16 Preface وَلَقَد جَعَلنا فِي السَّماءِ بُروجًا وَزَيَّنّاها لِلنّاظِرينَYusuf AliIt is We Who have set out1 The Zodiacal Signs2 in the heavens, and made them fairseeming to (all) beholders;Evil having been described, not as an external thing, hut as a taint of the soul, we have in this section a glorious account of the purity and beauty of God’s Creation. Evil is a blot on it, not a normal feature of it. Indeed, the normal feature is the guard which God has put on it, to protect it from evil.In the countless millions of stars in the universe which we see, the first step in our astronomical knowledge is to find marvellous order, beauty, and harmony, on a scale of grandeur which we appreciate more and more as our knowledge increases. The first broad belt that we distinguish is the Zodiac, which marks the sun’s path through the heavens year after year and the limit of the wanderings of the moon and the planets. We make twelve divisions of it and call them Signs of the Zodiac. Each marks the solar path through the heavens as we see it, month after month. We can thus mark off the seasons in our solar year, and express in definite laws the most important facts in meteorology, agriculture, seasonal winds, and tides. Then there are the mansions of the moon, the mapping out of the Constellations, and other marvellous facts of the heavens, some of which affect our physical life on this earth. But the highest lessons we can draw from them are spiritual. The author of this wonderful Order and Beauty is One, and He alone is entitled to our worship (Cf. 25:63).