Fana · the world passes away
The Hour
The world passes away; only the Face of the Creator remains
If the world had a beginning — will it have an end?
كُلُّ مَنْ عَلَيْهَا فَانٍ، وَيَبْقَىٰ وَجْهُ رَبِّكَ ذُو الْجَلَالِ وَالْإِكْرَامِ
All that is upon it will perish. And there remains the Face of your Lord, Possessor of majesty and honor.
The passing and the Remaining
The world has an end; the Creator has none. "All that is on the earth will perish" is not a threat but the nature of the created: what received its being from without gives it back. Remaining — baqa' — is an attribute of Allah alone; in the Hall of Time it sounded as "everlasting without end", and here it turns toward us: since He alone remains, all else is a guest.
The Hour — as-sa'a — is not the ruin of one Earth but the folding-up of the world itself as a stage. Revelation speaks of it with awe and with bounty; of its time, one word: hidden. And science, by its own road, has reached that same first word: this world is not eternal.
Stars do not burn forever
A star lives as long as it has fuel to burn. The Sun turns hydrogen into helium, and the store is not infinite: in about five billion years the core will burn out, the Sun will swell into a red giant, swallow the inner orbits, and settle into a white dwarf — a cooling ember the size of the Earth.
And so with all of them. Stars are born from gas, and gas is finite; an age will come when new ones cease to ignite and the old ones burn out. A sky full of fires is not the world's eternal state but its youth.
A world that cools
This has a name — the growth of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics: heat flows from hot to cold, differences of level smooth out, order wears away. For the Universe as a whole this leads toward a limit called the heat death: everything at one temperature, and nothing more can happen — no star, no thought.
The growth of entropy is among the most reliable macroscopic rules of physics: in a closed system available energy disperses and differences even out. But the far future of the world depends on what we do not know: dark energy, the shape of space. "Heat death" is a model, not a sentence. One thing is firm: physics describes no eternally unchanging world — this order has a direction, and it does not run in a circle.
إِذَا الشَّمْسُ كُوِّرَتْ، وَإِذَا النُّجُومُ انكَدَرَتْ، وَإِذَا الْجِبَالُ سُيِّرَتْ، وَإِذَا الْعِشَارُ عُطِّلَتْ، وَإِذَا الْوُحُوشُ حُشِرَتْ، وَإِذَا الْبِحَارُ سُجِّرَتْ
When the sun is folded up, when the stars fall away, when the mountains are set moving, when the pregnant she-camels are abandoned, when the wild beasts are gathered, when the seas are set ablaze…
يَوْمَ نَطْوِي السَّمَاءَ كَطَيِّ السِّجِلِّ لِلْكُتُبِ، كَمَا بَدَأْنَا أَوَّلَ خَلْقٍ نُّعِيدُهُ، وَعْدًا عَلَيْنَا، إِنَّا كُنَّا فَاعِلِينَ
On that Day We will roll up the heaven as a scroll is rolled up for records. As We began the first creation, We will repeat it — a promise binding upon Us; indeed, We will do it.
Two words about the end
For fourteen centuries Revelation has said: the sun will be folded up, the stars will fall away, the heaven will be rolled up like a scroll. Physics, going by measurements, says: the sun will burn out, the stars will die down, the world will cool. This is not a coincidence of scenarios but a meeting in the first word: the world passes away.
Past that first word, they part. Physics draws a slow cooling over unmeasurable spans; Revelation speaks of a sudden Hour by His will, "in the twinkling of an eye", beyond which lies not emptiness but resurrection — that very "as We began, so We will repeat". What it is and when — physics is not given to know: its time is ghayb, "knowledge of it is with the Lord".