The first two arguments fell very quickly. There are no compelling prophecies in the Quran. There are many verses that can be construed as prophecies, but the Quran does not assert that they are in any way predictions of the future. Regardless of details, they certainly were not clear enough for me to build a strong, objective case.
Similarly, I could not accept the argument that mathematical patterns in the Quran were an indication of divine inspiration. Many purported patterns were simply fudged data, and the rest were of the kind that can be found in the Bible, in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and even in online message boards.
Thankfully, those two arguments had not been a foundational part of my worldview as I was growing up. The final two arguments held powerful sway over my regard for the Quran, however. I believed from childhood that the Quran contained advanced scientific truths that Muhammad could not have known without divine revelation. These scientific truths were enough to prove that God wrote the Quran.
Trumping even the scientific argument, most Muslims have faith in the Quran’s perfect preservation. Muslims believe none of it has been changed, not even a dot. Allah promises to guard the Quran in 15:9, and Muslims believe its preservation is a testament to Allah’s protection over His message.
The science argument, and especially the perfect preservation of the Quran, formed the keystone of my faith. I set out to scrutinize this keystone, trusting it to bear the weight of the case for the Quran, indeed to provide the entire basis for my faith.
All the while, I did my best not to be bothered by the niggling question, “What will happen if this keystone fails?” I let the question instead drive me to my knees in prayer, asking Allah to make me a vanguard for Islam. I further embraced Islamic culture, embodied the Muslim persona by leading Friday sermons when possible, and taught sessions on aqeedah. By doing so, I did my best to resolve the dissonance by aspiring to the highest of Muslim standards.
The two opposing forces meant that, should the foundation fail, the collapse would be colossal.
Chapter Forty-One
THE QURAN, SCIENCE, AND BUCAILLEISM
DAWAH HAS BEEN A DRIVING FORCE for Muslims since the time of Muhammad, but the twentieth century saw the Islamic ethos of proselytization powered by an unexpected fuel: modern science. Even more surprising, this vogue came at the hands of a secular Frenchman.
Maurice Bucaille, gastroenterologist and personal physician to a king of Saudi Arabia, fertilized a budding field of Islamic apologetics when he wrote his 1976 work, The Bible, The Qur’an, and Science. This seminal work argues that the Bible is rife with scientific errors, while the Quran stands in contradistinction as miraculously precocious and flawless. He concludes that the Quran is so scientifically advanced that it must be the work of God.
“Epochal” only approximates the book’s impact on Muslim proselytism. Much like the Martin Lings phenomenon, a Western intellectual siding with Islam after critically scrutinizing evidence served as a war cry for dawah-oriented Muslims. This scenario was all the more gratifying because Bucaille roundly denounced the Bible in the process.
The technique of referring to the Quran for miraculously advanced scientific truths soon became so commonplace that a term for the method was coined: Bucailleism.
Bucailleism: The technique of referring to the Quran for miraculously advanced scientific truths in order to defend its divine origin
An example of one such argument involves the subject of human reproduction. Bucaille declares, “The Quranic description of certain stages in the development of the embryo corresponds exactly to what we today know about it, and the Quran does not contain a single statement that is open to criticism from modern science.”98 The implication is obvious: only God knew anything about embryology when the Quran was revealed. Thus, God must be the author of the Quran.
Within a few years of publication, Bucaille’s arguments perfused the more apologetically minded Muslim world, which was the world I was born into. His arguments were a staple of our religious discussions, whether eating around the dinner table, visiting with guests, or reading a book written by jamaat leaders. We were swept up in the elegance and erudition of the arguments, and just like most of what I knew as a Muslim, the fulsome and unanimous reception of Bucailleism was a part of our culture.
We were convinced science confirmed the divine origin of the Quran. This was such a widely held point of pride among Muslims that no one tested it.
When I finally did test it, another foundational pillar of my worldview cracked. I pored over Bucaille’s arguments as a student of both medicine and religion. I saw many problems with his exegesis, his reasoning, and his scholarship.
Turning back to his assessment of human reproduction, most academicians would consider Bucaille’s unreserved praise as too unctuous to be scholarly, at least by Western standards. But quite apart from his fawning adulation, there are scientific problems with the very Quranic verses Bucaille quotes as miraculous, some rather obvious to physicians and others rather obvious to everyone.
For example, 23:13 – 14 reads, “Then we made him a sperm in a fixed lodging. Then we made the sperm a hanging (thing), then we made the hanging into a chewed (thing), then we made the chewed into bones, then we clothed the bones with flesh, then we developed it into another creation, so blessed be Allah, the best of creators.”
To a student of developmental biology, this verse is singularly unimpressive. Even Bucaille begins his assessment by remarking that, at face value, the scientific statements are “totally unacceptable to scientists specializing in this field.”99 However, he explains that the problem is the seventh-century vocabulary the Quran was forced to use. Once we substitute modern scientific vocabulary (such as “uterus” for “lodging”) the problems are more than resolved.100
As a Muslim who grew up with somewhat fluid interpretations of the Quran, I conceded Bucaille’s point. But as a student of medicine, I realized that no matter how much we substituted the words, one aspect of this verse was simply inaccurate. The verse explains the sequential development of an embryo, but the sequence is incorrect. An embryo does not first become bones to be later clothed with flesh. One layer of an embryo, the mesoderm, differentiates into bone and flesh at the same time.
I investigated responses to this critique. Most argued that it is a pedantic objection, but even as a Muslim, I disagreed. The very point Bucaille was making by referring to this verse is that the sequence of embryonic development is miraculously accurate; but the sequence is incorrect. This was serious, and though Bucaille treated this verse with some depth, he glossed over the difficulty.
That this inaccuracy is found in the clearest section of the verse, the easiest to understand, only compounds the problem. The first part of the verse requires us to substitute appropriate scientific concepts for the incorrect terms captured by the Arabic. So if we have to fix the first half of the statement and ignore the latter half, what is left to be scientifically miraculous?
I then realized that this verse could not defend the inspiration of the Quran. Far from it, we had to assume the inspiration of the Quran to defend this verse.
More obvious problems arose in the Quran as I continued my search, even in the subfield of human reproduction. Verses 86:6 – 7 state that sperm gushes “from between the backbone and the ribs.”
Believing that it was impossible for the Quran to say something so obviously incorrect, I began looking online for answers. Once again, I found a similar procedure to defend the verse: redefine the words and gloss over the difficulties.
And that was the pattern that emerged. Whether proclaiming scientific miracles or defending scientific inaccuracies, the protocol always called for redefining the clear statements of the Quran to say something they did not say and then glossing over any strain.
After I recognized the pattern, it struck me that Bucailleism was very much like studying the life of Muhammad. I could defend my Islamic beliefs if I approached the issue as a partisan Muslim, willing
to redefine certain terms and emphasize certain points in favor of my position. But if I tried to build a case as an objective investigator reading the text at face value, there simply was no scientifically miraculous knowledge in the Quran.
At that point, I did not dismiss the possibility of scientific knowledge in the Quran, but I concluded that something far stronger had to anchor a defense of its divine inspiration. With unrelenting confidence, I now turned to the deepest of all my roots: my faith in the perfect preservation of the Quranic text.
Chapter Forty-Two
HADITH AND THE HISTORY OF THE QURAN
AT LEAST TWO POWERFUL FORCES combine to make the perfect textual preservation of the Quran the bastion of Muslim confidence.
On the one hand, much like the other proclamations of Islamic pride, it is a ubiquitous axiom that becomes ingrained in the Muslim psyche. “At no point has anything in the Quran ever been changed. It comes down to us exactly as Muhammad received it from Gabriel.” In this, we are told, is a prophecy of the Quran fulfilled: “Surely We have revealed the Reminder [Quran] and We will most surely be its guardian” (15:9).
On the other hand, this belief in perfect textual preservation also forms the very basis for the condemnation of modern Judaism and Christianity. One of the most well-known dawah initiatives in the United States, called “Why Islam?” summarizes the sentiment well: “The Psalms, the Torah, and the Gospel, according to Islam, are no longer in their original state. They have been added to, cannot be traced directly to their prophets, or were simply altered. Only the Quran has been preserved in its original state, exactly as it was revealed to Prophet Muhammad.”101
Serving as a basis for the rejection of other faiths and the acceptance of Islam, the preservation of the Quran is critical to Islamic apologetics. But it is even more important to Islamic theology. The Quran is the cornerstone of the Islamic worldview, underlies all of sharia, serves as the fulcrum of daily devotions, and provides the source of Islamic identity. In the minds of most Muslims, if the Quran were not perfectly preserved, their world would be in jeopardy. Since that is not the case, they maintain the utmost confidence in their faith.
Thus, the preservation of the Quran undergirds the unparalleled confidence of the modern Muslim zeitgeist. It is not even a remote possibility in most Muslims’ minds that the Quran of today might be different from the Quran of Muhammad’s day.
But most Muslims have not read the hadith for themselves. Once again, it was the most trustworthy Islamic traditions that subverted my faith.
Volume 6 of Sahih Bukhari, a volume dedicated to the Quran, details the process of Quran’s collection in book 61.102 We find that Muhammad used to dictate the Quran to Muslims orally, not having first written it down. It came to Muslims a few verses at a time, and sometimes Muhammad would relay the same verse differently to different Muslims.
Because of this, people recited the Quran disparately enough even in Muhammad’s time that there were heated, accusatory arguments among pious Muslims over what constituted the real Quran. Since Muhammad was still around, he dispelled the arguments by addressing the parties directly, saying, “Both of you are reciting in a correct way, so carry on reciting.” He admonished them not to argue over their differences, since “the nations which were before you were destroyed because they differed.”
When Muhammad died, many people no longer felt the need to remain Muslim. Abu Bakr sent Muslims to fight the apostates, ordering them to fulfill their Islamic obligations.103 Muslim fought former Muslim until many who had known the Quran lost their lives in battle. Abu Bakr was worried that large parts of the Quran would be lost if the battles continued, so he officially ordered the Quran to be collected under the auspices of one Zaid ibn Thabit.
Sahih Bukhari emphasizes that the Muslims easily forgot Quranic verses, and Zaid found the task of collecting the Quran extremely burdensome. He collected the verses from people’s memories and from written fragments. On more than one occasion, only a single person was able to testify to some of the Quran’s verses. After Zaid finished, the Quran was ultimately given to one of Muhammad’s widows to safeguard.
Even though the primary purpose for this collection was that verses not be lost, it was discovered that Zaid had accidentally left a small portion out of the Quran. Moreover, regions of the Muslim world were reciting the Quran incongruously enough that an appeal was made to the Muslim leaders to “save this nation before it differs about the Quran.”
Breaking from the preference of Muhammad, who simply told his people not to focus on the differences, the khalifa Uthman ordered that the Quran be standardized. They recalled the previous copy from Muhammad’s widow, edited it, copied it, and distributed the copies to each Muslim province.
Then, to settle the disputes over the Quran once and for all, Uthman “ordered that all the other Quranic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be destroyed by fire.”
This was the story of the Quran’s collection as found in Sahih Bukhari. Like the life of Muhammad, Sahih Bukhari depicted a raw, much more realistic story than what Muslims generally teach one another. What I had been taught was that Muhammad would dictate the Quran to scribes while Muslims memorized the revelations, and after Muhammad died, many Muslims had the Quran written and memorized. Zaid ibn Thabit was the first to officially write down the Quran, though this was not a difficult task because he had it memorized. His Quran was confirmed by other leading Muslims, who also had the Quran memorized.
That was it. According to widely accepted knowledge, there were no arguments over its contents, no poor memories, no fear of lost passages, no solitary witnesses, no forgotten verses, and certainly no orchestrated destruction of variants. The process of collecting the Quran recorded in Sahih Bukhari was so choppy that it left the door wide open for lost sections of the Quran. In fact, Sahih Bukhari testifies to this.
When Zaid’s standardized Quran was distributed, it left out some sections that a man named Ubay ibn Ka’b used to recite. Ubay insisted that, regardless of Zaid’s Quran, he would not stop reciting those verses because he had heard them from Muhammad himself.
I was shocked by the testimony of Sahih Bukhari. Why had my teachers not taught me the whole story? What else did I not know?
I turned to other books of hadith for their story. Sahih Muslim, the next most trustworthy source, records more problems. It documents that a whole surah is no longer found in the Quran, and at least one verse went missing around the time of Muhammad’s death.104 Sunan ibn Majah, one of the next most authentic books, clarifies that the verse went missing because the paper on which it was written was eaten by a goat.105
As I continued my research, tradition after tradition kept cropping up that challenged the preservation of the Quran. Much like my incredulity when I studied the historical Muhammad, I simply would not assimilate these hadith into my mind, keeping them at bay by accepting the far-fetched explanations of Muslim apologists or by inventing some of my own. What finally pushed me over the edge, though, was when I revisited a hadith from Sahih Bukhari.
According to the hadith, Muhammad named four men as the best teachers of the Quran. The first one was Abdullah ibn Mas’ud, whom Muhammad distinguished as the foremost expert of the Quran. The last one was Ubay ibn Ka’b, whom Sahih Bukhari identifies as the best reciter of the Quran.
These were the men that Muhammad hand selected as the best teachers of the Quran, but as I studied the early sources, I found that they did not agree with the final Quran, which has been passed down as today’s version. They did not even agree with each other.
In addition to the previously quoted hadith in which he refused to stop reciting certain verses, Ubay is known to have had 116 chapters in his Quran, two more than Zaid’s edition. Ibn Mas’ud had only 111 chapters in his Quran, insisting that the additional chapters in Zaid’s Quran and Ubay’s Quran were just prayers, not Quranic recitation.106
Multiple early Muslims documented the differences between
the many Qurans of the early Muslim world. Though it was thought that all of those documents were destroyed, one resurfaced in the early twentieth century.107 It shows that, in many places, Abdullah ibn Mas’ud and Ubay ibn Ka’b agreed with one another where Zaid ibn Thabit’s Quran differed.
I added up all the pieces in my mind: multiple recitations of the same verse, missing verses, missing surahs, disputes over the canon, controlled destruction of all variants. How could we defend the Quran as perfectly preserved?
I researched defenses online and read the most scholarly Islamic books I could find. As usual, attempts were made to dismiss as many of the sources as possible. Even still, after all attempts at logical explanation were made, the Muslim scholars argued for a shocking position: Allah intended the lost sections to be lost, He intended the variants to be destroyed, and He intended Zaid’s edition to be the final Quran.
So, in truth, the scholars were not arguing that the Quran had remained unchanged. They were arguing that Allah intended all the many changes that came to it. That was a defensive position at best, not one that could bear the weight of the entire Islamic case.
I was forced to conclude that, once again, the early Islamic sources challenged what modern Islam taught me. The doctrine of the Quran’s perfect preservation, far from defending the faith, needed to be defended by faith.
With that final investigation, the keystone of my faith crumbled. The entire structure was ungrounded, poised to collapse at the slightest burden.
What came next might as well have been dynamite.
Chapter Forty-Three
THOSE WHOM THEIR RIGHT HANDS POSSESS
I HAD READ THE WORDS multiple times since childhood, never really stopping to consider what they meant. But David had just added it to his binder, and now I was forced to research it.
Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity Page 21