The urban legend surrounding Neil Armstrong hearing the Azaan on stepping on to the moon has survived despite denials and of course scientific dismissal.Is there any truth behind the claim? Is the US Government trying to hold something vital from the world by denying and hushing up the matter, is the fact that Neil Armstrong led a very private life away from the prying public eye that he was thought to be deeply affected and moved by the incident, and finally did he accept Islam as a result of this experience? After the death of Neil Armstrong a few days back, I was again musing on the issue and wondering why and how this came up and I decided to do some research on the net. Surely enough most of the sites claiming this to be based on fact were Islamic sites and had a bias opinion. What can be the truth? I thought about it? There is no doubt about the very existence of God the supreme being who has created this universe and all that's beyond it. This is the primary belief of Muslims. We also believe that God manifests his existence in everything that is created by him, they are the ready evidence of the very fact that there is a supreme and all-powerful creator behind the creation. God has also made certain laws by which those creations work, some of these laws are now discovered by science such as the force of gravity which keeps everything including us from falling off in space. The same law applies to celestial bodies, earth and the moon and the sun are where they are because of the law of gravity otherwise they would either bang into each other or fly off in the vast space. There are several such givens in the physical world which we believe were created by God to have order in the universe. God make the world go in order, this is a cosmos not a chaos. For instance, a child grows to be a human not a monkey (though it can be debatable at times) time does indeed run forward into the future and not backwards in the past or at least it seems so and has been the case since man has recorded time. We have so much evidence and proof of the existence of God that asking for one more no matter how small would seem like an indulgence of the highest order - a kind of arrogance - who do we really think we are? constantly asking god to put in front of us the veracity of his being while we ourselves keep our eyes, mind and ears shut tight. The fact that a man was on the moon, the fact that people could behold the surface of the moon, the fact that the mission was successful wasn't good enough, we had to go and invent something for it to give it an enigma, why? Why can't we just believe that it was a great scientific feat of the human brain, a brain created by GOD. No, we have to go and make sure there is some miracle involved so that we can be assured that where the question of faith comes in there is always something mysterious about it. I don't believe that he heard anything on the moon for the simple reason that there is no atmosphere on the moon and sound needs air to travel, a law that is the same every place in the universe, and also because god does not need to keep giving us petty reminders of his existence, if beholding the earth, and the moon and the stars we still question him and his reality then azaan means not much. If Azaan doesn't mean much to us five times every day on earth why should it matter on the moon just once to actually make us finally accept that there is a god. We are such pathetic creatures, and I think will remain so!
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