... Yet another explanation, pitched by Muslim thinkers, is that all these grand civilizational relics that we can’t quite account for were built by the jinn, who resided on earth and had dominion over the planet long before us, with their lost empires and civilisations.

By Emad Aysha

Ahmad Shammazadeh, for instance, tackles von Däniken head-on, coming up with alternate explanations for Solomon’s (supposed) trip to Peru and the mystery of the Nazca lines. At the same time, he incorporates the Silurian hypothesis into his work.

None of this is definitive. It’s just theory, and each alternative theory can explain the same kind of collective memory we all seem to have, so unless you can make testable predictions, it’s still all just conjecture. That is why we need to carefully distinguish between science and ‘pseudoscience’, as Dr. Stefano Bigliardi of Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane (Morocco) has done before at the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation (“Islam, Science, and Pseudoscience”, Kuala Lumpur, 21 August 2024).

Not to mention that there are lots of borrowings and overlaps between the different theories themselves, and more so in the case of Muslim thinkers – another point raised by Dr. Bigliardi, given how some Muslim thinkers either incorporate or reject evolution into Quranic interpretation, along with extraterrestrial life. (See our own interview with him).

Even though it’s interesting and I’m a bit inclined towards the last two arguments – either older terrestrial races before us or the jinn. Both fit into Islamic religious discourse and subsequently appear from time to time in our science fiction.

The Quran discusses fallen kingdoms and races of jinn that perished due to their arrogance and pride. The Prophet Solomon is said to have had dominion over the jinn and may even have learned magic from the angels. There are also stories outside the mainstream Islamic sources that talk of generations of beings that even preceded the jinn, such as the Hin and Ban.

As for SF, Dr. Hosam Elzembely (from Egypt) has ancient alien visitations and some crossbreeding in his space epic The Half-Humans. From Iran, Iraj Fazel Bakhsheshi has A Message Older than Time, where an older sentient species that left the planet before the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit is featured. There’s also borderline SF where magic and the supernatural coexist with science and technology, as in Ammar Al-Masry, a youthful writer who uses both aliens and jinn to argue against anthropocentrism.

HOMECOMING: 'Heart of Atlantis', Ammar's third book in his Atlantis 'alien invasion' series fuses ancient aliens with the myth of the flood. And cybernetics!

I suppose that’s the more important point, and evolutionary theory is another way to move away from this human-centric perspective, a point Dr. Stefano highlighted in his talk, as some modern Islamic thinkers have Adam being created by God.

Still, the human race already exists, thanks to evolution.

That’s not an outlandish position in Islamic thought since many scholars and scientists in our past speculated about parallel universes and that Adam may have resulted from spontaneous generation. Historians and alchemists, in particular, were comfortable with the idea that mud could be used to create life through chemical reactions, and that the pyramids may have preceded Adam; this would explain why they weren’t mentioned in the Quran. Sufis had their spiritual model of evolution, with base metals transforming into gold and silver through spontaneous generation from mud, as illustrated in the parable of Hayy ibn Yaqzan.

One version of the story has him emerging from mud on an island off the coast of India, which was reported to be legendary for instances of spontaneous generation. (Check out my chapter in Islamic Theology and Extraterrestrial Life: New Frontiers in Science and Religion, by Jörg Matthias Determann and Shoaib Ahmed Malik, pp. 205-230).

The Quran itself makes constant references to generations that existed before us that likewise disobeyed God, and how God can easily replace us through future generations. Are generations here generations of modern man, or different stages in man’s evolution or of other sentient races? It’s hard to tell.

I began this article with myths, and it seems only fair that I conclude with them. I’m going to disagree with these endless notions of ‘sky people’ in ancient faiths, since this is a reference to rankings of people and the utilisation of religion by the elite to make themselves out to be divine.

In ancient Egypt, for instance, the sun god Ra was the top god, but his chief rival was Osiris, the earth-bound god of the peasants. (That’s why Osiris is so important in the Book of the Dead, but almost unheard of in the older Pyramid Texts; they had to compromise between the two rival priesthoods, too.)

When Egypt was conquered, however, and the elite were removed, the solar faith dissipated to the point that Osiris continued to be worshipped, as evidenced by Roman soldiers stationed in Egypt building temples to him in far-off Scotland.

GALACTIC MINDS: This is one of the too frequent Egyptian takes on extraterrestrial intelligence, minus the extraterrestrial part!

No, wait. There’s a fifth thesis that explains all these common myths and mysteries, and it's a typically Egyptian one. It’s that ancient Egyptians, being so advanced, were capable of interstellar travel and that these alien visitations we keep hearing about in the tabloid press are our ancestors checking up on us.

But that’s pure science fiction, pushed by Nihad Sharif, Anis Masour, and modern pulp writers, and doesn’t even qualify as pseudoscience.