Part 7 – Embryology : "Proof that Islam is the truth''
Assalamaleykum Arahmatullahi va Barakatu, may the peace & blessings & the mercy of God be upon all of you. Welcome back to the next article of the proof that Islam is the Truth. And today we are going to be talking about the scientific miracles of the Quran, those statements in the Quran & the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, the Hadeeth of the Prophet Sallalahu Alleyhem Va Salam, may God's peace & blessings be upon him, that are truly remarkable, that beg the question: "How could such information be in a book 1400 years old?" You see, scientific knowledge depends upon the gradual advancement of information. We can only know a certain thing in scientific terms when something has been studied & observed & examined. And of course the ability to study & observe & examine something depends largely upon what is available to us in order to be able to do that.
So for example how much can we know about the stars & cosmology if we don't have access to powerful telescopes & different ways of interpreting & gathering & then interpreting data from the Universe around us? How for example can we know about the Earth, the Earth's crust, the formation of the Earth without sophisticated instruments able to measure it? How can we know for example about the details of human embryonic development without the sophisticated processes available to us today in order to be able to acquire that information. This is something concerning how scientific knowledge comes to us. What if we were to come across a book, an ancient book, 1400 years old, & this book was going to give us information, it was going to reveal facts that we have only discovered recently through our hard-earned scientific method of investigation. And that now after continued observation & gathering of information. Now we know, yes, these are facts, these are things that are true, but no one knew those things 1400 years ago. No one even had a possibility of knowing those things 1400 years ago.
Then surely this begs the question. Where could such information come from? Where could a book, so ancient have received such knowledge that is so modern? This is the question we are going to be exploring in the next few articles of the proof that Islam is the Truth. And what we want to remember is that the Quran is a miracle for all times. It was not only a miracle for the Arabs living in Arabia 1400 years old. For them the language of the Quran, its structure, its rhythm, its whole meaning, was a miracle for them. They would hear the Quran, as we've shown, & they would embrace Islam. It was enough for them. They knew that no human being could produce a work like this.
We are not Arabs. We may hear the Quran, we may find it beautiful, we may not find it beautiful. So the linguistic miracle of the Quran, the miracle of the Quran's language, it doesn't mean that much to us. But we do believe that the Quran is a miracle for all times. It is just as much miraculous for you today as it was for those people living 1400 years ago. But the way it is miracle, the aspect in which it is miraculous is obviously going to change. Because the things that we consider to be important today are not necessarily the things that the Arabs considered to be important 1400 years ago. And just as poetry & language was what the Arabs living in the time of the Prophet Muhammad were so proud of. They were so proud of their linguistic abilities.
Today I think we can safely agree that it is scientific knowledge that we are proud of. We are so proud of the ability & the achievements of science. In fact many people will hold up the achievements of science is one of the defining characteristics of the superiority of Western civilisation. In fact there is no doubt that the achievements of science have by & large in recent times been a product of western civilisation. And there is no doubt for that reason that many people today are in awe of the West & the power & the ability of the West.
We study, in universities based upon the patterns of western institutions. English is the Lingua Franco, the international language that is spoken all over the world & in which many different studies are performed. And all this is really connected with science & the advancement in science & technology. So the Quran is a miracle to the scientists. The Quran is a miracle to the people of the XX & the XXIst century just as it was a miracle to those people living in a desert 1400 years ago. Now what we plan to do over the next few episodes is to introduce to you some of the statements & explain some of the statements in the Quran that are of a scientific nature & that have proven to be in accordance with modern scientific knowledge.
Now before we go into it I do want to mention a very important matter. And that matter is that the Quran is not a scientific textbook. The Quran is a book of guidance. In the Quran Allah says: "Alif lya mim, thalikal kitabu la raybafi huddalil muttakim. Alif lya mim. This is the book without doubt. In it is the guidance for the pious people." So the Quran is fundamentally essentially before anything else, it is a book of guidance. It is a book that teaches us who is Allah, who is the Creator, that there is only one God that is worthy of worship. It tells us also that Muhammad may God's peace & blessings be upon him is the Messenger of God. It teaches us morals. What is right & what is wrong. How we should behave with each other. How we should behave with the world around us. It teaches us the stories of those pious people who have come before us so that their lives & their examples could be an encouragement for us so that we could further better ourselves & the Quran also warns us of those people who have disobeyed God, who have sinned against God, who have transgressed the limits that God has laid down & the Quran warns us & tells us about the fate of what has happened to those people.
The Quran is a book of law. It teaches us the laws through which & by which we should govern ourselves according to the wisdom & the knowledge of the mighty the wise Allah Subhana Wa Ta Allah. So the Quran is not a book of science but without doubt we believe, we know that it is from Allah the Creator of the Heavens & the Earth. And therefore it is not unreasonable to expect that the information that is contained in the Quran should reflect the perfect & absolute wisdom & knowledge that is from God. We should expect of course that a book that is from God to be consistent with the reality of the Universe around us. Since God is the Creator of the Universe & God is the Creator of all things, & God is the One who knows everything. Surely a book that is from God should be consistent with what we can observe to be facts.
Now importantly we are talking here about facts. And so what I have tried to confine myself to are those aspects that are very clear & that are very obvious & then are not ambiguous. We are not talking here about so much scientific theory although of course in a philosophical sense every statement in science is a theory. Everything is a theory. It's only in the eyes of scientists a theory that is very-very strongly proven with very-very strong evidence as supposed to a theory that may have very little evidence or perhaps even no evidence at all. So scientists put their faith, as you could say, they put their faith in those theories which simply offer the best explanation & has the strongest degree of evidence. However we have only tried to select those statements in the Quran that are supported by the strongest degree of scientific evidence. And again we only say this because the Quran is not a scientific textbook, it's not a book of science. It's a book of guidance.
But we should expect that it does not contradict the reality of the world around us. So I have chosen some of those statements in the Quran that have also amazed & fascinated me personally. And I remember that when I first read the Quran for myself, one of the things that astounded me about the Quran was that it lacked the fables & the fairytales & a type of fantastic statements that you would expect from a book that was revealed 1400 years ago. In fact what I discovered was that its statements were truly amazing. We will be talking about some of those things after the break. Don't go away. Stay there for the proof that Islam is the truth. Welcome back to the proof that Islam is the Truth.
I'm going to be talking today about some of the amazing statements in the Quran concerning the natural world. Some of the amazing findings that we find in the Quran that agree with present scientific observations amongst most ot among one of the most remarkable of them are without doubt the statements in the Quran dealing with the development of the human foetus. Now it's interesting as a comparison to see what was the state of knowledge at the time of the Prophet Muhammad may God's peace & blessings be upon him. Because you would expect a work that has been made by human beings to reflect the ideas & the concepts that were prevalent at the time. If Muhammad may God's peace & blessings be upon him had invented the Quran, had authored the Quran himself most certainly he would have picked up the ideas that are normal amongst the Arabs & the Greeks & the Romans & the Egyptians & so on & so forth.
So one of the prevalent theories was of course the Aristotelian theory. And Aristotle was one of the people, one of the first people to really begin to make scientific investigations & theories as to the origin of human life. When I say one of the first people certainly in the Western world he was one of the first people. And also he is one of the people whose statements have been recorded & preserved for posterity than may of course have been others. But his theory was very-very common. And his idea was that the male sperm acted as rennet in cheese to congeal the female menstrual blood. And from the congealing of the female menstrual blood the human embryo was formed.
Now he based this upon his observation that when women became pregnant their monthly periods ceased & so he theorised that therefore something must happen to that monthly period & what happened to it was that it congealed in order to form a human life. Now of course we realise at this time that such a theory is completely false. Even as late as the 18th century a man called Hartsoeker claimed to have seen through a primitive microscope various sperms of different animals. And so looking through this primitive microscope he claimed that he could see inside the actual sperm a preformed human being, a little child crouched up. Similarly he claimed that in the giraffe sperm he could see a long neck & in the rabbit's sperm there were the big ears & stuff life that. And this was known as the preformation theory. Of course again today we know that that is false. And it's an example of course that those type of theories that sometimes float around in science that later show to be false & even quite laughable.
And that's the case with both Aristotle & the ideas that were prevalent in the 18th century. And it's not really until the 19th century that we began to develop an accurate description of the stages of human embryonic development. Now whet we want to examine is: What does the Quran say? If the Quran was a forgery, if the Quran was invented & written by the Prophet Muhammad as people claim, then surely it would reflect the ignorant beliefs of the time.
However it does not. Let us read the 23rd chapter of the Quran, verses 12 to 16. The meaning of it is this: "We created a man from quintessence of clay." this by the way is referring to the creation of Adam. Muslims believe that God created Adam miraculously, not like the rest of the creation. He took clay, Allah took clay from different places in the Earth, & He formed from this clay the shape of a man & he gave life to this form & thus Adam was created. And from the rib of Adam Eve was created. So this is what Muslims believe & when Allah says: "He create man from quintessence of clay", - this is talking about the creation of Adam.
But the Quran goes on to say: "He placed him as a drop", - & the word in the Arabic is "nootfa". "Nootfa" means a drop: "in a place of rest firmly fixed. Then we made a drop into an alaq", & I will tell you what these words mean in a moment. So first: "We placed him as a nutfa, then we made a drop into alaq & then we changed an alaq into a mudra & then we made out of that mudra bones. And then we clothed the bones with flesh. Then we caused him to grow & come into being & attain definitive form." So Allah is mentioning the stages: nutfa, alaq, mudra, laham. Ok? So this is the stages & then we begin to look like human beings & Allah goes on to say: "Blessed be Allah the perfect Creator. After that you will die. Again on the day of judgement you will be raised up." It's very important my dear listeners, that Allah at the same time as he is mentioning these amazing & astounding facts that science has only discovered recently, immediately afterward Allah is reminding us that you will die, & you will be rased up on the day of Judgement. Just like Allah created you in stages, from a thing that clings, from an alaq & a mudra & from laham, from all of these things Allah most certainly will create you again on the day of Judgement.
Now the Prophet Sallalahu Alleyhem Va Salam, nutfa means a small drop that is emitted, & the Prophet Sallalahu Alleyhem Va Salam referred to this nutfa as both belonging to the male & female, in fact he mentioned that these nutfa are mixed in the creation, this is what he mentioned in the authentic Hadeeth. The nutfa, the drop from a man, which is the semen & from a women which is of course the ovum, the nutfa the small drops, they are mixed. This is very important, because the Prophet is mentioning that the human being comes from both the man & from the women. This already goes against the theories that were prevalent at the time.
Secondly the word alaq in Arabic, what does it mean? It has three meanings. A thing that clings, a blood clot & a leech-like object. In fact all of these three things accurately describe the first stage of human embryonic development. After the fertilisation of the egg a blastosis develops, which has on its exterior villous sites which literally cling to the wall of the uterus, so they are little, it's rather like a Velcro, they cling to the inside of the uterus in the womb. This is what happens to this alaq, a thing that clings. And then it goes on to resemble exactly a leech-like object. The similarity is absolutely remarkable, not only in appearance but also in behaviour, because a leech also takes blood from its host similarly the alaq stage also takes nutrition & blood from inside the mother. So this is, it goes on & it also resembles at a latest stage after that a blood clot.
So this is the first thing. The word alaq describes exactly the first state of human embryonic development. This is not something that could have been known 1400 years ago. It is impossible because this stage of embryonic development is something that only can be observed with powerful microscopes. Yet the description is accurately mentioned in the Quran 1400 years ago. So it mentions then from the alaq stage it becomes a mudra, a mudra means like a chewed piece of flesh. And this is exactly what it's like. The Prophet Muhammad Sallalahu Alleyhem Va Salam, the Quran also said "partly formed & unformed." So it has bits that are slightly formed, bits that are not. And if you again, you look at this stage it looks exactly like a piece of meet that has been chewed.
Then the amazing thing is that the bones precede the development of the flesh. The bones come & then on the bones the flesh grow, although the time between the growing of the bones & the flesh is very-very close. And it's very interesting that the word that is used, the term that is used in Arabic, the word indicates speed: one thing following another very-very closely even the structure of the words on Arabic is consistent with the development of the human embryo. And then the Prophet Muhammad Sallalahu Alleyhem Va Salam said: when 42 nights have passed over the conceptus Allah sends an Angel to it, who shapes it & makes its ears & its eyes & skin & flesh & bones & then he says: "Oh, Lord, is it a male or a female?" And your Lord decides what He wishes & then the angel records it." It is also true that you can not determine the sex of the foetus until just after 42 nights. How did this information come to a man living in a desert 1400 years ago? Most certainly this is the evidence that the Quran is from Allah & that Muhammad is his Messenger. Join us for the next article of the proof that Islam is the Truth. And until then Assalamaleykum Arahmatullahi va Barakatu.
So for example how much can we know about the stars & cosmology if we don't have access to powerful telescopes & different ways of interpreting & gathering & then interpreting data from the Universe around us? How for example can we know about the Earth, the Earth's crust, the formation of the Earth without sophisticated instruments able to measure it? How can we know for example about the details of human embryonic development without the sophisticated processes available to us today in order to be able to acquire that information. This is something concerning how scientific knowledge comes to us. What if we were to come across a book, an ancient book, 1400 years old, & this book was going to give us information, it was going to reveal facts that we have only discovered recently through our hard-earned scientific method of investigation. And that now after continued observation & gathering of information. Now we know, yes, these are facts, these are things that are true, but no one knew those things 1400 years ago. No one even had a possibility of knowing those things 1400 years ago.
Then surely this begs the question. Where could such information come from? Where could a book, so ancient have received such knowledge that is so modern? This is the question we are going to be exploring in the next few articles of the proof that Islam is the Truth. And what we want to remember is that the Quran is a miracle for all times. It was not only a miracle for the Arabs living in Arabia 1400 years old. For them the language of the Quran, its structure, its rhythm, its whole meaning, was a miracle for them. They would hear the Quran, as we've shown, & they would embrace Islam. It was enough for them. They knew that no human being could produce a work like this.
We are not Arabs. We may hear the Quran, we may find it beautiful, we may not find it beautiful. So the linguistic miracle of the Quran, the miracle of the Quran's language, it doesn't mean that much to us. But we do believe that the Quran is a miracle for all times. It is just as much miraculous for you today as it was for those people living 1400 years ago. But the way it is miracle, the aspect in which it is miraculous is obviously going to change. Because the things that we consider to be important today are not necessarily the things that the Arabs considered to be important 1400 years ago. And just as poetry & language was what the Arabs living in the time of the Prophet Muhammad were so proud of. They were so proud of their linguistic abilities.
Today I think we can safely agree that it is scientific knowledge that we are proud of. We are so proud of the ability & the achievements of science. In fact many people will hold up the achievements of science is one of the defining characteristics of the superiority of Western civilisation. In fact there is no doubt that the achievements of science have by & large in recent times been a product of western civilisation. And there is no doubt for that reason that many people today are in awe of the West & the power & the ability of the West.
We study, in universities based upon the patterns of western institutions. English is the Lingua Franco, the international language that is spoken all over the world & in which many different studies are performed. And all this is really connected with science & the advancement in science & technology. So the Quran is a miracle to the scientists. The Quran is a miracle to the people of the XX & the XXIst century just as it was a miracle to those people living in a desert 1400 years ago. Now what we plan to do over the next few episodes is to introduce to you some of the statements & explain some of the statements in the Quran that are of a scientific nature & that have proven to be in accordance with modern scientific knowledge.
Now before we go into it I do want to mention a very important matter. And that matter is that the Quran is not a scientific textbook. The Quran is a book of guidance. In the Quran Allah says: "Alif lya mim, thalikal kitabu la raybafi huddalil muttakim. Alif lya mim. This is the book without doubt. In it is the guidance for the pious people." So the Quran is fundamentally essentially before anything else, it is a book of guidance. It is a book that teaches us who is Allah, who is the Creator, that there is only one God that is worthy of worship. It tells us also that Muhammad may God's peace & blessings be upon him is the Messenger of God. It teaches us morals. What is right & what is wrong. How we should behave with each other. How we should behave with the world around us. It teaches us the stories of those pious people who have come before us so that their lives & their examples could be an encouragement for us so that we could further better ourselves & the Quran also warns us of those people who have disobeyed God, who have sinned against God, who have transgressed the limits that God has laid down & the Quran warns us & tells us about the fate of what has happened to those people.
The Quran is a book of law. It teaches us the laws through which & by which we should govern ourselves according to the wisdom & the knowledge of the mighty the wise Allah Subhana Wa Ta Allah. So the Quran is not a book of science but without doubt we believe, we know that it is from Allah the Creator of the Heavens & the Earth. And therefore it is not unreasonable to expect that the information that is contained in the Quran should reflect the perfect & absolute wisdom & knowledge that is from God. We should expect of course that a book that is from God to be consistent with the reality of the Universe around us. Since God is the Creator of the Universe & God is the Creator of all things, & God is the One who knows everything. Surely a book that is from God should be consistent with what we can observe to be facts.
Now importantly we are talking here about facts. And so what I have tried to confine myself to are those aspects that are very clear & that are very obvious & then are not ambiguous. We are not talking here about so much scientific theory although of course in a philosophical sense every statement in science is a theory. Everything is a theory. It's only in the eyes of scientists a theory that is very-very strongly proven with very-very strong evidence as supposed to a theory that may have very little evidence or perhaps even no evidence at all. So scientists put their faith, as you could say, they put their faith in those theories which simply offer the best explanation & has the strongest degree of evidence. However we have only tried to select those statements in the Quran that are supported by the strongest degree of scientific evidence. And again we only say this because the Quran is not a scientific textbook, it's not a book of science. It's a book of guidance.
But we should expect that it does not contradict the reality of the world around us. So I have chosen some of those statements in the Quran that have also amazed & fascinated me personally. And I remember that when I first read the Quran for myself, one of the things that astounded me about the Quran was that it lacked the fables & the fairytales & a type of fantastic statements that you would expect from a book that was revealed 1400 years ago. In fact what I discovered was that its statements were truly amazing. We will be talking about some of those things after the break. Don't go away. Stay there for the proof that Islam is the truth. Welcome back to the proof that Islam is the Truth.
I'm going to be talking today about some of the amazing statements in the Quran concerning the natural world. Some of the amazing findings that we find in the Quran that agree with present scientific observations amongst most ot among one of the most remarkable of them are without doubt the statements in the Quran dealing with the development of the human foetus. Now it's interesting as a comparison to see what was the state of knowledge at the time of the Prophet Muhammad may God's peace & blessings be upon him. Because you would expect a work that has been made by human beings to reflect the ideas & the concepts that were prevalent at the time. If Muhammad may God's peace & blessings be upon him had invented the Quran, had authored the Quran himself most certainly he would have picked up the ideas that are normal amongst the Arabs & the Greeks & the Romans & the Egyptians & so on & so forth.
So one of the prevalent theories was of course the Aristotelian theory. And Aristotle was one of the people, one of the first people to really begin to make scientific investigations & theories as to the origin of human life. When I say one of the first people certainly in the Western world he was one of the first people. And also he is one of the people whose statements have been recorded & preserved for posterity than may of course have been others. But his theory was very-very common. And his idea was that the male sperm acted as rennet in cheese to congeal the female menstrual blood. And from the congealing of the female menstrual blood the human embryo was formed.
Now he based this upon his observation that when women became pregnant their monthly periods ceased & so he theorised that therefore something must happen to that monthly period & what happened to it was that it congealed in order to form a human life. Now of course we realise at this time that such a theory is completely false. Even as late as the 18th century a man called Hartsoeker claimed to have seen through a primitive microscope various sperms of different animals. And so looking through this primitive microscope he claimed that he could see inside the actual sperm a preformed human being, a little child crouched up. Similarly he claimed that in the giraffe sperm he could see a long neck & in the rabbit's sperm there were the big ears & stuff life that. And this was known as the preformation theory. Of course again today we know that that is false. And it's an example of course that those type of theories that sometimes float around in science that later show to be false & even quite laughable.
And that's the case with both Aristotle & the ideas that were prevalent in the 18th century. And it's not really until the 19th century that we began to develop an accurate description of the stages of human embryonic development. Now whet we want to examine is: What does the Quran say? If the Quran was a forgery, if the Quran was invented & written by the Prophet Muhammad as people claim, then surely it would reflect the ignorant beliefs of the time.
However it does not. Let us read the 23rd chapter of the Quran, verses 12 to 16. The meaning of it is this: "We created a man from quintessence of clay." this by the way is referring to the creation of Adam. Muslims believe that God created Adam miraculously, not like the rest of the creation. He took clay, Allah took clay from different places in the Earth, & He formed from this clay the shape of a man & he gave life to this form & thus Adam was created. And from the rib of Adam Eve was created. So this is what Muslims believe & when Allah says: "He create man from quintessence of clay", - this is talking about the creation of Adam.
But the Quran goes on to say: "He placed him as a drop", - & the word in the Arabic is "nootfa". "Nootfa" means a drop: "in a place of rest firmly fixed. Then we made a drop into an alaq", & I will tell you what these words mean in a moment. So first: "We placed him as a nutfa, then we made a drop into alaq & then we changed an alaq into a mudra & then we made out of that mudra bones. And then we clothed the bones with flesh. Then we caused him to grow & come into being & attain definitive form." So Allah is mentioning the stages: nutfa, alaq, mudra, laham. Ok? So this is the stages & then we begin to look like human beings & Allah goes on to say: "Blessed be Allah the perfect Creator. After that you will die. Again on the day of judgement you will be raised up." It's very important my dear listeners, that Allah at the same time as he is mentioning these amazing & astounding facts that science has only discovered recently, immediately afterward Allah is reminding us that you will die, & you will be rased up on the day of Judgement. Just like Allah created you in stages, from a thing that clings, from an alaq & a mudra & from laham, from all of these things Allah most certainly will create you again on the day of Judgement.
Now the Prophet Sallalahu Alleyhem Va Salam, nutfa means a small drop that is emitted, & the Prophet Sallalahu Alleyhem Va Salam referred to this nutfa as both belonging to the male & female, in fact he mentioned that these nutfa are mixed in the creation, this is what he mentioned in the authentic Hadeeth. The nutfa, the drop from a man, which is the semen & from a women which is of course the ovum, the nutfa the small drops, they are mixed. This is very important, because the Prophet is mentioning that the human being comes from both the man & from the women. This already goes against the theories that were prevalent at the time.
Secondly the word alaq in Arabic, what does it mean? It has three meanings. A thing that clings, a blood clot & a leech-like object. In fact all of these three things accurately describe the first stage of human embryonic development. After the fertilisation of the egg a blastosis develops, which has on its exterior villous sites which literally cling to the wall of the uterus, so they are little, it's rather like a Velcro, they cling to the inside of the uterus in the womb. This is what happens to this alaq, a thing that clings. And then it goes on to resemble exactly a leech-like object. The similarity is absolutely remarkable, not only in appearance but also in behaviour, because a leech also takes blood from its host similarly the alaq stage also takes nutrition & blood from inside the mother. So this is, it goes on & it also resembles at a latest stage after that a blood clot.
So this is the first thing. The word alaq describes exactly the first state of human embryonic development. This is not something that could have been known 1400 years ago. It is impossible because this stage of embryonic development is something that only can be observed with powerful microscopes. Yet the description is accurately mentioned in the Quran 1400 years ago. So it mentions then from the alaq stage it becomes a mudra, a mudra means like a chewed piece of flesh. And this is exactly what it's like. The Prophet Muhammad Sallalahu Alleyhem Va Salam, the Quran also said "partly formed & unformed." So it has bits that are slightly formed, bits that are not. And if you again, you look at this stage it looks exactly like a piece of meet that has been chewed.
Then the amazing thing is that the bones precede the development of the flesh. The bones come & then on the bones the flesh grow, although the time between the growing of the bones & the flesh is very-very close. And it's very interesting that the word that is used, the term that is used in Arabic, the word indicates speed: one thing following another very-very closely even the structure of the words on Arabic is consistent with the development of the human embryo. And then the Prophet Muhammad Sallalahu Alleyhem Va Salam said: when 42 nights have passed over the conceptus Allah sends an Angel to it, who shapes it & makes its ears & its eyes & skin & flesh & bones & then he says: "Oh, Lord, is it a male or a female?" And your Lord decides what He wishes & then the angel records it." It is also true that you can not determine the sex of the foetus until just after 42 nights. How did this information come to a man living in a desert 1400 years ago? Most certainly this is the evidence that the Quran is from Allah & that Muhammad is his Messenger. Join us for the next article of the proof that Islam is the Truth. And until then Assalamaleykum Arahmatullahi va Barakatu.