Welcome to Ummati! Ladies and gentlemen! Today’s video is going to be an exciting one.
We all know Albert Einstein and his theories of relativity.
What if I tell you Einstein is late in the story!
Einstein’s theory of relativity says that time and space are no different;
just the two different aspects of space-time. If you can travel in space, you can travel in time.
For example, time slows down for objects moving close to the speed of light. If you travel with
the speed of light through space, and come back after 100 years have passed on earth,
you will be still young and your class fellows would probably have died.
Quran narrates events of time travel from centuries ago, and science
explains them today. This freshens our Iman. In the words of the verse 5 of Surah As-Sajda:
He regulates the affair from the heaven to the earth;
then shall it ascend to Him in a day the measure of which is a thousand years of what you count.
There are four-time travel events narrated with full vigor and detail in Quran. We will discuss
two of them in this video. For the other two, you will have to visit the part 2 of this video.
The Quran contains a parable that is one of the most popularly quoted and
commented events in the Islamic tradition. It relates a person coming across a town in ruins.
He wonders how will Allah Subhana Wataala bring the dead to life on the Day of Judgement.
According to some Islamic scholars, the person mentioned in this story was Prophet Uzair.
The story tells us that prophet Uzair fell asleep under a tree. He woke up after a hundred years,
his donkey was turned into bones and there was nothing around him. But his food was fresh.
Time had travelled differently for all these subjects. Science tells us
that huge masses create strong gravitational fields and near them, time proceeds slowly.
So, there! Science explains it years and years after Quran narrates the incident. And even
more years after the incident actually happens. When Uzair A.S. came to know of this, he said:
‘I know that God hath power over all things.’ There is yet another tradition where Allah
showed us gravitational time dilation. It’s about seven pious, young men who declared that Allah was
the Lord of the heavens and the earth; and they would never call upon any deity other than Him.
Their people were to kill them for their beliefs or force them to worship other gods.
Putting their belief on Allah’s mercy, they fled and hid in a cave.
There they felt asleep. Quran narrates the what happened afterwards in the following words:
“When we awakened them, they asked each other, “How long have you been here?” “We have been
here one day or part of the day,” they answered. “Your Lord knows best how long we stayed here,
so let us send one of us with this money to the city. Let him fetch the good lawful food,
and buy some for us. Let him keep a low profile, and attract no attention.”
About the time for which they lived in the cave; Quran says:
They stayed in their cave three hundred years, increased by nine.
And so, when one of them left the cave, very carefully, with a silver coin, what he sees is
that the town has changed completely. When he showed the coin to a shopkeeper to buy food,
it was found to be hundreds of years old. A thousand and four hundred years after the
revelation of Quran, science explains this phenomenon by gravitational time dilation.
Time travelled swiftly for the rest of the world, but very slow for the seven men in the cave.
Even we did not have scientific theories to prove them, we would still believe
these events. But science explaining them is a proof that time travel is completely possible.
We will discuss the throne of Sheeba and Isra wal Miraj in the next part. Till then take care!