Iqbal's Apocrypha II

Qur'anic Evolution: A Substitute Hypothesis to Parallelize Evolution with Creationism

(Please read Iqbal's Apocrypha, my original article, before reading this one)

Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938)

    In the beginning, there was nothing. Then God uttered a single word "kun (Be)" and the entire universe was formed. This is how Qur'an introduces the historical origins of the galactic systems. Bible and Qur'an are supposed to give rise to the idea that everything was created spontaneously in a matter of six days. Both scriptures unanimously verify that it took God a labor of six periods of time to build the gigantic structure of heavens and the earth. Thus, many Christians and Muslims believe in creationism i.e. doctrine that life on earth was brought by God in the form as it is seen today. Hence, all the birds, animals and insects that live on this planet looked the same in the past. As for Jews and Christians, this past does not exceed sixty centuries i.e. Hebrew calendar dates Adam's birth an exact 5778 lunar years ago. According to them, mankind, planets and not even the universe existed before that because that was the time when God decided to have something created for His pleasure. Hallelujah!

    When all living beings have been living with the same body form since the first Jewish year then why humans should be any exception? Yep, the first human on earth looked just like any man you can spot on your street. The first man walked on earth 5778-5779 lunar years ago and he was created by God individually. He was Adam and his wife was Eve. He had no parents, neither had she. All the human beings are the descendants of Adam. But that's not the completion of the chronicles of our ancestral origins. No, sir! Some 1661 years after the birth of the first man, God deluged the planet and saved Noah with his family. After the Flood (approximately 2386 BC), Noah became the ancestor to all human beings who are alive today because only he had survived the worldwide tragedy, that global water epidemic. Muslim historians have imitated the Judeo-Christian narrative of the Flood as well and have explained that only eighty people survived the God's judgement who later colonized Sauq Thamanayn (Village of the Eighty) with Noah being the Second Father of the Man.

My People will do everything the Judeo-Christians have done before; even if they will squeeze into an anthill, my people will follow them into it.

(Muhammad)

    The events of the Fall and the Flood can be traced back - as I have written in my previous article regarding Dr. Muhammad Iqbal's un-Islamic and secularist view of Qur'anic narrative of the Genesis story - to the Sumerians. Utnapishtim was a fictional character who appears in the epic of Gilgamesh. He can be noted for his striking similarities with the biblical Noah. Then there is the story of Manu whom the Hindu deity Vishnu protects during a great storm by transforming into a whale, one of his ten avatars. Even the romance of Joseph (Yusuf in Qur'an) has similarities with the ancient Egyptian chronicle of the Two Brothers. Freud had also proposed that the entire notion of monotheism was borrowed by Jews from the legendary Pharaoh Akhenaten.

    Whatever the sources for the Fall narrative may be, the story stands at extreme odds with modern scientific (biological and astrophysical) discoveries which prove that the universe is fourteen billion years old, the earth was formed around ten billion years after that, life began in water with a single cell that later evolved into all the species we have on this planet and human beings existed on earth more than hundreds of thousands years ago. There are proofs of people (and here I mean members of the genus homo) living during the last hundred thousand years. They used to live in caves, paint on their walls, hunt down animals with artificial tools and had developed religious leanings. Civilization began with homo sapeins around ten thousand years ago. Thirty centuries before Jesus, India, Egypt and Iraq had become cradles of human learning and culture. As a summary, I will say that human beings and chimpanzees are related to each other as they evolved from a shared ancestor. This, my dear readers, is called evolution - it doesn't mean our ancestors were monkeys - and it is a hardcore scientific truth denying which is similar to the denial of heliocentric model of the solar system.

    Then what about Bible and Qur'an? How can we explain what the revealed religion tells us about the origins of the mankind? If there is no concept of the first men, how can we even believe in a certain person called Adam who was created individually by God? Should we resort to what Iqbal preached in his lectures that Adam was not an individual rather represents an era in human history, the era of awakening of civilization? Or should we totally reject the story of Adam and falsify everything Bible and Qur'an teaches us? That we can do but only after we leave the fold of our respective religions. So my purpose is to stand by my scripture, Qur'an, and merge its "creationist approach" (the term is in inverted comas because I doubt I have used the right word to describe a scientifically-accurate book) with the theory of evolution because, as a firm believer, I cannot reject the narrative of Adam or fool myself into believing it to be a moral story like Iqbal did, and, as a student of science, I also cannot sin against my God by mocking the theory of evolution that is an affirmed belief. God forbids us from uttering blasphemy against His word. His word is truth. Thus, denying truth is akin to denying His word. May God save us all from falsehood!

    First of all, the belief that God created the universe in six days has been disputed by some modern Islamic scholars. Following in the footsteps of Dr. Maurice Bucaille, the esteemed French author of La Bible, Le Coran et La Science, he has proposed that Qur'anic six days meant six periods of creation and not the biblical concept of six pairs of morning and evening. Qur'an, on many locations, has opposed Bible. For instance, at one point, Qur'an states that God created the universe in six days and wearisome didn't even touch Him; being a direct attack on Genesis where Jehovah is said to have rested on the seventh day, the day of Sabbath. But, as the differences between Bible and Qur'an is not my subject, I shall move on.

    It must be noted that, when Qur'an says that God created the universe is six days, no Muslim should assume that the process of creation was spontaneous. When God said "Be", He initiated the process of creation. It took fourteen billion years to reach this level. Evolution is everywhere, O believers, you just have to observe carefully! A child does not fall from the heavens in his mother's lap. The process of his birth takes many steps, beginning from a drop of semen (something Qur'an points out at so many points that man was nothing but sperm) and finishing after nine months when a woman acquires the status of a mother. A human being does not become an active member of society just after that. First, he learns as an infant, grows up to become a young active guy and then grows old. This too has been mentioned by Qur'an that man has many stages ("Thumma Radadnahu Asfala Safilin"). Thus, if everything around us happens in stages, why does it come to us as a surprise when someone tells us that mankind itself was created in stages, beginning from a unicellular organism in oceans and ending with homo sapiens' victory as the sole surviving member of the genus homo?

    Evolution has many proofs in our daily life. Mosquitoes! Antibiotics! The entire science behind vaccination! What else do you need, O Muslim, to comprehend this beautiful truth of your Lord, which is evolution? Mosquitoes and bacteria get immunized from the pesticides and antibiotics we use against them so we have to create new medicine against them? New diseases emerge after we defeat the old ones. The concept of vaccination is this that you actually insert some of that disease you are afraid of in your blood stream so your blood learns to fight it and then you can never pick that disease again. So the best way to ward polio off your children is to have him some polio serum. So evolution is the truth of mankind. There are myths regarding evolution. One myth states that man was chimp in the beginning. No, that is stupid. Man and chimps were one in the beginning, that is what evolution says. So if you are trying to win by saying, "If Darwin was right, why haven't all monkeys turned into humans yet?", you must know that this is 100% false. By the way, Darwin was not the pioneer of this theory. Lamarck first proposed it. Darwin found proofs for it and even he was hesitant to openly call mankind a cousin of monkey tribe. It was his student, if my memory is correct, who actively stated that we all have evolved from the same animal who once served as the father of all great apes.

Evolution is a scientific deserved to be embraced rather than mocked

    Now for you hypothesis which is merely simple: Isn't it possible that Adam and Eve were created by God and sent down on earth to live with neanderthals or other members of the genus homo? Then Adam and Eve could have had their children copulate with those species and that's how we could have gotten the entire humanity. Lame, eh? What else were you expecting? Again, it is just a crazy theory I developed after I had finished reading my copy of Dan Brown's Origin after which I was inspired to stop opposing evolution and admit its truth.

    I hope you all agree with me that we should stop this nonsense of opposing accurate scientific truths. Just look at what we did with Galileo. He opposed the geocentric solar system and we nearly executed him when he was right all along. We had flat-earthers (we still have) and people who claimed a cow or a turtle was lifting the entire planet. We had idiots who killed thousands of innocent women thinking they were witches. We had morons who thought all diseases were the creation of the Jewish race. We had lunatics who actually tried to kill an Indian scholar for translating Qur'an into Persian. Will any Muslim try to kill another one jus because he has translated Qur'an? Of course not! Then why did people try to do that in the past? It's because man evolved. He first acts rash and stupid but then embraces the truth because God has created every single man on the nature of Islam.

Every child is born on the nature (of Islam) and then his parents make him either a Jew or a Christian.

(Muhammad)

May God bless these scientists for they try to discover His truth!