Can Your Heart Be as Orderly as the Heavens?  Inspired by Surah Al-Mulk (67:3–4)

Once upon a not-so-imaginary time in the city of Barzakhabad—where gravity was optional and philosophy leaked from every rooftop like sunlight through banana leaves—there lived an ancient astronomer named Malik-ul-Falak, whose name literally meant “King of the Heavens.” He was neither king nor heavenly, but in the dusty observatory above the whispering bazaar, he traced stars with trembling hands and whispered verses from a Book that had once split time like a pomegranate.

He had grown old staring upward. Not in boredom, but in desperate devotion.

> “He Who created seven heavens in layers. You see no incongruity in the creation of the Gracious God…”



He had read it. Chanted it. Cried it. And yet—he still searched. With telescopes and tears.

Malik had a student, a boy called Qalbuddin—Heart of the Faith. A name given to him not for his piety, but for the question he once asked a mullah that got him expelled from madrasa: “If the stars obey God, why can’t we?”

The boy had one ambition: to see if the heart could be measured like a galaxy. To dissect virtue with equations. To map mercy using gravitational lensing.

They were an odd pair—one trying to understand the heavens through the soul, the other trying to understand the soul through the heavens.


—

One night, a comet with a tail like a minaret brushed the sky. Malik rose from his mat and shouted to Qalbuddin:

> “Look again! Do you see any flaw?”



Qalbuddin squinted through the telescope.

> “No, master. It is perfect.”



“Then,” whispered Malik, “why is your heart still in chaos?”

The boy didn’t answer. Not yet.



In the weeks that followed, Malik grew ill. His bones forgot how to hold time. As he lay beneath the dome of his beloved observatory, Qalbuddin brought him water and whispered Qur’anic verses not like a muezzin, but like a physicist reciting laws of thermodynamics.

> “The seven heavens are not merely skies, my son,” said Malik with a rasp. “They are dimensions. Of reality. Of self. Of mercy. Of accountability.”



Qalbuddin nodded. “String theory. Multiverse. Branes.”

“No,” said Malik. “Taqwa. Tawheed. Sabr. Ikhlas. Adl. Rahma. Noor.”

He closed his eyes.



Malik died that night, and the heavens did not cry, for the heavens do not mourn—they proclaim. But Qalbuddin wept into the eyepiece of a telescope and saw, not Saturn, but himself.

And then came the question that changed him:

“If the universe is flawless, why am I fractured?”

He abandoned the laboratory and entered solitude. He fasted not just from food but from fury. He observed not stars, but silence. He studied the orbit of his own anger, the gravity of his own pride.

And slowly, miraculously—order emerged. His inner cosmos obeyed celestial laws.



Years passed. Qalbuddin—now known as The Cosmic Dervish—began teaching not astronomy, but adab (spiritual etiquette). His blackboard bore no equations, only verses. His students were seekers, not scholars. They gazed up with telescopes, yes—but also inward, through the lens of repentance.

> “The Qur’an is not afraid of your questions,” he would say. “But it dares to ask you one in return—Can your heart reflect My heavens?”




In the age when cities fell to algorithms and morality was outsourced to machines, the Dervish’s story was told by lantern-light. Children repeated his name like a lullaby. Scientists quoted him. Philosophers puzzled over him. Poets turned him into myth.

And somewhere, in the ruins of Barzakhabad, an old telescope still pointed skyward—waiting for another Qalbuddin.


—

Final Echo

> The sky proclaimed: My Creator is Perfect.
The earth declared: My Lord is Just.
And the heart whispered: My God is One.