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  1. says

    To be fair to Moore the nonsense about embryology in the Qur’an was not his idea. Virtually every edition of his text, The Developing Human has an historical summary of the process of embryonic development as viewed in different cultures and times. The Muslim view in all but the 3rd edition is distinctly Aristotelian. The 3rd edition is a special edition published with permission of the regular publishers by Sordid Arabia. The “Islamic additions” distributed through it are actually authored by Abdul Majid Zindani the Director of the Project of Scientific Miracles in the Qur’an and Hadith at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. You would expect someone holding such a position to hold at a minimum a PhD with extensive Post-Doc experience and publications. Instead Zindani studied at Ain Shams university in Egypt. First studying biology and chemistry then switching to Islamic Studies. He left there without completing any degree. The Islamic additions are clearly authored by him. They are included in separate sections within the main body of the text. The result is glaringly obvious errors such as a page claiming that Qur’anic verses referring to the embryo as a “lump of chewed flesh” are actually referring to the somites and a drawing is included to demonstrate this. Its glaringly wrong because the facing page contains the actual textbook discussion of the somites together with an elegant photograph of them which shows they are totally unlike a lump of chewed flesh.