5يُدَبِّرُ الأَمرَ مِنَ السَّماءِ إِلَى الأَرضِ ثُمَّ يَعرُجُ إِلَيهِ في يَومٍ كانَ مِقدارُهُ أَلفَ سَنَةٍ مِمّا تَعُدّونَAli UnalHe directs the affair from heaven to the earth; then the affair ascends to Him in a day— the measure of which is a thousand years of what you reckon.1The sun is nearer to us than ourselves. Its light manifests itself in and penetrates the “heart” of everything in the world, unless a hindrance intervenes. Similarly, God, free of all restrictions of matter, time, and space, is infinitely nearer to us than ourselves, but we are infinitely distant from Him. So this verse expresses God’s infinite nearness to us vis-à-vis our infinite distance from Him. It also implies the fact that we can get near to Him only by His making us near. Secondly, the origin of everything and every affair or event in the world is the pure, heavenly realm. So what is meant by heaven in this verse is not the sky, but the pure, spiritual realms where God acts and executes His will without any veil or material cause. All decrees concerning the world issue from these realms. Thirdly, as stated in note 13 to 7: 54, the Qur’ān uses the word day not only in the sense of our normal day, but also as time unit and period. While this verse mentions a day to be the equivalent of 1,000 years by our reckoning, another verse mentions a day that measures 50,000 years (70: 4). This shows that the concept of day is relative. The world does not consist only in our world or the visible universe. Rather, there are worlds or dimensions within one another. Just as time or the length of a day is different in the world of dreams, so, too, is it also different in the worlds of spirit and imagination and that of immaterial forms, in other spiritual realms. Fourthly, the verse may also be referring to the fact that periods of 1,000 years are usually turning points in human history. (Also see 55: 29, note 11.)