Evolution has become a Muslim Issue. This was inevitable: the self-fueling kinetic energy of “Darwin’s dangerous idea” is such that no religious tradition can remain immune to its sound and fury. Muslims were late-comers, and ill-prepared, for the encounter: when Darwin arrived in their colonized lands in the late nineteenth century, they had no intellectual resistance against the onslaught: not only their lands were colonized, their minds had also been conquered, as Ibn Khaldun had foretold in the fifteenth century.

The post-colonial era (after World War II) did not immediately yield any radical change in the overall intellectual makeup of the Muslim world. The second half of the twentieth century was marked by various pseudo-starts—“revolutions” that produced more heat than light. There were a few bright spots: the Islamization of knowledge movement that started with great zeal, but failed; the grand gathering of over 350 Muslim intellectuals in Makka in 1977 that attempted to lay the foundation of a new educational framework but started at the wrong end of the tunnel; instead of ground up, it led to the establishment of so-called international Islamic universities, which were neither international nor Islamic and were soon swallowed by modernity and its discomforts.

The century was, however, not barren altogether: there was a "jihadi-effort" by a few individuals whose deep understanding of the Western civilization together with their grounding in the Islamic intellectual tradition produced works which highlighted the dangers of falling in the same Faustian trap that had swallowed the Western civilization. They have laid the foundation of a revival and renewal that continues to gain momentum. 

Yet, at the same time, the mainstream educational system in the Muslim world has produced a generation in the image of Lord Macaulay, who wrote in his 1835 report: We must at present do our best to form a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect."

What Lord Macaulay wished has come to pass through the educational institutions now thriving in the Muslim world. They have produced a new generation of Muslims who are “epistemic prisoners”—much like the prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, who were forced to remain in an underground cave where all they could see was the prison wall in front of them, where shadows were cast by puppeteers. Since the prisoners could not turn to look at the puppeteers or the fire lit to produce the light used to cast shadows, they took the shadows to be real objects.

What is different in these twenty-first century advocates of a borrowed worldview is their clever efforts to use the names of the likes of Imam al-Ghazali, whom they misread, to advance an agenda of modernity whose corner stone is Evolution. Their discourse is finding support in certain Western centers which have their own agendas of spreading a certain evolutionary narrative in the Muslim world.

This union of the two self-serving entities has recently produced a storm in the cup that seems to gain traction in various regions. This section, called “debunking” is an effort to lay bare the falsehood of the idea of evolution as being propagated by the new Muslim evolutionists; it also places them in a compelling historical context that almost foresaw their emergence.

Evolution, Causality, and Transcendental Truths

​Wolfgang Smith in conversation with
​Muzaffar Iqbal

Evolution, Intelligent Design and Muslim Evolutionists

William Dembski in conversation with
​Muzaffar Iqbal

Evolution in the Light of the Qurʾan and Tradition

Seyyed Hossein Nasr in conversation with
​Muzaffar Iqbal