the expansion of universe

[2.187] ...Thus does Allah make clear His communications for men that they may guard (against evil). [2.219] ...Thus does Allah make clear to you the communications, that you may ponder [2.242] Allah thus makes clear to you His communications that you may understand. [3.103] ... thus does Allah make clear to you His communications that you may follow the right way.etc

awa lam yaraa allatheena kafaroo anna as-Samaawaati wa al-Arda kaanataa ratqan fa-fataqnaahumaa. How one translates those words can make or break the polemic. The opening part of the verse asks "Do not those who disbelieve see that..." and then we get to what it is that the disbelievers have not seen (id est, what should have been obvious to them - interestingly hinting that the original intention of the author was to convey something that was taken as common sense at the time the text was uttered). A step-by-step analysis of the relevant remaining Arabic is needed here. Have not the disbelievers seen that as-Samaawaati ("the heavens") wa ("and") al-Arda ("the earth") kaanataa ("were") ratqan ("sewn [together]") fa ("then") fataqnaahumaa ("we ripped them").

should make the fundie Hindus happy ...

Hinduism is the only religion that propounds the idea of life-cycles of the universe. It suggests that the universe undergoes an infinite number of deaths and rebirths. Hinduism, according to Carl Sagan, "... is the only religion in which the time scales correspond... to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of the Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang"Long before Aryabhata (6th century) came up with this awesome achievement, apparently there was a mythological angle to this as well -- it becomes clear when one looks at the following translation of Bhagavad Gita (part VIII, lines 16 and 17),"All the planets of the universe, from the most evolved to the most base, are places of suffering, where birth and death takes place. But for the soul that reaches my Kingdom, O son of Kunti, there is no more reincarnation. One day of Brahma is worth a thousand of the ages [yuga] known to humankind; as is each night."Thus each kalpa is worth one day in the life of Brahma, the God of creation. In other words, the four ages of the mahayuga must be repeated a thousand times to make a "day ot Brahma", a unit of time that is the equivalent of 4.32 billion human years, doubling which one gets 8.64 billion years for a Brahma day and night. This was later theorized (possibly independently) by Aryabhata in the 6th century. The cyclic nature of this analysis suggests a universe that is expanding to be followed by contraction... a cosmos without end. This, according to modern physicists is not an impossibility.(source: Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient India).Count Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was a Belgian writer of poetry, a wide variety of essays. He won the 1911 Nobel Prize for literature. In his book Mountain Paths, says:"he falls back upon the earliest and greatest of Revelations, those of the Sacred Books of India with a Cosmogony which no European conception has ever surpassed."(source: Mountain Paths - By Maurice Maeterlinck).Princeton University’s Paul Steinhardt and Cambridge University’s Neil Turok, have recently developed The Cyclical Model.

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They have just fired their latest volley at that belief, saying there could be a timeless cycle of expansion and contraction. It’s an idea as old as Hinduism, updated for the 21st century. The theorists acknowledge that their cyclic concept draws upon religious and scientific ideas going back for millennia echoing the "oscillating universe" model that was in vogue in the 1930s, as well as the Hindu belief that the universe has no beginning or end, but follows a cosmic cycle of creation and dissolution.
(source: Questioning the Big Bang - msnbcnews.com).

Society has very little scientific knowledge. Bedouin tribalism is the "dominant feature" of the population (The Arabs in History , Bernard Lewis (1958), page 23). This mostly desolate area in which you live, is an "oral" culture, with a "nomadic" lifestyle. Very few people know how to read, even fewer know how to write. Myth and magic controls people's thoughts and guides their rituals. Trade routes to the north (and the resulting contact with the major Empires) has very recently been restored, after two centuries of decline and deterioration (The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years , Bernard Lewis, 1995). How far would you go if you wanted to discover the true origin of the universe? How much progress would you make if you wanted to uncover the origin of life? The Koran mentions that at a stage in its origin, the universe was "gaseous":

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