Surah Al-Qasas (28) — Ayah 38

And Pharaoh said: O chiefs! I do not know of any god for you other than myself. So, O Haman! Fire up the clay for me and build me a lofty tower so that I may look at the God of Moses. But I think he is surely a liar.

[49] Pharaoh’s claim to divinity was to such an extent that he had seized control over all the economic resources of the country. Secondly, he did not acknowledge any higher authority in his legal and political powers. Otherwise, like other polytheists, he also believed Allah to be the Creator of the universe and acknowledged other deities besides Allah. Thus, even his own courtiers said to Pharaoh, “Will you let Moses and his followers go free so that they abandon you and your gods?” [7: 127] The Pharaohs of Egypt actually considered themselves incarnations of the sun god. That is why they made their subjects worship their statues. In addition, the worship of cows and bulls was also common among these people.

[50]
Revelations About the Existence of Allah Almighty and Its Response:

In reality, he said this to fool his subjects and to nullify the effect of the call to truth upon them. And this is exactly like what, a few years ago, Russia—a communist and atheistic country—said. When they launched their Sputnik aircraft, which reached hundreds of thousands of miles in altitude, upon its return they claimed, “We have been to such and such hundreds of thousands of miles in height, but we did not find the God of the Muslims anywhere.” That is, these fools thought that if the existence of Allah Almighty is real, then He could only be at these few hundred thousand miles of height. And they presented this argument as a scientific proof only to fool people. Because these same people, when describing the vastness of the universe, say that the sun is 93 million miles away from our earth and the earth revolves around it. This is the third planet from the sun, and the ninth planet, Pluto, revolves around the sun at a distance of 3 billion 680 million miles. Also, in this universe, in our solar system, the sun is a star or a fixed star, and thousands of such fixed stars have been observed in the universe. And these stars or suns, in terms of size, are much larger than our sun. At a distance of about 40 trillion kilometers from our sun, there is a sun that appears to us as just a tiny point of light. Its name is Alpha Centauri. Similarly, there are other suns farther than this. In the same way, there is a star named Antares. If it were placed in our solar system, the entire area from the sun to Mars would fit inside it, while Mars is 141.5 million miles away from the sun. Thus, the diameter of Antares is about 283 million miles. Then, when the distances between the scattered planets in the universe exceeded even trillions of miles, astronomers invented the term “light year.” This means that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. In this respect, the distance from our earth to the sun, which is actually 93 million miles, is a journey of 8 minutes for light. That is, the sun is 8 light minutes away from us. Now, there are such planets in the universe that are thousands, even hundreds of thousands of light years apart from each other.

Pharaoh Instructing Haman to Build a Tall Palace:

This is the study of the vastness of the universe that man has done, and what is still unknown to man, Allah knows best. Now, can that Being who is the Creator of all these things and above all, can these fools find Him at a height of a few hundred thousand miles? Moreover, they think of Him as if He is some material body that can come within their grasp. ﴿قٰاتَلَهُمُ اللّٰهُ اَنّٰي يُؤْفَكُوْنَ﴾ An even greater folly committed by these Russian scholars was that they began teaching this scientific research in their schools. So, a girl spontaneously uttered, “Wherever this Sputnik missile reached, Allah Almighty was far above that.” Pharaoh also said something similar to Haman, which would cast doubt about the existence of Allah in people’s minds. Otherwise, in practice, neither did Haman build any such tall palace or tower, nor was it Pharaoh’s real intention.