explained and proved in the Tenth Word just how right and true are these disclosures of the Qur’an about the Unseen.
#### Second Radiance
SECOND RADIANCE: This is the Qur’an’s youth. It preserves its freshness and youth every age as though newly revealed. In fact, the Qur’an has to have perpetual youth since as a pre-eternal address, it addresses at once all the levels of humankind in every age. And that is how it has been seen and is seen. Even, although all the centuries are different with regard to ideas and capacity, it as though looks to each particularly, and teaches it. Human works and laws grow old like man, they change and are changed. But the rulings and laws of the Qur’an are so firm and well-founded that they increase in strength as the centuries pass. Indeed, this present age and the People of the Book this age, who have more than any other relied on themselves and stopped up their ears to the words of the Qur’an, are in such need of its guiding address of, “O People of the Book! O People of the Book!” that it is as if it addresses this age directly, and the phrase “O People of the Book!” comprises also the meaning of “O People of the Modern Science Books!” [^8] It delivers its shout of,
[^8]:Ehl-i Mekteb, those educated in modern secular schools, as opposed to Ehl-i Kitab. (Tr.)
O People of the Book! Come to common terms as between us and you (3:64)
to the ends of the world with all its strength, all its freshness, all its youth.
For example, as the product of the thought of all humankind and perhaps the jinn as well, modern civilization has taken up a position opposed to the Qur’an, although individuals and communities have failed to dispute it. With its sorcery it impugns the Qur’an’s miraculousness. Now, in order to prove the claim of the verse:
Say: if the whole of mankind and the jinns were to gather together,(17:88)
we shall compare the foundations and principles which civilization has laid in the form of dispute, with the principles of the Qur’an.
At the First Degree: The comparisons and balances which form all the Words from the First to the Twenty-Fifth, and the verses at their heads which form their truths, all prove with the certainty that two plus two equals four the Qur’an’s miraculousness and superiority in the face of civilization.
At the Second Degree: Like the proofs in the Twelfth Word, this summarizes a number of principles. By reason of its philosophy, present-day