The Holy Qur'an contains no statements contradicting established scientific facts

Compiled By: Syed Ali Shahbaz
The late Maurice Bucaille, a French medical doctor, and member of the French Society of Egyptology, who was a specialist in gastroenterology, after embracing the truth of Islam, wrote an interesting book titled The Bible, The Qur'an and Modern Science in which he has proved that the holy Qur'an contains no statements contradicting established scientific facts.
Bucaille has presented argument that the holy Qur'an is in agreement with scientific facts, while the Bible is not. He states that in Islam, science and religion have always been “twin sisters”. According to him, there are monumental errors of science in the Bible and not a single error in the holy Qur'an. Bucaille's belief is that the Qur'an's descriptions of natural phenomena make it compatible with modern science. He concludes that the holy Qur'an is indeed the unsullied Revealed Word of God Almighty. He points out that the Old Testament including the Torah has been distorted because of numerous translations and corrections as it was transmitted orally. He highlights, in his words, “numerous disagreements and repetitions”, in the Old Testament and the Christian Gospels. In his analysis, Bucaille notes that e makes use of many propositions of Biblical criticism, such as the documentary hypothesis.
Professor Bucaille was born in 1920 in France into a Christian family. After completing medicine, he embarked on research about religions and his interest in Islam led him to learn and master the Arabic language. This naturally inspired him to new heights and opened new vistas of thought in his mind. After comparing the contents of the holy Qur’an with modern technology, Bucaille, who passed away in 1998, embraced the truth of Islam in the early 1970s. In his objective study of the texts, Maurice Bucaille clears' away many preconceived ideas about the Old Testament, the Gospels and the Quran. He endeavoured in this collection of writings, to separate what belongs to Revelation from what is the product of error or human interpretation. His study has shed new light on the Holy Scriptures. At the end of a gripping account, he places the Believer before a point of cardinal importance: the continuity of a Revelation emanating from the same God, with modes of expression that differ in the course of time. It leads us to meditate upon those factors which, in our day, should spiritually unite rather than divide-Jews, Christians and Muslims. As a surgeon, Maurice Bucaille has often been in a situation where he was able to examine not only people's bodies, but their souls. This is how he was struck by the existence of Muslim piety and by aspects of Islam which remain unknown to the vast majority of non-Muslims.
In his search for explanations which are otherwise difficult to obtain, he learnt Arabic and studied the Qur’an. In it, he was surprised to find statements on natural phenomena whose meaning can only be understood through modern scientific knowledge. Bucaille then turned to the question of the authenticity of the writings that constitute the Holy Scriptures of the monotheistic religions. Finally, in the case of the Bible, he proceeded to a confrontation between these writings and scientific data. The results of his research into the Judeo-Christian Revelation and the holy Qur’an are set out in this book. For instance, this French Muslim has delved into the orderly changing of days into nights, and calls it among the eternal miracles of the holy Qur’an for no other scripture has dealt in such a scientific manner with the subject of the sun, moon and stars. He says: At a time when it was held that the Earth was the centre of the world and that the Sun moved in relation to it, how could anyone have failed to refer to the Sun's movement when talking of the sequence of night and day? This is not however referred to in the Qur’an and the subject is dealt with as ayah 54 of Surah A’raa says: "(God) covers the day with the night which is in haste to follow it . . ."
And ayah 37 of Surah Yasin states: "And a sign for them (human beings) is the night. We strip it of the day and they are in darkness."
And ayah 20 of Surah Luqman points out: “Have you not seen how God merges the night into the day and merges the day into the night."
Then there is ayah 5 of Surah Zumar, which informs us: ". . . He coils the night upon the day and He coils the day upon the night."
Bucaille goes on to point out in his analysis that the first ayah he has mentioned requires no comment, while the second simply provides an image. It is mainly the third and fourth ayahs that he has mentioned which provide interesting material on the process of interpenetration and especially of winding the night upon the day and the day upon the night.
Bucaille notes that American astronauts have seen and photographed what happens from their spaceships, especially at a great distance from Earth, e.g. from the Moon. They saw how the Sun permanently lights up (except in the case of an eclipse) the half of the Earth's surface that is facing it, while the other half of the globe is in darkness. The Earth turns on its own axis and the lighting remains the same, so that an area in the form of a half-sphere makes one revolution around the Earth in twenty-four hours while the other half-sphere that has remained in darkness, makes the same revolution in the same time. This perpetual rotation of night and day is quite clearly described in the holy Qur’an. It is easy for the human understanding to grasp this notion nowadays because we have the idea of the Sun's (relative) immobility and the Earth's rotation. This process of perpetual coiling, including the interpenetration of one sector by another is expressed in the Quran just as if the concept of the Earth's roundness had already been conceived at the time-which was obviously not the case. Further to the above reflections on the sequence of day and night, one must also mention, with a quotation of some ayahs from the Qur’an, the idea that there is more than one Orient and one Occident. This is of purely descriptive interest because these phenomena rely on the most commonplace observations. The idea is mentioned here with the aim of reproducing as faithfully as possible all that the Qur’an has to say on this subject. Here are some examples, as cited by ayah 40 of Surah Ma’arej is the expression “Lord of Orients and Occidents.”
In ayah 17 of Surah Rahman, the expression used is: “Lord of the two Orients and the two Occidents.”
In ayah 39 of Surah Suad, is a reference to the “distance between the two Orients”, an image intended to express the immense size of the distance separating the two points.
Thus anyone who carefully watches the sunrise and sunset knows that the Sun rises at different point of the Orient and sets at different points of the Occident, according to season. Bearings taken on each of the horizons define the extreme limits that mark the two Orients and Occidents, and between these there are points marked off throughout the year. The phenomenon described here is rather commonplace, but what mainly deserves attention in this chapter are the other topics dealt with, where the description of astronomical phenomena referred to in the Qur’an is in keeping with modern data. There are many other interesting facts noted by Maurice Bucaille including the Virgin-birth of Prophet Jesus, which is indeed a divine miracle that the holy Qur’an so beautifully explains in a convincing manner in contrast to myth of godson and other irrational things mentioned in the Christian Bible, which shows distortion on a grand scale. In short, what this French research has proved is indeed interesting and confirmation of the facts known to Muslims since God Almighty revealed the holy Qur’an in this month of Ramadhan almost a millennium and a half ago to the Greatest Messenger, Prophet Mohammad (SAWA). No wonder, Islam as the universal religion of mankind is the world’s rapidly growing religion.

The Holy Qur’an holds a unique place among the books of Revelation
Thanks to its undisputed authenticity, the text of the Qur’an holds a unique place among the books of Revelation, shared neither by the Old nor the New Testament. A review of the Torah and the Evangel reveals that these two books have undergone alterations before they were handed down to us in the form we know today. The same is not true for the Qur’an for the simple reason that it was written down at the time of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA). In the case of the Old Testament, the sheer number of authors who tell the same story, plus all the revisions carried out on the text of certain books from the pre-Christian era, constitute as many reasons for inaccuracy and contradiction.
As for the Christian Gospels, nobody can claim that they invariably contain faithful accounts of the words of Jesus or a description of his actions strictly in keeping with reality. It is clear how successive versions of the texts showed a lack of definite authenticity and moreover that their authors were not eyewitnesses. Not a single Gospel was written down at the time of Jesus. They were all written long after his earthly mission had come to an end. The situation is very different for the holy Qur’an. As the Revelation progressed, the Prophet and the believers following him recited the text by heart and it was also written down by the scribes. It therefore starts off with two elements of authenticity that the Gospels do not possess. This continued up to the Prophet's passing away. At a time when not everybody could write, but everyone was able to recite, recitation afforded a considerable advantage because of the double-checking possible when the definitive text was compiled. The Qur’anic Revelation was made by Archangel Gabriel to Prophet Mohammad (SAWA). It took place over a period of more than twenty years of the Prophet's life.
It is important to say that Qur’an was collected during the Prophet's lifetime. So, what is said in regard to collecting of Quran during the ruling period of the Caliphs after the Prophet means copying the same original copy written in the Prophet's life which later were sent to different countries, and it does not mean the recording or writing of Quran through oral sources as it may be thought. Yet, many of the Companions have written the Quran exactly during the lifetime of the Prophet. One of those was the copy written by the Prophet’s cousin, son-in-law and divinely-decreed vicegerent, Imam Ali ibn Abi Taleb (AS). He, because of his close relation with the Prophet, his long companionship, didn't only collect the dispersed scrolls of the Quran, but he rather could accompany it with a remarkable Tafseer or explanation, mentioning the occasion of the revelation of each ayah, and was regarded the first Tafseer of the holy Qur’an since the beginning of the Islamic mission. The Sunni Mu’tazali scholar, Ibn Abi’l-Hadeed says in his famous commentary on the Nahj al-Balagha that "All the scholars agree that Imam Ali is the first one who collected the holy Qur’an (between two covers)." Another Sunni Muslim scholar, Ibn Sireen Tabe'ee relates from 'Ikramah, that lmam Ali (AS) collected the holy Qur’an in a manner that if all mankind and jinn gathered to do that, they could not do it at all. That was only a brief note about the benefits of Imam Ali's Mus'haf. Unfortunately, the inconvenient political conditions that emerged after the passing away of the Prophet, was a main obstacle to get benefits from that remarkable copy of the Qur’an, which had tafseer or explanation along with it, which could have helped mankind to unravel many more mysteries of science and creation.
There are passages scattered all over the holy Qur’an which deal with certain aspects of the Creation and provide information on the successive events marking its development with varying degrees of detail. To gain a clear idea of how these events are presented, the fragments scattered throughout a large number of suras have to be brought together. Many important subjects are treated in the same manner in the Qur’an: earthly or celestial phenomena, or problems concerning man that are of interest to scientists. re are very obvious differences. On subjects that are by no means unimportant from a scientific point of view, we find statements in the Quran whose equivalents we search for in vain in the Bible. The latter contains descriptions that have no equivalent in the Quran.
The obvious resemblances between the two texts are well known; among them is the fact that, at first glance, the number given to the successive stages of the Creation is identical: the six days in the Bible correspond to the six days in the Quran. In fact however, the problem is more complex than this and it is worth pausing to examine it.
The Earth and planets rotating around the Sun constitute an organized world of dimensions which, to our human scale, appear quite colossal. The Earth is, after all, roughly 93 million miles from the Sun. This is a very great distance for a human being, but it is very small in comparison to the distance separating the Sun from the furthermost planet from it in the solar system (Pluto); in round numbers it is 40 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, i.e. approximately 3,672 million miles away. This distance, when doubled, represents the largest dimension of our solar system. The Sun's light takes nearly 6 hours to reach Pluto, and yet the journey is made at the terrifying speed of over 186,000 miles per second. The light coming from stars on the very confines of the known celestial world therefore takes billions of years to reach us. The Sun, of which we are a satellite like the other planets surrounding it, is itself an infinitesmally small element among a hundred billion stars that form a whole, called a galaxy. On a fine summer night, the whole of space seems to be filled with stars that make up what is known as the Milky Way. This group has extremely large dimensions. Whereas light could cross the solar system in units of one hour, it would require something like 90,000 years to go from one extreme to the other of the most compact group of stars that make up our galaxy.
review of the ayahs of the holy Qur’an reveals the remarkable conformity with scientific facts. For instance ayah 29 of Surah Baqarah says: “(God is) the One Who created for you all that is on the earth. Moreover He turned to the heaven and fashioned seven heavens with harmony. He is Full of Knowledge of all things."
Ayah 23 of Surah al-Isra’ reads: --"And We have created above you seven paths. We have never been unmindful of the Creation."
Similarly there are several other ayahs in this regard. For example ayahs 15 and 16 of Surah 71 read: "Did you see how God created seven heavens one above another and made the moon a light therein and made the sun a lamp?”.
Ayah 12 of Sura 78, says in this regard: "We have built above you seven strong (heavens) and placed a blazing lamp."
Here the blazing lamp is the Sun. To be brief the scientific facts mentioned in the Qur’an cannot be denied and modern science has still not yet fully discovered