The miracle of lightning passage: from the perspective of science and Prophetic Hadith
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32410/huj-10221Abstract
It is worth noting that lightning, is one of the oldest observed natural phenomena on earth. It is the occurrence of a natural electrical discharge of very short duration and high voltage between a cloud and the ground or within a cloud, accompanied by a bright flash and typically also thunder. In the early stages of development, air acts as an insulator between the positive and negative charges in the cloud and between the cloud and the ground. When the opposite charges builds up enough, this insulating capacity of the air breaks down and there is a rapid discharge of electricity that we know as lightning. The flash of lightning temporarily equalizes the charged regions in the atmosphere until the opposite charges build up again.
Novel experiments have shown that any flash of lightning is not continuous as we see it; it is composed from different phases. The most important phases are: the downward phase, in which the beam passes through the clouds towards the earth, and the upward phase, in which the spark returns towards the cloud. This means, the lightning beam passes and returns during a time that cannot be detected by the naked eye. This time is typically estimated in a range of a millisecond. The identical description about this phenomenon is stated by the Holy Prophet (P.U.H) more than 1400 years ago. The Prophetic Hadith about the straightway (Sirrat) in Day of Resurrection is considered to be one of the scientific miracles in the Prophetic Sunnah. In this Hadith the Holy Prophet says: “don›t you see that the lightning comes and go back in an eye blink” (Sahih Muslim Vol. 1, Book 1, Hadith 380).
Thus, to our best knowledge, this Hadith involves a scientific miracle where the full correspondence between the Prophet›s speech and the recent revelations of complicated and accurate processes occur in the lightning flash. Therefore, in this study we will see that the Great Prophet (P.U.H) mentioned the phases of lightning with astonishing accuracy. The scientific miracle about this Holy Hadith is very clear, especially if we know that scientists use the same word that has been used, very carefully, by the Holy Prophet (P.U.H), by expressing the downward and upward phases, and these two phases take a period of time which is equal to the necessary time of an eye blink.
The time needed for each lightning phase is estimated to be in milliseconds, and of course the eye cannot analyze the information coming to it during such a time, and this proves that the Holy Prophet (P.U.H) tells us about things we could only see with sophisticated cameras that capture more than thousand images in every second. These descriptions, of course, prove the sincerity of the message of our Prophet (P.U.H) and he is a messenger of Allah (S.W.T), and he came with theses precise information that required the discovery of scientists for a long time
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Copyright (c) 2019 Azeez Abdullah Barzinjy, Abbas Hussein Rostam, Haidar Jalal Ismail, Mohammed Abdullah Hamad, Mudhaffer Mustafa Ameen
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