Another news revealed by the Hadith literature regarding the End Times is that the original religion will no longer be misunderstood. In the Golden Age, all heretical misunderstandings that entered Islam after the Prophet (saas) will be eliminated, and the original religion will be restored. Just as in the case of the Prophet, the requirements of the religion will be fulfilled.
After the death of our Prophet (saas) and his Companions, history records that unrelated heresies and forms of worship were introduced into the original religion, and that countless hadiths and judgments, most of which have survived to our day, were fabricated and attributed to our Prophet (saas). Despite the best efforts of true Muslims to eliminate these fabrications, many practices done in the name of Islam today are not based upon the Qur'an.
As the Qur'an is the only source that can distinguish between the correct and mistaken practices, only its guidance can expose and remove these fabricated heresies. This way, the true religion will resurface.
In the End Times, Allah will restore the religion to its original state and make the Qur'an's morality prevail. When this time comes, He will remove all deviations that hinder people from living by His religion, and will purify Islam from all heresies, false beliefs, and forms of worship.
How does the Collapse of the Theory of Evolution Demonstrate the Truth of Creation?
by Harun Yahya
When we ask how life on Earth emerged, we find two different answers:
One is that living things emerged by evolution. According to the theory of evolution, which makes this claim, life began with the first cell, which itself emerged by chance or by some hypothetical natural laws of "self-organization." Again as a result of chance and natural laws, this living cell developed and evolved, and by taking on different forms gave rise to the millions of species of life on Earth.
 
INTERESTING SPINES: Hallucigenia: One of the creatures that suddenly emerged in the Cambrian Age. This and many other Cambrian fossils have hard, sharp spines to protect them from attack. One thing that evolutionists cannot account for is how these creatures should have such an effective defense system when there were no predators around. The lack of predators makes it impossible to explain these spines in terms of natural selection. |
The second answer is "Creation." All living things came into existence by being created by an intelligent Creator. When life and the millions of forms it takes, which could not possibly have come into existence by chance, were first created, they had the same complete, flawless, and superior design that they possess today. The fact that even the simplest-looking forms of life possess such complex structures and systems that could never have come about by chance and natural conditions is a clear proof of this.
Outside these two alternatives, there is no third claim or hypothesis today regarding how life emerged. According to the rules of logic, if one answer to a question with two alternative possible answers is proved to be false, then the other must be true. This rule, one of the most fundamental in logic, is called disjunctive inference (modus tollendo ponens).
In other words, if it is demonstrated that living species on Earth did not evolve by chance, as the theory of evolution claims, then that is clear proof that they were formed by a Creator. Scientists who support the theory of evolution agree that there is no third alternative. One of these, Douglas Futuyma, makes the following statement:
Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from pre-existing species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence. (Douglas J. Futuyma, Science on Trial, Pantheon Books, New York, 1983, p. 197.)
The fossil record provides the answer to the evolutionist Futuyma. The science of fossils (paleontology) shows that all living groups emerged on Earth at different times, all at once, and perfectly formed.
All the discoveries from excavations and studies over the last hundred years or so show that, contrary to evolutionists' expectations, living things came into existence suddenly, in perfect and flawless form, in other words that they were "created." Bacteria, protozoa, worms, molluscs, and other invertebrate sea creatures, arthropods, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals all appeared suddenly, with complex organs and systems. There are no fossils that show any so-called "transition" between them. Paleontology bears the same message as other branches of science: Living things did not evolve, but were created. As a result, while evolutionists were trying to prove their unrealistic theory, they by their own hands produced proof of creation.
Robert Carroll, an expert on vertebrate paleontology and a committed evolutionist, comes to admit that the Darwinist hope has not been satisfied with fossil discoveries:
Despite more than a hundred years of intense collecting efforts since the time of Darwin's death, the fossil record still does not yield the picture of infinitely numerous transitional links that he expected. (Robert L. Carroll, Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 25.)
The world of living things is divided by biologists into such fundamental groups as plants, animals, fungae etc. These are then subdivided into different "phyla." When designating these phyla, the fact that each one possesses completely different physical structures should always be borne in mind. Arthropoda (insects, spiders, and other creatures with jointed legs), for instance, are a phylum by themselves, and all the animals in the phylum have the same fundamental physical structure. The phylum called Chordata includes those creatures with a notochord or, most commonly, a spinal column. All the large animals such as fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals that we are familiar in daily life are in a subphylum of Chordata known as vertebrates.
There are around 35 different phyla of animals, including the Mollusca, which include soft-bodied creatures such as snails and octopuses, or the Nematoda, which include diminutive worms. The most important feature of these phyla is that they possess totally different physical characteristics. The categories below the phyla possess basically similar body plans, but the phyla are very different from one another.
So how did these differences come about?
Let us first consider the Darwinist hypothesis. As we know, Darwinism proposes that life developed from one single common ancestor, and took on all its varieties by a series of tiny changes. In that case, life should first have emerged in very similar and simple forms. And according to the same theory, the differentiation between, and growing complexity in, living things must have happened in parallel over time.
 One of the complex invertebrates that suddenly emerged in the Cambrian Age some 550 million years ago were the fossil trilobites above. Another feature of trilobites that poses a quandary for evolutionists is their compound eye structure. Trilobites' very advanced eyes possessed a multi-lens system. That system is exactly the same as that found in many creatures today, such as spiders, bees, and flies. The sudden emergence of such a complex eye structure in a creature that lived 500 million years ago is enough on its own to consign evolutionists' theories based on chance to the waste bin.
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According to Darwinism, life must be like a tree, with a common root, subsequently splitting up into different branches. And this hypothesis is constantly emphasized in Darwinist sources, where the concept of the "tree of life" is frequently employed. According to this tree concept, one phylum must first emerge, and then the other phyla must slowly come about with minute changes over very long periods of time.
That is the theory of evolution's claim. But is this really how it happened?
Definitely not. Quite the contrary, animals have been very different and complex since the moment they first emerged. All the animal phyla known today emerged at the same time, in the middle of the geological period known as the Cambrian Age. The Cambrian Age is a geological period estimated to have lasted some 65 million years, approximately between 570 to 505 million years ago. But the period of the abrupt appearance of major animal groups fit in an even shorter phase of the Cambrian, often referred to as the "Cambrian explosion." Stephen C. Meyer, P. A. Nelson, and Paul Chien, in an article based on a detailed literature survey, dated 2001, note that the "Cambrian explosion occurred within an exceedingly narrow window of geologic time, lasting no more than 5 million years." (Stephen C. Meyer, P. A. Nelson, and Paul Chien, The Cambrian Explosion: Biology's Big Bang, 2001, p. 2.)
Before then, there is no trace in the fossil record of anything apart from single-celled creatures and a few very primitive multicellular ones. All animal phyla emerged completely formed and all at once, in the very short period of time represented by the Cambrian Explosion. (Five million years is a very short time in geological terms!)
The fossils found in Cambrian rocks belong to very different creatures, such as snails, trilobites, sponges, jellyfish, starfish, shellfish, etc. Most of the creatures in this layer have complex systems and advanced structures, such as eyes, gills, and circulatory systems, exactly the same as those in modern specimens. These structures are at one and the same time very advanced, and very different.
Richard Monastersky, a staff writer at Science News journal, states the following about the Cambrian explosion, which is a deathtrap for evolutionary theory:
A half-billion years ago, ...the remarkably complex forms of animals we see today suddenly appeared. This moment, right at the start of Earth's Cambrian Period, some 550 million years ago, marks the evolutionary explosion that filled the seas with the world's first complex creatures. (Richard Monastersky, "Mysteries of the Orient,” Discover, April 1993, p. 40.)
Phillip Johnson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who is also one of the world's foremost critics of Darwinism, describes the contradiction between this paleontological truth and Darwinism:
Darwinian theory predicts a "cone of increasing diversity," as the first living organism, or first animal species, gradually and continually diversified to create the higher levels of taxonomic order. The animal fossil record more resembles such a cone turned upside down, with the phyla present at the start and thereafter decreasing. (Phillip E. Johnson, "Darwinism's Rules of Reasoning,” in Darwinism: Science or Philosophy by Buell Hearn, Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 1994, p. 12.)
As Phillip Johnson has revealed, far from its being the case that phyla came about by stages, in reality they all came into being at once, and some of them even became extinct in later periods. The meaning of the emergence of very different living creatures all of a sudden and perfectly formed, is creation. As we have seen, all the available scientific discoveries disprove the claims of the theory of evolution and reveal the truth of creation.
| THE MUSLIM WAY OF SPEAKING |
Speaking with awareness that the life of the world
is transitory
Those who deify worldly things employ a way of speaking peculiar to themselves. It can be clearly discerned from their speech that they have made the life of this world the major object of their longing. Some speak with envy, some with covetousness of the fine things they see in the possession of others. These desires hidden in their hearts arise out of ignorance of the truth of this worldly life as well of the afterlife, while, in the Qur'an Allah tells us that the blessings of this world are to test people:
Know that your wealth and children are a trial and that there is an immense reward with Allah. (Surat al-Anfal: 28)
Because they are unaware of this, those who have no faith are partial to others who possess more in this world than they do, and adopt a fawning manner of speaking towards them. For example, when speaking of the car and the clothes of a person who is rich and famous, their profound jealousy, compounded by feelings of inferiority, captivates them. They exhibit this longing through such statements as "If only I were as rich as he," "If only I were in his place right now," and "What a fine car he has; if only it were mine." In fact, those they look upon with envy are all—as they themselves are—weak and needy in the sight of Allah. Everything that people possess belongs ultimately to Allah. Everybody, for the whole period of his or her life, is being tested with the blessings which Allah proffers.
Because they know that the true and lasting life is the one in the Hereafter, the faithful strive throughout their worldly lives to attain the abode of Paradise. They desire worldly blessings, like wealth and property, only to use them in a way that is pleasing to Allah, to show their gratitude to Him, and to exalt Him. Because of this moral excellence, even if they lose one such worldly blessing, or even all their possessions, they do not give way to sorrow or despair. They consider it to be predestined by Allah, and they want Allah to give them the real blessings and finer things of the Hereafter. In addition, it can be understood from all that they say that they know that Allah provides sustenance and other worldly blessings through His mercy and wisdom. In a verse of the Qur'an, Allah tells us the following:
Allah expands provision to anyone He wills and restricts it. They rejoice in the life of this world. Yet the life of this world, compared to the Hereafter, is only fleeting enjoyment. (Surat ar-Ra‘d: 26)
Failing to grasp that specific purposes have been preordained by Allah, those who are passionately devoted to their wealth and property, render interpretations of events that are worldly-oriented. For example, a person, whose wealth and fame they covet, may, at bottom, be one of low morality. Nevertheless, those who lack understanding will not consider him to be of base morality at all, nor will they think about that which he will encounter on the Day of Judgment, and possibly see no fault in longing for that person's wealth or repute. Muslims, however, see the truth of this worldly life, and try to earn Allah's approval to attain the afterlife. For this reason, their manner of speech consistently reflects their knowledge of this reality. As an example, the Qur'an cites the instance of certain people envious of the wealth of a rich man named Qarun:
Qarun was one of the people of Musa but he lorded it over them. We gave him treasures, the keys alone to which were a heavy weight for a party of strong men. (Surat al-Qasas: 76)
Addicted to the life of the world, and, for this reason, unable to evaluate accurately what a malefactor was Qarun, these people said the following when they saw his wealth:
He went out among his people in his finery. Those who desired the life of this world said, "Oh! If only we had the same as Qarun has been given! What immense good fortune he possesses." (Surat al-Qasas: 79)
While Muslims had reminded them that He Who had provided Qarun his possessions was our Lord, and that his real destination was the afterlife, those who failed to speak with a morality particular to a Muslim were affected by Qarun's wealth and behaved ignorantly. The Qur'an tells of the warning given to these people by Muslims like this:
But those who had been given knowledge said, "Woe to you! Allah's reward is better for those who believe and act rightly. But only the steadfast will obtain it." (Surat al-Qasas: 80)
In the Qur'an we are told that, because of his immorality, Qarun and his house were brought down. After this, those who had formerly envied Qarun saw that he was powerless in the front of Allah and, realizing their error, this time responded by speaking as Muslims:
We caused the earth to swallow up both him and his house. There was no group to come to his aid, besides Allah, and he was not someone who is helped. Those who had longed to take his place the day before woke up saying, "Allah expands the provision of any of His servants He wills or restricts it. If Allah had not shown great kindness to us, we would have been swallowed up as well. Ah! Truly the unbelievers are not successful." (Surat al-Qasas: 81-82)
As we are told in the verse, "Do not let their wealth and children impress you. Allah merely wants to punish them by them during their life in this world and for them to expire while they are unbelievers." (Surat at-Tawba: 55), Muslims show that they do not covet worldly wealth, and that they are people who think always of Allah and their final home in the afterlife, reflected in all their actions and their speech. This firm morality of Muslims receives its reward, by the grace of Allah, in this world, as in the afterlife. Allah tells us that He will grant blessings and the best rewards, both in this world and the afterlife, to those who purify themselves of worldly ambition and aim to earn His approval:
Anyone who acts rightly, male or female, being a believer, We will give them a good life and We will recompense them according to the best of what they did. (Surat an-Nahl: 97)
AL-BARI'
The Maker
He is Allah—the Creator, the Maker , the Giver of Form. To Him belong the Most Beautiful Names. Everything in the heavens and Earth glorifies Him. He is the Almighty, the All-Wise. ( Surat al-Hashr, 59:24)
The universe is based upon equilibrium and harmony. As scientific developments reveal more of its mysteries, we learn more about this equilibrium and harmony. It is apparent that each system in the universe has been designed by a superior intelligence that created everything in an amazing way. For billions of years, this great harmony and order has existed among an infinite number of living and non-living beings.
When we examine life on Earth, we come across amazing details. Whether we recognize it or not, we are surrounded with countless signs of creation. For instance, the ratio of different gases in the atmosphere are ideal for the survival of all living beings. Human beings and animals inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Although this process continues without interruption, the amount of oxygen never decreases and the amount of carbon dioxide never increases. Moreover, this amazing equilibrium is never disturbed, because contrary to human beings and animals, plants inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. Thus, the oxygen consumed by people and animals is replaced by plants, a process that preserves this equilibrium.
This example is only one of the countless signs of creation on Earth. Both the micro- and macro-universes abound with similar examples. The universe, and thus life on Earth, exists only because our Lord creates things in conformity with one another. One verse reads:
And when Musa said to his people: “My people, You wronged yourselves by adopting the [golden] calf, so turn toward your Maker and kill yourselves. That is the best thing for you in your Maker's sight.” And He turned toward you. He is the Ever-Returning, the Most Merciful. (Surat al-Baqara, 2:54)
Is it proper to complain about a disease, a disability, a physical defect, or poverty?
Such imperfections are specially created by Allah in order to make people grasp the temporary nature of this world’s life and yearn for Paradise, so that they will strive to attain it. Hence, and in fact, these imperfections are blessings that Allah grants to His servants. For those who know how to take heed, situations that seem to be difficulties in the world turn out to be great blessings in respect to the eternal life. Allah promises Paradise to His servants who, when faced with the deficiencies and difficulties of this world’s life, trust Allah and are steadfast in order to earn His good pleasure. Furthermore, Allah will remove all imperfections, both spiritual and physical, of those who attain Paradise and will create them in the most beautiful and eternal form.
That is why, when faced with any imperfection, one should remember this fact and utterly yield to Allah, the Lord of infinite wisdom. There is absolute goodness and great wisdom, unknown to any person, in the destiny that Allah has determined for them. It is incompatible with the Qur’an’s morals to be displeased with and to complain of situations that people do not like, such as poverty, unattractiveness, or sickness. All men and women should be content with their destiny, for those who complain and are unhappy with a situation are, in fact, displeased with a good thing that Allah has willed for them. Such an attitude displays their ingratitude toward Allah, because He creates every incident in order to test people, and makes it a means for their eternal salvation. The ideal behavior that believers should exhibit is described in the Qur’an, as follows:
Say: "Nothing can happen to us except what Allah has ordained for us. He is Our Master. It is in Allah that the believers should put their trust." (Surat at-Tawba, 51)
(For further reference, please see, Quick Grasp of Faith
1,
2,
3 by Harun Yahya)
JESUS WILL RETURN
By Harun Yahya
Jesus (‘Isa) (as), just as all the other prophets, is a chosen slave of Allah whom Allah assigned to summon people to the true path. However, there are some attributes of Jesus distinguishing him from other prophets, the most important one being that he was raised up to Allah and that he will come back to earth again.
Contrary to what most people believe, Jesus was not crucified and killed nor did he die for any other reason. The Qur'an tells us that they did not kill him and they did not crucify him and that Allah raised him up to Him. In none of the verses, is there an actual reference to his murder or that he was killed, apart from the verse (ayah) which denies that it happened. Furthermore, the Qur'an acquaints us with some events from the life of Jesus (as) which have not yet happened. Thus, his second coming to earth is a prerequisite for these events to happen. There is no doubt that the Qur'an's revelations will surely happen.
Despite this, however, many people assume that Jesus (as) passed away some thousands of years ago and that thus it is unlikely that he will return. This is a misconception arising from lack of knowledge about the Qur'an and the Sunnah. A careful scrutiny of the Qur'an will render an accurate understanding of the verses about Jesus (as) possible.
Our Prophet (saas) also told us that Jesus (as) will be sent back to earth and related that in that time, which is called "the end of time", there may be a period in which the earth will attain unprecedented peace, justice and welfare.
The "end times" refers to the period of time close to the end of the world. According to Islam, in this time, there will be the terrible trials of the Dajjal, many earthquakes and the emergence of Yajuj and Majuj after which the ways of the Qur'an will prevail and people will extensively adhere to the values it introduces.
In their dreams, people always long for better. A more beautiful landscape, a more delicious food, a more socially promising society…
later period of "the end of time" expresses a period which entirely embraces all these favourable concepts, "the better", "the more beautiful" etc. It is a blessed period people have been longing for ages. It is the glorious time of welfare and abundance, of justice and peace. It is the time when all these blessings will supersede injustice, immorality, conflict and wars. It is surely the blessed time when Islamic morals will penetrate to every aspect of life.
Evidence that Jesus (as) did not die, that he was raised to the presence of Allah and that he will return again will be examined in this book in the light of the Qur'anic verses.
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SIGNS OF THE LAST DAY
The purpose of this site is to examine the signs of the Hour through the verses of the Qur’an and hadiths of the Prophet (saas), and to show that these signs have begun to appear in our present time. The fact that the advent of these signs was revealed fourteen centuries ago should increase a believer’s faith in Allah and his devotion to Him. The following pages have been written keeping in mind our Lord’s promise: “Say: Praise be to Allah. He will show you His Signs and you will recognize them…” (Surat an-Naml: 93) |
