Scientific Tafsir Zakaria Kamal -

For Kamal, al-tafsir al-‘ilmi (scientific exegesis) was not a parlor trick of matching verses to recent discoveries. It was, rather, a rigorous epistemological project—a hermeneutic that sought to reconcile the sacred text with the spirit of rational inquiry, avoiding both the Scylla of literalist dogmatism and the Charybdis of reductive materialism. Kamal began his intellectual journey from a place of diagnosis. He observed that the modern Muslim world suffered from a deep cognitive dissonance. On one hand, popular i’jazi literature (miraculous scientific inimitability) was frantic, forcing verses about mountains, embryology, or the cosmos to align perfectly with every new issue of Scientific American . This approach, Kamal argued, was intellectually suicidal: it made the Qur’an a hostage to shifting scientific paradigms. When science corrects itself (as it always does), the Qur’an appears fallible.

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? scientific tafsir zakaria kamal

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 observed that the modern Muslim world suffered

On the other hand, secularized Muslims and Western orientalists claimed that the Qur’an had nothing to say about nature beyond medieval folklore. Against both extremes, Kamal proposed a : a return to the rationalist tradition of falsafa (Islamic philosophy) as embodied by al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd. He believed that the decline of tafsir began when theology ( kalam ) defeated philosophy ( falsafa ). His project was to revive the philosophical reading of revelation. 2. The Qur’an as a “Summons to Reason” (Istiqlal al-‘Aql) Central to Kamal’s scientific tafsir is the concept of Tawhid not merely as a theological formula, but as a cosmic hypothesis . For Kamal, the declaration “There is no god but God” is also a statement about the universe’s intelligibility. Because the universe is the creation of a singular, rational Will, it operates according to consistent laws ( sunan ). This consistency is the precondition for science. When science corrects itself (as it always does),

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.