Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Zaid Ghazzawi
June 21, 2010
I show here a pilot episode from the proposed TV program as an example for the
methodology adopted in presenting all the episodes in the program, and I chose here the
episode entitled: (The Superiority of The Quran in The Field of Civil Engineering: Designing
an Earthquake Resistant Structure from The Quran)
Such that each episode will be presented in three parts which are:
1. Presenting a problem in a certain field, and in this episode the problem is not knowing
the optimal design for an earthquake resistant structure.
2. Showing how to solve this problem by pondering upon the verses of the last revelation to
people (i.e. The Quran).
3. Illustrating how to practically apply the theoretical solution found from The Quran.
These three parts are shown in more details in the following pages.
In civil engineering there is a big problem which is that till this date there is no adequate
design for a building that would enable it to withstand the large vibrations produced by
earthquakes, and as a result of this when an earthquake strikes a certain area the damage
to the structures within this area is extensive.
There are many attempts to strengthen the structure to resist earthquakes and most of
these attempts focus on increasing the thickness of structural material like steel and
cement and adding extra reinforcing walls, however, there is a main problem in this which
is that this kind of reinforcement increases the weight of the building which in turns
increases the stress on the building due to its own weight (self-loading phenomenon). This
phenomenon increases the risk of structural collapse due to the structure’s own weight.
Thus in conclusion it can be said that there is no adequate design to date strong enough to
withstand earthquakes. In the following page the solution to this problem from the
guidance of The Quran will be shown.
The solution from The Quran to the problem of not finding a structure that can optimally
withstand earthquakes can be found by pondering upon one verse of The Quran which is
verse 68 of chapter 16 as shown in the figure above. Such that Allah (God) urges us to
ponder upon how He created the habitation of the bees, and if we do that we realize that the
a bee hive is a structure which is strong, stiff, light weight, and resistant to large vibrations
produced from the bees around the hive knowing that the vibrations produced by bees are
far greater than any earthquake known to people. The specifications found in bee hives are
the same specifications required in an earthquake resistant structure, which means that if
we ponder upon the design of a bee hive we can find concepts that can be applied into man
made engineering structures to optimize these structures.
We can summarize how we can apply practically the solution from The Quran on the design
of structures that can withstand earthquakes in the following:
If we ponder upon the angle between the walls of the bee hive then we find it to be 120
degrees, while the angle people’s construct the walls of structures upon is 90 degrees, and
in order to study the difference this change in the angle makes on the strength of a
structure I made two computer models as shown in the figure shown above, such that one of
these models is based on 90 degrees angle and the other is made on 120 degrees angle.
The results of the computer simulation show that there is a reduction of 91% in
displacement values in the model based on the 120 degrees angle which means that the
structure made on 120 degrees angle is much stronger and more stable than the structure
based on the 90 degrees angle.
This indicates that if we build structures based on the creation of Allah (God) of bee hives
then we will have structures that can withstand large vibrations like those produced from
earthquakes and at the same time use smaller quantities of structural materials in building
structures. These computer models show how to apply practically The Quranic Solution
shown in the previous step.