The Signs Were Always There

“And We made the sky a protected ceiling. Yet they turn away from its signs.” ~Surah Al-Anbiya, 21:32

The verse does not say the signs were hidden. It says people turned away. That distinction carries the full weight of the Quranic argument. A sky that functions as a protected ceiling, regulating temperature, filtering radiation, sustaining every breath, broadcasts its own design continuously. The problem is not absence of evidence. It is the direction of attention.

Psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris demonstrated this mechanism with precision in their 1999 selective attention experiment at Harvard University. Participants asked to count basketball passes among players in a video failed, in large numbers, to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. The gorilla was not subtle. It walked through the centre of the action, faced the camera, thumped its chest, and exited. What the experiment showed was that focused attention on one task creates genuine blindness to events outside its frame. Simons and Chabris called this inattentional blindness. The Quran identified the spiritual consequence of the same cognitive structure fourteen centuries earlier.

Ghana is living through a current illustration. The Mpox outbreak that began in May 2025 had, by March 2026, confirmed 1,038 cases across 124 districts in all sixteen regions, with eight deaths recorded. The signs of a spreading outbreak were present across the country for months before vaccination reached 95 per cent coverage in the most affected districts. When attention finally locked onto the pattern, the weekly case rate fell from 28 to seven. The disease did not change. The attentiveness of the response did. The Health Minister, addressing Parliament on 9 March, urged Members to support the spread of accurate public health information in their constituencies. The institutional lesson is the same as the cognitive one: systems that build structured attention into their design catch problems earlier than systems that rely on crisis to redirect focus.

Globally, the pattern scales up to a level where the consequences of inattention become irreversible. In 2024, the global average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first time in a full calendar year, confirmed independently by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the World Meteorological Organisation, NASA, and Berkeley Earth. A February 2026 study led by Oregon State University, published in the journal One Earth, warned that multiple critical Earth systems now appear closer to destabilisation than previously believed, with the risk of feedback loops pushing the planet toward a hothouse trajectory. Scientists have been issuing these warnings for decades. The signs were not hidden. The problem, as the verse names it, is that governments and industries turned away.

Deliberately expanding attention to patterns you usually ignore is both an intellectual and a spiritual discipline. The fasting month trains this capacity. It breaks habitual rhbehaviour andpts automatic behaviour, and creates the conditions in which signs that ordinarily pass unnoticed become visible. The sky does not change during Ramadan. The attentiveness of the person observing it does. That shift in attention, practiced consistently, is what the verse is inviting.

Today, identify one domain in your life, your health, your community, your civic environment, where a pattern has been signalling for some time and you have not yet looked at it directly.

Issaka Sannie - Farakhan
farakhani@hotmail.com

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