The Quran orders us to look at the camel, sky, mountain and earth but these are things which we see all the time and know many things about. Why?

In many verses, the Quran instructs humans not to drown in feelings known as mahsosat (sense perceptions) and to gaze at the maqulat (human reasoning) the wisdom world. In addition, the Quran draws our attention to the wonderful works of art, which we ignore because we see them everyday and do not think about them very much.

Just an example:

In the Surah Ghaashiyah, the humans are asked to look at the creation of the camel, sky, mountains, and earth:

Do they not consider the camels, how they are created? And the heaven, how it has been raised high? And the mountains, how they have been set firm? And the earth, how it has been spread out? (Al-Ghaashiyah Surah, 88:17-20)

We leave the boundless meaning of the verses to the Quranic interpretations (Tafseer) on. We are going to point to the similarities in the shapes of the creatures, which are presented to our thoughts (tafaqqur).

Whoever raised the hump of a camel on its waist also raised the mountains on the waist of the earth. The sky also, as a whole, is reminiscent of the hump of a camel.

The verse draws our attention first to the camel, then the sky, the mountains and finally to the earth. This order is a miracle of rhetoric just by itself. Draw a line from the human eye to the camels hump, then an imaginary line to the sky, then continue that line back to the mountain and then to the earth. You will get another hump or another mountain.

The Surah Naml (88) states:

You see the mountains, thinking them to be firmly fixed, but in reality they (are in constant motion) and pass by (with the movement of the earth) like the passing of the clouds. (And so will they be crumbled on Doomsday so as to take on the form particular to the other world.) This is the pattern of God Who has perfected everything. He is fully aware of all that you do. (An-Naml Surah, 27: 88)

The movement of the hump of the camel would mean the walk of the camel and this informs us fourteen centuries ago that the earth is not stationary and that it moves.

Many verses like these teach us to go from the work of art to the owner of that work of art. That would be the wisely and exemplary tafaqqur- thinking deep about the creator of the works of art, ones nafs -self and this world. The people who take this thinking lesson from the Quran will not die like an unwary badawi –desert dweller without watching a camel to the full nor will they leave this earth like a nonbeliever astronomer without thinking about the sky.