64فَكَذَّبوهُ فَأَنجَيناهُ وَالَّذينَ مَعَهُ فِي الفُلكِ وَأَغرَقنَا الَّذينَ كَذَّبوا بِآياتِنا ۚ إِنَّهُم كانوا قَومًا عَمينَMuhammad AsadAnd yet they gave him the lie! And so We saved him and those who stood by him, in the ark, the while We caused those who had given the lie to Our messages to drown: verily, they were blind folk!1Explaining this verse in his translation of the Qur'an, Muhammad Ali rightly points out that 212 the latter "does not support the theory of a world deluge, for it plainly states ... that only people to whom Noah had delivered his message called him a liar, and ... were drowned .... Hence the deluge affected the territory of Noah's people, not the whole world, as the Bible would have us believe." To this may be added that the deluge spoken of in the Bible, in the myths of Sumeria and Babylonia, and, finally, in the Qur'an, most probably represents the inundation, during the Ice Age, of the huge basin which today is covered by the Mediterranean: an inundation which was due to the break-in of the Atlantic through the land-barrier at the modern Gibraltar, and of the Black Sea through what is now the Dardanelles.