Fetching
One moment.
Fetching
One moment.
Romanised transliteration as printed by the translator, not the original script. This is what we hold.
1It follows then that the two sentences would be necessarily symmetrical, and the presence of rhythm would not only please the ear but contribute to the better understanding of the sense, while the rhyme would mark the pause in the sense and emphasize the proposition. The Qur’4n is written in this rhetorical style, in which the clauses are rhythmical though not symmetrically so, and for the most part end in the same rhyme throughout the chapter. The Arabic language lends itself very readily to this species of composition, and the Arabs of the desert in the present day employ it to a great extent in their more formal orations, while the literary men of the towns adopt it as the recognised correct style, deliberately imitating the Qur'an. That the best of Arab writers has never succeeded in producing anything equal in merit to the Qur'an itself is not surprising. In the first place, they have agreed beforehand that it is unapproachable, and they have adopted its style as the perfect standard; any deviation from it therefore must of necessity be a defect. Again, with them this style is not spontaneous as with Mohammed and his contemporaries, but is as artificial as though Englishmen should still continue to follow Chaucer as their model, in spite of the changes which their language has undergone. With the prophet the style was natural, and the words were those used in every-day ordinary life, while with the later Arabic authors the style is imitative and the ancient words are introduced as a literary embellishment. The natural consequence is that their attempts look laboured and unreal by the side of his impromptu and forcible eloquence. That Mohammed, though, should have been able to challenge even his contemporaries to produce anything like the Qur’4n, ‘And if ye are in doubt of what we have revealed Ivi THE QUR'AN. unto our servant, then bring a chapter like it... But if ye do it not, and ye surely shall do it not, &c.,’ is at first sight surprising, but, as Néldeke?! has pointed out, this challenge really refers much more to the subject than to the mere style, —to the originality of the conception of the unity of God and of a revelation supposed to be couched in God’s own words. Any attempt at such a work must of necessity have had all the weakness and want of prestige which attaches to an imitation. This idea is by no means foreign to the genius of the old Arabs ; thus the learned grammarian and rhetorician ‘Hariri excuses himself in the preface to his celebrated ‘Assemblies’ for any shortcomings, which might possibly be detected in a composition professedly modelled on that of another, by quoting an ancient poem: “’'Twas this affected me, that while I lay Snatching a breath of sleep for drowsiness, There wept a dove upon the Aikah bough Trilling her weeping forth with sweetest notes: Ah, had I wept—ere she began to weep— For Sauda’s love, my soul had found relief! But ’twas her weeping that excited mine,
2But ’twas her weeping that excited mine, And he who comes first must be always best!’ Amongst a people who believed firmly in witchcraft and soothsaying and who, though passionately fond of poetry, believed that every poet had his familiar spirit who inspired his utterances, it was no wonder that the prophet should be taken for ‘a soothsayer,’ for ‘one possessed with an evil spirit, or for ‘an infatuated poet 2.’ Each chapter of the Qur’4n is called in Arabic a sfirah, a word which signifies a course of bricks in a wall, and is generally used in the body of the work for any connected or continuous portion complete in itself. 1 Geschichte des Qordns, p. 43. ? Mohammed may well have repudiated the charge of being a poet, for he is only credited with one verse, and that an involuntary one: Ana ‘nnabiyu 14 Kapuib; Ana ’bnu ‘Abd el Muésalib. ‘I am the prophet who lies not; I am the son of Abd el Mussalib.’ INTRODUCTION. Ivii The word Qur’dn, ‘a reading,’ comes from the verb qara’a, ‘to read,’ though some lexicographers derive it from qarana, ‘to join, and interpret it as meaning the ‘collected whole.’ It is also called El] Forq4n, ‘the discrimination,’ a word borrowed from the Hebrew and also applied in the Qur’4n to divine inspiration generally. The individual portions of the Qur’4n were not always written down immediately after their revelation, as we find that Mohammed often repeated them several times until he had learnt them by heart, and the book itself shows that he occasionally forgot them and even altered and supplemented them: ‘Whatever verse we may annul or cause thee to forget, we will bring a better one than it, or one like it’ (Chapter II, ver. 100). On other occasions he employed an amanuensis, as, for instance, Abdallah ibn Sa’hd ibn Abi Sar‘h (see Part I, p. 126, note 2) and Zaid ibn THAbit ; and tradition relates that he would frequently direct in which Sarah the passage dictated was to be placed. That the Qur’4n was, or that even the individual Sfrahs were, however, arranged in the present order by the prophet himself is impossible, both from internal evidence and that of tradition.
3That the Qur’4n was, or that even the individual Sfrahs were, however, arranged in the present order by the prophet himself is impossible, both from internal evidence and that of tradition. At the prophet’s death no collected edition of the Qur’4n existed. Scattered fragments were in the possession of certain of his followers, written down at different times and on the most heterogeneous materials, but by far the greater portion was preserved only in the memories of men whom death might at any moment carry off. The death of many Muslim warriors at the battle of Yemamah opened the eyes of the early Caliphs to the danger that the ‘Book of God’ might be, ere long, irrevocably lost: they accordingly provided, to the best of their power, against such a contingency. Abu Bekr,—or rather Omar, during his reign,—was the first to take the matter in hand, and employed Zaid ibn THAbit the Ans4ri, a native of Medinah, who had acted as amanuensis to Mohammed, to collect and arrange the text. This he did from ‘ palm-leaves, skins, blade-bones, and the hearts of men,’ and presented to the Caliph a copy Iviii THE QUR'AN, of the Qur’An, which did not probably differ greatly from that which we now possess. As we have already seen, the whole was strung together without any reference to the chronological order, and with very little regard to the logical connection of various passages. The longer Sdrahs were placed at the beginning and the short ones at the end, although the order of their revelation was for the most part just the reverse. And, lastly, many odd verses appear to have been inserted into various Sfrahs for no other reason than that they suit the rhyme. The text was so far fixed by Zaid, but not the reading of it. In the first place, the vowel points, which make often a very great difference in the meaning of a word, were probably hardly ever, if at all, used; again, many persons were still alive who themselves remembered portions of the Qur’4n by heart, but who did not agree as to individual words, or who remembering the sense only substituted some of the locutions of their own tribe for the actual words of Mohammed. These tribal dialects often differed diametrically in the use of particular words; thus i‘/fa’un means ‘to conceal’ in the dialect of one tribe and ‘to display’ in that of another; when such words occurred, as they often do, in the Qur'an, they could not fail to give rise to disputes as to their interpretation.
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
Romanised transliteration as printed by the translator, not the original script. This is what we hold.
1It follows then that the two sentences would be necessarily symmetrical, and the presence of rhythm would not only please the ear but contribute to the better understanding of the sense, while the rhyme would mark the pause in the sense and emphasize the proposition. The Qur’4n is written in this rhetorical style, in which the clauses are rhythmical though not symmetrically so, and for the most part end in the same rhyme throughout the chapter. The Arabic language lends itself very readily to this species of composition, and the Arabs of the desert in the present day employ it to a great extent in their more formal orations, while the literary men of the towns adopt it as the recognised correct style, deliberately imitating the Qur'an. That the best of Arab writers has never succeeded in producing anything equal in merit to the Qur'an itself is not surprising. In the first place, they have agreed beforehand that it is unapproachable, and they have adopted its style as the perfect standard; any deviation from it therefore must of necessity be a defect. Again, with them this style is not spontaneous as with Mohammed and his contemporaries, but is as artificial as though Englishmen should still continue to follow Chaucer as their model, in spite of the changes which their language has undergone. With the prophet the style was natural, and the words were those used in every-day ordinary life, while with the later Arabic authors the style is imitative and the ancient words are introduced as a literary embellishment. The natural consequence is that their attempts look laboured and unreal by the side of his impromptu and forcible eloquence. That Mohammed, though, should have been able to challenge even his contemporaries to produce anything like the Qur’4n, ‘And if ye are in doubt of what we have revealed Ivi THE QUR'AN. unto our servant, then bring a chapter like it... But if ye do it not, and ye surely shall do it not, &c.,’ is at first sight surprising, but, as Néldeke?! has pointed out, this challenge really refers much more to the subject than to the mere style, —to the originality of the conception of the unity of God and of a revelation supposed to be couched in God’s own words. Any attempt at such a work must of necessity have had all the weakness and want of prestige which attaches to an imitation. This idea is by no means foreign to the genius of the old Arabs ; thus the learned grammarian and rhetorician ‘Hariri excuses himself in the preface to his celebrated ‘Assemblies’ for any shortcomings, which might possibly be detected in a composition professedly modelled on that of another, by quoting an ancient poem: “’'Twas this affected me, that while I lay Snatching a breath of sleep for drowsiness, There wept a dove upon the Aikah bough Trilling her weeping forth with sweetest notes: Ah, had I wept—ere she began to weep— For Sauda’s love, my soul had found relief! But ’twas her weeping that excited mine,
2But ’twas her weeping that excited mine, And he who comes first must be always best!’ Amongst a people who believed firmly in witchcraft and soothsaying and who, though passionately fond of poetry, believed that every poet had his familiar spirit who inspired his utterances, it was no wonder that the prophet should be taken for ‘a soothsayer,’ for ‘one possessed with an evil spirit, or for ‘an infatuated poet 2.’ Each chapter of the Qur’4n is called in Arabic a sfirah, a word which signifies a course of bricks in a wall, and is generally used in the body of the work for any connected or continuous portion complete in itself. 1 Geschichte des Qordns, p. 43. ? Mohammed may well have repudiated the charge of being a poet, for he is only credited with one verse, and that an involuntary one: Ana ‘nnabiyu 14 Kapuib; Ana ’bnu ‘Abd el Muésalib. ‘I am the prophet who lies not; I am the son of Abd el Mussalib.’ INTRODUCTION. Ivii The word Qur’dn, ‘a reading,’ comes from the verb qara’a, ‘to read,’ though some lexicographers derive it from qarana, ‘to join, and interpret it as meaning the ‘collected whole.’ It is also called El] Forq4n, ‘the discrimination,’ a word borrowed from the Hebrew and also applied in the Qur’4n to divine inspiration generally. The individual portions of the Qur’4n were not always written down immediately after their revelation, as we find that Mohammed often repeated them several times until he had learnt them by heart, and the book itself shows that he occasionally forgot them and even altered and supplemented them: ‘Whatever verse we may annul or cause thee to forget, we will bring a better one than it, or one like it’ (Chapter II, ver. 100). On other occasions he employed an amanuensis, as, for instance, Abdallah ibn Sa’hd ibn Abi Sar‘h (see Part I, p. 126, note 2) and Zaid ibn THAbit ; and tradition relates that he would frequently direct in which Sarah the passage dictated was to be placed. That the Qur’4n was, or that even the individual Sfrahs were, however, arranged in the present order by the prophet himself is impossible, both from internal evidence and that of tradition.
3That the Qur’4n was, or that even the individual Sfrahs were, however, arranged in the present order by the prophet himself is impossible, both from internal evidence and that of tradition. At the prophet’s death no collected edition of the Qur’4n existed. Scattered fragments were in the possession of certain of his followers, written down at different times and on the most heterogeneous materials, but by far the greater portion was preserved only in the memories of men whom death might at any moment carry off. The death of many Muslim warriors at the battle of Yemamah opened the eyes of the early Caliphs to the danger that the ‘Book of God’ might be, ere long, irrevocably lost: they accordingly provided, to the best of their power, against such a contingency. Abu Bekr,—or rather Omar, during his reign,—was the first to take the matter in hand, and employed Zaid ibn THAbit the Ans4ri, a native of Medinah, who had acted as amanuensis to Mohammed, to collect and arrange the text. This he did from ‘ palm-leaves, skins, blade-bones, and the hearts of men,’ and presented to the Caliph a copy Iviii THE QUR'AN, of the Qur’An, which did not probably differ greatly from that which we now possess. As we have already seen, the whole was strung together without any reference to the chronological order, and with very little regard to the logical connection of various passages. The longer Sdrahs were placed at the beginning and the short ones at the end, although the order of their revelation was for the most part just the reverse. And, lastly, many odd verses appear to have been inserted into various Sfrahs for no other reason than that they suit the rhyme. The text was so far fixed by Zaid, but not the reading of it. In the first place, the vowel points, which make often a very great difference in the meaning of a word, were probably hardly ever, if at all, used; again, many persons were still alive who themselves remembered portions of the Qur’4n by heart, but who did not agree as to individual words, or who remembering the sense only substituted some of the locutions of their own tribe for the actual words of Mohammed. These tribal dialects often differed diametrically in the use of particular words; thus i‘/fa’un means ‘to conceal’ in the dialect of one tribe and ‘to display’ in that of another; when such words occurred, as they often do, in the Qur'an, they could not fail to give rise to disputes as to their interpretation.
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
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