A scholarly essay prepared for Zia H. Shah, MD, The Glorious Quran and Science (thequran.love) by Claude

Abstract

This essay asks whether the idea of extra spatial dimensions, from Riemann’s geometry and Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884) to Kaluza–Klein theory, superstring theory’s ten dimensions and M-theory’s eleven, can deepen our understanding of key Quranic themes: God’s transcendence and immanence, His all-encompassing knowledge (‘Alim al-ghayb wa’l-shahada), the hidden world of angels and jinn, the relativity of time in the Quran, the vastness of Paradise, and the Prophet’s Night Journey. It follows the extended argument of Zia H. Shah, MD, across his “Extra dimensions” series on thequran.love. His central thesis is that “Omniscience of God demands Omnipresence of some sort.” thequran Over time he has softened his early “reverse paradigm” (that theology predicts physics) into a more careful claim that extra dimensions offer “a coherent model that removes an apparent impossibility.” thequran The essay sets this modern concordist reading beside classical Islamic metaphysics (Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, Suhrawardi’s school, Mulla Sadra) and the major tafsir works. It then weighs serious objections: tanzih, bila kayf, Nidhal Guessoum’s critique of “scientific miracle” exegesis, the mismatch between tiny compactified dimensions and the vast heavens, and anachronism. Eleven key verses are given in Arabic, each with six translations side by side: Sahih International, Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, Hilali–Muhsin Khan, Abdel Haleem and Maududi. The conclusion is that extra dimensions work best as a conceptual bridge. They show that “unseen” need not mean “unreal” and that “everywhere” need not mean “spread out”, while God Himself stays beyond every dimension, created or conceivable.

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I. The Problem: How Can the Infinite Be Near?

The Quran makes two kinds of claims about God that seem to pull in opposite directions. On one side it declares Him beyond every sense and every concept:

Quran 6:103 (al-An’am)

لَّا تُدۡرِكُهُ ٱلۡأَبۡصَـٰرُ وَهُوَ یُدۡرِكُ ٱلۡأَبۡصَـٰرَۖ وَهُوَ ٱللَّطِیفُ ٱلۡخَبِیرُ

Translator	Translation
Sahih International	Vision perceives Him not, but He perceives [all] vision; and He is the Subtle, the Acquainted. islamawakened
Yusuf Ali (Saudi rev.)	No vision can grasp Him, but His grasp is over all vision: He is above all comprehension, yet is acquainted with all things. islamawakened
Pickthall	Vision comprehendeth Him not, but He comprehendeth (all) vision. He is the Subtile, the Aware. myislam
Hilali–Muhsin Khan	No vision can grasp Him, but He grasps all vision. He is Al-Latîf (the Most Subtle and Courteous), Well-Acquainted with all things. myislam
Abdel Haleem	No vision can take Him in, but He takes in all vision. He is the All Subtle, the All Aware. myislam
Maududi	No visual perception can encompass Him, even though He encompasses all visual perception. He is the All-Subtle, the All-Aware. myislam

On the other side, the Quran insists on a nearness closer than our own bodies:

Quran 50:16 (Qaf)

وَلَقَدۡ خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ وَنَعۡلَمُ مَا تُوَسۡوِسُ بِهِۦ نَفۡسُهُۥۖ وَنَحۡنُ أَقۡرَبُ إِلَيۡهِ مِنۡ حَبۡلِ ٱلۡوَرِيدِ

Translator	Translation
Sahih International	And We have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to him than [his] jugular vein myislam
Yusuf Ali	It was We Who created man, and We know what dark suggestions his soul makes to him: for We are nearer to him than (his) jugular vein. myislam
Pickthall	We verily created man and We know what his soul whispereth to him, and We are nearer to him than his jugular vein. myislam
Hilali–Muhsin Khan	And indeed We have created man, and We know what his ownself whispers to him. And We are nearer to him than his jugular vein (by Our Knowledge). myislam
Abdel Haleem	We created man––We know what his soul whispers to him: We are closer to him than his jugular vein–– myislam
Maududi	Surely We have created man, and We know the promptings of his heart, and We are nearer to him than even his jugular vein. myislam

The verse at the centre of Dr. Shah’s project holds both sides at once:

Quran 57:3 (al-Hadid)

هُوَ ٱلْأَوَّلُ وَٱلْـَٔاخِرُ وَٱلظَّـٰهِرُ وَٱلْبَاطِنُ ۖ وَهُوَ بِكُلِّ شَىْءٍ عَلِيمٌ

Translator	Translation
Sahih International	He is the First and the Last, the Ascendant and the Intimate, and He is, of all things, Knowing. myislam
Yusuf Ali	He is the First and the Last, the Evident and the Immanent: and He has full knowledge of all things. myislam
Pickthall	He is the First and the Last, and the Outward and the Inward; and He is Knower of all things. myislam
Hilali–Muhsin Khan	He is the First (nothing is before Him) and the Last (nothing is after Him), the Most High (nothing is above Him) and the Most Near (nothing is nearer than Him). And He is the All-Knower of every thing. myislam
Abdel Haleem	He is the First and the Last; the Outer and the Inner; He has knowledge of all things. myislam
Maududi	He is the First and the Last, and the Manifest and the Hidden, and He has knowledge of everything. myislam

Classical commentators read this verse through a prophetic supplication reported by Muslim and others and cited by Maududi: “You alone are the First; none is before You … You alone are the Hidden: none is more hidden than You.” Maududi explains that God is “the most Manifest of all the manifests,” because whatever appears does so “by His attributes and His works and His light”. He is also the most hidden, because “not only do the senses fail to perceive Him but the intellect and thought and imagination also cannot attain to His essence and reality.” myislam Sayyid Qutb (quoted on quran-wiki) noticed something geometric here. The pair “First/Last” covers time, he wrote, and the pair “Outer/Inner” covers place. quran-wiki The verse, in other words, already invites us to think about God in relation to the dimensions of the created order.

The Hilali–Khan rendering adds glosses that are themselves a piece of theology. Its parenthetical “(by Our Knowledge)” in 50:16, and in 58:7 “(with His Knowledge, while He Himself is over the Throne, over the seventh heaven)”, show how strongly part of the tradition guards against reading divine nearness as spatial presence. myislammyislam Any dimensional analogy has to respect that concern.

II. A Brief History of Higher Dimensions

The modern idea of extra dimensions has a long history. Aristotle argued in De Caelo that a magnitude divisible in three ways is a complete body, so a fourth dimension was ruled out. Ptolemy reportedly argued that a fourth line cannot be perpendicular to three mutually perpendicular lines. arxiv Medieval natural philosophy, Islamic and Latin alike, inherited this closed three-dimensional picture. The Stanford Encyclopedia and the Dictionary of Scientific Biography both note that for Ibn Sina “the common characteristic of all bodies with respect to form is that they have three dimensions,” and that he denied any vacuum or any “dimension that is not located in some material substance.” encyclopedia

The break came in the nineteenth century. Bernhard Riemann’s 1854 lecture on the foundations of geometry made n-dimensional curved spaces mathematically respectable. Charles Howard Hinton introduced the “tesseract” in 1888 and popularized the exercise of sweeping a cube through a fourth direction. Wikipedia In 1884 Edwin A. Abbott published Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. In it a Sphere visits A. Square, a two-dimensional being, who sees only a circle that appears from nowhere, grows, shrinks and vanishes. johnrector Carl Sagan brought the parable to a mass audience in Episode 10 of Cosmos (“The Edge of Forever,” 1980), using an apple: Flatlanders “see only a fragment as it passes through our plane.” upworthy

Physics took up the idea in 1919, when Theodor Kaluza wrote to Einstein proposing that a fifth dimension could unify gravity and electromagnetism. Oskar Klein (1926) suggested that this dimension is curled into a circle too small to detect. thequran Superstring theory later required ten spacetime dimensions and M-theory eleven. As the University of Washington’s Eöt-Wash gravity group puts it, “String theory requires that there are 10 space dimensions, and it is usually assumed that 7 of these dimensions are curled up in very tiny regions.” Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe and Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace made these ideas familiar to general readers. In 1998 Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos and Dvali (ADD) proposed “large” extra dimensions into which gravity alone could leak; the Eöt-Wash group notes that under ADD “these extra dimensions could be as big as a millimeter.” In 1999 Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum proposed warped “braneworlds,” in which our universe is a membrane in a higher-dimensional “bulk”; Randall later popularized the idea in Warped Passages. Dr. Shah’s own summary, in “The Quranic Paradise and the Extra Dimensions of Our Universe” (February 24, 2025), accurately notes that despite this theoretical appeal, “direct experimental evidence for extra dimensions remains elusive.” thequran

The religious use of Flatland is not new or limited to Islam. Jewish and Christian writers have long seen in Sagan’s apple an image of God passing through a world that cannot contain Him. aishwordpress What is distinctive about Dr. Shah’s work is that he ties the analogy closely to the Quran’s vocabulary of ghayb and shahada.

III. Zia H. Shah’s Argument: From Omniscience to Extra Dimensions

The founding intuition (2024)

The series starts with a short essay, “Arguing for Extra Dimensions in Physics from God’s Omniscience” (September 13, 2024). Writing as chief editor of The Muslim Times, Dr. Shah borrows Einstein’s habit of asking how he would build the universe if he were God. His answer: “if God is to know each and every speck, atom or quark of the universe, He needs to have some presence there, either personally or through some agents like angels.” He concludes: “Omniscience of God demands Omnipresence of some sort and from these attributes of Allah from the Quran one can easily conclude that physics should include extra dimensions.” And he adds the striking methodological remark: “If we be absolutely sure about our theology then it definitely has implications and offers ideas for physics and cosmology.” thequran

The expansion argument and Paradise (2025)

In “From Our Expanding Universe to the Extra-Dimensions” (January 13, 2025), Dr. Shah lists the verses that persuade him: God nearer than the jugular vein (50:16), knowing our innermost thoughts (5:7, 11:5), in complete control of the cosmos (57:1–6), and a Paradise covering “the expanse of the universe” (3:133). He writes that “we are convinced of extra dimensions in our universe,” and offers an explicit prediction: “Taking confidence from its expansion, I propose that in time extra dimensions will also be confirmed that will justify Quranic descriptions of God’s knowledge, His Providence, our psychological dependence on Him and our afterlife.” thequran

His Paradise essay (February 24, 2025) opens with a parable in the style of Flatland. Finn, a creature of Lineland, passes through Flatland, where A. Square teaches him a second dimension, and is lifted by a being called Spherius into Spaceland. thequran Dr. Shah then turns to the Quran’s description of Paradise:

Quran 3:133 (Al ‘Imran)

وَسَارِعُوٓا۟ إِلَىٰ مَغْفِرَةٍ مِّن رَّبِّكُمْ وَجَنَّةٍ عَرْضُهَا ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتُ وَٱلْأَرْضُ أُعِدَّتْ لِلْمُتَّقِينَ

Translator	Translation
Sahih International	And hasten to forgiveness from your Lord and a garden as wide as the heavens and earth, prepared for the righteous myislam
Yusuf Ali	Be quick in the race for forgiveness from your Lord, and for a Garden whose width is that (of the whole) of the heavens and of the earth, prepared for the righteous,- myislam
Pickthall	And vie one with another for forgiveness from your Lord, and for a paradise as wide as are the heavens and the earth, prepared for those who ward off (evil); myislam
Hilali–Muhsin Khan	And march forth in the way (which leads to) forgiveness from your Lord, and for Paradise as wide as are the heavens and the earth, prepared for Al-Muttaqun (the pious – see V. 2:2). myislam
Abdel Haleem	Hurry towards your Lord’s forgiveness and a Garden as wide as the heavens and earth prepared for the righteous, myislam
Maududi	And hasten to the forgiveness of your Lord and to a Paradise as vast as the heavens and the earth, prepared for the God-fearing. myislam

A companion verse, 57:21, repeats the image. thequran The old puzzle, recorded by Ibn Kathir in a report about the question “Where is the Fire then?”, is how a Garden as wide as the whole cosmos leaves room for anything else. myislam Dr. Shah’s answer is spatial: “Paradise and hell could be in totally separate dimensions.” His conclusion has become something of a motto for the site: “When we read science in the light of the Quran and then the word of God in the light of the works of God, which is our universe, new dimensions open up literally and figuratively.” thequran

The Architecture of Omniscience (2026)

The fullest statement is “The Architecture of Omniscience: Extra-Dimensional Physics and the Islamic Metaphysics of Reality” (January 27, 2026). Its abstract argues that “absolute, granular omniscience logically necessitates the existence of extra spatial or temporal dimensions.” Its reasoning: for a transcendent Being to know “every electron, positron, and quark within a three-dimensional volume without being constrained by its physical boundaries, the Being must operate from a higher-dimensional perspective.” thequran Its scriptural anchor is the divine title in Surat al-Hashr:

Quran 59:22 (al-Hashr)

هُوَ ٱللَّهُ ٱلَّذِى لَآ إِلَـٰهَ إِلَّا هُوَ ۖ عَـٰلِمُ ٱلْغَيْبِ وَٱلشَّهَـٰدَةِ ۖ هُوَ ٱلرَّحْمَـٰنُ ٱلرَّحِيمُ tafsirwebequranclasses

Translator	Translation
Sahih International	He is Allah, other than whom there is no deity, Knower of the unseen and the witnessed. He is the Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful. myislam
Yusuf Ali	Allah is He, than Whom there is no other god;- Who knows (all things) both secret and open; He, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. myislam
Pickthall	He is Allah, than Whom there is no other Allah, the Knower of the Invisible and the Visible. He is the Beneficent, Merciful. (wording as printed on myislam.org; print editions may differ) myislam
Hilali–Muhsin Khan	He is Allah, than Whom there is La ilaha illa Huwa (none has the right to be worshipped but He) the All-Knower of the unseen and the seen (open). He is the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. myislam Wikipedia
Abdel Haleem	He is God: there is no god other than Him. It is He who knows what is hidden as well as what is in the open, He is the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy. myislam
Maududi	He is Allah: there is no god but He; the Knower of the unseen and the manifest, He is the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate. myislam

Dr. Shah notes that the root gh-y-b is pervasive in the Quran. The Quranic Arabic Corpus confirms that “the triliteral root ghayn yā bā (غ ي ب) occurs 60 times in the Quran, in six derived forms,” including 49 times as the noun ghayb. He counts the ghayb/shahada pairing ten times (6:73, 9:94, 9:105, 13:9, 23:92, 32:6, 39:46, 59:22, 62:8, 64:18), and stresses that “the ‘Unseen’ is not synonymous with the ‘non-existent.’” He maps this pair onto the brane-and-bulk picture: we are “confined to a brane” (the seen), while the unseen “may correspond to the additional dimensions.” He reads the verses about being “taken back to the Knower of the unseen and the witnessed” (9:94, 9:105, 62:8) as describing death as “a ‘change of coordinate’ into the higher-dimensional reality of the Unseen.” The essay ends by calling the extra dimensions of Kaluza–Klein, string theory and M-theory “the very ‘keys to the unseen’ (Mafatih al-Ghayb)” of 6:59. It even lists “theological predictions for future physics,” including the eventual discovery of large extra dimensions.

Omnipresence without incarnation (2025–2026)

Several essays apply the model to God’s “withness” (ma’iyya). The key verse is 58:7, which Dr. Shah treated at length in “The Dimensional Architecture of Divine Omnipresence” (July 16, 2026): thequran

Quran 58:7 (al-Mujadila)

أَلَمْ تَرَ أَنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَعْلَمُ مَا فِى ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَمَا فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ ۖ مَا يَكُونُ مِن نَّجْوَىٰ ثَلَـٰثَةٍ إِلَّا هُوَ رَابِعُهُمْ وَلَا خَمْسَةٍ إِلَّا هُوَ سَادِسُهُمْ وَلَآ أَدْنَىٰ مِن ذَٰلِكَ وَلَآ أَكْثَرَ إِلَّا هُوَ مَعَهُمْ أَيْنَ مَا كَانُوا۟ ۖ ثُمَّ يُنَبِّئُهُم بِمَا عَمِلُوا۟ يَوْمَ ٱلْقِيَـٰمَةِ ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ بِكُلِّ شَىْءٍ عَلِيمٌ

Translator	Translation
Sahih International	Have you not considered that Allah knows what is in the heavens and what is on the earth? There is in no private conversation three but that He is the fourth of them, nor are there five but that He is the sixth of them – and no less than that and no more except that He is with them [in knowledge] wherever they are. Then He will inform them of what they did, on the Day of Resurrection. Indeed Allah is, of all things, Knowing. myislam
Yusuf Ali	Seest thou not that Allah doth know (all) that is in the heavens and on earth? There is not a secret consultation between three, but He makes the fourth among them, – Nor between five but He makes the sixth,- nor between fewer nor more, but He is in their midst, wheresoever they be: In the end will He tell them the truth of their conduct, on the Day of Judgment. For Allah has full knowledge of all things. myislam
Pickthall	Hast thou not seen that Allah knoweth all that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth? There is no secret conference of three but He is their fourth, nor of five but He is their sixth, nor of less than that or more but He is with them wheresoever they may be; and afterward, on the Day of Resurrection, He will inform them of what they did. Lo! Allah is Knower of all things. myislam
Hilali–Muhsin Khan	Have you not seen that Allah knows whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is on the earth? There is no Najwa (secret counsel) of three, but He is their fourth (with His Knowledge, while He Himself is over the Throne, over the seventh heaven), nor of five but He is their sixth (with His Knowledge), not of less than that or more, but He is with them (with His Knowledge) wheresoever they may be; and afterwards on the Day of Resurrection, He will inform them of what they did. Verily, Allah is the All-Knower of everything. myislam
Abdel Haleem	Do you not see [Prophet] that God knows everything in the heavens and earth? There is no secret conversation between three people where He is not the fourth, nor between five where He is not the sixth, nor between less or more than that without Him being with them, wherever they may be. On the Day of Resurrection, He will show them what they have done: God truly has full knowledge of everything. myislam
Maududi	Are you not aware that Allah knows whatever is in the heavens and whatever is in the earth? Never is there any whispering among three but He is their fourth; nor among five but He is their sixth; nor fewer nor more but He is with them wherever they may be. And then He will tell them on the Day of Judgement all that they have done. Surely Allah knows everything. myislam

Dr. Shah’s image is a “3D hand” that “can touch a flat surface without replacing any 2D creature on it”: a higher-dimensional presence would “surround and interlock with the world at every location” without displacing anything. He links this to the divine name al-Wasi’ (the All-Encompassing). thequran The same name closes 2:115, the verse about the divine Face:

Quran 2:115 (al-Baqarah)

وَلِلَّهِ ٱلْمَشْرِقُ وَٱلْمَغْرِبُ ۚ فَأَيْنَمَا تُوَلُّوا۟ فَثَمَّ وَجْهُ ٱللَّهِ ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ وَٰسِعٌ عَلِيمٌ

Translator	Translation
Sahih International	And to Allah belongs the east and the west. So wherever you [might] turn, there is the Face of Allah. Indeed, Allah is all-Encompassing and Knowing. myislam
Yusuf Ali	To Allah belong the east and the West: Whithersoever ye turn, there is the presence of Allah. For Allah is all-Pervading, all-Knowing. myislam
Pickthall	Unto Allah belong the East and the West, and whithersoever ye turn, there is Allah’s Countenance. Lo! Allah is All-Embracing, All-Knowing. myislam
Hilali–Muhsin Khan	And to Allah belong the east and the west, so wherever you turn yourselves or your faces there is the Face of Allah (and He is High above, over His Throne). Surely! Allah is All-Sufficient for His creatures’ needs, All-Knowing. myislam
Abdel Haleem	The East and the West belong to God: wherever you turn, there is His Face. God is all pervading and all knowing. myislam
Maududi	The East and the West, all belong to Allah: you will face Allah in whichsoever direction you turn your face: Allah is All-Embracing and All-Knowing. myislam

In “Omnipresence, Omniscience, and Extra Dimensions” (April 19, 2025), Dr. Shah writes that rather than “picturing a spirit somehow diffused like a gas in 3D space (which classical theologians rightly reject), we might picture God as operating in a higher-dimensional ‘space’ that underlies and penetrates our own.” He frankly raises the strongest objection himself, quoting William Lane Craig: God “transcends space altogether,” and “we shouldn’t think of God as some sort of invisible ether spread throughout space.” thequran In “Bridging Pantheism and Abrahamic Monotheism” (2026) he gives the model its best formula: extra-dimensional physics offers a way to picture God’s “immanence without incarnation.” thequran

The maturing of the thesis

Read in order, the corpus shows Dr. Shah’s own thinking developing. The 2024 claim that one “can easily conclude that physics should include extra dimensions” gives way to explicit statements of limit. The 2025 omnipresence essay states: “To be clear, portraying God as utilizing extra dimensions is a theological model or analogy,” and “Our argument is not that ‘God must exist because extra dimensions do,’ nor that ‘extra dimensions prove God’s presence.’” thequranthequran A 2026 essay on divine omnipotence insists: “Divine transcendence is ontological, not merely geometrical.” thequran “Consciousness and the Limits of Human Knowledge” (September 15, 2026) concludes that extra dimensions “offer a suggestive modern analogy for realities beyond ordinary perception, but their connection to consciousness and the Afterlife remains a theological proposal.” thequran The commentary on 14:48, “Another Earth, Other Heavens” (October 1, 2026), records Dr. Shah’s acknowledgment that “no conclusive experimental evidence has been found to confirm the existence of extra dimensions.” It calls the extra-dimensional reading “a coherent model that removes an apparent impossibility, not a confirmation.” thequran This later, more careful position is the one this essay endorses.

IV. The Unseen Inhabitants: Jinn, Angels and the Geometry of Concealment

No verse fits the Flatland analogy more naturally than the Quran’s warning about Satan. (The source notes supplied for this essay cite it as 6:103; the correct reference is 7:27.)

Quran 7:27 (al-A’raf)

يَٰبَنِيٓ ءَادَمَ لَا يَفۡتِنَنَّكُمُ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنُ كَمَآ أَخۡرَجَ أَبَوَيۡكُم مِّنَ ٱلۡجَنَّةِ يَنزِعُ عَنۡهُمَا لِبَاسَهُمَا لِيُرِيَهُمَا سَوۡءَٰتِهِمَآۚ إِنَّهُۥ يَرَىٰكُمۡ هُوَ وَقَبِيلُهُۥ مِنۡ حَيۡثُ لَا تَرَوۡنَهُمۡۗ إِنَّا جَعَلۡنَا ٱلشَّيَٰطِينَ أَوۡلِيَآءَ لِلَّذِينَ لَا يُؤۡمِنُونَ

Translator	Translation
Sahih International	O children of Adam, let not Satan tempt you as he removed your parents from Paradise, stripping them of their clothing to show them their private parts. Indeed, he sees you, he and his tribe, from where you do not see them. Indeed, We have made the devils allies to those who do not believe. myislam
Yusuf Ali	O ye Children of Adam! Let not Satan seduce you, in the same manner as He got your parents out of the Garden, stripping them of their raiment, to expose their shame: for he and his tribe watch you from a position where ye cannot see them: We made the evil ones friends (only) to those without faith. myislam
Pickthall	O Children of Adam! Let not Satan seduce you as he caused your (first) parents to go forth from the Garden and tore off from them their robe (of innocence) that he might manifest their shame to them. Lo! he seeth you, he and his tribe, from whence ye see him not. Lo! We have made the devils protecting friends for those who believe not. myislam
Hilali–Muhsin Khan	O Children of Adam! Let not Shaitan (Satan) deceive you, as he got your parents [Adam and Hawwa (Eve)] out of Paradise, stripping them of their raiments, to show them their private parts. Verily, he and Qabiluhu (his soldiers from the jinns or his tribe) see you from where you cannot see them. Verily, We made the Shayatin (devils) Auliya’ (protectors and helpers) for those who believe not. myislam
Abdel Haleem	Children of Adam, do not let Satan seduce you, as he did your parents, causing them to leave the Garden, stripping them of their garments to expose their nakedness to them: he and his forces can see you from where you cannot see them: We have made evil ones allies to those who do not believe. myislam
Maududi	Children of Adam! Let not Satan deceive you in the manner he deceived your parents out of Paradise, pulling off from them their clothing to reveal to them their shame. He and his host surely see you from whence you do not see them. We have made satans the guardians of those who do not believe. myislam

The phrase min haythu la tarawnahum (“from where you do not see them”) describes exactly the asymmetry Abbott dramatized. The Sphere looks down on the inside of every Flatland house, while the Flatlanders cannot see the Sphere at all. organism In the “Architecture” essay and in “Unseen Witnesses and Hidden Dimensions” (July 9, 2026), Dr. Shah extends this to the recording angels of 50:17–18. thequran On his reading, the unseen witnesses can observe our world fully without being part of its visible order. The “Holographic Eschaton” essay (January 25, 2026) puts it boldly: “unseen” beings may exist “in orthogonal dimensions.” thequran

Two clarifications keep this honest. First, the tafsir tradition explains the jinn’s invisibility through their created nature, beings made of “smokeless fire” (55:15), not through geometry. The dimensional picture adds a how that the text does not supply. Second, the analogy explains asymmetric seeing, but the Quran also attributes agency to jinn: whispering (waswasa), temptation, even physical labor for Solomon. A strictly higher-dimensional being touching a lower world would leave cross-sections, the “points of contact” Sagan described. organism That is a suggestive image for waswasa, but it is still an image.

V. Seven Heavens, Seven Earths: Layers, Branes, or Realms?

Quran 65:12 (al-Talaq) (opening clause shown for all six; where a translator’s full text was verified it is given)

ٱللَّهُ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ سَبْعَ سَمَـٰوَٰتٍۢ وَمِنَ ٱلْأَرْضِ مِثْلَهُنَّ يَتَنَزَّلُ ٱلْأَمْرُ بَيْنَهُنَّ لِتَعْلَمُوٓا۟ أَنَّ ٱللَّهَ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَىْءٍۢ قَدِيرٌۭ وَأَنَّ ٱللَّهَ قَدْ أَحَاطَ بِكُلِّ شَىْءٍ عِلْمًۢا

Translator	Translation
Sahih International	It is Allah who has created seven heavens and of the earth, the like of them. [His] command descends among them so you may know that Allah is over all things competent and that Allah has encompassed all things in knowledge. surahquran myislam
Yusuf Ali	Allah is He Who created seven Firmaments and of the earth a similar number. … quran
Pickthall	Allah it is who hath created seven heavens, and of the earth the like thereof. … quran
Hilali–Muhsin Khan	It is Allah Who has created seven heavens and of the earth the like thereof (i.e. seven). His Command descends between them (heavens and earth), that you may know that Allah has power over all things, and that Allah surrounds all things in (His) Knowledge. myislam myislam
Abdel Haleem	It is God who created seven heavens and a similar [number] of earths. … myislam
Maududi	Allah it is He Who created seven heavens, and, like them, the earth. His commandment descends among them. (All this is being stated so that you know) that Allah has power over everything, and that Allah encompasses all things in His knowledge. myislam islamicstudies

The “seven heavens” (2:29, 17:44, 23:86, 41:12, 65:12, 67:3, 71:15, 78:12) are often read in modern concordist literature as a hierarchy of dimensions. Wikipedia In the “Architecture” essay Dr. Shah sets M-theory’s eleven-dimensional “Bulk” against “the ‘Seven Heavens’ and the Bulk.” thequran In “The Holographic Eschaton” he identifies the lowest heaven (al-sama’ al-dunya, adorned with lamps per 41:12 and 67:5) with “our observable 3D universe.” The higher heavens become “the ‘bulk’ or the extra dimensions posited by M-theory,” containing “realities and beings (angels, jinn) that act upon our world but are invisible to us.” thequran Notably, 65:12 itself ends on omniscience: “Allah has encompassed all things in knowledge.” That is why Dr. Shah’s “Architecture” essay remarks that here “omniscience is explicitly linked to the multiplicity of heavens and earths.” quranthequran

The classical record cuts both ways. Ibn Kathir and the Jalalayn take “the like thereof” to mean seven earths, citing hadith. surahquran Another exegetical opinion, recorded in a fatwa on islamweb, holds that “the earth is one and the comparison is not in number but in creation.” islamweb Julien Decharneux (Université libre de Bruxelles), in Creation and Contemplation: The Cosmology of the Qur’ān and Its Late Antique Background (De Gruyter, 2023), “explores the connections between the cosmology of the Qur’ān and various cosmological traditions of Late Antiquity, with a focus on Syriac Christianity.” He devotes a chapter to the creation of the heavens and allows that 65:12 may set a single earth against the seven heavens. All of this suggests caution. A layered heaven is native to the text. A layered heaven made of spacetime dimensions is a modern overlay, and should be offered as one.

VI. The Relativity of Time and the Ascent of Angels

The Quran gives two scales for a “day” with God:

Quran 22:47 (al-Hajj)

وَيَسْتَعْجِلُونَكَ بِٱلْعَذَابِ وَلَن يُخْلِفَ ٱللَّهُ وَعْدَهُۥ ۚ وَإِنَّ يَوْمًا عِندَ رَبِّكَ كَأَلْفِ سَنَةٍ مِّمَّا تَعُدُّونَ

Translator	Translation
Sahih International	And they urge you to hasten the punishment. But Allah will never fail in His promise. And indeed, a day with your Lord is like a thousand years of those which you count. celiktafsir
Yusuf Ali	Yet they ask thee to hasten on the Punishment! But Allah will not fail in His Promise. Verily a Day in the sight of thy Lord is like a thousand years of your reckoning. myislam
Pickthall	And they will bid thee hasten on the Doom, and Allah faileth not His promise, but lo! a Day with Allah is as a thousand years of what ye reckon. myislam
Hilali–Muhsin Khan	And they ask you to hasten on the torment! And Allah fails not His Promise. And verily, a day with your Lord is as a thousand years of what you reckon. myislam
Abdel Haleem	They will challenge you [Prophet] to hasten the punishment. God will not fail in His promise- a Day with your Lord is like a thousand years by your reckoning. myislam
Maududi	They ask you to hasten the punishment. Allah shall most certainly not fail His promise; but a Day with your Lord is as a thousand years of your reckoning. myislam

Quran 70:4 (al-Ma’arij)

تَعۡرُجُ ٱلۡمَلَـٰٓئِكَةُ وَٱلرُّوحُ إِلَيۡهِ فِي يَوۡمٖ كَانَ مِقۡدَارُهُۥ خَمۡسِينَ أَلۡفَ سَنَةٖ

Translator	Translation
Sahih International	The angels and the Spirit will ascend to Him during a Day the extent of which is fifty thousand years. myislam
Yusuf Ali	The angels and the spirit ascend unto him in a Day the measure whereof is (as) fifty thousand years: myislam
Pickthall	(Whereby) the angels and the Spirit ascend unto Him in a Day whereof the span is fifty thousand years. myislam
Hilali–Muhsin Khan	The angels and the Ruh [Jibrael (Gabriel)] ascend to Him in a Day the measure whereof is fifty thousand years, myislam
Abdel Haleem	by which the angels and the Spirit ascend to Him, on a Day whose length is fifty thousand years. myislam
Maududi	by which the angels and the Spirit ascend to Him in one Day the duration of which is fifty thousand years. myislam

Verse 32:5 gives the thousand-year figure again for the “affair” that ascends to Him. myislam Popular exegesis, including the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs commentary on 22:47, says the verse “implies the concept of the relativity of time.” alkhoirot Ibn Kathir’s reading is moral rather than physical: God “does not hasten,” for “what is counted as a thousand years with His creation is as one day with Him.” surahquran The relativity analogy is legitimate, since special and general relativity really do show that elapsed time depends on the observer’s frame. But it should not be overstated. A fixed ratio of 1:1,000 or 1:50,000 is not a Lorentz factor, and the different numbers in different verses show the Quran speaking of incommensurability, not giving a conversion formula. The dimensional point that does hold is the one Dr. Shah makes: a Being not bound by our time-coordinate would see our history whole, the way a Spacelander sees all of Flatland at once. This is the temporal half of his claim that omniscience requires “extra spatial or temporal dimensions.” thequran

VII. The Night Journey and Other Transits

The Isra’ and Mi’raj (17:1; 53:1–18) is the obvious narrative candidate for a “traversal of dimensions.” The Prophet is carried by night from the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque, then rises through the seven heavens to the Lote-Tree of the Boundary (sidrat al-muntaha) and returns the same night. Wikipedia A dimensional reading would describe the ascent as movement along an axis orthogonal to ordinary space, so that “distance” through the heavens is not measured in light-years. The same template is often applied to 27:40, where “one who had knowledge of the Book” brings the Queen of Sheba’s throne “before your glance returns.” It is applied to 55:33, which challenges jinn and humans to “pass beyond the regions of the heavens and the earth” only with sultan (authority). And it is applied to the eschatological images of the heavens “folded in His right hand” (39:67) and rolled “like a scroll” (21:104). Rolling up a scroll is, quite literally, a lower-dimensional surface handled from a higher-dimensional space.

These readings are imaginative and, as hermeneutic play, harmless. They are also the most speculative in the field. Classical scholars debated whether the Mi’raj was bodily or spiritual, waking or visionary, and that debate is untouched by any physical model. Flatland adds an image to it, not an argument.

VIII. The Classical Background: Ontological, Not Geometric, Dimensions

The source notes behind this essay rightly observe that classical Islamic thought treated “dimensions” as gradients of existence. Each higher level sustains and contains the lower, rather than adding spatial axes.

Ibn Sina. The notes credit Avicenna with a point-line-square-cube progression that ends in a moving cube generating a fourth dimension, applied to spiritual proximity to God. Searches of the Stanford Encyclopedia entries on his natural philosophy and metaphysics, standard reference works, and the history of four-dimensional geometry found no primary or scholarly source for this. The idea of a point “flowing” into a line is ancient. But Ibn Sina, following Aristotle, held that body is complete in three dimensions and that no dimension exists apart from matter. encyclopedia The “moving cube produces a tesseract” exercise belongs to Hinton and to late-nineteenth-century hyperspace literature. scribdautodidactproject The claim should be treated as unverified and probably misattributed until someone produces a passage from the Shifa’ or Najat. What Ibn Sina did provide is a hierarchy of emanated intellects and celestial souls between the Necessary Existent and the sublunar world. researchgate That is a vertical ontology, not a geometric one.

Al-Ghazali. In Mishkat al-Anwar and the Ihya’, al-Ghazali divides reality into ‘alam al-mulk (the phenomenal world of the senses), ‘alam al-malakut (the invisible, angelic world of essences and divine determination) and ‘alam al-jabarut, which for him is an intermediate realm. al-islamthequran The Routledge Encyclopedia entry by Kojiro Nakamura notes that he took this triad from Abu Talib al-Makki “although he reverses the meanings of malakut and jabarut.” For al-Ghazali, the phenomenal world is an “incomplete replica” of malakut, much as Abbott’s Flatland is a shadowed slice of Spaceland. ghazalimajzooban

Suhrawardi and the imaginal world. In the Illuminationist school (Suhrawardi, later systematized by al-Shahrazuri), jabarut becomes a higher realm and an intermediate ‘alam al-mithal (the “world of suspended images”) emerges between the sensible and the intelligible. Wikipedia +2 Henry Corbin famously argued that this world is not mental fantasy but “a hidden reality” unveiled by the imaginative faculty. Wikipedia

Ibn ‘Arabi and Mulla Sadra. Ibn ‘Arabi’s barzakh, the isthmus that both separates and joins, and his teaching that every created form is a locus of divine self-disclosure (tajalli), give the richest classical language for “presence without containment.” Mulla Sadra’s al-Hikma al-Muta’aliya adds the principle of the gradation of being (tashkik al-wujud). Existence is one reality varying in intensity, from the material world (the lowest and densest level) through the imaginal to the intellectual, all ultimately grounded in the Necessary Being. As interpreters such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr and William Chittick have shown, this is a ladder of being, not a stack of spaces.

This classical picture is in one way a better fit for the Quran than string theory. M-theory’s extra dimensions are still physical, still created and still measurable in principle. The tradition’s higher “dimensions” are more real precisely because they are less material. Dr. Shah’s mature phrase, that transcendence is “ontological, not merely geometrical,” aligns his project with this older wisdom. thequran

IX. What the Analogy Legitimately Does

With these guardrails in place, the analogy still does real conceptual work, in five ways.

• It defeats a common argument from absence. “If God, angels or Paradise existed, we would detect them” assumes that reality is exhausted by what three-dimensional instruments register. Flatland shows how weak that assumption is: the Square’s whole civilization was mistaken about the shape of reality.
• It makes ghayb coherent. The unseen can be fully real, nearby and causally active without being visible, as Dr. Shah puts it, “not synonymous with the ‘non-existent.’” thequran
• It reconciles 6:103 with 50:16. A higher-dimensional observer is at once nearer than any lower-dimensional distance and beyond any lower-dimensional grasp. The analogy captures the logic of transcendence with immanence, though not its substance.
• It removes apparent impossibilities in eschatology. A Paradise as wide as the cosmos and a hell that “has room,” or a new earth that is “other than the earth” (14:48), stop looking self-contradictory once one sees that a space need not be in our space. Dr. Shah calls this “a coherent model that removes an apparent impossibility.” thequran
• It builds humility and awe. The Quran’s repeated call to reflect on “the horizons and within themselves” (41:53) finds a modern echo in the realization that our senses sample a thin slice of what may exist.

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Thematic Epilogue: The Square Who Looked Up

In Abbott’s story, A. Square is lifted out of his plane and sees his whole world at once: the insides of houses, the hidden contents of closed rooms, his own interior. When he returns and speaks of “upward, not northward,” he is imprisoned for heresy. The parable is usually told as a lesson about geometry. It is better read as a lesson about revelation: a truth that the one who receives it cannot fully translate into the language of the lower world.

The Quran knows this predicament. It speaks of the unseen in the vocabulary of the seen: thrones, gardens, veils, ladders (ma’arij), a Lote-Tree at the boundary. It warns that the eye does not reach God while God reaches every eye. Zia H. Shah’s twenty-odd essays on extra dimensions are a contemporary attempt to say “upward, not northward” to a scientific age. His early confidence that physics must find extra dimensions was, by his own later standard, too strong. His later formulation (transcendence that is “ontological, not merely geometrical”; immanence “without incarnation”; a model “not a confirmation”) is the right one. It stands closer to al-Ghazali’s malakut and Mulla Sadra’s graded being than to any Calabi–Yau manifold, and that is a strength, not a retreat.

What the physics adds is not proof but permission. Once the most rigorous science of our time treats unseen dimensions, hidden sectors and a universe far larger than our perception as live possibilities, the believer’s claim that reality has an unseen dimension stops sounding naive. It sounds like what it always was: a claim about the depth of things. The Quran’s God is not the eleventh dimension, nor the bulk in which our brane floats. He is the One for whom every dimension, counted or uncounted, is a creature, and who is still “with you wherever you are.” If extra dimensions are someday found, they will be one more of His signs on the horizons. If they never are, the jugular vein will remain exactly as near as it was.