Before the Doomsday
It is an essential part of our faith as Muslims that we
take the universe in which we live as created and contingent and not eternal.
Unlike the early Greeks, who thought that the universe had always existed, the
Holy Qur’an teaches us that ours is a very large but finite universe in terms
of both space and time, and as such it has a definite beginning and a certain
end. The following scenario emerges when we study modern cosmology from an
Islamic perspective.
In the beginning, Almighty Allah (SWT) created a concentrated
core of light-energy, and then, later on, He caused it to explode in a Big
Bang, leading to the creation of time, space, and matter. This phenomenon of
creation out of nothing represents the manifestation of divine command “Be!”
The Big Bang did not happen at any specific place, as the “space” itself was
created with this explosion. Similarly, it did not occur at any particular
instant, as the “time” itself came into being with the Big Bang.
Since then, the universe has been continuously expanding,
rotating, and evolving. At a predetermined point in the future, it will stop
expanding, and from then on the contraction or folding-back phase of the
universe will commence — either due to the gravitational pull of the unseen
matter exceeding the forces of expansion, or as a result of the swallowing
up of
entire galaxies by Black Holes — leading ultimately to the
Big Crunch, which is the disappearance of the cosmos in a catastrophic
implosion, like the Big Bang in reverse.
The Big Crunch will be followed by another Big Bang,
leading to the creation of a new universe that will last forever, and which
will be totally different from our present universe, utterly beyond the realm
of our imagination. We believe, on the authority of the Qur’an and Prophet
Muhammad (SAW), in the rebirth of all humanity, their final judgment, the Hell
and the Paradise, though the exact nature of that state of existence is simply
inconceivable.
As far as the end of our own world is concerned, it
seems that a major catastrophe will befall, destroying a part of our galaxy
including the sun and the earth, and that this will happen well before the
universal doomsday or the Big Crunch. It is this local doomsday that is
referred to in the Holy Qur’an as the “Startling Calamity” or the “Inevitable.”
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