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

340 Devin J. StewartQur'an in the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam. He concludes thatmysterious letters are part of the original text, that they in some fashionthe Arabic alphabet rather than provide initials or abbreviations of otherwords, that they are associated with the Book or Scripture, which is in mostmentioned in the text immediately following them, and that they are intendedrhyme or provide assonance with the following verses. 45One may corroborate and flesh out Welch's view, emphasizing that theare assertions of mantic authority. The mysterious letters are meant to bematic. They establish mantic authority in the text by representing writing or ·alphabet rather than specific words, and thus refer to a sacred text fromrevelations are drawn that exists on another plane. While Welch err1plltasizesrhyme in his discussion of the mysterious letters, I would add to this co:nsi1jeni~~tions of rhythm as well. 46 In most cases, the mysterious letters not only rhymethe verses following them but also establish a rhythm that will be '""'uH.am ... uiJ'modified gradually thereafter. This connection with rhyme and rhythm isseen in one of the reported watchwords or battle cries of the Muslims thatJones has discussed in connection with the myst~rious letters: l;zii-m'fm Iii vt.,;n.~r;•rm' ,"I:I. M. They will not be made victorious!" 47 Something that Jones doesemphasize is that the phrase l;zii-mfm rhymes with Iii yun$an7n, and that thephrases are rhythmically parallel according to the accent-based meter of saj ',colon containing two beats provided by the word accents. 48In a 1996 article Kevin Massey has shown that the order in which theappear within the combinations is not random. There appears to be anorder of the letters from which particular combinations are chosen; eachprecedes certain letters but not others, and vice versa. However, I believeMassey has interpreted the consequences of this insightful observationrectly. He entertains the possibility that the letters represent words or ser1tet1ces,then rejects this view, taking up one of the older suggestions regarding the ·rious letters, going back to Noldeke's 1860 Geschichte des Qorans: that theyinitials or monograms of early Companions who owned the .copies from which'Uthmanic Codex was created. ID. Massey's view, the ordered letters rep,res,entsomething like the critical apparatus of each Sura, denoting the copies onthe text was based; the order would have been seen as necessary becausecopies were evaluated as more reliable than others. 49 Like Welch, I wouldthat the letters are meant instead to represent the alphabet. The fact thatappear in a particular order, as Massey discovered, tends to corroborate thishypothesis. The order defined by the series of letters bears some resemblancethe abjad alphabet, though it does not match it exactly, and the choice ofprurticular;45 Welch, "al-Kur'an," 5:412-14.46 Welch, "al-Kur'an," 5:414.47 A. Jones, "The mystical letters of the Qur'an," Sf 16, 1962, (5-11) 6-7.48 See D.J. Stewart, "Saj' in the Qur'an: Prosody and Structure." .49 K. Massey, "A new investigation into the 'mystery letters' of the Quran," Arabica 43,497-501.Mysterious letters and other features of the Qur 'lin 341seems also to be related directly to the structure of the abjad alphabet. It is,ii:tte:restinll to note that none of the six final letters of the Arabic alphabet, termed- th, kh, dh, r;l, :f, gh or thakhidh r;/a+agh according to the abjad systemamong the mysterious letters. The probability of this happening by chance22/28 = 11/14 = 0.786 to the 76th power, where 76 is the total number ofmuqaffa 'at. The result is 1.1 x 10- 8 , i.e. a chance of 11 in one billion.a regular series of omissions may have occurred for three possible reasons. Itbe the consequence of a seemingly arbitrary physical rule - the mysteriousinclude no letters with dots. There is an apparent exception to this rule, theocctmet1ces of yii' in Q 19:1: kiif hii yii 'ayn $iid and Q 31'i:l: yii sin. Welch hassu~~ge1;ted a sinlllar rule as follows: "Another striking fact that must be more thanoim~idt~nt:al is that the mysterious letters represent every consonantal form in Arabic,no form occurs for more than one letter.'' 50 Alternatively, the letters may beto represent an archaic version of the Arabic alphabet that did not distinthesix extra letters that appear at the end of the abjad alphabet (the rawiidif).would be consonant with an aspect of Qur' iinic style that is often overlookedla.tll;;U'"lo\"'already sounded archaic to the original audience, something that may beby the reported characterization of the Qur' an as asii!ir al-awwalfn "myths/of the ancients/forefathers" (Q 6:25; 8:31; 16:24; 23:83; 25:5; 27:68; 46:17;15; 83:13). It is also possible that the letters are meant to represent the Hebrew oralphabet, which follow the abjad order but do not contain the six rawiidif,than the Arabic alphabet per se. 51 The use of other languages occurs frequentlyassertion of mantic or magical authority in other texts and traditions, as is thewith the Greek verses of the Sibylline books of the Romans, the Chaldeanof later times, the Aramaic phrases in Islamic magical texts, or the Latinof witches and wizards in medieval Europe. The magical phrase Abracadabra,example, is held to derive from the Aramaic 'avra ke davra "there has come towhat was spoken.'' Sinlllarly, hocus pocus most likely is a parody of the Romanliturgy of the eucharist, which contains the phrase Hoc est corpus "this is theor Hoc est enim corpus meum, "this is my very body," which occurs at thepoint of transubstantiation. In any case, the mysterious letters are evidentlyto represent a distinctive or archaic alphabet associated with a scripture thatClosely tied to the Biblical tradition, exists on a supernatural plane, and serves asultimate source for the revelations of the Qur'an.Out of 44 letters added to one letter or more (that is, omitting the single letters, and q, and only considering those letters added after the first letter has beenWelch, "al-Kur'iin," 5:414.Otto Loth suggested a connection between the mysterious letters and Jewish models already in.1881, but he seems to have had in mind the mystical and numerological uses of the letters in JewishKabbalism and not, as suggested here, that the alphabet was itself meant to represent Hebrew letters.0. Loth, "Tabaris Korankommentar,'' ZDMG 35, 1888, (588--628) 603-4. The other main differencebetween the Hebrew alphabet and the Arabic abjad alphabet has to do with the placement ofsin (s). It occurs in the Arabic abjad sequence in the place corresponding in the Hebrew sequence tothat of samech, a Hebrew letter that has no immediate Arabic counterpart; and the place of Arabicshin is occupied in the Hebrew sequence by one sign that represents both sin and shin.