Answering Christianity Research Center

Brother Ahmad,
We are getting into a rather fine detail of parsing an English word I am not certain is absolutely the correct or best translation, but "overtake" does seem to be a fair word to use in this case.

When driving on a multi-lane road in the same direction one car overtakes another when it passes the other.  If they were in the same lane there would be, instead, a rear end collision.

To overtake on a curve is similar, one car passes the other, but in different lanes.  On a circular track the runners run in different lanes, and to overtake means to pass but along a different path.  Passing means to achieve a greater distance run which can also be expressed as a greater angular measure traversed.

In the 7th century nearly all people accepted the Ptolemaic system.


Note, the moon, mercury, venus, sun, mars, jupiter, and saturn were treated the same in terms of motion and were all considered planets of the earth. 

Also, note the position of the stars in a spherical shell outside the planets, hence the reference to spheres in the Qur'an.

It is interesting to note that this system got the order of the planets correct, is correct in that the moon is closest to the earth, and interchanges the position of the earth and the sun such that mercury and venus are inside whereas mars, jupiter, and saturn are outside which is also correct.

This model was no accident, rather, it fits quiet well with careful naked eye observations.  Not shown in this image are the epicycles needed to account for retrograde motion.

So, brother Ahmad, we can see that the verses in the Qur'an are simply poetic and very simple words that describe the prevailing view of that day.

But, those words are in error to the extent that the planets do overtake each other as they move in their circular tracks, just like racers who stay in their own lanes but overtake by running faster.

The heliocentric model was known to learned people as a hypothesis dating back to ancient Greece, and at least one Muslim scholar did in fact promote that hypothesis.  But, it seemed rather fantastic to people that the Earth, which is obviously standing still, would actually be moving, and the sun, which is obviously moving, would actually be standing still.  That idea seemed so outlandish to nearly all humans that Aristotle and Ptolemy ruled the day for millennia.

It was Christian Europe that deduced the truth we all know today, and corrected the scientific errors of the Qur'an and nearly everybody else, thanks to Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton.