Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

196 • The Making of Islamic Sciencewere joined together, then We clove them asunder and We created everyliving thing out of water. Will they then not believe? The latter reads, Godturned toward the heaven and it was smoke… In the first verse, the twokey Arabic words are ratq and fatq; the former is translated as “fusingor binding together” and the latter as the process of separation.These two key words are then used to support the Big Bang model.Other verses pertaining to creation mention “six days” during whichthe heavens and the earth and all that is between them were createdby God. The six days are shown to mean six indefinite periods oftime (Bucaille 1976, 149).There seems to be no problem with the interpretation of six daysas six periods, for the QurāĀnic usage supports this, but numerousproblems begin to surface when this QurāĀnic data is superimposedon specific data arising from modern science. Bucaille chose tointerpret “smoke” (dukhan), mentioned in verse 11 of chapter 41, as“the predominantly gaseous state of the material that composes[the universe, which] obviously corresponds to the concept of theprimary nebula put forward by modern science” (Bucaille 1976, 153).It is this one-to-one correspondence that begins to stretch QurāĀnichermeneutics. The entire enterprise remains conjectural, as no proofscan be found for such an interpretation. As the narrative proceeds,the desire to reveal “science” in the QurāĀn makes the task ofinterpretation even more difficult: “The existence of an intermediatecreation between ‘the heavens’ and ‘the earth’ expressed in theQurāĀn may be compared to the discovery of those bridges of materialpresent outside organized astronomic systems” (Bucaille 1976, 153).The foregone conclusion of this approach toward the relationshipbetween the QurāĀn and science is thatalthough not all the questions raised by the descriptions inthe QurāĀn have been completely confirmed by scientific data,there is in any case absolutely no opposition between the datain the QurāĀn on the Creation and modern knowledge on theformation of the universe. This fact is worth stressing for theQurāĀnic Revelation, whereas it is very obvious that the presentdaytext of the Old Testament provides data on the same eventsthat are unacceptable from a scientific point of view. (Bucaille1976, 153–54)