Do the zodiac signs have an influence on human character?

- Do changes in people's emotions have anything to do with the zodiac signs? For example, sometimes one feels very clever, sometimes very emotional, and sometimes useless.

- Is a person regarded to have committed a sin if he says, "I am of this sign and it fits my personality," without believing in the zodiac's predictions about the future?

Dear Brother / Sister,

There is a famous story about Nasreddin Hodja:

Hodja and his friends made a bet on a day when extreme cold was prevailing. While his friends said that no one could spend a whole night outside without any fire or source of heat, Hodja claimed that he could do it.

After some discussion, Hodja said that he would spend a night in return for a feast from his friends and that if he could do it, he would host the feast himself. Eventually, Hodja managed to spend a cold night alone in the mountains.

When his friends saw that Hodja had completed the challenge unharmed, they asked him how he did it without making any fire. Hodja said that he saw a candle burning in a hut on the opposite mountain and just thinking about it warmed him up inside. His friends objected, saying that Hodja warmed himself with a candle from the opposite mountain and hence lost the bet. Reluctantly, Hodja had to agree.

On the day of the feast, Hodja's friends gathered at his house, waiting for the meal. However, despite Hodja's constant claims that the food was cooking, it never arrived. Finally, they insisted on seeing the meal and went to the kitchen. Hodja led them to a big pot hanging from a tree in the garden, claiming that the food was cooking there. There was a candle burning meters below the pot. Seeing this, his friends said, "Hodja, can a big pot boil with a candle in this cold weather?" Hodja replied, "If a person can warm themselves with a candle from the opposite mountain in this cold weather, then surely the pot can boil." Thus, he taught them a lesson.

The reason why I have started with this story is that I will delve into the topic of astrology, which has gained popularity recently. Astrology is not inherently bad when thoughtfully considered and linked to good reasons. However, it is quite saddening to see this topic exploited for materialistic philosophies recently. Just as our Lord associates everything with a reason, the movements of stars and planets surely convey something to us. However, the first truth it conveys should be the existence of a Creator behind this magnificent order in the universe. That is, the existence and unity of Allah. While everything points to this, people can get dragged into worshiping stars and planets; even if they start with good intentions, they can end up attributing divinity to these unconscious beings without realizing it.

Since the dawn of humanity up until the present day, the greatest preoccupation of man has been the quest to understand himself. Some people claim they can provide a brief summary of your life and character traits based on your date and time of birth. They make good money through this "age-old" curiosity of ours. They claim that at the moment of our birth, certain rays from the stars and planets, primarily determined by the position of the sun in the zodiac and other constellations, affect us and shape our characteristics. They have quite interesting approaches to this matter. For example, they say those born under the Capricorn sign are as stubborn as goats, or those under the Cancer sign walk sideways like crabs. You can find these claims in almost every astrology book.

Analyzing people based on star positions is one thing, but it is quite bewildering when the constellations, which are likened to certain animals or shapes only from our perspective, are believed to impart the characteristics of those animals to humans. If stars influence us with their rays, then we should all have the characteristic traits of the closest star, the sun. For if we were to shrink the distance between the sun and the earth to the length of the magazine you are reading now, the closest star (Proxima Centauri) would be in New York. While there is a fire burning 40 cm away from you, can you say that the fire someone lit in New York affects you? Moreover, the stars that make up the 12 zodiac signs are much farther away than the mentioned star. For example, while the closest star, Proxima Centauri, we have mentioned above, is about four light-years away, the brightest member of the Virgo constellation, Spica (alpha virginis), is 281 light-years away. That is, approximately seventy times farther than the example of New York! This is a good example in a way. Some of the stars that make up the signs are thousands of light-years away from Earth. For instance, the two brightest stars of the Aquarius constellation, alpha and beta Aquarius (Sadalmelik and Sadalsuud), are approximately 1359 and 2174 light-years away, respectively. If we apply this to the previous example, we would need to move the fire in New York beyond the moon.

Is it clear now why I began with Nasreddin Hodja's candle story? Besides, the pot-candle relationship in this story is very fair considering the stellar distances. After this information about distances, I want to attract attention to other mistakes regarding the issue.

People's zodiac signs are determined based on the constellation that the sun is in or passing through on the day of their birth. For example, the sun is in the constellation Scorpio in the first half of November each year and people born on those days are considered to belong to the sign of Scorpio. The characteristics of these people are considered to be under the influence of this constellation. However, there is a great fact. The moment when the sun is in a sign is actually the moment when that sign is farthest from the earth. This is because another solar distance is added to the average distance of that sign to the earth. Besides, if you are born at night, the rays coming from the zodiac sign in which the sun is at that moment must penetrate all the earth rock and magma layers of the earth and reach you. For the zodiac sign in which the sun is located sets with the sun and the night remains on the other side of the world! Anyway, a solution to this situation was found with the concept of rising sign.

However, the distance between the stars that make up the zodiac signs is often greater than our distance from them. We can clarify it as follows. A person looking east from Istanbul has the impression that there are only a few meters on a two-dimensional scale between the nearest city of Izmit and the farthest city of Kars, but there are more than a thousand kilometers between them. When we look into space, we cannot perceive depth either. We think that two stars standing next to each other are next door neighbors. However, they can be thousands of light-years apart. Perhaps we are much less distant from the closer star than the one we think of as a neighbor. For example, there is a distance of at least 1277 light years between the stars Antares (Alpha Scorpii) and Sigma scorpii in the constellation Scorpio, which appear very close to each other, However, the closest of them, Antares, is 276 light years from Earth. The distance between those two stars, which belong to the same constellation, is four times greater than the distance between us and the nearest one. Of course, we are just learning this. We did not have the chance to calculate their distances before but people thought they were neighbors for thousands of years.

A major mistake is made in the calculation of the zodiac signs of past personalities. There's a rotational movement of the Earth, completing a full spin every 26,000 years, which causes the signs to shift forward approximately every 2,300 years. Thus, a person born on January 1, 2000, would be considered a Capricorn, but someone born on January 1, 300 BC, would be in the Aquarius sign. So, when Jesus Christ was born on December 25, 1 BC, the Sun was in Aquarius but in today's sky, December 25, 2000 falls in Capricorn. Therefore, if you calculated based on today’s system, the signs of people from the past would be incorrect, leading to much misinformation in statistical data.

Regarding planets, let us take Jupiter, the largest of the nine planets discovered so far in the Sun's orbit: The average distance of this planet from Earth is about five times that of the Sun's. While the Sun is 1,300,000 times larger than the Earth in volume, Jupiter is only 1,300 times larger. In addition, while the Sun exhibits star-like properties, Jupiter is a giant gas ball. On top of this thousand-fold difference in size, we also have to consider the distance between the Sun and Jupiter.

In physics, the effects of light and gravity decrease inversely with the square of the distance. Therefore, even if Jupiter, which is five times farther from the Sun than us, were a star, it would have 25,000 times less effect on us due to its size difference alone. Thus, we realize how insignificant even the largest planets are compared to the Sun.

If you look at major centers like NASA or ESA, which have already proved themselves scientifically and where thousands of studies are conducted on astronomy, not astrology, you cannot find anyone dealing with the astrological properties of stars or the solar system. This is because the scientists there are well aware of the distances and characteristics I have mentioned, and no one wastes time with concepts beyond positive science.

In conclusion, seeking any influence on our lives other than from our Lord is futile. Only Allah knows the unseen; similarly, He alone knows the characters and other traits He has given His creatures while creating them; and linking these characteristics to the rays coming from the stars is wrong. In this world, there are no two identical individuals. Even identical twins born on the same day, at the same hour, in the same place, and from the same mother have very different characters. With thousands of reasons, including the genetic structure that connects these twins beyond siblinghood, why should there be such divergence? If the stars were to guide our characters and destinies, at least the characteristics of twins like these should be identical. Additionally, the being that truly gives humans their character and other emotional qualities is the spirit. Our spirits were created before the stars.

The magnificent order we see in the sky may indeed point to its Creator but it is not the source of our material or spiritual attributes but merely an indication, if anything.

ZODIAC SIGNS, ZODIAC, ZODIAC FORTUNE TELLING

ZODIAC SIGNS: The word zodiac etymologically means circle, circle of little animals.

As a term, "the constellations and star clusters in the sky are called zodiac". There are twelve zodiac signs. Six of them are in the north, and six are in the south. Astronomers named the star clusters based on the shapes they appeared in each month and season. Accordingly, the names of the zodiac signs and the corresponding months are as follows:

1. Aries (Ram) sign, March 21 - April 19.
2. Taurus (Bull) sign, April 20 - May 20.
3. Gemini (Twins) sign, May 21 - June 21.
4. Cancer (Crab) sign, June 22 - July 22.
5. Leo (Lion) sign, July 23 - August 22.
6. Virgo (Maiden) sign, August 23 - September 22.
7. Libra (Scales) sign, September 23 - October 23.
8. Scorpio (Scorpion) sign, October 24 - November 21.
9. Sagittarius (Archer) sign, November 22 - December 21.
10. Capricorn (Goat) sign, December 22 - January 19.
11. Aquarius (Water Bearer) sign, January 20 - February 18.
12. Pisces (Fish) sign, February 19 - March 20.

The sun enters one of these zodiac signs every month of the year. As he sun enters the Aries sign, spring begins; as the sun enters the Cancer sign, summer begins; as the sun enters the Libra sign, autumn begins; and as the sun enters the Capricorn sign, winter begins.

Zodiac Fortune Telling

Fortune telling means the "art of informing about the unknown and the future and reading personalities in various ways." Zodiac fortune telling is "grouping people according to the zodiac signs they were born under and predicting their future, speaking about their destiny." A fortune teller is someone who claims to know the secrets of the unseen by predicting events that will happen in the future.

Fortune telling has been popular among some people since ancient times. Especially for troubled individuals, the business of predicting the future is extremely tempting. Since human intelligence is not sufficient to see the fate hidden in the dark depths of the future, people have sought help from such superstitions and empty means to determine fate. Even in the late twentieth century, there were quite a few people among the people of economically developed nations who believed in prophecy and turned prophecy into an art. (Kâmil Miras, Translation and Commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, Ankara 1974, VI, 543). In our country, some newspaper journalists who consider themselves enlightened make daily comments about people's fate with zodiac fortune-telling nonsense, which has no scientific basis. In addition, these unfounded comments negatively affect the mental balance of readers. This is nothing more than absurdity, nonsense, and deception.

Fortune telling is strictly forbidden in Islam. It is unbelief to affirm the soothsayer regarding the news he gives from the unseen. [Sâdeddîn et-Taftâzânî, Kelâm İlmi ve İslâm Akâidi (Sharhul-Aqaid), Translated by Süleyman Uludağ, Istanbul 1980, 353]. The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) said:

"If anyone affirms the soothsayer regarding the news he gives, he has denied what Allah has revealed to Muhammad." (Tirmidhi, Taharah, 102; Ibn Majah, Taharah, 122; Ahmad ibn Hanbal, II, 408)

No one except Allah knows the future (the unseen). "Say: None in the heavens and the earth knows the unseen except Allah." (an-Naml, 27/65). "The keys to the unseen are with Him. No one knows them except Him." (al-An'am, 6/59). These verses and similar ones indicate that no one knows the unseen except Allah.

Islamic scholars, unanimously agree that attempting to derive rulings solely from the stars and deriving some judgments from them is unbelief and polytheism like the Sabians,. (Elmalılı M. Hamdi Yazır, Hak Dini Kur'an Dili, VII, 5207)

In addition, it is legitimate and recommended in Islam for a person to perform istikhara before undertaking an important matter. This has no connection with the fortune telling and prophecy prohibited in Islam.

(Mehmed BULUT)

Questions on Islam