iERA's dawah for Olympics - Is life just a game?

Good question, iERA.

But whence cometh, I wonder, the inspiration for this dire dawah leaflet?
Hmm, I wonder....

Is life just a game... where we make up the rules,

While we're searching for something to say?

Or are we just simply spiralling coils, 

Of self-relicating DN..NNA?


This life...what is our fate?
Is there a heaven and hell?
Do we reincarnate?
Is mankind evolving..
Or is it too late?
Well, tonight is the meaning of life!  

Let's leave it to the inimitable Eric Idle to remind us of the rest.

I suggest, should you be unfortunate enough to encounter a iERA dawah chugger bothering some poor innocent tourist trying to get to the opening ceremony on this momentous day, that you whistle this happy tune.

Dawah Olympics - iERA go for gold with a giant pyramid selling scam!

iERA, my favourite Islamic educational and research organisation, has launched a new dawah campaign for the Olympics. Abdurraham Green, chairman, has been tweeting excitedly about the tens of thousands of leaflets which will be distributed this summer to coincide with The Games. There will be five flyers which donors can choose from to help publish and distribute - all with a unique, uplifting message such as: Every soul will taste death. Then to us you will be returned. 29.57 A bit different from the ubiquitous: Plan your journey - arrive on time, although now I come to think of it...
In any case, this got me to thinking about dawah and the pyramid selling nature of conversion in Islam.

It seems that in Islam, if you bring one soul to Allah then you get the benefit of all the good works done by that soul. Not only that, you also get the payback from that soul's children's good works.
The nature of this has not escaped Mr Green. But far from being embarrassed that dawah, to all intents and purposes, is predicated on an enormous spiritual ponzi scheme, Abdurraham seems amused and even inspired  by the fact.

"You know pyramid schemes? Anyone ever been bitten by one of those? I know I have! (ironic chuckle) You know what? Well you know what, this is a REAL one, but for adja*! This is where you get adja, 'cause if you start at the top and you start this movement, brothers and sisters, everyone you bring on board, everyone you get to bring dawah, every person who comes to Islam, you're getting the adja for it. Does that sound like something you want to meet Allah on the day of judgement with, yes or no?"

Now I hate to be the fly in the ointment here, but does that mean that if I bring someone to Islam who turns out not to be such a good bet, I get negative points, so to speak? Let's imagine that with my amazing Yusuf Estes-like powers of persuasion I manage to convince Mr Smith down the road to convert to Islam. Unfortunately for me, Mr Smith turns out to be a bad egg and enjoys the odd drink, flutter and occasional petty theft. Does that sound like something I want to meet Allah on the day of judgement with? And what happens if his kids turn out even worse? Suddenly Allah's pyramid scheme doesn't seem like such a good deal after all.

Just asking.

*adja (sp?)

Allah's Hell - according to iERA's Abdurraheem Green

There has been a lot of discussion in this blog recently about whether Hell as described in the Qur'an should be taken as simply a metaphor or understood literally.
My contention has been that for the vast majority of Muslims and Islamic teachers and scholars, Hell is a very real place whose inhabitants can expect the most appalling torture imaginable (Allah being all-powerful and all-knowing can, after all, create the ultimate in pain)
I visited iERA (Islamic Education and Research Association) to see if they could help clarify matters. The founding member and chairman of iERA, Abdurraheem Green, is apparently in no doubt.
Here are some highlights of a lecture he has given on more than one occasion...(Please don't read if you have a weak stomach)

"Hell is a place where Allah will burn the skins of the people and then will recreate their skins and burn the skins again so that the people will taste the punishment. It is a place of heat, a place of pain, a place of suffering. The people will cry in agony [...] for a drink and they will be given a drink. It will be a boiling water that will scald their faces and burn their insides. And they will drink from a river that is made of the puss that flows out from the wounds of the people in the hell-fire. [...] The smallest punishment will be their brain will boil."

And so it goes on and on, the speaker seemingly taking great delight in the details.
This is not a metaphor for the iERA.
Nor, as far as I can tell, is it anything other than a terrifyingly real threat  for most scholars, imams or Muslims the world over.

iERA Seeds of change - irony-free zone

iERA (Islamic Education and Research Association) is hosting an international women's conference this Sunday. Entitled Seeds of Change, the conference calls for the Muslim sisters to be the best of womankind. I'm not sure, however, that their choice of key note lecturers is  a particularly  wise one.
Among the inspiring speakers will be the (morally? but certainly financially) bankrupt sister-in-law of the blessed Tony, Lauren Booth. She is represented by this liberating picture...

This is presumably to stop the male visitors to iERA getting over-excited by a photo of A REAL WOMAN,  since the male speakers are all represented by old-fashioned fleshy photos.
The webpage also includes a video opened by our old friend, Hamza Tzortzis. In the video he tells the ladies not to be to be "shackled to a social construct or social consensus" but rather to enslave themselves to Allah.  All good stuff. "Free yourselves from the slavery of trying to be like men", continues Hamza. (Well they've certainly managed it with the photos...)
This is then followed by another six videos, all telling the ladies they must attend to become free.
And do you know something?
Not one, not a single one of those videos produced by the good MEN of iERA is presented by a WOMAN.
iERA are so far removed from reality that they apparently genuinely believe that a supposedly feminist conference ought to be introduced and explained to the sisters by MEN.

Well done iERA. You've shot yourselves in the foot ... again.

# 1 Sperm emerging from between the backbone and ribs - Top 5 reasons to believe the Qu'ran is manmade

Consider for a moment Muslims' oft repeated challenge  to those who question the authenticity of their holy book: Find one mistake -just one - in the Qur'an, they say,  and we will accept that Islam is a false creed.
So completely do Muslims believe that that their revelation is the perfect word of God, unchanged and unchanging, that they cannot conceive of any error being possible.

And yet there are many statements in the Qur'an that seem to contradict common sense and run counter to what we know about the world, the animal kingdom and our own bodies. I have listed some of the more glaring examples in previous posts in this series, but there is one error that leaves Muslims grasping at semantic straws and inventing imaginative interpretations that, quite frankly, beggar belief.
Here is the offending ayat (86:5-7) in Pickthall's translation:

So let man consider from what he is created. He is created from a gushing fluid that issued from between the loins and ribs. Transliteration: Falyanthuri al-insanu mimma khuliqa Khuliqa min ma-in dafiqin Yakhruju min bayni alssulbi waalttara-ibi

Picture showing testes and prostate - anyone spot the ribs?

For the sake of completeness, let us examine some other translations, lest Muslims accuse us of cherry picking...
Yusuf Ali: proceeding from between the backbone and the ribs.
Pickthal: that issued from between the loins and ribs.
Arberry: issuing between the loins and the breast-bones.
Shakir: coming from between the back and the ribs.
Sarwar: which comes out of the loins and ribs.
Khalifa: from between the spine and the viscera.
Hilali/Khan: proceeding from between the back-bone and the ribs.
Malik: that is produced from between the loins and the ribs.
QXP: that issued from between tough rocks and mingled dust.????????
Maulana Ali: coming from between the back and the ribs.
Free Minds: it comes out from between the spine and the testicles.!!!!!!!!

(The reason for giving multiple translations becomes clear when one tries to debate issues such as the above with Muslims, for one of the favourite ways of muddying the waters when presented with a clear error in the Qur'an is the old "Ah, but Arabic is such a difficult language - you cannot hope to understand its myriad complexities")

Not only is the above statement about semen being produced from a region between the backbone and the ribs patently incorrect, it also bears a striking similarity with the teachings of the Greek physician, Hippocrates, who believed that semen was produced throughout the body before being collected in the kidneys (located between the ribs and the backbone) and thence to the penis. Given that we know such writings were available to Muhammad's followers (see here for a fuller examination of this) it seems that not only do we have a clear error in the Qur'an but also a fair idea how and why the author might have made such a mistake.

So how do Muslims try to explain away this apparent gibberish?  Shaykh `Abd al-Wahhâb al-Turayrî of IslamToday.com is typical of the Islamic apologists. He writes:

The words translated as “backbone” (sulb) and “ribs” (tarâ’ib) are not understood in Arabic to belong to the same person. Arabs understand the “sulb” to refer to a part of the male body and the “tarâ’ib” to a part of the female. Ibn Kathîr states: “It refers to the ‘sulb’ of the man and the ‘tarâ’ib’ of the woman…” He then quotes this interpretation on the authority of the Prophet’s companion Ibn `Abbâs. This same understanding is given in all the major classical works of Qur’anic commentary.
Many non-Arabs misinterpret this verse because they think that sulb and tara’ib refer to different body parts of the male. In reality, tara’ib is feminine, and refers to the female’s body part. For fourteen hundred years, all of the scholars have held this belief, and not a single classical scholar has ever differed on this point. The reason is that the Arabic makes it clear that tara’ib refers to a feminine body part, and not a male one.
Lane’s Lexicon says:
Tara’ib: … most of the authors on strange words affirm decidedly that it (tara’ib) is peculiar to women. (Lane’s Lexicon, p.301)

So let's have a look to see what Lane's Lexicon p 301 actually says. This is the definition of tara'ib we find before the quoted section above: The part of the breast which is the place of the collar, the bones of the breast which are between the collarbone and the pap, the part of the breast or chest that is next to the two collar bones, the four ribs on the right side of the chest and the four on the left thereof.


So if I understand things correctly, we have, according to Shaykh `Abd al-Wahhâb al-Turayrî, the Qur'an stating that man is created from a gushing fluid coming from an area between the backbone/loins (take your pick) and the chest area of a woman. That's so much clearer.

And let us not forget that the Qur'an claims for itself a clarity beyond criticism: a book in clear Arabic speech (16:103) He it is who has bestowed upon thee from on high this divine writ, containing messages that are clear in and by themselves. (3:7)


Does it not seem strange to educated Muslims that their holy book should on the one hand claim to be written in clear language and on the other be so opaque as to lead to whole books of contradictory interpretations?

Perhaps we should turn to the iERA (Islamic Education and Research Association) for some help
This is a reply an acquaintance received when he put my qualms regarding this verse to the "scholars" at iERA:

The statement “sperm produced from between ribs and backbone?” is inaccurate. The most correct interpretation and translation (see Abdel Haleem’s translation of the Qur’an) states that it is not the sperm that is produced from the ribs and the backbone but rather that the baby comes from there (in other words the womb). This is the view of the classical scholar al-Razi in his al-Tafsir al-Kabir. The pronoun refers back to man and not to the gushing fluid:
86. THE NIGHT-COMER
5) Man should reflect on what he was created from.
6) He is created from spurting fluid,
7) then he * emerges from between the backbone and breastbone **
*= The Pronoun here is taken to refer to the person rather than the fluid.
**=Of the mother, where she carries the baby.

Ah, so now it's not the terms for backbone or ribs that are being debated, but in fact the grammar and, more specifically, the difference between a personal and a relative pronoun. I'm afraid I do find it difficult to summon up the requisite awe for God's wondrous prose and a concomitant willingness to suspend my critical faculties and believe this is divine revelation, when even expert speakers in the language of Allah can't agree on what the bloody thing means.

Let us turn to a world expert, the translator of the above verse quoted above by the iERA, and ask him why he chose this new interpretation which is so blatantly at odds with all the others that have gone before. In an email (which I'd be happy to show to anyone who requests it) Professor Abdel Haleem explains the reasons for his interpretation thus:

My interpretation is that this issuing /emerging refers to man, not the fluid, which does not violate the scheme of imagery that runs through this compact sura, or our knowledge of biology: the spurting fluid from which man is created has little to do with bones.

Let me just underline that for you, in case you missed it. We have here a leading academic, expert in the field of Qur'anic interpretation and translation, Professor of Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, an OBE no less, and editor of the Journal of Qur'anic Studies stating that he chose his translation of this ayat because "it doesn't violate ... our knowledge of biology".

Can anyone think of any other academic discipline in the world where the experts are happy to admit that they have chosen a particular interpretation of a text (which runs counter to all other previous ones) because otherwise it risks suggesting that the author is fallible?

No - I thought not.

Embryology in the Qur'an - a challenge to Hamza Tzortzis, iERA and Islam Papers

So let man observe from what he has been created. He was created from a fluid, ejected, emerging from between the backbone and the ribs 

Following the recent correspondence between this blog and the dawah site, Islam Papers, and the suggestion by IP that I put my points relating to the above verse in the Qur'an to Hamza Tzortzis of iERA (Islamic Education and Research Association) I thought it might be enlightening for my readers to see what the iERA said when I did exactly that via the kind offices of a Muslim friend a few months back. Here is the reply he got. Notice that there is NO MENTION of the various translations Hamza is so keen to highlight in his latest article quoted in IP and reproduced at the end of this post.

  The statement “sperm produced from between ribs and backbone?” is inaccurate. The most correct interpretation and translation (see Abdel Haleem’s translation of the Qur’an)  states that it is not the sperm that is produced from the ribs and the backbone but rather that the baby comes from there (in other words the womb). This is the view of the classical scholar al-Razi in his al-Tafsir al-Kabir. The pronoun refers back to man and not to the gushing fluid:
86. THE NIGHT-COMER 5) Man should reflect on what he was created from.6) He is created from spurting fluid, 7) then he * emerges from between the backbone and breastbone **
* *= The Pronoun here is taken to refer to the person rather than the fluid.**=Of the mother, where she carries the baby.

and here is Hamza's latest article in full:

The above verses have been condemned by various critics and commentators as being scientifically inaccurate, and any attempt to salvage an accurate meaning from them has been suggested to be tantamount to textual acrobatics. This evaluation arises from an analysis of the words sulb andtara’ib which have been translated to mean ‘backbone’ and ‘ribs’. Those who maintain the scientific inaccuracy of the Qur’an claim the above translation for the words sulb and tara’ib cannot be reconciled with modern developments in physiology. However, after a lexical analysis of these words it will be seen that these words do in fact concur with modern physiology.The word sulb carries various meanings including hard, firm, solid, stiff and rigid. It also means any portion of the backbone, particularly the lumbar portion and the loins. It is specific to males.[2][3] The word tara’ib means breastbone, the ribs[4] or the pelvic arch,[5] and this word according to most authors refers specifically to women.
With such examinations of the interpretations offered by the Arabic language, it can be inferred that the Qur’an complies with modern physiology as it is well known that the sperm and semen come from an area referred to as the loins, and the ovum comes from the pelvic arch area. Both of which are required for the creation of man, that is to say, the human being. 

So my question to all Muslim miracle seekers, the iERA, Hamza Tzortzis and Islamic Papers is this: Can you please make up your minds what your holy book actually says, because at the moment it looks horribly like you can't tell your sulb from your elbow...

The Islam Papers - interesting, very interesting...

A new blog has appeared in the dawahsphere - The Islam Papers. It claims to "host a collection of really interesting  articles, papers and posts".
My attention was drawn to the Islam Papers by a kindly soul who commented on my post Embryology in the Qur'an..."

"Islampapers.com has an interesting article on Was Al-Harith the Source of the Prophet's embryologcal knowledge. very interesting!"

Now this commenter was really on the ball, since the Islam Papers has only just gone on line - in fact its first ever post was October 2nd.
Intrigued, I visited Islam Papers and read the article. I shall publish a proper response shortly, but just so my readers are aware of how the Islamic miracle-seekers of the iERA et al work, I hereby make a prediction:
That Islam Papers turns out to be run and financed by our friends at the Islamic Education and Research Association (iERA) and that the over-enthusiastic commenter on my article turns out to be a member of both Islam Papers and the iERA.

So what is my gripe, you may ask.
Just this, that if Islam Papers is, as I strongly suspect, a blog run by and funded by the iERA, then it should surely admit as much and not pretend by omission to be an objective collection of "interesting articles" which thus run the risk of being taken by readers to be a dispassionate examination of the miracle claims of the Qur'an.

Addendum: I've left a comment on the Islamic Papers post on embryology. It reads as follows:

 If it is indeed the case that the translations you offer are possible and likely, can you explain why the most lauded and revered modern translation of the Qur’an by Professor Muhammad A S Abdel Haleem at the SOAS at the University of London has man emerging from between the backbone and the ribs instead of the spurting fluid/nutfah?

Will Hamza allow it, do you think?

Mountains as tent pegs...

One of the more persistent miracle claims, and one that seems to over-excite a certain type of believer, is the role of mountains in the Earth’s geological processes, as apparently described in the Qur’an. “Kevin” had suggested some time ago that these references in the Qur’an to mountains were an example of miraculous divine knowledge and had recently sent me some material from (you’ve guessed it) the iERA. Before we examine this material and the claims in more detail, let us look at the qur’anic verses that refer to mountains. I have gone with YusufAli’s translations as this appears to be the version preferred by believers for this particular miracle because of the word peg (Pickthall prefers “bulwarks” and Shakir “projections” for example).

78:6-7: Have We not made the earth as a wide expanse,
78:7: And the mountains as pegs?
(88:17-19 : Do they not look at the Camels, how they are made?-
 And at the Sky, how it is raised high?-)
 And at the Mountains, how they are fixed firm?-
79:32 : And the mountains hath He firmly fixed;-
21:31 : And We have set on the earth mountains standing firm, lest it should shake with them, and We have made therein broad highways (between mountains) for them to pass through: that they may receive Guidance.

(I include 88:17-18 as well as 19 purely to give context and so that you may wonder, along with the believers, at “how camels are made”...)

In summary then, we have mountains as pegs, which are firmly fixed and which apparently stop the Earth from shaking.

You may wonder if, like me, you are a non-believer and thus destined to be tortured for an eternity by the merciful Allah, what all the fuss is about. There appears to be little here to convince one of a divinely inspired, omniscient author. In fact quite the opposite, as there is a  rather obvious error in that mountains don’t prevent the Earth from shaking (one has only to look at the number of earth quakes in geologically active mountainous areas such as Japan to see this). So let’s see how the iERA deal with this...

The Qur’an always mentions nature as a sign for God’s existence, power and majesty. Every time these are mentioned, they are expressed with a great accuracy, and they also give us information that could have never been known at the time of the Prophet Muhammad. One of these signs includes the function and structure of mountains. The Qur’an mentions that mountains have “peg” like structures and that they have been embedded into earth to stabilise it, a concept known in Geology as isostasy. The Qur’an mentions: “We placed firmly embedded mountains on the earth, so it would not move under them…” and “Have We not made the earth as a bed and the mountains its pegs?” The Qur’an’s eloquent renderings of the facts mentioned above are confirmed by modern science which only came to be understood by the end of the 20th Century. In the book Earth, by Dr. Frank Press, former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, states that mountains are like stakes, and are buried deep under the surface of Earth. With regards to the vital role of mountains, it was formerly understood that mountains were merely protrusions rising above the surface of Earth. However, scientists realised that this was not actually the case, and that the parts known as the mountain roots extended down as far as 10 to 15 times their own height. With these features, mountains play a similar role to a nail or peg firmly holding down a tent, which has been discovered by modern geological and seismic research, a concept known as isostasy.  In conclusion, how can we explain this in the light of the fact that this is relatively recent science (with no one at the time of the revelation knowing this information)? What does this tell you about the author? Again, there is no naturalistic explanation.

Here is what I sent to “Kevin”.

Thanks for the reference to mountains as pegs. I was disappointed but not surprised to learn the name of the expert quoted.

In the same way that one particular edition of one book by Keith Moore has been used by the miracle-seekers hoping to give some semblance of respectability to their claims for embryology, so I have discovered that Dr.Frank Press appears to be fulfilling much the same role for the mountains as pegs miracle. As far as I can ascertain, he seems to be the go-to guy to support the idea that mountains act like pegs and help stabilise the Earth. Put another way, wherever one looks to get to the bottom of this, Frank Press's 24 year-old book is there on ALL THE ISLAMIC SITES. If the scientific geological community thought that mountains acted like pegs you'd have thought that it would have appeared somewhere else...

"The man in the red underpants" and other cunning ploys from the shameless iERA

iERA have released the latest attempt in their "One Reason" campaign to get the poor ignorant population of the UK to convert to Islam. Disarmingly called "The Man in the Red Underpants", it's a folksy examination, in the emetic style of Yusuf Estes, of the the reasons why belief in Allah is philosophically logical. It can, at best, be described as intellectually dishonest. 
 I'm going to take a break from relating my discussions with "Kevin" to examine this publication in detail over the next few posts.
Here's a flavour of the introduction:
"What would you do if a man in a pair of red underpants came knocking on your door saying that he’d come to read the gas meter?" See? You thought it was going to be scary stuff about burning in Hell for eternity if you don't believe, didn't you? Shucks, now that's old style dawah.
"Would you believe him without thinking and let him into your house? Just ‘have faith?’ Or would you think about the situation, ask some questions and apply reason?" Did you see what they did there?
"I’m pretty sure it’s the last one. Even if you told him to “Get lost you weirdo!”, you’d use reason, logic and common sense to make sense of the man in red underpants, just as we do for most things that happen in our lives" ... And that's what we're going to do here, iERA.


Let's start with a nice easy one from the section entitled "Amazing level of information"...
"Actually what is remarkable about the Quran is not only that it does not contain any contradictions (er, yes it does), but in fact it seems to be making statements about history, theology, philosophy, law and the natural world that defies a normal human explanation... OK, hit me with the best evidence you have, iERA...
"Science is a very fickle fellow. (Pass me a bucket...) Things which scientists all agree upon at one time are turned on their heads and are shown to be contradicted by observations at another time, so perhaps it’s not the best thing to judge a book by. Still, there are some things that seem to have been observed so often and so much that it becomes some sort of ‘fact’." ...er, like evolution, you mean? ...Here's an erudite Islamic cleric discussing just that topic. The reason for choosing this particular sheik will become clear...

"One of these things is the embryonic development of humans." ah - that old chestnut....

The miracle of embryology and the strange case of the mistranslated verse (according to iERA) pt 2

(Keen readers will notice this post has been changed. This is because Mrs Spinoza was worried that ... well, use your imagination.)

Previously.... we learned that to avoid accusations that Mohammad might have copied the incorrect facts pertaining to embryology in the Qur'an from Greek ideas that we know were being taught at a world renowned centre of learning in Gundishapur that his followers attended, (deep breath) iERA maintain that all the previous translators of the Qur'an have been misled.
They referred to a translation recently published by Professor Muhammad A S Abdel Haleem at the SOAS at the University of London.
The professor's translation is the only translation in the world (as far as I know) that has man emerging from between the backbone and the ribs instead of the spurting fluid/nutfah. I understand the professor says that one of the two reasons why he chose a translation that differs (on his own admission) from all other previous translations is so that the words of Allah "do not seem to violate ... our knowledge of biology."

If I were a Muslim, I would be concerned that academics are choosing a particular interpretation based upon our present knowledge of medicine. As Muslims (correctly) point out, our knowledge is evolving all the time, and we are apparently constantly discovering knowledge referred to in the Qur'an. Who knows whether one day we might therefore discover that there are indeed areas of the body that lie between the backbone and the ribs that can be said to be involved in the production of sperm...I think it highly unlikely personally, but there we go.

Perhaps the best that Muslims can say for now is that it appears that there is a mistake in the Qur'an but who knows what we will discover in the future. That would be an honest position to take, rather than - like the iERA- maintaining that all translations of the holy text hitherto have been incorrect.
More on this tomorrow...

The miracle of embryology and the strange case of the mistranslated verse (according to iERA)

Following on from yesterday's post when I promised my response to the iERA's statement that the translation of 86:5-7 as "sperm produced from between the ribs and backbone" was incorrect...herewith. And tomorrow yet more shocking revelations about the the peculiar extremes some Islamic apologists will go to to extricate the Qur'an from apparent errors and/or contradictions.

Wow - these guys at iREA are amazing!

So the statement “sperm produced from between ribs and backbone?” is inaccurate, is it?

I think they need to let every translator of the Qur'an that I have been able to locate know then, including: Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, Shakir, Dr. Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din Al-Hilali, Ph.D., Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan, M Asad (the one who helpfully adds "of man and "of woman", both French translators and the three German and every single Spanish translator (Cortes, Abboud, Halek, Navio, Castellano et al).

BECAUSE NOT ONE OF THEM AGREES. NOT...A...SINGLE...ONE.

Can you ask the guys at iREA why they think Abdel Haleem's is the correct translation (if indeed that is what it does say - I've been unable to check, as it's still in copyright) and everyone else is mistaken? How does that work with the Qur'an being "CLEAR"?
He it is who has bestowed upon thee from on high this divine writ, containing messages that are clear in and by themselves (3:7)

If the messages from Allah are so clear, why have over 20 separate translators misunderstood it?

And if we do allow the iREA interpretation, then we apparently have the baby emerging from between the backbone and the ribs. Where are these fellas learning their biology?

I'll look at the rest later but it seems to me this is again a pretty desperate attempt to avoid an accusation of plagiarism.

Embryology in the Qur'an, iERA's claims and other non-sequiturs

Having repeatedly debated the topic of the so-called miracle of Allah's detailed knowledge of embryology in the Qur'an, "Kevin" sent me a link to the iERA website which showed the following video:

I felt compelled to respond...
Just watched the video by iERA (Islamic  Education and Research Association) that was on the their website linked in your mail – the one where they corner Prof. Myers and ask him about embryology. Wow!
Quote: "Those stages (the four stages of embryology described in the Qur’an and awkwardly also in Helenic science) are quite specific to the Qur’an. The Qur’an is quite unique in describing those stages. How would a desert nomad know about that?"
Quote: "There’s no empirical or historical evidence for that (that Mohammad had access to this material)"
Quote: "There were only seventeen people in his city who could read and write."
Now remember this is the Islamic EDUCATION and RESEARCH Association. These people are being invited to universities across the country to give talks and THEY ARE LYING or THEY ARE IGNORANT IN THE VERY FIELD IN WHICH THEY PROFESS TO BE EXPERTS.