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The Muslim Responses to Evolution
ABDUL MAJID
There are three different viewpoints of
Muslim theologians and scholars about evolution. One view is that
evolution is totally contradictory and incompatible with the Islamic
teachings. The proponents of this view believe literally in the
Quran and
Hadith.
They argue that Almighty Allah created
all organisms in their present form and then scattered from those
created parents of animals and plants, all the present diversity of
animals and plants. About the creation of man, they quote different
verses of the Holy Quran in which it is described that Allah created the
father of all humans “Adam”
from clay and then from the rib of
Adam,
his wife
Hawwa
(Eve),
the mother of all mankind. Then from these two, all human beings sprung.
The important personalities of this viewpoint are Shihab-ud-Din Nadvi,
Wahiduddin Khan and Harun Yahya.
Shihab-ud -Din Nadvi wrote a very
comprehensive book entitled “The Creation of Adam and the Evolutionary
Theory” in which he categorically refuted the evolutionary theory.
Wahidud Din Khan also wrote number of books especially his book“
Ilm-
e- jaded ka challenge (The Challenge of
the Modern Knowledge ) the English translation of which is published as
“God
Arising: Evidence of God in Nature and in Science”.
Maulana Wahidud Din Khan writes about evolutionary theory as:
“For a hundred years this
theory held sway over human thought. But then further investigations
revealed that it had loopholes. It did not fully fit in the framework of
creation. In certain fundamental ways, it clashed with the order of the
universe as a whole.(1)
Harun Yahya is an eminent Turkish
scholar, the author of several books on evolution and creation. Yahya’s
opponents claim that Harun Yahya is not a single person but a group of
writers formed by Science Research Foundation (known in Turkey with its
Turkish initials as BAV). They even claim that Harun Yahya is actually
Necmettin Erbakan himself or collaboration between Erbakan and Adnan
Okhtar. His website
http://www.harunyahya.org has an impressive range of books and it
states that Harun Yahya is the pen-name of Adnan Oktar, who devoted his
life explaining the existence and unity of Allah.( 2) His two important
books “Evolution
Deceit” and “Allah
is known through Reason“ are basically on
the refutation of Darwinism. In the introduction of
Evolution Deceit ,
Harun Yahya notes:
“Some of the people who heard of the
theory of Evolution or Darwinism may think that these concepts only
concern the field of biology and that they have no significance in their
every day lives. This is big misconception because far more than a
biological concept, the theory of evolution constitutes the
underpinnings of a dishonest philosophy that has held sway over a great
number of people”. He further says, “This philosophy is materialism
which holds a number of bogus views about why and how we came into
being. Materialism maintains that there is nothing but the matter and
that matter is the essence of every thing ----------- it (materialism)
denies the existence of a divine creator, this is Allah. It also seeks
to abolish the basic values on which the state and society rest.”(3)
Harun Yahya’s book
Evolution Deceit is
in fact a scientific approach to refute and reject Darwinism , that is
why it is written on the first page of this book.
“The Scientific collapse of Darwinism
and its Ideological Background”. Harun Yahya refers to the event of
“Cambrian Explosion” during which the remarkably complex forms of
animals appeared suddenly, some 550 million years ago. He then quotes a
number of contemporary biologists who authenticate the “Cambrian
Explosion” and then at page 30 of his book (the
Evolution Deceit)
writes “the fossil record indicated that living things did not evolve
from primitive to the advanced forms, but instead emerged all of a
sudden and in a perfect state.”(4)
Some of the very important and recent
traditional writers as Martin Lings (Abu-Bakr-Siraj-ud-Din) Frithjof
Shuun and Sayyed Hossein Nasr offer clear and lucid arguments to
condemn the theory of evolution in its present form. Shuan points out
that the transformist evolution of species is a prolonged elaboration
that is at once arbitrary and unlimited.
Materialists, even those who consider
transformist evolution “inexplicable and even contradictory, accept this
hypothesis as an indispensable idea, which moreover carries us outside
of Science and into Philosophy, or more exactly into rationalism with
its reasoning cut off from the very roots of knowledge, and if the
evolutionist idea is indispensable to them, it is because in their minds
it replaces the concept of a sudden creation ex nihilo, which to them
seems to be only possible solution.” He further notes that “modern
philosophers replace metaphysical causality with physical and empirical
causalities, which no doubt demands intelligence”. (5)
S.H.Nasr gives the main reason for the
acceptances of evolutionary theory:
“Rather in a world in which the Divinity
had been either denied or neglected to the role of the maker of the
clock which the seventeenth century conceived the universe to be and
where sapiential wisdom based on the contemplation of the higher states
of being had become practically inaccessible, the theory of evolution
seemed the best way of providing a background for the study of the
amazing diversity of life forms without having to have recourse to the
creation power of God. Nasr further argues, that the theory of evolution
soon turned into a dogma precisely, because it rapidly replaced
religious faith and came to provide what appeared to be a ‘scientific’
crutch for the soul to enable it to forget God.”(6)
Jamal-ul-Din
Afghani also refuted Darwinism by writing an essay titled
Al-Radd
ala al Dahriyyah
(The Refutation of Materialists) in 1881. In 1885, Muhammad Abduh, one
of Afghan’s disciples, translated this text into Arabic. Dr Muzaffar
Iqbal, after discussing the views of Afghani, writes that in his later
life, Afghani softened his stand (about the rejection of evolution) but
he remained a firm believer in the special creation of Man.
Ghulam Ahmad Pervez and his student
Dr.Abdul Wadood are included in the category of those who totally accept
evolutionary theory and endorsed Darwin’s idea into a book titled, “The
Phenomena of Nature in the Quran and
Sunnah” in which he
completely derives the evolutionary stages from different verses of the
Holy Quran.
The third category of Muslims response
can be called as a moderate response i.e. trying to relate some of the
features of the theory to the teachings of Islam (especially the Quran).
The important figures which have this viewpoint are Hossein al-Jisr, al-Asfahani,
Dr.Mohammad Iqbal, Dr.Inayatullah Mashriqi, Dr.Ahman Afzal , Dr.Israr
Ahmed Dr.Absar Ahmad.
Hossein al-Jisr, a Lebanese Scholar who
wrote more than twenty five books, including
Al-Risala
al-Hamidiyya
and Falsafa Science and Quran. The former is translated from Arabic into
urdu by Syed Muhammad Ishaq and published in urdu as
Science and Islam under the patronage of
Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi. The latter (Falsfa, science and Quran) is the
translation of al-Jisr’s Arabic book.
Qissat-ul-Eman bain-ul-falsfa wal-hilm wal Quran
by khuda Baksh kaliar Advocate and is in dialogue from. In these two
books, especially in
falsafa, science and Quran
at pages 203 to 211, he makes efforts to reconcile the theory of
evolution with the Quranic teachings. He seems to defend Darwinian
Theory and quotes elsewhere the Quranic verse “We made every living
thing from water, will they not believe?” (21:30) and then agrees with
the theory of evolution. “There is no evidence in the Quran”, he writes,
“to suggest whether all species, each of which exists by the grace of
God, were created all at once or gradually.”(7)
Another Iraqi theologian, abu al-Majid
Muhammad Rida al-Isfahani accommodated the evolutionary theory in his
book
Naqd
Falsfa Darwin, (Critique of Darwin’s
Philsophy). Isfahani defends a God-based version of evolution and
counted Lamarck, Wallace, Huxly, Spencer and Darwin among those who
believed in God. He referred to the works of Imam Jafar Sadiq
(especially to his
Kitab
al-Tawhid) and to
those of Ikhwan al-Safa to point out anatomical similarities in Man and
apes, claiming that Darwin could never provide full treatment of these
similarities as compared to Ikhwan. But he disputed the embryological
similarities between man and other mammals. He affirmed that the
structural unity of living organisms was a result of heavenly wisdom and
not a consequence of blind chance in nature”.(8)
Dr.Inayatullah Khan al-Mashraqi also
defended the Darwinian theory of evolution in his famous book
Tazkira. According to him, evolution is
inherent in nature as a well- thought out program of Almighty Creator;
it has not merely been going on ever since creation but it will continue
for endless years till the fulfillment of the purpose of creation. He
appears at variance with Darwin who was reluctant to accept God as an
entity, and also differs with his somewhat limited framework of
‘fitness’ which when applied to human societies is found inadequate.
Allama Mashraqi, wrote a long footnote in the Urdu text of the first
volume of
Tazkira (published
in 1924) in which he took a comprehensive view of this phenomenon with
special reference to and support of Darwin in the context of what the
Quran stated over 1400 years ago .(9)
Dr. Muhammad Iqbal noted in his
Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
that the idea of evolution was first presented by Muslims scientists
before Darwin or Lamarck. Iqbal recalled that it was Al-Jahiz (776 –869
CE), the author of
Kitab-al-Haiwanat who first hinted at the
changes in animal life caused by migrations and environment generally,
and Ibn Maskawaih (942 –1032 CE), the author of
Fauz
al-Asghar, who give
a clear and in many respects thoroughly modern theory of the origin of
man. Iqbal further notes, “The discoveries of Newton in the sphere of
matter and those of Darwin in the sphere of natural history reveal a
mechanism. All problems, it was believed were really the problem of
Physics, Energy and atoms with the properties self-existing in them,
could explain everything including life itself, thought, will and
feeling. The concept of mechanism –a purely physical concept – claimed
to be the all-embracing explanation of Nature. And the battle for and
against mechanism is still being fiercely fought in the domain of
biology. The question, then, is whether the passage to Reality through
the revelations of sense perception necessarily leads to a view of
Reality essentially opposed to the view that religion takes of its
ultimate character. Is Natural science finally committed to
materialism?”(10)
Iqbal further states, “though natural
science can produce a verifiable data about matter, life and mind it
generates a sectional view of Reality”. He then delineates the
limitations of natural sciences: “the moment you ask the question how
matter, life and mind are mutually related, you begin to see the
sectional character of the various sciences that deal with them and the
inability of those sciences, taken singly, to furnish a complete answer
to your question.(11)
Dr.Hamidullah fully accommodated the
theory of evolution and the process of evolution. During the
question-answer session that followed the lecture on “Religion’ some one
asked Dr.Hamidullah: If Darwin’s theory of evolution is correct from the
scientific point of view, there is conflict between science and Islam.
Kindly explain. Dr.Hamidullah’s answer is totally astonishing, he said:
It has been presumed that Darwin’s
theory had been rejected by Islam. It appears to create complications
for us because we presume that Darwin was an atheist, although he
believed in God. When he completed his medical education and entered his
family profession, Darwin went through a metamorphosis. Being sick of
the world he became interested in God. He studied Christianity in the
Faculty of Religion at the University of Cambridge. Comparative Religion
was one of the subjects taught in the university. Darwin also learned
Arabic in order to understand Islam. In the collection of his letters
that have been published, a number of them are addressed to his Arabic
teachers. They are couched in extremely reverend and respectful
language.
Dr.Muzaffar Iqbal, after quoting the
above mentioned answer, writes, “This is indeed an amazing statement
that belies all known facts about Darwin.” (12)
Then Dr.Hamidullah elucidated the theory
of evolution contained in “The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity” (Ikhwan-al-Safa)
and states:
In the Quran it is stated that God made
men out of clay. Our concept of the creation of man is that God, like a
potter, moulded clay into shape and breathed his spirit into it and Adam
was thus created. Possibly this was the process but what does one do
with verses 18:37, 22:5, 25:11, 40:67 which state time and again that
God created man from clay and sperm? It is obvious that clay does not
create sperm: it comes from an animal and a human being. It means that
the mention of all intermediary stages of evolution has been omitted and
attention is drawn to the original source, which is clay. The last cause
is the sperm of man which stays in the womb of a woman”. According to
Dr. Muzaffar, the worst example of this attitude is the definition of
evolution that he ( Dr. Hamidullah) produced from the Quran “He created
you in stages” (Wallah-o-Khalaqaqum
Atwara ,71:14). The word
tawr
is the basis of
tatawwar, which
means evolution. This is then further defended: This can also mean that
God created man as a mineral in the first instance. Mineral developed
into vegetation, which developed into animal life. There is no
contradiction. (13)
Dr.Rafiuddin and Dr.Ahmed Afzal have
more or less the same opinion about evolution and Darwinism.
Dr.Rafiuddin discussed in detail the Darwinian Theory in his book,
Quran
and Ilm-I-Jadeed. Dr.Israr Ahmed who is
very much impressed by ideas of Dr. Rafiuddin has discussed the concept
of evolution in detail in the special issue of the
Hikmat-I-Quran entitled “Eejad-o-Abda-I-Alam”.
Dr.Ahmed Ahmad Afzal, who is student of Dr.Israr Ahmed, wrote a
brilliant and thought provoking article entitled “Quran
and Human Evolution”
about which Dr.Absar Ahmed writes: “Dr.Ahmed Afzal’s brilliant and
substantial article, essentially concurring and amplifying the idea and
insights of Dr.Israr Ahmed as it does, cuts new grounds in this area by
bridging the gulf between the theory of Special Creation and natural
biological evolution.” (14)
These three scholars are of the
opinion that evolution is not synonymous with Darwinism; secondly they
confess that although evolution is a universal fact which can be
established through the study of comparative morphology, Paleontology,
embryology, anthropology and genetics – the theory which is commonly
propounded to explain its mechanism i.e. Natural Selection, is by no
means a secure and scientifically proven fact. Thirdly they consider
that human beings have a dual nature. There is a non-material mind or
spirit or ego which exists side by side with man’s corporeal body. They
further argue that the real essence of human being is his spiritual soul
which is directly inspired in humans and it has nothing to do with
evolution. Evolution concerns only the physical body of man. The man’s
true superiority over the rest of creation, including angles, is not
because of his physical body, which he shares with other animals, but is
actually due to his spiritual soul which truly distinguishes him and
sets him apart from all living creatures. The tradition of prophet
Muhammad (PBUH) that “Allah created Adam in his own image”, refers to
man’s spirit and not his body. Then Dr.Ahmed Afzal says that the dual
nature of man represents the duality of God’s creation. Then he refers
to Shah Waliullah Dehlvi who had discussed in his
Hujjal-ullah-al-Baligha, the two types of
Divine creative activity. According to Shah Waliullah Dehlvi (1703—1762
A.D. ), there are two types of Divine Creative activity viz;
Al-Aalam
Khalq &
Al-Aalam
Amr. The
Al-Aalam
Khalq,the world of Allah’s ordinary
creatures, in which every thing that happens takes times (e.g. the
universe took approximately 15 billion years to develop from Big Bang
and the primitive gaseous state to its presents form. A fertilized ovum
takes 270—280 days to grow into a fully developed baby). But there is
Al-
Aalam Amr, or the domain of Divine
Creative Energy, that is a direct manifestation of His Word or Logos
that is His command of Be! There is absolutely no time factor involved
in this realm and things happens instantaneously. He says: Be! and it
becomes (Al-Quran 36:82). The initial act of the creation of matter out
of nothing (creatio
ex
Nihilo) represents a direct command or
Amr
of Almighty Allah. According to the Holy Quran “Ruh
(soul) is an Amr-i-Rabb(17:85)]. (15)
He further refers to verses of the Holy
Quran in which different stages of the creation of man are described
like:
Allah has
caused you to grow as a growth from the earth (Nuh 71:17)
He
brought you forth from the earth and settled you therein (Hud 11:61)
He fashioned you in stages (Nuh 7:14)
He
created man of fermented clay dried tinkling hard like earth ware (Ar-Rahman
55:14).
He
fashioned man from fermented clay dried tinkling hard (A.Hijr 15:26).
It is He who created man from water (Al-Furqan
25:54).
Then Dr.Ahmad Afzal mentioned the fossil
record of bipedal human like forms
Australopithecines, (approximately 3-6
million years old),
Homo
hobilis,
Homo
erectus (Java Man and Peking man belong to
this group)
Homo
sapiens
neanderthalenisis and finally
Homo
sapiens sapiens
(Modern Man). The fossils of this last mentioned form are as old as
35000 (According to some, biologists 50000 – 100,000). It must be noted
that although there is no general agreement regarding the precise
relation ship between modern Man and the various man-like forms
mentioned above, a number of anthropogical and biochemical studies have
pointed the emergence of all present day humans from a small group of
individuals, perhaps some where in the middle East. It is supposed that
their descendants soon migrated to various continents and adopted to
their different environments and climatic conditions leading to the
variations in the skeletal, muscular, and other details of different
races. (16)
Dr.Ahmed Afzal (and similarly Dr.Israr
Ahmed) is inclined to believe that when the process of biological
evolution reached its goal and the final form of man appeared on earth,
Almighty Allah selected a single pair – a male and female – and endowed
them with their spiritual souls. It is not entirely in conceivable that
all other members of this species died and became extinct and that all
of us are, therefore, descendants of this, primordial human pair, Adam
and Eve, as alluded to in the Quran (Al-Hujrat 49:13). The Quran,
however, gives no clue as to when this happened. (17)
Now the modern scientific findings also
confirm that all human beings of today are the descendants of a single
pair, “because the Mitocheridrial DNA in each living human being can be
traced back to a single female, who lived in Africa or Asia some 100,000
years ago”. (18)
The Quran declared this fact 14
centuries ago.
O mankind! Reverence your Lord, who
created you from a single soul, and He created there of his mate and
from them twains, He spread countless men and women. (Al-Quran 4:1)
In another verse Almighty Allah
Proclaims:
(Allah
is the one God) who made all things He created excellent; and He began
the creation of man from clay. Then He made his offspring from the
extract of base fluid; then He fashioned and breathed into him of His
Spirit; and gave you hearing and sight and the faculty of inferring. And
yet how little are the thanks you offer! Qaliluma ma Tashkuroon
(Al-Quran, 32:7-9)
REFERENCES
1. Wahiduddin
Khan:
God
Arising, Evidence of God in Nature and in Science
(New Delhi: Goodword Books, 1999), p.182
2. Dr.
Muzaffar Iqbal:
Biological Origins: Traditional and contemporary perspectives,
p.33. This paper was
presented at an International conference on God, Life and Cosmos:
Theistic Perspectives held – November 6-9, 2000, Islamabad.
3. Harun
Yahya:
Evolution Deceit
(London: Ta-Ha Publishers, I Wynne Road, 1999), p.1
4. Ibid,
pp.29-30
5. F.
Schuon:
From
the Divine to the Human, (Bloomington, Ind:
Word Wisdom Books, 1982), p.88 and F.Schuon’s book
Roots
of the Human Condition (Bloomington Ind.
1991), p.5 both quoted in John Herlihy’s book
Modern Man at the Crossroads
(Lahore: Suhail Academy, 1999), p.93
6. S.
H. Nasr:
The
Need for a Sacred Science (NY: Albany
Sunny Press, 1993), p.156, Quoted in
Modern Man at Crossroads,
p.94
7. Dr.
Muzaffar Iqbal’s paper op.cit, p.30
8. Ibid,
p.31, and for details of Isfahani’s and other Muslims’ views, please see
Adel A. Ziadat’s book”Western
Science in the Arab World” :
The
impact of Darwinism,
(London, The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1986), pp.84-122
9. Inayatullah
Khan Al-Mashriqi:
Tazkira (Amritsar: Idaratul
Ishayat-lil-Tazkirah, 1924),
Muqaddima, pp.1-41
and for English version of that syyed shabbir Hussain (ed): Quran and
Evolution (Islamabad: EI-Mashriqi Foundation, 1987), pp.30-75
10. Dr.
Mohammad Iqbal:
The
Reconstruction of Religios Thought in Islam,
ed. By M. Saeed Sheikh, (Lahore: Iqbal Academy and Institute of Islamic
Culture, 1986), p.33
11.
Ibid, pp.33-34
12.
Dr. Hamidullah:
The
Emergence of Islam,
Lectures on the Development of Islamic world-view, intellectual
Tradition and
Polity (Islamabad:
Islamic Research Institute, 1993), pp.143-144 quoted in Dr. Muzaffar
Iqbal’s paper, op.cit, pp.39-42
13.
Dr. Muzaffar Iqbal, op.cit. p.42
14.
Dr. Absar Ahmed:
Religion and Science (editorial)
The Quranic Horizons
1:3, 1996 (Lahore: The Quran Academy), p.11
15.
Dr. Ahmed Afzal:
“Quran and Human Evolution” in the
Quranic Horizons,
1:3, 1996, pp.50-51
16.
Ibid, p.53
17.
Ibid., for details also study, Dr. Absar Ahmad’s
Article:
Creation and Evolution in the Quranic Perspectives
in this issue.
18. John
Herlihy:
Modern Man at the Crossroads: The search for the Knowledge of first
origins and final ends,
(Lahore: Suhail Academy, 1999), p.49
Assistant Professor of Zoology, Govt. Post Graduate
College, Mansehra, NWFP, Pakistan.
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