There’s been a recent trend online as of late. A seemingly organized push by Christians, Muslims and certain New-Ager sects alike claiming the earth is apparently, a flat plane. Indeed, due to a particular uptick in internet brain rot, you have more of a significant portion of the human population believing this drivel than in recent centuries.
Why? Personally, I’m willing to promote the conspiratorial here, and suggest the powers that be have intentionally stoked the flames of the flat earth movement in order to distract from actual, more legitimate conspiracy theories. Nobody is going to discuss anything more problematic to certain forces when they’re all busy shouting each other over flat earth idiocy.
The issue is in fact, so severe in some corners of the internet, that there’s a push among Western Muslims to “debunk” the fact the Quran suggests the earth is flat, because they’re acutely aware of how damaging it is to their religion to suggest it. I’m here to disprove the apologetics and say to you that, yes, the Quran is very explicit in stating the earth is flat.
There are, in fact, so many verses to suggest it that posting them all would make this article overlong. For the sake of consistency, however, I’ll post the verse numbers, and then investigate a few of the more “interesting” ones.
Surahs 2:187, 2:22, 15:19, 18:47, 20:53, 20:105-7, 43:10, 50:7, 51:48, 71:19, 78:6, 79:30, 88:20 and 91:6 (and more, I genuinely began to lose track) all clearly state this, meanwhile, there is no Surah that claims the earth is spherical.
Yes, even 79:30. I single this one out prior to highlighting specific examples because there’s been a recent trend of deception with Muslims claiming this Surah is a reference to an “ostrich egg shaped planet”. First off, even if this was true, the earth isn’t shaped like an ostrich egg anyway, they’re far too oblong. Secondly, the verse in fact does not say this. As always, certain Muslims try to take advantage of the Quran being written in an unusual form of Arabic to deceive foreigners. What the Surah refers to is in fact yet another instance of the Quran claiming the earth is flat (using how an ostrich prepares the ground by flattening it out as an analogy). Here’s an actual Quranic scholar discussing this in finer detail.
With that out of the way, we’ll investigate two interesting examples from the prior list. Surah 20:105-7 will be first.
They ask you concerning the mountains: Say “My Lord will uproot them and scatter them like dust, and leave the earth a levelled plain in which you shall find no crookedness or curvature.”
You can’t really get more explicit than this, as the implication is, without mountains, the earth will be utterly visible. It says outright, without curvature. A levelled plane, nothing more.
As for Surah 2:187:
“It is made lawful for you to go in unto your wives on the night of the fast. They are raiment for you and ye are raiment for them. Allah is Aware that ye were deceiving yourselves in this respect and He hath turned in mercy toward you and relieved you. So hold intercourse with them and seek that which Allah hath ordained for you, and eat and drink until the white thread becometh distinct to you from the black thread of the dawn. Then strictly observe the fast till nightfall and touch them not, but be at your devotions in the mosques. These are the limits imposed by Allah, so approach them not. Thus Allah expoundeth His revelation to mankind that they may ward off (evil).”
Effectively, this is a commandment for Muslims, when fasting, not to eat, drink or have sex during daylight hours. This is particularly important for the Fourth Pillar of Islam (Sawm), which is ritualistic fasting.
What’s the issue with this commandment? Simple. In this era, people of various religious denominations live all over the world. For people who live extremely far north, or extremely far south, there are periods of the year in which day and night respectively can last well over a month. If you’re a Muslim working on an arctic research station, and you’re devout enough to follow this commandment, what do you do, die?
Here’s the reality of it. Like the rest of the Quran, it was written by sandblasted borderline brain dead nomads who weren’t aware the world existed outside of early medieval Arabia. The fact that any such place could exist where sunlight hours last far beyond the human capacity for food and drink (and sex, in the case of Muslims, as judging by the other Verses they need to rape something on a highly routine basis) was utterly unfathomable. Again, sheer and absolute proof the Quran was authored by human hands alone, and was not divinely inspired.
If you thought the idiocy ended on the earth merely being flat, think again. No doubt apologists will try to claim the Quran shouldn’t be read literally. This is nothing but deception, as the literal interpretation of the Quran is the only way it functions as a religious text due to its inherent dogma, and many Islamic sects actually demand you interpret it literally.
But it really is just the start of the lunacy, however. It’s well known (despite some pointless debate from so-called “moderate” Muslims) that the Hadiths are considered Islamic canon of secondary importance to the Quran itself. Again, Islamic canon. Combining that with some choice Surahs from the Quran itself, you get a very strange glimpse at the strange discussions that occur between Quranic experts about the nature of Islamic cosmology. Here’s a breakdown on some examples.
In the traditional Arabic (which can carry a vastly different meaning to any form of translation), there’s a significant discussion online about the nature of Surah 68:1, taken from “renowned” Quranic commentator Tafsir Ibn Kathir. To make it particularly apparent, these are missing from the English translation. One wonders why.
“The first thing my Lord created, may He be Exalted and Glorified, was the pen and He said to it, ‘Write.’ So the pen wrote all that will be until judgement day. Then Allah created the Nun (the whale) above the waters and he pressed the earth onto its back.”
Some Islamic scholars go deeper still, stating that the seven flat earths are sat upon a giant bull with forty thousand horns which is in turn, sat upon the aforementioned whale.
But it gets stupider still.
“Satan crept up to the whale, on whom the seven earths are placed, and whispered into its heart saying, ‘Do you realize what is on your back, Oh Lo-tho-tha of beasts and plants and humans and others? If you are annoyed with them, you can throw them all off your back.’ So Lo-tho-tha intended to do what was suggested (by Satan) but Allah sent the whale a reptile that crawled through into its blowhole and reached its brain. The whale then cried to Allah –may He be glorified and honored – and He gave permission for the reptile to exit (the whale).” Kab continued and said, “By Allah, the whale stares at the reptile and the reptile stares at the whale, and if the whale intends to do (what Satan suggested) the reptile would return to the place it was before.”
As if the malevolent reptile whispering to the heart of the cosmic whale wasn’t enough, here’s an extra one, from the Hadith collection of Sunan Abu Dawud.
“I was sitting in al-Batha with a company among whom the Apostle of Allah was sitting, when a cloud passed above them.
The Apostle of Allah, looked at it and said: What do you call this? They said: Sahab.
He said: And muzn? They said: And muzn. He said: And anan? They said: And anan. Abu Dawud said: I am not quite confident about the word anan. He asked: Do you know the distance between Heaven and Earth? They replied: We do not know. He then said: The distance between them is seventy-one, seventy-two, or seventy-three years. The heaven which is above it is at a similar distance (going on till he counted seven heavens). Above the seventh heaven there is a sea, the distance between whose surface and bottom is like that between one heaven and the next. Above that there are eight mountain goats the distance between whose hoofs and haunches is like the distance between one heaven and the next. Then Allah, the Blessed and the Exalted, is above that.”
Now there are mountain goats as well. Not only is earth flat, but there’s in fact seven of them, sat upon a bull, on a rock, on a whale, and somewhere above all that in the heavens there are eight mountain goats as well. This is the sort of insanity you have to deal with compiling the Quran and the Hadiths into one consistent text, which, a devout Muslim is supposed to do.
No doubt, there are people out there who will try to surgically remove the truly insane parts in lieu of just stating that the earth is flat (as the Quran states). Seeing as we live in an age of idiots, let’s debunk this as well, because the theory has become even more popular among idiotic Christians who are trying to brainwash as many people as they can, exploiting the ignorance increasingly more people have of basic science.
The earth’s globular shape has in fact been known of since Ancient Greece (again, showing the wisdom and intelligence of the Ancient Pagans over that of the Muslim). I ask you now, to inspect the intellectualism of Eratosthenes, who was the head of the library of Alexandria at the time.
Eratosthenes had heard that in Syene (a city south of Alexandria), no vertical shadows were cast at noon, specifically on the summer solstice. He wondered if this was true in Alexandria as well. On June 21, he planted a stick directly in the ground and waited to see if a shadow would be cast at noon. It turns out there was one, and it measured about 7 degrees.
If the sun’s rays are coming in at the same angle at the same time of day, and a stick in Alexandria is casting a shadow while a stick in Syene is not, it must mean that the Earth’s surface is, obviously, curved. Before him, Pythagoras and Aristotle were both acutely aware of this fact and had even spoken of it themselves.
Since the difference in shadow length is 7 degrees in Alexandria and Syene, that means the two cities are 7 degrees apart on Earth’s 360-degrees surface. Eratosthenes hired a man to pace the distance between the two cities and learned they were 800 kilometres apart. He could then use proportions to find the Earth’s circumference – 7.2 degrees is 1/50 of 360 degrees, so 800 times 50 equals 40,000 kilometres.
Simple as that, an Ancient Greek proved the world wasn’t flat just with a stick, and all the supposed “wisdom” of Islam put together couldn’t do the same.
Now, to those who figure they may find themselves in arguments with Xians and Muslims alike over this very topic, I’ll provide two further means of debunking their claims so they’ll cease spreading their idiocy so you don’t have to remember numbers off the top of your head.
First off, long exposure photography. Depending on what hemisphere you’re on, if you set up a camera at night and focus it at the stars, and leave it to take a long exposure shot, the stars, over the course of the hours, will provide a wheeling effect on your photo. Here’s an example.
The direction the lines travel is dependent on whether you’re in the north or south hemisphere, and this effect you see shows the earth globular rotation.
Secondly, is watching a ship depart the shoreline and disappear beyond the horizon. If the earth was flat, a ship would simply gradually fade from view. Instead, bit by bit, you see ships slowly disappear below the bulge of the earth. Again, something only possible on a globular earth. Here’s an image showing the process.
Demonstrably, the earth is not flat, and thus, the Quran and Islam are yet again, wrong.
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