BEYOND THE VEIL OF THREE DIMENSIONS An Interview with Dr. Zia H. Shah — Audio Script (approx. 20 minutes)

INTERVIEWER: Here’s a question to start with. Imagine you’re a flat drawing on a sheet of paper. Your whole world is length and width. One day someone tells you there’s a direction called “up.” Would you believe them? Or would you call them a lunatic? Hold on to that, because today we’re asking whether we might be the flat drawings. My guest is Dr. Zia H. Shah. He’s a physician board-certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Disease and Sleep Medicine, practicing in Upstate New York. He’s also chief editor of The Muslim Times and the founder of The Glorious Quran and Science at thequran.love. His new essay is called “Beyond the Veil of Three Dimensions: Extra Dimensions in Quranic and Islamic Theology.” Dr. Shah, welcome.

DR. SHAH: Thank you. And I’ll admit I was a flat drawing for most of medical school. [laughs] It’s a pleasure to be here.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s start with the puzzle that got you into this. What problem were you trying to solve?

DR. SHAH: A very old one. The Quran says two things about God that seem to pull in opposite directions. In one verse, chapter 6, verse 103, it says no vision can grasp Him, but He grasps all vision. He is beyond every sense and every concept. Then in chapter 50, verse 16, it says God is nearer to us than our own jugular vein. thequran As a lung doctor I put needles near that vein. It’s about as close to you as anything gets.

So how can the Infinite be beyond everything and also closer than your own bloodstream? One verse holds both sides at once, chapter 57, verse 3: God is the First and the Last, the Outward and the Inward. The Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb noticed something geometric in it. “First and Last” covers time, he said, and “Outward and Inward” covers place. So the verse already invites us to think about how God relates to the dimensions of the created world. thequran

INTERVIEWER: And this is where dimensions come in. For people who haven’t thought about a dimension since high school geometry, what are we talking about?

DR. SHAH: A dimension is just an independent direction you can move in. Left-right, forward-back, up-down. Three of space, plus time. For most of history, people assumed three was the limit. Aristotle argued that a body divisible in three ways is complete. Ptolemy reportedly argued that you can’t draw a fourth line at right angles to three others. The great Muslim philosopher Ibn Sina accepted this too. For him, every body has three dimensions, and there is no dimension apart from matter. thequran

That changed in the nineteenth century. In 1854 the mathematician Bernhard Riemann made spaces with any number of dimensions mathematically respectable. thequran In 1884 an English clergyman and schoolmaster, Edwin Abbott, wrote a little book called Flatland. Wikipedia Its hero is a two-dimensional being named A. Square. A Sphere visits him. But the Square can only see the slice of the Sphere that crosses his plane. So he sees a dot appear from nowhere, grow into a circle, shrink, and vanish. thequranWikipedia To him it’s a miracle, or a trick. twinandtine

Then in 1980 Carl Sagan put this on television, in episode ten of Cosmos. He took an apple, stamped it in ink, and pressed it onto paper. The Flatlanders would only see those ink marks, the points where the apple touched their world. They’d never see the apple. organismupworthy

INTERVIEWER: So we might be the Flatlanders, and the apple is something bigger than us.

DR. SHAH: Exactly. And here’s what surprises people. This isn’t just a Victorian parlor game. Physics took it seriously. In 1919 a young mathematician, Theodor Kaluza, wrote to Einstein. He said that if you add a fifth dimension, gravity and electromagnetism fall out of the same equations. Einstein was intrigued. Then in 1926 the Swedish physicist Oskar Klein answered the obvious objection: if there’s a fifth dimension, why don’t we see it? His answer was that it’s curled up into a circle far too small to detect. arxiv +2

INTERVIEWER: Curled up. That’s where I start to lose it. How can a dimension be curled up?

DR. SHAH: Brian Greene, the Columbia physicist, has a lovely analogy in The Elegant Universe. Picture a garden hose stretched across a canyon. From far away it looks like a line. One dimension, just length. But an ant crawling on that hose can also go around it. There’s a second, circular dimension you couldn’t see from the far side of the canyon. Newsweek +2 Now shrink that circle down far below the size of an atom, and you have what physicists call a compactified dimension. It’s everywhere, at every point, and completely invisible.

INTERVIEWER: And string theory runs with this?

DR. SHAH: String theory runs a marathon with it. String theory says the smallest building blocks of nature are tiny vibrating strings, not points. And the mathematics only works if spacetime has ten dimensions. WikipediaWikipedia In 1995 Edward Witten showed that the different versions of string theory are corners of one deeper eleven-dimensional framework, which he called M-theory. arxivpreposterousuniverse The University of Washington’s Eöt-Wash gravity group puts it plainly. They say string theory requires that there are 10 space dimensions, and that it’s usually assumed that 7 of these are curled up in very tiny regions, so small that they cannot be detected with foreseeable technology. washington

Then come the bolder versions. In 1998 Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos and Dvali suggested some extra dimensions could be much larger, perhaps as big as a millimeter, with gravity alone leaking into them. washington In 1999 Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum proposed that our whole universe might be a membrane, a “brane,” floating in a higher-dimensional “bulk.” nih81018 Randall wrote a popular book about it called Warped Passages, and Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace covers similar ground.

INTERVIEWER: Okay, I have to play the skeptic. Has anyone actually found one of these dimensions?

DR. SHAH: No, and I want to be completely honest about that. In my own writing I’ve said that direct experimental evidence for extra dimensions remains elusive. thequran People have looked hard. At CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS collaboration analyzed all its collisions from 2015 to 2018 and, in a 2021 paper in Physical Review D, found the data agreed with the Standard Model, with no sign of large extra dimensions. The Eöt-Wash group has measured gravity between tiny masses at very short distances. In March 2020, J.G. Lee, Eric Adelberger and colleagues at the University of Washington reported in Physical Review Letters that Newtonian gravity gave an excellent fit to their data at separations down to 52 micrometers, less than the width of a hair. So the large dimensions have been squeezed smaller and smaller. The tiny ones may sit forever out of reach of any machine we could build.

But that last point is the heart of my argument.

INTERVIEWER: Then let’s get to it. You say this is a powerful argument against physicalism. First, what is physicalism?

DR. SHAH: Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical. stanford Reality is exhausted by matter, energy and the laws of physics. Its popular cousin is a hard-line empiricism: if you can’t observe it or measure it, it isn’t real, or at least you have no right to believe in it. Carl Sagan summed up the mood in one line: the Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. thequran Many of my atheist friends say, “Show me. Put God under the microscope, and then we’ll talk.”

INTERVIEWER: And your reply?

DR. SHAH: My reply is to look at what our best physics is doing. String theory is no fringe hobby. Some of the most brilliant physicists on earth have spent decades on it. And at its foundation it says there are probably six or seven extra dimensions of space, at every point around us right now, that we will likely never see, touch or measure directly. Why believe it? Because of mathematical consistency, elegance and explanatory power. You infer the unseen from the seen.

This has caused a real fight among scientists. In 2014 the cosmologists George Ellis and Joe Silk wrote a piece in Nature called “Defend the integrity of physics.” They were alarmed that some string theorists trust the theory even though it relies on extra dimensions we can never observe. proquestharvard On the other side, the philosopher of science Richard Dawid has argued that theories can earn what he calls “non-empirical confirmation.” uio

So step back and look at the scene. The rule “only believe what you can observe” is being bent at the very summit of physics, by physicists themselves, for very good reasons. If a dogmatic empiricist says, “No observation, no reality,” he has to tell the string theorist that his life’s work is meaningless. Most won’t do that. And once you admit that rational people may accept realities that are in principle beyond our instruments, inferred from their effects and their explanatory power, you can’t turn around and call the believer irrational for doing the same thing about the unseen. That’s my central claim. Dogmatic insistence on empiricism isn’t just unproven. It’s futile, because our own science has already walked past it.

INTERVIEWER: But here’s the pushback I’d expect. A physicist would say, “Fine, but extra dimensions are still physical. That helps physicalism, not you.”

DR. SHAH: That’s the best objection, and I’m glad you raised it. Two answers.

First, look at what’s happened to the word “physical.” It used to mean the solid, the visible, the measurable. Now it has to include dimensions no one can access, dark matter that emits no light, and dark energy that no one can explain. According to the European Space Agency’s Planck mission, ordinary matter, everything we’re made of, is just 4.9 percent of the universe’s mass and energy. There’s a famous puzzle in philosophy called Hempel’s dilemma. If “physical” means what today’s physics says exists, physicalism is probably false, because today’s physics is incomplete. If it means whatever some future, perfect physics will say exists, then physicalism becomes empty. uchicagoWikipedia It just says “whatever turns out to be real is real.” That’s not a bold worldview anymore. It’s a blank check.

Second, I’m not claiming God is the eleventh dimension. God is not a physical object hiding in a curled-up corner of space. In the Quran, every dimension, counted or uncounted, is a creature of God. My point is about the logic of the unseen. Extra dimensions show that “unseen” need not mean “unreal.” thequran They show that something can be right here, at every point, and still be invisible to us. Once physics admits that, the materialist’s favorite argument, “If it existed, we’d detect it,” collapses. A. Square’s whole civilization was wrong about the shape of reality, thequran and they had perfectly good eyes.

INTERVIEWER: Let me push harder. Isn’t this just a God-of-the-gaps argument? Science hasn’t found something, so you slot God in?

DR. SHAH: No, and the difference matters. A God-of-the-gaps argument says, “Science can’t explain this yet, therefore God.” As science advances, that God shrinks. thequranthequran I’m doing the reverse. I’m pointing to what physics positively tells us: reality may have far more structure than our senses sample. That’s a finding, not a gap. And I say lawful nature is a witness, not a rival. thequran I’m not hiding God in the cracks of the universe. I’m saying the universe is bigger and deeper than the materialist assumed, and the Quran said as much long ago.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s go there. Where does the Quran talk about the unseen?

DR. SHAH: Everywhere. The Arabic word is al-ghayb, the unseen. According to the Quranic Arabic Corpus, its root occurs 60 times in the Quran, and 49 of those are the noun ghayb itself. God is repeatedly called “Knower of the unseen and the witnessed,” for example in chapter 59, verse 22. That pairing, unseen and seen, ghayb and shahada, appears about ten times. thequran And the very first quality the Quran names in the God-conscious, at the opening of its longest chapter, is that they believe in the unseen. thequran The unseen is not the same as the non-existent. thequran

In my essay “The Architecture of Omniscience,” I map this onto the brane-and-bulk picture. We live confined to our brane, the “seen.” The unseen may correspond to the additional dimensions. I’ve even read the verses about being “returned to the Knower of the unseen and the seen” as describing death as a kind of change of coordinates, a passage into the higher reality of the unseen. thequran

INTERVIEWER: You also argue from God’s knowledge. Walk us through that.

DR. SHAH: Einstein liked to ask how he would build the universe if he were God. So I asked the same question. If God knows every speck, every atom, every quark in the universe, the Quran’s claim, then He must have some kind of presence there, whether directly or through agents like angels. In 2024 I put it this way: omniscience of God demands omnipresence of some sort. But how can God be present at every point without being smeared through space like a gas? Classical theologians rightly reject that picture. thequranthequran

Here’s the image I use. Think of a three-dimensional hand resting on a flat sheet. It touches every point of that surface at once, yet it doesn’t push aside a single two-dimensional creature living there. A higher-dimensional presence could surround and interlock with our world at every location without displacing anything. That fits chapter 58, verse 7: no three people confer in secret but He is the fourth, no five but He is the sixth. And chapter 2, verse 115: wherever you turn, there is the Face of God, for God is al-Wasi’, the All-Encompassing. I call this “immanence without incarnation.” thequran God is close without becoming part of the furniture.

INTERVIEWER: What about angels and jinn? A lot of modern listeners find those hardest to accept.

DR. SHAH: The Quran gives us a striking verse, chapter 7, verse 27. It warns that Satan and his tribe see you from where you do not see them. That’s exactly the Flatland situation. The Sphere looks down into every Flatland house, even inside closed rooms, and the Flatlanders can’t see the Sphere at all. Wikipedia I extend this to the recording angels of chapter 50, who witness our deeds. They could observe our world fully without being part of its visible order. thequran

But I owe your listeners two honest caveats. First, the classical commentators explained the jinn’s invisibility by their nature. They are made of smokeless fire, chapter 55, verse 15, not by geometry. The dimensional picture adds a “how” the text itself doesn’t supply. Second, the Quran gives jinn agency. They whisper, they tempt. A higher-dimensional being touching our world would leave only cross-sections, like Sagan’s ink marks. That’s a suggestive picture of a whisper, but it’s still a picture. thequran

INTERVIEWER: Let’s talk Paradise. Your favorite verse there?

DR. SHAH: Chapter 3, verse 133. It describes a Garden as wide as the heavens and the earth, and chapter 57, verse 21 repeats the image. Ibn Kathir records an ancient puzzle about this. If Paradise is as wide as the whole cosmos, someone asked, “Where is the Fire then?” Where’s the room for anything else? thequran

To answer that, I wrote a parable in the Flatland style about a creature named Finn from Lineland. He learns a second dimension from A. Square, then gets lifted by a being called Spherius into Spaceland. thequran Each time, there’s more room than he could have imagined. My answer to the puzzle is spatial: Paradise and Hell could be in totally separate dimensions. A space need not be inside our space. Of course that’s a model, not a map. I’ve said the same about chapter 14, verse 48, where the earth is replaced by another earth: it’s a coherent model that removes an apparent impossibility, not a confirmation. thequran

INTERVIEWER: Time, too? I’ve heard you mention verses where a day is a thousand years.

DR. SHAH: Yes. Chapter 22, verse 47 says a day with your Lord is like a thousand years of your reckoning. Chapter 70, verse 4 says the angels and the Spirit ascend in a day whose measure is fifty thousand years. Some commentators link this to Einstein’s relativity, and it’s true that elapsed time depends on the observer. But I don’t overstate it. A fixed ratio of one to a thousand isn’t a relativity formula, and the different numbers tell me the Quran is speaking of incommensurability. thequran God’s time can’t be measured by ours. The dimensional point that holds is simpler. A Being not bound by our time line would see our whole history at once, the way a Spacelander sees all of Flatland at a glance. thequran

The same template has been applied to the Prophet’s Night Journey and Ascension through the seven heavens, to the throne of the Queen of Sheba brought before “the blink of an eye,” and to the heavens being “rolled up like a scroll.” Think about that one: rolling up a scroll is literally handling a flat surface from a higher dimension. But I treat these as the most speculative readings. Flatland adds an image to those debates, not an argument. thequran

INTERVIEWER: You keep adding caveats. Did your thinking change over time?

DR. SHAH: It did, and I’m proud of that. In 2024 I wrote that one could easily conclude physics should include extra dimensions. In 2025 I predicted that extra dimensions would eventually be confirmed. thequran I still hope so. But I’ve become more careful. I now say plainly that this is a theological model or analogy. My argument is not that God must exist because extra dimensions do, nor that extra dimensions prove God’s presence. As I put it in a 2026 essay, divine transcendence is ontological, not merely geometrical. thequranthequran God isn’t just “further away” along some axis. He is a different order of being.

I also take the critics seriously. William Lane Craig warns that God transcends space altogether and is not some invisible ether. Muslim scholars stress tanzih, God’s utter otherness, and bila kayf, affirming without asking “how.” thequran And the astrophysicist Nidhal Guessoum of the American University of Sharjah, in his book Islam’s Quantum Question, published by I.B. Tauris in 2011, and in a 2008 article in the journal Zygon, has criticized the “scientific miracle” style of reading the Quran. He calls it misguided because it misunderstands both science and scripture, and he prefers Averroes’s principle that true science and true revelation cannot conflict. wiley +2 I accept that discipline. I’m not saying the Quran predicted M-theory. I’m saying the two are consistent, and that the consistency is illuminating.

INTERVIEWER: Does the Islamic tradition itself have anything like “higher dimensions”?

DR. SHAH: Beautifully so, though not as geometry. Al-Ghazali spoke of the visible world of the senses, alam al-mulk, and the invisible world of the angels, alam al-malakut. For him our world is like an incomplete copy of the higher one, much as Flatland is a shadowed slice of Spaceland. The Illuminationist school of Suhrawardi described an intermediate “world of images,” which Henry Corbin argued is a hidden reality, not mere fantasy. Ibn Arabi spoke of the barzakh, an isthmus that both separates and joins. And Mulla Sadra taught that existence comes in grades of intensity, from dense matter up to pure intellect. Scholars like Seyyed Hossein Nasr and William Chittick have explained that this is a ladder of being, not a stack of spaces. thequran

One honesty note. You’ll sometimes read online that Ibn Sina described a moving cube producing a fourth dimension. We searched and could find no source for it. That “tesseract” exercise belongs to the nineteenth century, to Charles Howard Hinton, who coined the word in 1888. Ibn Sina gave us a hierarchy of being, not hypercubes. thequran

And in one way the classical picture fits the Quran better than string theory does. M-theory’s dimensions are still created and still physical. The tradition’s higher realms are more real precisely because they’re less material. thequran

INTERVIEWER: So, as we wrap up, what’s the one thing you want a listener to take away?

DR. SHAH: Five things, quickly, and then one. The dimensional picture defeats the lazy argument from absence. It makes the unseen coherent. It reconciles “beyond all vision” with “nearer than the jugular vein.” It removes apparent impossibilities about Paradise and the Hereafter. And it builds humility. The Quran tells us to look at the signs on the horizons and within ourselves, and physics now tells us our senses sample only a thin slice of what may exist. thequran

And the one thing: at the end of Flatland, A. Square goes back home and tries to tell everyone about a direction he calls “upward, not northward.” They throw him in prison for heresy. bookramblingssobrief I think that’s a story about revelation. Someone has seen something real and can’t fully translate it into the language of the lower world. What physics gives the believer is not proof but permission. Once our most rigorous science treats unseen dimensions as live possibilities, belief in the unseen stops sounding naive. It sounds like what it always was: a claim about the depth of things. If extra dimensions are found someday, they’ll be one more of God’s signs on the horizons. If they never are, the jugular vein will be exactly as near as it was. thequranenotes

INTERVIEWER: “Upward, not northward.” I think I’ll be repeating that all week. Dr. Zia Shah, thank you so much.

DR. SHAH: Thank you. It’s been a joy.

INTERVIEWER: To our listeners, the full essay, “Beyond the Veil of Three Dimensions,” is at thequran.love. If this stretched your mind into a dimension or two, share it with a friend. Until next time, keep looking up. Not north. Up.