Dr. Hossam Badrawi Official Website
The naughty young man said: Your tweet, Doctor, and your question about the value of Friday for Muslims, Saturday for Jews, and Sunday for Christians, opened a strange fire on you, as if the mere question was a departure from religion and the Sunnah.. So what prompted you to open this topic in the first place?
I smiled and said: I had finished reading the book: “My Own Universe” by James Bailey, followed by “Physics of the Future” by Mikio Kaku, “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Green, and a summary of Stephen Hawkins’ book Answers Brief Answers to the Big Questions, and I was confused about time and what we consider to be postulates on Earth, which are relative to the universe.
And when I looked at the messages of friends and those I do not know in dozens of posts that they often do not read, but rather send them back to everyone on their phone about the sanctification of supplication at a particular hour or on a particular day because God responds to the supplication, I asked myself about the importance of the day, which day, and why do people think that Today is very relative for the inhabitants of the Earth, from its north to its south, and the most relative between the day of the Earth in the first place and the day of Mars or Saturn. What about the day of a planet in another galaxy? .. It was just a desire to engage people in thinking outside what is local (in this case, the local is the ball terrestrial) and what is cosmic.
An open-minded, intelligent young woman said: Explain to us more.
I said: A few among those I discussed saw in my question an invitation to think, and they reached, like me, explanations worthy of consideration.. If Einstein’s theory of relativity proved the possibility of changing time and its relationship to place and speed, and that with increasing speed to near the speed of light time decreases and mass decreases, and when speed is reached Light has no matter and time stops, for I can understand things that were said and I was required to believe them out of faith and not out of operating the mind.
Another young man said: What are you, doctor?
I said: An educated friend told me in her discussion with me that she sees the relativity of time and the verses of the Qur’an after researching the following verses:
“A day with your Lord is like a thousand years of what you count.”
Then he ascends to him on a day the amount of which is a thousand years of what you count.
And “the angels and the Spirit ascend to Him in a day the length of which is fifty thousand years.”
And they stayed in their cave for three hundred years and added nine.
And “God killed him for a hundred years, then sent him back.” He said, “How long did I stay?” He said, “I stayed for a day or part of a day.”
And “On the Day He will gather them as if they had not stayed but an hour of the day.”
And “the number of months with God is twelve months in God’s book, the day He created the heavens and the earth.”
And “On the Day He will call you, and you will respond with His praise, and you will think that you have tarried but a little.”
And “On the Day We will fold the sky, it will be like folding the record of books, as We began the first creation, We will repeat it as a promise to us that we were doing.”
The attentive young woman said: We are longing, Doctor. Now we want to read about the theory of relativity.
I said: I will propose, through my discussion with you, a new form of journalistic writing that gives me the opportunity to prolong what I write without violating the space available to me in the newspaper, and allows you and the reader, as you will find in my next book an opportunity to increase knowledge of technological means with traditional writing.
All you have to do is point your mobile phone to the next barcode and I’ll walk you through some YouTube links that explain what I mean.
Science is beautiful, and questioning is the origin of knowledge.
As for those who wanted me to consider that the mind took a leave after the interpretation of the ancients for what I read now after more than a thousand years, and that belief in believing what has no proof is the way to God, I tell them that God gave us the mind to reflect, think and strive with the knowledge with which his book began, and that what What distinguishes us from the rest of creation is this awareness of God’s grace upon us.
The first young man said: We go back to the days of the week, what is their source?
I said: I have read that the first people who named the days of the week as I read were the Babylonians, and they had called these days the names of the planets known to them, and there were five, and they assigned the sixth day to the moon and the seventh to the sun.
Sunday was the first day of the week before Islam, and after Islam, Saturday became the first day of the week.
Then came a second stage among the Arabs, as they followed the rest of the peoples by showing that the week consisted of seven days and they did not count the weeks.
In the third stage, the days of the week were named by their well-known names today: (Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday). The names from Sunday to Thursday are split from the same number, first, second to fifth.. Sunday was the first day of the week. As for Friday, the origin of this name refers to gathering and gathering with the intention of prayer or other, then the Qur’an came to prove a day for the group to meet and pray together.
In Latin and English, the days of the week are named after the celestial bodies, and some mythical figures in ancient history.
The young woman said: What about other languages?
I said: The English language depends on the ancient Greek, Latin, and Germanic languages, and seeing those influences lies in their naming of the days of the week. The original order of the days was between the first and second centuries AD, in relation to the Greek and Roman gods, and they were: the sun, the moon, Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, and Cronus, then the names of the planets moved from Latin to other languages in southern and western Europe.
The Romans named the days of the week after naming their gods, because they saw a relationship between their gods and the changing face of the sky, and they were able every night to see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, in addition to the moon and the sun, which formed for them seven major astronomical bodies, so It was normal to use these seven names when the days of the week reached seven.
These are the meanings of the original designation of the days of the week.
Then I said: They are all names, whether Arabic or other languages, just names that reflected cultures, but in the end they are a human creation with a history.
