Dr Zaghloul Al-Najjar has a PhD from Wales University in geology, specialising in micropalaeontology. He has worked in a variety of Universities around the world and currently is a Professor at King Saud University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. We had the honour of presenting a talk by Dr Al-Najjar at UNSW, which we feel is an issue that irks many Muslims that are taught evolution in Australian schools and universities.

Lecture

Humans must accept that they are limited beings – and that they do not observe all things. In the observable parts of the universe, humanity does not only have the right to investigate it, but divine encouragement to do so.

In the unobservable world, we must rely on divine guidance. For who but the Creator could tell us of such things ? We cannot ourselves deduce what we should do where there is nothing to base our choices on. This is the domain of religion, and in particular Islam.

The areas that religion thus should covered is faith in the Creator, the method of worship of this Creator, human morality and the transactions between people.

In the issue of faith in the Creator, we must accept what Allah has told us, since we have no means of finding out about these events, since they are beyond the observable world. We are asked to believe in life after death, yet no-one has returned from the dead to tell us about this; we are asked to believe in resurrection and the Day of Judgement without any evidence; we are asked to believe in the life to come, and its eternity, when we really don’t even have the capability to understand what eternity really means. These all fall in the domain of the unseen, and we must rely on Allah to tell us what these things are.

The second aspect of religion is worship. By definition, worship is obedience; the peak of obedience. There can be no obedience without instructions. Thus unless we receive divine guidance, any innovation in this area can lead Man astray.

The other two basic foundations of religion are a moral code, and in accordance with Muhammad’s teachings, morality is the essence and message of religion. Muhammad’s 23-year message was directed to the cause of achieving the peak of morality. The Prophet (PBUH) said: “I was only sent to establish the peak of morality.”

And the final aspect is the area of a code that governs the transactions between people. This is an area from which all humanity is suffering today. Unless we know how to deal with each other, within the framework of divine guidance, people tend to transgress on the limits of each other. That is why I always address brothers and sisters by the fact that Islam is the only divine message today, within the hands of human beings, directly from Allah the Creator of the Universe, and everything in it, in its original language and preserved by the will of Allah, word for word and letter for letter.

Islam is a religion that established a civilisation that lasted for more than ten centuries; and it is the only civilisation that has taken this world and the world to come hand in hand, without neglecting either.

It is a civilisation that encourages looking into the universe, and reading the laws of Allah in this Universe. This is, in Islam, considered a form of worship. The Qur’an says: “Look on that planet and see how Allah did originate creation”. Islam has never stood in the face of scientific endeavour, on the contrary, it encourages scientific research, and considers research a form of worship, if done honestly and objectively.

With this I would like to come to tonight’s topic. One may think there is an element of contradiction – what has Islam to do with a theory that negates creation ?

Many people think that evolution is a relatively new idea, suggested by Darwin, which is incorrect. We find touches on evolution as far back as the Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Hindu civilisations, as if this was the language of the Devil, being spoken in the ears of people as if to make them disbelieve in the presence of a creator; while if we look into the Universe, animate and inanimate, we see ample evidence of an orderly, systematic universe, governed by laws could not possibly have come into being by themselves, could not have been produced by accident or chance. Every angle you look at the University leads this to the conclusion leads the need for a Creator, who is above both matter and energy, above both space and time, He is the present and the past, He is the first without any beginning and the last with no end, otherwise he could not possibly have created this Universe.

How is it that people use the idea of evolution to negate religion? We all know that the Renaissance in Europe follow what we call the Dark Ages, which were in the Muslim world the Golden Ages – ages of knowledge and leadership.

Coming from the Dark Ages, European scholars looked into the Universe, knowing that the first book of the Bible, Genesis, discusses the creation of the Universe. By the way, while Muslims believe in the Torah and the Injeel (or Gospel), though neither of these two books exist today, and have been distorted a great deal over the past millenia. When you distort when human knowledge is at a very low level, you are bound to misfigure the divine message. The current Bible is a human reflection of the original messages, written centuries after the original messengers died, written by people who never met those messengers, leading to distortion, and particularly in the creation of the Universe. Genesis thus has parts that cannot be accepted, since it has been infiltrated by ideas at a time when human knowledge was at a very low level.

European scientists learned of the scientific method from the Muslim scientific literature from Spain and Southern Europe. The scientific method is there are laws embedded into every aspect of the universe, and if you look into these laws systematically you can read the laws of Allah, and you can apply these laws to make life on this world easier, happier and more enjoyable. This implies that you cannot accept things solely in theory, as happened in the Ancient Greek civilisation, you have to look into things critically, believing only in what can be repeated experimentally. This method is Qur’anic in nature, which states that we should not believe in things in this world that can not be seen or proved. “Give me your evidence”, the Qur’an says.

When Western scholars began to investigate the Universe in this way, they came to contradict what was in the Old Testament. This started a war between the scientists and the Church. This created a negative feeling among the scientists, who were highly persecuted by the Church, resulting in the scientific community taking a negative stand to any religious aspect, and to reject anything from the unseen. But we know that we are surrounded by many unknowns and that these can only be revealed to us by divine revelation; the simplest example being what happens to us after death.

Thus the Islamic attitude is that in this world, we cannot accept anything without the scientific method of observation, experimentation and conclusion; but at the same time there is a huge unobservable universe as well that we can only find out about through divine revelation – in the four areas mentioned above, since these are beyond the human brain to explore or explain.

But when the scientific world started to emerge from a stance which rejected completely the idea of the unobserved, it had no choice but to reject the idea of creation. And organic evolution was used as a means to stand in the face of the church and the face of religion at large.

Muslims have taken one of two stands regarding this issue. One is to completely reject it, and the other is that this is the result of scientific endeavour and we have to accept it fully. Both stands are completely wrong. In Islam we are taught not to accept theories dogmatically and at the same time, not to reject theories that have some evidence behind them.

Thus the Islamic stand with regards to organic evolution has to be a rational stand. Any aspect of the theory that can be proved by observation, must be accepted, since this is the instruction of the Prophet (PBUH). While we advocate this stand, we must consider the theory critically.

The theory says that everything in this Universe was created gradually, created one step after another, which is true. We can find ample evidence that supports gradualism in Creator. This does not negate creation at all, and does not stand in the face in the limitless powers of the creation. So we believe in the gradualism of creation. Things were not created suddenly, but Allah has the power to say “Be” and it “is”.

The second part of the theory says that the simple forms led to more complex forms. This part must be considered more carefully and critically. How can a simple single-cell amoeba understand that in time it will develop into a human being, needing a backbone, and requiring particular dimensions for the skull and limbs, and certain organs to function? No man worth his salt would assume this. This assumption is beyond the scientific process itself. To assume that simple forms evolved to higher forms by themselves without any divine guidance is completely incorrect. It is unscientific. We know from life on Earth that this process is very slow, and neither subject to direct observation nor to direct experimentation. The shortest lifespan of a species is 500 000 years. Who would live for 500 000 years to observe that species A has slowly changed into species B? It is unscientific. It is a theoretical conclusion established on the background belief of whoever is expounding this theory. If you are a believer, you will frame this information in a completely different way from someone who has a disbelieving attitude.

To cut this short, I would like to emphasise that the modern theory of organic evolution has three main dimensions. The first dimension is what I call the “horizontal dimension”. This part of the theory states that we are surrounded by a variety of forms of life, of around 1 1/2 million species as well as 3/4 million fossil species. These animals can be classified. This led people to suggest there is some relationship between these creatures; while the process of classification itself is a human tool for the simplification of the knowledge of these simple forms. Just because you can classify creatures into particular groups is not in itself an indication of any relationship between the species.

The second is the “vertical” dimension of the theory that says the Earth which was gradually inhabited by life. I always tell my Muslim brothers and sisters that if by evolution we mean the gradual inhabitation of the world by life, then this is correct; and the Muslim should believe this since there is ample evidence of this. If we observe each stratographic section, I can easily see that gradualism; that each bed or group of beds had different forms of life to the preceding and succeeding beds. The Earth did not have the same forms of life throughout the ages, but for each span of time there was a group of creation that existed, and this in itself is a miracle of creation. It is by use of such remains that we can identify each bed. Without this fact, man could not possiblly extract any of the wealth of our planet; not oil or minerals or ground water, because is one of the miraculous aspects of this creation.

Does this imply that these lifeforms developed from one another, from the simpler to the more complex? No. I am a micropalaeontologist and I work with these fossils, and we know one of the realities of the fossil record is that it is incomplete, and I cannot make such dangerous conclusions from an incomplete record.

The third dimesion is what I call the “abstract” dimension, where they talk about many small observations, such as relic organs in some of the creation, the ability of domestication of certain wildlife, the possibility of hybridisation between different species, but these are minor observation which do not add or subtract from the correctness or incorrectness of the Theory of Evolution. The most dangerous part of this theory is the background knowledge of the person trying to write about the gradual inhabitation of this planet.

We know that this planet is about 4.6 billion years of age and we have a span of time where the Earth was being prepared for inhabitation of Earth by life, and that is why the oldest record of life is 3.8 billion years and these are no more than amino acids. There was then a very long period before life flourished.

We divide the Earth’s life into eras: Azoic (ie no life) between 4.6 billion and 3.8 billion years; Cryptozoic (hidden life) between 3.8 billion and 0.7 billion years. At around 700 million years ago, there was an explosion of life. We then have the Phanelozoic (flourishing life). Even within this last 700 million years, we notice that life started in the oceans and streams. For about 300 million years,there was no life on Earth at all – the land was being prepared for receiving life.

Really, when we think about the jump of life from sea to land, it seems impossible that this would have happened by itself. No man can tell you that a unicellular plant simply jumped onto land, realised that it needs roots, so it develops roots, it needs a stem so it develops a stem, it needs leaves so it develops leaves.

The shift of life from water to land is a basic shift that really needs careful plaaning and careful decisions. It cannot taken by simple forms of life that have no logic by themselves. We have many jumps like this in the development of life on Earth, that cannot be taken for granted.

For example, evolutionists believe that fishes developed into amphibians through what they call lungfishes. Lungfishes are a completely aquatic form of life, although they have the capacity to breathe with lungs. But these lungs did not develop by themselves. These require careful design and planning. These are part of the overall plan of the Creator. Amphibians, then reptiles and then birds and mammals form the chain of ancestry of man.

We can see this is a very tempting concept to those who wish to disbelieve in God, that these life-forms developed in their own way, that sun-rays reacted with mud and water to form the first protein molecule, and this developed into a unicellular lifeform and this developed into a multicellular lifeform and so on until it reached man. This is the atheistic attitude that tries to use scientific observations as a means to negate religion at large, while on the other side we can see in every living cell there is a large amount of information stored in genes. The genes of a single human being can make a line much longer than the distance from here to the sun, which is 150 million kilometres. This is a massive amount of knowledge in every cell. The question is where can this knowledge come from? The cell cannot produce the knowledge by itself.

This by itself proves that life needs a creator and this Creator must be so knowledgeable and powerful to create life according to that plan.

Advocates of evolution put forward many hypotheses to explain how evolution comes about, such as competition between species, survival of the fittest, geographic isolation, mutations and finally they came to inheritance – each creature inherits from its mother and father and extrapolating this process, we get to man. They started talking about this and they realised that this can defeat their own purpose, since the knowledge in a living cell cannot possibly have come by chance.

They started this idea of punctuated evolution – evolution with “jumps”, due to mutations or sudden changes in the environment. None of these can explain how evolution can take place. I’m not going to delve into this, but I am completely against the acclamation of these theories without some application of intellectual capabilities. What does the “fittest” mean? Is it the strongest? For example, the dinosaurs, giant magnificent creatures died out 65 million years ago – yet a simple amoeba cells, a species hundreds of millions of years old continues to survive. Are amoeba therefore fitter than dinosaurs? There are destinies destined by the Creator for each individual and species. There is no scientific definition of the “fittest”.

Geographic isolation by no means explains evolution, because there is ample proof that the continents of today were once one entity that were split apart. Really I cannot explain evolution on the basis of geographic isolation. I cannot explain evolution with any of the suggestions that have been put forward to negate creation. I recall in the late sixties, one of the advocates of organic evolution, called Morris published a book called “The Naked Ape”. On the front cover he put a picture of a man naked and he said, “This is the naked ape.” He was immediately rebutted by a famous Finnish professor called Bjorn Curtin, a very famous anthropologist and geologist actually studying the organic remains of man. He is a professor of geology at the University of Helsinki, and he published a book called “Not from the Apes”. He wrote book from a purely scientific point of view; he is not religious, he does not believe in any religion.

He said in the book that throughout his research he has observed that the oldest records of man on Earth are much older than the oldest records of monkeys on Earth, and if there is a relationship between the two, then apes were men and not the other way around.

He mentioned two other important points. He has noticed that the process of organic evolution is so slow that to produce a minor change in the shell of an animal, it needs several hundred thousand years. If we compare the morphological changes in a human being, ignoring the abstract aspects of man (ie the intelligent being that can feel and express his feelings, that can learn and pass on his learning) with the highest being before man, say the orang-utan, this would require the age of the Earth multiplied by some astronomical figure. These include an erect posture, a certain number of vertebrae and a certain skull struture which would require much longer than feasible. He came to say that man appeared suddenly of this planet within a very short span of time. Where did he come from? Is it a return to Adam and Eve, or is it a question that can only be answered only by “ESP men”?

I also recall a professor of zoology from the University of Manchester who published a book called “Evolution”. In it he says both Darwinists and Mendelists have gone astray if they believe unintelligent life can mutate itself that simply without any guidance. He says that inside every cell there is a secret that the human brain cannot possibly unfold. If evolution has taken place by the process suggested then there is a power above the living cell that has put the blueprint for the process of evolution into the cell. This process would be much more miaculous than simple creation, this unfolding of life from a single cell.

In the area of evolution, Islam has no trouble at all accepting the concept of evolution, with three basic conditions:

• We cannot believe that the earliest forms of life started spontaneously by the reaction of the sun with mud and water. One of our contemporaries wanted to estimate the probability of making a single protein molecule. Protein is composed of Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen and sometimes Phospohrous. To simply select these five would take a mass much greater than that of the known universe and an ange several time the age of the universe. Then each protein molecule consists of amino acids and these can be very complex. The probability of assembing the amino acids into useful proteins and to DNA in particular is extremely remote.
• For creation to take place by itself is impossible. The early beginnings of life must be carefully planned, else they are doomed to failure. This creation by whatever means, is a miracle that is beyond the reaches of science. These simple forms of life can not evolve upwards by themselves, and if evolution did occur as suggested, it must have been encoded into the first cells themselves.
• Man is not part of this general schema and was created separately and is not linked to the process itself.

This means that in Islam, it is perfectly acceptable to accept one of two theories. One of separate creation of each individual lifeform, or what we might call “evolutionary creation”, carefully planeed and set out, with each lifeform having its own period and stage.

We know that each lifeform played a very important part in successive generations. For example, plants were created before animals, by millions of years. Plants produce oxygen which is required by animals. I wish I had time to elaborate on this aspect a bit more.

Finally, if we can remove the notion of man being linked to this chain, whom Allah has honoured above all creation, then the theory of evolution can be accepted. As it says in the Qur’an: We have honoured mankind and we carried him through land and sea and we have bestowed our bounty upon them and preferred them over much of the creation. As Muslims, we cannot accept that man was a monkey, or a bird or a fly.

Questions

In the Qur’an what it says that the Earth was created in six days. What does this mean ?

These six days are not days of our time – since the Earth was not created then and that the measure of a day is produced by the revolution of the Earth. So what are these six phases?

You would be surprised to see how accurate these six days or phases are. We have the day when the Heavens and the Earth were one part. The Qur’an speaks about a stage when the Heavens and Earth were one entity and that they were broken asunder. The second stage is the Big Bang. We then had a phase when the sky was full of smoke. The fourth was when Allah told the Earth to form, and a mass was created. Following this was then the formation of the atmosphere and hydrosphere, and finally the creation of the mountains. Every single one of these events is documented in the creation, either in the rocks of our planet, or the stars. This is through Allah’s promise to us – that he has made the Universe understandable to a certain extent by the human psyche.

How come you don’t apply the idea of critical thought you have for science to Islam?

To survive on this planet we need two forms of knowledge. One is revealed knowledge, in areas that cannot be reached by the senses – as I mentioned before – faith, worship, a moral code and interpersonal interaction. In these areas man requires divine guidance and he cannot innovate in these areas by any means.

The other form of knowedge is knowledge of the Universe, of the human body, of the animate and inanimate creation of Allah. These areas have been made accessible to the human intellect and man is asked to investigate these areas to the best of his abilities. If this is done, with belief in Allah, this is considered an act of worship.

This Universe is the book of Allah in as much as the Qur’an is the book of Allah. The Qur’an is the divine guidance in areas that cannot be touched by man, and the Universe is the window through which one looks and sees the miraculous creation of Allah.

We need both of these forms – revealed and acquired knowledge. These two sources of information are in harmony, since as I said before, the Qur’an is the word of Allah, and the Universe is the creation of Allah. The contradiction comes from looking into distorted revelations, like the Old Testament and the New Testament. With all due respect and honour and belief in the original revelation, we believe the books found today have been distorted, resulting in the conflict between science and religion in the West. This is something that has not happened in Muslim history.

Finally, Islam should not be judged by its current state, since Muslims have not been following Islam themselves, and despite appearances, very few people really follow its laws. Al-hamdulillah, there is a Muslim revival now, and increasingly more people are adopting Islam’s teachings. Islam should be judged by its original sources of Islam, the Qur’an and Sunnah, which remain intact and unchanged.

The chemical composition of human bodies is similar to that of other animals. What is the Islamic and evolutionary perspective?

All creation is from Earth. When we eat meat, fruit vegetables or whatever, all of these come from the Earth. Since this is the same for all creation, this is hardly a surprise. And we will go back to the Earth.

But this is not life. The essence of life is something from Allah breathed into the human being. The similarity of the structure and nature of the various creation is a reflection of the unity of the creation. The similarity of the composition is an indication of the origin of all life – the Earth. But the essence of life in the human body is something above the physical form. The spiritual and physical are separate entities brought together by the will of Allah.

In the Qur’an it says that Solomon spoke to the animals. This indicates intelligence on the part of the animals. How does this compare to human intellect?

Definitely, Allah has given every single creature faculties for life. There is a great difference in the intelligence between man and an ant or a bird. We know that these animals that migrate for huge distances. There are species of bird that fly from one side of the Earth to the other, lay their eggs and when the chicks hatch they fly back. How do they know this? They have implanted intelligence to do this.

There is a difference however, between implanted intelligence and intelligence in the form of self-rule given to man. Man has free will, while animals pretty much follow intuition.

These creation also worship Allah, but we do not understand their language.

Last Updated on Thursday, 10 July 2008 09:45