A subject written and spoken about hundreds of times. Many — our own circle among them — must be asking: “if the matter is this clear, why are we still debating it?” Yet we see young people still caught in the dilemma “if evolution is true, religion is false,” unaware that evolution is in fact quite compatible with religion. So we thought it worth writing once more.

Evolution has often been a source of dispute and confusion for Muslims. On this ground borrowed from the Christian world, the Catholic Church declared plainly in 1996 that evolution does not conflict with faith, while some evangelical groups and most Muslims take the Genesis account of the Old Testament literally, as a theory of creation.

In this essay I take up the arguments for why a Muslim should accept evolution, from four perspectives: scientific, logical, scriptural, and that of public benefit.

ERVs are inherited genetic traces of viruses that once integrated into our ancestors' DNA and were passed down through generations. Finding the same ERVs at the same synteny in two species is among the clearest evidences of a shared evolutionary process.

The Qur'an also relays some of the true accounts found in the Old Testament. In relaying them it omits the details that mislead, and presents what it does relay with a careful choice of words that addresses the understanding of every age. For what is essential in the Qur'an is the passage from physics to metaphysics, knowing God by His names and attributes, and drawing near to Him in worship.

Looking at the verses in this light we find many indications that the human was created through an evolutionary process; a number of Muslim scholars have said as much. Some read the account of Adam allegorically, but even that is unnecessary: it suffices to see Adam, peace be upon him, as the father and prophet of a society developed enough to be addressed by revelation. There is no need to claim he was biologically the first homo sapiens.

In the verses, creation is most often expressed as a process: the creation of the cosmos, the forming of stars, the development of each human from an embryo, the evolution of societies. That this process should hold for humanity as a whole is both reasonable and necessary in view of the manifestations of the divine names. For a monotheistic and integral cosmology in the twenty-first century, common ancestry is nearly indispensable; otherwise the mind is left with a fragmented, eclectic, ad hoc picture of the cosmos.

Evolution is one of the processes within the world God created; seeking to understand this art, rather than standing against it, matters greatly if our children are to grow up at peace with science. Reading the cosmos through processes rather than objects, and passing from the work to the acts, is an important approach to understanding creation.

Some figures representing religious movements did not set out to expound the foundations of biological origins — quite naturally. Wishing not to depart from the broad highway of the Muslims, that is, not to create divisions distracting from the principal aim, they preferred to avoid contentious discourse. The Risale-i Nur corpus, for instance, contends against the denial of divinity without ever taking up the theory of evolution; it opposes only the metaphysics of chance and nature created it.

Many Muslim scholars through history have accepted evolution; indeed even before Darwin there were views known as the “Mohammedan Theory of Evolution.” The great majority of scholars in Islamic history agree that animals and humans undergo a spiritual evolution, passing through certain animal strata in the process; some defend such a process biologically as well.

Muhammad Hamidullah · Muhammad Iqbal · Syed Ameer Ali · İsmail Hakkı İzmirli · Maurice Bucaille · Muhammad Asad · Bahaeddin Sağlam · Süleyman Ateş · Cafer Sadık Yaran · Mehmed Bayraktar · İsmail Yakıt · Shabir Ally — these have seen evolution as one way of understanding creation.

Evolution can be a confusing and at times frightening subject for many. Yet understanding this process, resolving the contradictions, and grasping how the cosmos God created actually works offers us, as Muslims, a deeper reflection and a more consistent approach. Accepting evolution as one of God's processes of creation frees us from dual thinking and doublethink.