There is a controversy of sorts within Islam concerning a sentence or two in their holy books which assert that during a visit by Mohammed to Mecca, the Moon was split apart such that one piece was hidden behind a mountain, and another appeared in front of it.

First note that any Muslim recounting this story accurately will say that Allah split the Moon, not Mohammed.

Various interpretations exist of the supposed celestial event. For example, some consider it allegorical or indicative of an end-times event, not of that day and year in which Mohammed visited Mecca. Others consider it may have been an optical illusion. Others have suggested it may have been an asteroid impact, but that would have been a very large impact and there are no craters for which this is a plausible explanation.

Some weak correlative evidence exists for this event in that a King in India said that he saw it. However, he was a convert to Islam. In ancient times, there were many sky watchers and they recorded their findings. That is how they came to have knowledge of the cycles of lunar and solar eclipses. We can call this “weak collaborative evidence” because it has only the one person as a source, instead of dozens of places where it is recorded.

Some short decades ago, it might have been said that “No scientific evidence exists that the Moon was split apart and later rejoined.”  However, with the continually evolving planetary database we have today of the Moon, today we can say.

“Anyone can look at the Moon in detail down to about one meter resolution and see that no evidence exists on the surface of the Moon that it was split apart and rejoined.”  If the Moon had split apart, there would be massive evidence of it in the LRO image database.  There is no such thing. The Moon shows clearly a long extended time frame of development, several billion years of it.

This is because the top few millimeters of the surface are weathered by the impact of solar rays and particles.  This is why a “young crater” may be bright white, while older formations are grey, as seen from Earth.  “Young” as far as lunar science goes is less than, say, a hundred million years.  Therefore we are clearly able to talk about no “splitting of the Moon” having occurred at the time of Mohamed, some 1400 years ago.  And may PBUH (peace be unto him).