Epigraph

أَوَلَمْ يَرَوْا إِلَى الْأَرْضِ كَمْ أَنبَتْنَا فِيهَا مِن كُلِّ زَوْجٍ كَرِيمٍ

Al Quran 26:7

Presented by Gemini for Zia H Shah MD

Abstract

This commentary examines Sūrat al-Shuʿarāʾ 26:7–9 — the rhetorical invitation “Do they not look at the earth — how many of every noble pair/kind (zawj karīm) We have caused to grow therein?” — as a case study in how a single Qur’anic verse about the botanical world sustains, and is continually re-illuminated by, advancing science. Linguistically, the pivotal term zawj is shown by the classical lexica (Lisān al-ʿArab, al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, Lane) to carry three senses — a pair, one of a pair/mate, and a kind/sort (ṣinf) — and the classical exegetes (al-Ṭabarī, al-Zamakhsharī, al-Qurṭubī, al-Rāzī, Ibn Kathīr) overwhelmingly read 26:7 in the “kind” sense, glossing karīm as “goodly/beneficial.” Modern and “scientific” commentators (Ṭanṭāwī Jawharī, Sayyid Quṭb, Muhammad Asad, the Tafsīr Nemūneh school, and iʿjāz ʿilmī writers such as Zaghloul El-Naggar) recruited the “pair” sense to the post-1694 discovery of plant sexuality — an interpretive move that critics (Nidhal Guessoum, Ziauddin Sardar, and others) regard as methodologically hazardous. I integrate verified botanical data — 2,034 new vascular-plant species named in 2015 and slightly more than 2,000 per year over the preceding decade; a currently accepted total near 350,000–391,000 depending on methodology; 571 documented extinctions since 1753; and an estimated 10–20% of flowering plants still undescribed — and argue that the verse’s grammatical construction (kam + kull, “how many … of every”) is best read not as a coded scientific claim but as an open-ended epistemic summons whose force grows with each year’s discoveries. The philosophical spine is the Islamic teleological tradition (Ibn Rushd’s dalīl al-ʿināya and dalīl al-ikhtirāʿ), the “two books” motif (Qurʾān-e tadwīnī and Qurʾān-e takwīnī), and the philosophy-of-biology “species problem,” which together suggest that an ever-expanding catalogue of life deepens rather than dissolves the argument from providence.

Textual and Linguistic Analysis

The Arabic text reads:

أَوَلَمْ يَرَوْا إِلَى الْأَرْضِ كَمْ أَنبَتْنَا فِيهَا مِن كُلِّ زَوْجٍ كَرِيمٍ ﴿٧﴾ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَةً ۖ وَمَا كَانَ أَكْثَرُهُم مُّؤْمِنِينَ ﴿٨﴾ وَإِنَّ رَبَّكَ لَهُوَ الْعَزِيزُ الرَّحِيمُ ﴿٩﴾

Awa lam yaraw ilā al-arḍi kam anbatnā fīhā min kulli zawjin karīm. Inna fī dhālika la-āyah; wa mā kāna aktharuhum muʾminīn. Wa inna rabbaka la-huwa al-ʿazīzu al-raḥīm.

“Have they not looked at the earth — how many of every noble kind [zawj karīm] We have caused to grow therein? Surely in that is a sign, yet most of them are not believers. And indeed your Lord — He is the Mighty, the Merciful.”

Four terms carry the weight of the passage.

Awa lam yaraw (“do they not look”). The verb is raʾā (to see), but governed by the preposition ilā, which shifts the sense from mere optical seeing to considered looking — regarding, contemplating, “looking at.” Commentators note the deliberateness: everyone sees the earth, but the verse demands naẓar, sight joined to thought. Ibn ʿĀshūr and others treat the interrogative as tawbīkh (reproach): the failure is not sensory but reflective.

Kam anbatnā (“how many We caused to grow”). Anbata is the causative (fourth form) of nabata (to grow, sprout); the “We” is the plural of divine majesty, locating the agency of growth in God. The lexica note that both nabatat al-arḍ and anbatat al-arḍ are used, God being “the One who brings forth and makes grow” (al-Qurṭubī). Kam here is the declarative kam khabariyya, a “noun of multitude” (Ibn ʿĀshūr, al-Taḥrīr wa’l-Tanwīr) governed by anbatnā — “We grew a great many.”

Zawj (“pair / kind”). This is the interpretive crux. The classical lexicographers are unambiguous that the word is polysemous. Ibn Manẓūr’s Lisān al-ʿArab states plainly: “The root meaning of zawj is al-ṣinf wa’l-nawʿ (kind and type) of anything; and any two coupled things — whether alike or opposite — are a zawjān, and each one of them is a zawj.” It further glosses zawj as al-lawn (color/variety) and al-namaṭ (pattern/type), citing the parallel verse 22:5 (min kulli zawjin bahīj, “every joyous kind”). Al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī’s Mufradāt records the same range: zawj is said of each of two mating counterparts (male and female), of any two coupled things (a boot and a sandal), and by extension of any ṣinf (kind). Lane’s Lexicon likewise gives “a sort, or species; syn. lawn and ḍarb and ṣinf,” citing precisely these Qur’anic usages. So the word can mean (a) a pair, (b) one of a pair/mate/spouse, or (c) a kind, sort, or variety. In the grammar of 26:7 — “of every zawj karīm” — the dominant classical reading is sense (c): every kind of plant.

Karīm (“noble / excellent / beneficial”). The root k-r-m denotes sharaf wa faḍl (nobility and excellence). Ibn Manẓūr calls al-karīm “a comprehensive name for everything that is praised (kull mā yuḥmad)” and notes its use for horses, camels, and trees “when excellence or preciousness is meant.” Crucially for a verse about vegetation, the lexica preserve agrarian senses: karumat al-arḍ (“the land flourished in vegetation”), arḍ makrama (“land excellent and fertile for plants”), and karuma al-saḥāb (“the cloud gave beneficial rain”). Applied to a plant, then, karīm means goodly, beneficial, abundant-yielding — not merely aesthetically “noble.”

Classical Tafsīr (Exegesis)

The classical commentators, working centuries before the discovery of plant sexuality, read the verse as a proof of divine power and providence drawn from the diversity and usefulness of vegetation.

Al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) glosses the verse: “Have these polytheists who deny the resurrection not looked at the earth — how many We caused to grow therein, after it was dead with no vegetation, of every noble pair? By karīm is meant al-ḥasan (the goodly), just as one says of a fruitful date-palm karīma, and of a ewe or she-camel abundant in milk karīma.” He cites Mujāhid (“of the vegetation of the earth, of what people and cattle eat”) and Qatāda (“karīm means goodly”). For al-Ṭabarī, the sign lies in the revival of dead earth into a fecund, useful multiplicity — a template for resurrection.

Al-Zamakhsharī (d. 1143), the Muʿtazilite master of rhetoric, defines “the noble plant (al-nabāt al-karīm)” as “that which is approved/pleasing (al-marḍī) in the benefits attached to it,” adding that “karam in every category is according to that category.” His most influential contribution is grammatical. Asking why the verse combines kam (“how many”) with kull (“every”) — why not simply “how many pairs did We grow?” — he answers: “Kull indicates the comprehensive encompassing of the kinds of plants in detail, while kam indicates that this all-encompassing set is exceedingly, excessively numerous. That is the point of combining the two, and thereby He drew attention to the perfection of His power.” The double quantifier thus signals both exhaustiveness (every kind) and superabundance (how many).

Al-Qurṭubī (d. 1273) writes that God “drew attention to His greatness and power, and that had they looked with their inner sight they would have known He alone deserves worship.” He reports al-Farrāʾ’s gloss that “the zawj is the lawn (variety),” and defines karīm as ḥasan sharīf (goodly, noble), rooting it in al-sharaf wa’l-faḍl — “so nakhla karīma means an excellent palm abundant in fruit.” He preserves al-Shaʿbī’s striking moral extension: “People are of the vegetation of the earth; whoever ends up in Paradise is karīm (noble), and whoever ends up in the Fire is laʾīm (base).”

Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210), in Mafātīḥ al-Ghayb, organizes the verse into rational masāʾil. He reproduces and endorses al-Zamakhsharī’s kam+kull analysis almost verbatim, treating the construction as a demonstration of kamāl al-qudra (the perfection of divine power) through the infinite multiplicity of encompassed kinds. He further asks why the sequel says “a sign (āyah)” in the singular rather than “signs,” answering that “that” points to the act of growing itself (the maṣdar of anbatnā) — “in that growing is a mighty sign.” And he frames the theology: despite human disbelief and God’s power to hasten punishment, God “does not abandon mercy … through the creation of every noble pair of vegetation, then the granting of health, intellect, and guidance” — a reading that anticipates the verse’s closing pairing of al-ʿazīz (Might) with al-raḥīm (Mercy). Notably, an explicit natural-philosophical discussion of plant sexuality at 26:7 is not firmly attested in the reachable text of al-Rāzī; his hallmark here is the rationalist-grammatical proof from multiplicity, and the male/female-in-plants reading belongs predominantly to much later commentators (e.g., al-Shaʿrāwī).

Ibn Kathīr (d. 1373) is brief but significant: God “created the earth and caused to grow therein of every noble pair — of crops, fruits, and animals (min zurūʿ wa thimār wa ḥayawān).” Ibn Kathīr uniquely widens the referent of zawj karīm beyond plants to animals, and he too cites the al-Shaʿbī report.

Cross-commentator synthesis. Across the tradition, karīm is glossed ḥasan / nāfiʿ / maḥmūd (goodly, beneficial, praiseworthy — cf. al-Wāḥidī’s al-Wajīz: “every praiseworthy kind that people need”; al-Baghawī: “goodly … of what people and cattle eat”). Zawj at 26:7 is taken as ṣinf/ḍarb/nawʿ (kind/type). The rhetorical kam+kull construction is read as proof of the perfection of divine power. The classical “sign” (āyah), then, is lodged in three features simultaneously: the revival of dead earth, the diversity of kinds, and their beneficence to humans and animals.

Modern and Scientific Tafsīr

With the modern era, a new reading became available. The sexuality of plants — the existence of male and female reproductive organs and the role of pollen in fertilization — was established experimentally by Rudolf Jakob Camerarius (1665–1721) in his 1694 letter De sexu plantarum epistola (though anticipated in Adam Zalužanský’s 1592 chapter of the same title), and later systematized in Linnaeus’s “sexual system” of classification in the eighteenth century. Once plants were known to come in sexed pairs, the “pair” sense of zawj — long a subordinate reading at 26:7 — could be foregrounded.

Ṭanṭāwī Jawharī (d. 1940), in his 25-volume al-Jawāhir fī Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-Karīm, embedded botanical science directly alongside the text, using verses on vegetation (e.g., 6:99 on floral morphology, 27:60 on roots and stems, 36:80 on leaves) as occasions to teach flower structure, photosynthesis, and reproduction — the earliest full-scale “scientific tafsīr.” His work was as much a reformist project (demonstrating Islam’s compatibility with modern science) as an exegetical one; later commentators used it sparingly, and critics such as Ghulāmḥusayn Ibrāhīmī Dīnānī objected that science’s mutability makes it an unstable ground for exegesis.

Sayyid Quṭb (d. 1966), in Fī Ẓilāl al-Qurʾān, characteristically reads the vegetal sign existentially rather than technically: the sprouting of a plant from a dormant seed is “a miracle whose secret no one can know, much less make,” a manifestation of a life-secret known only to God. His emphasis is the aesthetic-devotional summons to see the sign, not to decode a datum. Quranandscience

Muhammad Asad (d. 1992), in The Message of the Qurʾān (1980), is philologically cautious. Commenting on the parallel zawj passages, he notes that “the term zawj denotes, according to the context, either ‘a pair’ or ‘one of a pair’,” and renders such verses by context rather than forcing a single technical meaning — an approach aligned with the interpretive pluralism he shares with reform-minded modernists.

The Shīʿī tradition (Tafsīr Nemūneh of Nāṣir Makārim Shīrāzī; al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s al-Mīzān) explicitly connects the verse to plant gender, reading zawj as pointing to the reproductive pairing of plants — “a scientific truth discovered much later” — and glossing karīm as useful/beneficial, embracing both the ornamental and the nutritional-medicinal value of vegetation. (Popular presentations of this reading sometimes garble the technical terms — e.g., swapping “monoecious” and “dioecious” — a caution that even sympathetic scientific tafsīr can misstate the botany it invokes.)

The iʿjāz ʿilmī (“scientific miracle”) movement, exemplified by Maurice Bucaille’s The Bible, the Qurʾān and Science (1976) and the prolific Egyptian geologist Zaghloul El-Naggar (1933–2025, longtime chairman of the Committee of Scientific Notions in the Qurʾān of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs), treats such verses as anticipations of modern findings — the Qurʾān “preceding, yet never contradicting” science. El-Naggar’s stated rule was that only established scientific facts, not theories, should be adduced. On plant “pairs,” the argument runs that the Qurʾānic zawj, and companion verses stating that God made “of everything two pairs / two kinds” (e.g., 13:3, 51:49), anticipate the dioecy/monoecy and gamete-pairing later revealed by botany. Islamonweb

Critiques. This approach is now sharply contested. The physicist-astronomer Nidhal Guessoum (Islam’s Quantum Question, 2011) regards iʿjāz ʿilmī as “dangerous philosophically and intellectually, even dangerous Islamically,” arguing it is methodologically flawed — it retrofits shifting science onto a fixed text, projects the “imperfection of human sciences” onto a perfect scripture, downplays occasions of revelation and sociocultural context, and assigns untenable meanings to Qur’anic vocabulary. He instead defends a multi-level reading (al-qirāʾa al-mutaʿaddida) of “cosmic verses” (āyāt kawniyya), aligning with modernists like Asad. The astrophysicist Bruno Guiderdoni calls Bucailleism “bad science and bad theology” that “inverts the way things should be done,” and the physicist Taner Edis memorably charges that it reduces science to “stamp collecting.” Cultural critic Ziauddin Sardar has long lampooned the genre as apologetic pseudoscience. The measured academic consensus (echoed by Stefano Bigliardi’s work in Zygon) is that the Qur’an’s nature-verses are better read as summons to contemplation and gratitude than as encrypted textbooks.

The Science of Plant Diversity and Discovery

If the verse asks “how many … of every kind,” the honest modern answer is: more than the original audience could have imagined, and more than we yet know.

The pace of discovery. Botanists describe roughly two thousand new vascular-plant species every year, a rate essentially constant for decades. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, reported in its State of the World’s Plants 2016 that “in 2015, there were 2,034 vascular plant species new to science,” and that there had been “slightly more than 2,000 new species described each year for the past decade,” with the bulk of discoveries year after year concentrated in Australia, Brazil, and China. Since the start of 2020, several thousand more plant species have been formally named. At current rates, describing the remaining unknown flora would take on the order of centuries.

The total. The count of currently accepted species depends heavily on methodology, illustrating that even the tally of kinds is an evolving construct. Kew’s State of the World’s Plants 2016 (led by director of science Kathy Willis) estimated 390,900 vascular plant species known to science, of which 369,000 (94%) are flowering plants — and warned that “21 percent of all plant species … is likely threatened with extinction.” A 2016 Phytotaxa synthesis (Christenhusz & Byng) counted ~374,000 accepted plant species. The World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) and databases like the Leipzig Catalogue place accepted vascular species around 350,000, out of well over a million names — because a large majority of published names turn out to be synonyms or duplicates (The Plant List contained ~1.17 million names but only ~308,000 accepted). This synonymy problem is itself instructive: many “new” species are later merged, and many genuinely new species are found not in the field but in the drawers of herbaria, recognized among specimens collected decades earlier.

The undiscovered fraction. Multiple lines of analysis (Joppa, Roberts & Pimm 2010–2011; Pimm & Joppa 2015; Corlett 2016) estimate that 10–20% of flowering-plant species remain undescribed — plausibly on the order of 70,000–100,000 species, with a modeled ~21% “missing” in some samples. Kew’s State of the World’s Plants 2016 stresses that most unknown species “are likely to be rare, which is why we have not yet found them”; these undiscovered species are disproportionately range-restricted and threatened, and Kew’s later models suggest three of every four undescribed plants are already at risk of extinction. PNAS

Extinction. Against this ongoing discovery runs loss. The landmark study by Humphreys, Govaerts, Ficinski, Nic Lughadha and Vorontsova (Nature Ecology & Evolution 3:1043–1047, 2019) found that of 1,234 seed-plant species reported extinct since Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum (1753), “more than half … had been either rediscovered or reclassified,” leaving 571 still presumed extinct — nearly four times prior estimates, and more than twice the recorded extinctions of birds, mammals, and amphibians combined. On average “2.3 species of seed plants have gone extinct per year over the past two and a half centuries”; Nature summarized that “since 1900, nearly 3 species of seed-bearing plants have disappeared per year — 500 times faster than they would naturally.” Encouragingly, the same study logged 431 rediscovered species (alongside 571 extinct and 232 synonymized) — a reminder that even the extinction ledger is provisional.

“Pairs” in botany. The verse’s “pair” reading maps onto real biology, though imperfectly. Plants reproduce sexually via male gametes (pollen) and female gametes (ovules). Flowers may be perfect (bisexual, both stamens and pistil) or imperfect (unisexual); species may be monoecious (separate male and female flowers on one individual, e.g., maize) or dioecious (separate male and female individuals, e.g., date palms, willows, Chinese pistache). Camerarius’s own experiments on mulberry, spinach, maize, and castor established exactly this. Pollination — by wind, water, insects, birds — effects the pairing. Ancient Near Eastern date-growers had long practiced artificial pollination (Assyrian reliefs depict it), so the existence of plant “pairing” was practically known even if its mechanism was not theorized until 1694.

“Noble/beneficial.” The karīm dimension is likewise empirically rich. Bob Allkin’s chapter “Useful Plants – Medicines” in Kew’s State of the World’s Plants 2017 records that “at least 28,187 plant species are currently recorded as being of medicinal use,” while noting that “fewer than 16% (4,478) … are cited in a medicinal regulatory publication.” Plants supply staple crops, timber, fuel, and the ecosystem services (climate regulation, soil formation, pollination support) on which civilization rests. Newly described species repeatedly prove useful — e.g., wild relatives of cassava (Manihot) from Brazil that may confer drought tolerance and virus resistance on the crop. The verse’s coupling of kind and benefit thus tracks a genuine feature of biodiversity: variety is not ornamental surplus but functional reservoir.

DNA and the reshaping of “kind.” Finally, molecular phylogenetics and DNA barcoding are actively redrawing species boundaries — splitting cryptic species, lumping others, and rebuilding the classification of families and orders. The “kind” the verse invokes is, scientifically, not a fixed Platonic unit but a moving target under continuous revision.

Philosophical Dimensions

The argument from design in Islamic thought. The verse’s structure — observe nature, infer the Maker — is the classic form of Islamic natural theology. Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198), in al-Kashf ʿan manāhij al-adilla, distilled the Qur’an’s theistic reasoning into two arguments grounded in its āyāt: the dalīl al-ʿināya (argument from providence/design — that everything is fitted to human welfare and purpose) and the dalīl al-ikhtirāʿ (argument from invention/creation — that living things bear the marks of having been made). Ibn Rushd held these to be the “universal and simple” arguments accessible to all people, and he read Qur’anic verses as either instances of ʿināya, of ikhtirāʿ, or a combination of both. Q 26:7 is a near-perfect specimen of the combined form: the diversity and manufacture of vegetation (ikhtirāʿ) and its beneficence — the karīm — for humans and animals (ʿināya).

The epistemology of signs (āyāt). In Qur’anic epistemology the same word, āyah, denotes a verse of scripture and a sign in nature — the basis of the “two books” motif. The 13th-century Sufi ʿAzīz al-Dīn Nasafī distinguished the Qurʾān-e tadwīnī (the written Qur’an) from the Qurʾān-e takwīnī (the Qur’an of creation), holding that nature “reads itself to you, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, letter by letter.” On this view, revelation and creation, authored by one Source, cannot ultimately conflict — the principle al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd both leaned on, if differently, in adjudicating reason and text. Q 26:7’s “do they not look” makes the Book of Nature not decorative but epistemically load-bearing: contemplation of the created order is a route to knowledge of God.

The species problem. Philosophy of biology complicates — and enriches — the reading. There is no consensus definition of “species”: over twenty species concepts compete (biological/interbreeding, morphological, phylogenetic, ecological), and philosophers debate whether species are natural kinds, individuals, or a pluralistic patchwork (the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy surveys the field; Wilkins, Dupré, Kitcher, Mishler and others defend various pluralisms). This bears directly on zawj/ṣinf: the Qur’anic “kind” is not identical to the Linnaean species, and the very unit by which we count “how many kinds” is philosophically contested and historically mutable. Far from embarrassing the verse, this arguably vindicates its choice of the elastic zawj over any rigid taxon. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Does an expanding catalogue help or hurt design arguments? This is the user’s implicit question. A naïve “God-of-the-gaps” design argument weakens as science fills gaps. But the ʿināya/ikhtirāʿ argument is not gap-based: it reasons from the intelligibility, fecundity, and beneficence of the natural order as a whole, not from what science cannot yet explain. On that construal, every newly described species — every additional instance of ordered, functional, “noble” life — adds a data point to the very pattern the argument tracks. The catalogue’s growth is cumulative evidence of the phenomenon the verse points at, not a retreating frontier.

Evolution. Contemporary Muslim thinkers increasingly reconcile plant (and general biological) evolution with divine creation. Nidhal Guessoum and the molecular biologist Rana Dajani argue that theistic/guided evolution is compatible with, even congenial to, Islamic theology, provided divine action is not reduced to gap-filling. David Solomon Jalajel, working from Ashʿarī, Māturīdī, and Atharī hermeneutics, proposes “Adamic exceptionalism” and the methodological stance of tawaqquf (suspension of judgment where scripture is silent): scripture affirms Adam’s miraculous creation but neither confirms nor denies pre-Adamic or co-existing evolved humans — leaving the biology of speciation, including plant speciation, entirely open to empirical science. (Critics, in exchanges with Shoaib Malik in Theology and Science, question whether tawaqquf is logically complete, charging it with violating “negation completeness”; the debate is live.) For plants specifically there is little theological resistance: nothing in the tradition ties plant kinds to special creation, so botanical speciation sits comfortably within anbatnā — God causing to grow through natural processes.

The Evolving-Understanding Thesis

Here the strands converge on the user’s central theme. Read as a coded scientific claim, 26:7 is fragile — hostage to whatever this decade’s botany happens to say, and vulnerable to Guessoum’s critique. Read as an open-ended epistemic summons, it is robust and, indeed, self-renewing.

The grammar itself points this way. Al-Zamakhsharī and al-Rāzī saw that kam + kull fuses exhaustiveness (“every kind”) with superabundance (“how many!”). The construction is not a number to be checked but an invitation into an open magnitude. The seventh-century audience could name perhaps a few hundred plants; they read the verse truly. The eighteenth century learned, after Camerarius (1694) and Linnaeus, that each of those “kinds” was itself sexed and paired; they read it more richly. The twenty-first century counts roughly 350,000–391,000 accepted species, adds about 2,000 a year, suspects 70,000–100,000 more await discovery, mourns 571 lost since 1753, and watches DNA rewrite the very meaning of “kind.” Each of these is, on the “two books” logic, fresh commentary on kam anbatnā fīhā min kulli zawjin karīm — the answer to “how many?” enlarging annually.

This yields a disciplined hermeneutic, distinct from iʿjāz triumphalism. The verse does not predict Camerarius or Kew; it frames them — supplying the posture (attentive looking), the expectation (ordered, beneficial multiplicity), and the humility (the magnitude exceeds the observer). Epistemic humility is in fact the verse’s own note: “most of them are not believers” concedes that the sign, however plain, does not compel. And the closing names — al-ʿazīz (the Mighty, source of the ordered power that generates diversity) and al-raḥīm (the Merciful, source of the karam/beneficence in that diversity) — supply the interpretive key: the botanical world is read as simultaneously an expression of power and of mercy. The more kinds science finds, the more of both there is to see.