Embryology in Islamic Scripture: Difference between revisions

This article focuses on what the [[Islam and Scripture|Islamic texts]] tell us in regards to [[embryology]], rather than the apologetic spin.

#The embryo spends 40 days as a drop of sperm or seed.  

#The embryo then spends another 40 days as a “clot” or a “leech-like clot” of blood.  

#The embryo then spends another 40 days as a “lump of flesh.”  

#During which the gender of the child is assigned by an angel at Allah’s direction.  

 

 

Taken together, the three phases of Islamic embryology take 120 days to go from conception to the point where the embryo becomes a fetus (i.e. an identifiable human baby), or right around 17 weeks. Does this reflect what we now know about embryonic development?

 

In fact, there are no developmental milestones which can be mapped to the three 40 day periods required by Islamic embryology, even though they are stressed in several authoritative ahadith.  

'''Conclusion:''' The hadith is demonstrably wrong concerning the timing of embryologic development.  

The three Islamic phases of development are described in a very visual way, allowing for an informed evaluation of the accuracy of those descriptions. This might be expected if for no other reason than that during the Prophet’s day, there was not even the idea of a microscope, and any descriptions offered would reasonably be of objects that were visible to an unaided eye. And this is exactly what we find.  

And certainly, each of the three Islamic stages is described at a visible level of scale. A drop of seed, a clot of blood, a lump of flesh; all of them are objects of a size with which the ancient Arabs would have been familiar.  

Instead, the Qur’an tells us that the “drop of seed” remains exactly that (a drop of seed) for the entire nutfah phase (40 days according to Bukhari and Muslim). What actually ''is'' happening during those 40 days, and how might it be said to resemble a “drop of seed?”

The actual “drop of seed” provided by the male dissipates within minutes of ejaculation, so even before conception, the literal “drop of seed” no longer exists. The case could certainly be made that the fertilized egg resembles a seed until about day 13 or fourteen, but the “drop” is long gone, replaced with a microscopic egg that moves through a period called the “blastocyst.” But by the beginning of the third week, the embryo has already begun to differentiate into a trilaminar embryo with the three layers of ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm. A mere two and a half weeks after conception, the embryo no longer looks anything like a “drop of seed,” while the Islamic tradition indicates that the nutfah stage should last for an additional three weeks.  

However, rather than a “lump” of anything, this period is one primarily of increasing size for the already fully formed fetus. During this period of time the fetus grows finger and toenails, begins to grow hair, and by the end of it the mother is beginning to feel the child’s movements. At no time during these weeks does the fetus look like anything other than an obvious human being.  

According to multiple ahadith, it is only after the mudghah phase (days 81-120) that an angel of the Lord determines the gender of the baby. But in fact, modern genetics shows that the gender of the baby is determined at the moment of conception, and is therefore already set some four months before Islam asserts the question is even asked of Allah.

 

'''Conclusion:''' The authors of the Qur’an and the hadith had no idea as to the genetic nature of gender, and assumed wrongly that it was assigned by Allah months after it was actually determined by genetics. The Islamic model is wrong again.  

In articles published widely across Islamic [[websites]], [[Dr. Keith Moore and the Islamic Additions|Keith L. Moore]] goes on the record to provide a generous assessment of the Qur’an and hadith in the light of modern knowledge about embryology. But a review of his “analysis” shows the extent to which he had to twist both the Islamic scriptures and modern science in order to get the “facts” to correlate.

 

Specifically, Moore’s intellectual lapses are these:  

1. He liberally translates Arabic into terms that no Arabic speaker would consider justified, but that allows him to pretend the Arabic is closer to truth than it really is. For example, in spite of the fact that almost three dozen translations of “alaqah” found on line never once exclude the word “clot,” Moore writes instead that “The word "alaqah" refers to a leech or bloodsucker.”  

2. He completely ignores the timing of phases dictated by the hadith, for to consider them renders even his mistranslation unintelligible. For example, after mistranslating “alaqah” to mean “a leech or bloodsucker,” he then compares it to the human embryo at 24 days gestation. But 24 days is still firmly within the “nutfah” phase, when the embryo should actually look like a “drop of seed.” He does the same with “mudghah,” comparing it with the embryo at 28 days, still in the “nutfah” phase and only four days later than he had assigned to “alaqah.”