The Meaning of Life

6:52

15 Sep 2013

Biology, Miracles / I'jaz

Talk Islam presents this popular spoken word poem, The Meaning of Life (Muslim Version).  The poem with fast-paced visual cuts discusses one way to interpret the meaning of life and how scientific knowledge may be used in that goal, drawn from the Qurʾān.  Most of the topics mentioned are common in works on iʿjāz. The speaker/author of the poem is not named, but elsewhere it’s noted to be Kamal Saleh.

Topics included are evolution, the Big Bang, intelligent design, irreducible complexity, embryology, expansion of the universe, and mountains as pegs.

Talk Islam is a proselytizing group from Sydney, Australia that produces a variety of videos. The group is active on Twitter and Facebook, and has many other videos on YouTube, most of which are performed by Kamal Saleh.  This video is their signature work.

Kamal Saleh’s live performances of the poem from 2014 may be viewed here and here.  Kamal Saleh studied broadcast media and law at Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia.  The video has also spawned a secondary viewership among “reaction videos”, a form of vlogs in which users show themselves watching a video, and discussing their reactions to it.

The video is available in a wide variety of subtitles, including French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Turkish, Indonesian, and Urdu.  Some time between August 2015 and March 2016, the subtitle of the poem was changed from “Official Muslim Spoken Word” to “Muslim Version” on the YouTube splash page, although the video itself still bears the original title.

Evaluation:

The material on Islam is within the bounds of what Muslims have historically understood as acceptable.

Science as iʿjāz is presented here as an approach to constructing an Islamic identity.  Most of these common ideas are addressed individually in other videos.  The major problem with iʿjāz from a scientific perspective is that it generally waits for science to say what’s right and then interprets that from the Qurʾānic text rather than approaching what’s not known in the world and seeking the answer through reproducible testing.

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