Another Sabab

In our previous journey, we accompanied Dhul Qarnayn as he followed a sabab and encountered a reality unlike any familiar to ordinary human experience.

We began that journey where every journey through the Qur’an must begin: by observing what Allah has revealed, listening to the earliest generations who reflected upon those words, and carefully distinguishing between what was transmitted and what is our own attempt to understand.

Only then did we ask whether Allah has allowed us, in our own time, to observe aspects of His creation that help us appreciate those verses more deeply.

Now, we continue the journey.

Once again, the Qur’an tells us:

Another path.

Another means by which Allah allowed Dhul Qarnayn to reach a reality beyond the boundaries of familiar human experience.

The Qur’an does not tell us the nature of this sabab.

It simply tells us that Dhul Qarnayn followed it.

And at the end of that path, he encountered another reality within the vastness of Allah’s creation.

Yet this journey presents itself differently from the one before it.

The first journey immediately captures the imagination. The scene itself demands attention. It presents an encounter so unusual that the reader instinctively pauses and asks:

What kind of place was this?

This journey appears far quieter.

Dhul Qarnayn follows another path.

He reaches a people.

The sun rises upon them.

Allah tells us one thing about their world.

Then the account ends.

Three verses.

No extended description of the land.

No conversation with its inhabitants.

No explanation of how they lived.

At first glance, the account appears almost too brief to contain the weight of such a journey.

Yet the Qur’an never preserves what is without purpose.

Nothing within it is casual.

Every verse occupies its place with wisdom, and every word invites reflection.

If Allah chose to preserve this journey as part of the answer given to the Prophet ﷺ, then its brevity itself becomes a reason to look more carefully.

Perhaps the question is not why so little was revealed.

Perhaps the question is why these particular details were chosen.

As always, we begin with the Qur’an itself.

ثُمَّ أَتْبَعَ سَبَبًا

Then he followed another sabab.

حَتَّىٰ إِذَا بَلَغَ مَطْلِعَ الشَّمْسِ وَجَدَهَا تَطْلُعُ عَلَىٰ قَوْمٍ لَمْ نَجْعَل لَّهُم مِّن دُونِهَا سِتْرًا

Until, when he reached the rising place of the sun, he found it rising upon a people for whom We had made no covering from it.

كَذَٰلِكَ ۖ وَقَدْ أَحَطْنَا بِمَا لَدَيْهِ خُبْرًا

So it was. And We had encompassed in knowledge all that was with him.

Three verses.

And within them is a single statement that becomes the center of the entire journey:

We had made no covering for them from it.

Allah does not describe their architecture.

He does not describe their civilization.

He does not describe their history.

He tells us only this:

They were a people upon whom the sun rose, and Allah had made no covering between them and it.

That statement is both the puzzle and the clue.

What kind of world is being described?

How does a people exist in an environment where no covering has been provided from the sun?

Why does the Qur’an direct our attention not toward the location itself, but toward the condition in which these people lived?

And why do the earliest commentators, while offering different explanations for how such a people endured, preserve the same central understanding:

This was a people living without protection from the sun.

These are the questions that will guide this journey.

We will not begin with speculation.

We will begin with what Allah has said.

Then we will listen to those who came before us.

Only after the Qur’an and the earliest voices have spoken will we ask whether our expanding knowledge has allowed us to imagine realities that earlier generations could preserve faithfully, even without the means to observe them.

The purpose remains not to read modern science into the Qur’an.

It is to ask a different question:

Has Allah described aspects of His creation that we are only now beginning to appreciate?

With that question before us, we now turn to the earliest voices that reflected upon these remarkable verses.

The Earliest Voices

Before we ask what this journey may reveal about the breadth of Allah’s creation, we must first listen to those who received these verses closest to the time of revelation.

As with every journey through the Qur’an, our first responsibility is not to seek an explanation that satisfies our curiosity.

It is to understand what was preserved.

The first verse of this journey tells us:

ثُمَّ أَتْبَعَ سَبَبًا

Then he followed another sabab.

The earliest commentators approach this word with simplicity.

They do not attempt to explain the nature of the sabab.

They do not speculate about how Dhul Qarnayn traveled.

They preserve what the verse itself establishes:

Allah provided him with a means by which he reached successive destinations.

Ibn Abbas explains sabab as:

مَنْزِل

A stage or stopping place.

Qatadah describes it as following the stages and landmarks of the earth.

Al-Tabari summarizes the meaning as traveling and following routes and stages.

The consistency of these early explanations is noteworthy.

The word sabab does not become a subject of speculation.

It remains what the Qur’an presents it to be:

A means by which Dhul Qarnayn reached where Allah allowed him to reach.

The destination, however, is where this journey begins to reveal its mystery.

The second verse tells us:

حَتَّىٰ إِذَا بَلَغَ مَطْلِعَ الشَّمْسِ

Until, when he reached the rising place of the sun…

At this point, one might expect the earliest commentators to focus on the destination itself.

Where was this place?

What was its geography?

What kind of land did Dhul Qarnayn reach?

Yet the earliest voices largely move in another direction.

This is a striking contrast with the first journey.

When discussing the first destination, Ibn Abbas preserved descriptions of the scene Dhul Qarnayn witnessed. The image itself became central to understanding the verse.

Here, however, the location receives remarkably little attention.

Instead, the commentators immediately turn toward the people.

The Qur’an says:

وَجَدَهَا تَطْلُعُ عَلَىٰ قَوْمٍ لَمْ نَجْعَل لَّهُم مِّن دُونِهَا سِتْرًا

He found it rising upon a people for whom We had made no covering from it.

And this phrase becomes the center of the earliest explanations.

Ibn Abbas preserves the meaning simply:

لَيْسَ لَهُمْ سِتْرٌ مِنَ الشَّمْسِ

They had no covering from the sun.

Later reports expand upon this understanding.

Some describe a people without trees.

Others mention the absence of buildings or structures that could provide shade.

Some reports mention the absence of mountains or clouds.

The details vary.

But the central meaning remains unchanged.

They lived in an environment where no ordinary covering existed between them and the sun.

This is where the earliest voices converge.

They may differ in describing how these people endured such conditions, but they do not differ in recognizing the condition itself.

The environment offered no familiar protection.

This distinction is important.

The early commentators were not attempting to construct a complete description of this world.

They were preserving what the Qur’an itself emphasizes.

Allah tells us one defining characteristic of their existence:

There was no covering from the sun.

And from this single statement, the central question of the journey emerges.

How does a people live in such an environment?

The Central Question

The earliest voices have given us the foundation.

They preserve the meaning of the words.

They preserve the condition described by Allah.

But they leave us with a question.

A question that the verses themselves seem to invite.

How does a people exist in an environment where Allah tells us:

لَمْ نَجْعَل لَّهُم مِّن دُونِهَا سِتْرًا

We had made no covering for them from it.

This is the point where the second journey becomes different from the first.

In the first journey, the mystery was contained within the scene itself.

Dhul Qarnayn encountered a people at a place where the setting itself demanded reflection.

Here, the mystery is different.

The Qur’an does not draw our attention first to the landscape.

It draws our attention to a condition.

A people.

And the environment in which they lived.

The destination is not described by what it contained.

It is described by what it lacked.

There was no covering from the sun.

No natural barrier.

No ordinary protection.

And yet there were people.

Not a passing group.

Not a temporary gathering.

A qawm.

A community.

A people whose existence Allah chose to preserve in His Book.

This detail transforms the entire verse.

If the Qur’an had described only a barren world exposed to the sun, the question would be simple.

But it does not.

It describes a civilization existing within that condition.

The challenge is therefore not merely:

What kind of place receives such intense exposure from the sun?

The deeper question is:

What kind of world allows a people to flourish without the protections that we consider fundamental?

Because our assumptions are shaped by the world we know.

Every civilization known to us developed upon the surface of Earth.

The surface became the model through which we imagined all other possibilities.

The open sky above us.

The ground beneath our feet.

The rhythm of sunlight and darkness.

The availability of water upon the surface.

These became, almost without realizing it, the measure by which we judged what a world should look like.

But the verse quietly challenges that assumption.

It presents a people whose existence does not appear to fit the pattern familiar to us.

A world where the relationship between the surface and life itself may be different.

A world where the conditions we consider essential may not be the only way Allah sustains His creation.

The question, therefore, is not whether we can immediately identify such a place.

The question is whether we are willing to consider that Allah’s creation may extend beyond the boundaries of our experience.

And this is where the mystery of the second journey truly begins.

The Measure of What We Know

Human beings naturally understand creation through what they have experienced.

This is not a weakness.

It is part of how Allah created us.

We learn through observation.

We build knowledge through discovery.

We recognize patterns through what we encounter.

But the same process can create an unseen limitation.

The familiar can quietly become universal.

Because every civilization known to us developed upon the surface of Earth, the surface became the model through which we imagined all other possibilities.

Life meant sunlight.

Habitability meant an environment resembling our own.

A living world meant oceans, land, atmosphere, and conditions within the range of human experience.

Yet these are not revelations.

They are conclusions drawn from the one world that has been known to us.

Earth is the only inhabited world that we, the inhabitants of this world, have directly experienced.

And therefore, for much of our history, Earth became the measure against which every other possibility was judged.

But Allah’s creation is not measured by the limits of one world.

The Qur’an repeatedly calls us toward humility before what we do not know.

Every discovery does not make creation larger.

It reveals that creation was already larger than our understanding.

The second journey of Dhul Qarnayn therefore raises a deeper question:

If Allah created a people whose world did not resemble the environments familiar to us, are we certain that our experience represents the full range of what creation allows?

Before looking beyond Earth, however, there is a lesson we must first learn from Earth itself.

The Sun Was Not the Beginning

The Qur’an presents creation through a perspective that challenges the assumptions we naturally form from our own experience.

When Allah describes the ordering of creation, He tells us:

قُلْ أَئِنَّكُمْ لَتَكْفُرُونَ بِالَّذِي خَلَقَ الْأَرْضَ فِي يَوْمَيْنِ وَتَجْعَلُونَ لَهُ أَندَادًا ۚ ذَٰلِكَ رَبُّ الْعَالَمِينَ

“Say: Do you indeed disbelieve in the One who created the earth in two days and assign equals to Him? That is the Lord of all worlds.”

Then Allah says:

وَجَعَلَ فِيهَا رَوَاسِيَ مِن فَوْقِهَا وَبَارَكَ فِيهَا وَقَدَّرَ فِيهَا أَقْوَاتَهَا

“And He placed on it firm mountains from above it, and blessed it, and determined within it its provisions…”

The Qur’an describes the earth being prepared.

Its structure was established.

Its blessings were placed within it.

Its provisions were determined.

Then Allah describes the completion of the heavens:

فَقَضَاهُنَّ سَبْعَ سَمَاوَاتٍ فِي يَوْمَيْنِ

“So He completed them as seven heavens in two days…”

And He tells us:

وَزَيَّنَّا السَّمَاءَ الدُّنْيَا بِمَصَابِيحَ

“And We adorned the lowest heaven with lamps.”

This sequence invites reflection.

The Qur’an does not present the sun as the origin of Allah’s ability to sustain creation.

The sun is a part of the order Allah established.

It is one of His signs.

One of His means.

One of the mechanisms through which life on our world is being sustained.

But it is not the only means to sustain life on earth.

If Allah established the provisions of the earth before the lamps of the heavens were mentioned, then the possibility of sustenance cannot be limited to the relationship between life and sunlight that we observe today.

The sun is one means among the countless means Allah may use within creation.

With this principle in mind, we return to the people Dhul Qarnayn encountered.

The difficulty is not that Allah describes life receiving sunlight. The difficulty is that He describes a people for whom there was no covering from it.

Their world did not follow the pattern familiar to us.

And the Qur’an has already shown us that the familiar pattern is not the boundary of what Allah can create.

The question is therefore not:

Could life exist without the direct relationship with the sun that we know?

The Qur’an has already expanded the foundation of that question.

The question becomes:

What forms of life and civilization has Allah placed within His creation that we have not yet encountered?

The Earth We Had Not Yet Seen

Perhaps one of the greatest limitations in human understanding has been the assumption that what we have observed represents the full range of what exists.

For most of human history, the surface of Earth appeared to contain the complete story of life.

But as we explored deeper, we discovered that even our own world contains environments far removed from the conditions familiar to us.

Beneath the oceans, where sunlight never reaches, ecosystems exist around sources of energy within the Earth itself.

Deep beneath the surface, organisms survive separated from the world above.

These discoveries did not reveal the world of Dhul Qarnayn.

They do not tell us where those people lived or how their world functioned.

But they reveal something important.

The conditions we once considered essential were often only the conditions through which we first encountered life.

Creation was never limited to the portion visible to us.

And if even Earth contains hidden environments beyond what earlier generations imagined, then a world organized around a different relationship between surface, energy, and life is not beyond the possibilities within Allah’s creation.

The question raised by the second journey is therefore not answered by these discoveries.

It is expanded by them.

They remind us that unfamiliar does not mean impossible.

And they prepare us to consider a larger question:

What other worlds may exist beyond the one we know?

A World Beneath the Surface

The earliest commentators encountered a difficult question when reflecting upon the words:

لَمْ نَجْعَل لَّهُم مِّن دُونِهَا سِتْرًا

“We had made no covering for them from it.”

They did not begin by questioning the possibility of such a people.

They accepted the description given by Allah.

Their question was practical:

How could such a people exist?

Some early reports mention that these people entered places beneath the surface during the intensity of the sun and emerged afterward.

These reports do not establish the nature of their world.

They do not tell us that their civilization was beneath the surface.

But they reveal something important about how these verses were approached.

The condition described by Allah was accepted.

The question was not whether the description should be changed.

The question was how such a people lived within it.

And this opens a possibility that challenges one of our deepest assumptions.

For us, the surface represents existence itself.

The sky above us.

The land beneath our feet.

The sunlight that defines so much of our experience.

When we imagine a world beneath the surface, we usually imagine something temporary.

A shelter.

A refuge.

A place to escape the conditions above.

But this assumption comes from our own environment.

We have always lived upon the surface.

We have built our civilizations under the open sky.

The surface is our home.

But another world could exist according to a completely different relationship between surface and habitation.

The surface could be the harsh external environment.

The world beneath it could be the place where life flourishes.

A civilization beneath the surface would not necessarily be a civilization hiding from its world.

It could be a civilization adapted to its world.

Its environment could possess its own balance.

Its own systems.

Its own relationship between energy, resources, and life.

Water could move through hidden cycles.

Resources could exist within the depths.

Energy could come through means other than direct sunlight.

The surface sun could be only one part of a much larger system.

For such a civilization, the depths would not represent escape.

They would represent existence.

The significance of this possibility is not that we have identified the nature of Dhul Qarnayn’s destination.

The Qur’an does not tell us that.

The earliest commentators do not tell us that.

The significance is that the verse itself challenges the assumption that every civilization must emerge from the conditions familiar to us.

Allah describes a people whose relationship with their world was different from ours.

Their environment was different.

Their conditions were different.

Yet they existed.

And this is the question that remains before us:

Not what kind of world can we imagine,

but what kinds of worlds has Allah created?

When Another World Becomes Visible

For most of human history, Earth was the only inhabited world we knew.

Every civilization known to us developed beneath the same sky, within the same relationship between land, water, and sunlight.

The worlds beyond Earth were distant lights.

But as humanity began to explore them, they became worlds of their own.

Mars is one such reminder.

A world without forests.

A world without surface oceans.

A world without the familiar landscapes that shaped our understanding of life.

Yet it is still a world.

It has a history.

It has an environment.

It has possibilities we are only beginning to understand.

Mars does not reveal the destination of Dhul Qarnayn’s journey.

But it reveals something important:

A world does not need to resemble Earth to be a world.

The absence of familiar conditions does not mean the absence of possibility.

And if even a neighboring world can challenge our assumptions, then the possibility of worlds far beyond our current understanding becomes worthy of reflection.

The second journey of Dhul Qarnayn therefore returns us to the same lesson:

Creation is not measured by the portion of it that we have encountered.

When Allah Says: “So It Was”

After following this journey through the words of the Qur’an, the reflections of the earliest commentators, and the expanding horizon of what we have learned about creation, we return to the final verse:

كَذَٰلِكَ ۖ وَقَدْ أَحَطْنَا بِمَا لَدَيْهِ خُبْرًا

“So it was. And We had encompassed in knowledge all that was with him.”

At first glance, these words appear to simply conclude the account.

Dhul Qarnayn reached this place.

Allah knew what was there.

The journey ended.

But after reflecting upon the mystery of this destination, the verse carries a deeper meaning.

Because every human being eventually reaches the same point when encountering something beyond familiar experience.

How can such a world exist?

How can such conditions sustain life?

How can a reality so different from our own exist within creation?

The answer of the Qur’an is not to redefine the unknown until it becomes familiar.

The answer is to remember that Allah was never unfamiliar with it.

The world that challenges our understanding was never beyond His knowledge.

The reality that appears extraordinary to us was already fully encompassed by its Creator.

This is a recurring lesson of the Qur’an.

Human beings often mistake the limits of their observation for the limits of creation.

But creation was never measured by what we have seen.

Our knowledge expands when we discover what was already there.

The stars existed before we reached them.

The depths of the oceans existed before we explored them.

The hidden worlds within our own planet existed before we encountered them.

Discovery does not create reality.

It reveals reality.

And this is why the final verse of this journey is so significant.

Allah does not give us a map.

He does not provide every detail our curiosity seeks.

Instead, He gives us something greater.

Perspective.

The world we cannot yet explain is not a world unknown to Allah.

The people we cannot yet imagine are not people unknown to Allah.

The realities beyond our experience are not beyond His knowledge.

The purpose of this journey, therefore, is not to force certainty upon what Allah has left unseen.

It is to remove the limits we have placed upon what Allah may create.

The question is not whether our imagination is large enough to contain creation.

The question is whether we are willing to accept that creation has always been larger than our imagination.

A World Beyond Our Imagination

After following this journey from the words of the Qur’an, through the reflections of the earliest commentators, and through the expanding understanding of creation, we return to the central mystery.

Allah did not tell us only of a place.

He told us of a people.

قَوْمٍ

A community.

A civilization.

A people whose world did not follow the pattern familiar to us.

This distinction changes everything.

The question is no longer only whether life can exist under conditions different from our own.

The deeper question is whether we have mistaken our experience of one world for the definition of all worlds.

For those of us living on Earth, this planet has always been the center of our experience.

Every civilization we studied emerged upon this surface.

Every society known to us developed beneath this sky.

Every assumption we formed about life, civilization, and habitability came from the only inhabited world available to our observation.

And gradually, without realizing it, we began to confuse what we knew with what was possible.

Earth became the measure.

But Earth was only the world we knew.

It was never the measure of Allah’s creation.

The discovery of new worlds changes this perspective.

Not because discovery creates something new.

But because discovery reveals what was already there.

The Americas existed before Europeans crossed the Atlantic.

Civilizations flourished there before another part of humanity encountered them.

The arrival of Columbus did not create a continent.

It did not create civilizations.

It simply connected one part of humanity with another part of humanity that had always existed.

Perhaps we must approach the universe with the same humility.

We, the inhabitants of Earth, are not the entirety of humanity.

We are a part of humanity.

Our knowledge is a part of knowledge.

Our experience is a part of creation.

If Allah has created other peoples within His vast creation, their existence does not depend upon our awareness of them.

They do not become real when we encounter them.

They were real because Allah created them.

And perhaps this is why the final verse of this journey carries such weight:

كَذَٰلِكَ ۖ وَقَدْ أَحَطْنَا بِمَا لَدَيْهِ خُبْرًا

“So it was. And We had encompassed in knowledge all that was with him.”

The statement is not merely about Dhul Qarnayn.

It is a reminder about the relationship between Allah’s knowledge and ours.

What is hidden from us is not hidden from Him.

What we may encounter in the future was already known to Him.

What appears to us as discovery may simply be the moment when Allah allows us to encounter what already existed.

And perhaps this is one of the reasons these journeys were preserved.

Not only to tell us where Dhul Qarnayn went.

Not only to tell us what he witnessed.

But to prepare us for the possibility that the separation between worlds and peoples is not permanent.

That paths once opened by Allah may open again.

That realities once known may become known to us again.

The second journey therefore leaves us with a profound possibility:

The question was never whether such worlds could exist.

The question was whether we were ready to recognize them.

And perhaps this is one of the reasons Dhul Qarnayn’s journeys were preserved.

Not only to tell us where he went.

But to prepare us for the possibility that the paths Allah opened for him may one day open again for us.

And this is what leads us to his third journey.