I mentioned this subject quite a few times in various discourses as well as in this question and answer session. The fact is that the Holy Qur’an speaks very clearly and definitely about a great holocaust in which great powers would tumble down, like mountains turn to ashes or dust, and yet the mankind would survive. The whole mankind would not perish with that holocaust, but the world path would be destroyed and a new world order would emerge from the ashes of the ruin. Now this has been explained many a time in various places in the Holy Qur’an. Also it speaks of an atomic bomb so clearly that it was very difficult for the earlier interpreters to understand that verse because it spoke of something beyond their time.
But the obvious meanings are so challenging to man of today that you can’t escape that significance. It’s impossible because you don’t have to interpret, it’s just a little meaning. So that is why when I came across this particular surah, we call the chapters a surah, I was really surprised that how the earlier people could have coped with this. And when I consulted some of the older interpreters they were out of their depths to know what was meant. Because in that surah it is said that fire would be their abode, not abode, but fire would destroy them, a fire which would leap to the hearts, a fire which is concealed in the smallest particle. Khutama is the Arabic word which can be checked by any dictionary, in any dictionary, it doesn’t mean anything except the smallest particle.
So whatever the concept of particle be, but a fire cannot be contained in a particle. Again it says, innaha alayhim muhsudathun fee amadim muhammad dada. That particle in which that fire is enclosed would extend and become like a spindle before it bursts. Before it bursts it’s not mentioned, but it would extend and oscillate like a spindle. That is exactly the shape of the atomic bomb just before the explosion. I have seen the picture, the drawing, and I was surprised to find the similarity. It couldn’t be described better except by this word that it swells into a swindle because of the inner pressure. So this was said 1400 years ago when there was no concept of atom whatsoever.
In fact the universe as such was so misunderstood as people believed at that time still in the older philosophy of the Greek philosophers, astronomers, and they thought that the heaven was firmaments after firmaments of some plastic which you can see through. And the stars were just studded like jewels and the firmaments moved. That was the concept of heaven and earth. And the earth was flat and it was carried on the horn of a bull. This was the general philosophy which was inherited by the people of that age. And yet the Holy Quran speaks of some fire having been locked for them in a small or the tiny particle which would extend and become the shape of a spindle because of that inner pressure.
So this is a description of the weapon with which a certain age is to be punished because this verse refers to the punishment of mankind for having gone astray. And again the beauty of this is that the fire would attack not the body but leap to the heart. That means there is something like radiation which before the body is burnt is travelling faster and ahead of the actual heat. So recently I studied an article in some scientific magazine where the whole process of the atomic bomb, how it explodes and how the waves move one after the other, various kinds of waves, and the pictures were also drawn in that under some very high speed cameras. Now they have cameras developed which can take the photo in one millionth of a second. And various stages of small experiments were shown in color pictures. And there again I was surprised to find that the shock wave and then the radio wave travels faster than the heat wave.
So before man is struck by heat he would be destroyed because of heart failures and things because of the impact of the front wave which would not be a heat wave but just a sort of radiation which would leap at the heart. So all these things are impossible for a man of 1400 years ago and that too living in the most backward country of the time. Arabia was supposed to be the land of the ignorant, the land of the unlettered, and he being himself one of those who were unlettered. So because we see things happening, we have already seen things happening which were impossible for man to forecast, so the rest is obviously coming. That is why I’m so sure. That is one way of looking at it and the other way is because the wars are not the creation of political wranglings or mistakes committed, they are the outcome of immorality.
In essence, in the deepest root causes you will find immorality at work. And because man of today has become immoral in so many ways, particularly those who are at the helm of political affairs, their thinking is extremely biased in favor of their own nation. This they call patriotism and loyalty, but at the cost of morality as such, at the cost of international norms of justice and human standards. So when this happens, then your interests begin to clash and your decisions, however clever they may be, are bound to make mistakes here and there. And so the seeds of distrust and so on and so forth. Like it happened in the case of Alsace-Lorraine, in the French-German border, Alsace-Lorraine, that’s the that has been the cause of friction between Germans and the French and has been playing a very important role in the world wars. And again now it has subsided for a while, but when the disturbances begin to take shape, then all these dead issues like dormant ulcers and sleeping cancers, they come to the surface again.
So there are so many things in the world of today which have already been born out of immorality, and those are the things which would be ultimately responsible for the world war. Morality in this sense plays the same part as the expertise of a motor driver plays while he’s driving. The power which is at their disposal, of the people at the helms of political affairs, that has reached enormous proportions. And it is the morality which controls, which should control and keep under control these great forces, that is lacking. So it’s like a drunkard driving a fast car. If not now, after a while he’s going to make a crash, and that would be that.
