The Root
The Greatness of God
Nobody has seen God. What we have is what He told us, and a creation that carries His signature at every size we can look at.
He is the One GOD; there is no other god besides Him. Knower of all secrets and declarations. He is the Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
[59:22]Nobody has seen God. What we have is what He has told us about Himself, and a creation that carries His signature everywhere we look.
This page is for looking. What the Quran says about who God is, what there is to see in the sky, on the earth and inside our own bodies, and what all of it asks of us.
It is built to be read in order, though any part of it stands on its own.
On This Page
Four parts, and the questions people ask after each one.
Who God Is
Start with the mistake nearly everyone makes, because clearing it away is most of the work. We picture God as the biggest thing in a list of things. The strongest, the oldest, the one at the top.
God shuts that door in one sentence: “There is nothing that equals Him.” [42:11] Not the highest item on a scale, but off the scale altogether. And: “No visions can encompass Him, but He encompasses all visions.” [6:103]
So every picture we form is a scaled-up creature, and every one of them is wrong. What we are given instead is a set of names. They tell us how He acts and what He is, not what He looks like.
“To Him belong the most beautiful names” [20:8], and we are told to use them: “call upon Him therewith, and disregard those who distort His names.” [7:180]
Some of the Names He Gave Us
Each one is how God describes Himself. The verse is beside it.
The One and only
No partner, no equal, no family. Everything else that exists is something He made.
[112:1-4]
The Living, the Eternal
“Never a moment of unawareness or slumber overtakes Him.” [2:255] Not one moment, in the whole history of everything.
[2:255]
The Most Gracious, Most Merciful
The pair that opens every sura but one. Sura 9 has no opening statement.
[59:22]
The Creator, the Initiator, the Designer
Three names in one verse for three different things: bringing into being, starting from nothing, and shaping what results.
[59:24]
Knower of all secrets and declarations
What is said out loud and what is never said are equally known to Him.
[59:22]
The Alpha and the Omega
“He is the Outermost and the Innermost.” [57:3] Before everything and after it, around it and inside it.
[57:3]
The Almighty, Most Wise
Power and wisdom named together. Either one on its own would be a terror.
[59:24]
Omnipotent
“Most exalted is the One in whose hands is all kingship, and He is Omnipotent.” [67:1] In practice that means: “All He needs to do to carry out any command is say to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.” [36:82]
[67:1]
He Misses Nothing
The verse people learn first is the one that says He never looks away: “GOD: there is no other god besides Him, the Living, the Eternal. Never a moment of unawareness or slumber overtakes Him.” [2:255]
Then the reach of that attention: “Not a leaf falls without His knowledge. Nor is there a grain in the depths of the soil. Nor is there anything wet or dry, that is not recorded in a profound record.” [6:59]
And in both directions from a leaf: “Not even the equivalent of an atom's weight is hidden from Him, be it in the heavens or the earth. Not even smaller than that, or larger (is hidden).” [34:3]
The verse that reaches most people, though, is neither astronomical nor microscopic. It is about the inside of our own heads: “We created the human, and we know what he whispers to himself. We are closer to him than his jugular vein.” [50:16]
The thought we did not say out loud was heard where it was thought.
He Holds All of It
The Quran gives one picture of the whole of creation held in a hand: “They can never fathom the greatness of GOD. The whole earth is within His fist on the Day of Resurrection. In fact, the universes are folded within His right hand.” [39:67]
The footnote to that verse spells out the scale. Our universe, with its billion galaxies and its billion trillion stars, spanning many billions of light-years, is the smallest and innermost of seven.
What it costs Him to hold all of that is stated too, and the answer is nothing: “His dominion encompasses the heavens and the earth, and ruling them never burdens Him.” [2:255] And nothing holds together by itself: “GOD is the One who holds the heavens and the earth, lest they vanish. If anyone else is to hold them, they will most certainly vanish.” [35:41]
There is a limit to how much of this we can take in, and God says so kindly: “If all the trees on earth were made into pens, and the ocean supplied the ink, augmented by seven more oceans, the words of GOD would not run out.” [31:27]
So an honest page stops describing here, and starts pointing.
Questions About Who God Is
Why does the Quran give God names instead of describing what He looks like?
Because any description would be of a creature, and He is not one. God rules the comparison out: “There is nothing that equals Him.” [42:11] He adds that our sight is not the right instrument: “No visions can encompass Him, but He encompasses all visions.” [6:103] A picture would not be a small mistake. It would be the wrong kind of thing entirely. The names work differently. They tell us how He acts towards us, and God tells us to use them: “To GOD belongs the most beautiful names; call upon Him therewith.” [7:180] That is knowledge we can actually do something with.
If God already knows what we are thinking, what is the point of praying?
Prayer turns us towards Him. It was never there to inform Him. God says He is already closer to us than our jugular vein, and knows what we whisper to ourselves [50:16]. He also says: “I am always near. I answer their prayers when they pray to Me.” [2:186] Both are true at once. The prayers were decreed for our sake, and God says what for: “observe the Contact Prayers (Salat) to remember Me.” [20:14] Asking Him for something we know He is aware of is the act of a person who has remembered who is running things.
Is God male? The Quran keeps saying “He”.
No. God is not male or female, and the pronoun is a limit of language, not a description of Him. The rule that settles it is short: “There is nothing that equals Him.” [42:11] Sex belongs to created things, and He created the pairs Himself [42:11]. He also closes the family door completely: “Never did He beget. Nor was He begotten. None equals Him.” [112:3-4] No son, no consort, no line. Arabic has no neutral pronoun for a person, and the translation keeps what the Arabic says.
Signs in the Sky
God does not ask to be believed about the sky. He asks us to look at it.
“He created seven universes in layers. You do not see any imperfection in the creation by the Most Gracious. Keep looking; do you see any flaw? Look again and again; your eyes will come back stumped and conquered.” [67:3-4]
Seven universes are named in several places, and the descriptions agree. They are above us, in layers: “We created above you seven universes in layers, and we are never unaware of a single creature in them.” [23:17] And: “Do you not realize that GOD created seven universes in layers?” [71:15]
The lowest one is the one we can see. “He completed the seven universes in two days, and set up the laws for every universe. And we adorned the lowest universe with lamps, and placed guards around it.” [41:12] The adornment is named elsewhere as planets [37:6], and the sun is called a lamp [71:16].
So the arrangement is fixed: seven, in layers, above us, with the lowest one lit and guarded. What is in the other six is not described.
A Sky Still Being Stretched
The sky is described as work still in hand: “We constructed the sky with our hands, and we will continue to expand it.” [51:47]
Its beginning is described too: “Do the unbelievers not realize that the heaven and the earth used to be one solid mass that we exploded into existence?” [21:30]
Numbers help for a moment, then stop meaning much. Light crosses from the sun to our faces in a little over eight minutes. Crossing our own galaxy takes it about a hundred thousand years, and that galaxy alone holds a few hundred billion stars.
And all of that is the lowest of seven. That is the proportion this part of the page exists to give. It is also why the verse about the universes folded within His right hand reads differently the second time [39:67].
Each One in Its Own Orbit
What stops the night sky from being raw power alone is that it is not chaotic. It runs.
“And He is the One who created the night and the day, and the sun and the moon; each floating in its own orbit.” [21:33] The same picture comes again with the timing stated: “The sun is never to catch up with the moon—the night and the day never deviate—each of them is floating in its own orbit.” [36:40]
The running is calculated, not approximate: “The sun and the moon are perfectly calculated.” [55:5]
Which is why a calendar is possible at all. God says the moon's phases are part of the design: He “designed its phases that you may learn to count the years and to calculate.” [10:5]
Anyone can be impressed by size. What calls for worship is the One holding all of it in an order so exact that we can set a clock by a moving sky and still be right centuries later.
Questions About the Sky
What are the seven universes? We only know of one.
We know the lowest one. God says there are seven, in layers, and only describes ours. He says: “We created above you seven universes in layers, and we are never unaware of a single creature in them.” [23:17] Ours is the one with the lamps and the guards [41:12]. The footnote to 39:67 in this translation says our universe, with its billion galaxies and billion trillion stars, is the smallest and innermost of the seven. Nothing is said about what fills the other six, so nothing should be claimed about them.
Does the Quran say the universe is expanding?
Yes, in one sentence: “We constructed the sky with our hands, and we will continue to expand it.” [51:47] It also describes the beginning: “the heaven and the earth used to be one solid mass that we exploded into existence.” [21:30] The Quran is not a physics textbook, and it does not argue the case. It states it, in a book completed fourteen centuries before anyone measured either thing.
Why would God make something this big for one small planet of people?
The Quran does not present the universe as scenery for us. It presents it as a sign, and as something that worships God in its own right. God says: “Glorifying Him are the seven universes, the earth, and everyone in them. There is nothing that does not glorify Him, but you do not understand their glorification.” [17:44] The sky is not idle when nobody is looking at it. He also says what this life is for: “The One who created death and life for the purpose of distinguishing those among you who would do better.” [67:2] The size is not the point. What we do with the short time inside it is.
Signs on Earth and in Us
The sky is the easy argument, and it is also the one that lets us off. Nobody has to do anything about a galaxy.
So God keeps bringing the evidence closer, until it is in the room: “The earth is full of signs for those who are certain. And within yourselves; can you see?” [51:20-21]
He even names the ordinary things He wants us to look at: “Why do they not reflect on the camels and how they are created? And the sky and how it is raised. And the mountains and how they are constructed. And the earth and how it is built.” [88:17-20]
Camels first. Not cosmology.
The Water We Drank Today
There is a passage that asks about a glass of water as though it were a miracle. Follow it, and it is.
“Have you noted the water you drink? Did you send it down from the clouds, or did we? If we will, we can make it salty. You should be thankful.” [56:68-70]
Nearly all the water on this planet is salt, and undrinkable. What makes any of it drinkable is a process God runs over our heads every day. Seawater lifted by the sun, with the salt left behind, carried inland on the wind, and returned clean.
Then the sentence that makes water more than weather: “And from water we made all living things.” [21:30] Every living thing, including the mostly-water body reading this.
And the instruction attached to the passage is one word: “You should be thankful.” [56:70]
A World Made Habitable
Two questions, asked as though the answer were obvious: “Did we not make the earth habitable? And the mountains stabilizers?” [78:6-7]
Habitable is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. A planet at the right distance from its star, turning at the right speed, with air we can breathe and water we can drink.
God says the same thing again and adds us to it: “GOD is the One who rendered the earth habitable for you, and the sky a formidable structure, and He designed you, and designed you well.” [40:64]
The sky over it is called a ceiling, and a guarded one: “And we rendered the sky a guarded ceiling. Yet, they are totally oblivious to all the portents therein.” [21:32]
One verse gathers the whole of it: “In the creation of the heavens and the earth, the alternation of night and day, the ships that roam the ocean for the benefit of the people, the water that GOD sends down from the sky to revive dead land and to spread in it all kinds of creatures, the manipulation of the winds, and the clouds that are placed between the sky and the earth, there are sufficient proofs for people who understand.” [2:164]
And Within Ourselves
God describes the making of a person as a sequence, stage by stage.
“We created the human being from a certain kind of mud. Subsequently, we reproduced him from a tiny drop, that is placed into a well protected repository.” [23:12-13] Then: “we developed the drop into a hanging (embryo), then developed the hanging (embryo) into a bite-size (fetus), then created the bite-size (fetus) into bones, then covered the bones with flesh.” [23:14]
The sequence ends in praise, not in a body. God finishes it: “We thus produce a new creature. Most blessed is GOD, the best Creator.” [23:14]
What He made that way is running right now with no instruction from us. Something like thirty-seven trillion cells, a heart that has been beating since before we were born, and something in the blood finding and destroying things we never knew were there.
God's own summary of it is four words: “We created man in the best design.” [95:4]
Which is why the invitation in 51:21 is the sharpest one here. “And within yourselves; can you see?” [51:21] No telescope and no laboratory. Only attention paid to a body He gave us and we have never had to think about.
Questions About the Signs Around Us
Is it not just as reasonable to say nature is impressive and leave God out of it?
It is a position people hold, and the Quran answers it by pointing at the design, not at the size. God's argument is about order, not grandeur. The sun and the moon are “perfectly calculated” [55:5], each “floating in its own orbit” [21:33], regular enough that we can count years by them [10:5]. He then says what all of it amounts to: “there are sufficient proofs for people who understand.” [2:164] The word is proofs, and He leaves us to weigh them. Nowhere does the Quran ask anyone to be impressed without looking.
What does the Quran mean by calling mountains stabilizers?
It means they hold the ground steady. God says so twice, in the same words. He asks it as a question: “Did we not make the earth habitable? And the mountains stabilizers?” [78:6-7] And He says it again as a statement: “we placed on earth stabilizers, lest it tumbles with them, and we placed straight roads therein, that they may be guided.” [21:31] The verse names what they do, not how they do it. What the Quran asks for is that we look at the mountains and ask how they were built [88:19], which is a reasonable thing to ask of anyone standing under one.
Why does the Quran tell us to be thankful instead of impressed?
Because being impressed costs nothing and changes nothing. Thankfulness points back at the One who gave it. The water passage ends on exactly that: “If we will, we can make it salty. You should be thankful.” [56:70] The instruction is not believe, and not marvel. God also ties thankfulness to what He gives next: “The more you thank Me, the more I give you. But if you turn unappreciative, then My retribution is severe.” [14:7] Noticing is the first half. Saying so is the rest of it.
What Greatness Asks of Us
Go outside tonight and pick one star. The light arriving in our eye left it long before tonight. For the nearest, a few years ago. For most of what we can see, centuries or thousands of years.
Now hold that beside the verse from the first part: the whole earth in His fist, the universes folded within His right hand [39:67]. The universes are the thing that fits in the hand. They are no measure of God at all.
So no number astronomy ever produces is going to help us picture Him. That is the honest conclusion, and God already stated it: “They can never fathom the greatness of GOD.” [39:67]
Size and Closeness, in One Being
If greatness stopped there, we would be left with awe and nowhere to put it. God never leaves it there.
The One who folds the universes is the same One who said He knows what a person whispers to himself, and is “closer to him than his jugular vein” [50:16]. And: “I am always near. I answer their prayers when they pray to Me.” [2:186]
Hold those two together, because that is where the greatness actually sits. Not the size on its own, and not the closeness on its own, but one Being who is both at once.
It settles two questions we would otherwise keep asking. We never have to work out whether a worry is too small to bring to Him. And we never have to wonder whether He is too busy with the rest of it to have noticed ours.
Which Is Why We Go Straight to Him
Because the size and the closeness belong to one Being, there is no room left between them for anybody else.
God states it without softening: “Absolutely, the religion shall be devoted to GOD alone.” [39:3] The same verse quotes the excuse people give for putting someone in between, then calls the people who say it liars and disbelievers.
He makes the same point with a fly: “the idols you set up beside GOD can never create a fly, even if they banded together to do so.” [22:73] And the verse straight after is the one to leave this page with: “They do not value GOD as He should be valued.” [22:74]
Once the scale is real to us, none of that sounds severe. Putting a prophet, a saint or an object in between only routes a prayer through something He made. There is no humility in it.
So we go straight to Him. Of the people who are guided, God says: “They are the ones whose hearts rejoice in remembering GOD. Absolutely, by remembering GOD, the hearts rejoice.” [13:28]
Questions About Living With This
What does it mean to be conscious of God through an ordinary day?
It means He stays in mind while the day goes on, and not only at prayer times. God asks for all the modes: “You shall remember your Lord within yourself, publicly, privately, and quietly, day and night; do not be unaware.” [7:205] Quietly and within ourselves are on that list, which covers most of a working day. In practice it is small and repeatable. Thanking Him for something specific. Saying His name before starting. Taking a worry to Him first instead of last. The prayers are the anchor, decreed “to remember Me” [20:14], and the rest of the day is held between them.
How can God be near to every person at once?
Because nearness for God is not a distance, and He is not in one place while being away from another. He describes Himself as both ends at once: “He is the Alpha and the Omega. He is the Outermost and the Innermost. He is fully aware of all things.” [57:3] He also says that ruling the heavens and the earth “never burdens Him” [2:255]. Nothing is divided between us and shared out. The rule to keep hold of is the simplest one: “There is nothing that equals Him.” [42:11] Our idea of being near is a creature's idea.
Does God need our worship?
No. Nothing we do adds anything to Him. God says He is “much too high above needing any partners” [39:67], and that everything in the heavens and the earth already glorifies Him, whether we join in or not [17:44]. The worship is for us. He says what He made us for — “I did not create the jinns and the humans except to worship Me alone” [51:56] — and what it does to a person: “by remembering GOD, the hearts rejoice.” [13:28] The gift runs in our direction.
What the Quran Says About God's Greatness
The verses this page rests on, in one place.
GOD: there is no other god besides Him, the Living, the Eternal. Never a moment of unawareness or slumber overtakes Him. To Him belongs everything in the heavens and everything on earth. Who could intercede with Him, except in accordance with His will? He knows their past, and their future. No one attains any knowledge, except as He wills. His dominion encompasses the heavens and the earth, and ruling them never burdens Him. He is the Most High, the Great.[2:255]
He never looks away, and ruling all of it never burdens Him.
Initiator of the heavens and the earth. He created for you from among yourselves spouses—and also for the animals. He thus provides you with the means to multiply. There is nothing that equals Him. He is the Hearer, the Seer.[42:11]
The sentence that rules out every picture we could form.
No visions can encompass Him, but He encompasses all visions. He is the Compassionate, the Cognizant.[6:103]
Our sight is not the instrument for this.
They can never fathom the greatness of GOD. The whole earth is within His fist on the Day of Resurrection. In fact, the universes are folded within His right hand. Be He glorified; He is much too high above needing any partners.[39:67]
The universes folded within His right hand.
We created the human, and we know what he whispers to himself. We are closer to him than his jugular vein.[50:16]
Closer than the jugular vein, and He hears what is never said.
He created seven universes in layers. You do not see any imperfection in the creation by the Most Gracious. Keep looking; do you see any flaw?[67:3]
Seven universes, and an invitation to go looking for a flaw.
The earth is full of signs for those who are certain. And within yourselves; can you see?[51:20-21]
The signs are on the earth, and in us.
They do not value GOD as He should be valued. GOD is the Most Powerful, the Almighty.[22:74]
The short verdict on everyone who puts something else beside Him.
Growth Prompt
Take ten minutes today to look at one thing properly, then write. God asks for attention, not for expertise: “And within yourselves; can you see?” [51:21]
When did I last feel how great God is, and what did I do about it the next morning?
Keep growing
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