The Prophet Idris (saws) like Rasul Allah (saws) went on a Miraj of Heaven, but where Rasul Allah (saws) was shown the unseen (quantum) aspects of the universe, Idris was shown space itself, the outer surface of this Universe.
“They know but the outer surface of this world’s life, whereas of the ultimate things they are utterly unaware.”[Qur’an 30:7]
The prophet Enoch (Idris) said in the book of Enoch “I saw the paths of the angels”, Allah said in the Quran “By the heaven full of paths”(51:7), “And We have created above you seven paths, and never are We unmindful of (any of Our) creation” (23:17).
Allah said about the prophet Enoch (as) “And the same blessing was bestowed upon Ismail and Idris and Zul-Kifl, because they all practiced fortitude.”(21:85)
“And remember Idris in the Book; he was indeed very truthful, a Prophet. And We lifted him to a lofty station”.(19:56-57)
Idris (saws) was one of the earliest prophets Allah sent to mankind before the prophet Nuh (saws), with Him Allah originated writing and other technical arts of civilization including the study of astronomical phenomena. The purpose of His journey was to teach him first hand the significance of the heavenly bodies for later generations, to inspire in them their study, He reported in detail about all the things He saw. His words where unique because they are not the words of someone on earth looking up at the stars wondering and guessing what it all means they are definite in their phrasing and to the point, spoken from a persons experience.
The Book of Enoch (Idris) is divided into passages and parchments of the book that have survived are estimated to date from 300 BC in the earliest parchments to 100 BC in the later since no complete single record survived to date, this means the parchments are records of an earlier time of man on earth and not from His (saws) period directly.
The book is not part of the biblical canon and isn’t accepted by Christians or Jews because the accounts of Enoch (saws) in the book, like a dark void existing beneath the earth was considered to fantastic to be true but as is the case with much of what He (saws) said it would prove accurate in our time. The Book of Enoch has the same issues of historicity as both the Bible and Torah, it is a translation of a translation which causes great trouble when studying the text in a finite manner. In some places tampering with the text is clear and passages have been inserted by someone else because the text switches perspectives at times when it is meant to be the first person account of the prophet (saws) in most of it, but they are rare.
Having said that because it was not accepted by Christians and Jews into their canon there was far less incentive to tamper with it over the years and most of it is the literal word of the prophet Enoch (saws) himself, this is unlike the bible which contains mostly the words others.
Any educated muslim who reads the book with an understanding of language and the prophet Muhamads (saws) way of speaking will notice one thing immediately about the language of Enoch himself, which the Bible hardly contains because Jesus (as) speaks so little in it, He (saws) speaks like the Prophet Muhammad (saws) and many of his prayers (Dua) to Allah would almost mimic those of Rasul Allah (saws), they are just as refined and beautiful, muslims can repeat them and not tell the difference between the two. It stands out very clearly that these are the words of a prophet, and this is also clear in his attitude and behaviour towards things, one can even see the sunnah of our prophet (saws) through him and understand his reasoning even if it isn’t spelt out to the translator, from all of this we can be certain that the book is genuine because no corrupt mind can think like a prophet imitating them and their words so closely.
Even if the translators of the book did not understand his actions are the actions of a prophet (saws) causing many mistranslation, His (saws) words are still very clear because just like we read ahadith we can still see what is meant behind the actions, all of this is preserved in spite of the mistranslation and tampering issues.
Beyond these issues the book speaks about fallen Angels and other matters which are translated according to interpretation by christians, while it is clearly mentioned in the book that these Angels are Iblis and his tribe when they disobeyed Allah, they don’t seem to have understood the distinction being made in the book itself which is clear, this caused many christian scholars throughout history to think Jinn are fallen Angels and is the source for this confusion among them today. Iblis (satan) belonged to a tribe of Jinn who where granted the same honor, responsibility and power of Angels on earth, but they corrupted themselves and fell from this status, needless to say much can be clarified because Islamiclly we have more detail about the story and nature the Jinn who have a similar creation to the Angels, than previous scriptures who only have fragments of these events.
The Angels are created from Light, a subatomic particle, they can govern what is occurring in the Universe because everything from the weather, which relies on energy and pressure in the atmosphere, to all materials in the world are created from similar energy and subatomic particles, the Jinn are created from thermal energy and have a similar but lessor capacity as the Angels to influence this world through the subatomic part of our world, this is why they can be raised to the rank of an Angel and be called by that title even though they are a different creation entirely.
The first part of the Book of Enoch describes the fall of the Jinn who are called the Watchers which is descriptive name for them because they always accompany humans and watch them, Allah also referred to the Jinn as Angels in the Quran when He was honouring them before they lost their rank, the Jinn fathered the Nephilim which are Half Jinn Half Humans, many ahadith speak about such things and mentions that the Queen of Bilqis who went to the prophet Sulaiman (as) was a Nephalim. The remainder of the book describes Enoch’s (as) vision and visit to Space in the form of travels, visions, dreams, and revelations.
Because the Book wasn’t accepted by the Church every copy in Europe was burnt during it’s dark ages and it was thought lost until it was rediscovered in the 17th century. Many modern translations have been made but the earlier ones are clearly more superior, later translations suffer from the same fate as the NIV Bible, they seem to have been translated by an atheist who hadn’t grasped the idea that words must have meaning and are meant to say something, and so you can read entire passages that are mind numbing and whose meaning is lost because they are meant to be as “atheistically” neutral as possible since the translator was to afraid to admit the prophet (saws) could have said anything of scientific merit. When you compare the modern translation to the older one this becomes painfully clear.
Here are three accounts of a Black Hole the prophet Idris (saws) was shown, it should be remembered that no detailed concept of space existed in 300BC when the work is dated or even earlier when the Prophet (saws) actually lived, so the simple idea of traveling through space was alien to mankind let alone the fact there was a dark void beneath the earth. It required humanity to build the Hubbell telescope before we could see the accuracy of the prophets (saws) description.
(Source: The following was taken in part from a documentary about the Book of Enoch, which uses an older translation of the work).
This account is taken from the book of Enoch 1 Chapter 1:
The Prophet Idris (saws) said, “And i came to an empty place and i saw there neither a heaven above (no sky or atmosphere) or an earth below but a chaotic and terrible place (the black hole), and there i saw seven stars of heaven bound together in it like great mountains and burning with fire (He was no longer in our solar system, the passage is a description of the prophets nearness to a blackhole with stars trapped in orbit around it) at that moment i said (to the Angel) for which sin (fault) are they bound, for what reason where they cast in here, then one of the holy Angels Uriel who was with me guiding me spoke to me and said to me, Enoch for what reason are you asking and for what reason do you question and exhibit eagerness, these are among the stars of heaven which have transgressed the commandments of the lord (literally strayed from their path in space) and are bound in this place until the completion of 10 million years according to the number of their sins (the stars were circling the black hole because they strayed from their path), i then proceeded from that area to another place which is even more terrible (a larger black hole) and i saw a terrible thing a great fire that was burning and flaming the place had a cleavage which extended to the last sea, pouring out great pillars of fire, neither its extent nor its magnitude could i see nor was i able to estimate, what terrible opening is this place and a pain to look at”.
“Then Uriel one of the holy Angels who was with me responded and said to me Enoch why are you afraid like this i answered and said i am frightened because of this terrible place and the spectacle of this painful thing and he said unto me this place is the prison house of the Angels (meaning the devil Jinn) they are detained here for ever”. (End of passage)
To appreciate the prophets description we have learn about black holes, a black hole is the final stage of a star if the star had a mass of at least three times our sun, some black holes are much larger having the mass of millions or billions of suns, there isn’t any limit to how massive they can become, especially if they are well fed by stars near the centre of a galaxy, a super massive black hole such as those believed to lurk at the centre of radio galaxies tend to spew out huge pillars of radiation that look like fire some as far as six thousand light years, or even more in length. Our entire galaxy is only about 100 light years across so the two ascending and descending pillars of radiation from both sides of the black hole could add up to a total of 12 thousand light years across. A supermassive black hole would be surrounded by stelar and interstellar material such as dust and stars being torn apart, one example of a black hole having captured a star is cygnus x1, the star seems to be orbiting nothing at all but is in fact loosing much of its mass in its fatal attraction to the black hole.
A black hole has at its centre what is called a singularity (the completely black part) which has an incredible mass and infinite gravitational pull, so great is its pull that the space around it is bent to infinity, which is a generalisation for a large number that can’t be pronounced, infinity doesn’t actually exist, and even light can not escape a black hole. Keeping in mind infinity is just a large number, in a black hole gravity causes space to have infinite curvature so light doesn’t stop when it hits it, it simply continues along a straight path through this infinitely curved space, to imagine what this looks like ‘if we start with a straight line on a piece of paper and we are a dot on this line. If we bend the paper until it is curled upon itself like a tube. Now the line makes a full circle and we have a singularity. Light is now travelling a straight line that curls up on itself. If we continue curling the paper and it makes an ever tightening circle this is what a black hole is doing to space. But we will not see the curvature in space since the line is still straight on the paper and our vision follows the shape of space.’
But black holes don’t just bend space they bend time as well, “Einstein had realized in 1905, that space and time, are intimately connected with each other. One can describe the location of an event by four numbers. Three numbers describe the position of the event. They could be miles north and east of Oxford circus, and height above sea level. On a larger scale, they could be galactic latitude and longitude, and distance from the center of the galaxy. The fourth number, is the time of the event. Thus one can think of space and time together, as a four-dimensional entity, called space-time. Each point of space-time is labeled by four numbers, that specify its position in space, and in time’, all this meant that if something like a blackhole bent space it was also changing time.
Everything that passes a certain point in a black hole called the event horizon, is doomed, it is the threshold beyond which there is absolutely no escape and is a one way trip. The material that surrounds the black hole forms spiralling feature called an accretion disk in some cases this accretion disk can outshine in brightness the entire galaxy a hundred fold, it’s paradoxical, that even though no light can escape from a black hole it’s accretion disk can be extremely bright.
Now that we have the basics of black hole’s we can understand what the prophet Idrsis (saws) said;
The empty place which is chaotic and does not have a heaven above or a earth below is outer space, space is almost completely empty and it can be called chaotic because there are, constantly at work, stellar cycles of birth and death especially near a black hole.
The great fire that was burning and flaming corresponds to the accretion disk that surrounds and feeds a black hole, the cleavage is the bending of space and time to infinity, if one imagines space as a rubber flat sheet this bending of time and space would resemble a funnel, as if a long stick was pushed down the centre of the sheet stretching it, the bending is so extreme and the forces so vast that science doesn’t even have the physics to describe it, all the laws of physics break down because the environment (space) is warped and it is believed unknown laws relating to quantum gravity take over, that is gravity at the subatomic level because large objects can’t exist in a black hole only ones to small to be affected by it like subatomic particles.
Time and space as we know them literally go out of existence in the singularity of a black hole, the last sea is the singularity, to the new physics of quantum gravity this singularity is somehow a seething mass of something newly theorised called quantum foam, it is chaotic and not well understood yet but it would correspond nicely with the description of a sea, since a sea is both fluid and somewhat chaotic, the immense pillars of fire are the immense radiation jets that spew out from the black hole in both directions perpendicular to the accretion disk.
The fact the prophet Idris (saws) goes on to state that he could neither estimate its extent nor it’s magnitude in space where nothing is blocking his view lets us know these jets are larger than our solar system, possibly stretching for thousands of light years.
Another account of this black hole is given in chapter 18 verses 10 -16:
The prophet Idris (saws) said, A place beyond the great earth where the heavens come together (come together means there is no separation of mans view like the our sky and space, the heavens are endless here), and i saw a deep pit (the black hole) with heavenly fire on its pillars (the jets) and i saw inside them descending pillars of fire (jets on both sides) that where immeasurable in respect of altitude and depth, on top of that pit i saw a place without the heavenly firmament above it or earthly foundation under it (it was floating in endless space), or water, there was nothing on it not even birds but it was a desolate and terrible place and i saw there the seven stars which where like great burning mountains (encircling it) then the Angels said to me this place is the ultimate end of heaven and earth it is the prison house for the stars and the powers of heaven and the stars which role over upon the fire (get trapped in the black hole) they are the ones which have transgressed the commandments of God from the beginning of there rising (they followed a wrong path in space destined to doom them in the black hole from the beginning of the Universe) because they did not arrive punctually (they followed a delayed path) and He was wrath with them and He bound them until the time of the completion of their sin in the year of mystery (an unknown number of years).
This is very literally a description of stars being swallowed up by a black hole dating back to 300BC and even further. The fact this place is beyond the great Earth firmly establishes its location in outer space, the deep pit is the infinite bending of time and space that occurs beyond the event horizon, again the pillars are the radiation jets that pour out of a black hole. The fact that stars are in orbit is an indication that they are captured by it and the image of the stars rolling, correctly reflects the reality that stars rotate as they orbit a black hole. In contrast to the prophets words dating back to the first days of man on earth medieval Europe thought space was a black sheet with holes punched it, their explanation for stars, there was no detailed concept of space dating back to his time let alone anything this accurate, we only understood and discovered black holes recently after the humble telescope was built.
A third account of the black hole is found in chapter 108 verse 336:
The prophet Idris (saws) said, For there is not ground there, as is upon the earth, i also saw something that is like an invisible cloud, and though i could see that it (the black hole) was completely dark yet i could see the flame of its fire because it was burning brightly (the fire was coming out of the darkness) and there where somethings like bright mountains which formed a ring around it and where sweeping to and fro then i asked one of the Angels who was with me saying to them what is this bright thing (the accretion disk) for it is not a heaven but merely the flame of a fire which is burning and a voice of weeping crying and lamenting as well as strong pain (the sound of stars being destroyed) and he said unto me this place which you see into it shall be taken the spirits of sinners blasphemers those who do evil and those who alter all the things (the books of revelation) the lord has done through the mouth of the prophets all of which have to be fulfilled (the black hole is Jahanam, Hell and souls of the evil are punished with it).
The prophet mentions again there is no ground here, and the invisible cloud could be referring to interstellar dust and gas, these would obscure his ability to see clearly, it is truly amazing that he said it was completely dark but he could see the flame of its fire because it was burning brightly, the black hole itself would be completely dark and the accretion disk would be burning brightly. Scientist have always known that the only way we could see a black hole would be indirectly by seeing a star in orbit around it or by an accretion disk, the thing like bright mountains (the hump of the accretion disk) forming a ring around the black hole made the stars sweep to and fro, the stars are clearly in orbit around the black hole.
The knowledge contained in all these passages accurately describe a black hole both in its appearance and function which establishes the accuracy of His (saws) account, we notice at first His description of it is from a distance, from a vantage point where he views it all at once, he sees the pit then the heavenly fires of its pillars, from this distance he could see that there was nothing but empty space both above and below it, he then is able to describe the outer parts of the accretion disk in detail beginning with the dimmer outer edge of gas and interstellar debris which he likens to an invisible cloud.
The prophet Idris (saws) then notes the contrast between the inner disk and the hole itself by saying that it was completely dark but that it was burning brightly, he then is able to make out individual stars that surround it most notably the seven stars of heaven which the Angels tell him are bound in it until judgment is passed upon them, then he proceeds to the region of the event horizon, there he describes the most horrific aspect of this place it is a bottomless pit, the first thing he describes here is the great fire which is even more terrible than what was previously mentioned in the first account and was burning and flaming fiercely.
As the material spirals ever close to the centre it heats up to an imaginably high temperature, the cleavage would be the region around the event horizon where the fabric of space time gets bent to infinity, this is also precisely the place where the great pillars of fire are said to be pouring out, the immense radiation jets seem to hover just above this region, emitting powerful x-rays from the white hot disk material, here he notes that the black holes size and power are infinite by saying neither its extent (which is the infinite bending of space time), nor its magnitude, and the power of its event horizon “could i see (into the darkness) nor was able to estimate”, He then tells the Angel who was taking him on this journey that the spectacle of this painful thing which frightens him, is the ultimate end of heaven and earth, again the way both space and time exist as we know them on earth go out the window inside a Back hole.
To understand the significance of the prophet Idris’s (as) role to mankind we should consider the verses of the Quran, “Read! In the name of your Lord who created: He created man from a clinging form. Read! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, who taught by the pen, who taught man what he did not know.” (96:5) this is how Allah began revelation in Islam, these are it’s first verses. Allah taught all of mankind by the pen and it was with the prophet Idris (as) that Allah originated writing and learning from books, and it will be the prophet Idris (as) who will have the reward of every person who benefited from the pen after his time, so it shouldn’t be surprising that He (as) was shown space just like our prophet (saws) was shown the Universe, He (as) would be the source for the beginning of it’s study in mankind just like our prophet was the source for man’s focus on science, our prophet (saws) taught mankind that “Allah has encompassed all things in knowledge” (65:12).
Black Hole with Stars orbiting.
Actual Picture of a Black Hole NGC_4261.
A Black Hole with jets larger than it.