This Al Arabiya story doesn’t say so, but Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari is reflecting Qur’anic teaching. The Qur’an depicts Dhu’l-Qarneyn, a mysterious character whom most Muslims identify with Alexander the Great, as traveling until he reaches “the setting-place of the Sun,” where he sees it setting in a “muddy spring.” Then he travels to the “rising-place of the Sun.” Given the literalism that is mainstream in Islamic tradition, it isn’t surprising that Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari would take these passages as indication that the Sun does indeed rise and set around a stationary Earth.
“Till, when he reached the setting-place of the sun, he found it setting in a muddy spring, and found a people thereabout. We said: O Dhu’l-Qarneyn! Either punish or show them kindness….Till, when he reached the rising-place of the sun, he found it rising on a people for whom We had appointed no shelter therefrom.” (Qur’an 18:86, 90)
This same Qur’anic literalism, of course, leads all too many Muslims to seek to make war against and subjugate Infidels, as per Qur’an 9:29, etc.
“Saudi cleric rejects that Earth revolves around the Sun,” Al Arabiya, February 16, 2015:
A Saudi cleric has appeared in a recent video rejecting the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun and claiming the opposite holds true, prompting a wave of social media remarks.
Answering a student question on whether the Earth is stationary or moving, Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari replied: “stationary and does not move.”
He then attempted to support his argument by quoting some clerics and selected religious statements. But his most controversial method to debunk the rotation theory was a “logical” deduction in which he used a visual.
“First of all, where are we now? we go to Sharjah airport to travel to China by plane, clear?! focus with me, this is Earth;” he said, holding a sealed water cup.
He argued that if a plane stops still in air “China would be coming towards it” in case the Earth rotates on one direction. It the Earth rotates on opposite direction, the plane would never reach China, because “China is also rotating.”
In separate statements Sheikh al-Khaibari said man never went to the moon, rejecting NASA’s lunar excursion video as Hollywood fabrication.
The video of the sheikh triggered a wave of controversial remarks on social media, especially on Twitter, where a special hashtag is being widely circulated. The hashtag translates as: “#cleric_rejects_rotation_of_Earth
In an interesting remark, one user tweeted: “What a coincidence that this would occur on Galileo’s birthday!”
Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was born on Feb. 15, 1564. He was accused twice of heresy by the church for his beliefs, including his support for the Copernican theory that the earth and planets revolved around the sun….
Emilie Green says
This Muslim guy would have done equally as well as this Frenchman,
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x11qhk_stupid-audience-on-french-millionai_fun
katnis says
Wow. Once again, islam has everything right and is setting out to disprove what we already know as fact. You wasted your time Galileo. The rest of us were silly to believe you.
Jaladhi says
Ha, ha, ha,…. these delusional morons, he supports his theory with very ” clever” argument that on Muslims understand and he also thinks sun sets in a muddy pond and mountains are holding the earth down or it will fly away and land in Mo/allah’s paradise. Surely he is saying that to entertain us!!! LOL…
Jaladhi says
Oops typos: Ha, ha, ha,…. these delusional morons, he supports his theory with a very “clever” argument that only Muslims understand and he also thinks sun sets in a muddy pond and mountains are holding the earth down or it will fly away and land in Mo/allah’s paradise. Surely he is saying that to entertain us!!! LOL…
particolor says
And Rises in the Moring from Mohammed’s Porridge !! 🙂
mariam rove says
Well you can’t really blame him for saying this!! After all he studied at university of Islam!!!! M
GARY DEAN FRAZIER says
WHERE TO START WITH THIS IMAN,MAY JUST A OUT RIGHT NUT DOES HE KNOW ABOUT THE SPACE SPACESTATION UP ABOVE US AT THIS TIME AND WHAT ABOUT THE SHUTTLE ALL THE YEARS WE SENT THEM UP TO THAT STATION.HE HAS A FEW SMARTS ABOVE A ROCK
Georg says
a) Tablecloth = revolves around head ——-> Sun = revolves around Earth
c) Tablecloth ≠ revolves around head——–> Sun ≠ revolves around Earth
“When in doubt, pick ‘c'”.
Georg says
a) Tablecloth = revolves around head——> Sun = revolves around Earth
b) Tablecloth ≠ revolves around head——> Sun ≠ revolves around Earth
c) both a and b
d) This guy has a clue
“When in doubt, pick ‘c’”.
*That’s what I meant to put.
Don McKellar says
Well, gee, um — isn’t the plane spinning at the same speed as the Earth to begin with? Plus or minus its air speed? How can a plane stop dead in space and be completely disconnected from the movement of the Earth with all its momentum suddenly vanishing? Especially when not only is it being pulled by gravity from an Earth spinning at 1,040 mph, but it would face winds of 1,040 mph. Plus or minus, of course.
Oh, wait a second, I’m not using Islamic logic. Okay…I’ve bashed my head on the floor five times a day, babbled a bunch of violent and hateful nonsense, ignored all reality and science and common sense and see now that he’s exactly right.
Phil says
Thank you, Westman! I just wasted a good thirty minutes I should have spent analysing urine chemistry profiles reading the ‘intellectual debate’ our Muslim friends are having over issues we solved centuries ago. I nearly wet myself laughing!
Angemon says
I expect to see millions of muslims worldwide protesting and rioting in the streets against this man for making islam look ridiculous.
Oh, wait, he’s a muslim cleric, not a non-muslim. Well then, I’m guessing muslims worldwide will still protest and riot because non-muslims find islam riduculous.
Buraq says
This clown is revolving around his thumb, which is stuck firmly up his butt!
Legion says
Bahahahahaha! Oh man.
Wellington says
Well, sometimes Muslimthink is hilarious instead of dangerous, though it’s always goofy. Really, perhaps more than any other reason that Islam will eventually persist only on the margins of societies across the world is because it will be practically laughed out of existence. Yes, Islam is often lethal but it is even more of the time ridiculous and ridiculous may actually trump lethal long term.
Champ says
Oh my that was hilaaaarious!!! 😀 😀
Champ says
And this comedian kept a straight face while telling these jokes! …hey he’s good.
JamesonRocks says
Gotta be all that inbreeding… This is yet another example of successive generations breeding with siblings and first-cousins.
shoehorn says
He’s got a point. I’ve never seen the Earth move, but I’d probably have a different perspective if I lived on the Moon. It all depends on your frame of reference, I suppose.
The Doctor says
If you were on the Moon then the Earth would appear to move even if it were not moving because your movement would match that of the Moon, so it would appear to you that you were stationary and the Earth was moving because you are moving WITH the Moon. This is why you can have a glass of water on an aeroplane that is in flight – the aeroplane and the water and you all have the same rate and direction of movement. Any difference is relative to that.
allan carr bryan says
Is this “Learned idiot” one of the cast of ” One flew over the cuckoo’s nest?”, if not he certainly would not be out of place in a nuthouse. Bloody retard, but the idiots he is speaking to will believe him.
The Doctor says
Pity him, but don’t be mean. His entire world-view is based on the Qur’an being true and at the risk of severe emotional distress (not to mention the Qur’anic penalty for apostasy) he must somehow make everything else fit into the framework of what the Qur’an says, no matter how irrational it appears to us who do not base our entire world-view on the Qur’an.
They even reject proper logic if it contradicts the Qur’an. This is why there are only eleven Muslim Nobel laureates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim_Nobel_laureates) and only TWO of those are sciences! (Two are literature, and the remaining seven are peace prizes.). Muslims (approximately 1.57 billion people) make up over 23% of the world’s population.
Contrast this with Jews (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates) have at least 193, nearly all in sciences. Jews make up 0.2% of the world’s population. Amusingly enough, this includes nine peace prize winners, two more than the Muslim peace prize total, yet with Jews numbering approximately one percent of the number of Muslims in the world.
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which group has made a more significant contribution to the world.
Dennis Stotlemyer says
This is why Obama decreed that NASA support all of the science that the muslims have contributed to the world.
ConnectingDots says
He reminds me of documentaries shot in North Korea and the Soviet Union.
He truly believes this because his Islamic education tells him so.
Then again, maybe he knows more than the rest of us, given that he mentioned that an airplane can stop in mid-air!
Richie says
How long before Muslims demand that American school books reflect this ignorant belief?
abad says
Haven’t I seen Bandar on Comedy Central? LOL
abad says
LOL
Phil says
Let’s be fair! Let’s compare current intellectual achievements.
The very week such luminous scholars of the Dar al-Islam are debating whether the Earth is flat, rolled out like a carpet (see Qur’an Surah 15:19 – incidentally claiming mountains don’t move, in defiance of plate tectonics), and emphasizing the Qur’anically-revealed ‘truth’ that the Sun revolves around the Earth (Surah Ya-Seen 36: 38 – 40) following the moon (Surah ash-Shams 91: 1 – 2), the kaffir sons of apes and pigs have an ion-drive spaceprobe about to enter orbit around the largest of the asteroids and another probe four months away from a Pluto flyby. Judaeo-Christian Western culture is obviously inferior – we merely accomplish things never before achieved in human history, while the Ummah unfold the intellectual splendours of the ‘True Faith’ (we can leave the spiritual gifts of the Dawlah Islamiyah a.k.a. Daesh, IS, ISIS, ISIL et cetera ad nauseam).
Consider these salient facts: over 1.6 billion muslims have won ONLY 2 Nobel Prizes in Science – and one was an Ahmadiyah heretic and the other converted to Episcopalianism. It can’t be racial prejudice. Four hundred and fifty million arabs – historically over the last century around 10 – 8% were non-Muslims (largely Christians). Yet this piddling fraction of Arab Christians have wom as many Nobel Prizes in Science as the entire Dar al-Islam – despite the historical persecution by the Muslim majority. The Hindus (definitely less European-featured than the Arabs) and fewer in number than the Muslim Ummah have won twice as many Nobel Prizes in Science (and don’t even try to count up the Hindu contribution to twentieth century mathematics – it’s huge). We won’t even begin to consider the large number of prizes won by the Japanese, the Han Chinese etc. And let’s not even begin to wonder why the Jews have so disproportionally contributed to Nobel Prizes in Science, despite being a miniscule population (even as a world-wide count) compared even to the Arabs. Even Australia, Lord help us, has won 13 Nobel Prizes in Science and our current population is only 23.13 million.
Why the difference? Islam – pure and simple.
Ed says
Push forward 370 years, in 2015, Galileo Galilei would suffer the same fate under Islamic state.
Phil says
Sorry Ed, I have to disagree. Urban VIII had personally asked Galileo not to make the ‘Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems’ an open advocacy book – unfortunately, devout Catholic though Galileo was, he wrote the book as an argument between the two worldviews and created a fool strawman, Simplico, as the defender of Geocentrism (the name says it all!). By including the Pope’s pro-Geocentrist views he explicitly made Urban VIII look a fool. Urban had already been attacked for his apparent weakness in defending the church from heresy and schism and his position, never very secure, was being undermined by the powerful Roman curia, so he showcased Galileo’s trial to bolster his credentials with the conservative clergy. Even at its worst, his 1633 trial was far, far less arbitrary and his sentencing orders of magnitude less brutal than someone could expect from the Muslims – remember Mahmoud Taha was executed in Sudan in 1985 as much for his championing modern science against conservative Islamic interpretations as for his suggestion the Mediniyeh (Medinan surahs) of the Qur’an are less important than the Meccan verses (and were historically contingent). Even now, IS (or Daesh or….whatever) is threatening science teachers with death if they teach ‘unislamic’ science. I’m not defending the trial, but it is megaparsecs away from being anything as brutal as the Ummah serves up.
No Fear says
I propose a scientific thought experiment:
a. Imagine Mohammed, the ‘prophet’ of Islam, as a new born baby.
b. In your imagination, drown him.
That’s it. You have just saved 200 million non-muslims.
pumbar says
I really wanted to make some pithy, flippant comment on this but it’s so bizarre it’s just left me stymied. I think I need a few days in a holiday retreat with no access to the outside world.
Lesley says
I’m about to say something ugly that needs to be said, but first, a disclaimer: Of course not all Muslim Arabs in every generation marry their first cousins.
That being said, from working with Muslim Arabs from Lebanon and Egypt for 5 years, I will tell you that this is a common and an encouraged practice. I met one man from Lebanon who told me that he named his wife when she was born– because they were first cousins and their parents both had like 9 kids or something. It was explained to me that this is encouraged because it helps to keep money and inherited resources in the family.
I would bet that a large proportion of the Arab world carries the fallout of 14 centuries of inbreeding, which does not make people smarter. If Arab Muslims hadn’t incorporated the practice of taking of sex slaves and converting women under pain of death, I think the toll of this practice would be much greater. All of this is very, very disturbing.
I think this factor of inbreeding helps to explain why so many of the people raised as Muslim fail to think their way out of it and leave. They are easily raised for slaughter in the Islamist cause.
Lesley says
I found quite a bit of information about the traditional practice of inbreeding (termed consanguinous marriages) leading to high rates of birth defects in the Muslim world. Here is an article:
http://akarlin.com/2013/04/birth-defects-fbd-marriages/
Lesley says
More info in Muslim inbreeding:
‘The Cost of Islamic Incest”
https://pickeringpost.com/story/the-cost-of-islamic-incest/1316
“Video: Cousin Marriages: Muslim inbreeding causes low IQ, retardation, and birth defects”
https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/video-cousin-marriages-muslim-inbreeding-cause-low-iq-retardation-and-birth-defects/
There are plenty of other articles and videos out there, all supported by data. Are you getting the picture?
Should we be negotiating with and trying to appease this phenomenon? Our leaders are thinking western civilization into a casket by clinging to political correctness and tolerance of this backwards madness called Islam. Get ready for the army of dum-dums, they are coming…
American says
You only have to find one item in the Qur’an that is false to be able to discredit the Islamic faith. Since the Qur’an purportedly represents the word of God (Allah), and Allah got it wrong, that’s a tremendous contradiction. How could the creator of the universe get something like that wrong? If this item is in the Qur’an, it should be used to discredit the Qur’an as the word of God, identify Mohammed as a false prophet, and thereby dismantle Islam.
Lioness says
Soon it will be a crime to say that the earth is round and it moves. For Islam it’s flat and stationary, otherwise you burn at the stake. Very progressive.
mach37 says
Translators of Arabic into English have failed miserably. The English phrase “… he found it rising on a people for whom We had appointed no shelter therefrom” is virtually meaningless. Failing to express the flowery phrases in meaningful English expressions appears to be the best way to hide the true intent of phrases like Obama’s call for murdering infidels: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
ninetyninepct says
” “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”” – Could akbar obama really have meant that isis is doing the slandering and that they have no future? Could be. Depends how we think of what he meant. If that is true, he is against isis and islamist terrorists.
Things that make us go hmmmmmmm.
FABRIZIO says
I told the teacher at high school: I do not believe in the hearth rotation bullshit. She failed me!!
Luckily, there are smart guys like this one, that definitely got it right!!
Galileo/Copernico, you were f… drunks when you came up with your theories.
See what this gentleman has to say about the real truth!!!
Nope, You will never get to China by plane, if the hearth keeps on rotating!!!
Someone, Please stop it: I want to visit China!!!!!
Andrew GB says
Gasp! You thick goat shagging pedophile following tea towel wearing tosser.
His next video is how to nail jelly to the ceiling.
Yet Cameron, May, Obama et al think this shower of shit are ok and it’s us that are wrong???!!!!!
LairdKintyre says
This is the reason why fewer than 10 Muslims have been awarded the Nobel Prize since 1905. Listening to the esteemed clercs explanation about how when a plane stops moving in the air (which is not possible) the Earth below doesnt seem to rotate. It appears he doesnt beleive in momentum or gravity either. Maybe if muslims disbeleive gravity strong enough, they will all just float away into space.