Page 67 - Miracles of The Qur'an Vol. 3

It is He Who stretched out the earth and placed firmly embed-
ded mountains and rivers in it and made two types of every
kind of fruit. He covers over day with night. There are signs in
that for people who reflect. (Surat Ar-Ra‘d, 3)

The Arabic term “madda al-arda” translated “as stretched out” in the
above verse, means “to be covered, spread out, stretched, pulled out, ex-
panded or opened.” The use of this word in the context of the earth in re-
ferring to the formation of mountains and rivers is exceedingly wise, be-
cause looking at the scientific explanation of the formation of the earth, it
does indeed appear that mountains and rivers formed through the
stretching and expansion of the earth.
Present day science says that the earth had a very different appear-
ance in the very earliest times compared to what it is now. In his book Die
Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of the Continents and
Oceans) printed in 1915, the famous German scientist Alfred Lothar
Wegener proposed that all the continents had originally been one single
land mass. This great land mass later came to be known by the Greek
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name Pangaea, meaning “all continents. According to Alfred Wegener's
theory of “continental drift,” put forward in 1912, the continents at the
two ends of the Atlantic Ocean are still moving away from one an-

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