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The Qur'an
Jan. 25th, 2011 10:23 pmA few years ago, I set out to read the Qur'an from cover to cover in the original Arabic. I got as far as the beginning of Sura 3 (Al-i-`Imran) before getting sidetracked, and I think it's time to take it up again. I would like to recover something of the Arabic I studied for four years back in college.
There was an intriguing article in a magazine a while back that claimed that the standard story that the Qur'an was compiled in its present form in the time of Caliph `Uthman (644-656 by our calendar) is wrong; that it may have evolved over several centuries; and that Muhammad may have been more a legend than a historical person.
Certainly there are aspects of it that need explaining; for instance, several Hebrew names, such as Isaac, are close enough to their Arabic equivalents that they should have been easily understood by Arab listeners, yet seem not to have been. If "Yitzhaq" means "he laughs", that is "yad.haq" in Arabic, but the Qur'an spells the name "Ishaq", which is meaningless. Ishmael, Israel, and Abraham are similarly rendered incomprehensible. Yeshua (Jesus) is called Yasu` by Christian Arabs, yet the Qur'an names him `Isa. And John, which ought to have come out Yuhannan or some such, is Yahya. Could these names and the tales in which they figure have come into Arabic from Greek, Persian, or some other non-Semitic source?
Hebrew and Arabic are close enough that a few years ago in choir, when we were learning to sing the twenty- third psalm in Hebrew, I suddenly realized that the first words of it, "Adonai ro`i lo echsar", were perfectly comprehensible: "Adonai ra`i la akhsar", Adonai is my shepherd, I shall not lose.
There was an intriguing article in a magazine a while back that claimed that the standard story that the Qur'an was compiled in its present form in the time of Caliph `Uthman (644-656 by our calendar) is wrong; that it may have evolved over several centuries; and that Muhammad may have been more a legend than a historical person.
Certainly there are aspects of it that need explaining; for instance, several Hebrew names, such as Isaac, are close enough to their Arabic equivalents that they should have been easily understood by Arab listeners, yet seem not to have been. If "Yitzhaq" means "he laughs", that is "yad.haq" in Arabic, but the Qur'an spells the name "Ishaq", which is meaningless. Ishmael, Israel, and Abraham are similarly rendered incomprehensible. Yeshua (Jesus) is called Yasu` by Christian Arabs, yet the Qur'an names him `Isa. And John, which ought to have come out Yuhannan or some such, is Yahya. Could these names and the tales in which they figure have come into Arabic from Greek, Persian, or some other non-Semitic source?
Hebrew and Arabic are close enough that a few years ago in choir, when we were learning to sing the twenty- third psalm in Hebrew, I suddenly realized that the first words of it, "Adonai ro`i lo echsar", were perfectly comprehensible: "Adonai ra`i la akhsar", Adonai is my shepherd, I shall not lose.
