Science-in-the-Quran arguments appeal to an audience who respects science and technology and wants to feel more secure about their faith. Science and technology, however, are strongest in the advanced Western world; many Muslims, though they want to use science to affirm their own tradition, also continually look Westward for the best in science. The effect is curious. Naturally, the most commonly available authorities who support finding science in the Quran are people such as Muslim engineering professors. But as usual in science and technology, the best authorities hail from the West. So, Muslims especially value Westerners with technical backgrounds who testify to miraculous knowledge in the Quran.
In fact, some myths about Western scientists being amazed by the Quran have become very well known throughout the Muslim world. According to one of these myths, Jacques Cousteau, the renowned French underwater explorer, discovered the salinity barrier that impedes mixing between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Later, he was awestruck when shown 55 Ar-Rahman 19-20 from the Quran, “having loosed the two bodies of water to meet without overflowing a barrier between them”—clearly this was an accurate description of the very phenomenon he had encountered under the sea. Some versions of the myth go on to claim that Cousteau then converted to Islam.18 Another famous legend concerns the astronaut Neil Armstrong. When on the moon, the story goes, Armstrong heard some unfamiliar sounds. Later, when visiting Egypt, he discovered that this was the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer. He then converted to Islam.
Such myths, though easily dispelled by elementary fact-checking, remain popular. Hundreds of Muslim publications and Web sites continue to proclaim how Cousteau confirmed the miraculous “barrier between the two seas” pronouncement of the Quran. Evidently such stories help bolster the readers’ faith or perhaps even appeal to backsliders and prospective converts.
There are, however, some Westerners who have taken up the cause of Quranic miracles, although they are not quite as accomplished as Cousteau or Armstrong. Indeed, the authority perhaps most often cited by Muslims today is Maurice Bucaille, a French medical doctor. In 1976 Bucaille published La Bible, le Coran et la Science, a book that compared the Quran favorably to the Bible, asserting that unlike the Christian holy book, the Quran was not vulnerable to modern historical and textual criticism. Bucaille also argued that the Quran’s descriptions of nature were far superior, indeed, that the excellent fit between the Quran and today’s astronomy, earth science, biology, and medicine was inexplicable if the Muslim holy book was merely a human work from fourteen centuries ago. Bucaille has had a negligible influence outside of Muslim circles, and in the West, his book has mostly been ignored or treated as a mildly interesting example of crank literature. Muslims who were concerned to reconcile science and religion in the manner of the Nur movement in Turkey, however, embraced Bucaille. Bucaille was a latecomer to science-in-the-Quran apologetics, and his general approach was already familiar to Muslims. Still, the fact that Bucaille could be presented as a Western scientist who confirmed the miracle of the Quran meant that his name was soon known throughout the lands of Islam. Indeed, his popularity has led to Bucaille being identified with the search for modern science in the Quran. Muslim critics who prefer a subtler approach complain about “Bucaillism.”
Partly due to Bucaille, one of the most common claims of scientific knowledge hidden in the Quran concerns embryology. Some verses scattered throughout the Quran can be interpreted as referring to the divine creation of humans in the womb. 71 Nuh 14 has “who created you in successive forms”; 39 Az-Zumar 6 says, “God creates you inside your mothers, in successive formations, in three darknesses.” Bucaille takes such statements to be about “the successive transformations the embryo undergoes.” Another Western medical doctor soon joined Bucaille in claiming that the Quran anticipates modern embryology. In 1986 Keith L. Moore published a short paper in the Journal of the Islamic Medical Association that confirmed Muslim views about the Quran and embryology. This also became a favorite source for Muslim apologists to cite. Moore elaborated on the same themes as Bucaille, for example, stating that “doctors in the seventh century A.D. likely knew that the human embryo developed in the uterus. It is unlikely that they knew that it developed in stages, even though Aristotle described the stages of development of the chick embryo in the fourth century B.C. The realization that the human embryo develops in stages was not discussed and illustrated until the fifteenth century . . . ‘The three veils of darkness’ may refer to: (1) the anterior abdominal wall; (2) the uterine wall; and (3) the amniochorionic membrane.”
There are numerous other verses in which Moore, Bucaille, and their imitators can find embryology. For example, 23 Al-Muminun 12-14 says, “We created the human being from an extract of earth, then placed it as a drop in a secure repository; then We made the drop a clot, then We made the clot a lump of flesh, then We made the flesh bones, then we clothed the bones with flesh, and then We produced another creature from it. So blessed is God, best of creators.” This, apparently, refers to the sperm—or perhaps the zygote—implanted in the uterus, and describes its various stages in uncanny scientific detail until we get a fetus, which might possibly be the “other creature.” Moore adds that when 22 Al-Hajj 5 says, “remember that We created you from dust, then from a drop, then from a clot, then from a lump of flesh, formed and unformed,” this part of the verse “seems to indicate that the embryo is composed of both differentiated and undifferentiated tissues.”
It does not take much medical knowledge to see that Bucaille and Moore’s procedure consists of reading modern medical details into some very vague and general statements in the Quran. Moreover, they overlook much more plausible ways of understanding these statements. After all, the scattered verses that refer to the development of humans use this development as one among many examples of God’s creative acts. These examples must have been familiar to at least some of those hearing the Quranic message in the first centuries of Islam. So, unsurprisingly, these verses fit ancient medical beliefs better than modern conceptions. As Basim Musallam points out,
The stages of development which the Qur’an and Hadith established for believers agreed substantially with Galen’s scientific account. In De Semine, for example, Galen spoke of four periods in the formation of the embryo: (1) as seminal matter; (2) as a bloody form (still without flesh, in which the primitive heart, liver, and brain are ill-defined); (3) the fetus acquires flesh and solidity (the heart, liver, and brain are well-defined, and the limbs begin formation); and finally (4) all the organs attain their full perfection and the fetus is quickened. There is no doubt that medieval thought appreciated this agreement between the Qur’an and Galen, for Arabic science employed the same Qur’anic terms to describe the Galenic stages: (as in Ibn Sina’s account of Galen): nutfa for the first, ’alaqa for the second, “unformed” mudgha for the third, and “formed” mudgha for the fourth.
Nevertheless, in Muslim popular literature, it is Bucaille’s conclusion that has become the established wisdom: “The Qur’anic description of certain stages in the development of the embryo corresponds exactly to what we today know about it, and the Qur’an does not contain a single statement that is open to criticism from modern science.”
The search for science in holy writ encompasses much more than embryology. Popular Muslim writers also find much relating to the physical sciences in the Quran. Physics, especially, is the most mature among modern sciences, and physics is known for its ambitious theories about the fundamental nature of the universe. If the creator of all things was dropping hints about science in the divine revelation, surely physics and cosmology should appear alongside minor facts concerning embryos, oceans, or the water cycle.
The Quran does not say much concerning the structure of the universe, but it does draw attention to the marvels of creation as signs of the reality and power of God. In doing so, numerous verses mention the seven layers of heaven or sky. 71 Nuh 15-16 asks, “Haven’t you observed how God made the seven heavens in ascending order, and set the moon in their midst as a light, and made the sun a lamp?” 17 Bani Israil 44 says that “the seven heavens and the earth and all beings therein praise God”; 78 An-Naba 12 lists “And We built seven firmaments over you” among the ways God shaped nature; a few others such as 67 Al-Mulk 3, 23 Al-Muminun 17, and 65 Al-Talaq 12 also mention the seven layers of the skies in passing, as something many in the Quran’s audience would know as a fact about the universe.
Now, finding anything like seven layers of skies in modern astronomy is a challenge. Bucaille finesses the problem: he interprets the number seven to be no more than a symbolic expression of plurality, so that there are an indefinite number of heavens. He does not say more; when discussing the lowest heaven, for example, he says, “When however the Qur’an associates material notions intelligible to us, with statements of a purely spiritual nature, their meaning becomes obscure.” Others, however, are not satisfied by such excuses. Having set out to find modern science in the Quran, they would much prefer that the seven layers should mean something real.
~~An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam -by- Taner Edis
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