“Do you not see that Allah sends down water from the sky, whereby the earth turns green? Verily Allah is Subtle, All-Aware. All that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth in His. Surely, Allah, He alone is Self-Sufficient, Praiseworthy.”
(Al-Qur’ān – 22:63-64)
As the sprinkling of even a light shower makes barren land blossom into verdure, so the blessed downpour of revelation in the time of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ will soon show its blessed results. The verse gives the good tidings that the barren desert of Arabia will be quickened to life and turned into a flourishing centre of knowledge, of good morals and of a righteous and benevolent civilization never witnessed before.
To say that Allah is ‘subtle’ means that He accomplishes what He Wills by ways that are not tangible. When He Wills to bring about a change, He designs that it comes about in a manner which cannot even be imagined. One sees, for instance, the system of procreation in the world with the result that hundreds of thousands of babies are born every day. But who knows whether one of these will be an Abraham providing spiritual leadership to the greater part of the world, or a Chenghis Khan bringing about large-scale devastation in his wake. When the microscope was first invented who could have imagined that it would ultimately contribute to the manufacture of atomic and hydrogen bombs? Is short, God’s plans are fulfilled in such fine and imperceptible ways that people are hardly aware of them before their actual fulfilment.