Evidence for People Being Turned into Apes

Comment

Allah making people swine and apes? Sir you must understand that such language even mentioned metaphorically does not help Muslims at all, as it created a wall of hate between Jews and Muslims forever.

What was Allah thinking when saying such things? If a Jew today object on such teachings and say, I will never accept Islam as it teaches other religions with such absurdities, he will have full rights to have this opinion!

Muslims argue to take words of Allah in Quran literally, so can you please explain me how is this possible? Humans turned to apes and swines? I hope you have some good scientific knowledge to back up such claims of Allah.

Response

If you read my article, I have clearly mentioned that Muslim scholars have argued for both, that is that this conversion into apes was a metaphor to indicate that they lost their intellect and became slaves of their desires. The difference between men and animals is that man is rational and has moral values that he longs to live up to whereas animals go by their desires only and do not have concepts of morality. Those scholars who argue it is a metaphorical statement argue that it is indeed this aspect to which Quran alluded to. On the other side, a group of Muslim scholars have held the point of view to hold this literally since that is how the language of the Quran is.

Whether there is scientific evidence that some people were converted to animals or not does not impact much in this case since the language does allow it to be a metaphorical statement. If the Arabic language does not restrict its usage as such and this usage is per the rules of the language, then there would be no reason to not accept it to have a metaphorical meaning. Secondly, I will also add that science is based on events that are repeatable and perceivable by our five senses at any point in time. Consequently, whether Socrates and Aristotle existed or did not cannot be proven scientifically really, but it is learnt through an alternate field: History. Similarly, an incident mentioned in Quran of historical nature does not have to be proven ‘scientifically’ since it does not fall in that domain, the same way as it would be inappropriate for someone to come forth and ask for a scientific proof of Aristotle’s or Scorates’ existence before they accept them.

I do not agree that this verse should create a wall of hate between Jews and Muslims since this group of Israelites has been mentioned in Bible too, it is only their punishment that was not mentioned, which is brought up in Quran. On the other hand, God has mentioned several other groups of Jews in Quran that were praised and were upright, so how can one accept that universally Muslims should hate Jews? Not only that, God has also directed that Muslim males are free to marry Jew and Christian women, how is it possible that they marry them but do not have feelings of love? That would be contradictory to Quran’s own teachings.