Flatten the seven heavens and the seven earths into one floor. Beside the Kursi they are a ring dropped in open desert. The scale model, rung by rung.
Take the seven heavens apart and lay them flat. Put the seven earths down beside them, edge joined to edge, until all fourteen are one continuous floor with no gap anywhere in it. Ibn 'Abbas (RA) said that if you did that, the whole of it inside the expanse of the Kursi would be nothing more than a ring dropped in open desert.
Keep hold of that picture, because it is the answer. Creation is built in layers and every layer swallows the one under it. Your earth is one of seven. Seven heavens are stacked above them. All fourteen together are the ring lying in the sand of the Kursi. And above the Kursi is the Throne, which the Prophet ﷺ measured with the same image turned around: the excellence of the Throne over the Kursi is like the excellence of that desert over that ring. Four rungs, and somewhere near the top the word big stops meaning anything.
Most people know the seven heavens. Few have been told the floor is built the same way. It is Allah who has created seven heavens and of the earth, the like of them. His command descends among them so you may know that Allah is over all things competent and that Allah has encompassed all things in knowledge (65:12).
Al-Baghawi reads the like of them as the like in number, and he does not leave the layers sitting there as decoration. The command descends among them, he says, means revelation travelling down from the seventh heaven to the lowest earth. He brings Qatada with it: in every earth of His earths and every heaven of His heavens there is a creation of His and a command of His.
Ibn Kathir gathered the reports that fill the number in. Sa'id ibn Zayd (RA) heard the Messenger ﷺ say that whoever wrongs anything of the land will be collared with it from seven earths (Sahih al-Bukhari 2452). 'A'isha (RA) told a man in the middle of a boundary dispute to keep away from land, because the Prophet ﷺ said whoever wrongs a handspan of it will be collared with it from seven earths. Ibn 'Umar (RA) narrated it as a fall rather than a collar: whoever takes land without right is sunk with it on the Day of Resurrection down to seven earths (Sahih al-Bukhari 2454). Then Ibn Kathir gives his verdict: these reports are like mutawatir in establishing seven earths, and what is meant is that each one is above the other.
Sit with what that does to a property dispute. The floor under your argument is seven storeys deep. Ibn Mas'ud (RA) asked which wrongdoing is greatest and was told it is a cubit of ground taken from a brother, and that no pebble of earth is taken but its taker is collared with it down to the bottom of the earth, and nobody knows that bottom except the One who created it.
The sources measure the way up in travel time rather than distance, which tells you nobody was expected to make the trip. A cloud passed over the Prophet ﷺ and his companions, and the question he asked about it opened into the whole climb. One narration from his uncle al-'Abbas (RA) counts it out. Between the earth and the heaven, a journey of five hundred years. From each heaven to the next, five hundred years. The thickness of each heaven itself, five hundred years. Above the seventh a sea as deep as that same distance, then eight bearers above that, and on their backs the Throne, its underside to its top the same distance again.
The bearers are on the same scale as the thing they carry. Ibn Kathir records that the Prophet ﷺ was permitted to speak about one angel among the bearers of the Throne, and what he said was that from its earlobe to its shoulder is a journey of seven hundred years.
Notice they are all the same number. Five hundred years, five hundred years, five hundred years. The distances stop informing and start drumming, which is the point. You are not being handed a map. You are being handed a feeling.
His Kursi extends over the heavens and the earth, and their preservation tires Him not (2:255).
Al-Suddi laid the arrangement out plainly: the Kursi is beneath the Throne, the heavens and the earth are in the interior of the Kursi, and the Kursi is before the Throne. So the fourteen levels are not next to the Kursi. They are inside it, the way a coin is inside a room.
Then comes the report the whole subject turns on. Ibn Jarir and Ibn Abi Hatim both carry it from Ibn 'Abbas (RA): if the seven heavens and the seven earths were spread out flat and then joined one to another, they would not be, in the expanse of the Kursi, except like a ring in open desert.
And then the Prophet ﷺ takes the same image and adds the rung nobody was ready for. Abu Dharr (RA) asked him about the Kursi, and he ﷺ swore by the One in whose hand his soul was, and said that the seven heavens and the seven earths beside the Kursi are but like a ring thrown down in open desert, and that the excellence of the Throne over the Kursi is like the excellence of that desert over that ring. Ibn Hajar quotes it in Fath al-Bari, notes that Ibn Hibban accepted the long narration it sits inside, and adds that a second report from Mujahid supports it.
Go back over the sentence. The desert was the thing that made the ring look like nothing. Now the desert is the ring.
Ibn Kathir is careful about what he will add to this, and the refusals are the honest part.
Some of the astronomers of his day identified the Kursi with what they called the eighth sphere, the sphere of the fixed stars. He does not accept it, and his reason is a measurement. The Kursi is greater than the seven heavens by very much, and a ring lying in an open desert is not the relation of one sphere to the next one out. He says the same about making the Throne a ninth sphere. It has legs, and angels carry it, and a sphere has neither.
He is harder still on the furniture. A great deal circulated in his time about what each earth is made of, this one dust, the one beneath it iron, the next of sulphurous stone, taken from the People of the Book and repeated by some of our own. His ruling on all of it is one line. Where it does not come with a chain reaching one protected from error, it is rejected against whoever said it. The report that every earth holds a creation like ours, an Adam like your Adam, gets the same treatment.
So the sources hand you a number, a nesting order and a ratio, and then they stop. Half of Ibn 'Abbas (RA)'s most famous statement on this is exactly that refusal: as for the Throne, nobody can estimate its measure except Allah.
None of this was ever revealed as astronomy. Watch what happens to the entire structure in one verse. The earth entirely will be within His grip on the Day of Resurrection, and the heavens will be folded in His right hand (39:67). Fourteen levels, the sea above the seventh, the whole ring, closed like a hand closing.
And the verse that sentence belongs to opens by naming the actual failure. They have not appraised Allah with true appraisal. Not they have miscalculated the distances. They have misjudged Him.
Which leaves the last rung, and it is the warmest one. Those who carry the Throne and those around it exalt Allah with praise of their Lord and believe in Him and ask forgiveness for those who have believed (40:7). The greatest creatures at the top of the largest structure there is, and their work is asking forgiveness for you. You are a speck on the floor of a ring lying in a desert, and you are being prayed for at the ceiling of everything.
Silsila Research Desk
Grade: Sahih · 7 min read