Author: Ophelia Benson

The anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed that in the 1930s, when she was busy remaking the idea of culture, the notion of cultural diversity was to be found only in the ‘vocabulary of a small and technical group of professional anthropologists’. Today, everyone and everything seems to have its own culture. From anorexia to zydeco, the American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has observed, there is little that we don’t talk about as the product of some group’s culture. In this age of globalisation many people fret about Western culture taking over the world. But the greatest Western export is not Disney or McDonalds or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of culture. Every island in the Pacific, every tribe in the Amazon, has its own culture that it wants to defend against the depredation of Western cultural imperialism. You do not even have to be human to possess a culture. Primatologists tell us that different groups of chimpanzees each has its own culture. No doubt some chimp will soon complain that their traditions are disappearing under the steamroller of human cultural imperialism.

We’re All Multiculturalists Now observed the American academic, and former critic of pluralism, Nathan Glazer in the title of a book. And indeed we are. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics – these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook and as the foundation of modern liberal democracies. Ironically, culture has captured the popular imagination just as anthropologists themselves have started worrying about the very concept. After all, what exactly is a culture? What marks its boundaries? In what way is a 16-year old British born boy of Pakistani origin living in Bradford of the same culture as a 50-year old man living in Lahore? Does a 16-year white boy from Bradford have more in common culturally with his 50-year-old father than with that 16-year old ‘Asian’? Such questions have led most anthropologists today to reject the idea of cultures as fixed, bounded entities. Some reject the very idea of culture as meaningless. ‘Religious beliefs, rituals, knowledge, moral values, the arts, rhetorical genres, and so on’, the British anthropologist Adam Kuper suggests, ‘should be separated out from each other rather than bound together into a single bundle labelled culture’. ‘To understand culture’, he concludes, ‘we must first deconstruct it.

Whatever the doubts of anthropologists, politicians and political philosophers press on regardless. The idea of culture, and especially of multiculturalism, has proved politically too seductive. Over the past two decades, nations such as Australia, Canada and South Africa have created legal frameworks to institutionalise their existence as multicultural societies. Other countries such as Britain have no formal recognition of their multicultural status but have nevertheless pursued pluralist policies in a pragmatic fashion. Even France, whose Republican tradition might seem to be the nemesis of multiculturalism, has flirted with pluralist policies. In 1986 the College de France presented the President with a report entitled ‘Proposals for the Education of the Future’. The first of ten principles to which modern schools should subscribe was ‘The unity of science and the plurality of cultures’: ‘A carefully fabricated system of education must be able to integrate the universalism inherent in scientific thought with the relativism of the social sciences, that is with disciplines attentive to the significance of cultural differences among people and to the ways people live, think and feel.’

‘There is a certain way of being human that is my way’, wrote the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his much discussed essay on ‘The Politics of Recognition’. ‘I am called upon to live my life in this way… Being true to myself means being true to my own originality’. This sense of being ‘true to myself’ Taylor calls ‘the ideal of “authenticity”’. The ideal of the authentic self finds its origins in the Romantic notion of the inner voice that expressed a person’s true nature. The concept was developed in the 1950s by psychologists such as Erik Erikson and sociologists like Alvin Gouldner into the modern notion of identity. Identity, they pointed out, is not just a private matter but emerges in dialogue with others.

Increasingly identity came to be seen not as something the self creates but as something through which the self is created. Identity is, in sociologist Stuart Hall’s words, ‘formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways in which we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surround us.’ The inner self, in other words, finds its home in the outer world by participating in a collective. But not just any collective. The world is comprised of countless groups – philosophers, truck drivers, football supporters, drinkers, train spotters, conservatives, communists and so on. According to the modern idea of identity, however, each person’s sense of who they truly are is intimately linked to only a few special categories – collectives defined by people’s gender, sexuality, religion, race and, in particular, culture. A Unesco-organised ‘World Conference on Cultural Policies’ concluded that ‘cultural identity… was at the core of individual and collective personality, the vital principle that underlay the most authentic decisions, behaviour and actions’.

The collectives that appear significant to the contemporary sense of identity comprise, of course, very different kinds of groups and the members of each are bound together by very different characteristics. Nevertheless, what collectives such as gender, sexuality, religion, race and culture all have in common is that each is defined by a set of attributes that, whether rooted in biology, faith or history, is fixed in a certain sense and compels people to act in particular ways. Identity is that which is given, whether by nature, God or one’s ancestors. ‘I am called upon to live my life in this way’. Who or what does the calling? Apparently the culture itself. Unlike politically defined collectives, these collectives are, in philosopher John Gray’s words, ‘ascriptive, not elective… a matter of fate, not choice.’ The collectives that are important to the contemporary notion of identity are, in other words, the modern equivalents of what Herder defined as volks. For individual identity to be authentic, so too must collective identity. ‘Just like individuals’, Charles Taylor writes, ‘a Volk should be true to itself, that is its own culture.’ To be true to itself, a culture must faithfully pursue the traditions that mark out that culture as unique and rebuff the advances of modernity, pragmatism and other cultures.

This view of culture and identity has transformed the way that many people understand the relationship between equality and difference. For the Enlightenment philosophes, equality required that the state should treat all citizens in the same fashion without regard to their race, religion or culture. This was at the heart of their arguments against the ancien regime and has been an important strand of liberal and radical thought ever since. For contemporary multiculturalists, on the other hand, people should be treated not equally despite their differences, but differently because of them. ‘Justice between groups’, as the political philosopher Will Kymlicka has put it, ‘requires that members of different groups are accorded different rights’.

An individual’s cultural background frames their identity and helps define who they are. If we want to treat individuals with dignity and respect, many multiculturalists argue, we must also treat with dignity and respect the groups that furnish them with their sense of personal being. ‘The liberal is in theory committed to equal respect for persons’, the philosopher Bhikhu Parekh argues. ‘Since human beings are culturally embedded, respect for them entails respect for their cultures and ways of life.’ The British sociologist Tariq Madood takes this line of argument to make a distinction between what he calls the ‘equality of individualism’ and ‘equality encompassing public ethnicity: equality as not having to hide or apologise for one’s origins, family or community, but requiring others to show respect for them, and adapt public attitudes and arrangements so that the heritage they represent is encouraged rather than contemptuously expect them to wither away.’ We cannot, in other words, treat individuals equally unless groups are also treated equally. And since, in the words of the American scholar Iris Young, ‘groups cannot be socially equal unless their specific experience, culture and social contributions are publicly affirmed and recognised’, so society must protect and nurture cultures, ensure their flourishing and indeed their survival.

One expression of such equal treatment is the growing tendency in some Western nations for religious law – such as the Jewish halakha and the Islamic sharia – to take precedence over national secular law in civil, and occasionally criminal, cases. Another expression can be found in Australia, where the courts increasingly accept that Aborigines should have the right to be treated according to their own customs rather than be judged by ‘whitefella law’. According to Colin McDonald, a Darwin barrister and expert in customary law, ‘Human rights are essentially a creation of the last hundred years. These people have been carrying out their law for thousands of years.’ Some multiculturalists go further, requiring the state to ensure the survival of cultures not just in the present but in perpetuity. Charles Taylor, for instance, suggests that the Canadian and Quebec governments should take steps to ensure the survival of the French language in Quebec ‘through indefinite future generations’.

The demand that because a cultural practice has existed for a long time, so it should be preserved – or, in Charles Taylor’s version, the demand that because I am doing X so my descendants, through ‘indefinite future generations’, must also do X – is a modern version of the naturalistic fallacy, the belief that ought derives from is. For nineteenth century social Darwinists, morality – how we ought to behave – derived from the facts of nature – how humans are. This became an argument to justify capitalist exploitation, colonial oppression, racial savagery and even genocide. Today, virtually everyone recognises the falsity of this argument. Yet, when talking of culture rather than of nature, many multiculturalists continue to insist that is defines ought.

In any case, there is something deeply inauthentic about the contemporary demand for authenticity. The kind of cultures that the Enlightenment philosophes wanted to consign to history were, in an important sense, different from the cultures that today’s multiculturalists wish to preserve. In the premodern world there was no sense of cultural integrity or authenticity. There were no alternatives to the ways of life that people followed. Cultures were traditional but in an unselfconscious fashion. Those who lived in such cultures were not aware of their difference, let alone that they should value it or claim it as a right. A French peasant attended Church, an American Indian warrior painted his face not because they thought ‘This is my culture, I must preserve it’ but for pragmatic reasons. As the political philosopher Brian Barry suggests, in the absence of some compelling reason for doing things differently, people went on doing them in the same way as they had in the past. Cultural inertia, in other words, preserved traditional ways because it was the easiest way to organise collective life.

Multiculturalists, on the other hand, exhibit a self-conscious desire to preserve cultures. Such ‘self-consciousness traditionalism’, as Brian Barry calls it, is a peculiarly modern, post-Enlightenment phenomenon. In the modern view, traditions are to be preserved not for pragmatic reasons but because such preservation is a social, political and moral good. Maintaining the integrity of a culture binds societies together, lessens social dislocation and allows the individuals who belong to that culture to flourish. Such individuals can thrive only if they stay true to their culture – in other words, only if both the individual and the culture remains authentic.

Modern multiculturalism seeks self-consciously to yoke people to their identity for their own good, the good of that culture and the good of society. A clear example is the attempt by the Quebecois authorities to protect French culture. The Quebec government has passed laws which forbid French speakers and immigrants to send their children to English-language schools; compel businesses with more than fifty employees to be run in French; and ban English commercial signs. So, if your ancestors were French you, too, must by government fiat speak French whatever your personal wishes may be. Charles Taylor regards this as acceptable because the flourishing and survival of French culture is a good. ‘It is not just a matter of having the French language available for those who might choose it’, he argues. Quebec is ‘making sure that there is a community of people here in the future that will want to avail itself of the opportunity to use the French language.’ Its policies ‘actively seek to create members of the community… assuring that future generations continue to identify as French-speakers.’

An identity has become a bit like a private club. Once you join up, you have to abide by the rules. But unlike the Groucho or the Garrick it’s a private club you must join. Being black or gay, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests, requires one to follow certain ‘life-scripts’ because ‘Demanding respect for people as blacks and gays can go along with notably rigid strictures as to how one is to be an African American or a person with same-sex desires.’ There will be ‘proper modes of being black and gay: there will be demands that are made; expectations to be met; battle lines to be drawn.’ It is at this point, Appiah suggests, that ‘someone who takes autonomy seriously may worry whether we have replaced one kind of tyranny with another.’ An identity is supposed to be an expression of an individual’s authentic self. But it can too often seem like the denial of individual agency in the name of cultural authenticity.

‘It is in the interest of every person to be fully integrated in a cultural group’, Joseph Raz has written. But what is to be fully integrated? If a Muslim woman rejects sharia law, is she demonstrating her lack of integration? What about a Jew who doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of the Jewish State? Or a French Quebecois who speaks only English? Would Galileo have challenged the authority of the Church if he had been ‘fully integrated’ into his culture? Or Thomas Paine have supported the French Revolution? Or Salman Rushdie written The Satanic Verses? Cultures only change, societies only move forwards because many people, in Kwame Appiah’s words, ‘actively resist being fully integrated into a group’. To them ‘integration can sound like regulation, even restraint’. Far from giving voice to the voiceless, in other words, the politics of difference appears to undermine individual autonomy, reduce liberty and enforce conformity. You will speak French, you will act gay, don’t rock the cultural boat. The alternatives, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut suggests, are simple: ‘Either people have rights or they have uniforms; either they can legitimately free themselves from oppression… or else their culture has the last word.’

Part of the problem is a constant slippage in multiculturalism talk between the idea of humans as culture-bearing creatures with the idea that humans have to bear a particular culture. Clearly no human can live outside of culture. But then no human does. ‘It’s not easy to imagine a person, or people, bereft of culture’, observes Kwame Appiah. ‘The problem with grand claims for the necessity of culture’, he adds, ‘is that we can’t readily imagine an alternative. It’s like form: you can’t not have it.’ Culture, in other words, is like oxygen: no living human can do without it, but no living human does.

To say that no human can live outside of culture is not to say they have to live inside a particular one. Nor is it to say that particular cultures must be fixed or eternal. To view humans as culture-bearing is to view them as social beings, and hence as transformative beings. It suggests that humans have the capacity for change, for progress, and for the creation of universal moral and political forms through reason and dialogue. To view humans as having to bear specific cultures is, on the contrary, to deny such a capacity for transformation. It suggests that every human being is so shaped by a particular culture that to change or undermine that culture would be to undermine the very dignity of that individual. It suggests that the biological fact of, say, Jewish or Bangladeshi ancestry somehow make a human being incapable of living well except as a participant of Jewish or Bangladeshi culture. This would only make sense if Jews or Bangladeshis were biologically distinct – in other words if cultural identity was really about racial difference.

The relationship between cultural identity and racial difference becomes even clearer if we look at the argument that cultures must be protected and preserved. If a ‘culture is decaying’, the sociologists Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz argue, then ‘the options and opportunities open to its members will shrink, become less attractive, and their pursuit less likely to be successful.’ So society must step in to prevent such decay. Will Kymlicka similarly argues that since cultures are essential to peoples’ lives, so where ‘the survival of a culture is not guaranteed, and, where it is threatened with debasement or decay, we must act to protect it.’ For Charles Taylor, once ‘we’re concerned with identity’, nothing ‘is more legitimate than one’s aspiration that it is never lost’. Hence a culture needs to be protected not just in the here and now but through ‘indefinite future generations’.

A century ago intellectuals worried about the degeneration of the race. Today we fear cultural decay. Is the notion of cultural decay any more coherent than that of racial degeneration? Cultures certainly change and develop. But what does it mean for a culture to decay? Or for an identity to be lost? Will Kymlicka draws a distinction between the ‘existence of a culture’ and ‘its “character” at any given moment’. The character of culture can change but such changes are only acceptable if the existence of that culture is not threatened. But how can a culture exist if that existence is not embodied in its character? By ‘character’ Kymlicka seems to mean the actuality of a culture: what people do, how they live their lives, the rules and regulations and institutions that frame their existence. So, in making the distinction between character and existence, Kymlicka seems to be suggesting that Jewish, Navajo or French culture is not defined by what Jewish, Navajo or French people are actually doing. For if Jewish culture is simply that which Jewish people do or French culture is simply that which French people do, then cultures could never decay or perish – they would always exist in the activities of people.

So, if a culture is not defined by what its members are doing, what does define it? The only answer can be that it is defined by what its members should be doing. The African American writer Richard Wright described one of his finest creations Bigger Thomas, the hero of Native Son, as a man ‘bereft of a culture’. The Negro, Wright suggested, ‘possessed a rich and complex culture when he was brought to these alien shores’. But that culture was ‘taken from him’. Bigger Thomas’ ancestors had been enslaved. In the process of enslavement they had been torn from their ancestral homes, and forcibly deprived of the practices and institutions that they understood as their culture. Hence Bigger Thomas, and every black American, behaved very differently from his ancestors. Slavery was an abomination and clearly had a catastrophic impact on black Americans. But however inhuman the treatment of slaves and however deep its impact on black American life, why should this amount to a descendant of slaves being ‘bereft of a culture’ or having a culture ‘taken from him’? This can only be if we believe that Bigger Thomas should be behaving in certain ways that he isn’t, the ways that his ancestors used to behave. In other words, if we believe that what defines what you should be doing is the fact that your ancestors were doing it. Culture here has become defined by biological descent. And biological descent is a polite way of saying ‘race’. As the cultural critic Walter Benn Michaels puts it, ‘In order for a culture to be lost… it must be separable from one’s actual behaviour, and in order for it to be separable from one’s actual behaviour it must be anchorable in race.’

The logic of the preservationist argument is that every culture has a pristine form, its original state. It decays when it is not longer in that form. Like racial scientists with their idea of racial type, some modern multiculturalists appear to hold a belief in cultural type. For racial scientists, a ‘type’ was a group of human beings linked by a set of fundamental characteristics which were unique to it. Each type was separated from others by a sharp discontinuity; there was rarely any doubt as to which type an individual belonged. Each type remained constant through time. There were severe limits to how much any member of a type could drift away from the fundamental ground plan by which the type was constituted. These, of course, are the very characteristics that constitute a culture in much of today’s multiculturalism talk. Many multiculturalists, like racial scientists, have come to think of human types as fixed, unchanging entities, each defined by its special essence.

Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. His new book is Strange Fruit: Why both sides in the race debate are wrong (Oneworld, 2008), from which this article is taken.

Introduction

In 1976, a book was published which claimed that the Quran “..does not contain a single statement that is assailable from a modern scientific point of view”. The book: ‘The Bible, the Quran and Science’ [1] had been written by a French doctor, Maurice Bucaille, who became interested in Islam after he was appointed family physician to King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. In the early chapters, Bucaille proclaims articulately, enthusiastically and with apparent sincerity that the scientific accuracy of the Quran is such that “I could not find a single error…“ and that “…there can be no human explanation” for its contents.

Such a claim was not new. Something similar had been expressed in the 13th century by the Islamic scholar Al-Qurtubi (see e.g. [2]), but here was an educated Western non-Muslim putting forward a detailed and, seemingly, carefully argued case that, more than 700 years after Al-Qurtubi, the science in the Quran still stood up to scrutiny. To the Islamic world, frustrated by centuries of failure to convince the non-Muslim world that the Quran was miraculous, the book was enthusiastically received. It became a best seller and its existence fuelled the growth of the ‘Science in the Quran’ movement, a movement which is supported today by the enthusiasm of countless individuals on the internet, each endeavouring to push the claim even further and to publicise new ‘discoveries’ of scientific predictions in the Quran’s enigmatic verses.

As summarised above, the book itself does not make a feature of claiming that the Quran contains new information. It mostly promotes only the weaker claim that there is no contradiction between the Quran and modern science and so falls short of the claims of Bucaille’s many successors. Nevertheless, it is perhaps a surprise that such a claim can be made at all for a book nearly 1400 years old, so it is worth attempting to determine how at least the illusion of scientific compatibility came about. This article therefore presents a brief review of Bucaille’s approach and an assessment of selected Quranic statements. It is by no means the first critique of Bucaille’s work (e.g. [3,4]), but has been compiled without reference to previous reviews, so the thoughts below are at least original, if not particularly profound. This review also discusses the evidence in the book for Bucaille’s guilty secret, of which more later.

Water

The Quran contains many statements urging people to be grateful to (or fearful of) the Biblical God (‘God’) for various natural phenomena. Not surprisingly, given the desert location of Mecca and Medina, where Islam began, the Quran emphasises the importance of water in such verses as (Q39:21) (i.e. Quran, Sura (Chapter) 39, Verse 21):

“Have you not seen that God sent water down from the sky and led it through sources into the ground? Then He caused sown fields of different colours to grow.”

and (Q50:9-11):

“We sent down from the sky blessed water whereby We caused to grow gardens, grains for harvest, tall palm-trees with their spathes…”

with further references in (Q23:18,19), (Q36:34) and (Q56:68-70). It is evident that such verses remain true by being expressed as straightforward qualitative observational statements. Bucaille nevertheless contends that the work of a mere mortal would inevitably reveal errors, but that

“In the passages from the Quran, there is no trace of the mistaken ideas [concerning the water cycle] that were current at the time of Muhammad”

Nevertheless, consider the following:

(Q25:53)”(God) is the One Who has let free the two seas, one is agreeable and sweet, the other salty and bitter. He placed a barrier between them, a partition that it is forbidden to pass.”

(Q55:19) “He has loosed the two seas. They meet together. Between them there is a barrier which they do not transgress.”

The two verses, taken together, show that the ‘two seas’ refers to bodies of fresh and of salt water. Although the first of the verses suggests that the ‘barrier’ may refer to the land, the second shows that this is not so: it is located where the two seas ‘meet together’. Bucaille interprets this meeting as taking place at the mouths of rivers, a view that is consistent with the translations of Shakir, Yusufali and Sarwar [5]. However, what point is being made by the verses? It is surely noting the singular fact that the sea does not turn the rivers salty, nor do the rivers turn the sea fresh.

However, there is neither a physical nor a virtual barrier. The fresh water mixes fully with the sea and the status quo is maintained only because a similar quantity evaporates from the sea and falls as rain upstream. Therefore, the statement that a barrier exists is simply incorrect and disproves, if further disproof were needed, the notion that the Quran was authored by an all-knowing deity. In addition, Bucaille’s favourite get-out argument: that God adjusted his descriptions so as to be comprehensible to 7th century Arabs, is particularly inapplicable in this case, for there were then, as there are now, no rivers (at least, no permanent ones) in Arabia. Most of Muhammad’s compatriots must therefore have been mystified by the reference to the ‘two seas’.

The lack of Arabian rivers explains why the description of the ‘two seas’ is so muddled for, surely, even an unschooled river-bank dweller would realise that the separation between fresh and salt waters exists because of the continuous downstream flow. Muhammad’s meagre knowledge must therefore have been based entirely on hearsay from travellers familiar with (for example) the huge deltas of major rivers such as the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates. The Quran therefore does not demonstrate scientific knowledge of the water cycle; quite the opposite: it demonstrates nothing but a naive ignorance, an ignorance consistent with its authorship by an uneducated 7th century desert-dweller.

The sky

Though never unambiguously stating that the earth is flat, the Quran adopts a conventional pre-scientific geocentric stance and fails to distinguish adequately between ‘Heaven’ (where God is alleged to reside) and ‘the Heavens’ (space), so that a cryptic verse can be proclaimed as ‘scientific’ if it possesses an oblique resemblance to some finding within astronomy or cosmology, yet remain unassailable as ‘theology’ if it does not.

On many occasions in his book, Maurice Bucaille displays considerable inventiveness in perceiving the poetic imagery of the Quran as divine wisdom, but this inventiveness reaches its peak in the chapters dealing with ‘the Heavens’. A number of verses are helped along by scientific-sounding translations, such as that of the sun and the moon ‘travelling in an orbit’ where the Arberry translation refers to them as ‘swimming in the sky’ (Q21:33) which, incidentally, the Quran verses below imply is some sort of physical object:

(Q22:65) “(God) holds back the sky from falling on the earth unless by His leave . . .”

(Q13:2) “God is He who raised up the heavens without pillars you can see…”

As stated above, Bucaille takes the view that God expressed his concepts within the limited vocabulary of 7th Century Arabia and that therefore these concepts can now be freed from these constraints by means of the replacement of the original vocabulary by modern scientific terminology. This is a highly dubious process, and not just from a secular point of view. The idea that God was somehow prevented from expressing himself properly does not seem compatible with the Islamic notions that the Quran is perfect and that God is unlimited in his power. Furthermore, since (according to Islam) God chose both the time and the place for his revelation, it seems somewhat insolent to imply that this choice impaired the effectiveness of what he had to say. From the non-Islamic perspective, the manipulation of the wording in this way just looks like cheating.

In addition to giving God a helping hand with the terminology, Bucaille makes the most extraordinary interpretations of some fairly vague statements, such as:

(Q31:29) “Have you not seen how God merges the night into the day and merges the day into the night?”

(Q39:5) “. . . He coils the night upon the day and He coils the day upon the night.”

Bucaille states, obscurely: “This process of perpetual coiling, including the interpenetration of one sector by another is expressed in the Quran just as if the concept of the Earth’s roundness had already been conceived at the time-which was obviously not the case”. The statement, in addition to being largely incomprehensible, fails to note that the likelihood that the earth was a sphere had been appreciated for centuries. Eratosthenes (276 – 194 BC) had even made a remarkably accurate estimate of its diameter.

Sura 15, verses 14 and 15, speak of the unbelievers in Mecca:

“Even if We opened unto them a gate to Heaven and they were to continue ascending therein, they would say ‘Our sight is confused as in drunkenness. Nay, we are people bewitched.’”

The verse clearly says only that unbelievers would not recognise Heaven even if it was right in front of them. Bucaille, however, states that “It describes the human reactions to the unexpected spectacle that travellers in space will see”.

Of course, the author of the Quran is not to blame for Bucaille’s over-active imagination. However, Sura 36 contains verses which reveal the primitive level of understanding underlying them. Verse 38 states:

“The Sun runs its course to a settled place. This is the decree of the All Mighty, the Full of Knowledge.”

and Bucaille comments: “’Settled place’ is the translation of the word ‘mustaqarr’ and there can be no doubt that the idea of an exact place is attached to it”. The following recollection in the Bukhari Hadiths, along with the passage quoted above, suggest that Muhammad remained in complete ignorance about the true nature of the solar system:

(B9:93:520) “I entered the mosque while Allah’s Apostle was sitting there. When the sun had set, the Prophet said, ‘O Abu Dharr! Do you know where this (sun) goes?’ I said, ‘Allah and His Apostle know best.’ He said, ‘It goes and asks permission to prostrate, and it is allowed, and (one day) it, as if being ordered to return whence it came, then it will rise from the west’”

In discussing the following verse, Bucaille misses a most significant error:

(Q36:40) “The sun must not catch up the moon, nor does the night outstrip the day….”

Since the moon, along with the earth, orbits the sun, it is meaningless to speak of the sun actually ‘catching up’ with the moon, so the verse must refer to the apparent motion of the sun’s and moon’s disks across the sky. Because the moon orbits the earth in the same direction as the earth spins, its apparent speed across the sky is slightly less than that of the sun. The result is that the sun’s disk does indeed catch up and overtake that of the moon, an occurrence which can be clearly seen in sequences of photographs of a solar eclipse, of which there are a number of excellent examples on the internet. Furthermore, the sun overtakes the moon not just during eclipses (when they happen to line up with the Earth), but once a month, resulting in the familiar phenomenon of the new moon.

The wording of (Q36:40) is sufficiently clear and unambiguous that no significant difference exists between the various English translations. Its meaning is, therefore, exactly as it appears. Even if, by some creative interpretation of the original Arabic, it could be argued that some other meaning than that suggested above was intended, it is evident that the suspicion raised by the dubious way that the verse is expressed is trivially avoidable. Had the first part been expressed as “The moon must not catch up the sun”, the astronomical interpretation would have been correct. Had it been omitted altogether, nothing would have been lost. To include it was the author’s decision and therefore the author’s error. Again, provincial ignorance, not divine knowledge, is evident in the verse.

In addition to the remarks made above, it appears that the wording of the second part of the extract from (Q36:40): ‘..nor does the night outstrip the day..’ is superfluous. The following verse suggests a possible reason for its inclusion: that the author does not quite grasp the underlying causes of light and darkness:

(Q25:45,46) “Have you not seen how thy Lord has spread the shade. If He willed, He could have made it stationary. Moreover We made the sun its guide and We withdraw it towards Us easily.”

As a final observation: for a man selected to receive communications from God, Muhammad had a remarkably unsophisticated attitude to the harmless appearance of a solar eclipse. One of the Bukhari Hadiths (B1:8:423) reports that:

“The sun eclipsed and Allah’s Apostle offered the eclipse prayer and said, ‘I have been shown the Hellfire (now) and I never saw a worse and horrible sight than the sight I have seen today.’”

The earth

As with the verses dealing with the sky and the water cycle, those mentioning the earth reflect an almost total lack of any understanding of natural processes. For example, the following verse tells us that valleys came before rivers, rather than the other way around:

(Q27:61) “He Who made the earth an abode and set rivers in its interstices and mountains standing firm….”

In fact, the Quran is rather keen to emphasise the ‘stability’ of mountains, for example:

(Q79:30-33) “After that (God) spread the earth out. Therefrom He drew out its water and its pasture. And the mountains He has firmly fixed….”

with similar sentiments expressed in (Q16:15), (Q21:31) (27:61) and (Q31:10). Bucaille, who is outside his field of expertise, asserts the following:

“These verses express the idea that the way the mountains are laid out ensures stability and is in complete agreement with geological data.”

Strangely, given the appearance of permanence that mountains provide, the opposite is true. Over geological timescales, mountains are transient things and symptoms of instability, rather than stability. They grow as a result of major crustal movement and, once the force giving rise to them has ceased to operate, they sink and erode. The Quran is even more in error when it becomes more specific:

(Q78:6,7) “Have We not made the earth an expanse and the mountains stakes.”

about which Bucaille says: “The stakes referred to are the ones used to anchor a tent in the ground”. The idea that mountains are like stakes, anchoring the earth’s surface to some sort of stable foundation, is an analogy which has probably never occurred to anyone with any knowledge of geology.

Biology

When Bucaille is within his intellectual comfort zone, he commits none of the howlers that he makes when dealing with astronomy or geology. However, he is forced to confront the realisation that some Quranic statements relating to mammal physiology appear to be complete nonsense. Bucaille then steps beyond the bounds of merely lending a helping hand to the vocabulary, to the point where he simply rejects the existing translations because the errors can no longer be ignored.

In the undoctored versions of the Quran, there is a strange description of the region where human sperm originates:

(Q86:5-7) “So let man consider of what he was created;
he was created of gushing water
issuing between the loins and the breast-bones” (Arberry translation)

There are considerable variations of detail in the English translations for the last verse:

“Proceeding from between the backbone and the ribs” (Yusufali)
”That issued from between the loins and ribs”. (Pickthal)
”Coming from between the back and the ribs.” (Shakir)

There is also an equally inaccurate verse concerning the biology of mammalian milk production:

(Q16:66) “And surely in the cattle there is a lesson for you; We give you to drink of what is in their bellies, between filth and blood, pure milk, sweet to drinkers” (Arberry)

“ from what is within their bodies between excretions and blood…” (Yusufali)
” of that which is in their bellies, from betwixt the refuse and the blood….. “ (Pickthal)
” of what is in their bellies–from betwixt the faeces and the blood….” (Shakir)
” between dregs and blood, which is in their bellies…” (Rodwell)

So, semen comes from between the backbone and the ribs and milk is formed in the bellies of cattle between faeces and blood, whatever that means. Bucaille now takes a step beyond the already dubious process of ‘modernising’ the Quran’s vocabulary. He now alters the sense of the text for no other reason than that it is wrong in its original form, expressing it as

“ of what is inside their bodies, coming from a conjunction between the contents of the intestine and the blood”

His justification for the alteration is that:

“These translations are the work of highly eminent Arabists. It is a well known fact however, that a translator, even an expert, is liable to make mistakes in the translation of scientific statements, unless he happens to be a specialist in the discipline in question….From a scientific point of view, physiological notions must be called upon to grasp the meaning of this verse”

whereas, in reality, they have been used to correct the verse. The translators, though not experts in the sciences, were in no worse a position than the millions of others who have tried to understand the Quran. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that what they expressed in their translations is pretty much what the Quran says.

Creatures

The Quran makes a number of dubious statements regarding the Earth’s animal life. For example:

(Q16:79) “Do they not look at the birds subjected in the atmosphere of the sky? None can hold them up (in His Power) except God.”

As with (Q36:40) above, all the translations say more or less the same thing, implying that there is no ambiguity in the original. The verse says that birds can fly only because God holds them up. Now, it is true that Muslims believe that all things happen by the ‘will of Allah’, so (Q16:79) could be interpreted as a purely theological statement. However, it looks suspiciously like the verse is drawing our attention to the evident ‘miracle’ of the flight of birds, which is attributed to God’s direct intervention rather than to the lift produced by the shape and motion of their wings. This again is a sign of human ignorance, rather than divine knowledge. Bucaille clearly also had difficulty with this verse since, in addition to the substitution of the scientific term ‘atmosphere’ instead of the mundane ‘air’, he feels it necessary to misdirect his readers by including an irrelevant discussion of the alternative ‘miracle’ of migration.

Not surprisingly, Bucaille fails to include in his book the following account of one of King Solomon’s expeditions with his army. Starting with (Q27:17)

“And his hosts were mustered to Solomon, jinn, men and birds, duly disposed…”

The verse therefore claims that (a) Solomon’s army contained a division of birds (b) it contained another division of the Arab folklore beings called jinn who, according to (Q55:15), were created by God from “..a smokeless fire”. Incidentally, the previous verse, (Q55:14), gives the following information on the origin of humans: “He created man of a clay like the potter’s”.

The question of the existence of jinn presents something of a problem for the modern Muslim. To assert that they exist not only flies in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary but also implies the remarkable coincidence that only the Arabs, out of all the Earth’s cultures, had managed to discern them prior to the delivery, also to the Arabs, of the Quran, where their existence was ‘confirmed’. It must be tempting to consider the alternative explanation that the Quran was composed by an Arab who had been brought up to believe in jinn. However, to deny their existence is to doubt the Quran, which entails apostasy ([6], Section o8.7): a capital offence. It is as if Irish law specified the death penalty for denying the existence of leprechauns.

The account of Solomon’s journey does not get any more plausible, because the next verse tells us that

“.. when they came on the Valley of Ants, an ant said, ‘Ants, enter your dwelling-places, lest Solomon and his hosts crush you, being unaware!’ “

Solomon understood the local ant dialect [7], though his response was rather dismissive:

“But he smiled, laughing at its words….”

and he proceeded to ignore the ant, and to concentrate instead on a rather edgy discussion with one of his birds (Q27:22 onwards).

The story of Solomon and the ant is an old Jewish legend [8]. Many of the Earth’s cultures have a variety of barmy folk tales but Islam is unusual in that, in effect, it stakes its life on its own stories being true. For if the account of Solomon and the ant is untrue, then the Quran contains errors and the whole basis of Islam is false. It is a heavy burden to place on the narrow shoulders of a talking ant.

Muslim apologists are uncertain regarding the appropriate interpretation of the ant story. Those who prefer a rational explanation suggest that the inhabitants of the valley were a tribe called the ‘Naml’ (Arabic for ‘ant’), thereby avoiding the embarrassment of having to defend an indefensible position. However, the original Jewish story does indeed concern an actual ant, as the phrase “..lest Solomon and his hosts crush you, being unaware” implies. Furthermore, the ‘Naml’ explanation does not adequately deal with the subsequent implausible account of the man-bird dialogue.

The more traditional explanations portray Solomon as a Bronze Age Dr. Dolittle, miraculously endowed with the ability to talk with creatures. Although such a claim is no more implausible than many others within this and other religions, it falls well short of explaining all the remarkable features of the story. Not only, according to the tale, did Solomon possess miraculous powers (including, presumably, very acute hearing), the ant itself achieved the feat of recognising Solomon from a distance and evidently already knew his name. Unless Solomon had previously dropped in for a chat from time to time, it is difficult to see how the ant could have come by this knowledge.

The ant story is not the only Jewish legend which the Quran repeats uncritically:

(Q29:14) “Indeed, We sent Noah to his people, and he tarried among them a thousand years, all but fifty…”

Remind us of your conclusion, Maurice. Ah yes:

“.. the Qur’an does not contain a single statement that is assailable from a modern scientific point of view”.

Dr. Bucaille’s guilty secret

There is a perception that Maurice Bucaille converted to Islam as a result of his studies and his book certainly encourages that view. However, is it true? In a 1992 interview with the online Islamic Bulletin [9], Bucailles himself states:

“I knew then [i.e. during his studies] that the Quran was the “Work of Allah” and had not been authored by any human being.”

However, when asked the straight question “Have you embraced Islam?”, Bucaille fails to give a straight answer. He first replies:

“..when God guided me to undertake a study of the Quran, my inner soul cried out that Al-Quran was the Word of God revealed to his Last Prophet Mohammed”

which looks almost, but not quite, like ‘yes’. However, he goes on to say

“About my faith and belief, God knows what is in one’s heart. I am convinced that if I identify myself with any creed, people will invariably dub me as one belonging to such and such group”

which sounds suspiciously like a ‘no’. Campbell (see [10]) has looked into this subject more thoroughly, and says

“At a public lecture in Fez Morocco in either 1981 or 1983, a friend of mine asked during the question period whether Dr. Bucaille had become a Muslim. Dr. Bucaille said, “No”.

And [10] also points out that the following passage occurred in the catalogue of the Islamic publisher and book distributor Pak Books in 1998:

“Dr.Bucaille’s study of scientific information in scriptures gave him high regard for Qur’an and recognition of contradictions in Christian scriptures. Yet he remained a Christian.”

So, what is the truth? Surprisingly, the answer can be found in Bucaille’s book, though it is carefully disguised by weasel words. He writes:

“For me, there can be no human explanation to the Quran”.

“..statements that simply cannot be ascribed to the thought of a man who lived more than fourteen centuries ago.”

“Such statements….obviously do not lend themselves to a human explanation”

“…the existence in the Qur’an of the verse referring to these concepts can have no human explanation on account of the period in which they were formulated.”

These are words which are carefully crafted to convince Muslims that he had been won over by the Islamic view of the Quran, but equally carefully avoiding the explicit conclusion that its author was God. This he never states, so leaving open the question of what type of being he considers responsible for the text. Dr. Bucaille may not have embraced Islam, but he has certainly embraced the Islamic practice of dissimulation.

Muslims should perhaps consider why someone who appears so rapturously convinced of the miraculous origin of the Quran would not convert to Islam, particularly since “..God guided me..” to carry out the study in the first place. Kasem [11] has no doubt about Bucaille’s motives:

“This charlatan found a great opportunity to make good money out of this situation.”

However, despite the fact that Bucaille achieved a good deal of fame in the Muslim world as a result of his book, and undoubtedly received large amounts of money, the idea that he planned a scam from the very start seems a little too good to be true. My own view of Bucaille’s motives is less damning than Kasem’s, though I would shed no tears if Kasem turned out to be right.

I think that, for a long while during his studies, Bucaille did genuinely believe that the Quran was divinely authored: “..my inner soul cried out that Al-Quran was the Word of God”. However, I suspect that, at some point during his researches, Bucaille began to realise that this belief could not be sustained. The contrived special pleading that he was forced to make, time and time again, to support so many flagrantly poor descriptions of the natural world, must have had its effect.

Nevertheless, to retract his nascent book was impossible. Too many close acquaintances were eagerly anticipating the glowing praise soon to be bestowed on the Quran by a Western scholar: people who included his distinguished employer, King Faisal, of whom Bucaille writes “The debt of gratitude I owe to the late King Faisal, whose memory I salute with deepest respect, is indeed very great.” So he decided to weaken his conclusions just a touch, publish anyway, and remain a Roman Catholic. Nevertheless, the conclusion seems inevitable: by the time he penned his final words, and though he didn’t dare to admit it, Bucaille had ceased to believe his own book.

Summing up

There are no verses in the Quran with any modern scientific content. Those of the Quran’s statements about the natural world which have survived unrefuted to the present day have done so not because they contain profound truths, but precisely because they contain no profound truths. Most are just everyday rustic observations; those which venture beyond the mundane often contain nothing more than an opaque mixture of poetic description, vagueness and mysticism. How did Muhammad largely avoid expounding a series of then-current but erroneous scientific ideas? Because he was interested only in theology, lived in an intellectual backwater and had not received a formal education, so knew nothing of them.

There remains, however, a residue of statements in the Quran which are both clear enough to be understood and specific enough to be identified as erroneous. Even ignoring the simple errors and absurdities which Bucaille overlooks or tries to divert our attention from, the descriptions of natural phenomena in the Quran are often so poor that they cannot be the product of divine revelation, nor even of an educated mortal. There is no sense in which (Q36:38) is an adequate description of the motion of the sun, nor (Q78:6,7) an adequate description of the geology of mountains, nor (Q86:5-7) a competent account of human biology. Are Muslims really suggesting that the above was the best that an almighty, all-knowing deity could do? For anyone who believes that the descriptions quoted above are satisfactory, consider this: if you were marking an examination paper and you came across one of the above passages without realising it was a direct quote from the Quran, how many marks out of 10 would you give?

And there is, of course, the problem of the talking ant. If anyone could suggest a reason why this story should not be regarded as absurd, it would be most interesting to hear it. Nevertheless, even if a plausible explanation of the account could be constructed, the problem remains that ‘God’ has included in the Quran a tale which appears ridiculous, with its resulting adverse effect on the book’s credibility. For an almighty being intent on the world’s conversion to Islam, this is a strange approach.

The supposed existence of scientific references in the Quran, as with that of ‘inimitability’ [12], is a myth, born of wishful thinking and inflated by exaggerated repetition. The continuous ‘discovery’ of new interpretations resembles the ‘discovery’ of new predictions contained in the quatrains of Nostradamus. However, while the latter is a relatively inconsequential pastime for devotees, the former helps sustain the delusion that the Quran is miraculous, thereby giving support to the grim edifice of Islam itself.

Finally, one cannot explain away the Quran’s 0% score in Science by claiming (as Bucaille does) that God adjusted his descriptions to suit the average uneducated 7th century Arab. According to Islam, God composed the Quran for all people, for all time, and was happy elsewhere to include ‘ambiguous’ (i.e. incomprehensible) verses about other subjects (see Q3:7). So why not include accurate descriptions about the natural world for the benefit of later generations, even if they could not necessarily be appreciated at the time? The Quran was not composed for a 7th century Arab, it was composed by a 7th century Arab.

References

[1] M. Bucaille. The Bible, The Quran and Science.

[2] A. von Denffer. Introduction to the Quran.

[3] W. Campbell. The Qur’an and the Bible in the light of history and science.

[4] T. Edis. An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam.
Prometheus Books 2007.

[5] All the Quran translations cited here are easily found on the internet.

[6] Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, (rev. ed., trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller, Beltsville, Maryland: Amana, 1994)

[7] G. Chapman, T. Jones. Let’s Talk Ant.

[8] Jewish Encyclopedia.

[9] Islamic Bulletin. Issue 6, January 1992.

[10] Is Dr. Maurice Bucaille a Muslim?

[11] A. Kasem. The tales of Bucaille and Moore, two occidental charlatans.

[12] A. Reddy. Matchless Prose?