The Sun's Prostration Beneath the Throne

When the Sun Sets, Where Does It Go?

There is a moment, every single evening, that every human being who has ever lived has watched: the sun slips below the horizon and the world goes dark. It is the most ordinary event imaginable — and yet one narration places, at the heart of that ordinary moment, one of the strangest and most debated images in the whole corpus of Prophetic tradition.

Standing beside his companion Abu Dharr al-Ghifari at the very instant of sunset, the Prophet (peace be upon him) is reported to have turned and asked a question: "Do you know where the sun goes?" And the answer he gave has occupied commentators for more than a thousand years. It travels, he said, until it prostrates beneath the Throne. It asks permission to rise. And a day will come when it is told to rise not from the east, but from the place where it set.