ABSTRACT
While Shaykh Rashid Rida in Cairo was accommodating Islam to "Intelligent Design" Darwinism in his al-Manar, a Shi'i scholar in Karbala on the other side of the Arab world composed a serious study in two volumes on the subject. Isfahani was quite aware that much of what was being attributed to Darwin was not Darwin. Establishing what was authentic Darwin was only the first task; the second was to critique it. Repeating Shaykhs Jisr and Shaykh Rida, Imam Isfahani finds nothing in the Quran or Prophetic Tradition to be contrary to the evolution of animal species as exposited by Darwin. One of the more serious flaws was that Darwin failed to take into account the laws of heredity, which were not yet known in his time. Darwin knew there were limits to what could be known by science. The naturalist wisely understood a realm of knowledge existed that offered no answers to experimentation and observation.
