5 verses about the natural world and how scholars read them

“We have adorned the lowest heaven with lamps, and made them missiles against the devils.”^[2] Surah 72 has the jinn, the unseen beings the Quran says were created from fire, say that they once sat in places to listen, and now find a guard of fierce warriors and flaming fires.^[3]

Classical commentators read it as the stars (or meteors) being used to drive away eavesdropping devils. A report in Sahih Muslim has the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) ask his Companions about a star that had shot across the sky, and the scholar al-Zuhri, asked whether such stars were seen before Islam, replied that they were, but that they had grown fiercer once the Prophet was sent.^[4] That reading accepts that meteors are ordinary events and gives them a further meaning. A critic points out that meteors are natural and were seen long before the Quran. The classical answer, as in al-Zuhri, does not deny it.

Some modern writers read it as figurative. The early commentator Qatada, quoted in a chapter heading of Sahih al-Bukhari, said that God made the stars for adornment, as missiles for the devils and as signs for guidance, and that whoever claims more than this speaks without knowledge.^[5] What is common to all is the Quran’s point, that the unseen is not open to anyone’s hearing without God’s permission.^[6]

“Have We not made the earth a resting place, and the mountains as pegs?”^[7] The word awtād is tent pegs. The classical sense is that mountains steady the earth against shaking, as the Quran says in another place.^[8] Those passages say that God set firm mountains on the earth “lest it shake with you”, and the commentators took the sense to be that the ground was fixed for its inhabitants.

Some modern writers connect it to the deep roots that geology finds beneath mountain ranges, where the crust is thickened. A fair objection is that these roots are buoyant crust that holds a range up. They are not an anchor that steadies the crust, and mountain belts lie along the most active earthquake zones, so mountains do not stop the earth from shaking. Tectonics explains their rise.

Others warn that the word is used as a picture, and that neither reading should be built into a doctrine. The simile of a peg that holds a tent in place makes sense to a desert reader at once, and the verse stays within the surrounding language of a prepared home: a resting place, a spread of land and a roof above.

“By the fig and the olive, and Mount Sinai, and this secure city.”^[9] The oaths are by places and plants of revelation: the fig and olive of Syria and Palestine, Sinai where Moses was spoken to, and Mecca. The verse makes no claim about diet or botany.

The classical commentators were divided. Some said the oath is by the places where the fig and olive grow, which are also the lands of the prophets. Others, with a report from Ibn Abbas, took the fruits literally, as the fig and the olive that people eat. The Quran elsewhere speaks of a tree that grows on Mount Sinai and yields oil, which links the olive with the mountain in the same oath.^[10]

What follows the oath is the statement that humankind was created in the best stature, then brought low, except for those who believe and do good.^[11] The oath serves that claim about human dignity. Whichever reading is taken, the subject of the passage is the human being.

Surah 99, al-Zalzala, begins “When the earth is shaken with its final quaking.” It describes the Last Day and gives the line, “Whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it.”^[12] The Arabic word dharra meant a tiny ant or a mote of dust to the first hearers, and modern translators render it “atom” to convey the idea of the smallest weight.

Faruqi reports that the orientalist H. A. R. Gibb said he felt the earth shaking under his feet as he recited it.^[13] The remark concerns the force of the language, and it shows what the surah does to a reader: short, hammering lines in which the earth casts out its burdens and humankind asks what is happening to it.

It is no prediction of earthquakes, and the Quran does not try to teach seismology. It uses a natural terror to place the reader before the final accounting. A critic who looks for science in it will find none, and a believer who looks for a warning will find one.

“He let loose the two seas, meeting each other, with a barrier between them which they do not cross.”^[14] Another passage names the two as one sweet and pleasant, the other salt and bitter, with a barrier and a forbidding partition set between them.^[15] Some writers say this describes the meeting of the sea and fresh water at an estuary, where the waters keep their character for a stretch.

Classical commentators generally took it as two bodies of water, salt and fresh, kept apart by God’s decree. Some early authorities named particular seas, such as the seas of Persia and Rome, and others read the verse as a general statement about the order of the waters. This is another case where the verse describes an observable thing in a few words, and the modern claims go beyond what the verse says.

Oceanographers do describe sharp boundaries in places, where waters of different salinity and temperature meet and mix slowly, and estuaries show a wedge of salt water beneath fresher water. Those boundaries are real, and they are temporary. The popular claim that two seas never mix at all, shown in photographs of sea fronts, claims more than the verse does or the water allows.