Hand a microscope to a traveler from seventh-century Arabia. Place before them a slide showing a human embryo at day 18. They have no staining techniques, no histological sectioning, no concept of a cell, and no knowledge of modern developmental biology. Ask them to describe what they see. The exercise seems almost cruel in its absurdity.

Now reverse the experiment. Take a text composed in that same historical world a world of oral poetry, desert caravans, and no embryology laboratories and examine what it says about how a human being takes shape. Then place those descriptions beside a modern textbook of developmental biology.

Why would such a text discuss these processes at all? Why draw attention to the development of a human being inside the womb? And why would anyone want humanity to think about something the human eye cannot ordinarily see?

To appreciate why these questions matter, we first need to understand just how long it took humanity to see anything at all.

A History of Not Seeing

For most of recorded history, even the greatest scientific minds struggled to understand embryonic development.

Aristotle proposed that the embryo developed progressively from an initially undifferentiated state. Galen contributed substantially to ancient anatomical and embryological understanding. For centuries, theories involving menstrual blood and the gradual formation of the fetus influenced European medicine.

The arrival of the microscope did not immediately resolve the mystery. Early modern scientists developed preformationist theories, according to which a miniature, already formed human the homunculus was contained within the sperm or egg and merely enlarged during pregnancy.

Not until the nineteenth century, through advances in microscopy, cell theory, and comparative embryology, did a more coherent understanding begin to emerge. The work of Theodor Schwann and Karl Ernst von Baer was particularly important. Von Baer demonstrated that embryos do not begin as miniature versions of adults and that embryos of different species share important similarities during early development.

The historical lesson is significant. Scientific knowledge depends not only on intelligence but also on instruments, observation, experimentation, and the ability to test competing explanations. Some questions remained inaccessible because the necessary methods did not yet exist.

It is against this background that a certain text becomes interesting.

An Ancient Text, Described

Set the history aside for a moment and read the description itself, before asking where it came from.

The text describes human formation in a sequence. It begins with a nutfah a drop or small quantity of fluid placed in a firm lodging. That becomes an alaqah. That becomes a mudghah. Then bones are formed, and the bones are clothed with flesh. Finally, the human being is brought forth.

The terms are Arabic, and each carries more than one sense. Alaqah can mean something that clings, a leech, or a blood clot. Mudghah is commonly rendered as a chewed-like substance.

A recent comparative analysis published in Marifat examined this sequence alongside contemporary embryological findings. It identified five broad stages: the nutfah, interpreted by some contemporary writers in relation to fertilization and the zygote; the alaqah, a clinging substance; the mudghah, a chewed-like substance; skeletal and muscular differentiation; and finally ensoulment. Modern embryology classifies development differently germinal, embryonic, and fetal periods and the study acknowledges differences in taxonomy and in the ontological status of ensoulment. It nonetheless argues for significant structural congruence in the progression of development.

Some of the comparisons are worth pausing over.

The alaqah is associated with implantation in the uterine lining, with the embryo's changing morphology, and with the appearance of blood-containing embryonic structures. The resemblance to a leech has attracted particular attention: at certain early stages, the embryo has a shape that proponents consider comparable. This is a morphological analogy, not a scientific classification, and the embryo is not itself a blood clot.

The mudghah has been compared with the somite stage, when paired structures develop along the embryo's longitudinal axis, producing a segmented external appearance that some have likened to impressions in chewed material.

The sequence of bones followed by flesh raises a further question. Modern embryology shows that skeletal and muscular development are coordinated and overlapping. Cartilage models of many bones develop before ossification, while muscle precursors differentiate during overlapping periods. The sequence should therefore not be read automatically as two entirely separate biological stages.

These distinctions matter. The question is not whether every ancient term can be translated into a modern anatomical structure. It is whether the sequence, the language, and the imagery reveal a correspondence that deserves investigation.

So: where does this text come from?

The Reveal

It is the Qur'an. The passage is Qur'an 23:12–14, with related verses elsewhere describing development in the womb.

I have delayed naming it deliberately. The pattern is easier to see when the description arrives before the label, because the label carries two centuries of controversy, devotional literature, and institutional history that can obscure what is actually on the page. Once the text is identified, readers tend to take sides before they have examined the material.

The questions that follow are worth separating. Whether the Qur'an is a religious book is not in doubt; it obviously is. The question is whether a religious text from seventh-century Arabia should generate this kind of resonance with a science that did not exist for another twelve centuries and why the scientists who examined it most closely were, at least for a time, so struck by what they found.

That is where the story acquires a human face.

The Moore Affair: When Scientists Encountered the Text

Keith L. Moore was Professor of Anatomy at the University of Toronto and author of The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, a widely used medical textbook.

In 1983, a special edition of the third edition appeared in Jeddah under the title The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology with Islamic Additions, associated with Moore and Abdul-Majeed al-Zindani, a Yemeni Islamic scholar. The edition incorporated Qur'anic verses and hadith into the original embryological material. Moore subsequently published an article entitled "A Scientist's Interpretation of References to Embryology in the Qur'an" in the Journal of the Islamic Medical Association in 1986.

Statements attributed to Moore from this period have circulated widely. He is often quoted as suggesting that the descriptions must have come to Muhammad from God because the relevant knowledge was not discovered until many centuries later. Other scientists, including E. Marshall Johnson of Thomas Jefferson University and T. V. N. Persaud of the University of Manitoba, have also been quoted expressing astonishment at the apparent correspondence.

These testimonies are interesting, but they require careful examination. Repeated quotations are not necessarily independently verified statements, and the context in which scientists made them matters.

The institutional history is particularly important. The special edition was produced in connection with the Commission on Scientific Signs in the Qur'an and Sunnah, established in 1983 under the World Muslim League in Mecca and primarily funded by Saudi Arabia. Al-Zindani was its founder and first director.

A scholarly analysis by Guénon, published in the Journal of Qur'anic Studies in 2019, examines al-Zindani's approach to i'jaz 'ilmi, the interpretation of scientific miracles in religious texts. Her analysis shows that his embryological model involved specific interpretive strategies: reformulating earlier Islamic embryological models, modifying the interpretation of the final Qur'anic stage, and preferring a particular variant of a hadith.

In other words, the scientific-miracle reading did not emerge from a neutral comparison of ancient terminology with modern biology. It was shaped by a particular theological and interpretive project.

Critics have questioned the extent of Moore's involvement in the Islamic additions, suggesting that much of the religious material was al-Zindani's contribution. In a 2002 Wall Street Journal report, Moore reportedly declined to be interviewed, saying it had been ten or eleven years since his involvement with the Qur'an.

None of this invalidates Moore's scientific observations or his published statements. Nor does it establish that the Qur'anic descriptions are incorrect. It does suggest that testimony must be read in its historical and institutional context. The question is not only what a scientist said, but what he examined, what he actually endorsed, and how his statements were later presented.

Three Interpretations, One Larger Question

There are at least three ways to interpret the correspondence between the text and modern embryology.

Retrospective resemblance. On this view, the Arabic terms have broad semantic ranges that allow later readers to associate them with different embryological structures. Once science has identified those structures, interpretations can be selected that appear to fit. The text was not intended as a biological textbook, and it does not explicitly identify many modern concepts, such as the ovum or the cellular mechanisms of embryogenesis.

Metaphorical resonance. On this reading, the descriptions use vivid imagery that happens to resemble aspects of biological development. The comparison may be meaningful without constituting a precise scientific prediction. A metaphor can capture an observable feature without providing a technical account of the mechanism behind it.

Divine knowledge. For those who accept this possibility, the convergence suggests that the descriptions originate beyond the scientific horizon of seventh-century Arabia. The sequence, the imagery, and the apparent correspondence are understood as signs of knowledge unavailable through ordinary observation. The testimonies attributed to Moore and others are sometimes treated as supportive.

A methodological question applies to all three. How specific are the correspondences? A description that can be matched to several biological structures after their discovery is not equivalent to one that identifies an unknown structure, its function, its developmental timing, and its relationship to other structures. Retrospective resemblance and independently testable prediction are different kinds of evidence.

That distinction does not settle the theological question. It clarifies what would count as stronger evidence when evaluating it.

Why Would a Book Ask Us to Think?

Perhaps the most interesting question lies beyond embryology.

The Qur'an repeatedly directs attention toward the natural world as a subject of investigation. It asks people to consider the heavens and the Earth, the alternation of night and day, the creation of living beings, the movement of celestial bodies, and their own origins.

Qur'an 3:190–191 presents the creation of the heavens and the Earth and the alternation of night and day as signs for people who reflect. Qur'an 29:20 invites humanity to travel through the Earth and observe how creation began. Qur'an 88:17–20 turns attention to the camel, the sky, the mountains, and the Earth, asking people to consider how they were created and established.

This is more than an encouragement to admire nature. It is an invitation to use the intellect. Whether the Qur'an is literally unique among spiritual traditions in this respect is a separate comparative question, but the emphasis is unmistakable.

Which raises a possibility worth taking seriously: perhaps the embryological passages should not be read in isolation. Perhaps they belong to a broader pattern in which creation is repeatedly offered as something to be examined. If so, the human body becomes an especially immediate subject. What could be closer to us, and yet more hidden, than the process by which each of us came to be?

If the text is understood as revelation, why direct human attention toward things that can be examined by observation and reasoning? Why ask people to investigate creation rather than simply accept it?

One answer is that inquiry is not presented as the opposite of faith but as one of its expressions. Science asks how natural processes work, through observation and experiment. Theology asks about existence, purpose, and ultimate origin. The two are not identical, and neither should be used to bypass the standards of the other. But they can meet around a shared question: what does the world reveal when we examine it carefully?

The Question Is Yours

The history of science is a history of people asking questions about things they could not yet see. It is a story of observation, disagreement, experimentation, and the gradual replacement of inadequate explanations with better ones.

The Qur'an's invitation to reflect on creation raises a question that remains live: can scientific investigation and spiritual reflection deepen our understanding of the world without confusing their different methods and purposes?

The embryological passages offer one case for exploring that question. Whether the correspondence represents coincidence, metaphorical resonance, retrospective interpretation, or evidence of divine knowledge should not be settled by appealing to authority, conviction, or reputation alone.

It deserves examination.

Perhaps the better starting point is not whether an ancient text predicted modern embryology, but why a text from a world without microscopes repeatedly directed human beings to think about their own creation and the world around them. Why was this subject worth mentioning? Why were people asked to reflect on it? And what does it mean when a spiritual text repeatedly tells humanity to use the very faculty through which scientific knowledge is acquired the ability to think?

Those questions are worth carrying into the laboratory, into the library, and back to the text itself.

References

Aryan, H., & Faghihi, S. M. (2026). A Comparative Analysis of the Quranic Perspective and Embryological Findings in Describing and Analyzing the Stages of Human Embryonic Development. Marifat. https://doi.org/10.22034/marifat.2026.5002678

Guénon, M. (2019). ʿAbd al-Majīd al-Zindānī's iʿjāz ʿilmī Approach: Embryonic Development in Q. 23:12–14 as a Scientific Miracle. Journal of Qur'anic Studies, 21(3), 32–58. https://doi.org/10.3366/jqs.2019.0398

Moore, K. L., & al-Zindani, A. M. A. (1983). The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology with Islamic Additions (3rd ed.). Jeddah: Dar Al-Qiblah for Islamic Literature; Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders.

Moore, K. L. (1986). A Scientist's Interpretation of References to Embryology in the Qur'an. Journal of the Islamic Medical Association, 18, 15–16.

Golden, D. (2002, January 23). Islamic Creationists Use Scientists To Promote Agenda. The Wall Street Journal.

Les lectures scientifiques du Coran : de l'exégèse aux miracles scientifiques. (2019). Revue des sciences religieuses. Cairn.info.

The Qur'an, 3:190–191; 10:101; 23:12–14; 29:20; 41:53; 88:17–20.