Sto­ry of Cre­ation in the Qur’an and Old Testament

Mohd Habibullah Bin Abdullah

The sto­ry of Cre­ation is locat­ed in the first Book of the Old Tes­ta­ment, i.e. in the ear­ly chap­ters of Gen­e­sis. The Old Tes­ta­ment nar­ra­tive is almost like a sto­ry­book ; hence it starts off with the sto­ry of Cre­ation as the begin­ning of the sto­ry of mankind. The Qur’an gives a dif­fer­ent pre­sen­ta­tion to its idea and mes­sage with regard to the sto­ry of Cre­ation. The sto­ry of Cre­ation is locat­ed in var­i­ous places with­in the Qur’an, such as in Sura’ Al-Baqarah, Sura’ As-Saj­dah, Sura’ Yassin and so on.

creation story of creation bible

The Old Tes­ta­ment relates the sto­ry about God cre­at­ing the earth and man in six days (Gen­e­sis, 1) and that God took a rest on the sev­enth day (Gen­e­sis, 1 – 3). The Qur’an also men­tions that the Cre­ation takes place with­in six days“We must point out here that mod­ern com­men­ta­tors stress the inter­pre­ta­tion of ayyam, one trans­la­tion of which is days”, as mean­ing long peri­ods’ or ages’ rather than a peri­od of twen­ty-four hour days. but nev­er says that God had to take a rest on the sev­enth day. (Al-Saj­dah : 4, Al-A’raf : 54).

The Old Tes­ta­ment cre­ation sto­ry relates specif­i­cal­ly to what God cre­at­ed on each day of Cre­ation. On the first day, God cre­at­ed the heav­en and the earth with light and dark­ness, which is men­tioned as the day and the night. This hap­pened even before God cre­at­ed the sun and the moon ! On the sec­ond day, God cre­at­ed the sky and the oceans. On the third day, God gave the earth life. Then, in the fol­low­ing days, God cre­at­ed the sun and the moon, fol­lowed by the fish­es and birds and the wild ani­mals, rep­tiles and cat­tle. Final­ly, God cre­at­ed man (Gen­e­sis, 1). 

This sequence of the cre­ation sto­ry in the Bible cer­tain­ly has sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic prob­lems with it ; the most glar­ing being the account of the cre­ation of plants before the cre­ation of the sun, which is con­trary with what we know about sci­ence today.

In con­trast to the Bible, the Qur’an does not have any con­tra­dic­tion with estab­lished sci­ences and com­mon human sense. What appears to be fun­da­men­tal impor­tance in the mat­ter is that the Holy Qur’an does not men­tion specif­i­cal­ly the sequence of Cre­ation or the man­ner in how God cre­at­ed the world. In Sura’ Yassin, verse 33, we are told that God gave life to the earth that is dead, with­out men­tion­ing on which day it had happened.

A sign for them is the earth that is dead : We do give it life, and pro­duce grain there­from, of which ye do eat.” (Qur’an, 36:33)

creation story of creation quran

There is also absolute­ly fun­da­men­tal data con­cern­ing the exis­tence of an ini­tial gaseous mass (dukhan) which is unique and whose ele­ments, although at first fused togeth­er (ratq) sub­se­quent­ly became sep­a­rat­ed (fatq).

This is expressed in Sura’ Fussilat :

Then turned He to the heav­ens when it was smoke.” (Qur’an, 41:11)

And the same is expressed in Sura’ al-Anbiya’:

Do not the Unbe­liev­ers see that the heav­ens and the earth were joined togeth­er [as one unit of cre­ation] before We clove them asun­der?” (Qur’an, 21:30)

All this is in per­fect agree­ment with mod­ern ideas on the exis­tence of pri­ma­ry neb­u­la and the process of sec­ondary events that have formed the ini­tial unique mass ; this sep­a­ra­tion (known as the Big Bang) result­ed in the for­ma­tion of galax­ies and then, when these divid­ed, of stars from which the plan­ets were to be born. 

All these infor­ma­tion are dis­tin­guish­able from the cre­ation sto­ry in the Bible in ref­er­ence to the Bib­li­cal text with its suc­ces­sive phas­es that are total­ly unac­cept­able.It should be inter­est­ing to note that the Qur’an was right in stat­ing that it is the Unbe­liev­ers” who will first observe this phe­nom­e­non, as the astronomers who were involved in the obser­va­tion of uni­verse were made up of athe­ists, Jews and Christians.

Regard­ing the cre­ation of Adam(P), the Old Tes­ta­ment informs us that God invit­ed the angels to join Him in cre­at­ing man. In fact, God was quot­ed to have said :

Let us make a man, some­one like our­selves…” (Gen­e­sis, 1:26)

How­ev­er, in the Qur’an God Almighty informed the angels that He would cre­ate man with­out ask­ing for the angels’ approval to join him. And fur­ther, there is a con­ver­sa­tion between God and His angels where the angels ques­tioned why would God want to cre­ate man and He answered :

I know what you do not know.” (Qur’an, 2:30)

Fur­ther­more, the Old Tes­ta­ment says that God made Adam(P) in His image or like his Mak­er” (Gen­e­sis, 1:27). The Qur’an is in agree­ment with the Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian views in this aspect (Qur’an, 15:29), but also stress­es that Adam(P) was made from clay (Ar-Rah­man : 14, Al-Hijr : 28). Only lat­er in the Old Tes­ta­ment do we see that this is mentioned,

God formed a man’s body from the dust of the ground.” (Gen­e­sis, 2:7)

The Qur’an and the Old Tes­ta­ment cre­ation sto­ries are sim­i­lar in the case of God appoint­ing Adam(P) as His rep­re­sen­ta­tive on the earth. But the Qur’an has made clear­er this state­ment than the Old Tes­ta­ment, more so when God said to His angels that He wants to cre­ate a vicegerent (khal­i­fah) on the earth (Al-Baqarah : 30, Gen­e­sis, 1:26). This sta­tus did not change even when Adam(P) com­mit­ted a mis­deed, repent­ed and was for­giv­en for it. (Qur’an, 2:37). Man is not fall­en” from the Qur’an­ic per­spec­tive and hence there is no need to save” or ran­som him. In the Chris­t­ian view, how­ev­er, Adam’s(P) mis­deed is the basis for the doc­trine of Orig­i­nal Sin, the begin­ning of mankind’s fall into a state of sin, a flow­ing from faith in a salvic dra­ma that hap­pened in the past.See Isma’il Raji al-Faruqi, Al Tawhid : Its Impli­ca­tions for Thought and Life (IIIT:1992), pp. 70 – 74

In con­clu­sion, the Old Tes­ta­ment con­tains a col­lec­tion of lit­er­ary works pro­duced over the cen­turies by unknown authors who had con­sid­er­able influ­ence in the actu­al com­po­si­tion of the text. 

The Qur’an­ic rev­e­la­tion has a his­to­ry that is in total con­trast to the Bible and was pre­served both oral­ly and in writ­ing dur­ing the life­time of the Prophet Muham­mad(P) him­self. There­fore the Qur’an does not pose any prob­lem of authen­tic­i­ty as a Rev­e­la­tion from God Almighty and this is why its sto­ry of Cre­ation remains con­sis­tent with mod­ern sci­en­tif­ic knowledge.

And only God knows best. Story of Creation in the Qur'an and Old Testament 1

[cite]

TAGS