reynolds-the-quran-in-its-historical-context-2

246 Shawkat M Toorawato understand better how meaning inheres in the Qur'iin's lexical, uu 15 u"""'•and rhetorical choices before deciding whether a particular lexical item"foreign" or whether a particular reading, pointing, or vocalization is faulty. 104is my hope that the hapax lists above will contribute to the deepening ofunderstanding. 105Tripartite, but anti-Trinitarianformulas in the Qur' anic corpus,possibly pre-Qur' anicManfred Kropp104 See W. Saleh, "The Etymological fallacy and Qur'anic studies: Mul:tammad, paradise andAntiquity," in A. Neuwirth, N. Sinai and M. Marx (eds), The Qur'iin in Context:Literary Investigations into the Qur'iinic Milieu, Leiden: Brill, 2010,649-98.l 05 Since completing this article, I learned of the following online resource, which lists 395by root and Siira: February 3; 2011). The list was compiled by Basim Sa'Id al-Bassiiml in 2001.1nt:roc1m:tio>n to method and resultsiin 112 (al-Ikhla~) is said to be a complete Muslim confession of a strictly;iilonothei:stic faith, the very essence of the Qur'anic message on the character ofBut, astonishingly enough, for formal reasons certain voices in the Muslimdo not consider it to be part of the Qur' iin, properly speaking. In fact, like··first Siira (al-Fatil;a; Qur'iin 1), an opening prayer, and the last two Siiras113 and 114 ), two prayers invoking shelter and protection against evilit is not expressed in direct divine speech. Instead these four pieces belongand ritual. Only an introductory formula such as qul, "say," can turnartificially- their character into direct divine speech.are more peculiar features in Qur'iin 112. Not only are there tremendousgrarnrrmtical ambiguities and difficulties with it but the tradition does not come toexplanation of the syntactical structure or the hapax legomenon ~amad,is of unclear meaning (verse 2; tradition offers more than a dozen different·~--,,-r Also, the attested canonical variants for this short Siira are quiteand diverge considerably from the canonical text. In fact, one gets thermr"P''""'" here of a living oral tradition. This is in stark contrast to the characterreadings for other parts of the Qur' iinic corpus in general, which haveof the character of philological (guess)work on a highly ambiguous, undottedunvocalized consonantal text.·A nnJVma the method and rules of textual criticism to these variant readings aswere variants in manuscripts yields a surprising result: a tripartite butanti-Trinitarian formula. Verse 2 with the enigmatic word al-~amada later gloss and explanation for the problematical term abad (verse 1), an""1''"lli>Llu•uofthe type obscuntm per obscurior. The thus reconstructed version ismore concise, rhetorical and well-constructed according to the rules ofgrammar: a nominal subject followed by two coordinated (conjunctionverbal predicates, or, alternatively, a short nominal clause followed by twophrases with the same subject as the nominal clause, without any coordinabutin harmony with the specific rhetoric staccato-style of such a formula.the same kind of formula with the samefo~ila (Qur'anic rhyme) -ad and·crucial attribute for God (ale) bad can be reconstructed in another Siira of the