The Influence Of Islam Upon Classical Arabic Scientific Writings

Description

The biblical verse “ In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis, 1:1), was given supportive assertion by none other than Pope Pius XII himself when, in 1951 he alluded to the Big Bang theory of the beginning of the universe saying, “everything seems to indicate that the universe has in finite times times a mighty beginning.” (Davies, 1983:20) Some Muslim writers such as Sulaiman Noordin (1992:1-2) have similarly referred to the Quranic verse (21:30):

Do not the unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were jointed together (as one Unit of Creation), before We clove them asunder? We made from water every living thing, will they not then believe?

As positively supporting the Big Bang theory. On the last part of the verse “We made from water every living thing,” commentator Yusuf Ali (1989:801) says:

That all life began in the water is also a conclusion to which our latest knowledge in biological science points. Apart from the fact that protoplasm, the original basis of living matter, is a liquid or semi-liquid and in a state of constant flux and instability, there is the fact that land animals, like the higher vertebrates, including man, show in their embryological history, organs like those of fishes, indicating the watery origin of their original habitat. The constitution of protoplasm is about 80 to 85 percent water.