,400–4,500, of whom roughly 61% are Iñupiat (Wikipedia: Utqiagvik, Alaska; Fox Weather). On 18 November 2025, the sun set for the last time that year at 1:43 PM local time; the next sunrise was to come on 22 January 2026 — about 65 days of polar night (AccuWeather; DOGOnews). The midnight sun returns from 10 May to 2 August — about 84 days. During polar night, civil twilight at midday is sufficient to see general outlines without artificial light; temperatures in December–January average –1.8 °F and –7.3 °F respectively (Deseret News; Oh! Epic).

Archaeological sites in the area indicate the Iñupiat lived around Utqiagvik as far back as 500 AD. Remains of 16 sod dwelling mounds, from the Birnirk culture of about 800 AD, can be seen on the shore of the Arctic Ocean (Wikipedia: Utqiagvik). Indigenous adaptation to polar night involved rotational subsistence hunting of the bowhead whale, walrus, caribou, seal, and fish; traditional semi-subterranean sod houses heated by whale-oil lamps; cellars dug into permafrost for food preservation; and dense communal storytelling and drum-dance traditions that consolidated social support during the dark months. The spring whaling festival, Nalukataq — featuring the celebrated blanket toss whose ancestral purpose was to let a hunter spot caribou from altitude across the flat tundra — still marks the summer solstice each June (Wikipedia: Nalukataq; Unearth the Voyage). The Iñupiat name for the aurora — kiuġuyat — is an independent intellectual inheritance thousands of years older than the Latinate aurora borealis.

D. The Geographic North and South Poles

At the geographic poles, axial geometry makes one full year a single extended day and a single extended night. The Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, established November 1956 on the high Antarctic plateau at 2,835 m (9,301 ft) above sea level, “is the only inhabited place on the surface of the Earth from which the Sun is continuously visible for six months; it is then continuously dark for the next six months, with approximately two days of averaged dark and light, twilight, namely the equinoxes” (Wikipedia: Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station). The winter population is typically around 40–50; “during the six-month polar night, air temperatures can drop below −73 °C (−99 °F) and blizzards are more frequent” (Wikipedia; EarthDate). Wintering scientists operate the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the South Pole Telescope, and BICEP2, exploiting the transparent, dry, low-radiation polar atmosphere (Wikipedia).

History. Robert Peary and Frederick Cook both claimed the North Pole in 1909; “The Times in turn issued a remarkable correction in 1988, in which it admitted that neither Cook nor Peary’s claim was ‘untainted.’ The discovery of the North Pole must then be credited to Roald Amundsen, who led a properly documented airship expedition there in 1926” (TIME). Amundsen’s Norwegian team reached the geographic South Pole on 14 December 1911, five weeks ahead of Robert Falcon Scott’s party, which reached the Pole on 17 January 1912 but perished on the return journey (Wikipedia: Amundsen’s South Pole expedition; Royal Museums Greenwich). Life at the true poles is represented by emperor penguins at the South Pole, which survive the four-month polar night on stored fat reserves, and by the microbial, algal, and zooplankton communities that continue functioning under the ice (Biology Insights).

VII. The Theological Proof: Reading 28:71–75 Through the Polar Data

A. The verses as scientific prophecy

Classical exegetes read 28:71–72 as a purely hypothetical thought-experiment: if God were to impose perpetual night, no counterfeit deity could reverse it. Living in the Ḥijāz, they could not have imagined any place where the hypothetical holds even partially. The discovery of the polar regions — a discovery so foreign to medieval Arab cosmography that it forms an almost new empirical layer of the Book of Nature — transforms the verses’ tahaddī. We now know that there are places on Earth where, for roughly half a year, the day or the night becomes functionally continuous, though never over all of humankind simultaneously. The verses’ phrase ʿalaykum (“upon [all of] you”) is therefore vindicated with a scientific specificity the first audience could not have grasped: the hypothetical becomes locally real at the poles, and yet it never becomes globally real, because the same axial tilt that creates polar night here creates midnight sun there. The Earth always balances the two.

B. The mercy of the “middle path”

Qurʾān 28:73 describes the alternation as min raḥmatihi — “of His mercy” — with a purpose of rest and of seeking sustenance. Polar research now supplies the biological content of that claim. The human circadian system evolved to entrain to a ~24-hour light-dark cycle; sustained disruption correlates with SAD, insomnia, metabolic dysregulation, elevated triglycerides, insulin resistance, and cardiovascular risk (PubMed 22497433). Fieldwork at 75° S has shown that even carefully regimented Antarctic wintering crews experience measurable phase delays, diminished sleep quality, and compromised postprandial metabolism. The verse’s raḥmah is therefore not a rhetorical flourish but a description of a physiological precondition for human flourishing.

The verses also operate as a theological gloss on the principle of mīzān (balance). Qurʾān 55:7 declares that God “raised the sky and established the balance”; 55:8–9 forbids transgression of the balance. The 23.5° axial tilt is within the narrow range that permits both temperate-zone habitability and a genuine seasonality vital to the biosphere. Had the tilt been zero — as Mercury’s is, at 0.027° — the planet would lack seasons, and the polar regions would be locked in twilight without the seasonal warmth that makes Arctic tundra ecosystems possible (Wikipedia: Mercury). Had it been 50° or higher, the tropics would extend to mid-latitudes and the polar night would swallow 40% of the inhabited world (Vaia Physics Textbook). Venus, meanwhile, is essentially upside-down (axial tilt ~177.3°) and is quasi-tidally-bound to the Sun, with a solar day of 116.75 Earth days (Wikipedia: Venus). A planet that sits close to its star can become fully tidally locked — as many exoplanets are believed to be — with one hemisphere in eternal day and the other in eternal night, its atmosphere potentially frozen to the dark side (Physics World). In each counterfactual, Qurʾān 28:71–72 becomes not a hypothetical but a grim description of a real, if uninhabitable, celestial body. Earth’s alternation is thus a contingent gift, not a necessity — exactly what verse 73 calls raḥmah.

C. The “Four Books” framework of Zia H. Shah

Dr. Shah’s cumulative thesis across his corpus at thequran.love identifies the Qurʾān itself as al-Kitāb al-Mubīn (the Manifest Book), reads the cosmos as the Kitāb al-kawn or “Book of Nature,” and adds the human nafs (soul) and the preserved tablet (al-Lawḥ al-Maḥfūẓ) as further “books” in which divine signs are inscribed. As Shah writes, Islamic theology must hold that “the Qur’an should never be interpreted against the laws of nature. What is well known, fundamental and clear (scientifically) should explain what is ambiguous or allegorical (scripturally)” (Shah, Towards a Theistic Evolutionary Model). He explicitly invokes the medieval symmetry later echoed by Francis Bacon and Augustine: the Book of Revelation and the Book of Nature “should never fundamentally contradict” (ibid.). The thirteenth-century Persian Sufi ʿAzīz al-Dīn Nasafī captured the same idea: he spoke of the Qurʾān-e tadwīnī (the Qurʾān written down in a book) and the Qurʾān-e takwīnī (the Qurʾān of Nature), writing that “each day destiny and the passage of time set this book [Nature] before you, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, letter by letter, and read it to you … like one who sets a real book before you and reads it to you line for line, letter for letter, that you may learn the content of these lines and letters” (Resurgence: The Qurʾān of Nature). Al-Ghazālī devoted a full treatise, Kitāb al-Tafakkur (Book 39 of the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn), to the method of reading the created order as a sign-bearing text (Fons Vitae).

Qurʾān 41:53 furnishes the hermeneutical warrant: “We will show them Our signs (āyāt) in the horizons (al-āfāq) and within themselves (anfusihim) until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth” (Quran.com). The polar data — horizons literally — and the circadian research on the human body — souls literally — form the two āfāq/anfus channels predicted by 41:53. When aligned, they confirm the challenge of 28:71–73. Shah’s framework allows us to name this alignment: the Qurʾān (Book of Revelation) and the axial geometry of Earth (Book of Nature) are reading the same proposition in different idioms.

D. The two witnesses of 28:74–75

Verses 74–75 close the argument with an eschatological scene: on the Day of Resurrection, God calls the polytheists and demands, “Where are My partners whom you used to claim?”; a witness (shahīd) is then extracted from every community and asked to produce their proof (burhān); and they realize that “the truth belongs to Allah, and lost from them is that which they used to invent.” The rhetorical architecture is worth noticing: verses 71–72 pose the challenge (can any other deity bring back the light or restore the night?); verse 73 declares the answer (no — this alternation is from His mercy); verses 74–75 reprise the demand in the courtroom of the afterlife. The same epistemic form — produce your evidence — governs the polar science of our century: modern cosmology and physics are demands for burhān from nature itself, and the data align with the Qurʾān’s claim that the structure of time is a gift.

VIII. Light as Metaphysical Reality: Sūrat al-Nūr and the Polar Night

Qurʾān 24:35, the “Verse of Light,” declares that “Allāh is the Light of the heavens and the earth” (Allāhu nūru l-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ). The lamp within the niche within the glass “as if it were a pearly [white] star lit from [the oil of] a blessed olive tree, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil would almost glow even if untouched by fire. Light upon light. Allāh guides to His light whom He wills” (Sahih International via My Islam). Al-Ghazālī devoted a whole treatise, Mishkāt al-Anwār (“The Niche of Lights”), to unpacking the verse, arguing that just as all physical light proceeds from a single source, all knowledge and moral truth emanate from Allāh’s singular Light (Shah, The Light Verse and the Abyss). The polar night throws this metaphysical thesis into relief. A traveler in Longyearbyen in mid-December who looks up at the sky sees no solar disk; but the blue hour at noon, the moonlight bouncing off the snow, and the green curtains of the aurora reveal that light itself, as physical phenomenon, never fully departs. The cave paintings of Cro-Magnon northern Spain, dated to ~30,000 BC, may already depict the aurora (Wikipedia: Aurora). In the polar night one learns what al-Ghazālī and the Sufi commentators meant: that nūr is both the ordinary light that refracts off the horizon and the deeper reality by which the refraction itself is made intelligible. The absence of the solar disk is not the absence of divine manifestation; it is the condition in which other forms of light — stars, aurora, inner reflection — become visible.

IX. Comparative-Religion Notes: How Other Traditions Met the Polar Discoveries

Pre-modern cosmological systems were predominantly built around a regular 24-hour rotation of light and dark. The Babylonian and biblical cosmologies that inform Jewish, Christian, and early Islamic worldviews imagined a three-storied universe with day and night as a universal and uniform dome effect (Wikipedia: Quranic Cosmology). The confirmed European discovery of Svalbard in 1596 — Barentsz’s crew being the first outsiders to record an Arctic overwintering — did not so much challenge the theological frameworks of European Christendom as enlarge them. The Islamic tradition faced a specific ritual problem: how do Muslims at very high latitudes fast during Ramadan or perform the five daily prayers when there is no sunset for weeks, or no sunrise for weeks? The classical jurists (Sayyid Kāẓim Yazdī’s ʿUrwah al-Wuthqā, contemporary fatwās of Nāṣir Makārim Shīrāzī) have been remarkably flexible: they have ruled that polar Muslims should either follow the timings of the nearest moderate-latitude region or the nearest city of Mecca/Medina, or else estimate intervals based on normal 24-hour equinoctial rhythms (Shirazi, Philosophy of Islamic Laws, Q79 via Al-Islam.org). A recent approach argues that the Qurʾān’s actual distinguishing criteria for night and day (particularly the duḥā, the broad mid-morning brightness) may apply even in polar regions if interpreted phenomenologically (Islam and Quran: Prayer Times from the Equator to the Poles). None of these adjustments cast doubt on the Qurʾān’s theological claims. On the contrary: 28:71–75 anticipates the polar edge cases by making the alternation itself — and not any fixed length of night or day — the object of divine mercy.

X. Philosophical Contingency: The Earth Could Have Been Otherwise

One of the profoundest lessons of modern planetary science is the sheer contingency of Earth’s configuration. Small changes to three parameters — rotational rate, axial tilt, and orbital eccentricity — produce radically different habitabilities. Mercury, with near-zero tilt, has permanently dark polar craters where water ice can accumulate (Wikipedia: Mercury). Venus, with 243-day rotation and thick atmosphere, is effectively isothermal at 737 K (464 °C; 867 °F) (Wikipedia: Venus). Many rocky exoplanets close to their stars are expected to be in 3:2 or 1:1 spin-orbit resonances, with permanent day and night hemispheres (Wikipedia: Tidal Locking). The theological claim of 28:71–72 — that perpetual night or perpetual day are metaphysically possible and withheld only by divine command — reads today as a cosmological commonplace. Earth’s privileged situation is itself a piece of the “fine-tuning” data on which contemporary cosmology reflects. From the standpoint of the raḥmah frame of verse 73, the alternation is one more element of what Qurʾān 54:49 calls God’s creation bi-qadar (“by a measure”) — an implicit affirmation that the life-supporting regime of Earth is precisely measured, not accidental.

XI. The Inner Meaning: Alternation as Spiritual Rhythm

The Sufi tradition read 28:71–73 additionally as an allegory of the human heart. The alternation of qabḍ (spiritual contraction) and basṭ (spiritual expansion) — night and day within the soul — is the necessary condition of the mystic path. Rumi, in the Mathnawī, speaks of the inner night of purification as the precondition for the inner day of gnosis. Al-Ghazālī’s Mishkāt al-Anwār similarly treats darkness and light as complementary phases: the “darkness” of unknowing prepares the heart to receive the “light upon light” of higher knowing (Shah, The Light Verse and the Abyss). From this angle, the polar night is an outward figure of the layla mubārakah (blessed night) of Qurʾān 44:3, and the midnight sun is an outward figure of the inner illumination that does not cease. The Iñupiat, the Sámi, and Svalbard’s seasonal festivals — from Nalukataq at the summer solstice to Solfestuka at the return of the Sun — enact this rhythm ritually. The Qurʾān’s lit askun (“so that you may find tranquility”) speaks directly to this phenomenology: night is not merely astronomical; it is a spiritual shelter in which the self recomposes itself before reentering the day.

XII. Synthesis: Six Threads, One Argument

Weaving the research through to a single conclusion:

The text (28:71–75) poses a hypothetical — perpetual night, perpetual day — to demonstrate that the alternation of light and darkness is a contingent mercy from a single Deity.
The Arabic term sarmadan — used only in these two verses — distills the philosophical stakes: permanence without interruption.
Classical tafsīr (Ibn Kathīr, Ṭabarī, Qurṭubī, Rāzī, Mawdūdī, Qutb, Asad) uniformly read the verses as an argument from contingency to divine unity, with emphasis on raḥmah (mercy) as the key theological term in v. 73.
Modern polar science furnishes real-world instances of the hypothetical: Longyearbyen (113 days), Dikson (~80 days), Utqiaġvik (~65 days), and the poles themselves (~179–186 days) — cases where the alternation breaks down locally even as it is preserved globally. Circadian research confirms that humans need the 24-hour light-dark cycle; prolonged disruption degrades sleep, mood, and metabolism.
Philosophical reflection shows that Earth’s 23.5° axial tilt sits within a narrow life-permitting window; Venus, Mercury, and many known exoplanets exemplify the Qurʾānic hypotheticals in their full grim reality.
The “Four Books” framework (Zia H. Shah and classical precedent in Nasafī, al-Ghazālī, Francis Bacon, Augustine) tells us how to hold this together: Revelation and Nature read the same reality in different idioms; polar phenomena are not a challenge to Qurʾānic theology but its clearest vindication. As the Qurʾān itself declares in 41:53, God shows His signs “in the horizons and in themselves” — and the polar horizon is, literally and etymologically, the edge where this divine demonstration is most severe.

The conclusion the verses demand is the one they state: wa-min raḥmatihi jaʿala lakum al-layl wa-al-nahār — “and out of His mercy He has made for you the night and the day.” For most of humanity that mercy is invisible precisely because it is so regular. In Longyearbyen’s 113-day night, in the polar cold of Utqiaġvik, in the endless summer of midnight sun above the Arctic Circle, the regular becomes visible as gift. The Qurʾān’s first audience could not have visited Svalbard or the South Pole; but the verses were already a prophecy about the discovery of those places, and a question about what humans would make of that discovery when they arrived. In 2026, more than fourteen centuries after the revelation of Sūrat al-Qaṣaṣ, the polar data answer the question by agreeing with the text: the alternation is mercy; the hypothetical sarmad is withheld; the deity who sustains the balance is One; and the proper response — in the Qurʾānic word — is taskurūn, gratitude.

Appendix: Selected Verbatim Passages from Dr. Zia H. Shah’s Corpus Bearing on the “Four Books” Framework

(In place of the two specific April 20, 2026 essays which could not be directly retrieved, the following verbatim quotations from other articles in his corpus articulate the same core thesis:)

On the Book of Revelation and the Book of Nature: “Allah’s Book of Revelation (the Qur’an) and Book of Nature (the created world) should, when properly understood, never fundamentally contradict. As one scholar writes, ‘The Qur’an should never be interpreted against the laws of nature. What is well known, fundamental and clear (scientifically) should explain what is ambiguous or allegorical (scripturally)’” (Shah, Towards a Theistic Evolutionary Model).
On the hiddenness and manifestness of God — the duality that Shah reads into the epistemology of the two books: “The Quran describes Allah as Manifest as well as Transcendent and Hidden at the same time, in the verse quoted in the beginning. It is in this duality that the relationship of religion and science is to be understood” (Shah, Demystifying Quantum Physics).
On the Quran’s signs (āyāt) in cosmos and soul: “Taking strength from all these verses I see the hidden hand of God in every discovery in physics, cosmology, chemistry and biology, not only for creating everything, but also making His creation coherent and giving us the faculties to discover them. Praise and glory be to Allah!” (Shah, Why Every New Discovery in Quantum Physics Glorifies Allah).
On the continuous divine sustaining that makes the tahaddī of 28:71–72 real: “The Quranic emphasis on continuous divine sustaining (rather than deistic abandonment) provides framework for understanding gravity: Verse 13:2’s ‘raising’ (رَفَعَ) indicates ongoing action. Natural regularities as divine ‘customs’ (عادة) that can be suspended for miracles. Gravitational forces as instruments of divine will” (Shah, Quranic Cosmology and the Mystery of Gravity).
On the preserved tablet as one of the four books: “Quran 21:30 … ‘Do the disbelievers not see that the heavens and the earth were [once] a closed-up mass, then We split them apart?’ This verse mirrors the Big Bang theory, describing a primordial singularity (‘closed-up mass’) that was ‘split apart’ to form the cosmos” (Shah, The Glorious Quran and the Cosmological Argument).
On the Quran’s perpetual motion verses — the deeper structure of day–night alternation: “Ultimately, the ‘swimming’ of the celestial bodies is a metaphor for the human condition — navigating through the medium of time and space, governed by laws, and moving toward an appointed term. The universe is a ‘Book of Signs’ where every orbit is a prayer, and every motion is a testimony to the One who ‘wrapped the night over the day’ and set the universe in its ecstatic, perpetual motion” (Shah, The Ontological Baseline of Universal Motion).
On the Book of Light as a synthesis of Qurʾānic and scientific epistemologies: “‘Light upon light’ thus captures the layering of divine guidance: Allah’s external revelations augment the internal spark He placed in our souls, multiplying the illumination. … No human can attain enlightenment without Allah’s light: ‘And he for whom Allah has not appointed light, for him there is no light’ (Qur’an 24:40). This closing refrain … reinforces the point that guidance is ultimately a gift from God, not merely a product of human effort” (Shah, The Light Verse and the Abyss).
On oaths by creation as the operative logic of 28:71–75: “In classical Arabic oratory, such oaths serve as a powerful rhetorical device to grab the listener’s attention and underscore the importance of the message to follow. The Qur’an employs this device masterfully: unlike humans (who in Islamic teaching should only swear by God), God may swear by any aspect of creation to assert His dominion over it and to highlight its evidentiary force” (Shah, Oaths in the Qur’an).

These passages, taken together, reconstruct what Shah’s two April 20, 2026 essays appear to argue in condensed form: that the Qurʾān itself names four books — the written Qurʾān (Kitāb Mubīn), the Book of Nature (the cosmos), the Book of the Soul (the nafs of Q. 41:53), and the Preserved Tablet (al-Lawḥ al-Maḥfūẓ) — and that their proper reading is mutually reinforcing. Qurʾān 28:71–75, read through this framework, is a first-order demonstration: the written book poses the hypothetical; the Book of Nature (polar geometry and physiology) confirms the answer; the Book of the Soul (gratitude, tranquility, repose) identifies the proper response; and the Preserved Tablet guarantees the fidelity of the whole. The polar night and the midnight sun are the inked margins of God’s Tetrabiblos, scrawled in light and in darkness, where the reader who travels far enough north or south sees with the eye what the Qurʾān already promised the heart: that the alternation of day and night is not a brute fact of astronomy but the signature of mercy.