Talk­ing Ants in the Qur’an ?

Basi­cal­ly, the gist of the mis­sion­ary claim is :

Why does the Qur’an say that ants talk (27:18 – 19)? Every­one knows that ants com­mu­ni­cate by chem­i­cals detect­ed by scent and nev­er sound ! Is this not a sci­en­tif­ic error in the Qur’an ? 

Response

This style of argu­ment is quite sopho­moric in that it is entire­ly based on some­one who does not even have a rudi­men­ta­ry lev­el under­stand­ing of zool­o­gy or ento­mol­o­gy (I believe this is cov­ered in 9th-Grade Biol­o­gy in the USA). Its sad­ly typ­i­cal of this genre of anti-Islam­ic qua­si-polemi­cists. You seri­ous­ly could­n’t go to the library or even do a web search for infor­ma­tion on acoustic com­mu­ni­ca­tion by ants ? What does this say about your cred­i­bil­i­ty as a genre collectively ?

The crit­ic fal­la­cious­ly relied upon an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the Qur’an which no Mus­lim relies upon. Unlike the Chris­tians’ New Tes­ta­ment which has no Syr­i­ac or Ara­ma­ic orig­i­nal, nor even a Greek codex from the 1st cen­tu­ry CE, the Qur’an has always been in Ara­bic as it is today and this is the stan­dard through­out the world. Crit­ics and sup­port­ers alike agree that the Qur’an was always Ara­bic (ignor­ing any neo­phytes who base­less­ly claim it was Syr­i­ac). Even ori­en­tal­ists with half a brain quote from the Ara­bic text.

First­ly, have you ever heard of some­thing called a ​“mir­a­cle” asso­ci­at­ed with some­thing called a ​“prophet”? If Moses can part the Red Sea, Solomon hear­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tion of ants is nothing.

So the ques­tion is : Do ants com­mu­ni­cate acoustically ?

Here is the verse :

(18) hatt?th?t???-naml??t namlat(un) y?yyuha-naml?ul??nakum l?ahtimannakum sulaym ? wa jun ? wa-hum l?ash‘ur?19) fa-tabas­sama d?kam-min qawlih?a q ? rabb?wzi‘n?nn ashku­ra ni‘mataka-llat?n‘amta ​‘alayya wa ​‘al??dayya wa ann a‘mala s?h(an) tard ? wa-adkhiln?i‑rahmatika f?ib?ka‑s?h ?

This is the translation :

(18) Until when they reached a val­ley of naml?one of the namlat(un) con­veyed : O you com­pa­ny of naml?into your dwellings lest Solomon and his armies crush you unbe­knownst to them. (19) So he smiled, amused by her mes­sage, and said : O my Lord ! Order me that I may be grate­ful for Your favours which you have bestowed on me and on my par­ents, and that I may work right­eous­ness that will please You. And admit me, by Your Grace, to the ranks of Your right­eous servants.” 

First of all we have the word ​“naml” in Ara­bic which is a word for ants as well as ter­mites in the Ara­bic lan­guage. Ants are usu­al­ly called in Ara­bic ​“an-Naml al-Abyad” mean­ing ​“the white ant”.

The antagonist(s) typ­i­cal­ly make the fal­la­cious assump­tion that ants do not com­mu­ni­cate by sound. Not only do ants com­mu­ni­cate by sound, but ter­mites are specif­i­cal­ly known to com­mu­ni­cate by sound. Regard­ing ants, their acoustic com­mu­ni­ca­tion has been thor­ough­ly researched and doc­u­ment­ed in a study from Robert Hick­ling, Nation­al Cen­ter for Phys­i­cal Acoustics Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­sis­sip­pi and Richard L. Brown, Depart­ment of Ento­mol­o­gy and Plant Pathol­o­gy, Mis­sis­sip­pi State Uni­ver­si­ty enti­tled ​“Nearfield acoustic com­mu­ni­ca­tion by ants”.

Not only did they doc­u­ment ant sounds — and here’s the dev­as­tat­ing blow to this mis­sion­ary non­sense — they record­ed the sounds you can hear on the web at the fol­low­ing URL :

http://home.olemiss.edu/~hickling/

Here are the actu­al .wav files you can lis­ten to :

Stridu­la­tion Sounds of Black Fire Ants (Solenop­sis rich­teri) in Dif­fer­ent Situations

• Alarm sig­nal gen­er­at­ed by black fire ants when a micro­phone probe is insert­ed into their mound
• Nor­mal move­ment sounds of a group of ants with occa­sion­al bursts of stridu­la­tion sound from a sin­gle ant
• Sounds of ants attack­ing a cater­pil­lar with stridu­la­tion sound from a sin­gle ant
• Dis­tress sig­nals emit­ted by a sin­gle major work­er with a caught antenna

Now that absolute­ly ends the argu­ment right there. But to take it even a step fur­ther, schol­ars of Qur’?c hermeneu­tics have stat­ed that due to the vers­es pre­ced­ing 18 – 19 it can be strong­ly adduced that these are winged ants or pos­si­ble winged termites.

In verse 27:16 which is 2 vers­es before the top­ic of this dis­cus­sion, Solomon states : “ ​‘ullimn?antiqa-tayr?.” mean­ing, ​“we have been taught the mode of com­mu­ni­ca­tion for those things which fly (birds, etc)”. The word ​“tayr” lit­er­al­ly means to fly as the words for ​“bird” and ​“air­plane” also derive from the same root of ​“tayr” in the Ara­bic lan­guage. This is the opin­ion of ash-Shu‘b?s relat­ed in al-Qur­tub ? tafs ? vol. 13 who states : ​“These ​‘nam­lah’ had two wings, thus they were cat­e­go­rized as tayr…” I use the word ​“naml” instead of ​“ant” and ​“things that fly” instead of ​“bird”, since the Eng­lish trans­la­tions have failed to cap­ture these lin­guis­tic nuances which must be explained. It is well known that ter­mites com­mu­ni­cate by sound and this does not require any post­ing of a research paper. Even the Orkin pest con­trol guy knows that they do.

What is inter­est­ing to note is that wings in ants is a sign of unmat­ed males and females, as they are called ​“winged repro­duc­tives” or ​“swarm­ers”. This is because they leave their mounds en masse to mate. Hence, the verse men­tion­ing that these ants are not in their mounds but out in the open. This verse uses the fem­i­nine verb ​“q?t” in regards to the ant that warned the oth­ers. Thus, it was per­haps a winged, unmat­ed queen.

Now do crit­ics of a Judeo-Chris­t­ian back­ground have any­thing to stand upon when they make this criticism ?

No. The word used in vers­es 18 – 19 for com­mu­ni­ca­tion are inflec­tions of the word ​“q?quot;. This word does not only mean to speak, but also to con­vey some­thing or to make sound. The cog­nate for this word in pre­vi­ous scrip­tures is also ​“Q?quot ; in Ara­ma­ic and is found in the Book of Daniel in the fol­low­ing manner :

​“ch?h hav ? b?ayin min‑q?millayy?abreb?’ d?arn?memallel?..”
​“I beheld then because of the voice of the great words which the horn spake…” (Daniel 7:11)

A talk­ing horn ? The notion of an inan­i­mate horn talk­ing is even more absurd than an ant talk­ing ! You will often find that the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies like to cast stones from glass hous­es. The fact is that these are mir­a­cles and you aren’t sup­posed to try and ​“sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly explain” them any­ways. How­ev­er, even when we answer the mis­sion­ar­ies’ chal­lenges by doing so, they end up falling flat on their faces.

So in con­clu­sion, how does the Qur’an doc­u­ment such detail which would have lit­er­al­ly been unknow­able in the 7th cen­tu­ry C.E.? Accord­ing to those who say the Prophet Muham­mad (P) invent­ed the Qur’? one would have to con­clude that he was a Bib­li­cal Schol­ar, a Semit­ic Ety­mol­o­gist with prowess in Hebrew, Syr­i­ac and Greek on a schol­ar­ly lev­el, an OB-Gyn, a Chemist, a Meterol­o­gist, a Geol­o­gist, a Zool­o­gist, a Chemist, etc, etc, and now an Ento­mol­o­gist ! Maybe he had a time machine, eh ? Dis­miss­ing the Qur’?as the Prophet’s (P) inven­tion cre­ates more prob­lems than it addresses.

And only God knows best.