Everyone knows what a seed is..
But perhaps they have never considered how countless different plants come from a little thing that looks like a piece of wood.
But if you think more carefully about a seed, you will see that it is a great miracle. The colors, designs, smells and all the other qualities of the plants you see around are hidden in a tiny seed.
Actually, every seed is a wonderful data bank.
Seeds contain the information for each branch and leaf of the plant they belong to, the number and shape of the leaves, the color and thickness of the outside covering, the number and size of the tubes that transport water and nourishment; the height of the plant, whether or not it will bear fruit, and if it bears fruit, its taste, smell, shape and color.
In short, seeds contain all the information that can be known about a plant.
The redness of a rose, the veins in a leaf, the number of leaves, their texture and velvety softness and the proportion of substances that give a rose its smell are all pieces of this information.
It is this information that makes grapes come from little sacks filled with sweet water that grow on vine branches that look like dry sticks. The information that makes the skin of a grape different from a hazel-nut shell, and gives each of them the color, taste, smell, the vitamins it contains; what causes the watery texture of one and the dry texture of the other is all included in the embryo of every seed.
Human beings use computers to store information. Special computer components called hard disks are designed to store information. These high-tech devices are quite primitive when compared with a tiny seed. Within a seed there are hundreds of thousands of pages of information and complex systems that human beings have not yet been able to understand or replicate.
This is because Allah created the seed. And Allah brought into being the systems contained within it.
A tiny seed by itself is a proof of Allah’s incomparable and magnificent art of Creation.
Every seed is encompassed by Allah’s knowledge; it grows with His knowledge and becomes a plant.
Allah reveals this truth in a verse of the Qur’an:
The keys of the Unseen are in His possession. No one knows them but Him. He knows everything in the land and sea. No leaf falls without His knowing it. There is no seed in the darkness of the earth, and nothing moist or dry which is not in a Clear Book. (Surat Al-An‘am, 59)
Allah is He Who splits the seed and kernel. He brings forth the living from the dead, and produces the dead out of the living. That is Allah, so how are you perverted? (Surat Al-An‘am, 95)