| The only book that is authored by God on the earth is Al-Quran was revealed in Arabic to Prophet Muhammad (SAW) over a period of twenty-three years ending in 632 A.D., the year he passed away from the mortal world to live in eternity. When it comes to revelation, some people knit their brows, express their emotions with scowl and begin to criticize it prickly with logical or scientific play of words. They forget that Truth dwells in the Deeps. It must be remembered that throughout the world today's editions of the Quran are all faithful reproductions of the original manuscript. Contrary to the Bible, in the Quran, there are no instances of rewriting or corrupting the text over the course of time.
The Holy Quran is basically not a book of Science. The sole object of this luminous Book that manifests His Omnipotence, Wisdom and Knowledge is to guide the mankind to the straight path and piety and develop our faculties of thought and action to perfection. But there is, indeed, a mention of various scientific facts because man’s physical development has vital bearing on his mental make-up. For instance, the scientific concepts that cosmos was created out of chaos as the heaven was something like smoke, the heavens and the earth were once a closed-up mass and then God opened them out, water gives birth to all sorts of life and sustains it and that each (planet) is gliding along its orbit were stated in the Holy Quran fourteen hundred years ago. Then there were neither Scientists nor books on Science. An impartial and eminent French scientist, surgeon, scholar and author of "THE BIBLE, THE QUR'AN AND SCIENCE", Dr. Maurice Bucaille, was well-versed with the Biblical version of Pharaoh's story as being drowned in pursuit of Prophet Moses. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that unknown to the world till only of late, the Holy Quran made definite prediction about the preservation of the body of the same Pharaoh of Moses' time. This led Dr. Bucaille to study the Holy Quran thoroughly after learning the Arabic language. The final conclusion of his comparative study of Quran and the Bible is that the statements about scientific phenomena in the Holy Quran are perfectly in conformity with the modern sciences whereas the Biblical narrations on the same subjects are scientifically entirely unacceptable.
There in no denying the fact that in the 7th Century Arabia, the society has little scientific knowledge. Bedouin tribalism was the "dominant feature" of the population. The mostly desolate area, in which the Arabs lived, was an "oral" culture, with a "nomadic" lifestyle. Few people knew how to read and even fewer knew how to write. Myth and magic controlled their thoughts and guided their rituals. In these conditions, who could discover the true origin of the universe or uncover the origin of life? Nothing in the literature of the world, including the literature of the ancient Greeks, came even remotely close to the accuracy of statements about the natural world, contained in the Koran. In fact some of the information that we come across in the Koran was not known until about say 70 or100 years back and some of it was not known by the scientists just a few years ago.
The philosophic content of a science is only perceived if science is conscious of its limits. Today physics is undergoing a basic change, the most encouraging trait of which is a return to its original self-limitation though, in the words of Heisenberg, ‘we have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin’. On the question of embracing Rational and the Mystical, it is not impertinent to make a special mention of Wolfgang Pauli whose genius according to Max Born exceeded even that of Einstein. He allied himself with those who emphasize the role of intuition and the direction of attention in framing the concepts and ideas necessary for establishing a scientific theory. Pauli sought for an order of the cosmos distinct from the world of appearance. If according to him ‘both the soul and what is known in perception are subject to an order objectively conceived’, revelation, as some people contend, is not out of the question. With a positive approach, Einstein takes a broader view of science and religion: “If it is one of the goals of religion to liberate mankind as far as possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears, scientific reasoning can aid religion in yet another sense…..But whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances made in this domain (of discovering rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts) is moved by profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the understanding man achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains humble attitude of mind towards the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be more religious in the highest sense of the word . . . . . While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge. If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza’s Amor Dei Intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.” Al-Quran has invariably invited the attention of mankind to go deep into the realm of facts and delve into the profound study of nature as well as urged him to travel through the earth in order to learn the moral imperatives for his own well-being and self-realization:
Do they not look at the Camels, how they are made? And at the Sky, how it is raised high? And at the Mountains, how they are fixed firm? And at the Earth, how it is spread out? (88:17-20)
Say: "Travel through the earth and see what was the end of those before (you): Most of them worshipped others besides God." (30:42)
Do they not travel through the earth, and see what was the end of those before them? But the home of the hereafter is best, for those who do right. Will ye not then understand? (12:109)
And let us not overlook the very words of first revelation:
Read in the name of thy Lord and Cherisher, Who creates; Creates man, out of a (mere) clot of congealed blood; Read! And thy Lord is Most Bountiful; He Who teaches (the use of) the pen; teaches man that which he knows not (96:1-5)
It goes without saying that reading and writing are the basics of all learning, knowledge, philosophy and scientific research. Thus Al-Quran bears testimony to the supreme value of learning and science. In the words of Zamakhshari, “without the knowledge of writing no other knowledge could be comprehended, nor the sciences placed within bounds, nor the history of the ancients be acquired and their sayings (and findings) be recorded, nor the revealed books be written.” And to quote the valuable words of Hadith, “to listen to the words of the learned and to instill into the mind the lessons of science, is better than religious exercise.”
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