In an age where the Qur’an is often forced onto a Procrustean bed of modern physics or biology—either to “prove” its divinity via a miracle or to be dismissed as mythological—the voice of the Egyptian existentialist philosopher Zakaria Kamal stands as a remarkable, yet largely overlooked, alternative. Kamal did not ask, “Does the Qur’an contain scientific facts?” Instead, he asked a more fundamental question: “How does the Qur’an’s worldview structure the very possibility of science?”
Kamal famously wrote: “The Qur’an is not a textbook of geology, but it is a textbook of methodology.” He argued that the repeated Qur’anic injunctions to “travel through the earth” (29:20), “contemplate the heavens” (3:190), and “reflect” ( ta‘aqqul ) are not poetic ornaments. They are . To practice science is, in a profound sense, to obey the Qur’an. scientific tafsir zakaria kamal
Yet his relevance today is arguably greater than ever. In a time when young Muslims are leaving religion because they are told they must choose between a literalist reading of the Qur’an (where mountains are pegs) and atheistic materialism, Kamal offers a . He argues that one can be fully committed to the scientific method—with all its fallibility, historicity, and provisionality—and fully committed to the Qur’an as divine revelation, provided one reads nature and text as two books written by the same Author, in two different languages: one of quantitative law, the other of qualitative meaning. In an age where the Qur’an is often
In his own words: “The Qur’an does not tell you that water boils at 100 degrees. It tells you that water obeys its Lord. The scientist tells you the temperature. The mufassir tells you the meaning. Scientific tafsir is where the two meet in awe.” To practice science is, in a profound sense,
Thus, scientific tafsir, for Kamal, is the act of reading the Ayat al-Takwiniyya (cosmic verses) with the same hermeneutic rigor as the Ayat al-Tashri’iyya (legal verses). Both require ijtihad (independent reasoning). The scientist is the mujtahid of nature. Here is where Kamal departs most radically from mainstream i’jaz writers. He was deeply suspicious of literalism. For example, when the Qur’an describes the heavens as a “roof” (21:32) or the sun setting in a muddy spring (18:86), the i’jaz writer contorts physics to fit the literal. Kamal, drawing on his existentialist training (he was a scholar of Heidegger and Sartre), insisted on symbolic hermeneutics .
He would take a surah (e.g., Surah al-Rahman or Surah al-Waqi’a) and ask: what kind of natural attitude does this text produce? He concluded that the Qur’an generates an attitude of wonder mixed with rigor . The believer looks at a mountain. The geologist sees plate tectonics. The tafsir ‘ilmi , per Kamal, does not deny tectonics but asks: why is there a law of tectonics at all? Why is there regularity? Why is the universe knowable?