This concept does not appear in
those translations of the Qur'an that have been made by men of letters. Since the
latter know nothing about astronomy, they have translated the Arabic word that
expresses this movement by one of the meanings the word has: 'to swim'. They
have done this in both the French translations and the, otherwise remarkable,
English translation by Yusuf Ali.[66]
The Arabic word referring to a
movement with a self-propelled motion is the verb sabaha (yasbahuna
in the text of the two verses). All the senses of the verb imply a movement
that is associated with a motion that comes from the body in question. If the
movement takes place in water, it is 'to swim'; it is 'to move by the action of
one's own legs' if it takes place on land. For a movement that occurs in space,
it is difficult to see how else this meaning implied in the word could be rendered
other than by employing its original sense. Thus there seems to have been no
mistranslation, for the following reasons.
-The Moon completes its rotating motion on its own axis at the same time as it revolves around the Earth, i.e. 291/2 days (approx.), so that it always has the same side facing us.
-The Sun takes roughly 25 days to revolve on its own axis. There are certain differences in its rotation at its equator and poles, (we shall not go into them here) but as a whole, the Sun is animated by a rotating motion.
It appears therefore that a verbal
nuance in the Qur'an refers to the Sun and Moon's own motion. These motions of
the two celestial bodies are confirmed by the data of modern science, and it is
inconceivable that a man living in the Seventh century A.D.-however
knowledgeable he might have been in his day (and this was certainly not true in
Muhammad's case) -could have imagined them.
This view is
sometimes contested by examples from great thinkers of antiquity who
indisputably predicted certain data that modern science has verified. They
could hardly have relied on scientific deduction however; their method of
procedure was more one of philosophical reasoning. Thus the case of the
pythagoreans is often advanced. In the Sixth century B.C., they defended the
theory of the rotation of the Earth on its own axis and the movement of the
planets around the Sun.
This theory was to be confirmed by modern science. By
comparing it with the case of the Pythagoreans, it is easy to put forward the
hypothesis of Muhammad as being a brilliant thinker, who was supposed to have
imagined all on his own what modern science was to discover centuries later. In
so doing however, people quite simply forget to mention the other aspect of
what these geniuses of philosophical reasoning produced, i.e. the colossal
blunders that litter their work. It must be remembered for example, that the
Pythagoreans also defended the theory whereby the Sun was fixed in space; they
made it the centre of the world and only conceived of a celestial order that
was centered on it. It is quite common in the works of the great philosophers
of antiquity to find a mixture of valid and invalid ideas about the Universe.
The brilliance of these human works comes from the advanced ideas they contain,
but they should not make us overlook the mistaken concepts which have also been
left to us. From a strictly scientific point of view, this is what
distinguished them from the Qur'an. In the latter, many subjects are referred
to that have a bearing on modern knowledge without one of them containing a
statement that contradicts what has been established by present-day science.
