[WSJ.com]
January 23, 2002
Page One Feature
Western Scholars Play Key Role
In Touting 'Science' of the Quran
By DANIEL GOLDEN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Joe Leigh Simpson, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College
of Medicine in Houston, is a church-going Presbyterian.
But thanks to a few conferences he attended back in the 1980s, he is known
in parts of the Muslim world as a champion of the doctrine that the Quran,
Islam's holy book, is historically and scientifically correct in every
detail. Dr. Simpson now says he made some comments that sound "silly and
embarrassing" taken out of context, but no matter: Mideast television
shows, Muslim books and Web sites still quote him as saying the Quran must
have been "derived from God," because it foresaw modern discoveries in
embryology and genetics.
Publicity Machine
Dr. Simpson is just one of several non-Muslim scientists who have found
themselves caught up in the publicity machine of a fast-growing branch of
Islamic fundamentalism.
Dubbed "Bucailleism," after the French surgeon Maurice Bucaille, who
articulated it in an influential 1976 book, the doctrine is in some ways
the Muslim counterpart to Christian creationism. But while creationism
rejects much of modern science, Bucailleism embraces it. It holds that the
Quran prophesied the Big Bang theory, space travel and other contemporary
scientific breakthroughs. By the same token, it argues, the Bible makes
lots of scientific errors, and so is less reliable as the word of God.
Muslims believe the Quran to be God's revelations to the prophet Muhammad,
as told to him by an angel.
Before the planets and stars, modern science has largely concluded, the
universe was probably a cloud of dust and gas. The Quran presaged that
conclusion in the seventh century, Bucailleists argue, in a text saying
Allah "comprehended in his design the sky, and it had been as smoke." The
discovery of black holes in space? Foreseen in the passage, "Heaven is
opened and becomes as gates."
While disdained by most mainstream scholars, Bucailleism has had an
important role in attracting converts to Islam and in keeping young,
Western-leaning adherents faithful. Widely taught in Islamic secondary
schools, the doctrine fosters pride in Muslim heritage, and reconciles
conflicts that students may feel between their religious beliefs and
secular careers in engineering or computers.
Conferences and Videotapes
"All over the Arab world, in the universities, you will find people who
hold onto this line of thought more and more," says Muzaffar Iqbal,
president of Center for Islam and Science in Alberta, Canada. "It has more
credence there than creationism has here. In the Muslim world, there is no
organized opposition to it."
Says Zaghloul El-Naggar, an Egyptian geologist who touts the doctrine on a
popular weekly television program shown in the Arab world: "One of the main
convincing evidences to people to accept Islam is the large number of
scientific facts in the Quran."
Bucailleism has been propelled by a well-funded campaign led by Prof.
El-Naggar's onetime protege, Sheikh Abdul Majeed Zindani, a charismatic
Yemeni academic and politician. Founder and former secretary-general of the
Commission on Scientific Signs in the Quran and Sunnah, based in Saudi
Arabia, Mr. Zindani organized conferences where Dr. Simpson and other
scientists appeared and were videotaped.
A Friend of Osama
Mr. Zindani also is a friend and mentor to another Bucailleism devotee of
Yemeni descent: Osama bin Laden. The world's most wanted man has regularly
sought Mr. Zindani's guidance on whether planned terrorist actions are in
accord with Islam, says Yossef Bodansky, biographer of Mr. bin Laden and
staff director of a U.S. congressional task force on terrorism. "Zindani is
one of the people closest to bin Laden," says Mr. Bodansky, who attributes
the book's findings to interviews with various intelligence agencies,
current and former terrorists and others.
Mr. Zindani, who stepped down as secretary general of the Commission on
Scientific Signs in 1995, is now a leading figure in a Yemeni opposition
party that advocates an Islamic state. He isn't listed as a terrorist by
the U.S. government. He declined comment for this article, saying through
an intermediary that he is preoccupied with political and academic affairs.
In an interview last May in a magazine published by the Commission on
Scientific Signs, he said that when Muslims learn of the scientific
accuracy of the Quran, "they feel a kind of honor, confidence and
satisfaction that they are following a true religion." The persuasiveness
of the evidence, he added, "is clear and obvious, as it is testified by a
group of eminent non-Muslim scholars in several fields."
Bucailleism began gaining momentum around 1980, when Mr. Zindani became
director of a team at King Abdulaziz University that sought out Western
scientists visiting Saudi Arabia. His breakthrough came when one of his
assistants, Mustafa Abdul Basit Ahmed, presented a leech to Keith Moore, a
University of Toronto professor and author of a widely used embryology
textbook.
Mr. Ahmed wanted to show that a verse from the Quran, which states that God
made man as a leech, was an apt simile to describe early human gestation as
seen under a microscope. Mr. Ahmed says Prof. Moore was bowled over by the
resemblance between the leech and the early embryo. Since the Quran
predated microscopes, Prof. Moore, son of a Protestant clergyman, concluded
that God had revealed the Quran to Muhammad. Prof. Moore has disseminated
this view not only on Mr. Zindani's videos but in many lectures, panel
discussions and articles.
Prof. Moore sanctioned a special 1983 edition of his textbook, "The
Developing Human," for the Islamic world, that was co-written by Mr.
Zindani. It alternates chapters of standard science with Mr. Zindani's
"Islamic additions" on the Quran. In its acknowledgments, among
"distinguished scholars" who gave "full support in their personal and
official capacities," Mr. Zindani lists Sheikh Osama bin Laden, alongside
Dr. Simpson and other Western scientists. Prof. El-Naggar, the Egyptian
geology professor who taught Mr. Zindani, says Mr. bin Laden became
intrigued by Bucailleism in his college days after hearing Mr. Zindani
lecture, and helped pay for the book's publication.
Now a professor emeritus, Prof. Moore declined to be interviewed. Reached
in Toronto, he said he was busy revising his textbook and that "it's been
10 or 11 years since I was involved in the Quran."
Cultivating Scientists
In 1984, after being denied a permanent position at King Abdulaziz, Mr.
Zindani turned to the Muslim World League, a nonprofit organization
primarily funded by the Saudi government. The World League provided
financial support to establish the Commission on Scientific Signs. Mr.
Ahmed, who moved to Chicago in 1983, was put on its payroll at $3,000 a
month, and traveled from coast to coast cultivating U.S. and Canadian
scientists.
The commission drew the scientists to its conferences with first-class
plane tickets for them and their wives, rooms at the best hotels, $1,000
honoraria, and banquets with Muslim leaders -- such as a palace dinner in
Islamabad with Pakistani President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq shortly before he
was killed in a plane crash. Mr. Ahmed also gave at least one scientist a
crystal clock.
Mr. Ahmed, who left the commission in 1996 and now operates an Islamic
elementary school in Pennsylvania, says he reassured the scientists that
the commission was "completely neutral" and welcomed information
contradicting the Quran. The scientists soon learned differently. Each one
was given a verse from the Quran to examine in light of his expertise. Then
Mr. Zindani would interview him on videotape, pushing him to concede divine
inspiration.
Marine scientist William Hay, then at the University of Colorado, was
assigned a passage likening the minds of unbelievers to "the darkness in a
deep sea ... covered by waves, above which are waves." As the videotape
rolled, Mr. Zindani pressed Prof. Hay to admit that Muhammad couldn't have
known about internal waves caused by varying densities in ocean depths.
When Prof. Hay suggested Muhammad could have learned about the phenomenon
from sailors, Mr. Zindani insisted that the prophet never visited a
seaport.
Prof. Hay, a Methodist, says he then raised other hypotheses that Mr.
Zindani also dismissed. Finally, Prof. Hay conceded that the inspiration
for the reference to internal waves "must be the divine being," a statement
now trumpeted on Islamic Web sites.
"I fell into that trap and then warned other people to watch out for it,"
says Prof. Hay, now at a German marine institute.
Similar prodding failed to sway geologist Allison "Pete" Palmer, who was
working for the Geological Society of America. He stuck to his position
that Muhammad could have gleaned his science from Middle Eastern oral
history, not revelation. On one video, Mr. Zindani acknowledges that Mr.
Palmer still needs "someone to point the truth out to him," but contends
that the geologist was "astonished" by the accuracy of the Quran. Mr.
Palmer says that's an overstatement. Still, he has fond memories of Mr.
Zindani, whom he calls "just a lovely guy." He and the other American
scientists say they had no idea of Mr. Zindani's ties to Mr. bin Laden. And
in any case the U.S. didn't regard Mr. bin Laden as an outlaw at that time.
Looking for Verification
Prof. Gerald Goeringer, an embryologist retired from Georgetown University,
says he urged the commission to try some verification: hire an independent
scholar to see whether the Quran's statements could have been taken from
Aristotle, the Greek philosopher-scientist who preceded the book by nearly
1,000 years. After his request was denied, Prof. Goeringer says, he stopped
going to the conferences for fear of being associated with fanaticism.
"It was mutual manipulation," he says. "We got to go places we wouldn't
otherwise go to. They wanted to add some respectability to what they were
publishing."
Prof. Simpson -- who attended conferences in Saudi Arabia, Cairo and
Islamabad -- recalls being asked to analyze an anecdote from the Sunnah, an
Islamic holy book recording the acts and words of the prophet, in view of
modern genetics.
In this passage -- apparently intended to discourage unjustified
accusations of adultery -- a Bedouin complained to Muhammad that his wife
had given birth to a black child. Muhammed inquired about the nomad's
camels, and was told that some were tinged with red, but one was dusky in
color. The prophet then likened the child to the dusky camel, saying both
could have inherited their hues from ancestors.
At the urging of conference organizers, Prof. Simpson attested that this
passage was consistent with the way recessive genes pass on traits not
obvious in parents. But he says that the parallels -- while striking --
aren't necessarily evidence of divine inspiration.
University of Pennsylvania historian S. Nomanul Haq, a leading critic of
Bucailleism, says the notion of inheriting traits from ancestors was
commonplace in Muhammad's time. He attributes the rise of Bucailleism to a
"deep, deep inferiority complex" among Muslims humiliated by colonialism
and bidding to recapture faded glories of Islamic science.
Headquartered in the holy city of Mecca, the Commission on Scientific Signs
has a branch office in an ornate, three-story building on the outskirts of
another Saudi city, Jidda. According to its current secretary general,
Hassan A.A. Bahafzallah, Mr. Zindani no longer has any official ties to the
commission, although he is still invited to its events. Of Mr. Zindani's
association with Mr. bin Laden, he says, "All I know is that during the
jihad in Afghanistan, Zindani used to go and visit him."
Mr. Bahafzallah says the commission raises about $250,000 a year from
individuals and businesses, besides its subsidy from the Muslim World
League. It has operated five conferences since 1986, most recently in
Beirut in 2000, each costing about $100,000.
The legacy of those conferences lives on. Among other products, the
commission distributes a videotape, "This is the Truth," which intersperses
Mr. Zindani's interviews with non-Muslim scientists and his commentary --
including the prophecy that unbelievers "will be exposed to a fire in which
every time their skin is burnt, we will replace them with new skins."
Islamic publishers and organizations have distributed 800,000 copies of "A
Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam," which reprints large
portions of the videotape's script, including the testimonials of the
scientists.
The script is also available on Internet sites such as Islamicity.com,
which had more than one million visitors in November. Based in Culver City,
Calif., Islamicity has been digitizing Mr. Zindani's lectures on Quranic
infallibility, according to Chief Executive Mohammed Abdul Aleem. He visits
local schools to talk about "correspondences" between the Quran and modern
science. Bucailleism, Mr. Aleem says, "resonates very strongly in the young
and educated and especially I think among Muslims who are going through
universities in the U.S."
-- James Dorsey in Jidda and Elena Cherney in Toronto contributed to this
article.
Write to Daniel Golden at daniel.golden@wsj.com1
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