Imam Threatened for Teaching Evolution

2:28

15 Apr 2011

Evolution

Matthew Morris

Usama Hasan

This short, undated BBC news clip presents the bare bones of the furor over Usama Hasan, a scientist and an imam, who spoke openly about the possibility of reconciling human evolution with Islam in a Salafi mosque in London.  Other local Muslims, like “Abu Zubayr”, quoted in the clip, sought fatwas (Islamic legal rulings) against Hasan.  Both Hasan and Abu Zubayr have since recanted the problematic parts of their involvement in the controversy.

Hasan wrote an opinion piece on the topic in 2008 for The Guardian, a British daily newspaper.  The letter referred to in the clip is online here, published 10 March 2011.  The narrator/reporter for the piece is Matthew Morris.  The book that Hasan is shown reading is Ahmed Dallal’s Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History (Yale University Press, 2010).

More on the controversy may be found in videos on the Portal here and here.

Evaluation:

The material on Islam is within the bounds of what Muslims have historically understood as acceptable, which is a very broad standard.

The suggestion that evolution means that “man descended from apes” is a false construction.  Evolutionary biologists understand that the several species of hominins that have currently been identified descended from a common ancestor with the many other species of primates.

There is insufficient historical material on which to base an evaluation.