Is it a contradiction that humans are made in God’s image and from dust?

No. The contradiction only appears when figurative language is taken literally. The human body emerged from the earth through long stages, and the human spirit bears the imprint of God.

Holy scriptures often speak in images and parables. When these are misunderstood, they seem to contradict each other. Human beings are made in God’s image because they can carry something of God’s attributes within them, such as knowledge, mercy and justice. Being made from dust, on the other hand, says something about the body and its origin.

The Holy Qur’an explicitly rejects the idea that God kneaded a figure out of clay, breathed into it, and suddenly it had a brain, nerves and blood. Instead it describes human origins from many angles. It mentions dust, water, wet clay and dry, ringing clay. It says that human beings once grew from the earth like a plant, and that there was a time when they were nothing worth mentioning.

When these passages are read together, a sequence appears, a creation in stages, as the first verse above says. Life began with water and earth, passed through many stages and finally led to human beings. The Holy Qur’an also says that all life came from a single being, and that its partner was then created from it. So reproduction without a partner later became reproduction between two partners.

Human beings, then, are made of dust as far as the body is concerned, and they carry the imprint of God in their spirit. The two complete each other. Many people have lost their faith because they thought God’s word and God’s work contradicted each other. But whoever reads scripture carefully finds that both tell the same truth.