Encountering Darwin's Theory of Evolution in the Qajar Period: Muḥammad Riḍā Iṣfahānī and Human Evolution

The thory of evolution was introduced toward the middle of the nineteenth century to Arabic readers through secondry texts, including a mixture of Darwin’s and other evolutionists’ ideas and sometimes tinted with materialistic ideas. In his polemical book named A Critique of the Philosophy of Darwin, Muḥammad-Riḍā Najafī Iṣfahānī did not totally refute the theory of evolution, but only the part dealing with the theory of human evolution which, in his view, went against the religious teachings. Compared with his Christian Arab counterparts, he could attain a better understanding of the theory of evolution, based on Arabic translation of a summary of the first chapter of Darwin’s The Descent of the Man, Ludwig Buchner’s writings and the scientific articles published in contemporary Arabic journals. Since some of the western biologists and evolutionists of his time did not accept the human evolution, he could grasp their ideas and add his own remarks to prepare some sort of “scientific” critique of this theory which, in its kind, was unprecedented.