Shooting Stars in the Quran

Humans have always looked up at night and seen the stars lighting the sky. Folklore around stars, before our modern understanding of them as gigantic balls of gases, creating light energy via nuclear fusion,which takes years to reach us, has been creative and varied.

Due to their similar visual size and appearance, many ancient people have confused meteors, which are small rocky masses or grains of debris which burn up after entering the earth's atmosphere as stars streaking across the sky, which is why they were often called shooting stars (as we do in English), broken stars or falling stars.

On a typical night it means you might see just a few meteors an hour streaking randomly across the sky. These are called sporadic meteors. At certain times of the year these numbers can increase to around 100 meteors an hour in events called meteor showers, as Earth ploughs through denser streams of particles in its orbit around the Sun.^[1]

Meteors as stars

For example, in Ancient Egypt civilisation, we see a strong resemblance of a shooting star by the author of ‘The Shipwrecked Sailor’ (c. 2000-1900 BC), which recounts a series of many fantastic adventures, including a star falling to Earth:

Dr Lloyd D. Graham has linked this event to being a meteorite,^[2] and Aly Barakat has discussed a theoretically catastrophic impact in ancient Egypt.^[3][4]

Biblical motifs

Though there are no direct stories of the functions of stars in this way in the bible (or biblical literature), Dr Julien Decharneux notes in his book Creation and Contemplation: The Cosmology of the Qur'ān and Its Late Antique Background, which explores the connections between the cosmology of the Qur’ān and various cosmological traditions of Late Antiquity, with a focus on Syriac Christianity,^[5] that there are some general motifs which link to this imagery; such as Talmudic stories of demons listening in to divine councils, and separately fire as weapons from the upper skies. However, there is no direct story for this (yet) found in biblical literature. He notes it is more likely rooted in Iranian mythology:

Weapons against demons

Many cultures had mythology surrounding meteors and meteorites, with some believing they were weapons, such as in ancient Africa and Mesopotamia:

And this may have inspired their use much later in Zoroastrianism, (which was a prominent religion in the Persian (Iranian) empire both before and during the time of the prophet Muhammad/beginning of Islam), where we see the link between stars and meteors as weapons:

The Qur'an

The Qur'an states that stars (kawakib ٱلْكَوَاكِبِ), lamps (masabih مَصَٰبِيحَ) and/or great stars/constellations (burūj بُرُوجًا) adorn the heavens and guard against devils (shayāṭīn شياطين).

The Qur'an further asserts that Allah has made them (the stars/lamps) missiles to ward away devils (who are believed to be jinn in Islam), who attempt to listen in on heavenly meetings (known as the Exalted Assembly). The Quranic concept has a close parallel in an earlier Jewish development from Zoroastrian mythology. Such myths are best understood as pre-modern attempts to explain the common phenomenon of meteors streaking across the night sky. The relevant verses are below:

The same Arabic words are used at the start of Quran 67:5 as in Quran 37:6 (زَيَّنَّا ٱلسَّمَآءَ ٱلدُّنْيَا), except that in Quran 67:5 the word lamps is used instead of stars. The lamps that 'adorn the heaven' must refer to stars (and perhaps also the 5 visible planets), which are always there.

Stars and visible planets were often called the same thing (kawakib ٱلْكَوَاكِبِ) due to their similar appearance, with stars appearing 'fixed' and planets notably 'moving', usually differentiated by astronomers by labelling them respectively. This is confirmed by astronomers such as Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi who around 964 wrote the astronomical book of fixed stars كتاب صور الكواكب kitāb suwar al-kawākib. As professor David Cook notes, "Eventually in Arabic, najm generally came to mean 'a fixed star' while kawkab 'a planetary body' but there are plenty of exceptions to this rule. Planets were believed to be moving stars."^[6]

In Quran 67:5, the word translated "missiles" is rujūman (رُجُومًا), which are things that are thrown, especially stones.^[7]

In Quran 15:16 the phrase translated "zodiacal signs" is Burūj بُرُوجًا, meaning great stars or constellations; Surah 85 (Al-Burūj) is called The Great Star.

Other relevant verses are Quran 55:33-35 (flame of fire and smoke, though a slightly different context):

Note that no astronauts or human-made robots leaving Earth have yet been hit by fire and smoke, both which cannot actually occur in space due to the lack of oxygen.^[8]

And Quran 21:32, which many classical commentators have associated with protection against devils:

The Hadith

A hadith collected in Sahih Muslim and Sunan al Tirmidhi confirms that the 'pursuant flames / missiles' in the two verses refer to visible meteors which they saw shooting across the sky.

These also seem to reinforce the incorrect idea of stars being shooting stars, and give us yet a fourth word for stars.

In both cases we see the word (najm/نجم) is used to describe the shooting star. Literally: رُمِيَ was thrown^[9] بِنَجْمٍ a star^[10] فَاسْتَنَارَ then it flamed^[11] (نار in Arabic form X, derived from نور light). It is sometimes said that a najm (نجم) could refer to any kind of celestial body and not necessarily a star, but it is at least clear that these hadiths refer to what we now understand are visible meteors.

A hadith in Sunan Ibn Majah's collection also conveys the concept, though without clarifying the nature of the shihab (the word translated as "burning flame" in the Quran verses quoted above):

Other companions

Although much of the commentary is disputed to actually come from Ibn Abbas (the prophets cousin), the tafsir on the Qur'an attributed to him states:

Which even if not from him directly, gives us a more contemporary view of these verses.

Muslim Historians

Meteor showers were of unknown cause to 7th Century Arabs, as the later (than the Quran's writing) historian and geographer Al-Ya'qubi (d 897/8AD) reports several meteor showers that happened just before and during Muhammad's lifetime (In 571 AD and 609 AD), attributing them to shooting stars/planets striking devils, with the multitude of them potentially leading to the idea they are 'pelted from every side'. Further Muslim historians such as Ibn 'Idhari and Ibn al-Jawzi confirm this understanding, with a summary of their assessment of meteor showers held in this Royal Astronomical Society publication.

As mentioned in the introduction, while stars are giant balls of gas thousands of times larger than the earth, meteors are now known to be distinct from the distant stars, being small rocky masses or grains of debris which burn up after entering the earth's atmosphere. This debris is not even 'star-like', but just rocks, metal and dust with no light source, and therefore cannot accurately be said to match the description of 'lamps'.

They are often not much larger than grains of sand and only become visible for a second when they burn up, generating light in the Earth's atmosphere. Many ancient people confused the two, as meteors look like stars that are streaking across the sky; this is why they were often called shooting stars or falling stars (see: The Scientific American. The Science of Shooting Stars. 2023. Phil Plait. for a further explanation of the science for the casual reader).

Large increases in meteors occur on a predictable schedule each year as the Earth's orbit passes through the stream of particles and debris left in the wake of a number of comets (or in a few cases, of asteroids). They only burn in Earths atmosphere due to friction from travelling extremely fast in a vacuum which takes no energy, to being compressed by air in the atmosphere, rising the temperature and setting fire where there is oxygen.^[12][13] The most visible is usually the annual Perseid meteor shower in August, which easily look like stars with flames being used a weapon in the sky. Meteor showers look like stars 'pelting' from every side.

If the flaming missiles mentioned by the Quran are to be identified with meteors burning up in the Earth's atmosphere, this would locate the eavesdropping devils (or jinn) in the upper atmosphere too, which leaves no way for the (extremely distant) stars to serve as guards in this process as outlined in the verses. Also, meteor paths are dictated by physics, so it is unclear how they could pursue a jinn/devil that moved out of it's directed course.

Stars are an average 5 light years away from each other in our galaxy.^[14] For context, a light year is the distance light travels in one year, which is 5.88 trillion miles/9.46 trillion kilometres.^[15] This again makes them an odd choice for a protection/guard, with trillions of miles/kilometers of mostly empty space between them.

The results of many stellar size measurements over the years have shown that most nearby stars are roughly the size of the Sun, with typical diameters of a million kilometers or so.^[16] An example of a calculation to demonstrate the size of this, is the sun can fit around 22 billion billion billion (10^28) people in, with the full workings found in this Quora answer as an estimate. This of course makes them absurdly large to be used as an object to be thrown by angels at jinn, both of which are approximately human size and visit Earth.

Also, stars do not actually 'burn' or cause flame which is caused by chemical burning on Earth needing oxygen.^[17] Stars create energy via nuclear fusion instead with no flames.

However, these verses would of course fit a relatively small universe as imagined by 7th century Arabs, in which a heavenly firmament is adorned with small stars which appear relatively close to each other, able to pelt shooting stars at any devils or jinn in their vicinity, seeming to cover visible interstellar distances in a flaming streak across the sky.

Meteors come from stars

Some apologists, for example, the highly influential Abul Ala-Maududi (d. 1979 AD) writing in light of much more modern science in his modern tasfir wrote:

Note: the claim that meteorites ('Meteorites' are specifically 'space rocks', i.e. the debris that have survived the burning all the way to Earth’s surface from meteors, not meteors themselves which are the burning objects and mostly come from comet debris) come from planets disintegrating is highly misleading and out-of-date. Very few meteors become meteorites (only 5-10%),^[18] and of those that do, ~99.8% percent of meteorites are believed to originate from asteroids with the remaining small fraction (~0.2%) of meteorites originating from an asteroid or comet colliding with either the Mars or the Moon (split roughly equally between them), and the debris eventually falling into Earths gravitational pull.^[19] The moon is never mentioned having this function, and Mars is only one of approximately 700 quintillion planets, with the rest being too far away for this.^[20] Planets themselves, just like stars, are not missiles throw to become meteors.

Objections to this claim

The claim appears to be that stars create heavier elements^[21] which eventually go on to become the sources of debris which can become meteors.

However, there are objections to this interpretation.

1. Qur'an does not state that the shooting stars 'come from stars' (mostly many billions of years ago), which would be very easy to do - so put bluntly this isn't what is being said in the text. It is the stars themselves that are a protection and are thrown. I.e. you state that something is a missile, all rules of grammar and logic lead you to assume that it's the thing that is mentioned that is the missile, not something that part of it get its elements from after going through many other processes to become billions of years later.

2. Meteors do not even come directly from stars, but rather form asteroids and comets either hitting earth or occasionally breaking into Mars or the Moon, with the debris getting burned up in Earths atmosphere (again, see: The Scientific American. The Science of Shooting Stars. 2023. Phil Plait. for a further explanation of the science). It is only true to say all the elements which make up everything (and not just space debris) in the universe were once part of a star.

3. In light of the previous point, naming stars/lamps/constellations as a protection is a totally pointless link to make as they have nothing to do with the story, which should focus only on the flames if meteors were what was being mentioned. The stars could have been described as being made for anything else in the universe as they create heavy elements for everything, yet they only are in this context where it is easy for humans to confuse the two.

4. If it meant something like the unknown sources of meteors at the time, it easily could have used another of the many generic words for objects/things in the heavens rather than those which have a different meaning.

In other words, this has involved twisting the text into something that isn't there.

Cosmic rays

Abul Ala-Maududi (d. 1979 AD) also wrote:

Note the meteor shower being referred to here Leonid Meteor Storm, where fragments of ice, rock, and dust left behind by the Comet Tempel-Tuttle. About every 33 years, the Leonid meteor shower intensifies, increasing the possibility of a dazzling display of lights.^[22] This comes from a predictable pattern of material left behind by the comet entering earths atmosphere and burning up,^[23] they do not actually form a flame in space which is impossible due to there being no oxygen.^[24]

Two other alternative interpretations popular in modern times^[25] as seen above, are that the Quran is referring to coronal mass ejections (large eruptions of charged matter from the sun or other stars), or cosmic rays (high energy, sub-atomic particles travelling through interstellar space). However, coronal mass ejections move slowly in cosmic terms, disperse over distance and do not come from surprise directions (Quran 37:8 states that the devils are pelted from every side, and pursued by a piercing flame if they escape with anything they overheard). Cosmic rays do not emit light as they travel through space and therefore nor could these be the flaming missiles of fire and smoke in the Quran.

On a separate note, though stars are described as an ornament or beauty for the sky in Quran 37:6, and Quran 67:5, there are an estimated minimum c.100 septillion stars^[26] in the known universe, but only a few thousand are actually visible to the naked eye.^[27]

There is also nothing said of their function of holding planetary systems together,^[28] which could have easily been done by differentiation of fixed stars from moving stars, and shown genuine scientific foreknowledge.

• Meteors as Shooting Stars: A List of SEVEN Quranic Mistakes - Atheism-vs-Islam.com article covering this topic
• The Exalted Assembly الملأ الأعلى - YouTube video