THE CHALLENGE OF THE QUR’AN

The Challenge of The Qur’an ~ 290 ~ cause for alarm. The increase in population will be accompanied by an increase in production: the means will be available to provide food for 1½ times more than the number of people who have to be fed. And this increase in food production will be possible without deforestation. So there is no real danger of a food crisis, either on a regional or on a universal scale. Gwynne Dwyer concludes his report with the following words: ‘Malthus was wrong. We are not doomed to breed ourselves into famine.’ Fourteen hundred years before this, the Quran had said: ‘And fearing hunger, do not slay your own offspring. We provide for them and for you. Surely, it is a great error to slay them.2 Where Malthus’ book on population and sustenance—the work of a human mind working within the confines of time and place—was very far out in its predictions for the human race, (and this was proved to the world just 150 years after the author’s death) the Quran, on the other hand—the work of a superhuman mind—still bears out external realities to this very day.