A hundred and fifty years later, Darwin remains a source of troubles in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Darwin’s On The Origin of Species — published in 1859 and translated in full into Arabic in the mid-1870s — has been at the center of a long-running debate, albeit one with varying intensity.
The Darwin controversy is a unique one — and not just because of the powerful evolution theory and its implications. Like most protracted controversies, the one over Darwin in the Arab-Muslim worlds perhaps tells more about the debaters than the subject of the debate. In other words, the intellectual skirmishes over Darwin spanning one hundred and fifty anxious years of the Arab world’s history reflect a cautious evolution of ideas on Darwin’s theory itself, on the definition of scientific theory, on the boundaries of science, and on the bounds of interpretation of Islam’s sacred text, the Qur’an.
