Night 28. The last taraweeh is tomorrow. It went fast.
A few housekeeping notes: Thursday night — the eve of Eid — we will have a potluck iftar at Qaswa House starting at 6pm, with iftar around 6:35. Bring a plate to share. The kids will have activities while the adults eat. After that we’ll pray Isha together and do takbir to welcome Eid.
Friday is Eid prayer at McDougall Park in Como. Takbir at 8, prayer at 8:30. And yes — since Eid falls on a Friday this year, the question of Jumu’ah comes up. The Shafi’i position is that Jumu’ah remains obligatory for those living in the city. The Hanbali reading gives the option to skip it for those who came from outside the city, but holds that the Imam must still lead it. Since we live in the city and the masjid is not far, I’ll keep my khutbah to 10 minutes and the prayer short so everyone can go and celebrate.
This tafseer series continues after Ramadan on Thursday nights at Qaswa — 7pm, finishing with Isha and dinner around 9 to 9:30. If you want to follow Surah Al-A’raf through to the end, come join us.
Was the Flood Global or Local?
We ended last night at the great flood. Today I want to address the question that comes up every single time I teach this story to kids in Australia.
Were kangaroos on the ark?
And before you smile — it is actually a serious theological question. The Bible says the flood was global and every species of animal was taken two by two. That immediately creates a problem: Australian animals are unique. Kangaroos, wombats, possums, platypuses — they exist nowhere else on earth. How did they get to Prophet Nuh to board the ark? And how did they get back to Australia afterwards without leaving any trace of themselves along the way?
This level of specificity is precisely why many scientifically-minded people struggle with the biblical account. The Bible gives exact dimensions for the ark, an exact timeline, an exact animal count — and when those details collide with scientific and geographical reality, the whole thing becomes very difficult to hold.
The Quran does not work that way. And that difference matters enormously.
Three Readings
Our scholars hold two broad positions on the flood of Nuh, and I want to offer a third that I find most compelling.
The first position: it was a global flood. The argument rests on the generality of certain Quranic ayat — particularly in Surah Hud — where the language is broad enough to suggest the entire earth. Allah saved Nuh and those with him and destroyed everyone else. “Everyone else” could mean all of humanity everywhere.
The second position: it was a localised flood, specific to the qawm of Prophet Nuh. The theological argument is straightforward — Nuh was sent to his people. The punishment was for their rejection. Why would Allah destroy people in Australia, people in the Americas, people who had never received a messenger and had no idea any of this was happening? That is inconsistent with the divine justice we know from the Quran. Allah does not punish people who were never warned.
The third reading — and this is where it gets interesting — is that the flood was localised geographically, but effectively encompassed all of humanity, because at that point in history, all of humanity lived in roughly the same place.
Anthropological evidence suggests that when we trace humanity back 50,000 to 60,000 years, we find our ancestors concentrated in one region — having migrated out of Africa and settled in and around the Fertile Crescent. At the time of Prophet Nuh, the human race was still young. Its population was geographically concentrated. A great flood in that region could have destroyed virtually all of humanity that existed then — without covering the entire physical globe. And when the Quran says Allah took animals onto the ark, it was not every species on earth. It was the animals of that community. The sheep, the cattle, the camels — the practical animals you would need to rebuild your life after the waters receded. Not giraffes. Not hippos. Not kangaroos.
The Story That Made Me Stop
What makes this third reading extraordinary is the evidence you find when you look at how widely the flood story appears across human cultures — especially cultures that had zero contact with each other.
The Aztecs of Mesoamerica were completely isolated from the Old World until the 15th century. And yet they have a flood story. A man named Coxcox went before the Creator God, complained about the wickedness of his people, and the Creator sent a great flood to cleanse the earth. Coxcox survived on a raft. When the waters began to recede, he sent a bird out — and it returned with signs of land. Identical in structure to the story of Nuh. Same moral arc. Same divine response. Same bird.
And then there is the story from the Kimberley.
