45 Preface أَلَم تَرَ إِلىٰ رَبِّكَ كَيفَ مَدَّ الظِّلَّ وَلَو شاءَ لَجَعَلَهُ ساكِنًا ثُمَّ جَعَلنَا الشَّمسَ عَلَيهِ دَليلًاYusuf AliHast thou not turned1 thy vision to thy Lord?- How He doth prolong2 the shadow! If He willed, He could make it stationary! then do We make the sun its guide;3We saw in 24:35 that God is the Light of the heavens and the earth. We have now, another sublime passage, in which we are asked to contemplate the Glory of God by a parable of the subtle play of Light and Shade in God’s creation. (R).In our artificial life and surroundings we fail to see some of the finest mysteries of Light and Shade. We praise, and rightly so, the wonderful colours of sunset. We see, particularly in climates more northerly than that of India, the subtle play of Light and Shade in the twilights succeeding sunsets. If we were as assiduous in seeing sunrises and the play of Light and Shade preceding them, we should see phenomena even more impressive, as the early morning seems to us more holy than any other time in the twenty-four hours of the sun’s daily journey. There is the first false dawn, with its curious uncertain light and the curious long uncertain shadows which it casts. Then there are the streaks of black in the East, succeeded by the true dawn, with its delicate tones of colours, and light and shade. The light of this true or false Dawn is not given by the direct rays of the sun. In a sense it is not light, but the shadows or reflections of light. And they gradually merge into actual sunrise, with its more substantial or more defined shadows, which we can definitely connect with the sun.The morning shadows are long but more definite, and their length and direction are seen to be guided by the sun. But they change insensibly every second or fraction of a second.