The Scientific “Miracles” of the Qur’ān

In order to demonstrate the so-called i‘jāz (“inimitability”) of the Qur’ān, Zaghlūl El-Najjār, a prominent promoter and “specialist” in this subject, publicly discusses the most common examples claimed by supporters of this concept. In one of Cairo’s leading daily Arab newspapers, he wrote in one of his weekly articles the following comments about i‘jāz as it pertains to Q 23.14:

The verse refers to a specific embryonic stage called the stage of al-‘alaq [the congealed blood], which are the annelids [leeches] that live in freshwater. They are parasitic and feed on many of the vertebrates, and the fetus at the beginning of the third week takes the form of the body of the annelids.

Rational voices, such as accredited and widely respected Khaled Montaser (an Egyptian doctor, writer, and medical authority on skin and venereal diseases and sex education whose scientific views and knowledge are available online, on television, and in print), try to counter these preposterous statements and establish the truth regarding this and other claimed “scientific miracles”:

The true meaning of al-‘alaq in the Arabic dictionary is thick blood and has nothing to do with this kind of worm as Dr. Zaghlūl is imagining and not relevant whatsoever to the shape of the fetus in the third week and does not resemble the worm in any way. This manipulation of the facts and dealing with language in an opportunistic way make such conclusions laughable and dreadful at the same time. This tampering and linguistic deception only open new ways of tampering and deception....These miraculous cosmic signals that they [proponents] claim have never been mentioned before in any book. [These claims] confuse supporters of i‘jāz and us…especially after we find out that many of the things they [promoters of i‘jāz] talk about exist in Arabic poetry and myths of the [ancient] Sumerian, Babylonian and Egyptian empires and in other holy books….

Khaled Montaser’s comments have historical, documented support. The descriptions of embryonic development similar to the Qur’ān’s depiction in this verse were already in existence before Muhammad. Greek physician Claudius Galenus (c. AD 129-199) discusses in his book Corpus Medicorum Graecorum four stages of human fetus development, which are similar to the stages mentioned in the Qur’ān, but he includes additional specific details of these stages that are not mentioned in the Islamic holy books.

What is highly disturbing is the strong possibility that some Islamic scholars are pirating Galenus’s theory of early human development (published five centuries before the Qur’ān) and attributing its source to the Qur’ān and Hadith literature, claiming that the Qur’ān is the first book to introduce this description of embryonic development. Unfortunately, this dishonest deception provides “evidence” for misguided supporters of i‘jāz to advocate that the Qur’ān is a scientific “pioneer” because it contains verses that reveal “scientific miracles”.

These supporters of i‘jāz assert that the Qur’ān is the first credible source for scientific facts, and that it mentions everything about science, knowledge, and wisdom, based on Q 6.38: “…we have omitted nothing from the Book….” To bolster their position, they discard or ignore Islamic scholars’ interpretations of the Qur’ānic verses and search instead for expressions or words in the Qur’ān and Hadith literature that might indicate any relationship, no matter how tenuous, to astronomy, medicine and other modern sciences.