Semen From Between the Backbone and the Ribs
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“Let man consider from what he was created. He was created from a fluid, ejected, emerging from between the backbone and the ribs” (Quran 86:5–7). Sperm is produced in the testes and seminal fluid in glands in the pelvis — not between the spine and ribcage. The description matches Greek medical theory (the Hippocratic and Galenic view that semen descends from the region of the kidneys/back), which circulated in late antiquity.
Common Muslim Responses
Apologetic harmonizations: the verse describes the embryonic origin of the gonads near the kidneys (which later descend), or the “fluid” is the combined male-female contribution and the body region named is the woman’s, or sulb/tara’ib poetically denotes the loins of the man and chest of the woman respectively (see, e.g., the responses at Infiniti Islam and Answering Christianity).
Counter-Rebuttal
Each rescue, critics observe, requires the verse to be about something other than what it says: the fluid described is “ejected/gushing” semen, an adult phenomenon, not an embryonic structure; and the multiplicity of mutually exclusive apologetic readings (man’s back and woman’s ribs; gonadal embryology; pure metonymy) signals that the plain sense — semen comes from the torso region between back and ribs, as Greek physicians taught — is being avoided because it is wrong.