خلق
Khalq
Topic
The Quran says God created the heavens and the earth in six “days”, and gives “day” a wider sense than twenty-four hours.
What it means
“He created the heavens and the earth in six days” (7:54, 10:3, 11:7). The Quran says that a day with God may be a thousand years of ours (22:47) or fifty thousand (70:4), so classical and modern commentators have often taken “days” as periods. It says the heavens and the earth were “joined together, and We split them apart” (21:30), which some commentators explain as the separation of rain and earth’s fruit, and some modern writers as a sign of a beginning of the cosmos.
What the sources say
Muslim scholars hold that the Quran’s account does not set out the mechanics, and that science is free to study how creation unfolded: the Quran itself tells people to “travel through the earth and see how He began creation” (29:20).