Be a Zionist, Not Just a Christian Zionist
For decades, Muslim scholars sold their followers a particular way of reading the Quran. Unlike the Bible, they said, the Quran is not to be read in its historical context. It is a book that agrees with modern science completely, and where the two appear to conflict, the Muslim holds to the Quran and waits for science to catch up. Science changes its mind every generation, the argument goes. The Quran never does.
To make the case, the scholars handed ordinary Muslims a set of “scientific miracles”, verses said to contain knowledge a 7th-century man could not possibly have had. The most famous is how the Quran describes the creation of the embryo: God makes the lump into bones, and then “clothes the bones with flesh.” For decades Muslims were taught that this was miraculous, how could an illiterate man in the Arabian desert have known the stages of embryonic development unless the knowledge came from God?
Then came the internet.
It turns out the verse describes something that does not happen. Bones are not formed first and then wrapped in muscle. Bone and muscle grow from the same tissue, at the same time, there is no stage in which a little skeleton sits waiting to be clothed. Worse, the “bones then flesh” sequence wasn’t new knowledge at all. It matches what the Greek physician Galen taught five centuries before Muhammad. The “miracle” was a recycled error.
Verse after verse that had been sold as scientific prophecy, the sun setting in a muddy spring, the mountains as pegs holding the earth steady, the sky as a solid canopy, turned out to be the cosmology of late antiquity, not the voice of God.
The ordinary Muslim did not have the option of quietly letting the claim go. He had been told his faith depends on it. So he had to defend the indefensible, even when defending it made him look foolish. There is a clip that went viral a few years ago of an imam standing before a hall full of people, trying to prove the earth is flat and motionless. He told the audience that if a helicopter rises and hovers over Saudi Arabia for a few hours, he said, China does not come around underneath it, so the earth cannot be turning. Millions laughed at that clip, but what they were watching was simply a man defending what he sincerely believes is true, cornered into absurdity because his scholars built his faith on a claim that could not survive contact with reality.