Hiwar ma'a Sadiqi al-Mulhid

Hiwar ma'a Sadiqi al-Mulhid ("Dialogue with My Atheist Friend") is a book by Mostafa Mahmoud built on conversations with a friend who "graduated in France, earned a doctorate, lived with the hippies and came to deny everything"; the friend raises an objection and the author answers. ¹ The edition read here is Dar al-Awda's, Beirut 1986. ³

The contents list the chapters: He begets not nor is begotten; if God decreed my acts, why does He hold me to account; why did God create evil; what is the fault of one whom the Qur'an never reached; paradise and hell; is religion an opium; Islam and women; the soul; conscience; are the rites of pilgrimage idolatrous; why could the Qur'an not be Muhammad's composition; the Qur'an cannot have been composed; doubts; religion's position on evolution; the phrase "there is no god but God"; Kaf-Ha-Ya-Ayn-Sad; miracle; the meaning of religion; and "we won the happiness of this world and you won illusions". ^{2 4}

The book opens with the friend's objection: if causality is your proof of a Creator, then by the same logic we may ask who created the Creator. The author answers that the question is "unsound", because it grants that God is Creator and then makes Him created in the same sentence. ¹

The friend says the sciences of evolution hold that Adam came from a chain of animal stages; the author replies that the Qur'an itself does not tell of instant creation but of creation "in stages and phases over a long divine time", citing verses including al-Mu'minun 12, Nuh 14, Nuh 17 and al-Sajda 7. ^{5 6 7} He then distinguishes anatomical resemblance, which he accepts as evidence of a single Creator, from the claim of a single ancestor for all species, which he considers unnecessary, comparing means of transport that resemble one another yet each came from "an independent engineering idea". ^{7 8} He says Darwin "was right" about anatomical resemblance and about evolution, and "wrong" to explain ascent by material factors alone, since the struggle for survival does not explain "the survival of the more beautiful"; he answers mutation theory by saying random mutations cannot account for the design in creation, and sees the differing "chromosome map" of each species as a third obstacle. ^{9 10 11 12} He concludes that evolution is a fact but its stages and manner "are still a riddle". ¹² Details are in the entry evolution and Islam.

The author closes with his walk home alone after the long conversation, feeling he had "reopened a wound" in his friend that might widen, and that he cannot guide his friend but prays for his guidance. ¹³

• Printed page = scan page + 8.
• Only the chapters whose pages are cited were read here.