The Qur’an and Modern Science

Introduction

The relationship between the Qur’an and science is apriori a surprise, especially when it turns out to beone of harmony and not of discord. A confrontationbetween a religious book and the secular ideas proclaimedby science is perhaps, in the eyes of many people today,something of a paradox. The majority of today’sscientists, with a small number of exceptions of course,are indeed bound up in materialist theories, and haveonly indifference or contempt for religious questionswhich they often consider to be founded on legend. In theWest moreover, when science and religion are discussed,people are quite willing to mention Judaism andChristianity among the religions referred to, but theyhardly ever think of Islam. So many false judgementsbased on inaccurate ideas have indeed been made about it,that today it is very difficult to form an exact notionof the reality of Islam.

As a prelude to any confrontation between the IslamicRevelation and science, it would seem essential that anoutline be given of a religion that is so little known inthe West.

The totally erroneous statements made about Islam inthe West are sometimes the result of ignorance, andsometimes of systematic denigration. The most serious ofall the untruths told about it are however those dealingwith facts; for while mistaken opinions are excusable,the presentation of facts running contrary to the realityis not. It is disturbing to read blatant untruths ineminently respectable works written by authors who apriori are highly qualified. The following is anexample taken from the Universalis Encyclopedia(Encyclopedia Universalis) vol. 6. Under the headingGospels (Evangiles) the author alludes to the differencesbetween the latter and the Qur’an: “The evangelists(. . .) do not (. . .), as in the Qur’an, claim totransmit an autobiography that God miraculously dictatedto the Prophet . . .”. In fact, the Qur’an hasnothing to do with an autobiography: it is a preaching; aconsultation of even the worst translation would havemade that clear to the author. The statement we havequoted is as far from reality as if one were to define aGospel as an account of an evangelist’s life. The personresponsible for this untruth about the Qur’an is aprofessor at the Jesuit Faculty of Theology, Lyon ! Thefact that people utter such untruths helps to give afalse impression of. the Qur’an and Islam.

There is hope today however because religions are nolonger as inward-looking as they were and many of themare seeking for mutual understanding. One must indeed beimpressed by a knowledge of the fact that an attempt isbeing made on the highest level of the hierarchy by RomanCatholics to establish contact with Muslims; they aretrying to fight incomprehension and are doing theirutmost to change the inaccurate views on Islam that areso widely held.

In the Introduction to this work, I mentioned thegreat change that has taken place in the last few yearsand I quoted a document produced by the Office forNon-Christian Affairs at the Vatican under the title Orientationsfor a Dialogue between Christians and Muslims (Orientationspour un dialogue entre chrétiens et musulmans). It is avery important document in that it shows the new positionadopted towards Islam. As we read in the third edition ofthis study (1970), this new position calls for ‘arevision of our attitude towards it and a criticalexamination of our prejudices’ . . . ‘We should first setabout progressively changing the way our Christianbrothers see it. This is the most important of all.’ . .. We must clear away the ‘out-dated image inherited fromthe past, or distorted by prejudice and slander’ . . . ,and ‘recognize the past injustice towards the Muslims forwhich the West, with its Christian education, is to blame.’ [ At a certain period of history, hostility toIslam, in whatever shape or form, even coming fromdeclared enemies of the church, was received with themost heartfelt approbation by high dignitaries of theCatholic Church. Thus Pope Benedict XIV, who is reputedto have been the greatest Pontiff of the Eighteenthcentury, unhesitatingly sent his blessing to Voltaire.This was in thanks for the dedication to him of thetragedy Mohammed or Fanaticism (Mahomet ou le Fanatisme) 1741, a coarse satire that any cleverscribbler of bad faith could have written on any subject.In spite of a bad start, the play gained sufficientprestige to be included in the repertoire of the Comédie-Francaise.]The Vatican document is nearly 150 pageslong. It therefore expands on the refutation of classicviews held by Christians on Islam and sets out thereality.

Under the title Emancipating ourselves from ourworst prejudices (Nous libérer de nos préjugés lesplus notables) the authors address the followingsuggestions to Christians: “Here also, we mustsurrender to a deep purification of our attitude. Inparticular, what is meant by this are certain ‘setjudgements’ that are all too often and too lightly madeabout Islam. It is essential not to cultivate in thesecret of our hearts views such as these, too easily orarbitrarily arrived at, and which the sincere Muslimfinds confusing.”

One extremely important view of this kind is theattitude which leads people to repeatedly use the termAllah’ to mean the God of the Muslims, as if the Muslimsbelieved in a God who was different from the God of theChristians. Al lâh means ‘the Divinity’ inArabic: it is a single God, implying that a correcttranscription can only render the exact meaning of theword with the help of the expression ‘God’. For theMuslim, al lâh is none other than the God ofMoses and Jesus.

The document produced by the Office for Non-ChristianAffairs at the Vatican stresses this fundamental point inthe following terms:

“It would seem pointless to maintain that Allâhis not really God, as do certain people in the West! Theconciliar documents have put the above assertion in itsproper place. There is no better way of illustratingIslamic faith in God than by quoting the followingextracts from Lumen Gentium [ Lumen Gentium is the title of a document producedby the Second Vatican Council (1962-1966)]. ‘The Muslimsprofess the faith of Abraham and worship with us the solemerciful God, who is the future judge of men on the Dayof Reckoning . . .'”

One can therefore understand the Muslims’ protest atthe all too frequent custom in European languages ofsaying ‘Allâh’ instead of ‘God’ . . . CultivatedMuslims have praised D. Masson’s French transition of theQur’an for having ‘at last’ written ‘Dieu’ [ God.]instead of’Allah’.

The Vatican document points out the following:”Allâh is the only word that Arabic-speakingChristians have for God.” Muslims and Christiansworship a single God.The Vatican document then undertakes a criticalexamination of the other false judgements made on Islam.

‘Islamic fatalism’ is a widely-spread prejudice; thedocument examines this and quoting the Qur’an forsupport, it puts in opposition to this the notion of theresponsibility man has, who is to be judged by hisactions. It shows that the concept of an Islamic legalismis false; on the contrary, it opposes the sincerity offaith to this by quoting two phrases in the Qur’an thatare highly misunderstood in the West:

“There is no compulsion in religion” (sura2, verse 256) “(God) has not laid upon you in religion anyhardship” (sura 22, verse 78)

The document opposes the widely-spread notion of’Islam, religion of fear’ to ‘Islam, religion oflove’-love of one’s neighbor based on faith in God. Itrefutes the falsely spread notion that Muslim moralityhardly exists and the other notion, shared by so manyJews and Christians, of Islamic fanaticism. It makes thefollowing comment on this: “In fact, Islam washardly any more fanatical during its history than thesacred bastions of Christianity whenever the Christianfaith took on, as it were, a political value.” Atthis point, the authors quote expressions from the Qur’anthat show how, in the West, the expression ‘Holy War’ [ Translators of the Qur’an, even famous ones, havenot resisted the secular habit of putting into theirtranslations things that are not really in the Arabictext at all. One can indeed add titles to the text thatare not in the original without changing the text itself,but this addition changes the general meaning. R. Blachère, for example, in his well-known translation(Pub. Maisonneuve et Larose, Paris, 1966, page 115)inserts a title that does not figure in the Qur’an:Duties of the Holy War (Obligations de la guerre sainte).This is at the beginning of a passage that isindisputably a call to arms, but does not have thecharacter that has been ascribed to it. After readingthis, how can the reader who only has access to theQur’an via translations fail to think that a Muslim’sduty is to wage holy war?] has been mis-translated; “in Arabic it is Aljihâd fî sabîl Allâh, the effort on God’sroad”, “the effort to spread Islam and defendit against its aggressors.” The Vatican documentcontinues as follows: “The jihâd is not atall the Biblical kherem; it does not lead toextermination, but to the spreading of God’s and man’srights to new lands.”-“The past violence of thejihâd generally followed the rules of war; at thetime of the Crusades moreover, it was not always theMuslims that perpetrated the worst slaughters.”

Finally, the document deals with the prejudiceaccording to which “Islam is a hide-bound religionwhich keeps its followers in a kind of superannuatedMiddle Ages, making them unfit to adapt to the technicalconquests of the modern age.” It compares analogoussituations observed in Christian countries and states thefollowing: “we find, (. ..) in the traditionalexpansion of Muslim thought, a principle of possibleevolution in civilian society .”

I am certain that this defense of Islam by the Vaticanwill surprise many believers today, be they Muslims, Jewsor Christians. It is a demonstration of sincerity andopen-mindedness that is singularly in contrast with theattitudes inherited from the past. The number of peoplein the West who are aware of the new attitudes adopted bythe highest authorities in the Catholic Church is howeververy small.

Once one is aware of this fact, it comes as less of asurprise to learn of the actions that sealed thisreconciliation: firstly, there was the official visitmade by the President of the Office for Non-ChristianAffairs at the Vatican to King Faisal of Saudi Arabia;then the official reception given by Pope Paul VI to theGrand Ulema of Saudi Arabia in the course of 1974.Henceforth, one understands more clearly the spiritualsignificance of the fact that His Grace Bishop Elchingerreceived the Grand Ulema at his cathedral in Strasbourgand invited them during their visit to pray in the choir.This they did before the altar, turned towards Makka.

Thus the representatives of the Muslim and Christianworlds at their highest level, who share a faith in thesame God and a mutual respect for their differences ofopinion, have agreed to open a dialogue. This being so,it is surely quite natural for other aspects of eachrespective Revelation to be confronted. The subject ofthis confrontation is the examination of the Scripturesin the light of scientific data and knowledge concerningthe authenticity of the texts. This examination is to beundertaken for the Qur’an as it was for theJudeo-Christian Revelation.

The relationship between religions and science has notalways been the same in any one place or time. It is afact that there is no writing belonging to a monotheisticreligion that condemns science. In practise however, itmust be admitted that scientists have had greatdifficulties with the religious authorities of certaincreeds. For many centuries, in the Christian world,scientific development was opposed by the authorities inquestion, on their own initiative and without referenceto the authentic Scriptures. We already know the measurestaken against those who sought to enlarge science,measures which often made scientists go into exile toavoid being burnt at the stake, unless they recanted,changed their attitude and begged for pardon. The case ofGalileo is always cited in this context: he was tried forhaving accepted the discoveries made by Copernicus on therotation of the Earth. Galileo Was condemned as theresult of a mistaken interpretation of the Bible, sincenot a single Scripture could reasonably be broughtagainst him.

In the case of Islam, the attitude towards sciencewas, generally speaking, quite different. Nothing couldbe clearer than the famous Hadith of the Prophet:”Seek for science, even in China”, or the otherhadith which says that the search for knowledge is astrict duty for every Muslim man and woman. As we shallsee further on in this section, another crucial fact isthat the Qur’an, while inviting us to cultivate science,itself contains many observations on natural phenomenaand includes explanatory details which are seen to be intotal agreement with modem scientific data. There is noequal to this in the Judeo-Christian Revelation.

It would nevertheless be wrong to imagine that, in thehistory of Islam, certain believers had never harboured adifferent attitude towards science. It is a fact that, atcertain periods, the obligation to educate oneself andothers was rather neglected. It is equally true that inthe Muslim world, as elsewhere, an attempt was sometimesmade to stop scientific development. All the same it willbe remembered that at the height of Islam, between theEighth and Twelfth centuries A.D., i.e. at a time whenrestrictions on scientific development were in force inthe Christian world, a very large number of studies anddiscoveries were being made at Islamic universities. Itwas there that the remarkable cultural resources of thetime were to be found. The Calif’s library at Cordobacontained 400,000 volumes. Averroës was teaching there,and Greek, Indian and Persian sciences were taught. Thisis why scholars from all over Europe went to study atCordoba, just as today people go to the United States toperfect their studies. A very great number of ancientmanuscripts have come down to us thanks to cultivatedArabs who acted as the vehicle for the culture ofconquered countries. We are also greatly indebted toArabic culture for mathematics (algebra was an Arabicinvention), astronomy, physics (optics), geology, botany,medicine (Avicenna) etc. For the very first time, sciencetook on an international character in the Islamicuniversities of the Middle Ages. At this time, men weremore steeped in the religious spirit than they are today.but in the Islamic world, this did not prevent them frombeing both believers and scientists. Science was the twinof religion and it should never have ceased to be so.

The Medieval period was, for the Christian world, atime of stagnation and absolute conformity. It must bestressed that scientific research was not slowed down bythe Judeo-Christian Revelation itself, but rather bythose people who claimed to be its servants. Followingthe Renaissance, the scientists’ natural reaction was totake vengeance on their former enemies; this vengeancestill continues today, to such an extent indeed that inthe West, anyone who talks of God in scientific circlesreally does stand out. This attitude affects the thinkingof all young people who receive a university education,Muslims included.

Their thinking could hardly be different from what itis considering the extreme positions adopted by the mosteminent scientists. A Nobel prize winner for Medicine hastried in the last few years to persuade people, in a bookintended for mass publication, that living matter wasable to create itself by chance from several basiccomponents. Starting, he says, with this primitive livingmatter, and under the influence of various externalcircumstances, organized living beings were formed,resulting in the formidable complex being thatconstitutes man.

Surely these marvels of contemporary scientificknowledge in the field of life should lead a thinkingperson to the opposite conclusion. The organizationpresiding over the birth and maintenance of life surelyappears more and more complicated as one studies it; themore details one knows, the more admiration it commands.A knowledge of this organization must surely lead one toconsider as less and less probable the part chance has toplay in the phenomenon of life. The further one advancesalong the road to knowledge, especially of the infinitelysmall, the more eloquent are the arguments in favor ofthe existence of a Creator. Instead of being filled withhumility in the face of such facts, man is filled witharrogance. He sneers at any idea of God, in the same wayhe runs down anything that detracts from his pleasure andenjoyment. This is the image of the materialist societythat is flourishing at present in the West.

What spiritual forces can be used to oppose thispollution of thought practised by many contemporaryscientists?

Judaism and Christianity make no secret of theirinability to cope with the tide of materialism andinvasion of the West by atheism. Both of them arecompletely taken off guard, and from one decade to thenext one can surely see how seriously diminished theirresistance is to this tide that threatens to sweepeverything away. The materialist atheist sees in classicChristianity nothing more than a system constructed bymen over the last two thousand years designed to ensurethe authority of a minority over their fellow men. He isunable to find in Judeo-Christian writings any languagethat is even vaguely similar to his own; they contain somany improbabilities, contradictions andincompatibilities with modern scientific data, that herefuses to take texts into consideration that the vastmajority of theologians would like to see accepted as aninseparable whole.

When one mentions Islam to the materialist atheist, hesmiles with a complacency that is only equal to hisignorance of the subject. In common with the majority ofwestern intellectuals, of whatever religious persuasion,he has an impressive collection of false notions aboutIslam.

One must, on this point, allow him one or two excuses:Firstly, apart from the newly-adopted attitudesprevailing among the highest Catholic authorities, Islamhas always been subject in the West to a so-called’secular slander’. Anyone in the West who has acquired adeep knowledge of Islam knows just to what extent itshistory, dogma, and aims have been distorted. One mustalso take into account the fact that documents publishedin European languages on this subject (leaving asidehighly specialized studies) do not make the work of aperson willing to learn any easier.

A knowledge of the Islamic Revelation is indeedfundamental from this point of view. Unfortunately,passages from the Qur’an, especially those relating toscientific data, are badly translated and interpreted, sothat a scientist has every right to make criticisms-withapparent justification-that the Book does not actuallydeserve at all. This detail is worth noting henceforth:inaccuracies in translation or erroneous commentaries(the one is often associated with the other), which wouldnot have surprised anybody one or two centuries ago,offend today’s scientists. When faced with a badlytranslated phrase containing a scientificallyunacceptable statement, the scientist is prevented fromtaking the phrase into serious consideration. In thechapter on human reproduction, a very typical examplewill be given of this kind of error.

Why do such errors in translation exist? They may beexplained by the fact that modern translators often takeup, rather uncritically, the interpretations given byolder commentators. In their day, the latter had anexcuse for having given an inappropriate definition to anArabic word containing several possible meanings; theycould not possibly have understood the real sense of theword or phrase which has only become clear in the presentday thanks to scientific knowledge. In other words, theproblem is raised of the necessary revision oftranslations and commentaries. It was not possible to dothis at a certain period in the past, but nowadays wehave knowledge that enables us to render their truesense. These problems of translation are not present forthe texts of the Judeo-Christian Revelation. the casedescribed here is absolutely unique to the Qur’an.

These scientific considerations, which are veryspecific to the Qur’an, greatly surprised me at first. Upuntil then, I had not thought it possible for one to findso many statements in a text compiled more than thirteencenturies ago referring to extremely diverse subjects andall of them totally in keeping with modern scientificknowledge. In the beginning, I had no faith whatsoever inIslam. I began this examination of the texts with acompletely open mind and a total objectivity. If therewas any influence acting upon me, it was gained from whatI had been taught in my youth; people did not speak ofMuslims, but of ‘Muhammadans’, to make it quite clearthat what was meant was a religion founded by a man andwhich could not therefore have any kind of value in termsof God. Like many in the West, I could have retained thesame false notions about Islam; they are so widely-spreadtoday, that I am indeed surprised when I come acrossanyone, other than a specialist, who can talk in anenlightened manner on this subject. I therefore admitthat before I was given a view of Islam different fromthe one received in the West, I was myself extremelyignorant.

I owe the fact that I was able to realize the falsenature of the judgements generally made in the West aboutIslam to exceptional circumstances. It was in SaudiArabia itself that an inkling was given to me of theextent to which opinions held in the West on this subjectare liable to error.

The debt of gratitude I owe to the late King Faisal,whose memory I salute with deepest respect, is indeedvery great: the fact that I was given the signal honourof hearing him speak on Islam and was able to raise withhim certain problems concerning the interpretation of theQur’an in relation to modern science is a very cherishedmemory. It was an extremely great privilege for me tohave gathered so much precious information from himpersonally and those around him.

Since I had now seen the wide gap separating thereality of Islam from the image we have of it in theWest, I experienced a great need to learn Arabic (which Idid not speak) to be sumciently well-equipped to progressin the study of such a misunderstood religion. My firstgoal was to read the Qur’an and to make asentence-by-sentence analysis of it with the help ofvarious commentaries essential to a critical study. Myapproach was to pay special attention to the descriptionof numerous natural phenomena given in the Qur’an; thehighly accurate nature of certain details referring tothem in the Book, which was only apparent in theoriginal, struck me by the fact that they were in keepingwith present-day ideas, although a man living at the timeof Muhammad could not have suspected this at all. Isubsequently read several works written by Muslim authorson the scientific aspects- of the Qur’anic text: theywere extremely helpful in my appreciation of it, but Ihave not so far discovered a general study of thissubject made in the West.

What initially strikes the reader confronted for thefirst time with a text of this kind is the sheerabundance of subjects discussed: the Creation, astronomy,the explanation of certain matters concerning the earth,and the animal and vegetable kingdoms, humanreproduction. Whereas monumental errors are to be foundin the Bible, I could not find a single error in theQur’an. I had to stop and ask myself: if a man was theauthor of the Qur’an, how could he have written facts inthe Seventh century A.D. that today are shown to be inkeeping with modern scientific knowledge? There wasabsolutely no doubt about it: the text of the Qur’an wehave today is most definitely a text of the period, if Imay be allowed to put it in these terms (in the nextchapter of the present section of the book I shall bedealing with this problem). What human explanation canthere be for this observation? In my opinion there is noexplanation; there is no special reason why an inhabitantof the Arabian Peninsula should, at a time when KingDagobert was reigning in France (629-639 A.D.), have hadscientific knowledge on certain subjects that was tencenturies ahead of our own.

It is an established fact that at the time of theQur’anic Revelation, i.e. within a period of roughlytwenty years straddling Hegira (622 A.D.), scientificknowledge had not progressed for centuries and the periodof activity in Islamic civilization, with itsaccompanying scientific upsurge, came after theclose of the Qur’anic Revelation. Only ignorance of suchreligious and secular data can lead to the followingbizarre suggestion I have heard several times: ifsurprising statements of a scientific nature exist in theQur’an, they may be accounted for by the fact that Arabscientists were so far ahead of their time and Muhammadwas influenced by their work. Anyone who knows anythingabout Islamic history is aware that the period of theMiddle Ages which saw the cultural and scientific upsurgein the Arab world came after Muhammad, and would nottherefore indulge in such whims. Suggestions of this kindare particularly off the mark because the majority ofscientific facts which are either suggested or veryclearly recorded in the Qur’an have only been confirmedin modern times.

It is easy to see therefore how for centuriescommentators on the Qur’an (including those writing atthe height of Islamic culture) have inevitably madeerrors of interpretation in the case of certain verseswhose exact meaning could not possibly have been grasped.It was not until much later, at a period not far from ourown, that it was possible to translate and interpret themcorrectly. This implies that a thorough linguisticknowledge is not in itself sufficient to understand theseverses from the Qur’an. What is needed along with this isa highly diversified knowledge of science. A study suchas the present one embraces many disciplines and is inthat sense encyclopedic. As the questions raised arediscussed, the variety of scientific knowledge essentialto the understanding of certain verses of the Qur’an willbecome clear.

The Qur’an does not aim at explaining certain lawsgoverning the Universe, however; it has an absolutelybasic religious objective. The descriptions of DivineOmnipotence are what principally incite man to reflect onthe works of Creation. They are accompanied by referencesto facts accessible to human observation or to lawsdefined by God who presides over the organization of theuniverse both in the sciences of nature and as regardsman. One part of these assertions is easily understood,but the meaning of the other can only be grasped if onehas the essential scientific knowledge it requires. Thismeans that in former times, man could only distinguish anapparent meaning which led him to draw the wrongconclusions on account of the inadequacy of his knowledgeat the time in question.

It is possible that the choice of verses from theQur’an which are to be studied for their scientificcontent may perhaps seem too small for certain Muslimwriters who have already drawn attention to them before Ihave. In general, I believe I have retained a slightlysmaller number of verses than they have. On the otherhand, I have singled out several verses which until nowhave not, in my opinion, been granted the importance theydeserve from a scientific point of view. Wherever I mayhave mistakenly failed to take verses into considerationfor this study that were selected by these writers, Ihope that they will not hold it against me. I have alsofound, on occasion, that certain books contain scientificinterpretations which do not appear to me to be correct;it is with an open mind and a clear conscience that Ihave provided personal interpretations of such verses.

By the same token, I have tried to find references inthe Qur’an to phenomena accessible to human comprehensionbut which have not been confirmed by modern science. Inthis context, I think I may have found references in theQur’an to the presence of planets in the Universe thatare similar to the Earth. It must be added that manyscientists think this is a perfectly feasible fact,although modern data cannot provide any hint ofcertainty. I thought I owed it to myself to mention this,whilst retaining all the attendant reservations thatmight be applied.

Had this study been made thirty years ago, it wouldhave been necessary to add another fact predicted by theQur’an to what would have been cited concerning astronomy, this fact is the conquest of space. At that time,subsequent to the first trials of ballistic missiles,people imagined a day when man would perhaps have thematerial possibility of leaving his earthly habitat andexploring space. It was then known that a verse existedin the Qur’an predicting how one day man would make thisconquest. This statement has now been verified.

The present confrontation between Holy Scripture andscience brings ideas into play, both for the Bible andthe Qur’an, which concern scientific truth. For thisconfrontation to be valid, the scientific arguments to berelied upon must be quite soundly established and mustleave no room for doubt. Those who balk at the idea ofaccepting the intervention of science in an appreciationof the Scriptures deny that it is possible for science toconstitute a valid term of comparison (whether it be theBible, which does not escape the comparison unscathed-andwe have seen why-or the Qur’an, which has nothing to fearfrom science). Science, they say, is changing with thetimes and a fact accepted today may be rejected later.

This last comment calls for the following observation:a distinction must be drawn between scientific theory andduly controlled observed fact. Theory is intended toexplain a phenomenon or a series of phenomena not readilyunderstandable. In many instances theory changes: it isliable to be modified or replaced by another theory whenscientific progress makes it easier to analyse facts andinvisage a more viable explanation. On the other hand, anobserved fact checked by experimentation is not liable tomodification: it becomes easier to define itscharacteristics, but it remains the same. It has beenestablished that the Earth revolves around the Sun andthe Moon around the Earth, and this fact will not besubject to revision; all that may be done in the futureis to define the orbits more clearly.

A regard for the changing nature of theory is, forexample, what made me reject a verse from the Qur’anthought by a Muslim physicist to predict the concept ofanti-matter, a theory which is at present the subject ofmuch debate. One can, on the other hand. quitelegitimately devote great attention to a verse from theQur’an describing the aquatic origins of life, aphenomenon we shall never be able to verify, but whichhas many arguments that speak in its favour. As forobserved facts such as the evolution of the human embryo,it is quite possible to confront different stagesdescribed in the Qur’an with the data of modernembryology and find complete concordance between modernscience and the verses of the Qur’an referring to thissubject.

This confrontation between the Qur’an and science hasbeen completed by two other comparisons: one is theconfrontation of modern knowledge with Biblical data onthe same subjects; and the other is the comparison fromthe same scientific point of view between the data in theQur’an, the Book of Revelation transmitted by God to theProphet, and the data in the Hadiths, books narrating thedeeds and sayings of Muhammad that lie outside thewritten Revelation.

At the end of this, the third section of the presentwork, the detailed results of the comparison between theBiblical and Qur’anic description of a single event aregiven, along with an account of how the passage faredwhen subjected to the scientific criticism of eachdescription. An examination has, for example, been madein the case of the Creation and of the Flood. In eachinstance, the incompatibilities with science in theBiblical description have been made clear. Also to beseen is the complete agreement between science and thedescriptions in the Qur’an referring to them. We shallnote precisely those differences that make onedescription scientifically acceptable in the present dayand the other unacceptable.

This observation is of prime importance, since in theWest, Jews, Christians and Atheists are unanimous instating (without a scrap of evidence however) thatMuhammad wrote the Qur’an or had it written as animitation of the Bible. It is claimed that stories ofreligious history in the Qur’an resume Biblical stories.This attitude is as thoughtless as saying that JesusHimself duped His contemporaries by drawing inspirationfrom the Old Testament during His preachings: the wholeof Matthew’s Gospel is based on this continuation of theOld Testament, as we have indeed seen already. Whatexpert in exegesis would dream of depriving Jesus of hisstatus as God’s envoy for this reason? This isnevertheless the way that Muhammad is judged more oftenthan not in the West: “all he did Was to copy theBible”. It is a summary judgement that does not takeaccount of the fact that the Qur’an and the Bible providedifferent versions of a single event. People prefer notto talk about the difference in the descriptions. Theyare pronounced to be the same and thus scientificknowledge need not be brought in. We shall enlarge onthese problems when dealing with the description of theCreation and the Flood.

The collection of hadiths are to Muhammad what theGospels are to Jesus: descriptions of the actions andsayings of the Prophet. Their authors were noteyewitnesses.. (This applies at least to the compilers ofthe collections of hadiths which are said to be the mostauthentic and were collected much later than the timewhen Muhammad was alive). They do not in any wayconstitute books containing the written Revelation. Theyare not the word of God, but the sayings of the Prophet.In these books, which are very widely read, statementsare to be found containing errors from a scientific pointof view, especially medical remedies. We naturallydiscount anything relating to problems of a religiouskind, since they are not discussed here in the context ofthe hadiths. Many hadiths are of doubtful authenticity.they are discussed by Muslim scientists themselves. Whenthe scientific nature of one of the hadiths is touchedupon in the present work, it is essentially to put intorelief all that distinguishes them from the Qur’an itselfwhen seen from this point of view, since the latter doesnot contain a single scientific statement that isunacceptable. The difference, as we shall see, is quitestartling.

The above observation makes the hypothesis advanced bythose who see Muhammad as the author of the Qur’an quiteuntenable. How could a man, from being illiterate, becomethe most important author, in terms of literary merit, inthe whole of Arabic literature? How could he thenpronounce truths of a scientific nature that no otherhuman being could possibly have developed at the time,and all this without once making the slightest error inhis pronouncements on the subject?

The ideas in this study are developed from a purelyscientific point of view. They lead to the conclusionthat it is inconceivable for a human being living in theSeventh century A.D. to have made statements in theQur’an on a great variety of subjects that do not belongto his period and for them to be in keeping with what wasto be known only centuries later. For me, there can be nohuman explanation to the Qur’an.