You know, when somebody says, I bear witness, then naturally those witnesses which are presented mean something to the person who is addressed, or the court who is addressed. This swearing, it’s not swearing, it is just calling to witness. Now if somebody is atheist, and you tell him, I bear witness, Allah is my witness, it wouldn’t mean anything to him. But if you tell him that history is my witness, so he would immediately listen to you and pay attention, because many an atheist today believes in history.
So when an atheistic age is addressed by Allah, people who have absolutely no faith in the concept of Allah, in the reality of Allah, so how can they be convinced on this certain issue? They would only listen to it when something in which they believe is produced as witness. So the age, the time, is the most important witness which could carry weight before an age which has gone irreligious. So this is why Allah says, your age in which you are living, the time, that is witness that you are destroyed. The whole symptoms of destruction are so apparent that you cannot deny them.
So whether you believe in God or not, the symptoms have appeared, they have been writ large over horizon. This is the meaning of Allah. So it’s not like somebody swearing. The person who is calling something to witness can address a lower thing than he himself, and he requires witness not for his own sake, but for the sake of the person whom he is addressing and whom he wants to be convinced. This is the philosophy of calling witness, and this philosophy, if you keep in mind, then there is no objection against Allah calling witness to the age.
