41 Preface مَثَلُ الَّذينَ اتَّخَذوا مِن دونِ اللَّهِ أَولِياءَ كَمَثَلِ العَنكَبوتِ اتَّخَذَت بَيتًا ۖ وَإِنَّ أَوهَنَ البُيوتِ لَبَيتُ العَنكَبوتِ ۖ لَو كانوا يَعلَمونَYusuf AliThe parable of those who take protectors other than God is that of the spider, who builds (to itself) a house; but truly the flimsiest of houses1 is the spider?s house;-2 if they but knew.The Spider’s house is one of the wonderful Signs of God’s creation. It is made up of fine silk threads spun out of silk glands in the spider’s body. There are many kinds of spiders and many kinds of spider houses. Two main types of houses may be mentioned. There is the tubular nest or web, a silk-lined house or burrow with one or two trap doors. This may be called his residential or family mansion. Then there is what is ordinarily called a spider’s web, consisting of a central point with radiating threads running in all directions and acting as tiebeams to the quasi- circular concentric threads that form the body of the web. This is his hunting box. The whole structure exemplifies economy in time, material, and strength. If an insect is caught in the net, the vibration set up in the radiating threads is at once communicated to the spider, who can come and kill his prey. In case the prey is powerful, the spider is furnished with poison glands with which to kill his prey. The spider sits either in the centre of the web or hides on the underside of a leaf or in some crevice, but he always has a single thread connecting him with his web, to keep him in telephonic communication. The female spider is much bigger than the male, and in Arabic the generic gender of 'Ankabut is feminine.Most of the facts in the last note can be read into the Parable. For their thickness, the spider’s threads are very strong from the point of view of relativity, but in our actual world they are flimsy, especially the threads of the gossamer spider floating in the air. So is the house and strength of the man who relies on material resources however fine or beautiful relatively; before the eternal Reality they are as nothing. The spider’s most cunning architecture cannot stand against a wave of man’s hand. His poison glands are like the hidden poison in our beautiful worldly plants which may take various shapes but have seeds of death in them.