He does not know what would happen if he mixed certain...

He does not know what would happen if he mixed certain quantities of some chemical elements. So, he carries out an experiment to find out the answer. In some other instances the experiment is carried out for teaching purposes so that the others may see and learn, and there can be many other purposes. At any case, the aim of an experiment is to prepare the grounds for the appearance of a new phenomenon, which has the potentiality to appear under certain conditions.

The required grounds are arranged for, so that the new form may take shape. When a teacher wants to examine his student, he asks him a question which can have positive or negative answer, or a question with several suggested answers, of which only one is correct and the rest are incorrect, or one is correct and the other is more correct.

The teacher prepares the grounds for the student to help him to choose one of the answers, to discover the hidden, in order to know how much he knows, or he wants to have an answer to show to the others, while be does know the extent of his student's standard of knowledge and capacity such that he can guess his marks even before looking into his paper. Yet he may need the paper as a document to be shown to anybody who may have an objection.

However, preparing the grounds for the student to express himself is called "examination". We have no doubt that Allah, the Exalted is not ignorant of His servants' conditions. Allah's knowledge includes their final destiny, their past, present and future. We had also understood from the former discussion that Allah's existence was not a temporal one, and that He encompassed both time and place. To Him all times are the same, and His knowledge of all is the same, too.

Nothing, then, is concealed from Him, neither the past, the present nor the future. But He arranges the conditions for man to manifest themselves, or to bring to actuality what is potential, or to display what talents they have, especially that man is practically a gifted creature. Under certain conditions his talents manifest and blossom out.

Allah, the Exalted arranges the grounds for everyone to show out his faculties, to demonstrate what is hidden in him, and, finally, to choose his own way, either a right or a deviated one, a way of development and perfection or a way of deterioration and degeneration. The second ayah of Suratud-Dahr (or Insan) (The Time or Man), says: "We created man from a mixed sperm to try him, so We have made him hearing, seeing.