Trust me, 7th century Arabic didn't have any words for submicroscopic particles. But here's the koran talking about atoms.
10:61 ... There is not the weight of an atom on the earth and in the heavens that is hidden from your Lord,
Chapter 34 mentions atoms twice, in v3 and v22.
When the Arabs wanted to talk about the smallest thing there was, they used the word zarah. It meant 'a dust particle, or a mustard seed or the small ant', in other words 'a teeny-weeny speck'. Ok, that makes sense. Unless you're this loony tunes cleric, who says it's a “miracle of knowledge”, and “The process of atomic fusion can be explained fully from the Noble Qur'an.” !!! I shit you not: that's why they have all those A-bombs and nuclear power plants over there, don't ya know. OK, he's nuts, but 21 out of 27 translators translated this as “atom”. Biased apologists, or scientific miracle? I point and laugh, you decide.
It's only a miracle in English by the way. The three Russian translations I have give it as 'a particle', 'dust', or 'a tiny blade'--even though the Russian word for atom is, wait for it, 'atom'. comic from Zits You gotta pick one language and stay with it, not switch back and forth whenever you feel like, because languages are constantly changing and a gay ass in 700 AD might not be a happy donkey in 2009. We saw this before with the clusterfuck about the furthest mosque, where mosque used to mean just any old kind of church. I skipped one in chapter 12 that had Joe and his bros hauling corn around Egypt. Educated, non-mohammedan, people know that corn only grew in the New World until the Spanish came around. That's ok though, cuz back in the day, our word corn used to mean any old kind of grain. If you use the modern meaning of corn, you have to prove the Pharoahs were growing Zea mays. Good luck with that. News Flash! You're modifying it when you attach new meanings to the words in it. If words can mean anything you want them to, well, that was my last post. You might as well use Lewis Caroll's poem as scripture. Yay, let's.
A slightly less psychotic explanation goes like this. God, y'unnerstand, meant atoms, but the ancient Arabs didn't have a word for that, so they wouldn't have understood His Perfectness. When modern Arabs finally discovered the atom, they tagged it with this zarah word, so today 'atom' is an accurate translation of modern Arabic. 
Cultists don't get to say the quran is using Modern Arabic in one passage and Classical Arabic somewhere else. If god meant “islamic church” now, he had to've meant it back then. if they stick to 700 AD Arabic,
there is no atomic miracle, Mo just meant some church, and Joe ate barley or something. How boring. Geez, reality is such a drag. OTOH, If they wanna use modern terms and say zarah means submolecular particles, then they have to say Mohammed visited moslem churches that didn't exist, and maize grew in Ancient Egypt.
"Modifying the koran” is such horrible blasphemy that last month Afghanistan gave two guys twenty years for it. Oh, the horror, they left the Arabic text out of their translated version. (Uhh, if you can read Arabic why would you want a translation in the first place?) [—Whoops sorry—I keep having these little logic flashes.] Remember 10:64,10:64...“there can be no change in the words of Allah.”
2 comments:
Time changes the meanings of words too.
The solid elements were most likely known by the ancients - both Greek and Islamic - as atoms. That means carbon was known as an atomic element.
Gaseous elements were probably not thought of as atoms until later.
Nitrogen is a gaseous element, primarily encountered as part of the atmosphere. It would not have been thought of as an element or atom.
Whether that means anything will require thought.
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