54 Preface وَهُوَ الَّذي خَلَقَ مِنَ الماءِ بَشَرًا فَجَعَلَهُ نَسَبًا وَصِهرًا ۗ وَكانَ رَبُّكَ قَديرًاAhmed AliIt is He who created man from water, then gave him consanguinity and affinity.1 Your Lord is omnipotent. Apart from describing two bodies of water, verse 53 has a deeper allegorical significance and, read with v. 54, connects with v. 1 of Surah 4, The Woman, and the creation of human beings from a single cell, as well as human reproduction based, again, in cellular activity (see note to verse 4:1). It shows the intricacy of Nature’s design, the entire reproductive impulse being encoded in cells, including the genetic principle made explicit in consanguinity and affinity mentioned in v. 54, one springing from the male the other from the female, the creation of man from water (v. 54) pointing not only to ‘a single cell’ (4:1) but to arham or bond of relationships spoken therein. The two bodies of water one sweet the other brine (v. 53) are an allegorical description of man and woman who are biologically the same, only kept distinct and apart by ‘the barrier’ of sex - alkaline and acid - so that man does not become woman or woman man. The sole difference between the two is of sex chromosomes and hormones which are defined as “anything produced by on cell that can get to another cell by any means and change what it does,” as Wylie Vale of Salk Institute, La Jolla, California says. As a result “the lines between hormones and other body chemicals are blurring,” adds Dr. Sidney Ingbar of Harvard Medical School. (Newsweek, January 12, 1987).