Quranic Sciences Institute
Our Mission
To promote a scientific understanding of the Qurʾān through educational content, including books and documentaries, and fostering public and scholarly dialogue through accessible media and learning platforms.
Who We Are
The Quranic Sciences Institute (QSI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded on the premise that any meaningful roadmap to human prosperity must be rooted in both science and a precise understanding of the natural world. We exist to bridge those two great traditions of inquiry, divine revelation and empirical science, not by subordinating one to the other, but by demonstrating how both converge on the same fundamental truths.
Our work is grounded in the Qurʾānology series — a 20-volume body of research by Dr. Karim Rastegar, M.D., Ph.D. The series proceeds from a close reading of the Qurʾān's own internal structure: its distinction between the muḥkamāt, verses that are clear and direct, and the mutashābihāt, verses that are analogical and layered in meaning. Dr. Rastegar's central argument is that the mutashābihāt were not obscure by accident — they encoded descriptions of empirical reality in the language available at the time of revelation, designed to yield deeper meaning as human scientific knowledge advanced. The series works through that process of retrieval across disciplines including cosmology, physics, the life sciences, neuroscience, and the study of human society.
Through the publication of books, production of educational documentaries, and maintenance of open-access digital resources, QSI aims to make this body of knowledge available to readers, researchers, educators, and seekers of truth around the world.
What We Do
QSI pursues its mission through four core activities. First, though the publication and distribution of the Qurʾānology series — a comprehensive academic work spanning 20 volumes across disciplines including physics, cosmology, earth sciences, neuroscience, psychology, and social theory. Second, the production of educational documentaries (short clips of twelve films are currently available on our YouTube channel, in Persian with English subtitles, covering topics from the creation of the universe to the nature of the soul). Third, maintaing a bilingual (English and Persian) digital platform providing open-access resources for scholars, educators, and the general public. Fourth, fostering dialogue and creating space for scholars of science and religion to engage in thoughtful, evidence-based conversation about the deepest questions of existence.
Our Approach
We do not seek to prove religion through science, nor to fit revelation into scientific theory. What this body of work asks, more simply, is whether the Qurʾān contains a description of the world that rewards careful reading in light of what we now know; not because the text was written with modern science in mind, but because the questions it raises are genuinely the same questions that science has spent centuries trying to answer. We ask whether the Qurʾān, properly understood, contains a coherent and empirically grounded description of the world, one that was encoded in the language available at the time of revelation, and designed to be progressively unlocked as human scientific knowledge advanced. That inquiry, pursued honestly and without a predetermined conclusion, is what this work is about, and the answer, after decades of rigorous inquiry, is that it does..
This is a work of scholarship, grounded in evidence, open to scrutiny, and addressed to anyone willing to follow the argument wherever it leads.