"The Qur'an itself is the great ocean of truth that lies undiscovered before us. In "Journey of the Universe" the Shaykh has built an island in this vast Qur'anic see of knowledge so that we on the shore can build a bridge to it from religion, or from science or from wherever we may stand. Then, when we have bridged this gap between our intellectual knowledge and what is already written in our hearts we see, on looking back to the shore we left, the whole landscape of our existence from an entirely new perspective. The creation of the Universe is the eternal instant unfolding in time. There was the "nothingness" and with the fiat of creation, "kun fa-yakun", the nothingness" was split into the duality of existence, symbolized in the first Arabic letter "alif", the primary mark of creation that descends from God. Viewed from the other side of time, from where we stand, there was this last creation of immense energy that flung everything into separation, which we can liken to an explosion, or theorize as the "Big Bang". But everything is from its Creator and must return to its Lord." From the Foreword by Ibrahim Stokes The Qur'an traces the journey of all creation explicitly and implicitly, seeing the physical, biological and geological voyage of life as paralleled by the inner spiritual evolution of man. Bringing together the meanings and derivations of individual words, the Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri reveals vibrant images which the language of the Qur'an so subtly projects.