The Wound That Landed
The dramatic dilemma of Darwin.
The Four Recenterings, II: Darwin.
In 1911, in Cairo, a twenty-year-old fresh graduate of the Khedival school read a book in a single sleepless, frenzied stretch.
His name was Ismail Mazhar. The book, The Philosophy of Evolution and Progress, was Shibli Shumayyil’s Arabic version of a set of lectures on Darwin by the German philosopher Ludwig Büchner. Shumayyil, a Lebanese Christian physician, was one of a circle of Syro-Lebanese immigrants whose journals and presses carried the debate over Darwin into Arabic. What unsettled Mazhar was Shumayyil’s claim, beginning in his preface, that the soul is simply a function of the body:
“It has been said that the soul is distinct from the body and separate from it. But this claim is baseless.… The human soul, like the animal soul, is an operation of matter: one of the operations of the nerves and the brain.… Death is nothing but a transformation in matter and a change in forms.”
If that was true, immortality was an error, and the moral and spiritual assumptions Mazhar had grown up with lost their basis. For a while he called himself an Epicurean: a believer that everything is material and life is nothing more than pursuing personal pleasure. The questions he wrote down were metaphysical rather than biological:
“Darwin had settled the matter of the body, proving it the body of an animal higher than the rest — but what of the self? What of the spirit? What of the unseen, whose bonds encircle him as a bracelet encircles the wrist?”
“Darwinism,” in the decades that followed, never meant one thing. To some readers it was a biological account of how species change: common descent, natural selection, the deep history of life. To others it was materialism, the claim that matter is all there is and that soul and purpose are illusions. To others it was a social doctrine of struggle and hierarchy, and later a political badge of atheism, communism, or the West. Mazhar spent his life trying to separate these meanings. Again and again, public debate fused them back together.
The distinction was not academic for him, because the Darwin he met was already fused. On the Origin of Species doesn’t argue that the soul is an illusion or that morality is empty. Darwin ends the second edition on a note close to reverence, finding “grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.” Büchner had put Darwin to work for a materialism he never asserted, and Shumayyil had carried the materialism into Arabic under the banner of evolution and progress.
Mazhar didn’t meet the original Darwin when he first started reading. He had met Büchner and Shumayyil’s filtered version. Years later he would go back to the source, publishing a partial Arabic translation of the Origin in 1918 and an enlarged edition in 1928. What evolution came to mean, in Cairo and after, depended on who was speaking, in what language, through which institution, and with what baggage. Mazhar’s whole career grew out of an effort to separate the biology he received from the metaphysics wrapped around it. Much of the story that follows is traced by Marwa Elshakry in Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950.
Freud would later name Darwin’s demotion of humans as one of the great injuries to our pride. Mazhar’s sleepless night in Cairo is what that injury looked like in Arabic. Islamic thought had long known how to absorb a natural cause or a demonstrated fact. Why this version of Darwin nonetheless hurt was due to what was actually under threat.
On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, undercut two old certainties: that God had made each species separately, and that the fine design of an eye or a wing was direct proof of a designer. Darwin mostly left humans aside until The Descent of Man in 1871, which placed them squarely within the story of animal evolution. The whole quarrel is usually remembered as a single afternoon at Oxford in 1860, when Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce were said to have faced off — though the exact exchange is disputed, and the tidy version was built afterward by people who wanted a clean fight. In reality evolution produced no single worldview. Huxley used it to argue for agnosticism, Haeckel to fold mind and matter into one, Spencer to build a theory of social progress, and Büchner to prop up his materialism.
In the U.S., opposition to Darwin fused with Protestant fundamentalism and a long struggle over what public schools could teach. The struggle played out in front of a national audience during the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee, where a teacher was prosecuted under a state law against teaching human descent from animals. The heart of that fight was human origins and the authority of scripture; the young-earth movement, with its literal six days and flood geology, would harden only decades later.
What Islam had was different. There was no fixed creation date to defend. The Qur’an’s “days” of creation were already, mostly, read as long ages, so a very old, very large universe was easy to accept. Additionally, the idea that living things share a common design, even that humans are animals in some sense, could be absorbed, as we’ll see, by more than one Muslim thinker.
One thing could not be absorbed so easily: Adam.
In the plain-text reading of the Qur’an, the first human is not a metaphor. God makes Adam deliberately, teaches him “all the names,” and commands the angels to prostrate to him. Everything that follows — the line of prophets, the whole moral standing of the human being before God — begins with that act.
To say instead that the first human was simply the descendant of earlier animals was to unravel this reading and system of meaning. Adam was a claim about something that either happened or didn’t, and on it hung the belief that a human being is a distinct kind of creature and not just a clever animal.
The tradition was not disarmed. Ashʿarī theology, a major Sunni school, held the view that God is the true cause behind every event: fire doesn’t burn cotton on its own; God creates the burning when the two meet, in a consistent pattern. A scholar trained this way could accept long chains of causation without conceding that nature runs itself.
As for interpreting the Qur’an, the twelfth-century philosopher Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī offered a rule of thumb: when something had been conclusively demonstrated and a verse appeared to contradict it, the verse should be reinterpreted. The problem, whether in the case of Adam or anything else, was deciding which claims had truly been demonstrated and which remained speculative.
Adam was the point most Muslim thinkers wouldn’t give up. Purpose was different: it could unsettle even those who conceded everything else. A world that produced life by blind process, aimed at nothing, was hard to sit with in a tradition used to reading everything as a sign of God.
We can see this in Ghulam Ahmad Parwez, a modernist willing to rethink much of the tradition. Writing in 1968, he accepted evolution without flinching: “Man is the product of a long evolutionary process.” What he refused to accept was random chance. Animals, he wrote, act by instinct, but a human being has a free will that can steer his own development. And that free will, he insisted, “is not changed by natural forces nor even by random activity. It is changed only by his moral activity.” What Parwez wanted to protect above all was something that answers to right and wrong. Mazhar’s wound was of this second kind.
Ḥusayn al-Jisr was among the earliest Muslim scholars to take up Darwinism. In the 1887 he published The Praiseworthy Treatise, meant as the definitive reply to materialism. It is not primary a refutation of evolution. But in it, he stages a dialogue between the “most simple” religious scholar and an evolutionary materialist, and lets the believer grant that the theory might be true and that a Muslim could accept it once it was proven. His fight is over certainty.
Like al-Ghazālī, he sorts claims into the probable, which better evidence can revise, and the certain, which it cannot. A Muslim must hold to “the apparent or plain meaning” of the well-attested texts “unless their apparent meaning is contradicted by decisive and rational evidence that necessitates their interpretation.” The plain sense, as al-Jisr read it, is separate creation. God “created each species on earth independently from the others, and not according to evolution and by deriving one from another, even though he is capable of both.” In other words, evolution isn’t beyond God’s powers. It’s just that the Qur’an doesn’t describe creation that way.
The theory of evolution as al-Jisr saw it wasn't strong enough to require reinterpreting the Qur’an. “The evidence that you evolutionists mention in your books is speculative and conjectural,” and the speculative can’t trump the certian. Despite this, he keeps the door open for the future:
“If there was decisive, rational evidence in opposition to the apparent meaning of these passages, [Muslim theologians] would have to interpret them so as to reconcile them with these proofs.”
Around 1900, Muhammad ʿAbduh, the famous Egyptian reformer, went further. He listed the “laws of evolution” among the ordinary laws of nature and reached for them in his Qur’an commentary. On the opening verse of Sūrat an-Nisāʾ—“O humanity! Be mindful of your Lord Who created you from a single soul”—he refused to identify the “single soul” with Adam. “What is meant by ‘a single soul,’” he said, “is not Adam by explicit statement, nor by the apparent meaning.” The verse addressed all peoples, and not all of them knew Adam and Eve. Those who believed that humanity descended from Adam could understand the phrase that way; “those who believe that each type of human has a distinct father, carry ‘the soul’ onto what they believe.”
He continued: “If what the European researchers say, that each type of human has a distinct father, should be established, that would not bear against our Book.” The Qur’an’s references to the “children of Adam” did not settle the matter, since it was enough that those first addressed by the verse were among Adam’s descendants. And the Qur’an, he held, contained no “no methodologically decisive text that all humans are from the progeny of Adam.” A Muslim persuaded by the scientific evidence accept evolution and remain “a Muslim believing in the Qur’an.”
This was a long way from treating Adam as the point evolution could never touch. ʿAbduh was famous for arguing that reason and revelation were uniquely inseparable in Islam and called scholars who set science against the Qur’an “ignorant of the true principles of Islam.” His ease with these possibilities would become harder to find in later debates.
South Asia had an even calmer reception. There, as Martin Riexinger puts it, evolution could be discussed largely “devoid of political overtones.” Sayyid Ahmad Khan began writing about Darwinism in 1891 and, by 1895, had endorsed common descent, humans included. Abul Kalam Azad, the future nationalist, wrote in 1913 that there was nothing new in evolution, since the Greeks and Muslim philosophers had said as much long before — a move that Mazhar also uses in his work.
Mazhar found his way back slowly. Philosophy was the first to help. Knocked loose by Shumayyil, he went back to the Greeks, and in Plato's Apology he found Socrates: rational, contemptuous of the crowd's pieties, and, at his own trial and death, certain that the soul doesn’t die. Here was a reasoner who was no materialist. Mazhar came away “human again,” with a lasting sense that philosophy was his way of reaching beyond the visible.
Then he went back to Darwin, and found a different man than Büchner's version. In an 1873 letter to a Dutch theologian, Darwin had written that “the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God.” Mazhar took that line and left out the rest of the sentence: “but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide.” He also left out Darwin’s admission that he could not “overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world,” and Darwin’s conclusion that the question lay “beyond the scope of man’s intellect.” Mazhar narrowed a genuinely undecided Darwin into a usable one.
His reconciliation was a division of labor. Let science have the world and its workings — the how. Let religion and philosophy keep what science cannot reach — the why. Two domains, each with its own questions and no reason to collide. Purpose, which materialism to have killed, belonged to the second. You don’t disprove that the world has meaning by describing how it runs.
He worked this out in his abridged translation of Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. Mazhar reversed White’s opening chapters, beginning with Galileo’s trial and ending with Darwin’s victory over theology. He accepted that history could make science and religion look like enemies. But neither had ever destroyed the other because both were natural instincts of social life, each with its own way of thinking. The real war was with theology, not religion. It began when theologians tried to make religion an encyclopedia of the natural world. Religion’s proper place, in his telling, was moral guidance — it offered one form of truth, while truth itself could not be confined by inherited authority.
The settlement came with a hidden cost. Mazhar was not only saying that the Qur’an isn’t a science textbook. He was assigning science and revelation different kinds of authority. The division shielded Islam from being overturned by the next theory. It also conceded that the Qur’an was not a source of empirical knowledge about how the natural world works. Religion kept its authority over the source of things, the soul, and moral obligation, which remain truth claims, though not ones the natural sciences could confirm or refute. But once the facts of nature had been handed over to science, later readers could more easily treat revelation as a language of meaning and ethics alone — true, perhaps, but no longer publicly authoritative in the same way.
Once Mazhar had given science authority over the facts of nature, anyone who wanted revelation to speak authoritatively in public about those facts had two obvious choices. One was to deny that science had its own proper field at all: to insist that the Qur’an could overrule science. The other was to make the Qur’an a source of scientific knowledge, finding geology, embryology, astronomy, or evolution already hidden in its verses.
Mazhar rejected the second route. He wouldn’t search the Qur’an for the fossil record or the expanding universe, and he mocked the literature of “scientific miracles,” because it made revelation compete on scientific ground. That was a contest it could only lose, since each new theory or revised measurement could turn yesterday’s “miracle” into tomorrow’s embarrassment. For Mazhar, the Qur’anic verse on the spirit said it all: “They ask you about the spirit. Say, ‘Its nature is known only to my Lord, and you have been given but little knowledge.’” The spirit wasn’t a concealed scientific fact waiting to be decoded. The Qur’an didn’t need to smuggle physics into its verses to remain true. Later scientific-miracle writing tried to reclaim the public authority Mazhar had surrendered.
Mazhar’s second repair began with language. His critics thought an Arabic Origin was unnecessary. Educated readers, they said, could read Darwin in English. Readers who couldn’t would find its new Arabic scientific vocabulary no easier. Mazhar rejected the choice. English didn’t make Arabic dispensable, and difficulty wasn’t a good reason to leave a language intellectually empty. Arabic, he believed, could acquire the terms and habits of argument needed for modern science. His translation was meant to make Darwin available as a subject Arabic readers could argue over in their own philosophical and religious vocabulary.
He wanted the Origin to become, as Elshakry puts it, a “manual for belief” and a “science of conviction.” That didn’t mean Darwin proved Islam. It meant that evolution had to become discussable in Arabic: as biology and philosophy. By translating the Origin Mazhar became the first writer to give Arabic readers Darwin’s own argument at book length rather than another person’s summary of it.
Then came the genealogy. Mazhar wanted evolution to arrive as a modern theory with recognizably old, Islamic, materials. He didn’t do it by lazily claiming that Muslim scholars had discovered evolution before Darwin. In fact, he was careful to say that their ideas survived only in fragments, and that the decisive difference was modern science’s evidence and method:
“Anyone who studies the doctrine of evolution in its later stages can easily extract from the writings of the Brethren of Purity many of the principles that are now regarded as the fundamental supports of evolutionary theory in general. The same is true of what I have found in the writings of Arab philosophers and scholars. We find there only scattered fragments dispersed throughout their works, yet beneath them lie many elementary principles.”
The older writers, he said, had noticed realities that modern science later gave technical names. They had observed the links between minerals, plants, animals, and human beings, but had lacked the instruments and accumulated evidence needed to turn those observations into a general scientific theory:
“The Arabs recorded many observations demonstrating the realities to which these terms refer, although they did not investigate the conclusions to which those observations led. Thus, they were the first to assemble many of the individual elements that make up the doctrine of evolution.”
Mazhar was saying that Arabic and Islamic thought contained anticipations, not a complete Darwinism waiting to be uncovered. Modern science had gone further because it possessed tools, evidence, and methods unavailable to its predecessors.
He leaned heavily on The Brethren of Purity, a ninth- or tenth-century circle of anonymous philosophers. Mazhar argued that Darwin’s natural selection and their “Divine Wisdom” described similar results in different languages:
“Divine Wisdom did not give an animal an organ that it has no need for in obtaining benefit or avoiding harm. If it had been given what it did not need, that would have become a burden upon it in preserving itself and ensuring its survival.”
Mazhar made the connection explicit:
“In this respect, the Brethren of Purity call ‘Divine Wisdom’ what Darwin calls ‘natural selection.’ The names differ, but the results of the operative forces are similar.”
The comparison is revealing. Mazhar didn’t erase the difference between the two systems. “Divine Wisdom” still carried a purposeful and Godly universe that Darwin’s natural selection didn’t require. But he wanted readers to see that evolution wasn’t a foreign invader. It could be translated into familiar questions about the relation between natural processes and divine causation.
Mazhar’s last repair delt with struggle. Social Darwinists had turned natural selection into a national version of “survival of the fittest,” as though nature proved that the strong had a right to rule the weak. Mazhar, following Russian philosopher Peter Kropotkin, read it differently. “Struggle” could describe the pressure of a changing environment — cold, scarcity, disease, shifting conditions of life — as much as direct conflict among rivals. Under that pressure, cooperation could be as important to survival as competition.
His intent was to interpret evolution as an ethic of mutual aid rather than domination. Yet his faith in gradual progress was also paternalistic. He believed an educated minority had a duty to improve the peasant class, down to advising them on how to raise chickens. This made sense for Mazhar, but by the time later readers took up Darwin, they were less willing to separate evolution from the materialism and politics attached to it.
Mazhar's peace held on its own terms; what it couldn’t survive was a change in its audience. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, Egyptian debate fused “evolution” with “materialism,” “atheism,” and “the West” so tightly that a calm separation of the biology from the metaphysics came to sound like a relic of a more confident age.
We can see this in two men on opposite ends of the spectrum.
In his 1937 essay Why I Am an Atheist, Ismail Adham described reading Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man as a child and “emerg[ing] from them convinced of evolution.” He later remembered refusing to pray and telling his father: “I am not a believer. I am a Darwinian; I believe in evolution.” Darwin was not the sole source of Adham’s unbelief — he also named Huxley, Haeckel, Spinoza, and Büchner — but he made evolution its public declaration. He went on to define atheism as belief that “the cause of the universe is contained within the universe itself, and that there is nothing beyond this world.”
Adham also claimed Mazhar as part of the same free-thought world. “My friend, the scholar Ismail Mazhar,” he wrote, “was at that time publishing the journal al-ʿUṣūr in Egypt. It represented a moderate movement promoting freedom of thought and inquiry, as well as calling for atheism.” That was a bit of a stretch. The journal did publish atheist writing and defend freedom of inquiry, but its first issue opened with the name of God and the Qur’anic verse: “Perhaps your Lord will destroy your enemy and make you successors in the land to see what you will do.” Mazhar’s own work also retained a First Cause. Adham’s account establishes proximity, not agreement: he saw Mazhar as an ally against inherited authority.
Muhammad Farid Wajdi, a traditionalist scholar active from the 1890s through the 1920s, answered from the other side. For him, Darwin’s theory led where Adham said it did: toward materialism and unbelief. Islam therefore had to refuse it. The atheist and the believer split on whether to accept evolution and agreed completely on what it meant. Between two men who both read Darwin as materialism, Mazhar’s distinction had nowhere to land.
The colonial charge was also damaging. “Progress,” the banner under which Shumayyil and even Mazhar had carried evolution, was also the banner under which Europe ranked civilizations and justified ruling them. The ladder that ran from simpler organisms to more complex ran, in the imperial telling, from the colonized upward to the colonizer. To a Muslim reader, evolution could arrive already carrying the hierarchy that seated Europe at the top and Muslims some way below. Accepting Darwin could now be heard as siding with the colonizer. Refusing him could be cast as an act of self-defense.
In 1930, someone burned Mazhar’s press. The arsonists were said to be students from al-Azhar, Cairo’s great center of religious learning, and it is tempting to read the fire as a simple verdict by the religious establishment against a Darwinist. The truth is muddier. By then, Mazhar was not only famous for evolution. He was also a rationalist, a nationalist, an agrarian reformer, and a man previously arrested on a communism charge. In a public fight, none of those identities could be neatly separated. Darwin no longer arrived on his own. He came bundled with everything else Mazhar carried, much as he had first come bundled to Mazhar two decades earlier. The fire changed none of his convictions. He argued on for another thirty years.
He never dropped evolution. The Arab awakening (Nahda) had raised him on a confident universalism, but as that gave way to sharper divisions, he made his Darwin more Islamic. Near the end he gave his earlier idea of mutual cooperation an Arabic and Islamic name. He published two companion books against communism, Islam, Not Communism and Socialist Solidarity, Not Communism. For solidarity he chose the term for a community that holds itself up from within (takāful). Islam, he argued, already carried the justice communism claimed to deliver. He called ʿAbduh “our imam.” He read the century’s revolutions as violence against the grain of nature — failed attempts to move faster than natural progression.
Mazhar died in 1962, still working on separating science from spirit. But the question was morphing into what evolution stood for.
Preachers had criticized evolution from the start. But the first mass audience organized campaign against it emerged most dramatically in Turkey in the 1970s.
What made Turkey different, as Riexinger writes, was schooling. One early seed was planted by Said Nursi, the Kurdish-Turkish scholar who had supported the constitutional hopes of the Young Turks, then broke with Atatürk’s republic and spent much of his later life in exile. In 1934, in the Tabiat Risalesi, later placed in the Risale-i Nur, he gave his followers a parable against the idea that matter could organize itself. Imagine a pharmacy full of jars and phials. A living medicine requires exact measures from each one. Could chance produce it?
Is it in any way possible or probable that the phials and jars should have been knocked over by a strange coincidence or sudden gust of wind and that only the precise, though different, amounts that had been taken from each of them should have been spilt, and then arranged themselves and come together to form the remedy? Is there anything more superstitious, impossible and absurd than this?
For Nursi, each living being was like that remedy: matter arranged with impossible precision, not by “blind, deaf and innumerable elements and causes and natures.” The picture was aimed less at Darwin’s mechanism than at life emerging from non-life, but Nursi left later creationists a stock of images and anti-materialist instincts to draw on.
The Cold War fueled the fire. Through the 1970s Turkey tore itself apart in street battles between a Marxist left and a nationalist right. The leftists claimed Darwin as their own and folded evolution into the materialism they preached. Ideology soaked into every institution. The generals who seized power in the 1980 coup tried to put a stop to this by “promoting a quietist interpretation of Islam.” They adopted “the Turkish-Islamic synthesis,” which fused nationalism and Islam into a single state creed and turned it against the godless left. Compulsory religion classes were its most visible mark.
Biology didn’t escape. In 1985 the education minister, Vehbi Dinçerler, telephoned the Institute for Creation Research in California, a Protestant young-earth outfit, and had Henry Morris's Scientific Creationism translated and sent to public-school teachers across the country. He circulated a bulletin warning that teachers who defended evolution were communists. American creationism arrived in Turkish to do Islamic and anti-communist work. Into the same climate walked the preacher Fethullah Gülen, who had denounced evolution since 1971. He wasn’t interested in population genetics. He read Darwinism as the cornerstone of Marxist materialism and set out to pull that cornerstone loose. Opposing Darwin had become a way of opposing communism.
A few decades later, it went viral. Adnan Oktar, writing in English as Harun Yahya, turned Turkish creationism into a global export. In 2006 he published the Atlas of Creation, a huge glossy book built on a simple visual trick: fossil on one side, modern animal on the other. The point, as Thierry Backeljau puts it, was to prove that “the fossil and the recent specimens are identical, hence evolution did not occur.” Copies found their way, unsolicited, to the desks of American biologists and European clergy.
The book looked expensive, but the argument was cheap. A picture of a “living” caddisfly was actually a hand-tied fishing lure, hook still visible under the abdomen. Other lures from Owen’s work appeared elsewhere in the Atlas. Oktar’s later career only made the story uglier. Turkish prosecutors indicted him on charges including sexual abuse, blackmail, fraud, and espionage, and in 2022 he was sentenced to 8,658 years in prison.
The state continued to support the narrative. In 2017, Turkey removed the high-school biology unit on “The Beginning of Life and Evolution,” explaining that the subject was too advanced and belonged at university. The 2024 curriculum fight showed the next step, and also its limits. An early draft put “creation theory” at the center of biology and described evolution as not yet proven. After public criticism, the approved ministry text was softened. The current biology curriculum no longer says “creation,” but it also never says “evolution.” It speaks instead of “ecological balance,” “variation and adaptation,” genetic change, biodiversity, and the scientific study of living things.
The relocation is telling. Across much of the Muslim world, the settlement between biology and theology has often been a quiet partition rather than an outright ban. The mechanisms of change can be taught. Whether human beings sit inside the same natural history is muted or glossed over.
Survey numbers point the same way. A 2013 Pew report asked Muslims in twenty-two countries whether humans and other living things have evolved over time. Acceptance ran near eighty percent in Kazakhstan and Lebanon and fell to rejecting majorities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Indonesia, with Turkey itself split almost evenly. Something other than the biology is being measured. Pew went looking for the obvious culprit and mostly came up empty. How often a person prayed correlated with creationism in Southern and Eastern Europe, but almost nowhere else. In Russia, Muslims who prayed several times a day accepted evolution at forty-one percent, against sixty-six percent among those who prayed less. Across the rest of the surveyed world, religous observance and acceptance of evolution were unrelated. It is more likely that schooling, national politics, colonial memory, and the baggage that Darwin carries locally all affect the numbers.
Mazhar was never refuted. Evolution didn’t disprove him, and Islam didn’t forbid him. What failed was his separation: science for the what, religion for the why. The modern Muslim argument over evolution has been an argument over how to redraw that line. Scholars trained in the classical tradition and fluent in modern biology now offer drastically different answers, but most return to a few strategies.
The first grants the biology and keeps a single exception. Yasir Qadhi and Nazir Khan do not ask Muslims to reject the evolutionary picture wholesale. They explicitly note that “there is nothing in Islamic scripture that explicitly negates the concepts of abiogenesis, genetic mutation and diversification, natural selection, the existence of hominid species.” Adam alone remains outside the process, because, as they write, “the available empirical data requires a more robust ontological narrative of human origins than that offered by naturalism.” At that point, empirical reconstruction gives way to the Qur’an. Shoaib Ahmed Malik builds a more formal version, running evolution through al-Ghazālī’s Ashʿarī machinery coming to support Adamic exceptionalism: “the idea that non-humans and humans are a product of evolution, but only Adam is an exception to that process.” ʿAbduh, around 1900, could shrug that it mattered little whether man’s father was Adam or a someone else. A century later, Adam is the biggest issue with evolution.
The second strategy refuses evolution outright, and it comes from a philosopher on metaphysical rather than Qur’anic ground. Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s objection is that species permanent realities — ideas held in the Divine Mind, each stamped into matter at its appointed moment, so that one cannot become another. He makes the case with an insect:
"If God has knowledge of the ant, the ant must have a kind of archetypal reality in the 'mind' of God, in the Divine Intellect. To say … that the ant is simply a stage in evolutionary transformation is to take a certain part of temporal sequence and call it an ant; before that it was something else and it will evolve into something else."
Make the great chain of being into a sequence in time, he warns, and you have cut the Hands of God out of creation, and the world loses its center. For Nasr this makes evolutionism “not science” but “science fiction,” kept alive for reasons that have little to do with the evidence. He draws on the same Sufi metaphysics of Ibn al-ʿArabī that three centuries earlier made Copernicus a non-event.
The third strategy gives up the exception entirely. The Algerian astrophysicist Nidhal Guessoum takes the science whole, human descent included, and challenges only with the philosophy around it:
"[T]he process of evolution is an established fact of nature… No one can ignore or reject the facts of evolution (on any grounds) and expect to be taken seriously; this applies equally to the special area of human evolution and to the general field of biology… [Theistic evolution] accepts all of the scientific parts of the theory but proposes a nonmaterialistic interpretation. Clearly, evolution does not automatically imply atheism or even materialism."
Materialism is out; descent of Adam is in. He reads the Qur’an allegorically. “Breathing of God's Spirit” into an evolved creature marked the moment an animal lineage crossed over into the human: self-aware, addressed by God. Human worth then sits in that address. His position is similar to Mazhar's, though it’s closer to a full theology of nature than to Mazhar's separation of authority. Behind him stands the older path of Muhammad Iqbal: accept descent, reject blind chance, and interpret evolution as the self’s ascent toward God.
The strategies, different as they are, try to answer the same pressure: how to preserve human worth in the face of biology. Damian Howard names the anxiety best: “The place of the humanum in the cosmos has turned out to be of the utmost importance,” since Muslim writers keep returning to the Qur’anic category of vicegerency (khilāfa) and resist “Darwin’s effective dissolution of the hypostasis of human identity.” The responses, from “creative assimilation” to “radical rejection,” reflects not only different understandings of Islam and evolution, but, as Howard notes, also “different appraisals of western thought.” Darwin is rarely judged alone. He becomes part of a larger argument over how Muslims should understand the West: as a source of knowledge, corruption, or both.
Darwin arrived with a lot attached. He came first through a materialist translation, then through school curricula, political movements, and glossy anti-evolution propaganda. A theory about how species change became a way to argue about materialism, colonialism, communism, the Qur’an, and the meaning of humanity.
That is why Muslim responses never fell neatly into acceptance or rejection. The deeper question was what remained of human worth once the body had been placed inside animal history. Darwin made it harder to draw the old line at creation. So Muslim thinkers drew it further in.
That move solved one problem and opened another. If the body belonged to nature, perhaps human dignity could still be grounded inwardly. But the next wound would land exactly there. Freud would ask whether the mind itself was transparent, rational, and free — whether the self that defended its dignity after Darwin was even master in its own house.
