Salman Hameed in his blog Irtiqa:
Business Recorder – Pakistan's biggest financial daily – confirms that little knowledge, when combined with pre-existing religious beliefs, can be a source of a major embarrassment (hat tip to Muhammad Akbar Hussain and Zakir Thaver). This story also upsets me personally as the Business Recorder idiocy is related to astronomy. Okay, I don't want to make you wait any longer. Here is the headline: “Signs of the Day of Judgement: NASA confirms the possibility of sun rising from the West”
So first you notice that the story is about religion – rather than science. Second, there is a clear desire to seek an affirmation of a religious claim from science. Third, the source of authority regarding this lies in the West – in this case (and quite often) NASA (even though there is no mention of NASA in the story itself). Nidhal Guessoum recently attended a whole meeting dedicated to finding science in the Qur'an – and you can read his posts here and here.But what is this bold claim, in a major newspaper, based upon? Well, as it turns out, it is based upon a gross misunderstanding of how planets of our solar system appear to move in the sky. Muslim astronomers, a thousand years ago, had a better understanding of astronomy than these editors of Business Recorder in the 21st century.
More here.