Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

Islam and Modern Science: The Colonial Era • 181prove that the QurāĀn is the Book of Allah, since it was impossiblefor anyone to know about this or that scientific fact in seventhcenturyArabia. They also use the well-known QurāĀnic claim of itsinimitability by restating it to mean that the QurāĀn is inimitablebecause it contains precise scientific information that no humancould have known in the seventh century and some of which remainsunknown to humanity even now.This has been one of the most exhaustive and methodologicalphenomena in the new Islam and science discourse; by the end ofthe twentieth century, all verses of the QurāĀn that could have beenused to show its scientific content had received attention by scores ofzealous writers. Lists of “scientific verses” of the QurāĀn have beencompiled, verses have been divided according to their relevance tovarious branches of modern science such as physics, oceanography,geology, cosmology (Qurashi and Bhutta 1987), and counted to be750 out of a total of 6616 verses of the QurāĀn (Tantawi, 1931). Thisactivity then started to give birth to secondary literature—books,articles, television productions, and audiovisual and web-basedmaterial. The second half of the twentieth century saw the expansionof this kind of literature, and this is discussed in the next chapter.Islam, Muslims, and DarwinismOn the afternoon of July 1, 1858, Charles Lyell (1797–1875) andJoseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911), two friends of a man who hadlost faith in the traditional Christian understanding of the creationnarrative in Genesis, presented a paper at the meeting of theLinnean Society of London. The paper entitled “On the Tendencyof Species to Form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varietiesand Species by Natural Means of Selection,” was written by theirfriend, Charles Darwin (1809–1882). No one could anticipate the farreachingconsequences of Darwin’s paper that afternoon—not evenDarwin himself—but that day has become a landmark of sorts forall subsequent discourse on creation. In popular accounts, Darwin’stheory would be perceived as stating that human beings evolved frommonkeys. This layman account was to become the most dominantstrand in the Muslim discourse on Darwinism. To be historically