The Islamic Whale
The Islamic whale (in Arabic الحوت الإسلامية, al-hoot al-islamiyya), is a big whale, that supposedly carries the Earth on it's back. The whale is called Nun (نون, noon), which is also the name of the Arabic letter ن. This article analyzes the details of this Islamic whale hypothesis.
In the Qur'an
We don't get much detail about the whale from the Qur'an. She is only mentioned in this verse:
Word-by-word translation:
- نٓ - noon - the name of the whale
- وَٱلْقَلَمِ - wal-qalam - by the pen (wa- prefix means "and" or "by")
- وَمَا - wa-ma - and what
- يَسْطُرُونَ - yasturoona - they write
In the tafsir
Ibn Kathir
First, we will quote the whole commentary on the verse 68:1 from the English abridged version of the tafsir Ibn Kathir:
There is nothing, because the translators decided not to translate anything he wrote about this verse.
In the Arabic original, Ibn Kathir writes a lot about this verse.
This is the definition of ن:
- نۤ - noon - Nun
- حوت - hoot - whale
- عظيم - 'azeem - big
Nun is a big whale.
Ibn Abbas gives us some details about how the whale was created:
Ibn Abbas (ابن عباس) said: The first thing Allah created (خلق) was the pen (القلم). He ordered it to write. It said: What shall I write? He said: Write the fate (القدر). So it wrote what will happen from that day (اليوم) until the Day of judgement, then he created the Nun (النون, al-noon), then he raised the water and created the heavens with it and laid the earth (الأرض) on (على) the back (ظهر) of the Nun, the Nun moved and so did the earth, so it was fixed down with mountains (بالجبال).
So this quote also explains why mountains are described as pegs in the Qur'an. It is because otherwise the earth would move on the back of the whale: