11. By the blessings of the earth is meant the boundless and countless provisions that have continuously come forth from its bosom for hundreds of millions of years, and which keep fulfilling the ever-increasing needs of everything from microscopic organisms to mankind’s most advanced civilization. Among these blessings, the greatest blessings are air and water, by whose bounty plant life, animal life, and then human life became possible on earth.

Surah Ha-Mim as-Sajdah, Footnote 12

The original words are: qaddara fīhā aqwātahā fī arbaʿati ayyāmin sawāʾan lil-sāʾilīn. Commentators have offered several interpretations of this phrase:

Some exegetes explain it to mean: “He apportioned in it its sustenance, for those who ask, in exactly four days”—that is, not more or less, but exactly four full days.

Ibn Abbas, Qatadah, and al-Suddi explain it to mean: “He placed its sustenance in the earth within four days—a complete answer for those who ask.” That is, for anyone who asks how many days this task took, the full answer is: four days.

Ibn Zayd explains it to mean: “He placed its sustenance in the earth, for those who seek it, within four days, in precise measure according to each one’s need and requirement.”

As far as the rules of language go, the wording of the verse allows for all three of these meanings. But in the author’s view, the first two meanings have no real merit. Considered in light of the context, what significance could it possibly have whether this task took an hour less or an hour more than four days, rather than exactly four full days? What element of God’s perfect power, perfect sustaining care, and perfect wisdom would be left incomplete without such a specification? Likewise, the interpretation that this was “a complete answer for those who ask” is quite weak, since nothing in the passages before or after the verse indicates that anyone had asked how many days these tasks took, such that this verse came down as a reply. For these reasons, the author has adopted the third meaning in the translation. In the author’s view, the correct sense of the verse is that from the beginning of creation until the Last Day, whatever kinds and numbers of creatures God was going to bring into being on earth, He calculated and placed within the earth, in advance, the complete provision of food exactly suited to each one’s need and requirement. Countless kinds of vegetation exist on land and in water, each with different nutritional requirements from the others. God has created countless species of living creatures in the air, on land, and in water, and each species requires its own particular kind of food. Then, distinct from all of these, is another creature—man—who needs varied kinds of food not merely to sustain his body but also to satisfy his taste. No one but God could have known, from the beginning of life on this globe to its end, how many individuals of which kinds of creatures would come into being, where and when, and what kind and quantity of food would be needed to sustain them. Just as He planned, in His scheme of creation, to bring these food-requiring creatures into being, so too He made complete arrangements for the food needed to satisfy their needs.

In the present age, those who have produced an Islamic edition of the Marxist concept of socialism under the name “the Qur’anic system of rubūbiyyah (sustenance)” translate sawāʾan lil-sāʾilīn as “equally for all who ask,” and on this basis build the argument that since God has placed equal food in the earth for all people, fulfilling the intent of the verse requires a state system that distributes food equally to everyone, since such equality cannot be established under a system of private property. But in their eagerness to press the Qur’an into the service of their own ideology, these people forget that the “askers” mentioned in this verse are not human beings alone, but every kind of creature that needs food to survive. Has God really established equality in provision among all of them, or among all individuals of any single species? Do you see anywhere in this entire system of nature an arrangement for the equal rationing of food? If this is not the case, it would mean that in the world of plants and animals—where it is not a human state but God’s own governance that directly manages the distribution of sustenance—God Himself is violating His own “Qur’anic law,” indeed, God forbid, acting unjustly! They also forget that the “askers” include animals that human beings themselves raise and are responsible for feeding—sheep, goats, cattle, buffaloes, horses, donkeys, mules, camels, and so on. If the Qur’anic law really is that all askers should receive equal food, and a state running a system of rubūbiyyah is needed to enforce this very law, will that state also establish economic equality between human beings and these animals?

13. In interpreting this passage, commentators have generally faced this difficulty: if the two days of the creation of the earth, and the four days for setting mountains firmly in it, placing blessings in it, and producing food supplies in it, are accepted (as separate), then, in light of the subsequent mention of the creation of the heavens taking place in two days, adding these two more days makes a total of eight days — whereas Allah has explicitly stated at several places in the Qur’an that the creation of the heavens and the earth took place in six days altogether (see, for example, Tafhim al-Qur’an, Vol. 2, pp. 36, 261, 324; Vol. 2, p. 420). For this reason, nearly all commentators say that these four days include the two days of the earth’s creation — that is, two days for the creation of the earth and two days for the coming into being within it of the remaining things mentioned above — so that in a total of four days the earth, along with its provisions, was completed. But this is contrary to the plain wording of the Qur’an, and in reality, the difficulty for whose avoidance this interpretation was felt necessary is itself merely an imaginary difficulty. The two days of the earth’s creation are, in fact, not separate from the two days in which the entire universe as a whole was created. Consider the verses that follow. In them, the creation of both the earth and the heavens is mentioned together, and then it is stated that Allah made seven heavens in two days. By these seven heavens is meant the entire universe, of which this earth of ours is also one part. Then, when — like countless other stars and planets in the universe — this earth too had, within those two days, taken the form of a mere sphere, Allah began preparing it for living creatures, and within four days produced in it all the provisions mentioned in the verse above. What developmental work was carried out on other stars and planets within these four days, Allah has not stated, because not to speak of the people of the era in which the Qur’an was revealed, even the people of this present age do not have the capacity to digest such information.