Allah has said in the Quran:

11:36: “It was revealed to Noah “none of thy People will believe except those who have believed already! So grieve no longer over their (evil) deeds.”

We are told that Allah communicated His revelations to all of His prophets and apostle, starting with Adam and ending with Muhammad, through angel Gabriel. Only the last prophet is known to have behaved oddly at the time of receiving his revelations from Allah’s Soul i.e. the angel Gabriel.

Under the pressure of the revelation, Muhammad fainted, convulsed and frothed through his mouth. The communication of the revelation over, he lapsed into swoon, with a heavy snoring being a part of it. What he used to murmur while recovering from his swoon became the contents of the Quran.

Like all the prophets and apostles, including Muhammad, Jesus Christ, also received revelations from Allah through angel Gabriel. Though he had been sent to the same region to which Muhammad came about seven hundred years after him to amend the religious scruples of its people, Jesus Christ is not known to have ever suffered from the same agonizing symptoms, which Muhammad had to deal with at the time of receiving his revelations from the mouth of the angel Gabriel. Why?

In the absence of a clear-cut statement from Allah, we can surmise:

(1). The angel Gabriel gently communicated Allah’s messages to Jesus Christ, as he knew that he was a kind and a gentle being. He employed a hard and punishing tactic with Muhammad, as he knew that he was a liar and a dangerously brutal man. The angel, therefore, took out his anger at him by seizing his body and shoving hard Allah’s words into his ears – an action that caused him to faint, convulse and froth. He fell into sleep after the angel released his grip over his body.

(2). Or Muhammad suffered from epilepsy. What he blabbered under its influence became, for the Muslims, the divine revelations of Allah.

Realizing that the “none of thy People will believe except those who have believed already,’ Allah ordered Noah:

11:37: “But construct an Ark under Our eyes and Our Inspiration, and address Me no (further) on behalf of those who are in sin; for they are about to be overwhelmed (in the Flood).”

Having realized that the unbelievers were not going to believe in Noah, Allah decided to destroy them completely. But before doing that, He needed to save Noah, his family members, except those of them against whom His Word had already gone forth, a few of his followers and a pair of each of the earth’s animals, birds and insects, in consideration whereof, He instructed Noah to construct under His supervision an Ark with broad planks and caulked with palm-fibre.[1] Why He decided not to save the rest of the innocent animals, birds and insects from the flood water is not stated in the Quran.

The Quran also does not say if Allah had given the design and the specifications of the Ark to Noah before he began its construction, but the Bible says He had, indeed, provided them to him According to it, the Ark was to have a total length (from its bow to the aft) of between 425 ft. to 525 ft., the breadth of about 71 to 88 ft. and the height of about 43 to 53 ft. Comprising of three decks or floors, each of the Ark’s ceiling was to have a height of about 14 to 18 ft., with the opening of each of their doors and windows measuring between 1.5 to 1.75 ft.[2]

We could not state the exact size of the Ark and of its doors etc., as the biblical cubit is said to have varied from 17 to 21 inches; nor could we mention the number of the rooms the Ark had, as both the Bible and the Quran maintain silence on them.

The Ark apparently had no rudder and a steering-wheel for Noah to control its movement; no masts for hoisting sails upon, and no anchors to hold it at a certain place. In reality, it was a boat of its own kind that only Allah could have kept under His control by exercising His immense power over it!

The Quran or the Bible does not say as to how much time Noah and his small number of workers might have taken in building the Ark, but our guess is that they must have spent years in making it ready to sail on the choppy water of the flood. Allah waited for the Ark’s completion, and when it was ready, He ordered ‘the fountains, or the ovens (tannur in Arabic)[3] of the earth to gush out,’[4] and ‘the gates of the heaven to open up’ with the rain water[5] to overwhelm the earth and all of its stranded inhabitants.

After the water of the fountains began to gush out, Allah realized that He needed to load the Ark with its precious cargo, which consisted of Noah’s family members, but not his wife and a son, as both of them were sinners (and they were drowned in the flood),[6] his followers as well as a pair of each of the earth-based animals and insects and birds before they were killed by the water, so He asked Noah to bring them onboard the Ark and to put them in the rooms he had built for them. He complied – among the birds the parrot was the first, and among the beasts, the donkey was the last, to enter it[7] - and then the Ark began, we suppose, spinning violently on its keel for want of a controlling mechanism, or it floated aimlessly over the mountainous waves[8] of the earth-turned ocean for forty days,[9] with Allah being all the time in control of it.[10]

Before the earth swallowed up the flood water, and the sky withheld the rain, the Ark found itself resting on top of Mount Judi, prompting Allah to declare: “Gone are the evil-doers.”[11]

According to the Muslim scholars, Mount Judi is situated in the modern Turkish district of Bohtan (near the frontiers of modern Turkey, modern Iraq and modern Syria).[12] Corroboration to their claim can be found in the writing of a Babylonian priest, Berasus, who also wrote around 250 B.C. that the resting place of the Ark was Mt. Judi.

We understand that Muslims have taken steps to excavate Mount Judi in order to collect the fossils of the Ark from its bosom. Once this is done, the Quran would stand vindicated, and Islam propelled to a height it has never seen after it was founded over fourteen hundred years ago. The entire world will then realize the efficacy of the Quran and the truth it holds in its pages for the good of mankind. This realization would induce all the non-Muslims of the earth to become Muslims and then they would usher in, among all the humans, a new era of peace and harmony the kind of which they had never seen before in their history.

The Quran does not say if the Deluge was a global or a local one, but some of the Muslim scholars,[13] inspired by the Bible, imply that it was global and that it had engulfed the entire earth, killing all the living things on it Consequently, all the humans that walk the earth today owe their origin to Noah and to his followers, numbering eighty –forty men and forty women[14] - who were accommodated in the Ark by Noah (where he got a wife from to sleep with, when his wife was drowned in the flood,[15] is not known to the scholars). The same is the case with all the land-based animals, birds and insects we see today; all of them have descended from the survivors of the flood. Allah confirmed this fact, saying:

“O ye that are sprung from those whom We carried (in the Ark with Noah)! Verily he was a devotee, most grateful.”[16]

Though the biblical and the Quranic stories of the Flood of Noah’s time are elaborate, yet they have not given us some vital information without which, we cannot say that they are complete. For instance, we are not told:

-Even in the time of Noah, when the human population on earth is thought to have remained confined only to the area, which was over taken by the Flood,[17] the population of animals, insects and birds must have exceeded, if not millions, but hundreds of thousands. This means that their pairs, accommodated by Noah in the rooms of the Ark, must have run into a few hundred thousands, with each pair put into separate rooms, in order to protect the preyed upon from being devoured by their predatory enemies.

The question is: was the Ark large enough to provide separate accommodation to all of its passengers?

-Allah had not told Noah as to how long he and his guests would remain onboard the Ark. Yet, Noah must have taken enough food and water with him to last a good length of time. Again, knowing that the dietary needs of animals, birds and insects differed from one another, Noah must also have stockpiled the Ark with different kinds of food to keep all of his guests well fed.

-The question is: was it possible for Noah to store different kinds of food onboard the Ark and if he fed them with his hand?

-Some of the pairs of the animals Noah had collected to save from the flood water must have consisted of the elephants, giraffes, rhinos, tigers and lions etc. Each of them needed different environment and space to live in peace.

-The question is: how was it possible for these animals to pass through the 1.5 to 1.75 ft. wide doors of the Ark? Or is it possible that at the time of Noah, these animals were very small, but became huge after his time?


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[1] The Quran; 54:13.

[2] Genesis; 6:14 to 16.

[3] Cf. The Quran; 23:27

[4] The Quran; 11:40.

[5] The Quran; 54:11.

[6] Cf. The Quran; 66:10 & 11:43.

[7] See Ibn Kathir’s comment to verse 11:40.

[8] The Quran; 11:42.

[9] Genesis; 8:6.

[10] Cf. The Quran; 54:14.

[11] The Quran; 11:42 & 44.

[12] Abdullah Yusuf Ali, op. cit. vol. 1, p. 525.

[13] Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Abul Ala Mududi and Ibn Kathir, for example.

[14] Tafsir al-Jalalayn.

[15] The Quran; 66:10.

[16] The Quran; 17:3.

[17] Abul Ala Mududi, Tafhimul Quran;. vol. 2, p. 342.