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

THE QUR’AN IN RECENT SCHOLARSHIP
In sum, the orthography of the Qur’an seems to reflect Meccan or Hijazi
dialect, yet the text calls itself and is considered by most modern philologists to
reflect some form of the ‘arabiyya or poetic formal language. It cannot be both,
but how this paradox is to be resolved remains to be seen. Anton Spitaler argued
that the orthography of some words in the Qur’an, notably salat with its puzzling w
in the place of long a, reflect not dialect but the Aramaic (particularly Syriac)
convention of writing the word – in other words, that salat represents what we
might call a “loan-orthography,” if not a loan-word. 36 Werner Diem has proposed
that Qur’anic orthography reflects spoken dialect not directly, but rather through the
intermediary of a presumed pre-Islamic Hijazi tradition of Arabic orthography. 37
There are a few pre-Islamic inscriptions that seem to follow the orthographic
conventions we find in some early Qur’an texts, notably some from Jabal Usays
in the Syrian steppe southeast of Damascus, 38 but other pre-Islamic Arabic
inscriptions (such as those from Umm al-Jimal, Jabal Ramm, Namara, and the
many Safaitic inscriptions) vary significantly from one another in both script and
orthography, so the vigor of this presumed “tradition” of Hijazi writing, which in
any case is not yet attested for the Hijaz, remains uncertain. 39
Our understanding of these matters of Qur’anic orthography may be clarified by
close examination of the most important find in Qur’anic studies of the twentieth
century, the trove of early Qur’an fragments discovered in the 1970s hidden in
the ceiling of the great mosque of San‘a’, Yemen, during the course of restoration
work. A general description of the finds and some preliminary remarks on the
orthography of these early Qur’an manuscripts have been published by those who
have seen them, but this crucial body of material still awaits full study. 40
In the meantime, Luxenberg has made two proposals that relate to the question
of how the text was first written. First, he argues that the “Ur-Qur’an” sometimes
used a single “tooth” as mater lectionis not (or not only) for long i, as it does today,
but to indicate long a, rather than the alif that later was introduced to mark it; but
knowledge of this early convention was subsequently lost, so that the “tooth” was
then mistakenly pointed to represent y, t, or another letter that the “tooth” could
represent. The simplest example of this to grasp is the Arabic form of the name
of Abraham, Ibrahim, normally written in the rasm without any indication of the
long a and with a y (or long i) in the final syllable. This pronunciation diverges
from the way the name is pronounced in all other Semitic languages, which
always have a long a in the final syllable. Luxenberg argues that in this case, as
in many others, y was intended to serve as mater lectionis for long a, so that the
name was actually written to render a pronunciation akin to that known from
Hebrew and other languages, that is, “Abraham.” He adduces a number of other
instances where, he claims, a “tooth” originally intended as a y to signal long a was
misread by people who had lost knowledge of this convention and “corrected” the
tooth into a t by placing diacritical dots above, rather than beneath it. 41
Luxenberg’s idea that a “tooth” was once used as mater lectionis for long a
seems to be supported by a variety of evidence that Luxenberg does not mention.
In the specific case of the name Ibrahim, there is an occurrence of this orthography
37