Knowing the Creator

About the book

Three volumes established who wrote the Quran. This one asks what that leaves you to do.

The first three volumes of Beyond Human Design asked a single question and answered it beyond reasonable doubt. Volume I measured the Quran’s architecture; Volume II drew the portrait of its Author from twenty-two witnesses; Volume III found His signature written across the physical world. One hundred and three witnesses converge on one conclusion: a Creator, real and deliberate, who has spoken. Identifying a speaker, however, is not the same as receiving his message.

This fourth volume turns from the evidence to the message. Part 1 gathers the case in a single compressed account, so that a reader who has not read the trilogy can stand where it ends. Part 2 sets out what the Author has said, in His own words and read with the scholars of the tradition, from al-Ṭabarī to Ibn al-Qayyim: His name and His oneness; His mercy, His justice and His forgiveness; why He created; the trust and the test; death, the interval, the Day, the reckoning, the Garden and the Fire.

The first three volumes asked whether a Creator wrote the book. This one asks whether you will live as though one did.

From the opening of Part 2, the description “the Author” gives way to the name He gave Himself. The voice changes with it: citation-dense, pastoral without being sentimental, authoritative but humble. Every verse is given with its reference, every ḥadīth with its collection, and every scholar is named in the prose rather than buried in a footnote, so that a reader can see where each teaching comes from.

Consider how a careful examiner handles a question on which the authorities disagree. He does not pretend they agree. Where the classical scholars differed, on the duration of the Fire or on the exact list of the ninety-nine names, both positions are set out with the evidence each relied on. The warning of the Fire is not softened, and the door of return is never closed: do not despair of the mercy of Allah.

Here the investigation stops being about a text and becomes about the reader.

The final section turns knowledge into practice: the prayer as the keystone, the time each person is given, and the company each person keeps. It is deliberately gradual. Begin with the prayer; choose the practice you can keep for a year rather than the one that exhausts you in a month. The book ends with a prayer for its reader. Each chapter of Part 1 is built to serve as a single teaching session, for the imam, the teacher and the parent who will carry it further.

The volume opens with a foreword by Sheikh Abdurrahman Ishaq, Qārī, Ḥāfiẓ and ʿĀlim of the Quran, who writes as a reciter who has heard the Speaker’s words every day of his life and asks the question this book answers: having heard who is speaking, what has He said?

It is written for three readers: the one who has come through the trilogy and wants to know what follows; the one who has not, and needs the case in brief before the message; and the one who will teach it to others. All three are asked the same final question.

Its sources are named in the prose, so that no teaching rests on the author’s word.

Written by Abdul Zahir Sheikh, a Certified Fraud Examiner and Senior Partner at BDO East Africa with four decades of investigative experience across fourteen countries, this is the volume where the forensic case of Beyond Human Design becomes a reading of the message itself.

Proof settles a debate. It also begins a life.