Zaghloul El-Naggar

Zaghloul Ragheb Mohammed El-Naggar was an Egyptian geologist and preacher, born in the village of Mishal in the Basyun district of Gharbia Governorate on Friday 29 Rajab 1352 / 17 November 1933, who died in Amman on Sunday 18 Jumada al-Ula 1447 / 9 November 2025. ^{1 2 3} Both articles describe him as known for his close attention to 'scientific miracles' in the Qur'an and hadith, in lectures and in writing. ^{1 3}

The Arabic article says he grew up in a family whose grandfather was the village imam and whose father had memorized the Qur'an, and that after completing his own memorization he moved with his father to Cairo, entering primary school at nine and the Shubra secondary school in 1946. ¹ He graduated from the Faculty of Science of Cairo University in 1955 with an honours BSc, first of his year, winning the Baraka prize in earth sciences, and took a doctorate in geology at the University of Wales in 1963; the English article says his thesis was on the geology of the Esna-Idfu region of the Nile Valley. ^{1 3 2}

The Arabic article says he was detained after graduating for taking part in a political demonstration and was acquitted, but a political decision refused him a post as a teaching assistant because of his membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, so he worked for an oil company and in phosphate and coal mines. ¹ The English article says he was imprisoned in his student years for political activism and left Egypt in the early 1960s, returning only in 1970. ³ He worked at Ain Shams, King Saud, Kuwait and Qatar universities and at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran (1978–1996), was a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, helped found the geology departments of several of them, and became a professor in 1972. ¹ He then headed al-Ahqaf University in Yemen (1999–2000), chaired the committee on scientific miracles of the Qur'an at Egypt's Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs from 2001, was a founding member of the International Commission on Scientific Signs in the Qur'an and Sunna of the Muslim World League, and was elected a fellow of the Islamic Academy of Sciences. ^{1 3}

The Arabic article credits him with more than a hundred and fifty research papers and articles and forty-five books in several languages, and a weekly column in al-Ahram titled 'Min Asrar al-Qur'an' ('From the Secrets of the Qur'an'). ¹ The English article names among his books 'The Geological Concept of Mountains in the Qur'an' (2003) and 'The Issue of Scientific Miracles in the Holy Qur'an and the Rules for Dealing with It'. ³

He died in Amman; the funeral prayer was held the next day in the Abu 'Aysha mosque at the Seventh Circle, and he was buried in the Umm al-Qutayn cemetery in Na'ur. ¹

Under the heading of controversial claims, the English article lists statements attributed to him, among them prescribing camel urine as a treatment, denying the account of the 11 September attacks, and claiming in 2004 that NASA had confirmed the splitting of the Moon in a television programme; it also says his writings on scientific miracles were not peer reviewed. ³ These are recorded here as the article's statements, without a verdict from the museum.

The Assabile archive holds two series of his lessons: Wa Yatafakkarun, twenty-nine video episodes on the scientific miracle in the cosmic verses, and 'al-Hadara al-Nabawiyya' ('The Prophetic Civilization'), thirty audio episodes. ^{9 10} In Wa Yatafakkarun he says that in the 1980s he wrote a book in English on mountains in the Qur'an as 'a paper of da'wa' for English speakers. ¹¹ He says that he and others laid down a large number of scientific and religious rules for handling the question of the scientific miracle. ¹² He relates that he was invited to talk with an American official in Cairo who refused to read about Islam, whom the verse of the heavens and earth joined and parted persuaded to read the Qur'an, and that he has met many who became Muslim merely on hearing verses of it. ^{13 14}

In the thirty episodes of al-Hadara al-Nabawiyya El-Naggar speaks alone on the scientific miracle in the Sunna: he sets rules for it, defends the authority of the Sunna against those he calls the orientalists and the Qur'anists, then explains some thirty hadith on the earth and sky, medicine, food, the family and the signs of the Hour. ^{15 16 17} He says of himself that he attended two cardiology conferences in Saudi Arabia, reminding the doctors at the first that the Qur'an ascribes to the heart roles other than pumping, while scientists from California attended the second. ^{18 19 20} He says he visited a university in Berlin and looked at the work of the embryologist Hans Spemann, and that he asked many orthopaedic doctors how many joints the human body has. ^{21 22} He relates that an American offer of artificial rain in a Gulf state was put to him and those with him and that they refused it "from the Islamic standpoint". ²³ He repeatedly calls the scientific miracle "a fine card for preaching" to an age of science, holds that Islam is under a fierce attack against which the community has nothing left but preaching with good words, clear argument and scientific language, and calls on the rulers of Arab and Muslim states to support it. ^{24 25 26 27} In these lessons he says Islamic civilisation carried the banner of knowledge for more than eleven centuries and was defeated only with the fall of the Ottoman caliphate. ^{28 29}