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Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
The transcription of Arabic and Syriac letters
mostly follows the standard transcription with the following
difference: Arabic Qur’ān,dad and za are written
d. and z. respectively; Arabic kh in
khalifa and Syriac
het is
written
hammad, Arabic was not a written language.
Syro-Aramaic or Syriac was the language of written
communication in the Near East from the second to the seventh
centuries A.D. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, was the language
of Edessa, a city-state in upper Mesopotamia. While Edessa
ceased to be a political entity, its language became the
vehicle of Christianity and culture, spreading throughout Asia
as far as Malabar and eastern China. Until the rise of the
Qur’ān, Syriac was the medium of wider communication
and cultural dissemination for Arameans, Arabs, and to a lesser
extent Persians. It produced the richest literary expression in
the Near East from the fourth century (Aphrahat and Ephraem)
until it was replaced by Arabic in the seventh and eighth
centuries. Of importance is that the Syriac – Aramaic
literature and the cultural matrix in which that literature
existed was almost exclusively Christian. Part of
Luxenberg’s study shows that Syriac influence on those
who created written Arabic was transmitted through a Christian
medium, the influence of which was fundamental.
hadīth literature
which reports that Muhammad instructed
his followers to know Syriac (as well as Hebrew). This can only
be the case because these were the literary forerunners of
written Arabic. Luxenberg conceived his study to test the
following hypothesis: since written Syriac was the written
language of the Arabs, and since it informed the cultural
matrix of the Near East, much the same way that Akkadian did
before it and Arabic after it, then it is very likely that
Syriac exerted some influence on those who developed written
Arabic. Luxenberg further proposes, that these Arabs were
Christianized, and were participants in the Syriac Christian
liturgy.
hammad to
cUthmān, and its thematic content rest on
arguments drawn from evidence collected and examined through
the tools of philological and text-critical methods. No part of
the method rests on a blind acceptance of religious or
traditional assumptions of any kind, especially on the part of
the Arabian commentators. Until now, Western critical
commentators of the first rank have not been critical enough in
this regard and Luxenberg directly and indirectly through his
conclusions proves that their trust was betrayed. Hence any
argument that seeks to prove Luxenberg’s findings
incorrect cannot assume that the earliest Arabian commentators
understood correctly the grammar and lexicon of the Arabic of
the Qur’ān. This is an important contribution of the
study.
khalifa
cUthmān ibn
cAffan (A.D. 644-656) first assembled into a single
book the written record of the utterances of Muhammad (A.D. 570-632). The Qur’ān is the
first book of the Arabic language of which scholars are aware.
It is important because it is the basis for written Arabic, the
language of a sophisticated Medieval civilization, and because
for Muslims it is the source of all religious expression,
theology, and law, and is held to be God’s revelation to
Muhammad. For non-Muslims, it is an
important literary artifact, and deserves to be studied from a
historical as well as a philological perspective.
Abū JaTabarī.cfar Muhammad bin Jarīr at-Tabarī,
Jāmi c al-bayān can
ta’wīl al-Qur’ān (Cairo,
3
Abū l-Fadl Jamāl
ad-Dīn Muhammad bin Mukarram
al-Ifriqī al-Misrī bin
Manzūr, Lisān
al- carab (Beirut, 1955).
Richard Bell, The Qur’ān; Translated,
with a critical rearrangement of the Surahs, vol. 1
(Edinburgh, 1937), vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1939).
Régis Blachère, Le Coran (traduit
de l’arabe) (Paris, 1957).
Rudi Paret, Der Koran; Übersetzung
(Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 2nd ed., 1982).
R. Payne Smith, ed., Thesaurus Syriacus,
vol. 1 (Oxford, 1879), vol. 2 (Oxford, 1901).
Carl Brockelmann, Lexicon Syriacum (Halle in
Saxony, 1928).
Jaques Eugène Mannā, Vocabulaire
Chaldéen – Arabique (Mossul, 1900); reprinted
with new appendix by Raphael J. Bidawid (Beirut, 1975).
Tabarī did not have any
lexicographical tools and only occasionally cites a verse from
pre-Qur’ānic Arabic poetry as support for his
interpretation of a given expression. In such cases the margin
of error is wide because the context for these pre-Islamic
poems is often difficult to ascertain. Even so, in many
instances the Western commentators accept these explanations
uncritically.
lectio
difficilior prevails. Only when the context of an
expression is manifestly unclear, and the Arabian commentators
have no plausible explanation, does Luxenberg explore a
solution that involves changing one or more diacritical points
in the Cairene edition.
Tabarī that the
Western commentators overlooked. If not, then check whether the
Lisān records a meaning unknown to Tabarī and his earlier sources. If this turns
up nothing, check if the Arabic expression has a homonymous
root in Syriac with a different meaning which fits the context.
In many cases, Luxenberg found that the Syriac word with its
meaning makes more sense. It is to be noted, that these first
steps of the heuristic do not emend the consonantal text of the
Cairene edition of the Qur’ān.
Fernsehen is just the morphemes tele and
visio of English “television” translated
into their German equivalents. A semantic calque assigns the
borrowed meaning to a word that did not have the meaning
previously, but which is otherwise synonymous with the source
word.
hammad was not likely an oral
transmission by memory, contrary to one dominant claim of
Islamic tradition.
qurrā’,
contemporaries of Muhammad such as ibn
cAbbas (d. 692) and maintained by such early
authorities as Anas ibn Mālik (d. 709). Contradicting this
is another tradition, that cUthmān obtained the
"leaves" of the Qur’ān from Muhammad's widow Hafsa, and assembled them into a
codex. The Islamic tradition is unable to pinpoint when the
diacritical points were finally "fixed," a process that
unfolded over three hundred years, according to
Blachère. The reason for the difficulty in tracing the
development of the Qur’ān before
cUthmān is, as Tabarī points out, that cUthmān
destroyed all manuscripts with variant readings of the
consonantal text which disagreed with his final recension.
hammad himself concerning the
indeterminate nature of the Qur’ān's consonantal
text, of which two stories are recorded by Tabarī. The gist of these is that
Muhammad sanctioned any reading of the
text that did not blatantly change a curse into a blessing or
vice-versa. Luxenberg argues that these obviously later stories
reflect what must be a faint recollection of the indeterminacy
of the Arabic alphabet.
hammad's
“flexibility” concerning the text that arose among
the first commentators. In this section, Luxenberg applies his
heuristic method on the Qur’ān to show that the
Qur’ān itself gives evidence that the tradition of
the seven readings, Arabic sab cat ahruf, which were permitted to Mu
matres lectionis, alif, waw, and ya, must
also be polyvalent. Luxenberg points out that Islamic tradition
admits a reading of the mater for long /a/ in certain
instances as /e/ because this pronunciation was a peculiarity
of the Arabic of Mecca. Luxenberg shows that the term
harf, “sign” must
also carry a meaning synonymous to
textus receptus with
fixed diacritical points, such as for the Hebrew Bible.
Moreover, even the earliest Islamic commentators are divided
over many passages and offer sometimes over a dozen possible
interpretations, many mutually exclusive and equally
plausible.
umm kitāb (lit.
“mother of [the] book”), is in heaven or with God
and is the direct and immediate pre-image of the Arabic text
presents the strongest dogmatic challenge to Luxenberg’s
assertion that the Arabic of the Qur’ān is in large
measure not Arabic at all, at least not in the sense the
Arabian commentators understood it. The language of the
Qur’ān is the Arabic dialect of the tribe of
Muhammad, the Quraysh, who were located
in Mecca. This does not rule out the possibility that this
dialect was heavily influenced by Aramaic, and Syriac in
particular. Luxenberg maintains that the Islamic tradition
alludes to such an influence. Tabarī follows the tradition attributed to
Muhammad that a scholar must seek wisdom
"be it in China" and exhorts the philologists of the
Qur’ān, the ahl al-lisān, to seek sound
philological evidence from wherever it may come in order that
the Qur’ān be clearly explained to all. Luxenberg
undertakes in the subsequent chapters to mine the wisdom of
this advice.
qur’ān derives
from the Syriac qeryānā, a technical term from
the Christian liturgy that means "lectionary," the fixed
biblical readings used at the Divine Liturgy throughout the
year. His claim rests on variations in the spelling of the word
attested in early manuscripts. The word
qeryānā had been written without hamza
by Muhammad, according to one early
witness and Luxenberg argues that this reflects a Syriac
influence. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad's dialect pronounced the hamza, the
glottal stop, "weak." Indeed, the arabophone Aramaic Christians
of Syria and Mesopotamia pronounce the hamza in the same
way, approximately /y/. Furthermore, the Arabic-Syriac lexica
which preserve several pre-Islamic variant readings of Arabic
words, give for the Syriac word qeryānā both
qur’ān as well as quryān.
Luxenberg posits the development of the spelling of this word
as follows: qeryān > qurān, written
without alif, then qurān written with
alif, and finally qur’ān, with an
intrusive hamza. The commentators were no longer aware
that ya could represent /ā/, a use extensively
attested in the writing of third-weak verbs. The rest of the
section presents clarifications of other unclear passages where
the obscurity arose from the same phenomenon, sometimes
directly, and sometimes in conjunction with other ambiguities
in the writing system, such as mispointing ta for
ya and then applying the same derivation.
qur’ān. Most striking is the conclusion that
the term umm kitāb, an aramaism, must be a written
source and that the Qur’ān was never intended to
replace this written source. One might complain that the
details of the argument for the reading of suras 12:1-2 and 3:7
are squeezed into footnotes, but nevertheless the argument is
clear. Luxenberg proves that the term qur’ān
itself is the key to unlocking the passages that have given
commentators in and outside of the tradition frustration. If
quryān means “lectionary,” and if the
text itself claims to be a clarification of an earlier text,
then that earlier text must be written in another language. The
only candidate is the Old and New Testament in Syriac, the
Peshitta. Hence the influence of Aramaic on the Arabic of
Muhammad has an identifiable, textual
origin. At the very end of the work, Luxenberg makes a
compelling argument that sura 108 is a close allusion to the
Peshitta of 1 Peter 5:8-9. Indeed this sura, which is only
three lines long, is one of the most difficult passages for the
Arabian as well as the Western commentators. Luxenberg shows
why: it is composed of transcriptions into Arabic writing of
the Syriac New Testament text, i.e., there is almost no
“Arabic” in the sura. These are
“revealed” texts, and insofar as the
Qur’ān contains quotations or paraphrases of them,
the Qur’ān is also “revealed.”
hammad. In the ten places where the
Qur’ān claims to have been written in Arabic,
Luxenberg shows first that these passages have grammatical
forms which are difficult for the commentators and have varying
interpretations among the translators. He notes that in sura
41:44, the Arabic fassala means “to divide,”
but the context here requires "make distinct" or better
"interpret." Nowhere else does the Arabic word have this
meaning, and the Syriac-Arabic lexica do not give the one as a
translation for the other; tarjama (a direct borrowing
from Syriac) is the usual Arabic word for "interpret." However,
the Syriac praš / parreš can mean both
"divide" as well as "interpret" (like Hebrew
hibdīl; also this is an example of a
“semantic calque” mentioned above). Tabarī too understands fassala to be a
synonym for bayyana (sura 44:3), which also has the
meaning "interpret." Sura 41:44 also clearly attests to a
source for the Qur’ān that is written in a foreign
language. Luxenberg, following Tabarī, notes a corruption in the text of this
verse that clearly shows that part of the Qur’ān has
a non-Arabic source. His argument here is somewhat weak if not
for the further evidence deduced from eleven other locations in
the Qur’ān where Luxenberg consistently applies
these and similar arguments to difficulties all of which center
on the terms related to the revelation and language of the
Qur’ān. These arguments leave little doubt, that
Luxenberg has uncovered a key misunderstanding of these terms
throughout the Qur’ān.
h ‘Grieve not; thy Lord has
made your laying-down legitimate.’" Luxenberg’s
lengthy discussion of the complexities of this passage resolve
grammatical difficulties in the Arabic in a way that fits the
context: Jesus gives Mary the courage to face her relatives
even with a child born out of wedlock. The section then
presents lengthy arguments dealing with various lexical,
morphological, syntactic and versification problems in sura
11:116-117.
allah <
alāhā: absolute state alāh;
qarīb, ”near” <
qarībā: absolute state qarīb.
Luxenberg then demonstrates that the loss of the feminine
ending in Qur’ānic Arabic derives from the same
phenomenon. Many Arabic grammatical rules which the earliest
Arabian grammarians first posed to explain these anomalies are
shown to have been ad hoc, written by those who no
longer understood the language in which it had been written. A
similar fate befell the so-called accusative of
specification, which required the noun in the sequence
number + noun to be in the accusative singular. Luxenberg
demonstrates that the noun in every case is really a Syriac
masculine plural noun; singular and plural masculine nouns in
Syriac have the same consonantal spelling.
jaw (sura 16:79) misread “air,
atmosphere” is from Syriac gaw, which means both
“insides, inner part” and can also be used as a
preposition meaning “inside.” In sura 16:79
Luxenberg demonstrates that the prepositional use makes more
sense than the solution posed by the commentators. Classical
Arabic grammar, which was created three hundred years after the
Qur’ān, does not recall the prepositional meaning of
the word. However, dialects of Arabic preserve the original
Syriac prepositional use. So where sura 16:79 reads fī
jaw as-samā’ “in(side) heaven”
referring to birds held aloft and kept from falling down by
God, the dialects agree: fī jawwāt al-bet
“inside the house” is perfectly good Arabic. The
misreading of Qur’ānic Arabic jaw as
“air” has become part of the technical vocabulary
of modern standard Arabic: “air mail,” “air
force,” “airline,” and “weather
report” all use jaw. The imaginary meaning of the
grammarians lives on.
saxxara at
times corresponds to Syriac šaxxar “to
blame, use up” and at times to šawxar
“to keep back, hinder.” The confusion arose because
Syriac šawxar was pronounced in East Syriac and
Mandaic as either šāxar or
šaxxar.
ze for re and jim for
ha(both pairs distinguished only by a single
dot), instead of
On Paradise. Andrae remarked that
hūr was likely from the Syriac word for
“white,” but his solution was to say that the
Qur’ānic usage was somehow metaphorical. Neither he
nor Beck considered that the Arabic “virgin” was a
later misunderstanding on the part of the commentators.
gupnā, “vine,”
grammatically feminine, with which hūr agrees and
from this Andrae concluded that it was a metaphor for
“the virgins of paradise” in the Qur’ān.
In suras 44:54 and 52:20, Luxenberg argues that instead of the
singular
cīn the plural
Luxenberg does not give the place in Ephraem
but cites Edmund Beck, azwaj, “spouses,” also can mean
“species, kinds” (suras 2:25, 3:15, and 4:57). The
latter reading makes more sense “therein also are all
kinds of pure (fruits).” Luxenberg links to the
misunderstanding of sura 44:54 zawwaj, “join,
marry.” The misinterpretation of one verse spills over
into the related thematic content of another. The other
sections are also well-argued. Of special interest are the
discussions in sections 15.5 – 15.6 of suras 55:56 and
55:70, 72, 74, respectively, which state, referring to the
virgins of paradise “whom deflowered before them has
neither man nor jinn.” Instead, these are the
grapes of paradise “that neither man nor jinn have
defiled.” Luxenberg points out that sura 55:72 evidences
another Qur’ānic parallel to Ephraem, who writes
that the vines of paradise abound in “hanging
grapes.”Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers
Hymnen de Paradiso und contra Julianum, in Corpus
Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO), Scriptores Syri t.
78, vols. 174 [Syriac], t. 79, vol. 175 [German translation]
(Louvain, 1957). The passage to which Luxenberg refers is Hymn
VII, stanza 17. In fact, one finds the text in CSCO, vol. 174,
p. 29. There are many similar passages where the fruits
“stretch themselves out” to those in Paradise. See
Sebastian Brock, tr. and commentary, St. Ephrem the Syrian,
Hymns on Paradise (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, 1998).
youths,
Arabic wildun. Sura 76:19 “Round amongst them go
boys of perpetual youth, whom when one see, he thinks them
pearls unstrung” (sura 16.1, citing Bell’s
translation). Wildun is a genuinely Arabic word, but it
is used in a sense which is borrowed from Syriac
yaldā. Youths like pearls is somewhat suspicious,
especially given that “pearls” are a metaphor for
the grapes of paradise from the previous section. Luxenberg
uncovered that Syriac has the expression yaldā
dagpettā, “child of the vine,” appearing
in the Peshitta: Matthew 26:29, Mark 14:25, and Luke 22:18, in
which Christ foreshadows his death and resurrection: “I
will not drink of this child of the vine (yaldā
dagpettā) until the day when I drink it new in the
kingdom of my Father.” Here it is the juice of the grape
that is the “child.” Entries in the Arabic-Syriac
lexica for each of yaldā and gpettā
give in addition to “child” and “vine”
“fruit” and “wine,” respectively.
Luxenberg gives further evidence from suras 37:45, 43:71, and
76:15 that Ephraem the Syrian’s depiction of the grapes
of paradise is behind the original Qur’ānic
text.
’a which has stumped
the commentators and the grammarians is really two different
words: the Syriac word ’aw “or” and
the Syriac ’ēn “if, when.”
Omitting here the details of the argument, this sura is to be
read as a call to participate in liturgical prayer and has the
“character of a Christian-Syriac prooemium, which
in the later tradition was replaced by the fati ha (from Syriac
cUthmān in preparing his
redaction of the Qur’ān. Luxenberg presents the two
hadīth traditions recounting how
cUthmān came to possess the first manuscript.
If Luxenberg’s analysis is even in broad outline correct,
the content of the Qur’ān was substantially
different at the time of Muhammad and
cUthmān’s redaction played a part in the
misreading of key passages. Were these misreadings intentional
or not? The misreadings in general alter the Qur’ān
from a book that is more or less harmonious with the New
Testament and Syriac Christian liturgy and literature to one
that is distinct, of independent origin.