Ibrahim Esinler, MD

I spend my working life with evidence: reading it, weighing it, and telling patients what it does and does not support. That habit does not switch off when I open the Qur'an. It is, in fact, the reason this site exists.

For years I noticed that the verses touching on the natural world were usually presented in one of two ways: either as spectacular proofs that required the reader to abandon their scientific training, or as embarrassments to be explained away. Neither seemed honest to me. A text that invites its reader to look — “do they not see,” “will they not then believe” — deserves a reader who looks carefully.

So this project does something narrower than a polemic. It takes one verse at a time, gives the Arabic first, states what the classical lexicographers and commentators said, sets out the scientific observation as a specialist would state it, and then marks the boundary: this is where the correspondence holds, and this is where the analogy runs out. Where a popular claim is weak, the page says so. Where a verse is poetic, the page calls it poetry.

What I am not claiming

I am not claiming that the Qur'an is a textbook, or that it anticipated modern science in its terminology. I am not asking any scientist to accept an argument from authority, and I am not offering medical advice on this site. I am claiming something smaller and, I think, more interesting: that a seventh-century text speaks about the natural world with an accuracy and a restraint that repay attention, and that attention is a form of worship.

“We will show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves, until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth.”

Qur'an 41:53 · A. Yusuf Ali

A note on collaboration

The signs on this site are drafts. Specialists in cosmology, embryology, geology, oceanography and linguistics are invited to correct them. Corrections that make the argument smaller are as welcome as those that make it larger — more welcome, in fact, because they are harder to find and more necessary.

Professional affiliations, publications and contact details will be listed here. Until then, correspondence can be sent through the contact page.