Misunderstood Quranic Verses

You're watching "Let The Quran Speak." I'm Safiyyah, your host. Have you ever heard anyone say that the Quran predicted the Big Bang Theory, and the origins of life and water? Today, we're gonna be looking at a verse that relates to modern science, it's Chapter 21 Verse 30. With me is Dr. Shabir. Dr. Shabir, welcome to "Let The Quran Speak." - Pleasure to be on. - I'm gonna read the verse to you, Dr. Shabir, we're gonna look at what it means, what early commentators thought it meant, and what we can understand from it today. So the verse goes like this, in English, "Do the believers not realize that the Heavens and Earth were once one mass, then We split them apart? And We created from water every living thing. Will they not then believe?" This is the study Quran translation of Chapter 21 Verse 30, Dr. Shabir. So, tell me what it means, and how the early commentators understood it. - Yeah, so let's take the first part, because one part is about the Heavens and the Earth being one, and the other is about creating everything from water, every living thing. So about the Heavens and the Earth being of one piece, today, this might be interpreted from a scientific angle to say that, we know from the Big Bang Theory that everything, the entire universe, was packed into what scientists project back as a singularity. So 13.8 billion years ago, you know, an expansion began from that singularity into eventually what we have as the galaxies with their stars and planets, including our planet Earth, and human beings emerging on planet Earth. So the Heavens and the Earth together were eventually one, they were a singularity. And so, that's one aspect of this first. The other one is about, you know, creating every living thing from water. - Mm-hmm. - Today we know about the aquatic origins of life on Earth, and we know, you know, the essential nature of water, you know, even for our continued existence. Most of our body is like liquid as opposed to flesh or hard stuff. So for this to be said in the Quran some 1400 years ago, naturally, it was bewildering to the earliest commentators. They could not understand this from our, you know, scientific hindsight. With their pre-scientific views, they tried their best to explicate the Quran. And often, Safiyyah, they said that this means that, perhaps it was their, you know, quick way of like giving the information in summary form, otherwise, the big books would be too long by saying, "We don't know what it means, but we guess that it may mean something like this." You know, too many words, right? - Mm-hmm. - So if we read, for example, one of the earliest commentators on the Quran, Tabari, who we did a massive compilation, you know, he would just simply say, you know, "One opinion is this, and these are the people who said it," and then he would give along chain of narrators ending with "This person said," and sometimes it's a one-word explanation, like "This means this one word," for example. - Mm-hmm. - So I think we shouldn't take their statements as being definitive, but we should read in all, you know, "It's alleged that and our guess is that. We don't know, but we think it could mean this," and so on. So, their guesses were like this. So one guess is that the Heavens were... There are now seven Heavens according to the Quran, but there were initially only one heaven according to these commentators. - Mm-hmm. - That's what it means, that they were together as one. And maybe, well, it might be better, you know, for those who know the Arabic and wanna hear the Arabic first. So, (speaks verse in Arabic). To translate that very quickly, "Don't the nonbelievers see that the Heavens and the Earth were together as one until We split them asunder? And We made every living thing out of water. Will they not then believe?" - Mm-hmm. - So the two were together, ratqan, they were together as one, but the commentators say that each was one. So the Heavens were one heaven, and then God split the one heaven into seven Heavens. Likewise, the Earth was one Earth, and then God split the Earth into seven Earths, of course, we're only familiar with our Earth, but nowadays scientists speak about the possibility of being many Earths out there, not necessarily seven. But in Arabic as well, seven can mean not necessarily the number that is counted right after six, but a number that indicates a plurality, like- - Oh, I didn't know that. - Yes. - Okay. - Yes. So the Arabs use the number seven like that. It's almost like if we say, you know, though, I have one- - Several. - Yeah, we might say several- - Maybe several came from that word, seven. - Possibly, I don't know, I haven't traced the etymology, but I was gonna say, Safiyyah, sometimes in English we say, "I have 101 reasons-" - Hmm, that's true. - For something. So we don't mean 101 as the number that comes after 100, we mean, you know, so many that it even exceeds a hundred, right? So seven was used like this to mean several. In any case, today we can think about the Heavens and the Earth together as being one piece initially, and being split the asunder. Another way in which the commentators tried to explain this because they had different guesses, some commentators said this, some said the other thing. Some said that the Heavens were closed off, in that, you know, ratqan can mean like, it is so uniform, like, you know, there is no opening in it. - Hmm. - So they thought, "Okay, so the Heavens were all like so closed off that no rains were coming. And the Earth itself as well was so closed off that it was not giving rise to any vegetation." Of course, there was no need for it according to these commentators, because human beings did not come on Earth yet. But then God sent Adam an Eve down onto Earth, and he opened up the Heavens and he opened up the Earth. So they were ratqan, they were like sealed off, and then (speaks Arabic), like we split them. So the Heavens were split so the rains can come down, the Earth was split so the vegetation could come up. So these are the humble offerings that they could give us with their pre-scientific understanding. They tried their best, but they could only do so much. - Yeah, it was many, many hundreds of years ago. - Yes, exactly. - Right? - You know, at least a thousand years ago, you know, when the first commentators appeared. So, now how do we read the Quran, and how do we understand it today? Well, we have to benefit from all of these commentaries, that's our starting point in our education, but we need to also go back to the Quran itself and see what were the original wordings of the Quran. And this is what Dr. Maurice Bucaille did, as he describes in the introduction to his book, "The Bible, the Qur'an and Science." He said that "I was reading the translations of the Quran and there were not making any sense like scientifically, but I knew that there was more to it than this." And so, he studied the Arabic language in order to see what was the original text saying, and then he could go back to the dictionaries and see what was the meaning of those words which were used in the Quran before the commentators made it what they made it into. And he could see that this Quran packs scientific knowledge, which would not have been known to people in the seventh century when the Quran was first revealed, and we can see that we're not known to the commentators. But when we understand the Quran from that point of view, looking at the original meanings of the words, we can see that they correspond to many scientific discovery in our modern times. That helps us to have confidence, that this is a revelation given from the Almighty God to our Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. But we can see how the verses might have been partly understood, somewhat even misunderstood, in the past, and we can rise above that by bringing together a whole new scientific understanding together with the spiritual understanding, which of course is the main point of the passage. - Mm-hmm. But, Dr. Shabir, of course, science changes, right, you know, our understanding of science, and how do we know that our understanding of the Quran is the right one, right? Because, as you mentioned, the classical commentators did think that they had the right interpretation of this verse, right? - Yeah. So maybe a couple of points here. First, although science is forever changing, some theories become so well-established scientifically that, you know, they're not expected to change, it seems very unlikely that some of these will change. Whereas with the commentators of the past, they were not working with a scientific understanding. So we are working with a scientific understanding, though we are open to the possibility of change. What they were starting with is not a scientific understanding, they were just guessing. - Hmm. - Right? The best guess they could give at the time. Secondly, if, you know, we are familiar with certain theories of science, we should not make the verses of the Quran mean what the scientists are saying. We can say that there is an interesting possibility here, there's an interesting coincidence, so that those who are interested in science would have a reason to be interested in the Quran, because, look, there's this remarkable coincidence at the moment. And maybe a new meaning will unfold, like a new discovery will unfold in science, but also a new angle and a new meaning will unfold from the Quran itself, that for a new generation will be compatible with that new discovery in modern science. So God can reveal his book in such a way that it speaks to every generation. And, in his way, he's calling people of every generation back to his original message by showing them signs and miracles and wonders, sometimes even the correspondence between the Quranic wording and the modern discoveries in science. - Hmm. - So these are some of the- - Lot to think about. (chuckles). - Yeah. These are some of the ways in which we can make sense of this whole. - All right, thank you for sharing that, Dr. Shabir. - Okay, you're welcome. - As-salamu alaykum. - As-salamu alaykum. - Welcome to Muslim Media Hub, the new home of Let the Quran Speak. - Here we spread positivity and good. We help people experience the beauty of Islam and help them appreciate and understand Muslims. - This beautiful building we purchased, dad, costs $2.3 million. - Yeah, we've already raised a third of that money and with your help, inshallah, we can pay off the rest. - So we're looking for people who can give $1,000 each. 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