People · a Light

Your languages and your colours are listed among the signs

Surah al-Rum puts the making of the heavens and the earth in one clause and the differences of human languages and colours in the next, and calls both of them signs. There are roughly seven thousand languages spoken now, and about forty percent of them have fewer than a thousand speakers left. On colour, geneticists find that human variation is continuous rather than banded, that most of the variation in our species is found within any one population rather than between populations, and that skin tone is governed by a small number of genes tracking ultraviolet exposure across latitudes. The verse ranks nothing. It lists difference as evidence, in the same breath as the sky.

Surah al-Rum 30:22

Source · Qur'an 30:22