In an effort to show the scientific accuracy of the Qur'an, Muslim's are quick to say that the embryology revealed in it was beyond what man had discovered for himself. However, Muslims are completely unaware that all of the information in the Qur'an about embryology had already been revealed many centuries before. Furthermore, it has all been shown to be scientifically inaccurate - as is the totality of the Sunnah on this subject. The alleged "genius" of the Qur'an is found in its repetitive stories concerning the stages of formation of a fetus (surahs 22:5; 23:12-4; 40:67; 75:37-9; & 96:1-2). According to these surahs it passes through four stages, starting with torab, which means dust. Using a little hocus pocus, Muslims scholars translate torab as sperm, just to keep Allah from looking foolish. It becomes nutfah and alaqa. Though no one seems to know what the words "nutfah" or "alaqa" mean. Many have tried, contending that they are something which clings, a clot, an adhesion, an embryonic lump, and even chewed-up meat. The alaqa then creates motgha and uncreated motgha. But no one has a clue what motgha means. So some brilliant scholar suggested: "bones that are finally covered by flesh." The alaqa to bone stage is also in Qur'an 23:13-4 which introduces us to: "We made him a nutfah (mixed drops of male and female sexual discharge) in the safe lodging. Then We made the nutfah into an alaqa (piece of thick coagulated blood), then a motgha (little lump of bones clothed in flesh)." A more accurate translation would be: "I haven't got a clue."

Yet even the translators' wishful interpretations are inaccurate. Neither sperm nor dust becomes a "lump or adhesion." There is no clotting stage during the formation of a fetus. "The thing which clings" does not stop clinging to become "chewed meat," but remains clinging for nine months. And the skeleton is not formed independent of flesh. In fact, muscles form several weeks before there are calcified bones, rather than arriving later as the Qur'an implies. It is, therefore, ironic to hear the above accounts cited as proof by modern day apologists of the Qur'an's divine authority, when in fact, once the truth is known, the very science which they hope to harness for their cause proves to be their undoing.

Before we leave professor Allah's lecture on gestation, I'd like to repeat what Muhammad had to say about such things: Bukhari:V4B55N549 "Allah's Apostle, the true and truly inspired said, 'As regards to your creation, every one of you is collected in the womb of his mother for the first forty days, and then he becomes a clot for another forty days, and then a piece of flesh for forty days. [Four months, not nine.] Then Allah sends an angel to write four words: He writes his deeds, time of his death, means of his livelihood, and whether he will be wretched or blessed. Then the soul is breathed into his body. So a man may do deeds characteristic of the people of the Hell Fire...but he enters Paradise. A person may do deeds characteristic of Paradise...but he will enter the Hell Fire.'" It's easy to see where Allah got his material and why he was so confused.

In Qur'an 16:4, one of Allah's twenty-five variant creation accounts, says, "He has created man from a sperm-drop," But this was understood 2,000 years before Allah's book was revealed. The Bible says, "Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother's wife, he wasted his seed on the ground in order not to give offspring to his brother." (Genesis 38:9) Another Qur'anic assertion, that "man was created from the dust of the earth" was recorded in Genesis a few millennia before Muhammad ennobled his town's rock idol.

Muslim doctors, like Ibn-Qayyim, were first to blow the whistle when they saw the Qur'anic material mirrored by a much earlier Greek doctor named Galen. He lived in 150 A.D. In 1983 Basim Musallam, Director of the Center of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, concluded, "The stages of development which the Qur'an and Hadith established for believers agreed perfectly with Galen's account. In other words when it comes to embryology, the Qur'an merely echoes the scientific knowledge man had already discovered 450 years earlier."

The Qur'an is wrong when it states: "He is created from a drop emitted, proceeding from between the backbone and the ribs." This echoes the error of Hippocrates who believed semen originated from all the fluid in the body, starting from the brain down the spinal chord, before passing through the kidneys, testicles and penis. While Hippocrates error is understandable, Allah's is not.