Contextual Facts on Code 19
(From the Introductory pages of Edip Yuksel’s recent book, NINETEEN: God’s Signature in Nature and Scripture, Brainbowpress, 2011, 620 pages)
1. Code 19 provides a powerful evidence for God’s existence, as expected, envisioned or demanded by some philosophers and scientists, such as Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, Paul Dirac, and Carl Sagan.
2. Code 19 was hidden in the 74th chapter of the Quran The Hidden, for 19×74 (1406) lunar years, and was discovered in 1974 by my colleague, Dr. Rashad Khalifa, an Egyptian-American biochemist. The number 19 has been a major controversy since its discovery and the number has realized all its assigned functions according to the prophetic verses of Chapter 74.
3. Because of the implications of his discovery of the Secret, as well as his strong criticism of the sectarian teachings based on Hadith and Sunna, Rashad was declared a heretic/apostate by leading Sunni scholars from 38 countries who held an emergency conference in Saudi Arabia in 1989 to discuss the Salman Rushdie controversy. While Rushdi survived, Rashad was assassinated in this Masjid in January 31, 1990, by a terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda. The author of this book also received similar fatwa, yet he has escaped several assassination attempts, so far.
4. Code 19, which was also discovered in the original portions of the Old Testament by Judah ben Samuel in 11th century, is simple to understand but impossible to imitate.
5. Code 19 has little to do with numerology, since its literary-numerical (LitNu) pattern can be verified or falsified through scientific inquiry. It is radically different from the pattern demonstrated in The Bible Code, which has no statistical value.
6. Unlike regular metaphysical or paranormal claims, Code 19 can be verified or falsified by virtually anyone, since the Arabic version of the Quran is available everywhere. Besides, for the most part, the reader does not need to know Arabic but only two eyes to see, an ability to count, a critical mind, and an open mind and heart to witness extraordinary signs as the fulfillment of a great prophecy.
7. This discovery has created a paradigm change among those who witness it: ―instead of joining a religious bandwagon by blindly believing a holy story or hearsay, we must be critical thinkers; we must question everything and seek truth through knowledge. The code suggests a “Copernican revolution” in theology of religions. Instead of Krishna-centered, or Jesus-centered, or Muhammad-centered religions we must turn to the original center, to the God-centered model. The message of rational monotheism has sparked an ongoing controversy in countries with Muslim-majority populations, e.g., Egypt, Pakistan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, etc. Internet forums are filled with heated debates regarding this code.
8. A majority of people, including many adherents of Sunni and Shiite religions so far have not been able to witness this extraordinary divine sign. Code 19 proved one more time the Quranic maxim that the majority of people in fact do not seek nor follow the truth. It exposed billions of believers; contrary to what they pretend, they do not acknowledge the Truth but they are believers in their culture and are herds in various bandwagons (27:82).
9. Code 19 is one the greatest discoveries in human history, since it provides an extraordinary and universal evidence for God’s existence. The evidence is hundred percent objective, yet paradoxically it has a subjective pre-requisite, akin to the pre-requisite of keeping both eyes open in order to witness a 3-D picture made of random dots. This is exactly in accordance to the prophetic description in Chapter 74. As it is the case with computer generated random dot 3D stereograms, in order to witness one of the greatest miracles, some conditions need to be met.
10. By distinguishing those who regress and those who progress, Code 19 has opened a new era. (74:37). Code 19 distinguishes rational monotheists from the blind followers of manmade hearsay collections and sectarian teachings, as well as from those who give lip service to the Quran to serve their political, financial, and personal agendas (27:82).
11. Code 19 shed light on some multiple-meaning (mutashabih) and prophetic verses, in some cases enriching the meaning of many verses of the Quran. For instance, it explained the meaning and function of the combination of alphabet letters initializing 29 chapters.
12. Code 19 showed that the Quran is not an ordinary book, but a very interesting and unique book.
13. Code 19 showed us that there is indeed a force, negative energy called Satan, which exerts hypnotic power over its constituents. Those who decide not to use their God-given minds to their full potentials are blinded by their masters; they cannot see and appreciate the precise and obvious divine signs and their message (7:146).
14. The improbability and impossibility of the numerical structure of the Quran being produced by a medieval Arab genius becomes evident when we consider the following factors:
- It includes simple elements of the Quran and goes deeper to an interlocking system of complex numerical patterns and relationships.
- It involves not only frequencies of letters and words but also the numerical values of letters.
- It involves not only an intricate numerical pattern but also a huge set of data consisting of units with multiple functions, such as letters that are also digits, words that are also numbers.
- The nemeroliteral aspect of the Quran were not known by the adherents of the Quran until late 1960s and especially, 1974.
- The literary aspect of the Quran has received praises from many literary giants throughout centuries.
- The scientific accuracy of Quranic statements on various fields has been immaculate.
- Muhammad was one of the busiest and greatest social and political reformists in human history.
- The timing of the discovery of the code is precice and prophetic.
- A series of prophetic events regarding the code has been fulfilled.
15. Whether we like it or not, the Creator of the universe decided to design creatures that could make independent decisions from their original program. For some reasons that we may not know now, the Omniscient and Omnipotent Creator, by bringing specific limitations to His powers, is testing some of these creatures with their given ability to choose. He will later discard those programs that are infected with viruses and will select those who made good and proper decisions. Put it in computer terminology, Code 19 is one of those virus detectors. Its release year is 1974. It diagnoses the brains infected with the most destructive viruses called bigotry and polytheism, as well as the brains that are healthy. However, many people do not want to face the fact that the Hellfire and Smoke they see all over Chapter 74 is, in fact, the product of their own infected mind, their imagination.
16. You may understand nothing from the information shared in this book and you may wonder by saying “So what? What does this number mean?” You may choose to be duped by the ingrates or extreme skeptics who are good in hiding the truth and distorting the facts. Or you may witness one of the greatest miracles. If you become one of the few lucky witnesses with clear vision, nothing will be the same for you. You will experience the taste of eternal peace, love and happiness starting in this life on this lowly planet. You will respond to tragedies and miseries with resolve and dignity, and you will respond to blessings and gains with humility and appreciation. As an active peacemaker, you will stand against falsehood, superstitions, hedonism, corruption, oppression, racism, nationalism, misogyny, intolerance and injustices without fear and hesitation. You will no longer believe in religious stories, you will no longer accept others as holy power-brokers between you and your Creator, and you will no more compromise your brain with illogical and nonsensical dogmas and taboos. You will no longer be a sheep exploited and manipulated by kings and priests, sultans and mullahs, rajahs and maharajs, politicians and pundits, atheists and polytheists. You will no more accept the claims of any “holy book” without unequivocal evidence. You will no more turn yourself into a schizophrenic character by allocating prime regions of your brain for contradictory beliefs, bizarre stories and Trojan horses. You will be a perpetual seeker of truth and submit yourself to the Truth alone. And the Truth will set you free. You will be honest; whenever your errors are shown, you will correct yourself. You will know that there is God, a Loving God, and you will receive God’s communication through countless yet consistent signs received from multiple channels: brain, heart, nature, scripture, and your personal experience. You will be as rational as a human can be, and you will have no doubt about the purpose of life, eternity and resurrection. Though you will not find all the answers to your philosophical questions, but you will find answers to the most important ones. Of course, as a natural consequence of your appreciation and responsibility as a witness, you will share this message of rational monotheism with your friends and relatives in the best possible manner and expecting no reward from them.
17. The author of this book challenges theologians, mathematicians, philosophers, thinkers, believers, agnostics and atheists, specifically, the living Pope, Evangelist Rick Warren, Atheist Richard Dawkins, Skeptic Michael Shermer, Mathematician Ian Stewart, professors at al-Azhar University, Ayatollahs in Qum, and other prominent scholars, including those who live in Ivory Towers, to respond to the function of Code 19 that provides extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claims made by the Quran. The author is ready for face-to-face public debates at the place of their choice. The author also claims right to the James Randy Educational Foundation’s Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge and expects the JREF test his assertions regarding the fulfillment of the prophecies in Chapter 74 of the Quran.
18. The author invites all mathematicians and specifically the mathematicians who have signed a petition rejecting the assertions made by the so-called Bible Code to examine Code19. They rightly rejected its claims in a petition published at CalTech.
“We refer in particular to the paper Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis, published in Statistical Science in 1994. This experiment suffers from major problems concerning both its execution and the interpretation of its conclusions. Even without these concerns, we would not take such extraordinary claims seriously without a vastly more systematic and thorough investigation. No such investigation has been carried out, nor has the work so far established a prima facie case. In addition, word clusters such as mentioned in Witztum’s and Drosnin’s books and the so called messianic codes are an uncontrolled phenomenon and similar clusters will be found in any text of similar length. All claims of incredible probabilities for such clusters are bogus, since they are computed contrary to standard rules of probability and statistics.”
Thus, I invite the same mathematicians who rejected the Bible Code to critically evaluate the merits of the Quranic assertion that the Quran itself is a numerically coded divine book, and the number 19 provides extraordinary evidence for its claims:
Robert E. L. Aldred, Dror Bar-Natan, Jay H. Beder, Valentina M. Borok, Robert Brooks, Mark Burgin , George M. Butler, Gary A. Chase, E. B. Davies, Percy Deift, Persi Diaconis, Laurence S. Freedman, Fritz Gesztesy, Sheldon Goldstein, Lawrence F. Gray, Rami Grossberg, Lee O. Hagglund, A. Michael Hasofer, Tim Hesterberg, Peter Hines, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, Gil Kalai, Fima Klebaner, David Klein, Richard N. Lane, Joel Lebowitz, Nati Linial, Gary Lorden, Brendan McKay, Tom Metzger, Stephen D. Miller, Paul Nevai, Amos Nevo, Eli Passow, John Allen Paulos, Yehuda Pinchover, Alexander Pruss, Maurice Rojas, Mary Beth Ruskai, Jeremy Schiff, Gideon Schwarz, Senya Shlosman, Barry Simon, Martha Simon, J. Laurie Snell, Terry Speed, Terence Tao, Ian Wanless, Thomas Ward, Herbert S. Wilf , Henry Wolkowicz, Abraham Wyner, Doron Zeilberger, Yakov I. Zhitomirskii…
Knowing that scientists and scholars too are not immune from popular prejudices, I do not expect much from mathematicians. Compared to religious communities, scientific communities provide more freedom to their members. Yet they too have their own conventions and taboos. There are red lines in each scientific community, and scientists who dare to challenge them may risk being penalized through excommunication, defamation, or loss of their jobs. For instance, questioning the atheistic spin on the theory of evolution could be considered an anathema in the biological field. Likewise, questioning the double standard in discriminating between the consumption of alcohol and other drugs might be costly for a scientist living in a world where the horrific harms of alcohol consumption to human health and morals are minimized, ignored, or even suppressed by interest groups ―such as beer and wine industries, as well as the scientists and media personnel who financially benefit from them― under the mantra of beneficial effects of “drinking in moderation.”
So I am not surprised if two scientist colleagues of mine, who had been supportive of this work for years, now decline to write positive reviews of my work. One of them is an accomplished mathematician and the other is a professor of statistics at a major US university. I cannot justify such fear, and I consider it a sign of weakness in the academic and business establishment. Phillip Davis of Brown University and Reuben Hersh of University of New Mexico support my impression:
“It is the writer’s impression that most contemporary mathematicians and scientists are agnostics, or if they profess to a religious belief, they keep their science and their religion in two separate boxes. What might be described as the ‘conventional scientific’ view considers mathematics the foremost example of a field where reason is supreme, and where emotion is does not enter; where we know with certainty, and know that we know; where truths of today are truths forever. This view considers religion, by contrast, a realm of pure belief unaffected by reason. In this view, all religions are equal because all are equally incapable of verification and justification.”[i]
Many mathematicians and scientists apparently are constrained to consider spending even a few minutes on this work, let alone studying it carefully and objectively. They may confuse the teaching of the Quran with the backwards religious teachings and practices of Sunni or Shiite sects. They may be suspicious of anything with religious connotations. They may be influenced by the political agendas and propaganda of Western imperialism against backwards countries with predominantly Muslim populations. They may have bad experience with similar claims such as the so-called Bible Code and confuse this work with esoteric numerology. They may also feel incompetent in assessing the value of the claims, since they assume it to be heavily dependent on the knowledge of Arabic, which is not.
As for Arabic-speaking scientists, or more generally, Muslim scientists, they may have extra impediments: the prejudices caused by Sunni and Shiite teachings, fear of violence from religious zealots who are extremely irritated when they see or hear about the number Nineteen, fear of condemnation by religious scholars who remain innumerate and ignorant, and/or fear of repressive governments that imprison and kill those who are declared as heretics…
On the other hand, I also know that critics have helped us to learn and appreciate more about this amazing evidence. Even if one of these mathematicians shows the courage and wisdom to study and then witness this prophetic sign, it might encourage their peers to get over their prejudices.
Though mathematicians are objective in their professions, when they are confronted with philosophical or theological arguments, most react skeptically, which is justifiable. However, there is a line between skepticism and dogmatism, between confidence and bigotry.
[i] Philip J. Davis & Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1981, 1983, 10th edition, p. 109.