Just as no two of them are equal in knowledge, vision, or rank—rather, each has a known station—so too Allah, Glory be to Him, made the celestial and terrestrial parables in numerous ways corresponding to the multiplicity of their ranks. Likewise, religious knowledges follow this course.

We humans, due to our inability to perceive their knowledges and their luminosity, were shown their celestial luminous essences through these forms that we see according to our weak capability. For the smallest star in the sky is seventeen times the size of this world of ours. Due to our inability also to perceive their luminous knowledges and speak of them, He made for us these humble earthly parables and [provided] our dull [understandings], so that we may use them to infer the nature of their luminous knowledges without [direct] perception of them, but rather as a sign to indicate them.

Among the parables indicating the nature of their formation and arrangement are these days which we are mentioning. Allah, Glory be to Him, set for them boundaries: night and day, times, hours, Fridays, months, years, generations, centuries, eons, eras, epochs, and endless cycles—for "none knows the soldiers of your Lord but He."