Surah 79 · Verse 30

[79:30] The Arabic word dahaha comes from root dahy, which means egg. The earth, with its physical shape and geologic layers resembles an egg. Though the roundness of the earth was known by philosophers before the revelation of the Quran, ordinary people did not find it a reasonable or common-sense fact. Therefore, almost all the commentators of the Quran tried to interpret the word so that they could save their flat earth from being curved. They reasoned that the verse must be an allegorical description, that God must have meant the nest or the place of the egg from the word egg. So, they translated this verse as follows: "and after that He spread the earth"! Abd al-Aziz bin Baz was the chief cleric of Saudi Arabia, the head of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars for three decades. He had a great impact on regressive and oppressive laws in Saudi Arabia, including the ban on women's driving. A book authored by Bin Baz was published in 1975 carried the following title: "Scientific and Narrative Evidence for that the Earth is Fixed, the Sun is Moving and it is Possible to Go to the Planets." The book was not published by any publishing house; it was published by none other than the Islamic University of Medina. In that book, Bin Baz complains about a new heresy; he is saddened to see, well more accurately, hear, people talking about the motion of the earth and he wants to put a stop to that heresy. In page 23, Bin Baz after listing some hadiths, issues a fatwa, asserting that those who believe that the earth is rotating are kafirs (disbelievers), and if they were Muslims before, they became apostates. The Saudi Sunni leader does not stop there and explains the ramification of the fatwa: any Muslim believing in the rotation of the earth loses his or her right to life and property; they should be killed! This same cleric was the head of an international conference of Sunni scholars representing 38 countries discussing the Salman Rushdi affair. Then, Saudi Arabia was competing with Iran regarding leadership in the Islamic world and this was the hot issue. The conference issued a unanimous fatwa on March 19, 1989, condemning Rushdi and Rashad Khalifa, as apostates. The Western world by then knew Rushdi, but not many westerners were familiar with the second name in the fatwa. Dr. Rashad Khalifa, the late leader of the modern reformist movement and the discoverer of the mathematical code of the Quran, in less than a year after this fatwa, would be assassinated by a terrorist group affiliated with the Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden on January 31, 1990, in his mosque in Tucson, Arizona. Bin Baz, in his book, quoted some verses and many hadith to support his position that the earth is fixed. After his expressing his religious verdict of the death penalty for the apostates who believe in a moving earth, he included the following reasoning as his scientific evidence: "If the world was rotating as they assert, countries, mountains, trees, rivers, seas, nothing would be stable; humans would see the countries in the west in the east, the ones in the east in the west. The position of the qibla would change continuously. In sum, as you see, this claim is false in many respects. But, I do not wish to prolong my words." Towards the end of the 20th century, a "university" of a Sunni country publishes such nonsense authored by the highest-ranking religious leader of that country! Considering the Ottoman chief clerics banned the import and use of the printing machine for about 300 years, it becomes clear why the so-called Muslim countries are so lagging behind in civilization, socially, politically, and in science and technology. For a comparative discussion of this verse, see the Sample Comparisons section in the Introduction. The Bible, because of the tampering of many human hands, contains questionable information about the shape of earth: Isaiah 11:12; Matthew 4:8; Revelation 7:1. See 4:82; 68:1 and 39:5.