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

NOTES ON EMENDATIONS OF THE QUR’AN
wa-m’in maskub... (56:28–31)
“Among thornless lote trees,
ranged bananas,
spreading shade,
and gushing water...”
��fi sidrin makhdud
wa-tal’in mandud
wa-zillin mamdud
wa-ma’in maskub...
“Among thornless lote trees,
ranged date clusters,
spreading shade,
and gushing water”
It seems odd that bananas are mentioned here, for they do not occur elsewhere in
the Qur’an. ‘Ali b. Abi Talib (d. 40/661) supposedly proposed an emendation,
stating that this text should be read instead wa-tal’in mandud “ranged date
clusters.” Goldziher gives the translation Blütenschichten. A reference to
date clusters would make more sense, because dates and date-palms appear fairly
often in the Qur’anic text and would have been an important feature of the
environment in which the Qur’an was revealed. This is confirmed by the parallel
passage wa-l-nakhla basiqatin lahatal‘un nadid “And (We have sent down) lofty
date-palms that have ranged clusters” (50:10). The use in the latter verse of the
adjective nadid, cognate and synonymous with mandud, suggests the equivalence
of talh and tal‘. ‘Ali is claimed to have said that although this was the correct
meaning of the text, the accepted reading should not be changed: inna l-Qur’ana
la yuhaju wa-la yuhawwalu. It is thus clear that emendation was far from unheard
of as a method in traditional Islamic scholarship. In my assessment, all of the
proposed emendations described here have a high probability of being correct.
They fit the existing script quite closely and produce superior readings more in
keeping with the immediate context and with Qur’anic style.
Only a handful of scholars in Qur’anic studies since Nöldeke and Goldziher
have devoted serious attention to emendation of the text. Among them the most
prominent is undoubtedly James A. Bellamy, who, in seven articles dating from
1973 to 2002, proposed 29 emendations of the Qur’anic text as well as dozens of
emendations of the muqatta‘at, or “mysterious letters” of the Qur’an. 25 These
emendations are based on detailed consideration of the form of the rasm or ductus
of the received Qur’anic text and the types of errors that are likely to have
occurred at the hands of copyists. In most cases, however, they remain untested
or critically examined. The scant attention that they have received in publications
in the field may be a function of the slow pace of scholarship in Qur’anic
studies and Islamic studies in general. Alternatively, one senses that this topic
confronts in a tangible fashion widely held Muslim beliefs about the Qur’an, and so
233