Now that my monograph that I've worked on for the past years is finally out (and free for anyone to download!: brill.com/view/title/615…). I thought it would be nice to do a series of threads, writing accessible summaries on what my book is actually about. Today Chapter 1! 🧵
So the main question my book sets out to answer is: "What is the language of the Quran?"
There's an easy but unhelpful answer: "the language that you find in the Quran."
But what kind of language is that? Obviously Arabic. What kind of Arabic? What were its linguistic features?
As I set out to answer this question, I became more and more amazed by the fact that, somehow, this question hardly ever has gotten asked in scholarship. And the answer has typically been: "It's Classical Arabic".
And then nobody went on to define "Classical Arabic".
Occasionally scholars would claim, but not defend in any way shape or form, that the language of the Quran was "identical" to the language of poetry (which was in turn sometimes identified as "Classical Arabic"). The earliest explicit reference I could find is by Schwally in 1919
Note here that Schwally first rejects the mere notion that the Quran could have been composed on the local vernacular (Hijazi or Qurashi Arabic), likewise within argument, and then calls it identical to the language of poetry -- a pan-Arabian literary koinē.
I think we can glean from the quote that even by his time this view had already made it into the "Zeitgeist". He takes it for granted, and doesn't explain it further, and none of the authors after him seem to really mount a defense for their assertion.
This would be fine, if the language of the Quran being identical to the language of poetry was so self-evident that it didn't need defense. But that strikes me as wrong. It is easy to find examples where the Quran noticeably opts for different options than the poets.
A striking example is found in the deictic system. The Quran uses: ḏālika "that (masculine), and hāḏihī "this (feminine)" and hunālika "there" consistently. Poetry uses this too, but frequently opts for ḏāka, hāḏī and hunāka.
Such forms are not even used once in the Quran.
The notion of a "poetic koine" is already problematic in itself. The suggestion that the poetry is linguistically homogenous is clearly problematic and has not been sufficiently demonstrated.
But, I show that later on "poetic koine" starts to be conflated with "classical Arabic".
And "Classical Arabic" comes to be understood as the strict set of of linguistics norms that come to be associated with the standard literary language, but which, as we will see in chapter 2 were still very much being negotiated in early Islam.
As a result, I bring up a number authors who take for granted that the language of the Quran is identical to this literary standard; and make assertions about it that simply, in no way are true for the Quran. People who opine about its language, don't actually seem to check.
Thus, Hans Wehr, despite its orthography, takes for granted that Quranic Arabic (like "Classical Arabic") retained the hamzah in all places, citing biʾr, muʾmin and nāʾim -- apparently under the impression that those are not pronounced as bīr, mūmin and nāyim in the Quran.
Anyone who has ever opened up a Quran in the Maghreb would know that those examples are rather... let's say typical. Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ, the dominant reading traditions in that part of the world reads bīr and mūmin!
So is Warš suddenly not Quran? Have millions of Muslims been duped?
Of course not, rather there is a pervasive myth that because the Quran is "Classical Arabic" and it has been widely accepted as fact that "Classical Arabic" is whatever modern western textbooks like Wright or Fischer say it is, the language of the Quran must have these features.
This kind of implicit unexamined assumption that the Quran agrees with the modern norms are not just a thing of the past. See this recent claim claim that final ā written with ʾalif and yāʾ are pronounced identically in tajwīd.
Not even quite true for the dominant Ḥafṣ reading!
Zwettler calls nabīʾ (نبيء) for nabiyy 'prophet' "a peculiarly Ḥijāzī pseudo-correction and a feature neither of the ʿarabiyya [= Classical Arabic] nor of the other dialects."
This, while Zwettler, proudly claims the Quran = ʿArabiyyah. Apparently Warš once again isn't Quran.
The meme that the Quran was Classical Arabic, and Classical Arabic is completely identical with the modern standards, has been accepted so utterly, that it appears questions about the language of the Quran have gone essentially unexamined for well over a century.
Lots of opining about the language of the Quran without actually looking at it. The last real challenge to this view was by Karl Vollers in 1906. He argued the Quran had been composed in the local vernacular and had later been "classicized" by the Arab grammarians.
Vollers was essentially shouted down by his colleagues at the time. And there is plenty of things to criticize about his book, but the core question: what is the language of the Quran, AND HOW DO WE KNOW? Has, in the frenzy to discredit Vollers, been entirely ignored.
One of the reasons why we know so little about the Quran, is partially the discomfort of scholars to take the written text seriously. Can we trust the standard text as we have it today? Is it really from the 650s as the tradition would have it? The answer to this question is yes.
In recent years, with more access to early manuscripts, that have moreover been carbon dated, we can be confident that the standard text of the Quran was composed no more than two decades after the prophet's lifetime.
It's rasm (consonantal text) is ancient and can be studied.
In the study of the language of the Hebrew bible, it has long been understood that the consonantal skeleton is ultimately the guide to the actual original language of composition, not its reading tradition. This has simply never even been entertained for the Quran.
The Quran has never been allowed to tell its own story about what its language is; instead, convoluted arguments have been developed why we should not use the Quranic text as our guide, all the while uncritically accepted Ḥafṣ and ONLY Ḥafṣ as the "true" language of the Quran
Before we can continue with our examination of the language of the Quran, we first must address the elephant in the room: "Classical Arabic/the ʿarabiyyah/the poetic koine". What is it? And how do we know? That is what chapter 2 focuses on, which we'll discuss in the next thread!
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Ibn Ḫālawayh's (d. 380) Kitāb al-Badīʿ is an interesting book on the Qirāʾāt because it's the earliest surviving work that tries to simplify the transmissions of the readings, and does it rather differently from what becomes popular, the system of Ibn Ġalbūn the father (d. 389)
Ibn Ḫālawayh was Ibn Muǧāhid's student, who is widely held to be the canonizer of the seven reading traditions. Ibn Muǧāhid's book is the earliest book on the 7 reading traditions. But canon or not, Ibn Ḫālawayh's book actually describes 8 (adding Yaʿqūb).
Today the simplified system (and the only surviving one) is the "two-rawi canon". Each of the 7 readers, have two standard transmitters (all of them were once transmitter by more transmitters than those two). This system was introduced by ʾAbū al-Ṭayyib Ibn Ġalbūn in his ʾiršād.
NEW PUBLICATION: "Pronominal variation in Arabic among grammarians, Qurʾānic readings traditions and manuscripts".
This article has been in publication hell for 4 years. But it was an seminal work for my current research project, and a great collaboration with Hythem Sidky.
🧵
In this paper we try to describe the pronominal system used in early Islamic Classical Arabic. There is a striking amount of variation in this period, most of which does not survive into "standard classical Arabic".
We first look at the grammarians and how they describe the pronominal system.. Much of this description is already in my book (Van Putten 2022), but I assure you we wrote this way before I wrote that 🥲
Notable here is that Sībawayh prescribes minhū instead of now standard minhu.
In my book "Quranic Arabic" I argue that if you look closely at the Quranic rasm you can deduce that the text has been composed in Hijazi Arabic (and later classicized into more mixed forms in the reading traditions). Can we identify dialects in poetry?
I think this is possible to some extent, yes. And so far this has really not been done at all. Most of the time people assume complete linguistic uniformity in the poetry, and don't really explore it further.
But there are a number of rather complex issues to contend with:
As @Quranic_Islam already identified, there are some philological problems that get in the way in poetry that aren't there for the Quran: I would not trust a hamzah being written in a written down poem. This might be classicization. So it's hard to test for this Hijazi isogloss.
Last year I was asked to give a talk at the NISIS Autumn School about the textual history of the Quran. Here's a thread summarizing the points of that presentation. Specifically the presentation addresses some of Shoemaker's new objections on the Uthmanic canonization.
Traditionally, the third caliph ʿUṯmān is believed to have standardized the text.
However, in critical scholarship of the '70s the historicity of this view came to be questioned.
How can we really be sure that what the tradition tells us is correct?
This skepticism wasn't wholly unwarranted at the time. The Uthmanic canonization really had been uncritically accepted, not based on any material evidence.
But we now have access to many manuscripts, beautifully digitized, we can test the historicity of these claims!
The canonical Kufan readers Ḥamzah and al-Kisāʾī read the word ʾumm "mother" or ʾummahāt "mothers" with a kasrah whenever -ī or -i precedes, e.g.:
Q43:4 fī ʾimmi l-kitābi
Q39:6/Q53:32 fī buṭūni ʾimma/ihātikum
This seems random, but there is a general pattern here! 🧵
This feature was explained al-Farrāʾ in a lengthy discussion at the start of his Maʿānī. This makes sense: al-Farrāʾ was al-Kisāʾī's student who in turn was Ḥamzah's. Surprisingly in "The Iconic Sībawayh" Brustad is under the misapprehension that this is not a canonical variant.
This is irregular, such a vowel harmony does not occur in cases with other words that starts with ʾu-. For example, Q13:30 is just fī ʾummatin, not **fī ʾimmatin.
However this irregular reading is part of a larger pattern of vowel harmony accross guttural consonants.
Those who have read my book on Quranic Arabic may have noticed that I translate The Arabic word luġah as "linguistic practice", rather than "dialect" which is how many people commonly translate it.
This is for good reason: among the Arab grammarians it did not mean dialect! 🧵
In Modern Standard Arabic, luġah basically just means "language", as can be seen, e.g. on the Arabic Wikipedia page on the Dutch Language which calls it al-luġah al-hūlandiyyah.
This modern use gets projected onto the early Arab grammarians like Sībawayh and al-Farrāʾ.
But, they clearly do not mean that to the early grammarians. This is clear from statements like Sībawayh saying: faʿil forms that have a guttural consonant as second radical have four "luġāt": faʿil, fiʿil, faʿl and fiʿl.
In English a word or word-form cannot "have" a dialect.