THE NOT SO SECRET SCIENCE IN THE QURAN - ARAB SCHOLARS AND ISLAMIC THEOLOGIANS ON EVOLUTION

Inhabitants of planet Earth are in the dark about the true history of our civilization. This is the result of the fact that all religions have distorted or destroyed the old records while traditionalist historians have failed to address this problem. 

Most of what we have in the Bible, Torah and the Quran was not intended to be a religious text. These books were records of the information on the origin of man and the universe we received many thousands of years ago from sources that obviously knew a little more back then about that than we know today.  

In Feng Shui and the Secret Creation in the Bible, posted March 12, 2012, we saw that, in the Book of Genesis, we find remnants of the old records that have survived the heavy editing of the text by the priests . Again, that is not religious literature and they certainly do not preach what the old records are saying in church. 

As we are about to see, the Quran contains actually an abundance of data our scientists have uncovered only in recent times. In fact, the Quran is an encyclopedia of scientific information. 

So how can we explain that when according to creationists and evolutionists at the time the Quran was put on paper man would not be in the position to produce those amazing facts about the history of the universe and about our planet. Based on other evidence we have at our disposition, the only possible explanation is that the gods of our religions were scientists who came here from all four corners of the universe to introduce us to valuable knowledge, knowledge we would lose though to religion.

Excerpts from “A Time to Change – On the Necessary Return to a Rational Understanding of the Nature of Man and the Universe.”

Chapter 16.

When French physician Maurice Bucaille addressed the French Academy of Medicine in 1976, he declared in awe that, “it is impossible to explain how a text produced at the time of the Quran could have contained ideas that have only been discovered in modern times.”

There are a number of interesting articles on this subject available on the Internet and an entire series of such articles belongs to Ashraf Salmawy. He is also the author of a book less known called Finding God, that too available at submission.org. If he truly found god or not that is another topic for another project. His articles, however, such as Science in the Quran – The Creation of the Universe (see also Life on Earth), are rich in references to Muhammad’s recitations. Similar to what we have in Edgar Cayce’s readings, these recitations include amazing scientific information man was not supposed to know about at that time, according to our history books that is.   

Similar to the Edgar Cayce phenomenon, Prophet Muhammad would be provided with the information while in a state of semi-consciousness. Unlike in Cayce’s case, though, the information came from an individual some believe was an angel. His name was Jibril or Gabriel. Muhammad was in contact with Jibril for twenty-three years, from the age of 40 to the time of his death in 632. Since there is no such thing as angels, and since the information received is confirmed as valid by today’s science, as hilarious or offensive this may sound to some, it is more likely that Jibril/Gabriel was a counselor with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization on a mission to help the Earth-man make progress with his own. Specifically, through Muhammad, he was addressing the distortion of the old records by the Jewish and Christian priests. Same as in the case of the American Prophet, the information was far and beyond Muhammad’s level of education. In fact, historians tell us that he did not know how to read or to write. Despite that, his recitations abound in facts about Earth, the universe, and in references to natural laws our scientists were only able to figure out in relatively recent times.

Same as Jesus and Edgar Cayce, Muhammad was a messenger of wisdom and knowledge of great significance for the future of our civilization. That wisdom became a written record though at least thirty years after his trusted friends became privy to it, and no one could accurately date the moment when the first copy of the Quran became available to the public. The Saana manuscript is considered the oldest known version of the Quran. It was discovered in Yemen in 1972, and it was dated at around 715 CE. 

According to historians, during the 633 battle of Yamama, 700 Muslims among those who memorized Muhammad original recitations were killed. It appears they were targeted, and it is possible someone was on a mission to eliminate the record-keepers. According to ancient history researchers, we have a large amount of evidence, some of which will be presented here, that the ones after the record-keepers were individuals associated with the Custodial authorities, a group of Earth outsiders that at one time took control over the planet and created the institution of religion so they could control man and use him as a slave. From their prospective, it made sense to want to eliminate the ones preserving knowledge that had the potential of enlightening man and making him less susceptible to manipulation.  

Soon after the battle of Yamama, a variety of interpretations of the recitations began to circulate in the Arab world creating confusion and disharmony among his followers. The one who ordered the compiling of what at the time were scattered manuscripts into one large book in order to have a unifying written version of the Quran was Caliph ‘Uthman (644-656). That happened though four decades after Muhammad began receiving the revelations, two decades after his death. There is no information on when this extremely challenging task was completed. 

Both the Bible and the Torah are compilations of texts written by different people at different times. Most of the time there is no connection between these texts and no continuity in the subject matter. At the time the Quran was being put together, the scribes had nothing to work with other than an oral version and whatever was recorded on stone tablets by devoted followers in an empiric language and using an alphabet with graphic symbols that were not yet fully configured. As a result, it is more than probable that while in some areas the current version of the Quran is a more or less accurate interpretation of the original recitations, in other instances we are looking at reproductions of hearsay the authenticity of which, again, could not be verified.

Aside from that, there are a few instances when other traditions outside Muhammad’s recitations were included in the Quran the same way a diversity of traditional texts that belonged to other religions or schools of thought were included along the time in the Bible and the Torah. Such is the case with the story of Adam and Eve, a story we have in the Book of Genesis, a book labeled by both Jews and Christians as sacred religious literature despite their theological differences. Eleven centuries older than Muhammad’s time, it was a traditional story told in many Jewish and Christian communities, and while significantly edited, it was introduced in the Quran even though is very unlikely this was part of his recitations.

In the beginning, Islam would invite these two communities under its tent, and they may have brought this story with them to Islam. After his death, despite the fact Muhammad did not intend to create a religion, his recitations were associated with the new religion of Islam, and this could be the reason why the story of Adam and Eve became part of the Quran. Among others, it establishes that an inherently sinful man would have to always fear god, something that gave the religious institution authority over the Arab communities and it empowered the clerics.

Scholars consider Islam an offshoot of Arianism, a Christian denomination held by the church to be a heresy. That, however, is the same Christian sect Emperor Constantine would convert to on his deathbed. Christians are told that the Bible is the word of god. Islamic clerics claim the Quran too is the word of god/Allah, and in either instance the fact that someone says it is so is no proof that is the case. Unlike the Bible, however, most of the Quran is the result of an historic event. It contains information received by Muhammad at the Hiraa cave. An important thing to know about the Quran, contrary to what the radical Christian and the orthodox Jewish anti-Islam propaganda claims, in many instances and unlike the Bible it promotes a much more open-minded and rational attitude toward society as a whole, human rights and science in particular.

Same as in the case of the Bible, though, fallible humans decided what to be included in the Quran and what to be left out. As a result, it is reasonably possible that unintended errors were made by those who memorized the original recitations and later by those who put the text of the Quran together. Similar to what certain scribes have done with the text of the Bible, misrepresentations of the original quranic text, later insertions and deletions by radical imams could and most certainly have occurred.

To give one example, while same as Jesus Muhammad did not intend to create a new religion, Surah 24:55 says that, “Allah has promised to those of you who believe, and do good deeds, that He will surely grant them in the land inheritance of power as He granted it to those before them; that He will establish in authority their religion which He has chosen for them.” This looks very much like a self-serving forged decree that gives power of control to the clerics through a new religion. It also reminds us of the passages in the Bible where the text says that all one needs to do in order to gain access to the kingdom of god is to believe, which is contrary to Jesus teaching that man must apply himself toward finding out the truth in order to be free of belief. A couple of verses later, in Surah 24:57 we are told that “Think not that the disbelievers can, escape in the land. Fire will be their home, a hapless journey’s end!” This, however, contradicts Muhammad’s views on how people of different beliefs should be treated. After all, he is the one who issued the first known constitution in the history of man, the Constitution of Medina, in which, among others, he would establish the right of the “disbelievers” to practice their own religion. More than that, while in Medina, Muhammad adopted a number of Jewish practices, such as fasting and the midday prayer. It was certainly not in the spirit of Muhammad’s teachings, which included showing tolerance toward others and promoting the concept of non-violence to threaten those who embraced a different belief with putting them through fire, as this Surah does. 

As mentioned, some of the letters of the alphabet used at the time the first rudimentary transcriptions of the recitations were scribbled down on stone tablets did not have diacritical marks, and the Arab language was not clearly defined in those days. Because of that, certain words could be interpreted in more than one way, and most likely they were. There are no reasons to believe the people who decided which interpretation was accurate or not were not well intended. However, no one could tell today if every one of their interpretations was correct or if they were working with an accurate record of the original recitation.

Many secular scholars agree on the fact that the text of the Quran is not easy to follow. Same as the Bible and the Torah, it often lacks coherence and flow, and as I was attempting to read it, I soon found out that this was a reality difficult to overcome. That said, as long as you do not have an inclination toward looking at everything that comes your way through the dark, distorting glasses of belief or you are not constantly wearing the doctrinal blinkers of one dogma or the other, similar to what we have in the case of the Bible, portions of the Quran would turn out to be an interesting read for the dedicated truth seeker.

One of the most intriguing qualities of the Quran is that it is extremely rich in scientific knowledge men and women of the 7th century were not supposed to be familiar with. To begin with, if the way the Big Bang theory was worked out by current and past scientists is accurately describing the beginning of the universe is something to be established. Big Bang was not a topic of conversation until the 1920s though, and yet Salmawy reminds us that “Matter and space were joined as one and then were separated in the explosion, and this is accurately described in the Quran: ‘Do not unbelievers see that the skies (space) and the earth (matter) were joined together (as one unit of creation) and we ripped them apart.’” (Surah 21:30) This description of the original state of the universe matches the newer Two Big Bangs Theory of Raj Baldev, the one stating that space is eternal while time was a product of the Big Bangs. Indeed, the Quran says space did exist when the explosion happened, that it was joined with matter but it does not mention time.

According to what scientists have been telling us, in the earlier stages of its development the universe was a sea of hot gases. The Quran says, “Then He took hold of the sky when it was smoke.”(Surah 41:11) That is an accurate description since, indeed, ‘smoke is hot gas.’” (Science in the Quran) 

Placing a satellite on an orbit around our planet or around any planet within any solar system requires precise calculations of its trajectory based on weight, speed, and on the strength of the gravitational forces in play at a specific distance from the planet. One tiny error and the satellite would end up falling back to Earth or navigating aimlessly into cosmos. The same principles apply to celestial bodies orbiting around the sun, and Salmawy writes that, “Gravity was the brilliant divine invention, working as an equating factor to the centrifugal force to induce precise orbits for all heavenly bodies. The speed, mass and distance of two bodies have to be worked out very precisely to induce an orbit.”

Aside from the fact that this aspect of the universe too is a mark of intelligent design, a design produced by the way of the laws of the seen and the unseen, cosmologists and physicists claim that gravity is one of the four forces that makes the universe what it is. More than that, the same scientists claim gravity was the first force available immediately after the Big Bang. Without a doubt, all planets orbit around the sun following precise trajectories that correspond to their mass, speed, weight and to the attraction exerted by the sun at their respective distance from our star. This precise positioning of the planets allows them to maintain a steady course and to perfectly integrate into solar systems. Amazingly, this too is a fact accurately described in the Quran, and Surah 55:5 says that, “The sun and the moon follow courses precisely computed.”

Unlike what we have in the text in the Bible where it is implied that both the sun and the moon are producing light, the Quran accurately states that “Is He who made the sun to light up (the sky) and the moon that is lit.” (Surah 10:5)

Only in relatively recent times and after noticing a phenomenon associated with the Doppler effect have the scientists become aware that the light of the stars was shifting to the red end of its spectrum and that the universe was actually expanding. It was not officially acknowledged though until the end of the 1920s, and yet, as mentioned earlier, almost fifty years before that Helena Blavatsky would describe the universe as having an inhale/exhale type of movement. Same as the Bible in this instance, some 1,300 years before Hubble’s 1929 discovery in the case of the Quran, the Islamic text would accurately depict that reality: “and the heavens we created with might (power) and we are expanding it.” (Surah 51:47)

The Quran provides an accurate description of how our world is going to end, and the details of this catastrophic scenario provided fourteen centuries ago are fully confirmed by what scientists have predicted in recent years is going to happen in the remote future with our solar system. To give a few examples, the quranic text acknowledges the fact that the sun and the moon have a certain lifespan, and that they will not be here forever: “He has ordained the sun and the moon, each one runs (its course) for an appointed time.” (Surah 13:2) At the “appointed time,” which according to our scientists is approximately 4 to 5 billion years in the future, the sun will expand and become a red giant. The Quran describes that event in Surah 81:1: “When the sun is rounded (swelling like a ball).” There are a few alternative translations for this Surah, and they mean more or less the same thing. They read, “When the sun is overthrown,” and “When the sun (with its spacious light) is folded up.” Science predicts that the heat emanating from the expanding sun will cause the oceans and the seas on Earth to boil and to evaporate. The Quran says, “When the oceans boil over in a swell.” (Surah 81:6) According to our modern scientists, the sun will end up losing its brightness and it will turn into a white dwarf. That too is accurately described in the Quran in Surah 81:2, “When the stars fall, losing their luster;” and again in Surah 77: 8, “when the stars are put out.”

A probability supported by facts and logic, as already revealed here what some call “god” is actually a powerful source of energy and information having qualities we cannot imagine at our current level of awareness of the spiritual aspect of reality. Ashraf Salmawy reminds his reader how science describes the process that takes place inside of a star, a type of reaction similar to the one produced in a hydrogen bomb. While stars are very hot, the kind of combustion that makes them hot is different from the combustion that consumes a burning piece of wood. Salmawy writes that, “hydrogen is converted to helium with the emission of huge energy.” Surprisingly, in Surah 24:35, the Quran likens Allah to a powerful source of light, and in doing that it describes the same type of combustion we have inside a star: “… as if it were a brilliant star …whose oil (fuel) is well lit, even no fire touches it.” (A number of other translations are similar to the one used by Salmawy while others are not even close to what we have here.) One of the reasons why Egyptians worshiped a Sun God was because our star was a model, a visual representation for how the source of everything there is operates. The question is how would Bronze Age Egyptians and later on Muhammad know about that?

Many other verses in the Quran describe facts of a reality the modern man of science has unveiled only in recent times. Such are the references to the existence of sub-atomic particles mentioned here earlier. The Earth is described as being “egg-shaped,” and there is a depiction in the book of what today is known as the ozone layer. The Quran accurately describes the amazing qualities of the atmosphere, its protective properties and the fact that it contains the gases that sustain life on our planet. It puts the age of our universe at approximately 18 billion years, which is similar to what some of our physicists have concluded based on the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. “The team’s latest results, reported in the most recent Astrophysical Letters And Communications (vol. 29, no. 5), suggest the Hubble constant is low - between 25 and 55. This implies that the universe is 18 to 20 billion years old,” was reported in Science News on October 22, 1994. It also states that we have multiple universes out there, a strong possibility according to how quantum physics describes reality with the help of something called the string theory.

Men and women of science have publicly acknowledged the fact that the Quran provides an accurate description of the internal development of the human embryo. As E. Marshal Johnson, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Anatomy, Daniel Bough Institute at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia would declare,

“The Quran describes not only the development of external form but emphasizes also the internal stages - the stages inside the embryo of its creation and development, emphasizing major events recognized by contemporary science...” (An excerpt from an interview Professor Johnson gave for This is the Truth, a video made by Abdul-Majeed A al-Zindani)

As strange as this may sound to some, there is science in the Bible, Torah and the Quran. The question is, how it got there, and why is never discussed in churches, synagogues, and mosques.

The deliberate distortion by religious leaders of the esoteric knowledge that was supposed to bring us together into an elevated level of awareness has produced the divisive religious dogmas that took us to war against each other. While to most people the source for that knowledge remains unknown for now, both the biblical and the quranic text provide evidence for the fact that at one time or another someone would make available to man an amazing amount of scientific information. That vital for the development of our civilization treasure was deliberately disfigured by priests Thomas Paine calls “blasphemers of science.” 

WHAT THE QURAN, THE ARAB SCHOLARS, AND THE ISLAMIC THEOLOGIANS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT EVOLUTION.

Before we conclude this discussion, we need to go over something of relevance for this project, and that is the position Islam takes on evolution. While same as Christian religious leaders playing politics with this topic for the benefit of their cult and their personal public image some among the Islamic religious authorities claim they would not object evolution being seen as the way Allah created the world, a majority of the Islamic theologians and Arab scholars rejects Darwin’s gradualism. It may come as a surprise for many to know that the bases for their rejection are not religious dogmatism, though, but rational logic and good science.

Like many other Muslim scholars, Adem Tatli, who received his Ph.D. in biology from Ankara University, Faculty of Science and who was the dean of the Faculty of Science and Letters at Dumlupinar University, Turkey, is of the opinion that while something that could be perceived as evolution took place, it is certainly not the kind of evolution described by Darwin and the neo-Darwinists.  In an article posted on QuestionsAboutIslam.com, titled What are the viewpoints of Muslim scholars on evolution theory?, he states that “every scholar in a Muslim world could possibly have unique ideas, personal thoughts, and perceptions on subject, which should not be considered as Islamic doctrines.” While being that he is also a religious man not everything in his written opinion stands the test of reason, when it comes to addressing directly the issue of gradualism, Tatli states that, and this is a view embraced by most Arab scholars and Islamic theologians, life on Earth was created in phases. Then he discusses Arab terminology perceived by some as supporting a Darwinian type of evolution. He disagrees with that, though.

Taqamul (Maturation) is one of those terms, and we need to remind the reader that in Arabic there is no word that defines evolution in a Darwinian sense. According to Tali, “Maturation is the process by which organisms grow and develop in their own body and become mature.” Islamic theologians claim that Allah, and as we are going to see for many of them god is an entity without a body, a form of energy, has created all life forms in stages but certainly not by turning one life form into another. Istihala (Metamorphosis or Mutation) is another term used by some to create the illusion that Islam embraces gradualism. As Tali would state only a couple of sentences later, though, “it could certainly be said that takamul (maturation), and istihala (metamorphosis) are far away from being synonymous with evolution.”

He quotes from Ibrahim Hakki, a famous eighteen century Turkish Sufi philosopher, a Gnostic who authored a work called The Book of Gnosis or The Book of Knowledge. Similar to the Christian Gnostics considering themselves as being the true followers of Jesus true teachings, the Sufi view themselves as the true torchbearers of the original, authentic Islam. Among others, Hakki was of the opinion that self-examination was an indispensable part of the process of discovery, an idea that would be embraced by German philosopher Immanuel Kant. With regard to the history of life on our planet, his view was that there was, indeed, such thing as a gradual outfitting of the planet with plants and more and more complex organisms but not a gradual transformation of one species into another. He viewed corals as the intermediate between plants and animals, and apes as an intermediate between animals and man. As Tali points out, though, for Hakki, the term “intermediate” represented a form of classification. He would never imply or suggest that corals and apes were a transitional evolutionary form. In other words, they were species that developed on their own from within their own concept when the conditions were ripe preparing the way for the next phase of life development by creating the conditions favorable for the appearance of the next level of more complex species.

As one would have expected considering that Arab scholars have been at one time at the center of the human cognitive development on our planet, there have been many Arab luminaries that pondered over the issue of the origin of life and man. Among them, a thirteen-century sage named Nasiraddin Tusi (also known as Nasir ad-Din Tusi). He was born in 1201 in Tus, Khorasan, which is now part of Iran. Among others, he is known for “founding an observatory in Maragha (the ancient cultural center situated in Maragha which is east of Tabriz in present-day Iran), interpreting and developing the mathematics of Euclid, predicting the existence of land west of the Atlantic Ocean, as well as writing more than 80 influential books in Arabic and Persian about astronomy, geometry, geography, physics, law, history, medicine, philosophy, logic and ethics.” (A 13-Century Darwin? Tusi’s View on Evolution, by Farid Alakbarli) Some six hundred years before Charles Darwin, he would also develop his own theory of evolution. Indeed, his theory seems to be similar in some aspects to the Darwinian gradualism, and yet that does not make it true. There are essential aspects of it though that sets Tusi’s views on the origin of life apart from the claims made by Darwin and by today’s neo-Darwinists.

Unlike Darwin, who looked at facts and then would make up a story, an explanation that most of the times was an assumption, Tusi developed a thought, a mental rational theory about how life was produced by nature, and then he looked for facts in nature to see if they supported that possibility or not. That did not preclude him from producing his own set of assumptions.

According to Alakbarali, Tusi was of the opinion that, in the beginning, the world was all but elementary particles, and he wrote that, “They were equal and similar to each other. None of them had an advantage over the others, because all of these particles consisted of common primary matter.” Today’s quantum physicists would more than agree with that, and there is actually a theory advanced by some called supersymmetry or the symmetry of nature. Eventually, some kind of turmoil happened in the universe, though, and, as a result, “the balance was damaged, and the essential contrasts began to appear inside this early world. Therefore, some substances began to develop faster and better than others.” This is similar to the view espoused by the Gnostics who claimed the world was the result of some kind of error. Since the author of the article is seeking to prove that Tusi developed the theory of evolution way before Darwin did, he is kind biased toward putting the equal sign between his theory and Darwin’s theory. Much of what Tusi wrote on the topic supports that opinion. Not everything though.

Tusi wrote that, “The organisms that can gain the new features faster are more variable. As a result, they gain advantages over other creatures.” That, however, implies that changes resulting from adaptation are transmitted hereditarily and that this way they become advantageous treats allowing these individuals to overwhelm the other members of their species. As we have seen, though, this is a genetic impossibility, there is no evidence animals can change into something they are not, and Tusi may have had something else in his mind when he wrote that or otherwise he would be as wrong about evolution as Darwin.

Same as Darwin, Tusi made correct observation about the behavior of animals, and same as in the Case of Darwin, his explanation for that behavior ended up being tributary to false assumptions. When it comes to the origin of humans, though, while same as Darwin he saw many similarities between the physical aspect of man and the rest of the animal kingdom, especially apes, unlike Darwin, he would mention and then emphasize the spiritual aspect of the human being, something that sets him apart from the rest of the animals: “all differences between organisms were of the natural origin. The next step [humans] will be associated with spiritual perfection, will, observation and knowledge.” 

Generally speaking, many of the today’s Islamic theologians reject Darwin’s gradualism not just on the basses of what the Quran has to say about the creation of the world, a text that, as we just seen abounds in valid scientific information, but on the numerous logic and interpretative flaws in his evolutionary theory. As Atif Munawar Mir writes in a paper titled Quranic Concept of Evolution, in contrast to the Quran declaring that life is not an accident “natural selection, the foundation of modern theory of evolution, credits accidental mutation for the survival of life and its complexity. But it fails to explain how the life was created and how the accidents can guide the life towards complexity.”

He also reminds his reader of Professor Edwin Conklin, an eminent biologist who taught at the Princeton University, arguing a few decades ago that, “the probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.” Conklin was president of the American Society of Naturalists, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society for Developmental Biology has created the Edwin Grant Conklin Medal in his honor.  

(Last revised on 04.19.2013)

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