Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

Scientific Context: From “Despised Fluid” to Human Life

Quran 32:8 states: “Then He made his progeny from an extract of a liquid disdained.” In the original Arabic, sulālah (translated “extract” or “quintessence”) denotes something drawn out – “the best part of a thing” whyislam.org. Classical commentators understood this “liquid disdained” (Arabic māʾ maḥīn) to mean the lowly semen or sperm-drop by which human reproduction occurs quranx.comquestionsonislam.com. Modern scholarship affirms that this phrasing uncannily aligns with modern reproductive science. Semen is now known to be a complex fluid – a “mingled fluid” (nutfah amshāj as Quran 76:2 describes whyislam.org) composed of various secretions and sperm cells questionsonislam.com. Yet out of hundreds of millions of sperm in an ejaculation, typically only a single sperm cell fertilizes the egg. The Quran’s term sulālah or “extract” precisely captures this fact: “only one single cell, [a] spermatozoon, out of over 50 million” is the essential seed for a new human whyislam.org. In other words, the Quran says “human progeny will be formed from something extracted from this liquid” whyislam.org – exactly what science confirmed over a millennium later when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek observed human sperm under a microscope in 1677. It took until the 19th–20th centuries for biologists to understand fertilization and that one sperm unites with the ovum to form a zygote. Yet the 7th-century Quran already distinguishes the “despised fluid” (semen) from its “extract,” implying that a mere tiny portion of the semen is actually responsible for creation of a new lifejamalbadawi.orgwhyislam.org.

Crucially, the Quranic narrative omits the misconceptions prevalent in earlier eras. Ancient Greek and medieval theories of reproduction were rife with errors – for example, Aristotle thought the male semen and female menstrual blood combined to form an embryo, and some later theorists believed in pre-formed miniature humans (homunculi) in sperm or eggs whyislam.org. By contrast, the Quran’s references are free of such folklore. Maurice Bucaille, a modern physician and Quran commentator, emphasizes “the total absence of any reference…to the mistaken ideas that were prevalent around the world at the time” in the Quran’s embryological verses whyislam.orgwhyislam.org. Indeed, even as late as 1651, scientists like William Harvey only began formulating that “all life comes from an egg,” and debates raged for centuries over the roles of sperm versus egg whyislam.org. The Quranic account anticipated the essential role of the sperm extract without the benefit of microscopes, steering clear of ideas (like the mother’s menstrual blood forming the fetus or semen coming from the spine) that were later debunked.

Another point of alignment with modern genetics is the determination of a baby’s sex. The Quran intimates that male fluid is the decisive factor in whether a child is male or female. “He creates the two mates – the male and the female – from a sperm-drop when it is emitted,” says Quran 53:45–46. For centuries, many assumed the mother’s body determined the sex of a child; even into the 19th century, some scientists thought the woman’s egg carried gender information. Yet the X/Y chromosome mechanism – where the father’s sperm provides the sex-determining chromosome – was discovered only in the 20th century. Remarkably, “in the Qur’an, it is reported that gender…is created from the semen…However, until quite recently it was thought that gender was determined by the mother’s cells. Science discovered this information – given in the Qur’an – only in the 20th century.” questionsonislam.com. Modern Islamic commentators frequently highlight this as an instance of Quranic foresight: the scripture attributed the origin of male/female outcome to the father’s “drop of fluid,” which aligns precisely with genetic science questionsonislam.com.

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