Re: Hey New Member
Reply #90 - June 06, 2011, 05:02 PM
Ya qurrata 3ayni, here's an excerpt from Galen's De Semine (Galen lived half a millennium before Muhammad was even born):
But let us take the account back again to the first conformation of the animal, and in order to make our account orderly and clear, let us divide the creation of the foetus overall into four periods of time. The first is that in which. as is seen both in abortions and in dissection, the form of the semen prevails (Arabic nutfah). At this time, Hippocrates too, the all-marvelous, does not yet call the conformation of the animal a foetus; as we heard just now in the case of semen voided in the sixth day, he still calls it semen. But when it has been filled with blood (Arabic alaqa), and heart, brain and liver are still unarticulated and unshaped yet have by now a certain solidarity and considerable size, this is the second period; the substance of the foetus has the form of flesh and no longer the form of semen. Accordingly you would find that Hippocrates too no longer calls such a form semen but, as was said, foetus. The third period follows on this, when, as was said, it is possible to see the three ruling parts clearly and a kind of outline, a silhouette, as it were, of all the other parts (Arabic mudghah). You will see the conformation of the three ruling parts more clearly, that of the parts of the stomach more dimly, and much more still, that of the limbs. Later on they form "twigs", as Hippocrates expressed it, indicating by the term their similarity to branches. The fourth and final period is at the stage when all the parts in the limbs have been differentiated; and at this part Hippocrates the marvelous no longer calls the foetus an embryo only, but already a child, too when he says that it jerks and moves as an animal now fully formed (Arabic ‘a new creation’) ...
... The time has come for nature to articulate the organs precisely and to bring all the parts to completion. Thus it caused flesh to grow on and around all the bones, and at the same time ... it made at the ends of the bones ligaments that bind them to each other, and along their entire length it placed around them on all sides thin membranes, called periosteal, on which it caused flesh to grow.*
* Corpus Medicorum Graecorum: Galeni de Semine (Galen: On Semen) (Greek text with English trans. Phillip de Lacy, Akademic Verlag, 1992) section I:9:1-10 pp. 92-95, 101
Now, you might ask how Muhammad would have come to know about this. Remember, Muhammad would travel with his rich merchant wife's caravans all over the Arabian peninsula and the Levant. That's one way he could have met someone who told him these things.
Another is to keep in mind that Mecca was a buzzing trade center at the time, with visitors from the most distant of places. Surely it's not impossible that Muhammad should've had a conversation about this with one of them.
The most probable way he found out about it, though, was through Nafi ibn al-Harith, who was his companion (sa7aabi) and a physician and teacher at the Academy of Gundishapur in Persia, *where the works of Hippocrates and Galen were translated*.
What's also striking is that the *same mistakes the Greeks made appear in the Quran*, like the notion that semen comes from between the spine and the ribs (as-sulbi wa 't-taraa2ibi). Or that a fetus's gender is determined by whether the man's maniyy (semen) "overpowers" the woman's maniyy (vaginal fluids). Though this appears in a hadeeth sa7ee7, not the Quran.
قل للمليحة في الخمار الأسود
مـاذا فـعــلت بــناسـك مـتـعـبد
قـد كـان شـمّر لــلـصلاة ثـيابه
حتى خـطرت له بباب المسجد
ردي عليـه صـلاتـه وصيـامــه
لا تـقــتـلــيه بـحـق ديــن محمد
Topic: Hey New Member