The Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement Blog

Allah “is the manifest (zahir) and the hidden (batin)”

Bearing the above words in mind, which occur in the Quran, 57:3, please watch the video entitled: “Dimensions: Cosmic Eye”.

Starting from the eye of the girl, the view rises above from it, more and more, showing the scale of distance involved, till it reaches 10 billion light-years away from her. Then it zooms back in towards the girl’s eye, and passing within it it magnifies ever smaller objects inside her, till the scale reaches 1 femtometre (10 to the power minus 15 metres). Presumably these are the largest and the smallest distances so far discovered.

Allah is the “manifest (zahir)” because He is the outermost, even beyond the largest known distance, and He is the “hidden (batin)” because He is the innermost, beyond the smallest distance known. He encompasses the largest distance from above it and the smallest distance from beneath it.

Now read at this link the explanation of Dr Basharat Ahmad, from the collection of his articles Basharat-i Ahmadiyya, about the words of the Quran: “He is the First and the Last and the Manifest and the Hidden” (57:3). He deals more with “the First and the Last”, though.

In his Lecture Lahore, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad says about God:

“Being remote, He is very near, and being near, He is still far off. He is above all but still it cannot be said that beneath Him there is anything else, and He is the most hidden of all things, but it cannot be said of any thing that it is more manifest than He.” (Lecture Lahore; Ruhani Khaza’in, v. 20, p. 152-153)