6. J (cont.)

And, certainly, one of you will definitely perform the acts of the people of Hell until there is not between him and Hell except an arm's length and then what has been recorded will overtake him and he shall perform the deeds of the people of Paradise and enter it." Recorded by al-Bukhari and Muslim. Selected Vocabulary J.iL....l - "the truthful" J.J৑I - "the believed" ৔I u. - "verily, surely, certainly" - "collected and preserved" - "his creation, his being"; the • at the end is the singular, masculine pronoun, "his". ब - "abdomen, stomach"; o...l - "his mother", rl is mother. ॓) - "forty" L.. .J:l - "days" Ub.i - "a drop of fluid" ॑ - ''then" ufa. - "will be", it can also mean, "becomes" :i..ilc. - "something that clings and adheres" भ - "similar to" ࢬ - "a lump that looks like it has been chewed" J.. Y. - "is sent" ..&Ji - "the angel'', here it is in reference to the angel that is responsible for the wombs. CJ.JI - "the spirit, soul, breath of life" uWS. - in the language of the Prophet (peace be upon him), this usually meant complete statements or complete sentences. It can also be used to refer to "matters". Nowadays, it is almost exclusively for "words" as opposed to sentences. pԚt; rW 0; :7  r J.-... l;;;t "Then tell Me about the human semen that you emit. Is it you who creates it or are We the Creator?" (al-Waaqiah 58-59). Commenting on these verses, Albar wrote, The sex of the new born is determined by the male. It is definitely stated that the male and the female are fashioned from a drop of fluid from the semen that has been ejaculated ... We know now that the sex of the new born is determined by the sperm which will fertilize the ovum. If the sperm carrying the X chromosome, fertilizes an ovum (which always contains an X chromosome), the offspring will be a girl, while if the fertilizing sperm contains a Y chromosome, the offspring will be a boy ... The second important point, which is clearly stated in the Holy Quran is that only a small portion of the seminal fluid 1 See Albar, pp. 57ff. J Hadith #4: Creation in the Mother's Womb participates in forming the embryo ... [For example, Allah says above], "Was he not a mere 'drop of fluid' out of semen that has been ejaculated?"... We know now that the sperms constitute only 0.5 percent of the total semen ejaculated ... The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, "Not from the whole fluid (ejaculated) man is made, but only from a small portion of it." (Narrated by Muslim.)1 Second comes the female nutfah. In surah al-Insaan, verse 2, it mentions nutfat amshaaj or mixed sexual fluid. This implies the existence of a female source of nutfah. In fact, this has been interpreted by ibn Abbaas to mean both the male and female nutfah.2 Albar states that this is not explicitly mentioned in the Quran but it is stated in a hadith in Musnad Ahmad, wherein the Prophet (peace be upon him) tells a Jew that man is created from both male and female nutfah. Albar then states, "This is a very astonishing revelation, as it is only recently that we [in the medical field] came to know that both male and female participate equally to the formation of the human (or animal) zygote."3 It is this third usage for the word nutfah that is of interest here, where the male and female nutfah are intermixed in the womb of the mother. This is what scientists are now calling the "performational" stage.4 According to ibn Atheer, this portion of the hadith can be understood in one of two ways: Either the nutfah remains as it is in the womb for forty days or the nutfah is growing and developing during that period until it becomes ready for the next period. 5 The latter interpretation is more consistent with what appears to be scientific fact. "Then it is a clinging object ( alaqah ) during that same period." The next stage of human development mentioned by the Prophet (peace be upon him) is the alaqah. Albar defines alaqah (or alakah as he writes it) in the following manner, The Arabic word Alakah6 literally means something that clings or attaches to something else. The word also means a leech. The medical leech has been notorious for its clinging property to the skin whereby it sucks blood, a phenomenon that was often used in medicine as a remedy (blood letting). It also has a 1 Albar, pp. 58-59. 2 Albar, p. 59. 3 Albar, p. 59. 4 Albar, pp. 60-61 , quotes some authorities on this topic. However, this is where the borderline between scientific fact and theory begins to get cloudy for many people. 5 Ibn al-Atheer was quoted in ibn Hajr, Fath, vol. 13, p. 315. 6 In Albar's book, he spelled alaqah "Alakah".