Everything Flows by God's Decree

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The following is an excerpt from my Sunday Arabic class, The Arabic Reader. I wanted to illustrate how pre-modern scholars of the Qur’ān, in this case Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī, the author of the famous al-Risālah, commented on how everything “flows into existence according to the decree of Allāh”, itself a commentary on the Qur’ānic motif of "flowing rivers" in paradise. I illustrate how this resonates with ideas in quantum physics. So what can classical Islamic thought teach us, or rather, physicists!, about the nature of existence?

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