Solar Flare Non-Miracle in the Quran
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WikiIslam Archive,
Archives of the first iteration of WikiIslam, prior to acquisition and revamp by Ex-Muslims of North America
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The Quran doesn't talk about solar flare. The verses 70:30-33 are a description of hell, and they are not a description of the Sun.
"Miracle"
The miracle claim starts with scientific information about the Sun and it is followed by a verse which talks about hell and not about the Sun:
1400 years ago people thought that the sun was static, that is, it didn't eject anything. However today we know that this is false. The sun ejects coronal mass.
A solar flare is a sudden flash of increased brightness on the Sun, usually observed near its surface and in close proximity to a sunspot group. Powerful flares are often, but not always, accompanied by a coronal mass ejection. Even the most powerful flares are barely detectable in the total solar irradiance (the "solar constant"). Wikipedia, Solar Flare, 2019.
The sun ejects coronal mass but this is impossible to see in the naked eye.
However this was portrayed in the Quran 1400 years before it was discovered. Hell has three suns so any object would have three shadows:
[Quran 77:30-33] Proceed to a shadow of three branches. No shade, and no protection from the flames. It throws sparks like castles. As if they were yellow camels.
"As if they were yellow camels" camels are known for their humps. It turned out that our sun throws sparks like yellow hump of a camel.
How could an illiterate man who lived 1400 years ago have known how a coronal mass ejection looks like?
The verse
Proceed to a shadow of three branches. No shade, and no protection from the flames. It throws sparks like castles. As if they were yellow camels.
The verse doesn't talk about the Sun at all. It talks about the hell fire. "The shadow of three branches" is the smoke coming from the fire, according to tafsir al-Jalalayn:
Depart to a triple-forked shadow — this is the smoke of Hell which as it rises splits into three parts because of its magnitude —
The verse doesn't say that there are three Suns in hell. And it says "no protection from the flames". If the flames are supposed to torture people then it is more probable they are coming from a fire than from three Suns, because flames from three Suns would kill a person immediately. Other translations also don't indicate in any way that there are three Suns:
Yusuf Ali: "Depart ye to a Shadow (of smoke ascending) in three columns,
Muhsin Khan: "Depart you to a shadow (of Hell-fire smoke ascending) in three columns,
Pickthall: "Depart you to a shadow (of Hell-fire smoke ascending) in three columns,
Sahih International: Proceed to a shadow [of smoke] having three columns
According to the tafsir and the translations, the verse is about the smoke of hell and not about the Sun in our universe nor about three Suns in hell.
Discovery of sparks
How could an illiterate man who lived 1400 years ago have known how a coronal mass ejection looks like?
The verse doesn't talk about coronal mass ejection. It talks about sparks from fire. The fact that fire can emit sparks was discovered long before the written history. It was discovered by looking at fire and noticing that it emits sparks.
And the Quranic claim that the sparks will be big like castles or camels can be just a result of a simple deduction: Since small flame emits small sparks, then big flame (like the flame of hell) would probably emit big sparks.
Accuracy
This particular solar flare, which took place in 1999, jumped out of the sun with a diameter 35 times the diameter of our planet, which makes it one of the larger ones ever spotted. But solar flares of that size are not unheard of. especially these days.
Solar flares are much bigger than castles or camels.
