Earth · a Light

Night is wound over day with the verb for a turban

Surah al-Zumar says He winds the night over the day and winds the day over the night. The verb, yukawwir, comes from a root used for coiling a rope and for winding a turban round a head, and exegetes writing centuries before telescopes discussed what that shape implies. It is worth being careful about what follows. Muslim astronomers did not need the verse to tell them the earth is a ball. Al-Biruni measured its radius from a mountain in what is now Pakistan and got a figure close to the modern one, and no serious astronomer of the period held any other view. The verse gives an image of one thing wrapped over another, and the geographers went out and measured the thing.

Surah al-Zumar 39:5

Source · Qur'an 39:5