Islamic views on evolution are diverse, ranging from theistic evolution to Old Earth creationism. Some Muslims around the world believe "humans and other living things have evolved over time", yet some others believe they have "always existed in present form". Some Muslims believe that the processes of life on Earth started from one single point of speciesReview of Religions eGazette November 2008 with a mixture of water and a viscous clay-like substance. Muslim thinkers have proposed and accepted elements of the theory of evolution, some holding the belief of the supremacy of God in the process. Some scholars suggested that both narratives of creation and of evolution, as understood by modern science, may be believed by modern Muslims as addressing two different kinds of truth, the revealed and the empirical. Others argue that faith and science can be integrated and complement each other.Al-Ali, Muneer (2013). A scientific Tafsir of Qur'anic verses: interplay of faith and science (2nd Ed.). North Charleston, S.C.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
History
Pre-modern views In ('Book of the Animals'), the 9th-century Muslim scholar al-Jāḥiẓ references several facets of natural selection, such as animal embryology, adaptation, and animal psychology. One notable observation al-Jāḥiẓ makes is that stronger rats were able to compete better for resources than small birds, a reference to the modern day theory of the "struggle for existence". Al-Jāḥiẓ also wrote descriptions of food chains.
In 10th century Basra, an Islamic Encyclopedia titled Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity, expanded on the Platonic and Aristotelian concept of the great chain of being by proposing a causal relationship advancing up the chain as the mechanism of creation, beginning with the creation of matter and its investment with energy, thereby forming water vapour, which in turn became minerals and "mineral life", and has been proposed to be the earliest attested evolutionary framework by Muhammad Hamidullah.Muhammad Hamidullah and Afzal Iqbal (1993), The Emergence of Islam: Lectures on the Development of Islamic World-view, Intellectual Tradition and Polity, p. 143-144. Islamic Research Institute, Islamabad. However, the Brethren text has been largely dismissed as a reading on pre-Darwinian evolution theory.
Ziauddin Sardar writes for New Statesman in 2008,
According to Sami S. Hawi, the 11th-century Persian scholar Ibn Miskawayh wrote about the evolution of man in his Fawz al-aṣghar.
12th-century Maturidi theologian (mutakallim) Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī connects the process of evolution and the afterlife. He draws an analogy from the empirically knowable process of evolution as constant emergence of life and annihilation wherof, and the idea of transformation of the individual after death, concluding the existence of the afterlife by asserting live's eternity.Ahmad, Imtiaz. "The Place of Rumi in Muslim Thought." Islamic Quarterly 24.3 (1980): 67. As evident from his interpretation of a hadith, according to which Adam evolved over a time-span of 40 days, Rumi implies that human's creation was not at once, but a process.Shah, Muhammad Sultan. "Pre-Darwinian Muslim Scholars’ Views on Evolution." (2017). p. 13
The 14th-century influential historiographer and historian Ibn Khaldun wrote in the Muqaddimah or Prolegomena ("Introduction") on what he referred to as the "gradual process of creation". Some of Ibn Khaldun's thoughts, according to some commentators, anticipate the biological theory of evolution. Ibn Khaldun asserted that humans developed from "the world of the monkeys", in a process by which "species become more numerous". He believed that humans are the most evolved form of animals, in that they have the ability to reason. He also stated that the Earth began with abiotic components such as "minerals". Slowly, primitive stages of plants such as "herbs and seedless plants" developed and eventually "palms and vines".
Shoaib Ahmed Malik has pointed out that Ibn Khaldun's theory, while remarkable for its acceptance of the kinship between monkeys and humans, should be understood in the context of the late antique and medieval concept of the great chain of being. This theory postulates a linked hierarchy between all entities in creation but is not properly a theory of evolution.. The system of the great chain of being implies a graded similarity between the various stages in the hierarchy from minerals to plants, animals, humans, angels, and God, but not a temporal process in which one species originates from the other. While according to some mystical interpretations individual souls may move up the 'ladder' in order to reunite with the divine, the species (or 'substantial forms', in the language of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ontology) themselves are eternal and fixed.. Malik also notes that the is often quoted without proper regard for context.. One widely cited quote is taken from a section called The Real Meaning of Prophecy, which argues that prophets occupy a place in the great chain of being just beneath angels. In Ibn Khaldun's view, this explains why individual prophets may temporarily ascend to the rank of angels and share with them in the knowledge of the divine, which they may then bring back to humanity in the form of revelation. According to Malik, interpretations that see in this an early form of scientific evolution theory ought to explain how angels, prophets and the upwards ascent of the soul fit into that theory..
Modern views
19th and 20th centuries Evolution was an accepted fact among some Islamic scholarly circles.Taslaman, Caner. Bir Müslüman Evrimci Olabilir Mi? In his 1874 book titled History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, John William Draper, a scientist and contemporary of Charles Darwin, criticized the Catholic Church for its disapproval of "the Mohammedan theory of the evolution of man from lower forms, or his gradual development to his present condition in the long lapse of time". However, Draper's book has been criticized by more recent scholars as lacking historical accuracy. p. 157 (previously published as p. 504)
In the 19th century, a scholar of Islamic revival, Jamal-al-Din al-Afghānī criticised Darwin's theory of evolution in his Book The truth about the Neicheiri sect and an explanation of the Neicheiris. In this he asks some rhetorical questions on how Darwin would explain certain phenomena with evolutionary theory and claims what answer could he [i.e. Darwin] give except to bite his tongue? and comes to the conclusion: Only the imperfect reesemblance between man and monkey has cast this unfortunate man [i.e. Darwin] into the desert of fantasies, and in order to control his heart, he has clung to a few vain fancies. Later in his life he changed his stance and agreed with Darwin that life will compete with other life in order to succeed, and justified this by attributing the idea of evolution to Muslim thinkers of the middle ages. He also believed that there was competition in the realm of ideas similar to that of nature. However, he believed explicitly that life itself was created by God; Darwin did not discuss the origin of life, saying only "Probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some primordial form, into which life was first breathed."Charles Darwin and Evolution
A contemporary of Al-Afghani, Ottoman-Lebanese Sunni scholar Hussein al-Jisr, declared that there is no contradiction between evolution and the Islamic scriptures. He stated that "there is no evidence in the Quran to suggest whether all species, each of which exists by the grace of God, were created all at once or gradually", and referred to the aforementioned story of creation in Sūrat al-Anbiyā.Majid, Abdul. "The Muslim responses to evolution." Science-Religion Dialogue (2002).Varisco, Daniel. "Darwin and Dunya: Muslim Responses to Darwinian Evolution." Journal of International & Global Studies 9.2 (2018).
The late Ottoman intellectual Ismail Fennî, while personally rejecting Darwinism, insisted that it should be taught in schools as even false theories contributed to the improvement of science. He held that interpretations of the Quran might require amendment should Darwinism eventually be shown to be true.
In Kemalist Turkey, important scholars strove to accommodate the theory of evolution in Islamic scripture during the first decades of the Turkish Republic; their approach to the theory defended Islamic belief in the face of scientific theories of their times. The Saudi Arabian government, on the other hand, began funding and promoting denial of evolution in the 1970s in accordance to its Salafi-Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. This stance garnered criticism from the governments and academics of mainline Muslim countries such as Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Iran, where evolution was initially taught and promoted.
Modernist authors such as al-Afghānī, Muhammad 'Abduh, Hussein al-Jisr and Isma’il Mazhar embraced the notion of evolution, but without accepting its secular dimension. They viewed evolution as a divinely-guided process. The first to formulate the outline of a more positive Islamic theory of evolution was the British-Indian modernist thinker Muhammad Iqbal in his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, published in 1930. With the politicization of Islam in the 1930s, the debate about Islam and science in general and about evolution in particular died down, and Muslim modernism became focused on the reformulation of Islamic doctrine in light of modern sociopolitical thought, in particular socialism, democracy and the legal status of women and non-Muslims. In the 1960s, however, the Sudanese modernist thinker Mahmud Muhammad Taha formulated what can be considered the first full-blown Islamic theory of evolution. Taha uniquely based his Islamic evolutionism on the intellectual heritage of premodern Sufi thought, as formulated by authors such as al-Ghazāli and especially Ibn al-‘Arabi. His theory basically consists in extending the premodern Sufi concept of individual spiritual progress to the cosmos as a whole, consistent with the Sufi teaching of a correspondence between the human soul and the universe.Hoebink, Michel, Sufi Evolutionism: the Modernist Reform Theology of Mahmud Muhammad Taha. Leiden: Brill, 2025, 195-271.
21st century In the contemporary era, a significant minority of Muslims who support evolution exist, but evolution is not accepted by mainstream scholars of the post-colonial Muslim world.
Although evolutionary concepts, including natural selection, are presented in the curricula in many Muslim countries, explicit discussion of human evolution is often missing. With the exception of Pakistan, though, religious references are not common in evolutionary science curricula.
Khalid Anees, of the Islamic Society of Britain, discussed the relationship between Islam and evolution in 2004:Islam also has its own school of Evolutionary creationism/Theistic evolutionism, which holds that mainstream scientific analysis of the origin of the universe is supported by the Quran. Many Muslims believe in evolutionary creationism, especially among Sunni and Shia Muslims and the Liberal movements within Islam. Among scholars of Islam İbrahim Hakkı of Erzurum who lived in Erzurum then Ottoman Empire now Republic of Turkey in the 18th century is famous for stating that 'between plants and animals there is sponge, and, between animals and humans there is monkey'.Erzurumi, İ. H. (1257). Marifetname