On the other hand, secularized Muslims and Western orientalists claimed that the Qur’an had nothing to say about nature beyond medieval folklore. Against both extremes, Kamal proposed a : a return to the rationalist tradition of falsafa (Islamic philosophy) as embodied by al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd. He believed that the decline of tafsir began when theology ( kalam ) defeated philosophy ( falsafa ). His project was to revive the philosophical reading of revelation. 2. The Qur’an as a “Summons to Reason” (Istiqlal al-‘Aql) Central to Kamal’s scientific tafsir is the concept of Tawhid not merely as a theological formula, but as a cosmic hypothesis . For Kamal, the declaration “There is no god but God” is also a statement about the universe’s intelligibility. Because the universe is the creation of a singular, rational Will, it operates according to consistent laws ( sunan ). This consistency is the precondition for science.
Kamal famously wrote: “The Qur’an is not a textbook of geology, but it is a textbook of methodology.” He argued that the repeated Qur’anic injunctions to “travel through the earth” (29:20), “contemplate the heavens” (3:190), and “reflect” ( ta‘aqqul ) are not poetic ornaments. They are . To practice science is, in a profound sense, to obey the Qur’an.
For Zakaria Kamal, the deepest act of scientific tafsir was not to find a verse predicting the Big Bang. It was to look through a telescope and, in that very act of measurement and calculation, perform a silent dhikr . The scientist, when honest, is a theologian of the concrete. And the Qur’an, when read philosophically, is the manual for that theology.