This entry considers Surah al-Alaq 96:15-16, which calls the forelock (nasiyah) 'lying' and 'sinning,' and the reading that connects it to the functions of the prefrontal cortex behind the forehead. The case here is weak, resting on the reinterpretation of a rhetorical phrase.
The source text
كَلَّا لَئِن لَّمْ يَنتَهِ لَنَسْفَعًۢا بِٱلنَّاصِيَةِ
“No! If he does not desist, We will surely drag him by the forelock -”
Qur'an 96:15 · Saheeh International
نَاصِيَةٍ كَـٰذِبَةٍ خَاطِئَةٍ
“A lying, sinning forelock.”
Qur'an 96:16 · Saheeh International
What was understood in the seventh century
In the seventh century the forelock, the front of the head above the forehead, was a familiar idiom for seizing or humbling a person; to take someone 'by the forelock' was to have them wholly in one's power. There was no knowledge that the region of the brain behind the forehead governs decision-making, judgment, or the deliberate telling of a lie.
The verses are addressed to a defiant opponent, traditionally identified as Abu Jahl, warning that if he does not desist he will be dragged 'by the forelock, a lying, sinning forelock.' The plain sense is a threat of humiliation against a particular man, with the forelock standing for the person who is to be seized. The moral qualities 'lying' and 'sinning' are attached to the forelock as a way of characterizing the man himself.
The modern correspondence
The functions of the prefrontal cortex, the brain region directly behind the forehead, were mapped only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The case of Phineas Gage in 1848, whose personality and judgment changed after an iron rod destroyed part of his frontal lobe, was an early clue, and later lesion studies and imaging refined the picture. Neuroscience associates this region with planning, decision-making, moral judgment, and, in studies of deception, with the initiation of lies.
Commentators connect the verse's attribution of lying and sinning to the forelock with these functions, reading the moral characterization of the front of the head as pointing to the prefrontal cortex that lies just behind it. The correspondence argued here is between the location named and the brain region now linked to deceit and wrongdoing. The Britannica entry on the prefrontal cortex, cited below, sets out the functions invoked.
Considerations and counterpoints
Critics point out that 'seizing by the forelock' is a well-attested Arabic idiom for domination and humiliation, and that calling the forelock 'lying and sinning' is a figure of speech, a metonymy in which the part stands for the lying, sinning person, not an anatomical claim about the frontal lobe. The verse targets a specific opponent in a specific dispute, and the neuroscience reading requires importing modern findings to reinterpret what is, on its face, a rhetorical phrase about seizing a defiant man by the hair.
Credibility rating: Tier 3 · Contested — The link to the prefrontal cortex is an interpretive overlay on a verse whose plain meaning is seizing a specific defiant man (traditionally Abu Jahl) by the hair.