Qur’an and Science

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ

"Reciting Salawath on our Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is an activity that will be accepted by Allah, even if we don't have Ikhlas (piety)".

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The relation between Qur'an and science is a strong relation in the Islamic thought. Almost all sources, classical and modern, agree that the Qur’an condones, even encourages the acquisition of science and scientific knowledge. The contemporary Islamic discourse on the Qur’an and science abounds with assertions of the relationship between the two. This presumed relationship is construed in a variety of ways, the most common of which are the efforts to prove the divine nature of the Qur’an through modern science.

The belief that Qur'an had prophesied scientific theories and discoveries has become a strong and wide-spread belief in the contemporary Islamic world; these prophecies are often provided as Qur'anic miracles and a proof of the divine origin of the Qur'an.

Scientific signs

According to Qur'an; natural phenomena comprises a large portion of the divine signs; nature itself praises God [Qur'an 24:41], and God proclaims that he will show humankind his signs on the furthest horizons we well as deep within themselves [Qur'an 41:53].

"a time is fixed for every prophecy; you will come to know in time" [Qur'an 6:67].

Islamic scholar Zaghloul El-Naggar thinks that this verse refers to the scientific signs in the Qur'an that would be discovered by the world in modern time, centuries after the revelation. The scientific signs claimed to be in the Qur'an exist in different subjects, including creation, astronomy, the animal and vegetables kingdom, and human reproduction.

One claim of the scientific miracles is the reference in the Qur'an to the heavens and earth being originally an integrated mass before God split them "Have not those who disbelieve known that the heavens and the earth were of one piece, then We parted them" [Qur'an 21:30], which is nothing short of a condensed version of the Big bang theory. Another claim that the Qur'an talked about cosmic orbital motion: "It is not for the sun to overtake the moon, nor doth the night outstrip the day. They float each in an orbit" [Qur'an 36:40] at a period of time when people thought that earth was flat and stationary.

The most famous proponent of this argument is perhaps Maurice Bucaille, a French physician and author of the popular book The Bible, The Quran and Science. Maurice Bucaille asserts in his book that "he could not find a single error in the Qur'an", and that the Qur'an does "not contain a single statement which is assailable from a modern scientific point of view", which led him to believe that no human author in the seventh century could have written "facts" which "today are shown to be keeping with modern scientific knowledge".

As a manifestation of the popularity of the scientific miracles believe, the Muslim World League at Mecca formed a committee named the Committee on the Scientific Miracles of the Qur’ān and the Sunna to investigate the relation between Qur'an and science, headed by Zaghloul El-Naggar.

Scientific exegesis of the Qur'an

Scientific exegesis of the Qur'an is the assumption that all sorts of findings of the modern natural sciences have been anticipated in the Qur'an and that many unambiguous references to them can be discovered in its verses. Many Islamic authors, classical and modren , believe that all the sciences were contained in the Qur'an.

The scientific method of interpretation did not find general approval among Muslim authors. Many classical Muslim commentators and scientists, notably al-Biruni, assigned to the Qur'an a separate and autonomous realm of its own and held that the Qur'an "does not interfere in the business of science nor does it infringes on the realm of science." These medieval scholars argued for the possibility of multiple scientific explanations of the natural phenomena, and refused to subordinate the Qur'an to an ever-changing science

Rotraud Wielandt summarizes the arguments of the modern Muslim commentators such as Mahmud Shaltut and Sayyid Qutb who reject a scientific method of interpretation of the Qur'an as follows:

1. It is lexicographically untenable, since it falsely attributes modern meanings to the quranic vocabulary.
2. It neglects the contexts of words or phrases within the quranic text, and also the occasions of revelation where these are transmitted.
3. It ignores the fact that, for the Quran to be comprehensible for its first audience, the words of the Qurʾān had to conform to the language and the intellectual horizon of the ancient Arabs at the Prophet's time — an argument already used by the Andalusian Mālikite scholar al-Shāṭibī (d. 790/1388) against the scientific exegesis of his time.
4. It does not take notice of the fact that scientific knowledge and scientific theories are always incomplete and provisory by their very nature; therefore, the derivation of scientific knowledge and scientific theories in qurʾānic verses is actually tantamount to limiting the validity of these verses to the time for which the results of the science in question are accepted.
5. Most importantly, it fails to comprehend that the Quran is not a scientific book, but a religious one designed to guide human beings by imparting to them a creed and a set of moral values.