Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

194 • The Making of Islamic ScienceProphet’s Traditions relating to Cosmic Sciences, in the light ofmodern scientific finds, linguistic analysis and purpose of Shariah;(v) To provide Muslim missionaries and mass-media with Dawah; (vi)To publicize the accepted researches in simplified forms to suit thevarious academic levels and to translate those papers into languagesof the Muslim world and the other living languages. (As-Sawi 1992)The Commission has to date published about twenty booksdealing with the “scientific miracles” of the QurāĀn in various fieldssuch as embryology, botany, geology, astronomy, and cosmology. Itorganized five international conferences between 1987 and 2000 invarious countries, which hosted splendid ceremonies where Westernscientists were invited to receive attention and patronage from princesand other high officials of kingdoms and states. These scientistswere asked to comment on specific “scientific verses” of the QurāĀnon the basis of science. The result was the emergence of a scientifichermeneuticapproach that generated tremendously popularapologetic material. This material proposed to prove to the world thescientific correctness of the QurāĀn on the authority of great Westernscientists like so-and-so. In due course, these conferences havecovered all verses of the QurāĀn that have any relevance to variousbranches of science such as embryology, geology, and medicine. Theaudiovisual recordings of these conferences are available on scoresof websites and numerous books have been published in variouslanguages that use material from these conferences.A famous case is that of the Canadian embryologist Keith Moore,who was a regular keynote speaker at such conferences during the1980s. His textbook on embryology, The Developing Human, waspublished by the Commission with “Islamic Additions: CorrelationStudies with QurāĀn and Hadith” by Abdul Majeed A. Azzindani(Moore 1982). In the foreword to this edition, Moore wrote:I was astonished by the accuracy of the statements thatwere recorded in the 7th century AD, before the science ofembryology was established. Although I was aware of theglorious history of Muslim scientists in the 10th century ADand of some of their contributions to medicine, I knew nothingabout the religious facts and beliefs contained in the QurāĀnand Sunnah. It is important for Islamic and other students to