In the first verse God swears by the sky  and its function of ‘returning’ without specifying what it ‘returns.’  In Islamic doctrine, a divine oath signifies the magnitude of importance of a special relation to the Creator, and manifests His majesty and the supreme Truth in a special way.

By the sky which returns. (Quran 86:11)    He who made for you the earth a bed(sperad out) and the sky a ceiling….Quran 2:22

The second verse describes the Divine Act that made the sky a ‘ceiling’ for the dwellers of earth.

Let us see what modern atmospheric science has to say about the role and function of the sky.

The atmosphere is a word which denotes all the air surrounding the earth, from the ground all the way up to the edge from which space starts.  The atmosphere is composed of several layers, each defined because of the various phenomena which occur within the layer.

Rain, for one, is ‘returned’ to Earth by the clouds in the atmosphere.  Explaining the hydrologic cycle, Encyclopedia Britannica writes:

“Water evaporates from both the aquatic and terrestrial environments as it is heated by the Sun’s energy.  The rates of evaporation and precipitation depend on solar energy, as do the patterns of circulation of moisture in the air and currents in the ocean.  Evaporation exceeds precipitation over the oceans, and this water vapor is transported by the wind over land, where it returns to the land through precipitation.”[2]

Not only does the atmosphere return what was on the surface back to the surface, but it reflects back into space that which might damage the flora and fauna the earth sustains, such as excessive radiant heat.  In the 1990’s, collaborations between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) of Japan resulted in the International Solar-Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) Science Initiative.  Polar, Wind and Geotail are a part of this initiative, combining resources and scientific communities to obtain coordinated, simultaneous investigations of the Sun-Earth space environment over an extended period of time.  They have an excellent explanation of how the atmosphere returns solar heat to space.