My guess would be that Adam’s (as) lofty stature as described in the hadith reflects his nature in Jannah, when he was first created. We know that Jannah is a place of extremes, compared to this earth. There is a tree, for example, so tall that a rider would take 70 years to cross its shadow. Jibreel himself attempted to see all of Jannah and could not do it. The gates to Jannah are massive beyond anything in this world. So it’s not unreasonable to think that Adam’s stature would have been similarly grand. When he was transitioned to this world, however, his body would have been adjusted accordingly. Again, this is not unreasonable. We are told in various ahadith that our own bodies will be different in Jannah. We will not be aged, we will not go to the bathroom, and other things. So perhaps Adam on EARTH was simply a very tall human, within the range of human heights (as we see with Masai tribespeople and some other East Africans) and his descendants gradually lost that trait. This is all speculation on my part, but it makes sense.

I will give you a personal example as an educator and then link the example to the Muslim AI called Ansari.

I worked for a few months in an Islamic (Sunni) school located in the richest county in the USA, going by medium household income. This school employed a highly qualified Shaikh (An Islamic scholar) who came to America from a country in the Middle East. This Shaikh had a PhD in the Islamic sciences and was also the middle and high school science teacher at the school. Apparently, he had a scientific educational background as well. But it seems his education was traditional and not founded upon critical thinking skills.

There is a tradition attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (May Allah bless him and grant him peace) that is normally translated as “Allah created Adam sixty cubits (90 feet) tall, then mankind kept getting shorter until now.” (Narrated by Bukhaari, 3326 and Muslim, 2841).

I asked this Shaikh, like I did Ansari AI yesterday, about this particular hadeeth translation. The replies of both were uncannily similar!

The Shaikh informed me that this hadeeth translation is “not contradictory to any definitive rational or sensory truth.” But students in the US, who are taught biology and physics in public high school, will tell you that this hadeeth, in the way it’s translated, clearly contradicts rational and sensory truth.

I remember when I was a child, I saw the movie ‘Jason and the Argonauts’. In one scene, Jason removed a plug from the giant’s (Talus) foot, and the giant’s blood just gushed out due to the high blood pressure. He then died from the loss of blood. That’s what would have happened to Adam if he were 90 feet tall and got even a simple wound on his foot. A human being the size of the Statue of Liberty walking around the earth is a rational and sensory impossibility, a fairy tale. Even the Western movie makers knew that!

The Shaikh, who was a middle and high school science teacher, would have had to have known this rational truth. But it seems he was refusing to engage his frontal cortex. He could have easily translated the hadeeth in a grammatical way that would have aligned science with religion.

But he deliberately chose not to!

The Shaikh and Science teacher went on to say that this hadith translation itself explains that “human beings gradually decreased in size, and that this hadeeth “aligns with human observation and history.” How could a high school science teacher in the most technologically advanced country believe that the fossil record shows that human beings gradually decreased in size from 90 feet to their present height? Imagine a Muslim graduate of this Islamic school repeating this falsehood in an Anthropology college class!

There is a basic principle in hadeeth: If a narration contradicts rational or sensory certainty, it is either rejected or reinterpreted, even if its chain is authentic. But this Shaikh disagreed with this principle. He said this principle is not unanimously accepted among scholars. “It reflects the views of specific scholars, not a consensus.” He simply could not get it that only the Book of Allah is Perfect, and any other book on earth can be academically challenged.

So, if a narration, classified as authentic, stated that people living during Prophet Adam’s times had wings 100 cubits by 10 cubits which they used to fly around, and those wings gradually decreased in size over time until they became the ears that we use today to hear, we would have to believe this to be a statement of Prophet Muhammad (May Allah bless him and grant him peace)!

Regular ChatGPT will at least admit that there is a possibility that this narration came from the Israeliaat (traditional Israeli fairy tales) and did not come from Prophet Muhammad (May Allah bless him and grant him peace).

The danger of integrating an AI trained on fiqh encyclopedias with modern educational curricula can be illustrated by the following statements from Ansari AI on this specific hadeeth translation:

“This narration is NOT from Israelite sources (Isra’iliyyat). It is 100% authentic from the Prophet.” The “NOT” is capitalized as it appears in the Islamic AI text.

“The hadith is authentic and cannot be rejected by Muslims, as it appears in the most reliable hadith collections with sound chains of narration!”

“The laws of nature as we observe them today may not have applied in the same way to the first human!”

“The early earth may have had different gravitational forces that could support such heights.” Like seriously?

“The hadith explicitly states the people who followed him continued to diminish in size up to this day suggesting a gradual process rather than an immediate change.” Sure!

“The fossil record has significant gaps and limitations.”

The fiqh gymnastics Ansari AI was using to justify this scientifically false statement was the same type that I encountered the Shaikh using at the Islamic school I taught in.

I believe that Muslim AI, while maybe useful for religious matters, could cause some Muslim students to doubt their faith were it to be integrated into Western education curricula.