RE: Pre-Uthman Quran Found in England
July 22, 2015 at 3:57 pm
(This post was last modified: July 22, 2015 at 4:00 pm by Rayaan.)
(July 22, 2015 at 11:46 am)Minimalist Wrote: They should test Luxenberg's thesis on it and try reading it in Syriac.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Syro-A..._the_Koran
Quote:According to Luxenberg, the Qur'an was not written in classical Arabic but in a mixed Arabic-Syriac language, the traders' language of Mecca and it was based on Christian liturgical texts. When the final text of the Qur'an was codified, those working on it did not understand the original sense and meaning of this hybrid trading language any more, and they forcefully and randomly turned it into classical Arabic. This gave rise to a lot of misinterpretations. Something like this can only have happened if there was a gap in the oral transmission of the Qur'anic text. That idea is in serious disagreement with the views of both traditional Muslims and western scholars of Islam
It probably escaped you that almost all languages have borrowed words from previous languages and then those words became incorporated into the new language - with the addition of some lexcial re-arrangements.
For example, you know that the word "alcohol" is obviously an English word. But the word also has an Arabic origin, which comes from the root word al-kuhl, a powder used as an eyeliner. So, in the same way, certain words in the Quran may have a Syro-Aramaic origin, but that doesn't mean that the words themselves are not Arabic. If you still really believe Luxenberg's argument that the Quran was not written in pure Arabic but rather in a "mixed Arabic-Syriac language," then you also have to agree that Darwins On the Origin of Species was written not in English but in a mixed English-Greek-Latin-French-etc. language.
Muslim and Western scholars are already aware that many of the words in the Quran are variations of words that are originally found in the Syriac and Aramaic languages. These words already became a part of the Arabic dictionary during that time, and again, this is a well-known phenomenon that has occurred even in the English language as it gradually evolved over the course of time, along with many other languages. It has always been like that.
