The Story Written Inside You

Everything we have looked at so far has been out there. The sky, the sea, the mountains, the bees.

This chapter is about you. Specifically, about how you were built, and about a few parts of you that the Qur’an singles out for reasons that took centuries to make sense.

Fair warning: this is the chapter where the evidence gets hardest to shrug off.

Stage by stage

Chapter 23, verses 12 to 14, lays out the making of a human being as a sequence of stages.

It begins with an extract from clay. Then a tiny drop, settled in a secure place. Then that drop becomes an alaqah. Then the alaqah becomes a mudghah. Then bones are made from it. Then the bones are clothed with flesh. Then it is brought forth as another creation altogether.

Six steps, in order. Now let us take the words apart, because the Arabic is the whole argument.

Nutfah. A tiny drop. A minute quantity. That is how the verse describes the starting material, and a starting material is exactly what it is, far too small for anyone in the seventh century to have seen.

Chapter 32, verse 8 adds a word to it: sulalah. Sulalah means the extract, the quintessence, the best part drawn out of a whole. And that is precisely what happens. An enormous number of cells are involved, and exactly one of them gets through. One out of millions. The best part drawn out of the whole.

Alaqah. This word is a problem for anyone who wants to call this a lucky guess, because it has three meanings at once, and all three are correct.

It means a leech, the little creature that fastens onto a body and takes nourishment from it. It means a thing that clings or hangs on to something. And it means a clot of blood.

At that stage, the tiny embryo hangs onto the wall of the womb and draws nourishment out of it, which is exactly what a leech does. Its shape at that point genuinely resembles a leech. And it is gorged with blood that is not yet circulating, so it looks like a clot.

One word. Three meanings. Three hits.

Mudghah. This means a chewed lump. Something that has been in a mouth and been bitten.

At the next stage the embryo develops a row of blocks along its back called somites, and they leave the surface looking notched and bumpy. Embryologists who have compared the real thing with a piece of chewed material have said the resemblance is uncomfortable.

Then bones, then flesh over the bones. The verse is specific about the order. Bones are formed, and then the bones are clothed with muscle.

For a long time textbooks described those two as happening more or less together. Closer study showed the cartilage skeleton takes shape first and the muscle then wraps around it. Bones, then flesh, in that order, exactly as the verse puts it.

The man who checked

In the late 1970s, a professor named Keith Moore was head of anatomy at the University of Toronto. He was not some obscure figure. His textbook, The Developing Human, was one of the most widely used embryology books in the world and had been translated into several languages.

He was shown these verses and asked what he made of them.

By his own account, the leech comparison stopped him. He did not believe it. So he did what a scientist does. He put an embryo at that stage under a microscope, got a photograph of a leech, and set them side by side.

They matched.

Moore said afterwards that this information could not have come from a human source in the seventh century, and that the author had to be God. He went on to declare that Muhammad is a messenger of God, and in the third edition of his textbook he added a section discussing the Qur’anic and prophetic descriptions of these stages.

A man rewrote his own standard reference book because of a verse.

Three layers of darkness

Chapter 39, verse 6 says the human being is formed in the womb, in three veils of darkness.

Three. Not one, not “the darkness”, three.

There are three: the wall of the mother’s abdomen, the wall of the womb itself, and the membrane surrounding the baby. Three separate coverings, counted correctly, in a book written by people who had never opened one.

And chapter 22, verse 5 describes that early lump as partly formed and partly unformed, which is exactly what a developing embryo is. Some structures already shaped, others still nothing at all.

Who decides whether it is a boy or a girl

Here is a piece of this that had a social consequence, and it is worth telling honestly.

In a lot of places, for a long time, if a family kept having daughters, the mother got blamed for it. In parts of India this was so normal that a mother in law would say it straight to a daughter in law’s face. You gave us girls.

Chapter 53, verses 45 and 46, and chapter 75, verses 37 to 39, both say the same thing. The two kinds, male and female, come from the tiny drop from the father.

Modern genetics says the same thing in different language. You have twenty three pairs of chromosomes, and the last pair decides. The mother’s cell always carries an X. The father’s cell carries either an X or a Y. If it is X, the child is a girl. If it is Y, the child is a boy.

The mother contributes the same thing every time. The father’s cell is the one that varies.

So for generations, an enormous number of women were blamed for something that was never theirs, and the correct answer had been printed in a book the whole time and nobody bothered to read it that way.

Your fingertips

Chapter 75, verses 3 and 4 answers someone who scoffs at the idea of being raised after death, asking whether they think Allah cannot gather their bones. And then it says something odd. Not only that, but Allah is able to put in perfect order the very tips of their fingers.

Of all the things to mention. Not the face. Not the heart. The fingertips.

In 1880 Sir William Herschel worked out what a fingerprint is for, in the sense of what we can use it for. No two people on earth have the same pattern of ridges on their fingertips. Not identical twins. Not in a population of eight billion. The pattern forms before you are born and stays with you until your skin is gone.

That is why police forces and border agencies and the phone in your pocket all use it. Your fingertip is your name, written in a font nobody else has.

The verse could have made its point with any part of the body. It picked the one part that identifies a person uniquely, eleven hundred years before anyone knew it did.

Why the skin

Chapter 4, verse 56 is a verse about punishment in the Hereafter, and it says that those who are burned will be given new skins so that they will taste the punishment.

Read as a bit of frightening imagery, you would not look twice. Read as anatomy, it is a strange sentence. Why replace the skin so a person can feel? Why not the flesh?

Because feeling lives in the skin.

Pain receptors, the nerve endings that register damage, sit in the skin. Once a burn goes deep enough to destroy them, that area of the body stops reporting pain altogether, which is why the worst burns can be the ones that hurt least. Doctors use exactly this to assess a burn. Touch the area with a fine point. If the patient feels it, the receptors survived and the burn is shallow. If they feel nothing, the receptors are gone and the injury is deep.

A professor of anatomy in Thailand spent years working on pain receptors and did not believe the Qur’an could have located the sense of pain in the skin. He checked. At a medical conference in Riyadh he stood up and said he had come to believe the words of Prophet Muhammad, and he declared his faith in front of the room.

The glass of milk

One more, and it is the most domestic thing in this whole book.

Chapter 16, verse 66 says there is a lesson for us in cattle, and that from inside their bodies, from between the contents of their intestines and their blood, comes pure milk that is easy to drink.

From between the intestines and the blood. That is a very specific address.

It is also right. The cow eats grass. The grass is broken down in the gut, and the useful parts pass through the intestinal wall into the bloodstream. The blood carries them around the body and delivers them to the mammary glands, and the glands make milk out of what arrives.

So the milk really does come from a point between the contents of the intestine and the blood. That is the junction where it starts.

But there is a catch. That explanation depends on knowing that blood circulates, and that discovery is usually credited to William Harvey around four hundred years ago. Before that, nobody in Europe had a working picture of blood going round the body.

Which means this sentence was written roughly a thousand years before the science existed to understand what it was describing.

The point of all this

You have a body that was assembled in stages, in the dark, behind three walls, from one cell out of millions, with the skeleton laid down first and the muscle wrapped over it afterwards, and it finished with a pattern on your fingertips that belongs to nobody else who has ever lived.

Nobody in the seventh century could see any of that.

Somebody described it anyway.