Islamic Scientific Schools

In the Name of Allah — the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. Look down at the ground beneath your feet and it seems the least interesting thing in the world. It is brown, it is still, and when it is dry it cracks and crumbles to dust. Nothing in it appears to move. Yet that handful of soil is the most crowded place on the planet. A single teaspoon of it can hold more living things than there are people on Earth. And when rain falls on dry earth, that apparently dead ground wakes up — first in minutes, then in hours, then in days — until the cracked surface turns green. This post does what the first three posts in this series did for earthquakes, for astronomy and for the oceans: first the phenomenon as science understands it, then the argument for how it relates to the Qur'anic narrative. 1. A teaspoon of soil Soil is not dirt. Dirt is what you wash off your hands; soil is a living system, and it is built in layers. At the top is the litter: fallen leaves, dead stems, the rema...

In the Name of Allah — the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. Stand on a shore at night and look out to sea, and you are looking at most of the world. The ocean covers more of the earth's surface than all the land put together. It holds almost all of the planet's water, it sets the climate of every continent, it feeds billions of people, and most of it has never been seen by any human eye. It is the largest habitat on earth, and also the least explored. This post does what the first two posts in this series did for earthquakes and for astronomy: first the phenomenon as science understands it, then the argument for how it relates to the Qur'anic narrative. 1. What the ocean is The ocean is a single body of salt water covering about 71 percent of the earth's surface — some 361 million square kilometres. It holds about 1.335 billion cubic kilometres of water, which is about 97 percent of all the water on earth. The remaining few percent is locked in ice caps and glacie...

In the Name of Allah — the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. Look up on a clear night, far from the lights of a city, and the sky does something no other sight does: it makes you feel small and addressed at the same time. Thousands of stars hang above you in patterns that have not changed in a human lifetime, the Moon follows its monthly rhythm, and the planets drift slowly against the fixed stars, exactly as they did for the shepherds, sailors and scholars of every age before us. Astronomy is the oldest science, and it began with that simple act of looking up. This post does what the first post in this series did for earthquakes: first the phenomenon as science understands it, then the argument for how it relates to the Qur'anic narrative. 1. What astronomy studies Astronomy is the study of everything beyond the earth: the Sun, the Moon, the planets and their moons, comets and asteroids, stars, galaxies, and the universe as a whole. It is an observational science in a way tha...