Allah’s Timing?

Dates, times and the mathematical miracle of the Qur’an

Jochen Katz

Certainly the most intricate mathematical miracle that is claimed for the Qur’an is the “Miracle of 19”. To be confronted with the many calculations and claims associated with it, can be quite overwhelming. However, when examined in close detail, a number of problematic aspects arise.

In this article, I want to scrutinize some alleged mathematical miracles in the Qur’an that are connected to times and dates of recent historical events.

In particular, I will examine the questions whether (a) the year of the discovery of the miracle of 19 is coded / prophesied in the Qur’an, and/or (b) aspects of the timing of the Apollo 11 moon mission are predicted in the Qur’an.

The observations and arguments presented in this article will, however, be foundational to the evaluation of other miracle claims as well.

[A] The Discovery of the 19 Miracle

We start with one of the more complex claims of the 19 miracle as presented by Dr. Caner Taslaman in his book, The Quran: Unchallengeable Miracle, and point out a number of problems, some of them “small” and some of them fatal. Taslaman’s chapter is somewhat lengthy, so that I will only quote excerpts from it.

Caner Taslaman writes:¹

Wow, there are some grand statements in this last paragraph. Such mighty words in order to describe … nothing; the empty set; zero. Look at these eloquent words again. Let them sink in:

Sorry to burst the bubble, but before these “numerical features” were discovered, nobody knew of them, with the obvious implication that nobody could find them credible or incredible. My best guess is that nobody really bothered to wreck their brain over something they had never heard about. Here is my counter-challenge: Just think how few people really cared about it!

I understand that these words are intended to create anticipation and inspire awe, but let’s be in awe of something that is worth the emotion. Let’s not get all worked up about nothing.

That sounds like somebody worked very hard for 1400 years to be able to finally reveal this miracle. I don’t think so. This is merely another attempt to make things appear much bigger than they really are. For example, Rashad Khalifa could have wondered about the verse “over it 19” (Q. 74:30) and realized that the Basmalah that is “over” every sura (except Sura 9) consists of 19 letters. He may have doodled around a bit with the numerical values of the letters of the Basmalah, and realized that their value adds up to a number that is again divisible by 19. Then he got curious whether he could find that number in other verses of the Qur’an, and the rest is history.² But, whatever may have been his entry point into these calculations, it didn’t take him 1400 years.

That remains to be seen. I know of many Muslims³ and non-Muslims, including people of the Book, who still have doubts about this. I am one of them.

Taslaman continues in his exposition:

How could this miracle have been “hidden for 1974 years” when the Qur’an itself was only “revealed” during the years AD 610-632? This is a minor issue, but an indication that our math miracle workers are not always careful with their numbers. Also, when one places 74 besides 19 one can just as well get 7419. But why should these numbers be placed “side by side” at all? Why not add, subtract, or multiply them? How about one that is a bit more exotic? Since the verse that mentions “19” is found roughly in the middle of the sura 74, why not put the number 19 in the middle of the number 74 to obtain 7194? This shows that with a little bit of imagination there are many options and operations and, out of a host of options, there is quite often one mathematical operation that produces a result that can be viewed as “meaningful”. Anyway, Taslaman continues:

Here we have a first serious problem that applies to many of these calculations. Taslaman uses the word “year” to refer to two different entities. Sometimes it is the solar year that is the basis of the Western/Gregorian calendar (365 days long), sometimes it is the lunar year of the Islamic calendar (354 days long). Oftentimes, that makes quite a difference. From the death of Muhammad until the year 1974, about 1342 solar years passed, which corresponds to about 1383 lunar years. This difference of 41 years can obviously mess up lots of calculations.

On the other hand, 1406 lunar years are 1363.6 solar years, again not a very useful number as neither 1363 nor 1364 are divisible by 19. Using sometimes the Gregorian calendar and sometimes the Islamic calendar looks arbitrary. Not consistency but expediency seems to be the principle. Whatever works, whatever “does the trick”, is used to increase the miracle.

Moreover, for the “miracle of 19” to work properly, one needs the complete Qur’an. Why then would the starting point of the revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad be the significant date? Why not the date of the final part of the revelation, shortly before his death? The answer is easy. The number 22 (solar years) or 23 (lunar years) as the duration of the period of revelations is not divisible by 19, and thus the year of Muhammad’s death does not make the calculations work out, but the assumed date of the first revelation works, even if that first revelation was only a couple of verses and after that there was a long hiatus where Muhammad did not receive any revelations.

Apart from this confusion, the above paragraph contains a possible error in his identification of the year AD 1974 with the Islamic year 1393 AH because 1393 AH was nearly over when the year 1974 just began. These two years had only 24 days of overlap because 25 January 1974 was already 1 Muharram 1394 AH, the first day of the next Islamic year (*). Unless Taslaman can give us clear evidence that the miracle of 19 was discovered in the first few days of 1974, the corresponding Islamic year is 1394 and not 1393 with the immediate implication that we obtain 13 + 1394 = 1407 which is not a multiple of 19.

Update/Excursus:⁴ Originally, I worked only with Taslaman’s claim as presented in his book, which raised this obvious question. After having nearly finished this article, I had the idea to search Rashad Khalifa’s translation of the Qur’an with its numerous appendices. In this book, Quran: The Final Testament, Authorized English Version, Translated from the Original by Rashad Khalifa, Ph.D., Revised Edition 1992, Appendix 1, page 381, there is a short “Historical Note”, claiming: “The momentous discovery that “19” is the Quran’s common denominator became a reality in January 1974, coinciding with Zul-Hijjah 1393 A.H.” after which the above calculation is presented. Whether this is a genuine historical fact, or arranged this way to increase the miracle and create a legend, remains an open question. I cannot verify the details one way or other.

Yet, the formulation “the discovery … became reality” is a strange formulation and this claim is further put in doubt when we read in Rashad Khalifa’s footnote to Sura 54:1 that “This important sign of the approaching end of the world came to pass in 1969 when humans landed on the moon and brought pieces of the moon to earth. At the same time, God's mathematical Miracle of the Quran was being gradually unveiled…” If the alleged mathematical miracle was already in the process of being revealed in 1969, what is the justification to place this “gradual process” (extending over several years) as a discovery exactly in the early days of 1974? It seems that Khalifa was struggling with the desire and problem to somehow connect his numerical system with two “miraculous dates” which happened to be four and a half years apart.

There is, however, one interesting difference between Khalifa’s book and Taslaman’s formulation quoted above. Taslaman writes, “God started to reveal the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad 13 years before the hegira” which prompted my question whether the completion of the revelation of the Qur’an would not have been the more natural and appropriate date. Khalifa has an interesting claim that seeks to justify this calculation. On page vii, right before the table of contents, we find these assertions:

This is obviously a rather unorthodox account as anyone will recognize who has studied the Muslim sources.  I will not discuss this in detail here, only to remark that this “rewriting of history” allows Khalifa to claim that the full Qur’an was revealed in 13 BH (although it was only in Muhammad’s heart, but not yet in his memory!), and thus this date could be used as the basis of the above calculation deriving 19 x 74 = 1406 years between the revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad, the last prophet of Allah, and the revelation of the mathematical miracle of the Qur’an to Rashad Khalifa, the last messenger of Allah (see Appendix 2 of Khalifa’s book). Clearly, these claims are intricately interwoven with the cultic aspects of this relatively new Islamic sect.

Taslaman summarizes this section:

With the above observations on the problematic aspects of these calculations, this table isn’t quite as impressive anymore. Moreover, these three table entries do not yet constitute “lots of miracles”. Anyway, let’s continue in Taslaman’s text to see what else he has in store.

Although Taslaman somehow forgot to explain for us the deeper meaning of the number 39, these observations look quite amazing at first sight. I see no justification to call it a prophecy though, since nowhere in the Qur’an are we told to add number values of letters in certain selected verses, let alone to consider the sum to be a prophecy. Moreover, there is no prediction of anything stated in the content of these verses.⁵ Finally, even though the Qur’an was “revealed” gradually, I never heard that Sura 74:1-2 was revealed gradually as well. These two short verses were composed / given at one time and I cannot see any justification for the claim that “the semantic unity was maintained in such a way that even the date of the discovery of the miracle 19 was coded” since there is nothing gradual in these two verses. This is again a piece of empty bluster from Caner Taslaman. Nevertheless, whether intentional design or accidental feature, it is an elegant structure – at first glance.

However, when we examine the details, things are not quite so straight forward. Let’s begin with the claim in the last one of the above quoted paragraphs, i.e., that there are 741 verses from Sura 74:1 to the end of the Qur’an.

There are many problems in regard to counting verses in a section of the Qur’an that spans several suras, both general problems,⁶ and also a specific one for this case.

(A) The arrangement of the suras is most likely a later process, completed by Muslim leaders after the death of Muhammad. There exist old Qur’an manuscripts with a different order of suras. This means the exact sequence of the suras is not part of revelation; their order is not divinely given.⁷ Rearranging the order of the suras obviously changes the number count between two verses in different suras. What implications does it have if we find “mathematical miracles” in features of the Qur’an which are due to human editing and structuring?

(B) There are several different verse numbering systems in use even to this day. These versification systems are also a later human addition to the structure of the text of the Qur’an. The largest difference results from the debate whether the Basmalah at the beginning of each sura is to be counted as a verse of the Qur’an or not (cf. this article). Some readings (qira’at) of the Qur’an count the Basmalah, others don’t. In this specific case, counting the Basmalah obviously adds another 40 verses from Sura 74:1 (which would then actually be 74:2) to the end of the Qur’an. Again, observing such numbers in a certain edition of the Qur’an is an interesting coincidence, a curiosity, but it is quite a stretch to call it a divine miracle.

(C) Regarding the number 741, the reader needs to know that the notation “74:1” is a feature of English translations of the Qur’an, or rather of the English way of referencing verses from the Qur’an in English texts. But in Arabic the notation is different. Arabic is written from right to left, and the reference to this verse is written as “1:74” or, in Arabic digits, “١:٧٤”. When we perform Taslaman’s special operation of dropping the colon between chapter and verse, then we obtain “١٧٤” or “174”, a number which is of no use for Taslaman’s “verse-count miracle”, and it is not even divisible by 19. Could it really be that English translations of the Qur’an, i.e. texts produced by human beings, contain more mathematical miracles than the Arabic Qur’an? Is that Taslaman’s message?

Incidentally, Rashad Khalifa’s edition of the Qur’an, is available online. When we access Sura 74 on that website (*) and click on the Arabic reference button of the first verse, we see the following:

(Source, as accessed on 25 October 2011)

On the right, you see the button with the Arabic verse reference, and at the top left the corresponding “1 74” in Arabic digits.

Finally, let us examine the main claim for the two verses Q. 74:1-2, i.e. that the numerical values of the letters in these two verses add up to 1974. Here is the table again:

Compare the letters with serial numbers 1-12 (i.e. the first verse) with the transliteration of the first verse as given on these two Islamic websites (1, 2):

The second word, ayyuha, has two Ya, and the third word, almuddaththiru, has a double Dal and a double Tha. Taslaman enters these three double-consonants into his calculation only once. In order to perform an honest addition, he would have to add another Ya (10) + Dal (4) + Tha [Tse?] (500) = 514 to the total number, but he would obviously not like that as it would destroy his main miracle.

How he can think that such manipulation is going to “clear away the doubts of … the people of the Book” is beyond me. Muslims may be fooled by this simply because many of them so desperately want the Qur’an to be miraculous, but how is Taslaman going to convince honest but critical researchers by tampering with the text?⁸

Again, even Rashad Khalifa’s edition of the Qur’an is a witness against Taslaman because it spells the name of Sura 74 as Al-Muddath-thir with double d and double th (p. 351). The reader can see this also on the above displayed image taken from the website of the “Submitters”.

So far I have examined only the “number games” that Taslaman and his friends have staged for us. Even if they had all been true – and they are clearly not –, there are still serious other reasons against accepting Taslaman’s conclusions.

My main objections against Taslaman’s claims are based on the meaning and message of the Qur’an; the meaning of this particular passage in Sura 74 and the clear command regarding calendar issues that is found in the Qur’an. Certainly the explicit meaning of the text must be more important than alleged “hidden numerical features”? (Cf. Q. 3:7, *.)

The Islamic lunar calendar is inconvenient for many reasons. Since it is about 11 days shorter than the solar year, one significant disadvantage is that the seasons (important for sowing and harvesting) are not fixed but constantly moving through the calendar. For Muslims, it becomes especially burdensome when Ramadan and/or Hajj fall into the hottest time of the year. As in many other cultures, the Arabs had also adjusted their lunar calendar to the solar year by inserting an additional intercalary month about every third year, similar to the luni-solar Hebrew Calendar (*). This caused the regular months to be “moved” from their place in the pure lunar calendar.⁹ The author of the Qur’an was very displeased with this and declared that Allah only accepts a pure lunar calendar, i.e. the year is defined as consisting of twelve lunar months.

In Sura 9, verses 36-37, we read (in the translation by Rashad Khalifa¹⁰):

To follow the Islamic calendar has thus been made a sacred duty for the believers. To stray from it is “a sign of excessive disbelief”.

Even though Taslaman’s method of deriving 1974 from the first two verses of Sura 74 was shown to be manipulative, it may well be that it is possible to somehow extract the number 1974 from the Qur’an, whether from a verse, a block of verses, a chapter or larger sections. It is a large book, and there are lots of ways to combine numbers to derive many different results. But the point is this: Whoever may have been the author of the Qur’an, the author was strongly against using a calendar that deviated from a year that consisted of 12 lunar months – even calling this unbelief and disobedience against Allah. Therefore, I do not believe that the author intentionally coded dates of the Gregorian calendar into the Qur’an. If I take the message of the Qur’an on this issue seriously, I have to conclude that if such numbers are found, they are accidental, and not a deliberate miraculous design.

The Qur’an goes so far as to state that using a calendar of twelve lunar months in the year “is the right religion”.¹¹ Rashad Khalifa even translated this clause as, “this is the perfect religion”. Do the devotees of the “miracle of 19” really want to tell us that Allah deviates from the right religion? That he breaks his own commands, and codes Gregorian (“Christian”) dates into the Qur’an instead of Islamic dates? It makes Allah arbitrary and inconsistent.

Anyone who has ever worked on finding multiples of 19 in the Qur’an certainly had more failures than successes, i.e. he or she combined and calculated many values of words and verses and most had a result that he could not assign any meaning to. So, they were discarded as being “not part of the miracle”; accidental, not intentional. Similarly, when taking the author of the Qur’an seriously in his pronouncement about calendar issues, I can only conclude that “1974” is accidental and not intentional. Or do you believe in a god who commands one approach to time-keeping and then does himself what he has just forbidden to the believers? A god, who commands a lunar year and then uses the solar year in order to confuse the believers? That does not make sense to me.

This reason alone is sufficient to discard a good chunk of “the miracle of 19” as presented by Taslaman. However, since we are at it anyway, let’s expose his corruption of the meaning of Sura 74:1-2 as well.

Taslaman presented only the first two verses in a butchered translation, but 74:1-7 is a unit and needs to be read together. Here is the text in Arberry’s translation:

Since Arberry is a non-Muslim scholar of Islam and the Arabic language, let me also give a translation by a respected orthodox Muslim scholar. Maududi renders the same passage in this way:¹²

Does anyone get the impression these verses are addressing a number, or a “code” as Taslaman wants to make us believe? These are intensely personal words; personal commands to rise up, instead of hiding himself, to warn others of the punishment that awaits those who ignore God, to praise God (publicly), to remove everything impure from his garments and (metaphorically from) his life, to keep himself away from anything that is defiling, not to be greedy but generous, and to be patient. Trying to force these words on a number or a mathematical system is highly contrived and artificial. A number or concept cannot hear a command, it cannot act, it is not defiled, it has no garments and cannot purify itself, it cannot be greedy or generous, it cannot be patient or impatient. These are all attributes of persons, not of abstract concepts.

No matter how often Taslaman may find the number 19 in the values of the letters making up these verses, the meaning of this passage has nothing to do with a numerical system or code; these verses do not convey a message about a mathematical miracle hidden in the Qur’an.

To summarize: Taslaman manipulated the letter values and calculations, and he corrupted the meaning of the text. The claims we have examined so far are proven to be a fraud on every level. There is nothing left of his claims, nothing whatsoever.

Finally, for good measure, there is another contextual problem for Taslaman and all others who want to understand these verses as referring to the “19-based mathematical miracle of the Qur’an”.¹³ When was this sura revealed? Where does it stand in the chronological order of suras?

Abul Ala Maududi writes in his introduction to Sura 74:

Muhammad Asad states similarly in his intro to Sura 74:

Maulana Muhammad Ali concurs:

What does that mean? At the time when Muhammad received 74:1-7, the only passages of the Qur’an that were available so far, were Q. 96:1-5 and 74:1-7 – a meagre total of twelve short verses! Taslaman claims that not Muhammad is addressed in 74:1-2 but the mathematical miracle of the Qur’an. But which Qur’an is he talking about? What exactly could rise up in these few verses?

If Q. 74:1-7, or Sura 74 as a whole, had been the final part of the Quran to be revealed to Muhammad, completing the Qur’an including its alleged mathematical structure and “miracle of 19”, and if this passage had been formulated in a more suitable way so that it could be applicable also to an abstract concept, then PERHAPS one could accept Taslaman’s interpretation that it states that it is time for the code to appear (arise) and make itself known, and start to speak. But such a command does simply not make sense for the first couple of verses of the Quran when no miracle was available yet.

Taslaman’s interpretation totally disregards not only the plain meaning of the text but also the chronological position of these verses.

[B] The Apollo 11 Mission

The next “miraculous date” we want to look at is the Apollo 11 mission of travelling to the moon and back. On the website of the “Submitters” (the group founded by Rashad Khalifa), there is an article about Quranic prophecies of the journey to the Moon. I will quote only the relevant part of their article, where we find Q. 54:1 “explained” in the following way:

Here again, I have the same foundational question as in the last section: Why would Allah institute the lunar calendar as the only acceptable way of reckoning the years, and then code the Apollo 11 mission into the Qur’an based on the dates according to the Christian / Gregorian (solar) calendar when using such a calendar is explicitly called a sign of disbelief in Q. 9:36-37?

Apart from this foundational flaw, there is another strange detail in the above quoted section of the article. After the author(s) just emphasized that the prophecy does not refer to the landing on the moon, but rather to the departure from the moon, it is somewhat strange to see the claim that God coded the landing date¹⁴ (into what?¹⁵), and that even in the American notation of dates that deviates from the international notation. Their thinking seems to be: If I can find a number that is divisible by 19, then God must have intentionally arranged it, even if it is in contradiction to what I just stated.

The approach seems to be:

• The Qur’an mentions the number “19”;
• A certain number – even if it is a date from the Christian calendar in the peculiar American notation – is divisible by 19;
• Therefore, we have another miracle that supports the divine origin of the Qur’an.

The fact that this number or date is not found in the Qur’an seems to be irrelevant in this kind of thinking.

There are a number of serious questions to be asked about this interpretation of Q. 54:1. For example, the authors have not given any explanation why or how the moon mission of Apollo 11 marks “the hour” (of divine judgment) or the end of the World. Furthermore, equating the collection of 21 kg of rocks from the surface of the moon with the Quranic statement “the moon has split” is a highly imaginative interpretation, to say the least. These issues are discussed in detail in the companion article, “Splitting the Moon – Or Tearing the Qur’an to Shreds?” and need not be repeated here. This present article deals with the claims around calendar issues and conventions of assigning times to events.

Thus, let’s get back to the foundational matter of using dates as given in the Gregorian calendar versus dating according to the Islamic calendar. The Gregorian-Hijri Dates Converter gives the following result for 21 July 1969:¹⁶

Jumaada al-awal is the fifth month, i.e. the date of the moon landing would be 06 / 05 / 1389. Cross-checking this result yields:

This date converter does not write leading zeros for days or months, i.e. July is 7 not 07, Jumaada al-awal is represented by 5 not 05. Both conventions are common and possible but obviously yield different numbers to test for divisibility by 19.

Although 21 / 07 /1969 could be represented by 21071969 and 21071969 = 19 x 1109051, writing the date as 21 / 7 / 1969 would then become 2171969 which is not divisible by 19. Since the authors of our miracle article have chosen the convention to write leading zeros, we use the same methodology for the Islamic date.¹⁷

6 Jumaada al-awal 1389 would then be represented by 6051389. Since the Gregorian-Hijri Dates Converter cautions us that “there is a small probability of one day error”, we are going to test also the day before and the day after that date. However, not one of the three numbers, 6051389, 5051389, or 7051389 is divisible by 19 as the reader can easily confirm by using this tool.

And, for good measure, let’s write the date backwards, i.e. year / month / day: 13890505, 13890506, and 13890507. But we see again that none of them is divisible by 19. In fact, even if we “Americanize” the number, writing it as month-day-year, i.e. 05-06-1389, and then test 05051389, 05061389, and 05071389, we still get the same result: not one of them is divisible by 19 – as if Allah had sworn to himself to make it impossible for the 19er-Muslims to fit the Islamic date of the moon landing into the 19 miracle! Is this a divine conspiracy against Rashad Khalifa?

The Muslim article continues:

As the statement in Q. 54:1 speaks of “the hour” it is nice to see how the authors of the article worked out a ‘linguistic connection’ by including that word into their text by speaking of “the hour of departure”, but after they managed to “drop the word”, they only focus on the minutes and seconds and totally forget about the number of the hour. However, we simply note that the Qur’an does not speak of minutes and seconds. So, what is the point?

The Apollo 11 facts page (*) states:

The Muslim authors dropped the “p.m.” which changes the time by 12 hours, but it is irrelevant in this case, since they are interested only in the minutes and seconds anyway. They also dropped the leading zero for the seconds to make it more similar to the Qur’an reference. However, the “01” seconds means that it is the first of 60 seconds in this minute, but in the Qur’an the “1” refers to the first of 55 verses in this sura; so the correspondence isn’t quite so clear. If Allah had intended this correspondence, surely he could have given Sura 54 the length of 60 verses and mentioned the words “minute” and “seconds” somewhere in this sura in order to give a hint?

Moreover, just like in the last section¹⁸ there is a notational issue. In Arabic, references to the Qur’an do usually not contain the number but the name of the sura. It would usually be written as “Al-Qamar aya 1” and most Muslims would not know that this is the 54^th sura without looking that up. However, even if the reference is written in numbers, the writing direction of Arabic (right to left) reverses the order. Ironically, the website submission.org provides its own refutation:

(Source, as accessed on 29 October 2011)

On the right side, where the Arabic text and reference for Sura 54:1 are given, the notation for the reference on the button in Arabic numerals is “١:٥٤”, i.e. “1:54”, because Arabic is read from right to left. However, in Arabic, numbers and time stamps are still written with the larger unit on the left, i.e. 1234 means one-thousand two-hundred thirty four, not four-thousand three-hundred twenty one. And in our case, fifty-four is still written as 54 not 45. Also the time stamp “17:54:01 UT” would remain the same in Arabic texts. To summarize: In Arabic notation the time stamp would still be “17:54:01” but the Qur’an reference would be “1:54” destroying the nice visual connection dreamed up by the miracle hunters.

Perhaps the submitters could save their departure time miracle by focussing not on the minutes and seconds, but on the hour and minutes, i.e. “1:54:01 p.m. EDT”?

Anyway, all of this is child’s play since there is again a far more foundational issue. Whether Universal Time or EDT, these ways of measuring time are based on the Prime Meridian through Greenwich in London, an ultimately arbitrary convention agreed upon only in 1884:

In other words, a group of mostly western scientists and politicians, a.k.a. “infidels”¹⁹ decided this issue long after the Qur’an was revealed. Why would Allah base his codes and prophecies upon this arbitrary decision taken centuries after the time of Muhammad by a body of uninspired human beings, and mostly unbelievers by Islamic standards?

Therefore, apart from the fact that there is no indication anywhere in the Qur’an that verse and sura numbers should be interpreted as minutes and seconds of historical events, we have to ask a similar question as in the first part: Why should or would Allah count on the basis of Greenwich mean time? If any time standard, should it not be Mecca Time?

The difference of 02:39:18.2 between Universal Time and Mecca Time obviously obliterates this element of the Quranic “moon miracle” as well.

Conclusion

The numbers and calculations presented on the website submission.org are certainly interesting coincidences, I agree with that; but that is all they are – coincidences. Claiming that Allah designed his signs and prophecies around arbitrary calendar and time conventions agreed upon by Western and mostly Christian scientists more than a thousand years after the Qur’an was “revealed”, instead of the Islamic calendar and a time based on “the most important point on earth” (according to Islam), the location of the Kaaba towards which Muslims are commanded to bow and pray five times every day, raises quite a few questions about the consistency of the god of Islam.

In fact, another question could and should be asked: Universal Time and Mecca Time are both “earth times”. Why should times for events on the moon be measured by any particular time standard tied to the earth?²⁰ Landing and departure of the Lunar Module are historical events that happened “on the moon” and it would be appropriate to speak about them based on “moon time”.²¹ I will leave it to the Muslim miracle workers to propose an objective way to measure moon time, and do the calculations necessary to convert the departure time of 17:54:01 UT on July 21, 1969 to their proposed moon time.