The Qur'an in its historical context (pdf - Islam and Christian-Muslim ...

CLAUDE GILLIOT
for him the “readings” (qira’at, i.e. variae lectiones) of that ductus express the
influence of the poetic language.
Jonathan Owens has shown recently that the practice of the “major assimilation”
(i.e. a consonantal assimilation between words) traditionally linked with the
reader Abu ‘Amr (d. 154/770) does not imply linguistically the loss of the inflectional
ending, but only the absence of short vowels, inflectional or not, at
the ending. This means that: “[Voller’s] assumption that there was a koranic
variant without case ending receives plausible support from the koranic reading
tradition itself.” 79
Generally things are changing with the progress in Arabic studies of sociolinguistics
and historical linguistics. Arabists today have gone beyond the diglossic
representation of Arabic and are in favor of a polyglossic conception of Arabic
and of a continuum, even of an inherent variation. In doing so they take up again,
in some way, the conception that the most ancient Arab grammarians, notably
Sibawayh, had of Arabic. These last did not understand the speeches/dialects
(lughat) as discrete varieties, but only as variants, good or bad, of one and the
same language. In this context, the various “readings” (qira’at) of the Qur’an can
be seen as the reflection of this linguistic variation. 80
The ancient Christian or Syriac connection
These observations about the nature of Qur’anic Arabic do not, however, imply
that the language and content of the Qur’an were not influenced by other cultures
or religions. In this paper I will focus on the hypothesis that the Qur’an was
especially influenced by the Syriac or Aramaic connection or channel, an idea
that has been present in the mind of the Western scholars since the very beginning
of modern Qur’anic research, above all concerning Qur’anic loanwords, as seen
above. Hartwig Hirschfeld (1854–1934), for example, concluded that “many
Biblical words which occur in the Qorân, have evidently gone through an
Aramaic channel.” 81
However, in an article published in 1927, the great Christian Iraqi Semitist
Alphonse Mingana went further and defended the thesis or the idea of a Syriac
influence in the style of the Qur’an. 82 His attempt did not hold the attention of
most scholars for at least two reasons. First, he did not give many examples.
Second, his idea ran counter to a quasi dogma among Islamists: that the Qur’an
was written in so-called classical Arabic. 83
Beginning with different concerns than Mingana, the German liberal Protestant
theologian and Semitist Günter Lüling wrote an important study which has
also been overlooked by Islamists and Arabists, including Germans: Über den
Ur-Qur’an (On the Primitive Qur’an), 84 which has recently been translated into
English. 85 Therein he calls for “the rediscovery and reliable reconstruction of a
comprehensive pre-Islamic Christian hymnal hidden in the Koran under earliest
Islamic reinterpretation.” The point of departure is not only the Qur’an, but
Lüling’s own scholarly orientation, which is shaped by an “emphasis directed as
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