“He Grew You From the Earth Like a Plant”: Q 71:17 and 67:24 as Indirect Witnesses to Guided Evolution

Presented by Claude

Abstract

This essay examines Q 71:17 (wa-llāhu anbatakum mina-l-arḍi nabātan, “He has caused you to grow from the earth like a plant,” Sūrat Nūḥ) and Q 67:24 (qul huwa-lladhī dhara’akum fī-l-arḍ, “Say: It is He who has scattered/multiplied you on the earth,” Sūrat al-Mulk) within their immediate contexts (71:11–20 and 67:23–26). It argues that the agricultural-botanical and dispersive lexicon of these verses, read alongside Q 71:14’s khalaqakum aṭwāran (“created you in stages”), provides a Qurʾānic vocabulary unusually hospitable to — though not by itself demonstrating — what Dr. Zia H. Shah, MD, calls guided evolution. The essay presents six parallel English translations (Sahih International, Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, Asad, Maududi, Maulana Muhammad Ali), analyses the roots ن ب ت (n-b-t) and ذ ر أ (dh-r-ʾ) via al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, Lane’s Lexicon, and classical mufassirūn (al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Kathīr, al-Qurṭubī, al-Rāzī, al-Zamakhsharī, al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī), surveys the mainstream evolutionary timeline (origin of life ~3.8 Ga, Great Oxidation Event ~2.4 Ga, LECA ~1.5–1.8 Ga, Cambrian explosion 538.8 ± 0.6 Ma, land plants ~473–471 Ma, animals on land ~430–410 Ma, Homo sapiens ~300 ka), integrates this with the Shah corpus at thequran.love, and closes with a thematic synthesis on the four divine creation-names (al-Khāliq, al-Bāriʾ, al-Muṣawwir, al-Fāṭir). It distinguishes what the text plausibly means within its seventh-century horizon from what science independently established over the centuries.

I. Two Verses in the Hand of the Reader

The Qurʾān returns repeatedly to nature as a dalīl (evidentiary sign) for God’s oneness. Two striking botanical-agricultural turns of phrase appear in two short Meccan sūras: Sūrat Nūḥ and Sūrat al-Mulk, the latter recited by millions every night on the strength of a Prophetic ḥadīth that it shields the reciter from the punishment of the grave. Islamicstudies.info

In Sūrat Nūḥ, the Prophet Noah, building toward the climactic plea that his people render God His due waqār (grandeur), declares: “And God has caused you to grow from the earth like a growing” (Q 71:17). In Sūrat al-Mulk, the Prophet is commanded to say: “It is He who scattered you on the earth, and to Him you will be gathered” (Q 67:24). The verbs differ — anbata (Form IV of n-b-t, the verb of vegetation) and dhara’a (Form I of dh-r-ʾ, “to create, multiply, sow, scatter”) — but the semantic field overlaps: both pictures place the human being on a continuum with the earth’s productive crust. Clear Quran

This essay reads both verses in context, marshals classical Sunni and Shīʿī tafsīr, surveys the modern picture of how animals literally grow out of the earth via the food chain rooted in plant photosynthesis, and asks what additional layer of meaning these images take on once the reader is equipped with the conceptual furniture of deep time and common descent. The conclusion is modest: the verses do not establish evolution, but they furnish an unusually hospitable Arabic vocabulary for it, and any Muslim reader confronting the molecular and fossil evidence has, in these verses, scriptural warrant for integration rather than confrontation.

II. The Two Passages in Six Voices

A. Sūrat Nūḥ 71:11–20

Q 71:11 — يُرْسِلِ السَّمَاءَ عَلَيْكُم مِّدْرَارًا — Yursili-s-samāʾa ʿalaykum midrārā

Translator	Rendering
Sahih International	“He will send [rain from] the sky upon you in [continuing] showers”
Yusuf Ali	“He will send rain to you in abundance” Surah.my
Pickthall	“He will let loose the sky for you in plenteous rain”
Asad	“He will shower upon you heavenly blessings abundant”
Maududi	“He will shower upon you abundant rains from the heaven”
M. Muhammad Ali	“He will send down upon you rain, pouring in abundance” alahmadiyya

Q 71:12 — وَيُمْدِدْكُم بِأَمْوَالٍ وَبَنِينَ وَيَجْعَل لَّكُمْ جَنَّاتٍ وَيَجْعَل لَّكُمْ أَنْهَارًا

Translator	Rendering
Sahih Int’l	“And give you increase in wealth and children and provide for you gardens and provide for you rivers”
Yusuf Ali	“Give you increase in wealth and sons; and bestow on you gardens and bestow on you rivers” Surah.my
Pickthall	“And will help you with wealth and sons, and will assign unto you Gardens and rivers”
Asad	“and will aid you with worldly goods and children, and will bestow upon you gardens, and running waters”
Maududi	“and will provide you with wealth and children, and will bestow upon you gardens and rivers”
M. Muhammad Ali	“and help you with wealth and sons, and make for you gardens, and make for you rivers” alahmadiyya

Q 71:13 — مَّا لَكُمْ لَا تَرْجُونَ لِلَّهِ وَقَارًا

Translator	Rendering
Sahih Int’l	“What is [the matter] with you that you do not attribute to Allah [due] grandeur”
Yusuf Ali	“What is the matter with you, that ye place not your hope for kindness and long-suffering in Allah”
Pickthall	“What aileth you that ye hope not toward Allah for dignity”
Asad	“What is amiss with you that you cannot look forward to God’s majesty”
Maududi	“What is amiss with you that you do not look forward to the majesty of Allah”
M. Muhammad Ali	“What is the matter with you that you do not hope for greatness from Allah?” alahmadiyya

Q 71:14 — khalaqakum aṭwāran: وَقَدْ خَلَقَكُمْ أَطْوَارًا

Translator	Rendering
Sahih Int’l	“While He has created you in stages”
Yusuf Ali	“Seeing that it is He that has created you in diverse stages?”
Pickthall	“When He created you by (divers) stages?”
Asad	“seeing that He has created [every one of] you in successive stages”
Maududi	“when He has created you in stages?”
M. Muhammad Ali	“And indeed He has created you by various stages” alahmadiyya

Q 71:15 — أَلَمْ تَرَوْا كَيْفَ خَلَقَ اللَّهُ سَبْعَ سَمَاوَاتٍ طِبَاقًا

Translator	Rendering
Sahih Int’l	“Do you not consider how Allah has created seven heavens in layers”
Yusuf Ali	“See ye not how Allah has created the seven heavens one above another”
Pickthall	“See ye not how Allah hath created seven heavens in harmony”
Asad	“Do you not see how God has created seven heavens in full harmony with one another”
Maududi	“Do you not see how Allah has created seven heavens, one upon the other”
M. Muhammad Ali	“Do you not see how Allah has created the seven heavens alike” Ahmadiyya

Q 71:16 — وَجَعَلَ الْقَمَرَ فِيهِنَّ نُورًا وَجَعَلَ الشَّمْسَ سِرَاجًا

Translator	Rendering
Sahih Int’l	“And made the moon therein a [reflected] light and made the sun a burning lamp”
Yusuf Ali	“And made the moon a light in their midst, and made the sun as a (Glorious) Lamp?”
Pickthall	“And hath made the moon a light therein, and made the sun a lamp”
Asad	“and has set up within them the moon as a light [reflected] and the sun as a [radiant] lamp”
Maududi	“and has placed the moon in them as a light, and the sun as a radiant lamp?”
M. Muhammad Ali	“and made the moon in them (as) a light, and made the sun a lamp” Ahmadiyya

Q 71:17 (focal) — وَاللَّهُ أَنبَتَكُم مِّنَ الْأَرْضِ نَبَاتًا — Wallāhu anbatakum mina-l-arḍi nabātā

Translator	Rendering
Sahih Int’l	“And Allah has caused you to grow from the earth a [progressive] growth” Quran O Quranic Arabic Corpus
Yusuf Ali	“And Allah has produced you from the earth growing (gradually)” Surah Quran +2
Pickthall	“And Allah hath caused you to grow as a growth from the earth” Quran My Islam
Asad	“And God has caused you to grow out of the earth in [gradual] growth”
Maududi	“And Allah has caused you to grow out of the earth so wondrously” Surah Quran My Islam
M. Muhammad Ali	“And Allah has caused you to grow out of the earth as a growth” Ahmadiyya

Q 71:18 — ثُمَّ يُعِيدُكُمْ فِيهَا وَيُخْرِجُكُمْ إِخْرَاجًا

Translator	Rendering
Sahih Int’l	“Then He will return you into it and extract you [another] extraction”
Yusuf Ali	“And in the End He will return you into the (earth), and raise you forth (again at the Resurrection)?” Surah.my
Pickthall	“And afterward He maketh you return thereto, and He will bring you forth again, a (new) forthbringing”
Asad	“and thereafter He will return you to it [in death], and [then] He will bring you forth in resurrection”
Maududi	“Then He will cause you to return to the earth and will then again bring you out of it”
M. Muhammad Ali	“then He returns you to it, then will He bring you forth a (new) bringing forth” Ahmadiyya

Q 71:19–20 — وَاللَّهُ جَعَلَ لَكُمُ الْأَرْضَ بِسَاطًا * لِّتَسْلُكُوا مِنْهَا سُبُلًا فِجَاجًا

	71:19	71:20
Sahih Int’l	“Allah has made for you the earth an expanse”	“That you may follow therein roads of passage”
Yusuf Ali	“Allah has made the earth for you as a carpet (spread out)” Surah.my	“That ye may go about therein, in spacious roads” Surah.my
Pickthall	“Allah hath made the earth a wide expanse for you”	“That ye may thread the valleys, ways and roads thereof”
Asad	“God has made the earth a wide expanse for you”	“so that you might walk thereon on spacious paths”
Maududi	“Allah has made the earth a wide expanse for you”	“so that you may tread its spacious paths”
M. Muhammad Ali	“Allah has made the earth a wide expanse for you”	“that you may go along in it in spacious paths” Ahmadiyya alahmadiyya

B. Sūrat al-Mulk 67:23–26

Q 67:23 — قُلْ هُوَ الَّذِي أَنشَأَكُمْ وَجَعَلَ لَكُمُ السَّمْعَ وَالْأَبْصَارَ وَالْأَفْئِدَةَ ۖ قَلِيلًا مَّا تَشْكُرُونَ

Qul huwa-lladhī anshaʾakum wa-jaʿala lakumu-s-samʿa wa-l-abṣāra wa-l-afʾidah; qalīlan mā tashkurūn

Translator	Rendering
Sahih Int’l	“Say, ‘It is He who has produced you and made for you hearing and vision and hearts; little are you grateful’” My Islam
Yusuf Ali	“Say: ‘It is He Who has created you (and made you grow), and made for you the faculties of hearing, seeing, feeling and understanding: little thanks it is ye give’” My Islam
Pickthall	“Say: He it is who gave you being, and hath assigned unto you ears and eyes and hearts. Small thanks give ye!” IslamAwakened
Asad	“SAY: ‘[God is] He who has brought you [all] into being, and has endowed you with hearing, and sight, and hearts: how seldom are you grateful!’” IslamAwakened
Maududi	“Say: ‘He it is Who has brought you into being, and has given you hearing and sight, and hearts to think and understand. How seldom do you give thanks!’” Surah Quran
M. Muhammad Ali	“Say: He it is Who brought you into being and made for you ears and eyes and hearts. Little thanks you give!” alahmadiyya

Q 67:24 (focal) — قُلْ هُوَ الَّذِي ذَرَأَكُمْ فِي الْأَرْضِ وَإِلَيْهِ تُحْشَرُونَ

Qul huwa-lladhī dhara’akum fī-l-arḍi wa-ilayhi tuḥsharūn

Translator	Rendering
Sahih Int’l	“Say, ‘It is He who has multiplied you throughout the earth, and to Him you will be gathered’” Quran qurano
Yusuf Ali	“Say: ‘It is He Who has multiplied you through the earth, and to Him shall ye be gathered together’” Quran qurano
Pickthall	“Say: He it is Who multiplieth you in the earth, and unto Whom ye will be gathered” Quran qurano
Asad	“Say: ‘It is He who has caused you to multiply on earth; and it is unto Him that you shall be gathered’”
Maududi	“Say: ‘Allah it is Who multiplied you in the earth and to Him you will be mustered’” Quran qurano
M. Muhammad Ali	“Say: He it is Who multiplies you in the earth and to Him you will be gathered” alahmadiyya

Arberry’s “It is He who scattered you in the earth, and unto Him you shall be mustered” and Abdel Haleem’s “It is He who scattered you throughout the earth” preserve the dispersive force of dhara’a. Both senses — “scatter/sow” and “multiply” — are present in the root, and the verse trades on their semantic overlap. qurano + 2

Q 67:25–26

	67:25	67:26
Sahih Int’l	“And they say, ‘When is this promise, if you should be truthful?’”	“Say, ‘The knowledge is only with Allah, and I am only a clear warner’”
Yusuf Ali	“They ask: When will this promise be (fulfilled)? — If ye are telling the truth.”	“Say: ‘As to the knowledge of the time, it is with Allah alone: I am (sent) only to warn plainly in public.’”
Pickthall	“When (will) this promise (be fulfilled), if ye are truthful?”	“The knowledge is with Allah only, and I am but a plain warner”
Asad	“But they [only] ask, ‘When is this promise to be fulfilled? [Answer this] if you are men of truth!’”	“Knowledge thereof rests with God alone; and I am only a plain warner.”
Maududi	“They say: ‘If you are truthful, tell us when will this promise be fulfilled?’”	“Say: ‘Allah alone knows about that; and I am no more than a plain warner.’”
M. Muhammad Ali	“And they say: When will this promise come to pass, if you are truthful?” alahmadiyya	“Say: The knowledge is with Allah only, and I am only a plain warner.” alahmadiyya

The thematic arc of both passages is identical: God brings you forth from the earth (71:17) and scatters/multiplies you across it (67:24); then He gathers you back (71:18; 67:24); meanwhile He equips you with sensorium (67:23) and prepares the earth for you (71:19–20).

III. The Two Roots: ن ب ت (n-b-t) and ذ ر أ (dh-r-ʾ)

A. Anbata (Form IV of n-b-t)

Anbata is the standard Qurʾānic verb for God’s causing vegetation to issue from the earth (cf. 6:99, 16:11, 22:5, 26:7, 27:60, 31:10, 78:15). The cognate accusative nabātan in 71:17 — a construction known in Arabic grammar as mafʿūl muṭlaq — intensifies the verb to produce: “He made you grow from the earth — a [veritable] growing.” The image is unambiguously botanical, drawn from the same lexical field as crops, gardens, grain, and herbage.

Crucially, the verb is applied to human beings — “He caused you to grow” — and the cognate accusative makes the agricultural simile emphatic. The verse therefore admits of three concentric receptions: (i) the Adamic layer — Adam was from the dust of the earth, as Tafsīr al-Jalālayn and al-Ṭabarī read it; (ii) the ontogenetic-nutritive layer — every human is grown in the womb of one nourished by what springs from earth, and continues to live by eating what the earth produces; (iii) the phylogenetic layer, which only modernity makes visible.

B. Dhara’a (Form I of dh-r-ʾ)

The root dh-r-ʾ occurs only six times in the Qurʾān (6:136, 7:179, 16:13, 23:79, 42:11, 67:24). Edward William Lane’s Arabic–English Lexicon (1874), drawing on al-Ṣaḥāḥ of al-Jawharī, al-Tahdhīb of al-Azharī, al-Muḥkam of Ibn Sīda, al-Qāmūs of al-Fīrūzābādī, and al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī’s Mufradāt, records a semantic cluster: (i) “to create” (synonym of khalaqa), citing Q 7:179 (wa-laqad dhara’nā li-jahannama kathīran, “and verily We have created for Hell many [of the jinn and of mankind]”); (ii) “to multiply, to make numerous” — Lane cites al-Zajjāj and al-Farrāʾ on Q 42:11 (yadhraʾukum fīhi, “He multiplies you thereby,” through male-female pairing); (iii) “to sow [land]”; (iv) by extension, “to scatter, disperse” — the nominal dhurriyya (“offspring”) derived by some classical lexicographers from this root precisely because, as Lane puts it, “God scattered the dhurriyya upon the earth.” The Divine epithet al-Dhāriʾ belongs to the same field. arabic-english-dictionary arabic-english-dictionary

What is striking is that the root dh-r-ʾ overlaps semantically with the agricultural to sow. The picture of Q 67:24 is therefore not only of God demographically multiplying humanity (the Lane–Zajjāj–Farrāʾ sense) and geographically dispersing it across the earth (the Ibn Kathīr sense), but also sowing humanity into the earth’s surface, as a farmer sows seed. The vegetative imagery of 71:17 and the dispersive-sowing imagery of 67:24 thus speak in parallel registers.

IV. Classical Tafsīr: What the Tradition Saw and What it Did Not

A. The dominant Sunni reading of Q 71:17

The mainstream Sunni mufassirūn — al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144), al-Qurṭubī (d. 671/1273), al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1373) — read 71:17 as affirming that human beings are materially derived from the earth via Adam’s creation from dust. Al-Ṭabarī (vol. 29) glosses it “And Allah has brought you forth from the (dust of) earth.” Tafsīr al-Jalālayn says the same in compressed form. Maududi makes the analogy explicit: “the creation of man out of the substances of the earth has been compared to the growth of vegetation. Just as at one time there was no vegetation on the earth, then Allah caused it to grow, so at one time man did not exist, then Allah created him.” This is, in the classical reading, a parable of God’s power to bring things forth from nothing, instanced first in herbage and then in Adam. Surah Quran + 2

But one classical text pushes toward the developmental: al-Rāzī on the parallel verse 71:14 (khalaqakum aṭwāran). Ibn Kathīr, summarising the early authorities, records: “(While He has created you in aṭwār [stages].) It has been said that this means from a drop of sperm, then from a hanging clot, then from a lump of flesh. Ibn ʿAbbās, ʿIkrimah, Qatādah, Yaḥyā b. Rāfiʿ, al-Suddī and Ibn Zayd, all said this.” The classical reading is therefore embryological — the nuṭfa → ʿalaqa → muḍgha sequence detailed in Q 23:12–14, with the hadith of Ibn Masʿūd (al-Bukhārī, Muslim) assigning forty days to each. Al-Rāzī pressed the language toward the philosophical observation that the embryo is initially unformed — a germ that does not yet contain its final shape “in any way” — a wording that has provided the seam along which later thinkers extended aṭwār from ontogeny (development of the individual) to phylogeny (development of the species). Quran.com

B. The dominant Sunni reading of Q 67:24

The classical reading of dhara’akum fī-l-arḍ is geographical-demographic. Ibn Kathīr writes: “Qul huwa-lladhī dhara’akum fī-l-arḍ — Say: It is He Who has created you on the earth — meaning, He has spread and distributed you all throughout the various regions and areas of the earth with your differing languages, colors, shapes, appearances and forms. Wa-ilayhi tuḥsharūn — and to Him shall you be gathered — meaning, you all will come together after this separation and division. He will gather you all just as He separated you and He will bring you back again just as He originated you.” Tafsīr al-Jalālayn glosses similarly: “Say: It is He Who multiplied you, created you, on earth, and to Him you will be gathered, for the Reckoning.” The Egyptian al-Muntakhab adds: “He has spread you throughout the earth and varied your tongues and your colours.” Al-Ṭabarī, al-Zamakhsharī, al-Qurṭubī, and al-Rāzī differ in nuance, not substance. Quran O qurano

The classical tradition therefore did not see in 67:24 a biological-historical claim about the descent of humanity from earlier life-forms. It read the verse as a statement about the spread of human populations across the inhabited earth — a perfectly natural reading of seventh-century Arabic. The question is whether the verse will tolerate a second, deeper reading once the modern reader’s mind has been equipped with the categories of common ancestry, deep time, and molecular phylogeny.

C. Shīʿī perspective

Allamah Muḥammad Ḥusayn al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s al-Mīzān fī Tafsīr al-Qurʾān — generally regarded as the most important twentieth-century Shīʿī exegesis — has not yet been published in English for the volume covering juzʾ 29 (which contains both Sūrat al-Mulk and Sūrat Nūḥ). We therefore cite a published Twelver Shīʿī complement, the Enlightening Commentary into the Light of the Holy Qurʾān (vol. 18), which preserves al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s interpretive sensibility. On Q 71:17 it offers: “The employment of inbāt — denoting to germinate, cause to sprout, make grow, cultivate — applied to man reflects that man was created from dust and all his nourishment by which he grows comes from the earth, directly, like vegetables, seeds, and fruit, or indirectly, like meat; furthermore, there exist many a similarity between man and plants and many a laws as to nourishment, growth, and reproduction also apply to mankind. Such expression is quite meaningful reflecting that in terms of Guidance, the Lord is not only an Instructor, but also He is like a Gardener who places the seeds of plants in the required environment so that their potentialities…” The image of God as Gardener — sowing humanity in the prepared earth — is, in our view, the single classical line within the tradition that most readily naturalises to the modern evolutionary picture.

D. Maulana Muhammad Ali (Lahore Ahmadiyya): the explicit evolutionary reading

Among twentieth-century translators, it is Maulana Muhammad Ali of Lahore — whose 1917 English translation pre-dated and silently shaped the renderings of Pickthall, Yusuf Ali, and Asad (Pickthall himself in 1936 described Maulana Muhammad Ali as having done “more for the cause of Islamic revival than any other Muslim of our time”) — who first stated the evolutionary reading unambiguously. His footnote on 71:14 reads: “The words undoubtedly speak of the evolution of man. It is clear from v. 17, where the first stage is spoken of as a growth from the earth, that the words here imply that man has been brought to the present state after passing through various conditions.” His note on 71:17 closes the circuit: “Here man is described as having grown out of the earth as a growth, i.e., by a process of development. Thus verses 14 and 17 refer to that great process of development through which man has attained to the present stage of physical perfection.” Ahmadiyya + 3

This is, to our knowledge, the first sustained Muslim commentary to read anbatakum mina-l-arḍi nabātan as a Qurʾānic image of the phylogenetic emergence of humanity. The Lahore Ahmadiyya are a minority within Ahmadiyya, itself excluded from the constitutional definition of Muslim in Pakistan since 1974 (Constitution Second Amendment Act, XLIX of 1974) and rejected as non-Muslim by mainstream Sunni and Shīʿī authorities. The point is registered so that the reader can weigh the source: the philological observation about anbata and aṭwār stands on its own merits, but the theological framework in which Maulana Muhammad Ali — and Zia H. Shah after him — embeds the reading belongs to a specific minority tradition. Yusuf Ali, who lived and worked across Brandreth Road from Maulana Muhammad Ali in Lahore in 1934–37, is reported by senior Lahore Ahmadis to have consulted him on points of translation, and his note on al-Bāriʾ (Q 59:24) as “the Evolver” mirrors precisely the same theological framework.

V. How Animals Evolved From Plants — and the Time Frame Involved

That “He grew you from the earth like a plant” can be read literally rests on a fact of contemporary biology so well-established it has become a commonplace of secondary-school instruction: every atom of carbon in every animal body now living was, at some point in the recent past, captured from atmospheric CO₂ by a photosynthetic organism. The food chain is not an optional ecological filigree on animal life; it is the only mechanism by which the chemical mass of an animal exists at all. Plants (and, in the oceans, cyanobacteria, algae, and other photosynthetic protists) are the primary producers; all animals — herbivores, every trophic level of carnivore, and humans — are secondarily assembled from photosynthetically fixed carbon. In an exact biochemical sense, every animal is an elaborate, mobile rearrangement of plant matter.

A. The deep ancestry: a single eukaryotic origin

Beneath the food chain lies a deeper fact: animals, plants, and fungi all descend from a single eukaryotic ancestor. The Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (LECA) is currently dated to roughly 1.5 to 1.8 billion years ago (with phylogenomic estimates ranging from ~1.0–2.3 Ga depending on calibration). LECA is reconstructed as a sophisticated cell that already possessed a nucleus, mitochondria (themselves the descendants of an engulfed α-proteobacterium, per the endosymbiotic theory of Lynn Margulis), at least one centriole and flagellum, sex with meiosis, peroxisomes, and a complex cytoskeleton. The chloroplasts of plants represent a second endosymbiosis, in which a cyanobacterium was engulfed by a heterotrophic eukaryote, transforming it into a photosynthetic one — which is why plant and animal cells carry organelles whose DNA is genuinely bacterial in lineage.

From LECA the eukaryotic family tree split. Plants belong to the Archaeplastida; animals are nested within Opisthokonta, where their closest unicellular relatives are the choanoflagellates, with fungi as somewhat more distant kin. Animals and fungi (we and the mushrooms) share a more recent common ancestor than either does with plants. Phylogenomic dating of these splits varies considerably across studies (e.g., Parfrey et al., PNAS 2011, places opisthokonts at ~1,240–1,389 Ma; other studies place metazoa at ~800–1,000 Ma), but all converge on the conclusion that the animal lineage emerged from unicellular opisthokont ancestors during the late Mesoproterozoic to early Neoproterozoic, with the fungus-animal split predating the animal radiation by hundreds of millions of years.

So the claim of Q 71:17 is not, strictly speaking, that human beings descended from plants in a phylogenetic sense (we did not; we share with plants only the deeper LECA ancestor). It is rather that animal life and plant life are cousin lineages of the same eukaryotic origin, and that animal biomass is built from plant biomass via photosynthetic primary production. Both senses are captured by the verse’s image.

B. Photosynthesis, the Great Oxidation Event, and the conditions for animal life

The deeper biological prerequisite for animal life is oxygen. Animals require aerobic respiration to fuel the energy budgets of motile multicellular bodies; until the atmosphere held free O₂, animal life was impossible. The atmosphere acquired its O₂ in two great pulses, both driven by photosynthesis:

The Great Oxidation Event (GOE), approximately 2.4 billion years ago (sometimes dated 2.4–2.1 Ga). Cyanobacteria — single-celled photosynthetic bacteria — had evolved oxygenic photosynthesis at least several hundred million years before this. MIT geobiologist Greg Fournier (lead author, associate professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences) and colleagues estimated oxygenic photosynthesis evolved between 3.4 and 2.9 Ga, per Fournier et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B, September 29, 2021; as Fournier put it in MIT News (Sept. 28, 2021): “In evolution, things always start small” — cyanobacteria diversified rapidly just before the GOE ~2.4 Ga. For nearly half a billion years the oxygen they released was scrubbed from the oceans by dissolved ferrous iron (which precipitated as banded iron formations) and by reaction with atmospheric methane; when the buffer was exhausted, free O₂ flooded the atmosphere. As the American Society for Microbiology summarises, the GOE was “an epochal moment in the evolutionary timeline.” ASM.org
The Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event, roughly 800–600 Ma, when oxygen levels rose toward modern values. It is this second oxygen pulse that immediately preceded the explosive diversification of multicellular animal life. arxiv

For the present argument: animal life depends on photosynthesis not only for its biomass but for the very air it breathes. The Qurʾānic image of the sun as a sirāj (Q 71:16) — a self-luminous source whose photons fuel the photosynthesis described in 71:17 — and the moon as nūr (reflected light) is, on the modern reading, an elegant compression of the energetic economy of terrestrial life.

C. The geological-evolutionary timeline

~13.8 Ga: Big Bang.
~4.54 Ga: Formation of the Earth.
~3.8 Ga: Earliest evidence of life — anaerobic prokaryotes in iron-rich oceans. Stromatolites (microbial mats) appear in the geological record from ~3.5 Ga.
~3.4–2.9 Ga: Origin of oxygenic photosynthesis in cyanobacteria (Fournier et al., 2021).
~2.4 Ga: The Great Oxidation Event. Atmospheric oxygen rises substantially. Eukaryotes are made possible by the integration of an aerobic α-proteobacterial endosymbiont (the protomitochondrion) into an archaeal host cell.
~1.5–1.8 Ga: LECA, the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor.
~1.0 Ga: Estimated divergence of opisthokonts (animals + fungi) from other eukaryotic lineages (estimates vary considerably).
~800–600 Ma: Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event.
~650 Ma: Oldest known animal fossils. Princeton geoscientist Adam Maloof led the study reporting sponge-like fossils (~650 Ma) beneath a 635 Ma glacial deposit in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges, published in Nature Geoscience (August 17, 2010); ScienceDaily reported these as “the earliest evidence of animal body forms in the current fossil record by at least 70 million years.”
538.8 ± 0.6 Ma: The Cambrian explosion. In early 2022, the International Commission on Stratigraphy revised the base of the Cambrian to 538.8 ± 0.6 Ma, based on high-precision U-Pb zircon dating of volcanic ash beds from Siberia and southeastern Newfoundland (confirmed in the ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart; cf. Wikipedia’s “Geologic time scale”: “the base of the Cambrian Period … was revised from 541 Ma to 538.8 Ma”). The Cambrian explosion is a 13–25-million-year radiation in which nearly all extant animal phyla appear in the fossil record. As Encyclopædia Britannica summarises: “Cambrian explosion, the unparalleled emergence of organisms between 541 million and approximately 530 million years ago … characterised by the appearance of many of the major phyla (between 20 and 35) that make up modern animal life.” Encyclopedia Britannica
~473–471 Ma: First land plants. Per Wikipedia’s “Evolutionary history of plants” and Encyclopædia Britannica’s “Cryptospore” entry: cryptospores “found in rocks laid down between 473 million and 471 million years ago” from Saudi Arabia (Hanadir Shale Member, Qasim Formation, Darriwilian) and other Gondwana localities “are considered to be the first known terrestrial plants.”
~430 Ma: First unambiguous macrofossil land plants; arthropods, myriapods, and arachnids onto land at the end of the Silurian. Springer
~410 Ma: Insects on land. Encyclopedia of the Environment
~380 Ma: First terrestrial tetrapods (vertebrates).
~370 Ma: First forests (e.g., Archaeopteris).
~252 Ma: End-Permian mass extinction.
~66 Ma: End-Cretaceous (K-Pg) mass extinction, including non-avian dinosaurs.
~7 Ma: Last common ancestor of Homo and Pan (chimpanzee lineage).
~2.8 Ma: Earliest Homo (e.g., Homo habilis).
~300,000 years ago: Anatomically modern Homo sapiens in Africa (Jebel Irhoud, Morocco).

Within this timeline, anbatakum mina-l-arḍi nabātan finds biochemical and historical instantiation. The carbon of every human cell is borrowed plant-carbon. The oxygen we breathe is photosynthetic exhaust. The eukaryotic machinery of our cells is a hybrid of an archaeon and a proteobacterium plus, indirectly, the legacy of cyanobacterial chemistry. Our cousin lineages on the tree of life include the green algae and the flowering plants whose ancestors first sprouted onto the Ordovician land roughly 473–471 million years before Homo sapiens emerged in Africa. The image “you grew from the earth like a plant” — once received only as a parable of Adam from dust — has become, in light of modern biology, an unexpectedly precise compression of the actual story.

VI. Guided Evolution and the Corpus of Dr. Zia H. Shah

A. Who is Shah, and what is “guided evolution”?

Dr. Zia H. Shah, MD is a physician practising in Upstate New York, Chief Editor of The Muslim Times, founder of The Glorious Quran and Science (thequran.love), and author of The Quran and the Biological Evolution (2024). His verse-by-verse “Guided Evolution in Qurʾanic Perspective: A Commentary on Surah Nūḥ 71:13–21” (2025) and his recent treatments on thequran.love — “He Created You in Stages: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Commentary on Qurʾān 71:11–20″ and “The Architecture of Guided Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Commentary on Quran 71:11-20 in Light of the Zia H. Shah Paradigm” — form the most sustained contemporary Muslim defence of the position that the Qurʾān, read in light of modern biology, vindicates a fully evolutionary picture of life on Earth — provided the picture is theistically framed.

Shah defines guided evolution as the position that “divine wisdom underlies evolutionary processes” — distinguished alike from atheistic “blind evolution” and from “traditional creationism” (the insistence on instantaneous, species-by-species special creation, especially of Adam from “a statue of mud”). His signature epigram: “We can continue to embellish the best ways to show Divine Guidance in evolution, but need to completely shy away from traditional creationism.” In the preface to his 2024 book he writes that his focus is “what natural mechanisms or laws of nature God created the universe and all the … species on our planet including humans. After all, the God of the Qurʾān is not only Manifest [al-Ẓāhir] but is also Hidden [al-Bāṭin].” thequran + 3

B. The verses Shah marshals

Shah’s Qurʾānic dossier for guided evolution is extensive:

Q 71:14, khalaqakum aṭwāran — staged unfolding of human biological history;
Q 71:17, anbatakum mina-l-arḍi nabātan — organic emergence of life from earthly elements;
Q 6:133, anshaʾakum min dhurriyyati qawmin ākharīn (“He brought you into being from the offspring of other people”) — Shah’s view: the verse that most unequivocally states the creation of Homo sapiens from earlier populations; thequran
Q 84:19, la-tarkabunna ṭabaqan ʿan ṭabaq (“You shall surely travel from stage to stage”); Thequran
Q 82:7–8, “Who created you, then proportioned you, then balanced you; in whatever form He willed, He assembled you”; Thequran
Q 87:1–3, al-ladhī khalaqa fa-sawwā, wa-lladhī qaddara fa-hadā (“Who created, then proportioned, and who ordained and guided”) — the verb hadā furnishing the Arabic key term for guided evolution;
Q 25:2, khalaqa kulla shayʾin fa-qaddarahu taqdīrā — taqdīr read not as fatalism but as the laws of nature;
Q 29:20, “Travel through the earth and observe how He began creation” — a Qurʾānic injunction to the fossil and geological record;
Q 23:14, fa-tabāraka-llāhu aḥsanu-l-khāliqīn — the plural al-khāliqīn read as Qurʾānic licence to recognise secondary creative agencies under God.

To these Shah adds Q 67:23–24: anshaʾakum (“brought you into being”) and dhara’akum fī-l-arḍ together describe a staged emergence and dispersion of humanity that harmonises with the modern biological narrative.

C. The “Four Names” framework

Shah’s most powerful synthetic device — partially borrowed from Yusuf Ali’s celebrated note on Q 59:24 — uses four divine creation-names as the grammar of a single, layered creative act:

Al-Khāliq (الْخَالِق, “the Creator/Measurer”): the One who plans and measures, fixing the dimensionless constants of physics — the taqdīr of Q 25:2.
Al-Fāṭir (الْفَاطِر, “the Originator/Cleaver”): the One who brings into existence ex novo, splitting heaven and earth into being (Q 35:1). The famous Ibn ʿAbbās report — that he did not understand the meaning of fāṭir until he heard a Bedouin say of a well, anā faṭartuhā (“I originated it”) — fixes the sense of bringing-into-being without prior model.
Al-Bāriʾ (الْبَارِئ, “the Maker/Evolver”): Yusuf Ali’s translation, rendered with deliberate provocation, is “the Evolver.” On Q 59:24 Yusuf Ali writes: “Baraʾa implies a process of evolving from previously created matter or state; the Author of this process is Bāriʾ, the Originator.” On Shah’s reading, al-Bāriʾ is the divine name under which God evolves life through staged transformations — the very name under which 71:14’s aṭwār and 71:17’s anbatakum operate. thequran
Al-Muṣawwir (الْمُصَوِّر, “the Fashioner/Shaper”): the One who gives final form — Q 95:4’s aḥsan taqwīm (“the best of forms”) — the aesthetic finishing of the peacock’s tail, the Blue Morpho’s photonic lattice, the human face.

On Shah’s framework, the four names are the grammar of guided evolution: al-Khāliq designs, al-Fāṭir initiates, al-Bāriʾ evolves, al-Muṣawwir shapes. The sequence of the names tracks the sequence of the modern scientific account.

D. Mechanism: the “causal joint”

Where does divine action enter a natural process that, to the biologist’s eye, looks fully law-governed? Shah’s most philosophically interesting move is to locate the causal joint between divine action and natural law in quantum indeterminacy, drawing on the physicist-theologian Sir John Polkinghorne. The exact mutation that occurs in a strand of DNA at a given moment is, on standard quantum mechanics, irreducibly probabilistic at the relevant scale; Shah proposes that God’s providential guidance operates through such probabilistic processes without violating any law of physics. Over millions of “coincidences,” evolution would appear random to us but would be steered toward ordained outcomes.

This is bound up with a deliberate revival of al-Ghazālī’s occasionalism. In Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), al-Ghazālī argued that what we call causation is not the inherent power of created things but the ʿāda (habit) of God, who creates each moment afresh (tajdīd al-khalq). On this metaphysics, “natural selection” names a habit of God (sunnat Allāh); secondary causes are real as regularities but borrow all their efficacy from the First Cause. This dissolves the false dichotomy — either God created instantly and separately, or evolution is true and God is absent — in favour of a third way: God creates gradually, through laws He authors and sustains.

E. Engaging Ibn Khaldūn, Nagel, Polkinghorne

Shah repeatedly cites Ibn Khaldūn’s celebrated passage in the Muqaddimah: “The world of creation started out from the minerals and progressed, in an ingenious, gradual manner, to plants and animals… The last stage of plants… is connected with the first stage of animals, such as snails and shellfish… The animal world then widens, its species become numerous, and, in a gradual process of creation, it finally leads to man, who is able to think and to reflect. The higher stage of man is reached from the world of the monkeys… This is as far as our (physical) observation extends.” thequran

A scholarly caveat is required: the leading academic on Islam and evolution, Shoaib Ahmed Malik (Islam and Evolution: Al-Ghazali and the Modern Evolutionary Paradigm, Routledge 2021), and historians such as Paul Braterman argue — convincingly — that Ibn Khaldūn (like Miskawayh, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, and al-Jāḥiẓ before him) describes the static medieval “Great Chain of Being,” not a temporal evolutionary process. Jerry Coyne, having checked the primary quotations on al-Jāḥiẓ, wrote in his blog Why Evolution Is True (October 7, 2020): “I found one 1983 paper on Al-Jahiz by another scholar, who gives direct quotes, and it shows that Al-Jahiz never even came close to Darwin (the paper is from Bayrakdar, Mehmet, Islamic Quarterly; Jan 1, 1983; 27, 3).” The honest position is that the Islamic tradition supplied suggestive language and a hierarchical intuition, not a theory of evolution.

Thomas Nagel, in Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford UP, 2012), argues that reductive materialist Darwinism cannot account for consciousness, cognition, and objective value, and proposes “natural teleology” — a built-in cosmic bias toward producing minds, without God. For Shah and the theist generally, Nagel is both ally and foil: he concedes that blind materialism is inadequate and that teleology belongs in our picture of nature, yet refuses the further step to a Mind behind the teleology. Guided evolution, in effect, supplies the theological term Nagel’s natural teleology leaves blank: the telos is God’s, and the “bias toward the marvelous” is taqdīr.

F. Molecular evidence and the Linguistic-Genomic Thesis

Two further pillars deserve mention:

The molecular evidence for common ancestry — Human Endogenous Retroviruses (HERVs, ~8% of the human genome, with thousands of identical insertions at the same loci in humans and chimpanzees), the co-option of viral envelope genes into mammalian biology (Syncytin-1 for placental development, Arc for synaptic memory consolidation), the broken GULO pseudogene that prevents both humans and chimpanzees from synthesising vitamin C, and the fusion of ancestral chromosomes 2a and 2b into human Chromosome 2 — is presented by Shah as overwhelming. His distinctive theological move is to argue that if God had created humans and chimpanzees separately yet placed identical viral scars at the same genomic loci in both, He would be writing a false history into DNA. The God of the Qurʾān, who is al-Ḥaqq (“the Truth/Real”), would not do so. Therefore the molecular evidence for common descent should be received not as a problem for faith but as a vindication of Divine truthfulness. thequran + 3
The Linguistic-Genomic Thesis observes a structural parallel between Classical Arabic and the genetic code: 28 consonants vs. 4 nucleotides; trilateral roots (jadhr) vs. triplet codons; morphological templates (awzān) vs. genetic regulatory mechanisms; roughly 2,000 productive trilateral roots generating over 78,000 Arabic words vs. 64 codons specifying 20 amino acids that build the entire proteome. The parallel is treated by Shah as evidence of a unified informational architecture: the same Mind that authored the kitāb of revelation engineered the kitāb of the genome.

G. Contested status: the Adamic exceptionalist counter

Intellectual honesty requires registering the contest. Mainstream Sunni scholarship maintains Adamic exceptionalism: animal and even plant evolution may be accepted, but humans are held to descend miraculously and directly from Adam. Imam Omer Suleiman of the Yaqeen Institute argues that “the Quran and Sunnah show that humankind descended from Adam and Eve… the first humans created directly by Allah, not born to parents or evolved from previous lifeforms,” warning that metaphorical readings demand “radical hermeneutical gymnastics.” Dr Zakir Naik rejects evolution as “an unproven conjecture.” Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri separates scientific “theories” from religious creed. The Sapience Institute (Hamza Tzortzis) argues that homology does not entail common descent. The most careful academic middle position is Shoaib Ahmed Malik‘s: from an Ashʿarī–Ghazālian framework, accept evolution but defend Adamic exceptionalism on hermeneutical grounds — a wholly naturalistic, parentless Adam is theologically impermissible. thequran + 2

The biologists’ deep objection presses equally hard. Richard Dawkins: “To count as guided, [evolution] must have a destination, and a strategy for getting there.” Jerry Coyne: mutations are “by definition unguided,” and “the absence of evidence for a godly hand in evolution is evidence of godly absence.” If divine guidance is empirically indistinguishable from randomness — as Shah himself concedes when he locates the causal joint at the quantum level — it adds nothing testable and collapses toward deism. The theist’s reply — that this is precisely what al-Bāṭin (“the Hidden”) and taqdīr mean — is philosophically respectable, but it must be made openly and without claiming for the Qurʾān a quantitative scientific anticipation it does not contain. thequran

VII. The Honest Hermeneutic

The Qurʾān’s seventh-century horizon does not, on a fair philological reading, teach a theory of biological evolution. What it does is supply two pieces of vocabulary — anbata with cognate accusative nabātan, and dhara’a with locative fī-l-arḍ — that:

picture human emergence on a continuum with the earth’s vegetative productivity and with the dispersion of life across the earth;
employ a verb (anbata) that is literally the verb used of plants growing from soil;
share a semantic field (sowing, multiplying, scattering, growing) with the agricultural metaphors that Darwin himself reached for in On the Origin of Species;
flank the explicit phrase khalaqakum aṭwāran — “He created you in stages” — which the classical tradition itself reads developmentally (albeit at the scale of the womb).

The strong iʿjāz (scientific-miracle) claim that the Qurʾān independently and demonstrably anticipated Darwin is overreach; we explicitly distance ourselves from it. Modern evolutionary biology stands on its own evidentiary base — molecular phylogenetics, the fossil record, biogeography, comparative anatomy, and direct observation — and does not require Qurʾānic warrant. Conversely, the Qurʾān does not require scientific corroboration to stand as scripture.

The modest claim — first stated by Maulana Muhammad Ali and elaborated by Zia H. Shah — is that the Qurʾān’s vegetative-developmental lexicon is unusually hospitable to an evolutionary reading, in a way that the parallel Genesis vocabulary (with a fully formed Adam moulded from clay in a single act) is not. The verses do not force an evolutionary reading on the believer, but they very emphatically do not foreclose it; on the contrary, they sow the seeds of it. This is what Shah’s hermeneutical epigram — “eyes do not see what the mind does not know” — captures. The pre-modern eye, lacking the categories of deep time and common descent, saw in anbatakum only Adam from dust. The post-Darwinian eye, equipped with those categories, sees an additional layer of meaning that was always latent in the All-Knowing’s word.

VIII. Thematic Epilogue: One Creator, One Creation

The Qurʾān is, finally, not a biology textbook. Its concern in Sūrat Nūḥ 71:11–20 and Sūrat al-Mulk 67:23–26 is not to predict the Cambrian explosion or to settle a debate between Darwinians and creationists. Its concern is to evoke waqār — the grandeur owed to the Creator — by displaying the integrated wonder of one creation: rain (71:11) that drives the hydrological cycle, gardens and rivers (71:12) that are its first ecological fruit, the staged emergence of the human being (71:14), the layered heavens (71:15), the sun and moon (71:16), the plant-like growth of humanity from the earth (71:17), the burial and re-emergence of the body (71:18), the earth as habitable expanse (71:19–20); and, in the parallel passage, the equipment of hearing, sight, and heart (67:23), the scattering and multiplication of humanity across the earth (67:24), and the promise of eschatological gathering. The argument is not propositional but doxological: look — at the layered sky, at the lamp of the sun and the borrowed light of the moon, at the earth that grew you and will regrow you — and recognise the Author.

What modernity changes is not the argument but its scope. The hand that draws the wheat from the soil draws also, on a longer time-scale, the choanoflagellate, the sponge, the trilobite, the Devonian lungfish, the synapsid, the primate, the hominin, and at last the human being capable of being addressed by a sūra. The four divine names — al-Khāliq the planner, al-Fāṭir the originator, al-Bāriʾ the evolver, al-Muṣawwir the fashioner — form the grammar of the single act we have come, in our specialisations, to call cosmology, physics, chemistry, biology, and evolution. Disciplinary boundaries are conveniences of the human mind; from the Divine vantage there is only khalq, one continuous act beginning at “Be!” (kun fa-yakūn, Q 2:117) and running, in Shah’s image, “over the canvas of time.”

A reader who recites Sūrat al-Mulk on a quiet night, mindful of what biology now teaches about how she came to be, may find Q 67:24 — qul huwa-lladhī dhara’akum fī-l-arḍ — translating itself in her ear as a slightly different sentence than her grandparents heard. Where they heard “He scattered your peoples across the continents,” she also hears “He sowed you, generation by generation, into the long evolutionary soil of the earth.” Both sentences are, in their respective horizons, true. And the verse that follows — wa-ilayhi tuḥsharūn, “and to Him you will be gathered” — closes the seed-cycle: from the earth He grew you (71:17, 71:18), into the earth you return, and from the earth He will gather you again. The botanical image, once seen, is not easily unseen. Wa-llāhu anbatakum mina-l-arḍi nabātan. So blessed is God, the best of creators.