Glory Be to Him Who Created All the Pairs: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Commentary on Qurʾān 36:36 (Yā Sīn) and 51:49 (al-Dhāriyāt)

Epigraph

Dirac’s equation: $(i{{\partial }\!\!\!/}-m)\psi (x)=0,$

In the register of thequran.love — “The Glorious Quran and Science” — after the manner of Zia H. Shah MD by Claude AI

Abstract

This essay offers an interdisciplinary commentary on two Qurʾānic declarations that creation is fashioned in pairs: Subḥāna alladhī khalaqa l-azwāja kullahā mimmā tunbitu l-arḍu wa min anfusihim wa mimmā lā yaʿlamūn — “Glory be to Him who created all the pairs, of that which the earth grows, and of themselves, and of that which they do not know” (Q 36:36), and wa min kulli shayʾin khalaqnā zawjayni laʿallakum tadhakkarūn — “And of everything We created pairs, that you may reflect” (Q 51:49). I read these verses not in isolation but within their native passages — Q 36:33–40 and Q 51:47–49 — which are sustained meditations on agriculture, hydrology, solar and lunar mechanics, cosmic expansion, and the architecture of the earth. My argument, following Zia H. Shah MD, is threefold. First, in the seventh century the general sexual pairing of the plant kingdom was unknown, and pairing as a universal principle of matter was unimaginable; the experimental demonstration of plant sexuality came only with Rudolf Jakob Camerarius in 1694. Second, the Qurʾān’s own clause “of that which they do not know” (wa mimmā lā yaʿlamūn) is a self-conscious act of leaving the category open — a point the classical mufassirūn themselves conceded. Third, the twentieth century’s discovery of antimatter — Paul Dirac’s 1928 equation, his prediction of the anti-electron, and Carl Anderson’s 1932 discovery of the positron — furnishes the most vivid instance of a pairing “not known” to any prior age, now so domesticated that it is used daily in hospitals through positron emission tomography. Throughout, I insist on a hermeneutic of resonance and anticipation rather than concordist “scientific miracle” (iʿjāz ʿilmī) proof: the claim is not that the Qurʾān taught physics, but that a text making so sweeping a universal claim, in a domain then wholly unknown, has stood up rather than been embarrassed. I close by locating the theology of duality within the Islamic doctrine of tawḥīd: everything created is paired precisely because the Creator alone is One.

I. The Two Verses and the Word Zawj

The Qurʾān returns many times to the motif of pairs. Two verses carry it to its widest reach.

Q 36:36 (Sūrat Yā Sīn):

سُبْحَانَ الَّذِي خَلَقَ الْأَزْوَاجَ كُلَّهَا مِمَّا تُنبِتُ الْأَرْضُ وَمِنْ أَنفُسِهِمْ وَمِمَّا لَا يَعْلَمُونَ

Subḥāna alladhī khalaqa l-azwāja kullahā mimmā tunbitu l-arḍu wa min anfusihim wa mimmā lā yaʿlamūn.

Q 51:49 (Sūrat al-Dhāriyāt):

وَمِن كُلِّ شَيْءٍ خَلَقْنَا زَوْجَيْنِ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَذَكَّرُونَ

Wa min kulli shayʾin khalaqnā zawjayni laʿallakum tadhakkarūn.

The pivotal word is zawj (plural azwāj; dual zawjayn). It does not mean simply “two things.” As the lexicographers and commentators note, zawj denotes a member of a pair — a mate, a counterpart, one of two that belong together and complete one another. A married man is the zawj of his wife and she of him; each is incomplete without the other. The word therefore carries a freight of complementarity and mutual completion that the bland English “pair” only partly conveys. Muhammad Asad captured this by rendering azwāj as “opposites,” glossing it as “the polarity evident in all creation… which expresses itself in the existence of antithetic and yet complementary forces.” Note the grammatical texture: Q 36:36 uses the emphatic al-azwāja kullahā, “all the pairs, every one of them,” while Q 51:49 uses the dual zawjayn, “two of a pair,” governed by the sweeping min kulli shayʾin, “of every single thing.”

Six named translations of Q 36:36

Yusuf Ali: “Glory to Allah, Who created in pairs all things that the earth produces, as well as their own (human) kind and (other) things of which they have no knowledge.” My Islam
Pickthall: “Glory be to Him Who created all the sexual pairs, of that which the earth groweth, and of themselves, and of that which they know not!” My Islam
Muhammad Asad: “Limitless in His glory is He who has created opposites in whatever the earth produces, and in men’s own selves, and in that of which [as yet] they have no knowledge.” Knowthequran
Abdel Haleem: “Glory be to Him who created all the pairs of things that the earth produces, as well as themselves and other things they do not know about.” myislam thequran
Sahih International: “Exalted is He who created all pairs – from what the earth grows and from themselves and from that which they do not know.” My Islam
Maulana Muhammad Ali (Aḥmadiyya): “Glory be to Him Who created pairs of all things, of what the earth grows, and of their kind and of what they know not!”

Six named translations of Q 51:49

Yusuf Ali: “And of every thing We have created pairs: That ye may receive instruction.”
Pickthall: “And all things We have created by pairs, that haply ye may reflect.”
Muhammad Asad: “And in everything have We created opposites, so that you might bear in mind [that God alone is One].”
Abdel Haleem: “and We created pairs of all things so that you [people] might take note.”
Sahih International: “And of all things We created two mates; perhaps you will remember.” Islamic Vault
Maulana Muhammad Ali (Aḥmadiyya): “And of everything We have created pairs, that you may be mindful.”

II. The Native Milieu: These Are Not Cherry-Picked Verses

A central concern of Zia H. Shah’s writing — and a legitimate scholarly worry about the whole genre of “Qurʾān and science” — is that verses can be plucked out of context and retrofitted to modern discoveries. The best defense against that charge is to read the pairs verses where they actually sit. In both surahs, the pairs statement is embedded in a crescendo of reflection on the natural order. These are not isolated proof-texts; they are single beats in a sustained argument that the God who orders the cosmos is One.

Q 36:33–40: from the dead earth to the swimming orbits

The passage of Yā Sīn opens on the ground and ascends to the heavens:

36:33 وَآيَةٌ لَّهُمُ الْأَرْضُ الْمَيْتَةُ أَحْيَيْنَاهَا وَأَخْرَجْنَا مِنْهَا حَبًّا فَمِنْهُ يَأْكُلُونَ Wa āyatun lahumu l-arḍu l-maytatu aḥyaynāhā wa akhrajnā minhā ḥabban fa-minhu yaʾkulūn — “And a sign for them is the dead earth: We give it life and bring forth from it grain, so that from it they eat.” My Islam

36:34 وَجَعَلْنَا فِيهَا جَنَّاتٍ مِّن نَّخِيلٍ وَأَعْنَابٍ وَفَجَّرْنَا فِيهَا مِنَ الْعُيُونِ Wa jaʿalnā fīhā jannātin min nakhīlin wa aʿnābin wa fajjarnā fīhā mina l-ʿuyūn — “And We placed therein gardens of date palms and grapevines, and caused springs to gush forth in it.”

36:35 لِيَأْكُلُوا مِن ثَمَرِهِ وَمَا عَمِلَتْهُ أَيْدِيهِمْ ۖ أَفَلَا يَشْكُرُونَ Li-yaʾkulū min thamarihi wa mā ʿamilat-hu aydīhim, afalā yashkurūn — “That they may eat of its fruit — though it was not their hands that made it. Will they not then give thanks?”

36:36 سُبْحَانَ الَّذِي خَلَقَ الْأَزْوَاجَ كُلَّهَا مِمَّا تُنبِتُ الْأَرْضُ وَمِنْ أَنفُسِهِمْ وَمِمَّا لَا يَعْلَمُونَ Subḥāna alladhī khalaqa l-azwāja kullahā… — “Glory be to Him who created all the pairs, of that which the earth grows, and of themselves, and of that which they do not know.”

36:37 وَآيَةٌ لَّهُمُ اللَّيْلُ نَسْلَخُ مِنْهُ النَّهَارَ فَإِذَا هُم مُّظْلِمُونَ Wa āyatun lahumu l-laylu naslakhu minhu n-nahāra fa-idhā hum muẓlimūn — “And a sign for them is the night: We strip the day from it, and behold, they are in darkness.”

36:38 وَالشَّمْسُ تَجْرِي لِمُسْتَقَرٍّ لَّهَا ۚ ذَٰلِكَ تَقْدِيرُ الْعَزِيزِ الْعَلِيمِ Wa sh-shamsu tajrī li-mustaqarrin lahā, dhālika taqdīru l-ʿazīzi l-ʿalīm — “And the sun runs to its resting-place appointed for it. That is the decree of the Almighty, the All-Knowing.”

36:39 وَالْقَمَرَ قَدَّرْنَاهُ مَنَازِلَ حَتَّىٰ عَادَ كَالْعُرْجُونِ الْقَدِيمِ Wa l-qamara qaddarnāhu manāzila ḥattā ʿāda ka-l-ʿurjūni l-qadīm — “And the moon — We have measured for it mansions, till it returns like an old, withered palm-branch.”

36:40 لَا الشَّمْسُ يَنبَغِي لَهَا أَن تُدْرِكَ الْقَمَرَ وَلَا اللَّيْلُ سَابِقُ النَّهَارِ ۚ وَكُلٌّ فِي فَلَكٍ يَسْبَحُونَ Lā sh-shamsu yanbaghī lahā an tudrika l-qamara wa lā l-laylu sābiqu n-nahār, wa kullun fī falakin yasbaḥūn — “It is not for the sun to overtake the moon, nor does the night outstrip the day; and each swims in an orbit.”

Consider the sweep. The passage moves from agriculture and botany (the revived dead earth, the grain, the gardens of date palms and grapevines), through hydrology (the gushing springs), to the pairs verse, then to the night as a curtain stripped away to reveal the day, then to solar motion (tajrī li-mustaqarrin lahā, the sun “running” to an appointed place), to lunar orbital mechanics (the measured manāzil or mansions, the crescent returning like a dried palm-frond), and finally to the astonishing image of Q 36:40: each celestial body yasbaḥūn — “swims” or “floats” — fī falakin, “in an orbit.”

Two words in Q 36:40 deserve emphasis. Falak is not the ordinary word for sky (samāʾ); it denotes a rounded or spherical course, an orbit. And yasbaḥūn — “they swim” — is a verb of self-propelled motion through a medium, not of being fixed to a crystalline shell. Taken together, the idiom is remarkably free of the flat-earth or geocentric-crystalline-sphere picture that dominated much of antiquity. And the modern reader cannot help noticing that the sun’s “running to a resting-place” now has a literal referent unknown to any pre-modern commentator: the sun is not stationary but orbits the center of the Milky Way. The Solar System travels within its trajectory around the Galactic Center at an average speed of about 230 km/s (roughly 828,000 km/h), completing one galactic year — one full circuit of the galactic center — in a period usually cited as 225 to 250 million Earth years. Zia H. Shah has devoted a separate essay on thequran.love (“All in an Orbit”) to precisely this phrase, noting that kullun fī falakin yasbaḥūn appears twice in the Qurʾān (Q 21:33 and Q 36:40). Thequran

Q 51:47–49: a cosmological crescendo of three consecutive verses

If Yā Sīn ascends from earth to orbit, al-Dhāriyāt compresses the whole cosmos into three consecutive verses that end on the pairs:

51:47 وَالسَّمَاءَ بَنَيْنَاهَا بِأَيْدٍ وَإِنَّا لَمُوسِعُونَ Wa s-samāʾa banaynāhā bi-aydin wa innā la-mūsiʿūn — “And the heaven We built with power/hands, and indeed We are its expander.” Surah Quran

51:48 وَالْأَرْضَ فَرَشْنَاهَا فَنِعْمَ الْمَاهِدُونَ Wa l-arḍa farashnāhā fa-niʿma l-māhidūn — “And the earth We spread out — how excellently do We spread it!” Islamic Vault

51:49 وَمِن كُلِّ شَيْءٍ خَلَقْنَا زَوْجَيْنِ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَذَكَّرُونَ Wa min kulli shayʾin khalaqnā zawjayni laʿallakum tadhakkarūn — “And of everything We created pairs, that you may reflect.”

Here the movement is: cosmic construction and expansion (the heaven built and mūsiʿūn — “expanding”), then the spreading of the earth (its geology made habitable), then the pairs of all things. As Zia H. Shah observes, the pairs verse arrives immediately on the heels of a statement about the built and expanding heavens — so that “the scope from animals to all things, including physics” is opened by the very context in which it sits. The phrase wa innā la-mūsiʿūn — “and indeed We are [its] expander” — drew the attention of Muhammad Asad decades ago; in his commentary he wrote that “inna la-mūsiʿūn clearly foreshadows the modern notion of the ‘expanding universe.’” That modern notion is the cosmology of Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble, who between 1927 and 1929 established that distant galaxies are receding — the universe is expanding — and of Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess, whose two teams announced in 1998 that this expansion is in fact accelerating, a discovery honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. The prudent reader will resist the temptation to say the verse “predicted” Hubble; what one can responsibly say is that the Qurʾānic idiom of a heaven still being expanded by its Maker sits far more comfortably with twentieth-century cosmology than with the static, eternal cosmos assumed by Aristotle — and by Einstein himself until 1929. thequran AIP

The point of walking through both passages is simple and, I think, decisive against the cherry-picking charge: the pairs verses are not ornamental asides. They are structural members of two extended Qurʾānic arguments from the order of nature to the Oneness of its Author.

III. What the Seventh Century Did Not Know: Plant Sexuality

The force of Q 36:36 and 51:49 depends on a historical claim that must be stated with scrupulous care, because a serious scholarly register requires it.

What was known. The ancients were not ignorant of everything about plant reproduction in a practical sense. In Mesopotamia, the artificial pollination of the date palm was practiced empirically for millennia; Neo-Assyrian stone reliefs from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE) at Nimrud depict winged figures (apkallu) touching a cone-like male date-palm inflorescence to a stylized tree, a scene now widely interpreted as ritualized artificial pollination. Herodotus, Theophrastus, and Pliny the Elder all describe the fertilization of date palms, and the caprification of figs was likewise an old practical art. There is even a famous ḥadīth, cited by Zia H. Shah, in which the Prophet Muhammad, newly arrived in Medina, saw farmers climbing and tending the date palms, offered a casual opinion that the labor might be dispensable, and — when the crop failed — replied: “I am only a human being. If I command you to do something concerning your religion, then accept it; but if I command you something from my own opinion, then I am only a human being” (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Hadith 6126/139-2360). The episode is telling precisely because it shows that neither the Prophet nor his community possessed a theory of sexual pairing in plants. They knew a technique, not a principle. Leibniz-Institut

What was not known. The general biological fact — that sexuality is a universal principle running through the plant kingdom, that flowers have male (stamen) and female (pistil) organs, and that pollen is the fertilizing male agent — was established experimentally only in 1694, when Rudolf Jakob Camerarius (Rudolph Jacob Camerer, 1665–1721), professor of medicine and director of the botanical garden at Tübingen, published De sexu plantarum epistola (“A Letter on the Sex of Plants”). Isolating female plants of dioecious species such as Mercurialis annua and spinach from any male plant, and removing the pollen-bearing tassels from maize, Camerarius showed that without pollen no viable seed forms — the first true experimental proof that plants reproduce sexually. He had precursors who suspected the fact — Nehemiah Grew had suggested in 1682 that the stamen was male, and John Ray concurred — and even a little-known anticipation by the Bohemian Adam Zalužanský (1592); and Carl Linnaeus would later build his entire “sexual system” of classification (1735 onward) on the number and arrangement of these organs. But the decisive experimental establishment is Camerarius’s, and it is nearly a full millennium after the revelation of the Qurʾān. Crops Review + 2

So the honest and sufficient claim is this: the general principle of pairing across all plants was unknown in the seventh century — not that no one had ever tied a date-palm flower. As Zia H. Shah puts it, the seventh-century Arabs “only knew of pairs in the domestic animals,” and might reasonably have supposed the verse was about human and animal genders; the botanical and the sub-microscopic senses lay beyond their horizon. This is exactly the horizon the Qurʾān explicitly gestures beyond with its clause wa mimmā lā yaʿlamūn — “and of that which they do not know.” thequran

IV. “Of That Which They Do Not Know”: The Classical Commentators’ Honesty

It would be a mistake to imagine that the open-endedness of Q 36:36 is a modern apologetic invention read back into the text. The classical mufassirūn themselves understood wa mimmā lā yaʿlamūn as a genuinely open category.

Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1373), in his Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm, glosses the three clauses of 36:36 in turn: “of that which the earth produces” means crops, fruits, and plants; “of themselves” means He made humankind male and female; and “of that which they know not” means aṣnāf al-khalāʾiq mimmā lā yaʿlamūnahā — “different kinds of creatures of which they know nothing.” He then cross-references Q 51:49. The category is, by his own account, indefinitely extendable. On 51:49 he lists the pairs expansively: “heaven and earth, night and day, sun and moon, land and sea, light and darkness, faith and disbelief, death and life, misery and happiness, Paradise and Hell… jinn and humans, male and female” — closing that “you may remember” means “so that you may know that the Creator is One, with no partner.” surahquran

Al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), the father of tafsīr, is even more explicit on the parallel verse 51:49. Reporting a range of views and endorsing that of Mujāhid, he states his considered principle: for everything God created, He created a counterpart differing from it in some respect, so that each is the opposite or complement of the other — unlike created things that can perform only one action and not its opposite, “such as fire, which can only heat and cannot cool, or ice, which can only cool and cannot heat” (Tafsīr al-Ṭabarī, 22/439–440). This is pairing understood as a universal law of contingent being, not a list of known examples.

Al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144), in al-Kashshāf, reads al-azwāj as al-ajnās and al-aṣnāf — “kinds, sorts, categories” — so that the verse speaks of every variety of created thing, not merely the two human sexes. tafsiralquran

Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), in the expansive philosophical Mafātīḥ al-Ghayb, treats the opening Subḥāna as both glorification and an implicit command to glorify, and reads 36:36 in explicit connection with the preceding verse’s rebuke of the ungrateful — turning it into a ḥujja, a rational argument for people of intellect: the One who fashions all creatures in pairs is Himself the single, unpaired Creator with no partner. Islami[dot]co + 2

Al-Qurṭubī (d. 671/1273), in al-Jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-Qurʾān, notes the two forces of subḥāna here — self-glorification against those who ignore His signs, and taʿajjub, an expression of wonder — and on 51:49 (17/53) records the classic lists of pairs (from Mujāhid and Ibn Zayd): male and female, heaven and earth, sun and moon, night and day, light and darkness, plains and mountains, jinn and humankind, sweetness and sourness, and “different types of things such as tastes, smells, and sounds.” Tafsir Al Quran islamqa

The takeaway is important for a non-polemical reading: the tradition did not claim to know exhaustively what the “pairs unknown to you” were. It left the door open — al-Jalālayn glossing the phrase as “marvellous and strange creatures” (min ʿajāʾib al-khalq), the Tanwīr al-Miqbās as “other different kinds in the land and sea.” When later ages walked through that door — into plant sexuality, into chromosomes, into antimatter — they were not forcing the text; they were populating a category the text and its earliest interpreters had deliberately left unfilled.

V. The Dirac Equation: A Pairing “They Did Not Know”

Nowhere is the clause “of that which they do not know” more strikingly populated than in the physics of antimatter — and here Zia H. Shah’s two essays on thequran.love, “The Holy Quran and the Pairs in Quantum Physics” (2023) and “How Electron and Positron Enhance My Belief in the Quran and God’s Providence” (2024), find their sharpest point.

If you visit Westminster Abbey in London, and go to Newton’s tomb, you will see a small plaque set in the floor nearby with an equation inscribed on it. The plaque, unveiled on 13 November 1995, commemorates Paul Dirac, one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant scientists, buried far away in Tallahassee, Florida, but honored here in Scientists’ Corner among Newton, Darwin, Faraday, and Herschel. Take a look at the equation, and marvel at how simple and compact the formula is, even if the symbols mean nothing to you: Linda Hall Library $i\gamma\cdot\partial\psi = m\psi$ iγ⋅∂ψ=mψ

This little equation provides an entrée to a wonderland of mathematics and physics, and to a deeper layer of physical reality that you would never suspect existed, even though it is all around us. (For readers who want the fuller standard form, the Dirac equation is often written $i\hbar\gamma^{\mu}\partial_{\mu}\psi – mc\,\psi = 0$ iℏγμ∂μψ−mcψ=0; the Abbey inscription is a beautifully condensed version of it, in which $\gamma$ γ is a set of $4\times4$ 4×4 matrices and $\partial$ ∂ is a four-gradient.)

Published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A — “The Quantum Theory of the Electron,” vol. 117, no. 778, pp. 610–624, in February 1928, the manuscript submitted on 2 January 1928 — Dirac’s equation merges the two great triumphs of twentieth-century physics: the theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics. It was crafted for the very practical purpose of describing how electrons behave when moving at near the speed of light, as they do, for example, in radioactive emissions or when orbiting heavy atoms like uranium. But the equation is also a work of sublime artistry: these sparse symbols embed novel geometrical structures — the four-component spinor — that lead to an entirely new way of describing space, time, and matter. Almost as an afterthought, the equation explained why the electron has a spin of one-half, a fact that had been bolted onto earlier theory by hand.

When you invent an equation the first thing you try to do is solve it. In the case of the Dirac equation the solutions correspond to various possible states of the electron — for example in orbit around an atom, or just moving freely with a certain energy. When Dirac attempted this, he was puzzled by the fact that for every choice of energy there were two solutions to his equation. Only one was needed to describe the electron. What was the other one for? What was this strikingly elegant equation trying to say? Dirac made a wild guess: his equation was telling us (well, him) of the existence of a kind of anti-world, in which for every state of an electron there is a corresponding state of an “anti-electron” — a particle with the same mass as the electron but with the opposite electric charge, positive instead of negative. But no such particle was known in 1929. Dirac initially, and mistakenly, wondered whether the extra solutions might describe the proton; by 1931, in his paper “Quantised Singularities in the Electromagnetic Field” (Proceedings of the Royal Society A, vol. 133), he had committed to the bolder view, writing: “A hole, if there were one, would be a new kind of particle, unknown to experimental physics, having the same mass and opposite charge to an electron. We may call such a particle an anti-electron.” arxiv

Yet Dirac was right. In 1932, the anti-electron — usually called the positron — was discovered by the American physicist Carl Anderson at Caltech, who photographed its curved track in a cloud chamber while studying cosmic rays and published “The Positive Electron” in Physical Review (vol. 43, pp. 491–494) the following year, after first reporting it in Science on 9 September 1932. Anderson had not even known of Dirac’s prediction; he found the thing on its own terms, a positively charged particle with the mass of an electron. Dirac was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, sharing it with Erwin Schrödinger. Soon after the discovery of the positron it became clear that other anti-particles must exist: anti-protons, anti-neutrons, anti-neutrinos, and so on. The antiproton was produced and confirmed in 1955 by Owen Chamberlain and Emilio Segrè at the Bevatron accelerator in Berkeley (Nobel Prize 1959); the antineutron followed in 1956 at the same machine. In September 1995, a team led by Walter Oelert synthesized the first nine atoms of antihydrogen at CERN’s Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR); those atoms survived only about 40 billionths of a second, travelling some 10 metres at nearly the speed of light. In 2010 the ALPHA experiment at CERN succeeded in trapping antihydrogen: in 335 trapping attempts it observed 38 annihilations consistent with the controlled release of trapped anti-atoms, each held for at least 172 milliseconds — long enough to study — with results published in Nature on 17 November 2010. Today, the anti-particles of all known particles of matter have been discovered and, in some cases, harvested and used in experiments. Collectively, these anti-particles are called antimatter.

As Zia H. Shah writes, matter and antimatter particles “are always produced as a pair and, if they come in contact, annihilate one another, leaving behind pure energy.” The electron and the positron are a zawj in the fullest Qurʾānic sense — counterparts, mirror-opposites, mutually completing and mutually annihilating. And here is Shah’s arresting formulation, which I adopt: “The smartest mind in physics, Paul Dirac, who had little or no interest in religion, unintentionally became a tool for a commentary of the Holy Quran for the 20th and 21st century.” No one supposes Dirac intended this. That is exactly the point of the argument: the pairing was, in the Qurʾān’s own words, “of that which they do not know.” thequran thequran

VI. Antimatter in the Hospital: The Physician’s Bridge

There is a temptation, in essays of this kind, to leave antimatter in the exotic realm of accelerators and cosmic rays. But Zia H. Shah writes as a practicing physician, and the physician’s vantage supplies the most humane illustration of all: antimatter is used in medicine every day.

Positron emission tomography — the PET scan — is clinical antimatter. The most common tracer is fluorine-18 fluorodeoxyglucose (¹⁸F-FDG), a glucose analogue in which a hydroxyl group is replaced by a radioactive fluorine-18 atom (half-life about 110 minutes). Injected into the patient, FDG concentrates where glucose metabolism is highest — in tumors, in active brain tissue, in inflamed sites. Fluorine-18 decays predominantly by positron emission (β⁺, about 97% of decays): it throws off a positron, an anti-electron, the very particle Dirac dreamed and Anderson found. The positron travels less than a millimeter before it meets an ordinary electron in the patient’s tissue, and the two — matter and antimatter — annihilate. Their mass is converted, per Einstein’s E = mc², into two gamma-ray photons, each of energy 511 keV, flying off in almost exactly opposite directions (180° apart, as the conservation of momentum requires). A ring of detectors around the patient registers these two photons in coincidence — only near-simultaneous, back-to-back pairs are counted — and from millions of such annihilations a three-dimensional map of metabolic activity is reconstructed. Springer

Pause on what this means. Every PET scan is a controlled, benevolent staging of the matter–antimatter encounter. The clinician who reads a lit-up nodule on a PET image is reading the light of annihilating pairs. A doctrine that in 1928 seemed the wildest speculation of a solitary theorist — and that the seventh century could not have conceived — now saves lives in oncology, cardiology, and neurology. For a physician-author reflecting on wa mimmā lā yaʿlamūn, “of that which they do not know,” the PET scanner is not a metaphor. It is the thing itself, humming in the basement of the hospital.

VII. The Wider Catalogue of Pairs

Once one is attuned to it, pairing appears at nearly every stratum of physical reality — much of it in domains utterly beyond the reach of any pre-modern knowledge. Zia H. Shah, drawing on the Standard Model, lists these systematically; I summarize and extend.

Matter and antimatter; particle and antiparticle. Every fermion of the Standard Model has an antiparticle of equal mass and opposite charge: the electron and positron; the up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom quarks, each with its antiquark; the muon and tau and their antiparticles; the three neutrinos and their antineutrinos. thequran thequran
Positive and negative electric charge, and the north and south magnetic poles — the everyday polarity that structures electromagnetism.
Wave–particle duality — every quantum entity is at once wave and particle, a complementarity Niels Bohr made the cornerstone of his philosophy of physics.
Spin-up and spin-down — the two-valuedness that Dirac’s equation explained, the paired states of intrinsic angular momentum.
Fermions and bosons — the two great families of particles, matter-constituents and force-carriers.
Matter and energy — interconvertible, two aspects of one reality, as annihilation and pair-production show.
Chromosome pairs and diploidy. Human somatic cells carry 23 pairs of chromosomes, including the paired sex chromosomes X and Y. Sexual reproduction in animals, like that in plants, is a pairing of gametes.
The double helix. The structure of DNA, discovered by Watson and Crick in 1953, is built on complementary base pairing: adenine always with thymine, guanine always with cytosine, the two antiparallel strands each the template and mate of the other. Life stores and copies its information as a pair. Genome.gov
Quantum entanglement. Pairs of particles can be prepared in a shared state such that measuring one instantly fixes the property of the other — a correlation Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” now the working substance of quantum information science.

Some of these are complementary opposites (charge, poles, spin), some are mirror-counterparts (particle/antiparticle), some are cooperative mates (base pairs, gametes, entangled pairs). All of them answer to the semantic range of zawj — a member of a pair, joined to and completed by its other. And every one of them was unknown, unknowable, in the seventh century.

VIII. The Slight Asymmetry That Let a Universe Exist

There is a theological subtlety in the physics of pairs that deserves its own paragraph, because it cuts against a lazy reading. If matter and antimatter were created in perfectly equal amounts, they would have annihilated each other completely in the first instants after the Big Bang, leaving a universe of pure radiation and no matter at all — no galaxies, no earth, no life. That we exist at all means the pairing was very nearly, but not exactly, symmetric. As CERN puts it, “after the Big Bang some unknown mechanism created a tiny excess of matter — approximately one extra particle per billion antiparticles. When all the matter and antimatter annihilated, this excess is all that remained.” In 1967 the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov identified the three conditions — baryon-number violation, violation of the C and CP symmetries, and a departure from thermal equilibrium — that any physical process must satisfy to generate such an imbalance from an initially symmetric state. The mechanism (baryogenesis) is still not fully understood; it is one of the open problems of physics, and the Standard Model has so far failed to reproduce the observed imbalance quantitatively. arxiv

The theological reading I favor is careful and non-triumphalist. It is not that the Qurʾān “predicted baryon asymmetry.” It is rather that the deepest layer of the pairing motif contains a beautiful irony: creation is pervasively paired, yet the material world could exist only because the pairing was not a sterile perfect symmetry. Perfect symmetry is annihilation; a world requires a whisper of asymmetry. There is something here that resonates with the Qurʾānic insistence that only God is the absolute al-Aḥad — perfectly one, perfectly self-identical — while everything created is marked by the productive incompleteness of pairing.

IX. The Theology of Duality and Tawḥīd

This brings us to the heart of the matter, and to what I take to be the correct theological reading of the pairs verses. Why does the Qurʾān dwell so insistently on pairs? Because pairing is the signature of creaturehood. To be created is to be contingent, dependent, incomplete — to require a counterpart. Only the Creator is without pair, without partner, without counterpart. The duality of creation is the epistemic and metaphysical counterpart of the unicity of God.

This is why Q 36:36 opens with Subḥāna — “Glory be to Him” — and why al-Rāzī reads the whole verse as an argument against shirk (associating partners with God). The logic is compact and rigorous: everything you can point to comes in pairs; the paired is the dependent; therefore the ground of all pairing must itself be unpaired, single, and self-sufficient. Ibn Kathīr says the closing “that you may remember” (Q 51:49) means precisely “that you may know that the Creator is One, with no partner.”

The Qurʾān makes this explicit elsewhere. Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ (Q 112) declares God al-Aḥad and al-Ṣamad — the One, the Eternal Refuge — “He begets not, nor is He begotten, and there is none comparable to Him.” Q 42:11 insists laysa ka-mithlihi shayʾun — “there is nothing whatever like unto Him.” And Q 6:101 asks how God could have a child wa lam takun lahu ṣāḥibah — “when He has no consort/mate.” The last is decisive for our theme: God has no ṣāḥibah, no mate, no zawj. He is the one being in all of reality that is unpaired. Everything else — electron and positron, stamen and pistil, X and Y, adenine and thymine, matter and antimatter — is paired, and by its very pairing points beyond itself to the One who is not.

X. Duality Across the Traditions — and the Difference Islam Makes

The intuition that reality is structured by pairs of opposites is old and cross-cultural, and an interfaith-friendly reading should honor that. The Pythagoreans drew up a table of ten opposites (limit/unlimited, odd/even, one/many, light/dark, and so on). Heraclitus taught the unity of opposites — the road up and the road down are one and the same. Chinese thought gave us yin and yang, the complementary polarity whose interplay generates the ten thousand things. Zoroastrianism framed reality as a cosmic contest between paired principles of light and darkness, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu. And in modern philosophy, Hegel’s dialectic made the tension and resolution of opposites the engine of history and thought.

The Qurʾānic vision shares the observation — reality is deeply paired — but differs decisively in its metaphysics. It is not a dualism. Yin-yang and Zoroastrian dualism make the pair itself ultimate, co-eternal, irreducible. The Qurʾān subordinates all pairing to a single, unpaired, transcendent Creator who is prior to and sovereign over every polarity. The opposites are not two ultimate principles locked in eternal balance; they are creatures, brought into being in their pairs by the One who is Himself beyond pairing. This is the difference between metaphysical dualism and what we might call pairing-under-tawḥīd: the many pairs are signs (āyāt) pointing to the single Sign-giver. The duality of the world is not a rival to God’s oneness; it is its evidence.

XI. Epistemology: A Text That Makes Room for Discovery

The clause wa mimmā lā yaʿlamūn, “of that which they do not know,” is epistemically extraordinary. Most claims age badly precisely where they are most specific; a text that had listed the pairs known in the seventh century — man and woman, male and female livestock, day and night — and stopped there would have been true but unremarkable, and closed. Instead the Qurʾān appends an open variable: and pairs you don’t know about. It is a claim that, by design, leaves room for future knowledge to fill it. It does not close the book on the natural world; it holds a place open in it.

This is the right place to state, plainly, the hermeneutical discipline this essay observes — the discipline that distinguishes Zia H. Shah’s approach, at its best, from the excesses of the “scientific miracle” (iʿjāz ʿilmī) genre. The genre associated with Maurice Bucaille, and popularized by figures such as Zakir Naik, tends to claim that the Qurʾān stated modern scientific facts in advance — that it taught embryology or cosmology or particle physics — and then to treat each new discovery as a knock-down proof of divine authorship. That approach is fragile on two fronts. Scientifically, it hostages faith to the always-provisional state of research, so that every revised theory threatens the “miracle.” Hermeneutically, it forces anachronistic meanings onto words whose seventh-century senses were different, and it embarrasses itself when the retrofit is strained.

The reading defended here is more modest and, I think, more durable. I do not claim that Q 36:36 or 51:49 taught physics, or that “pairs” secretly meant “positrons.” I claim something weaker and stronger at once: that a text which, in the seventh century, made so sweeping and universal a claim — all pairs, everything in pairs, including what you do not know — in a domain where the general principle was genuinely unknown, has, over fourteen centuries, been vindicated rather than falsified by the widening of human knowledge. It could have been embarrassed. A universal claim is the easiest kind of claim to break: one counterexample suffices. Instead, the more we have learned — plant sexuality, chromosomes, base pairs, charge, spin, antimatter — the more the “pairs of all things” has been filled in. That is not proof in the geometer’s sense. It is resonance, and anticipation, and it is enough to enrich the belief of one already disposed to read the Qurʾān as revelation, without coercing the skeptic. It is, in Zia H. Shah’s honest framing, why “electron and positron enhance my belief” — enhancement, not demonstration.

I would add, in the same interfaith spirit that marks thequran.love, that this hermeneutic distances itself as much from over-claiming apologists within the Muslim tradition — including the confident concordism found in parts of Mirza Tahir Ahmad’s Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge and Truth — as it does from Bucaille. Resonance is a gift to contemplate, not a cudgel to win arguments.

XII. Mathematical Beauty, Dirac’s God, and the Structure of Reality

The Dirac story carries a further, philosophical charge that Zia H. Shah’s engagement with physics repeatedly returns to: the uncanny fit between abstract mathematics and physical reality. Dirac did not find the positron by looking for it in a laboratory. He found it by trusting his equation — by believing that the mathematics, if beautiful and consistent, was telling him something true about the world even when experiment had not yet caught up. He would later elevate this into a methodological creed, writing in Scientific American in May 1963 (“The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature”) that “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.” In the same essay he offered the sentence that believers have quoted ever since and that must be handled with care: “One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.” Wikiquote

Here honesty demands a firm hand, and the non-polemical register of this platform requires it. Dirac must not be co-opted. He was, for most of his life, an atheist or at best an agnostic; most biographers today regard him as an agnostic. At the 1927 Solvay Conference he delivered a sharp attack on religion as “a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality,” prompting Wolfgang Pauli’s famous quip: “There is no God, and Dirac is His prophet.” (Heisenberg recalled the exchange with tolerance; Bohr found Dirac’s view “quite lucid.”) His 1963 use of the word “God” was, in context, a way of expressing awe at the mathematical structure of nature, not a profession of theism. To enlist him as a secret believer would be exactly the kind of over-claiming this essay has renounced.

The genuinely interesting point is not about Dirac’s private beliefs but about the structure of reality his career revealed. Why should the universe be so deeply mathematical that a young man “playing with equations” in his rooms at St John’s College, Cambridge, could deduce the existence of a new form of matter years before anyone saw it? This is the puzzle Eugene Wigner named in his celebrated essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” (delivered 1959, published in Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics in 1960), calling the fit between mathematics and the physical world “a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” Wigner, Dirac, and later John Polkinghorne, Paul Davies, and Roger Penrose have all, in their different ways, registered this astonishment — that the cosmos is not merely orderly but comprehensible, and comprehensible in the austere language of mathematics. The theist has a candidate explanation ready to hand: the world is mathematically intelligible because it is the work of a rational Mind, and the human mind, made to know, is fitted to read it. This does not prove God; Penrose is not a theist, and Thomas Nagel, who in Mind and Cosmos argued that materialism cannot account for the mind’s grip on reality, explicitly is not either. But it reframes the “unreasonable effectiveness” from an embarrassment for naturalism into something the theist finds unsurprising.

This is where the Islamic intellectual tradition offers its own resource. In the occasionalism of al-Ghazālī, the regularities we call “laws of nature” are not autonomous powers but the habitual, moment-to-moment enactment of the divine will — sunnat Allāh, the “custom of God,” reliable because the One who wills it is faithful, not because nature possesses independent necessity. Zia H. Shah has framed this on thequran.love as the “Inshallah universe”: the laws hold, dependably, God willing — dependable enough to build a science on, contingent enough never to become a rival god. On this view the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” is neither miracle-as-fluke nor brute fact; it is what one should expect of a cosmos continuously sustained by a rational and faithful Creator. The mathematics is beautiful because the world is signed.

XIII. Epilogue: The Signature and the Sign

We began with two short verses and a single word. Zawj — a mate, a counterpart, one of a pair — turns out to be one of the master-keys of the Qurʾān’s engagement with the created order. Read where they actually live, in the crescendos of Yā Sīn and al-Dhāriyāt, the pairs verses are not stray proof-texts but structural beats in a sustained argument that ascends from the revived dead earth and the gardens of date palms, through the swimming orbits of sun and moon and the expanding heaven, to the Oneness of the Author of it all.

The seventh century knew a technique for pollinating a palm; it did not know that all plants are sexed, and it could not have dreamed that charge, spin, chromosome, base pair, and antiparticle would one day be added to the ledger of “pairs.” The Qurʾān wrote the ledger open. It said all the pairs, and everything in pairs, and — with a candor its own earliest commentators preserved — of that which they do not know. Then the centuries filled the blank: Camerarius in 1694 with the sexuality of plants; Watson and Crick in 1953 with the complementary rungs of the double helix; and, most vividly of all, Dirac in 1928 with an equation of eight symbols on an Abbey floor, from which he read the existence of an anti-world no one had seen — an anti-world confirmed by Anderson in 1932, harvested at Berkeley and CERN, and now, tamed into the PET scanner, quietly imaging the sick.

None of this is a knock-down proof, and this essay has refused to pretend otherwise. It is resonance — the phenomenon of a text that, having staked a universal claim in a domain then unknown, has been enlarged rather than embarrassed by the growth of knowledge. To the believer that resonance is a deepening; to the honest inquirer of any faith or none it is, at the least, a remarkable thing to sit with. And beneath it lies the theological point that outlasts every particular datum: the whole of creation is paired, and by its pairing confesses its own contingency, pointing past itself to the single Reality that has no counterpart, no partner, no mate — al-Aḥad, the One. The pairs are the signature; the Oneness is the Signer. Subḥāna alladhī khalaqa l-azwāja kullahā — Glory be to Him who created all the pairs.