10 Preface قالَ رَبِّ اجعَل لي آيَةً ۚ قالَ آيَتُكَ أَلّا تُكَلِّمَ النّاسَ ثَلاثَ لَيالٍ سَوِيًّاYusuf Ali(Zakariya) said: “O my Lord! give me a Sign.”1 “Thy Sign,” was the answer, “Shall be that thou shalt speak to no man for three nights,2 although thou art not dumb.”The “Sign”, I understand, was not in order to convince Zakariya that the Lord’s promise was true, for he had faith; but it was a symbol by which he was to show in his conduct that he was to conform to his new destiny as the father of Yahya who was to come. Yahya was to take up the work, and Zakariya was to be silent, although the latter was sound in body and there was nothing to prevent him from speaking.Compare this verse with 3:41. The variations are interesting. Here it is “for three nights”: there it is “for three days”. The meaning is the same, for a day is a period of 24 hours. But the point of view is different in each case. There it was from the point of view of the Ummah or Congregation, among whom he worked by day; here the point of view is that of his individual soul, which spent the nights in prayer and praise. Notice again that at the end of the next verse, we have here, “In the morning and in the evening”, and at the end of 3:41, “In the evening and in the morning”- showing again that the point of view is reversed.