Yes, it’s a very, very long time involved. In fact, the Holy Qur’an mentions this. The Holy Qur’an tells us that on the day of resurrection, when people will come to life again, as if immediately, but it’s not an immediate process. The Holy Qur’an makes it very clear, it’s a very long process. But anyway, there will be a final reckoning, and on that day, people would be talking to each other and imagining how long did they carry on earth.
So the Holy Qur’an tells us, some of them would suggest that perhaps a day, or a part thereof. But Allah would say, they don’t know, could be much less. So that shows the proportion between the time that has elapsed since they left this world, and the time when they are given a new consciousness, clear and final.
That means that when you leave a part of your life behind, even in this life, and many years have elapsed since, then you always tend to look at it as a short space. The greater your distance from that particular period of time, life, the smaller it would appear. And this is a phenomenon applicable equally to time and space. The farther an object is removed from you, the smaller it appears. So it’s a set proportion to which the Holy Qur’an is pointing out.
So it says to judge how far away that time would be from you, record this example, that when you look back at it, it will appear for you a very small, passing, transient period, while you might have lived there for a hundred years. Now, if you further extend this argument, it would mean a much shorter time for this whole world, because it may be not this individual life, that the people who are conversing with each other and are shown by Allah to have conversed with each other, may have meant by the Holy Qur’an to have said how long mankind carried on earth, how long the life has such remained on earth, and that whole period might appear to them to be so short that from that long distance it would appear like a day or a part thereof. So that means it is still farther away.
And secondly, the Holy Qur’an tells us, your first creation and your second creation would be very similar to the creation of every child which is born. Now this is a very interesting and very deep, I mean rich in knowledge verse, which throws a very big light on the whole phenomena and process of life to come, and the process of life which is in the past. It says to Nafs-e-Wahida, what does it mean by Nafs-e-Wahida?
Number one, it tells you that as the first creation took millions and millions of years to come to maturity, so your second creation would also take a very very long period to come to maturity. Secondly, it says in another place that if you want to understand the phenomena of creation, you should see what changes are taking place in the embryonic state, in the womb of a lady, in the uterus of a mother. If you study that phenomena of change, I don’t exactly remember, what’s the verse? If you want to understand the phenomena of life, you must understand the changes which take place within the uterus. And Yusuf-e-Rukum, he goes on changing you and giving you different shapes.
So that is in fact the most important proof which was forwarded by Darwin in favor of his theory of evolution. He said in miniature the embryo goes through all the stages of life which it covered over millions of years. But in a very short period of nine months, the whole film is unfolded and unrolled, and the life goes through, in a miniature form, all the stages it has passed through.
So the Holy Quran tells you that as in the earlier period of your creation, you went through a very long stage of development, and the difference between the first form of the embryo, the first cell, and the last stage when a child is delivered, is so great that there is no comparison whatsoever. Similarly, when you will be given a new life, your new form will have no comparison, or your early form will have no comparison as compared to the complex form which you will be given later on, at the time of resurrection. So, so many scenes have been explained in these two verses that there is food for thought for generations of scientists to come.
