Abstract and Keywords

Karl Vollers and Theodor Nöldeke held that the Qur’an first appeared in a tribal dialect, later adjusted to
Bedouin poetry. Frederico Corriente argued for an intertribal ‘Old Arabic koine’ of an esteemed quality,
distinct from tribal dialects. Ernest Axel Knauf places it alongside a commercial koine and tribal dialects
as an esteemed literary language. John Wansbrough dates the Qur’an after the death of Muḥammad,
while Günter Lüling and Christoph Luxenberg argue for an original Qur’an in Aramaic. Johnathan Owens,
finds evidence for both an early inflected and uninflected Arabic Qur’an. Fruitful avenues for research
include rereading old materials; mastering recitation systems; extending dialect studies; and returning
to the text of the Qur’an.

IN spite of the appearance of a plethora of new materials in the first decade of the twenty-first century,
no consensus yet exists on the topic of this chapter: the language of the Qur’an as uttered by
Muḥammad and received by the Muslim community during his life time, called here ‘the original
Qur’an’. The exploration of this issue will require first a consideration of two major proposals for the
language of the original Qur’an: an ‘esteemed literary koine’ and a dialect of Old Arabic. After an
introduction to the traditional Muslim position, the views of Theodor Nöldeke (d. 1930) and Karl Vollers
(d. 1909) that divided the early post-Enlightenment research require attention. An examination of the
various trajectories of existing research into the nature of the original Qur’an will follow, moving from
the twentieth century to the twenty-first century. A final section suggests avenues of research likely to
bear fruit in the future: discovering new materials and rereading old materials; mastering recitation
systems; extending dialect studies; returning to the study of the Qur’anic text itself; and rethinking the
Qur’an’s uniqueness.

The Language of the Original Qur’an: A Dialect or an Esteemed Literary Koine?

An Esteemed Literary Koine

Muslim scholars have traditionally held that both the language of today’s published Qur’an and the
language of the original Qur’an equal the everyday speech of the Quraysh, Muḥammad’s own tribe
(Versteegh 2001: 102). According to Soha Abboud-Haggar, how ever, most scholars agree that ‘Arab
tribes spoke ... colloquial linguistic varieties, which... differed from the variety used in poetry and the
Qurʾān and also (p. 278) from one another’ (EALL 1:614). They also appear to agree that the language of
both the poetry and the Qur’an was a supra-tribal and supra-regional special language ‘that had to be
acquired like a foreign idiom’ (EALL 1:617). The esteemed literary koine of this chapter’s title refers to
this special language. Since it is used mainly by poets and the Qur’an, it could also be termed
Liedersprache or ‘lyric discourse’ (Neuwirth 2007: 330). And when compared with the consistent formal
discourse of Classical Arabic codified by the grammarians, the esteemed literary koine obviously shares
in the diverse features of its sister corpora of Old Arabic: poetry and the dialects.

Dialects of Old Arabic

Chaim Rabin, in ‘The Beginnings of Classical Arabic’, insists that the relation of the pre-Islamic Arabic
dialects to Classical Arabic ‘provides the key to the question’ of the nature of the original Qur’an (1955:
23). But earlier, in Ancient West-Arabian, still the most comprehensive treatise on the subject, Rabin
also admits, ‘Owing mainly to our scanty knowledge of the ancient dialects, all views on the relations
between them and Classical Arabic are guesses or working hypotheses’ (1951: 17). That this is still true
follows from Rafael Talmon’s remark: ‘Modern scholarship on the relations between the dialects of old
Arabia and their relation to Qur’anic language reached its peak in the 1940s with the studies of Hans
Koffler ... and Chaim Rabin. ... A revision of their findings is a desideratum. ... ’ (EQ 1:530–1). Michael C.
A. Macdonald provides three consistent features as evidence for the continuity of Arabic from the first
century BCE to the formal Arabic of modern times: the definite article ʾl- (Classical Arabic al-), the
feminine singular relative pronoun ʾlt (Classical Arabic allatī), and the third person singular of weak verbs
with final long/ā/, such as banā, yabnī (2000: 312). The Qur’an manifests all three. But the Qur’anic
recitation systems (qirāʾāt) also share lexical and grammatical features with a variety of particular
ancient dialects. For example, al-arāʾik, plural of arīka, a word from the Arabic dialect of Yemen, occurs
in the recitation system represented by the most common published Qur’an. Al-Ḥasan [al-Baṣrī] (d.
110/728) reported, ‘We did not know the meaning of arāʾika [Q. 18:31] until we met a man from the
people of Yemen who informed us that al-arīka among them means al-ḥajala [a curtained alcove]’ (al-
Suyūṭī 1967: 2:89). Was the Qur’an, then, originally in the dialect of Muḥammad?

The Original Qur’an: Historical and Contemprary ViewsThe Traditional Muslim View

As stated above, the classic Muslim answer to this question is, Yes. The Qur’an was re- vealed in the
language of the Quraysh, the tribe of Muḥammad, the purest, most (p. 279) accurate, and most elegant
of varieties of Arabic (al-Sharkawi 2010: 30; Versteegh 2001: 38–9).

Setting the Stage:

Theodor Nöldeke and Karl Vollers Theodor Nöldeke held that

it is very unlikely that Muḥammad in the Qurʾān employed a form of the language quite different from
that customary in Mecca, and especially unlikely that he should have painstakingly inserted case and
mood endings (iʿrāb) if his local people did not use them. And so I assume that the poems of that period
represent the language the Bedouin at that time spoke and still—pretty long since speak. (1904: 2,
author’s translation)

Other European linguists followed Nöldeke in this conviction (Versteegh 2001: 40–52). They deviated
from the traditional Muslim majority, however, in allowing for some differences between the Meccan
dialect and the Bedouin dialects (Abboud-Haggar, EALL 1:614–15). With this quote Nöldeke was
responding to an early form of Karl Vollers’s revisionist claim that Classical Arabic was the language
variety of the poets and of the Bedouins of Nejd and Yamama, but not of the Quraysh (Vollers 1906:
169, 184). The Qur’an, he contended, originated in the colloquial dialect of the Quraysh without the
usual diction of the poets, particularly without any of the distinctive word-end markers of case and
mood (iʿrāb). According to him, later philologists rewrote the original tribal dialect of the Qur’an in
Classical style, eliminating all trace of its colloquial dialect (Rabin 1955: 23–4; Talmon, EQ 2:346).
Nöldeke ascertained that had Vollers’s position been correct, ‘the tradition supporting it would not have
disappeared without a trace (spurlos)’ (1910: 2). Against Nöldeke’s contention that no evidence existed
for Vollers’s uninflected Qur’an, Paul E. Kahle (d. 1964) charged that Nöldeke had not known the
supporting evidence. Kahle found traditions on Qur’anic recitation that promised a reward for reading
the Qur’an with iʿrāb of four times the reward for reading it without iʿrāb. Clearly recitation of the Holy
Book went on legitimately sans iʿrāb (1949: 67–71). In spite of Kahle’s support, almost no one now holds
that a vernacular Qur’an was upgraded at a later time to an inflected formal and literary language,
especially when an inter-tribal esteemed literary discourse was at hand. Nevertheless, epigraphy admits
no clear evidence for or against iʿrāb (Versteegh 2001: 47), a key issue in scholarly discussion. But
Vollers’s and Kahle’s work helped enable the conviction, now widely held, that at the time the original
Qur’an emerged, a diglossia prevailed in Arabia between an inter-tribal poetic koine and the tribal
varieties of Arabic at the time of Muḥammad. The diglossia in the modern Arab world between regional
dialects and Modern Standard Arabic resembles this Old Arabic diglossia (Rabin 1955: 24; Versteegh
2001: 41, 189–208). With few exceptions, European scholars until the mid-twentieth century accepted
the broad outlines Muslim scholarship provided for the history of the Arabic of the Qur’an (p. 280) from
its first recitations in Mecca to its codification in the tenth century. This consensus was challenged in the
second half of the twentieth century.

The 1970s: a Decade of Challenges

John Wansbrough: Arabic Language as Evidence of Prophethood The late British scholar John
Wansbrough (d. 2002) in publications of the late 1970s analysed Qur’anic formulas and narrative
conventions according to literary types familiar to biblical scholarship (1977). Because his analysis led to
an abundance of formulas characteristic of biblical prophetic literature (1977: 12–20), Wansbrough held
that in such passages as this, ‘We have never sent a messenger who did not use his own people’s
language to make things clear for them’ (Q. 14:4), the Qur’an was certifying Muḥammad as a genuine
prophet. It was not necessarily touting Qur’anic language as a clear and accessible medium for
communicating divine truth to Muḥammad’s own people (1977: 98–9). Furthermore, Wansbrough’s
analysis led to the conviction that the Qur’an’s elaborate array of material was too great to have been
produced by one man in as short a time as the Muslim biography-of-Muḥammad tradition (sīra) allowed.
Wansbrough speculated that the Qur’an had appeared in Mesopotamia in Abbasid times where and
when it represented an Arabic and Arabian monotheistic scripture alongside those of the Jews and the
Christians in the conquered territories of the Arab conquests (1977: 50, 83). The time required for this
process allowed for the Arabic of the Qur’an to evolve from the simpler ‘business Arabic’ of the
chancery papyri (1977: 91) to the elaborate Kunstprosa required by the Muslim doctrines of Qur’anic
inimitability (iʿjāz) and ‘the rhetorical potential of the Arabic language’ (1977: 92). This time period
corresponds to the two or three centuries required for the separate processes of Arabicization and
Islamization to take place (Wansbrough 1977: 88–9, 92).

Wansbrough’s position still finds adherents among competent scholars, for example Gilliot and Larcher
(EQ 3:113–15) and Retsö (2003: 41). Other evaluations include Schoeler (2010: 789); Sinai and Neuwirth
(2010: 7–11).

Günter Lüling and the Primitive Qur’an

Günter Lüling in another 1970s publication, Über den Ur-Koran (Now entitled A Challenge to Islam for
Reformation 2003), argued for a number of pre-Islamic Christian texts which, stemming from a ‘Christian
Arabic koine’ (Luxenberg 2007: 18–19) and altered in accordance with Muslim dogma, served as a basis
for about a third of the Qur’an’s discourse. The other two-thirds consist of pure Islamic texts. A fourth
text type (p. 281) results from further editing by Muslims after the Prophet’s time (Lüling 2003: 11–12).
Lüling’s work has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Yet, Claude Gilliot and Pierre Larcher
summarize Lüling’s argument and refer to his book as ‘an important study’ (EQ 3:129–30).
Federico C. Corriente and Old Arabic Koine In this same decade Federico C. Corriente published a series
of articles dealing with the original Qur’an (1971; 1975; 1976). They concluded that the Qur’an appeared
in what he called ‘Old Arabic koine’, an ‘intertribal, poetic and rhetorical language used by all Arabs, but
native to none and therefore learned with more or less ease depending on the degree of kinship with
each vernacular’ (1975: 41). Corriente especially draws attention to the difference between Arabic and
such Indo-European languages as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin at the point of their synthetic, or inflected,
characteristics. Scholars tacitly assumed at the time of Nöldeke and Vollers—even at the time of
Corriente’s writing—that ‘Iʿrāb-Arabic indeed belonged to a highly synthetic linguistic structure, while
Iʿrāb-less Middle Arabic and younger forms ... had a rather analytical structure’ (1971: 24). Suspicious of
this, Corriente analysed six different short corpora of ʿarabiyya for the significance of their iʿrāb in
conveying meaning: Imruʾ al-Qays’s Muʿallaqa; Q. 12:1–30; parts of ʿUmar ibn Abī Rabīʿa’s Diwān; the
story of the lion and the jackal from Kalīla wa-Dimna; and selections from modern poet Aḥmad Shawqī;
and from modern novelist Naguib Maḥfūẓ (1971: 35). He concluded that word-end iʿrāb, so precious to
the identity of the ʿArabiyya actually had ‘a negligible functional yield’ (1971: 25), that is, the same
discourse if transmitted without case endings would lose very little meaning (1971: 25–9). It turned out
that Q. 12:1–30 was the least synthetic of all six sets of material with a functional yield of zero. Sensing it
could be just a random phenomenon, Corriente further analysed Q. 5:1–30. There he found some
examples of iʿrāb with a measure of functional yield, such as the first part of Q. 5:7, given here with key
iʿrāb vowels superscripted to help illustrate functional yield: wa-udhkurū niʿmat llāh wa-mithāqahu
lladhī wāthaq kumbihia i a. The iʿrāb-superscripted/a/vowel in mithāq hu a (‘his pledge’) marks mithāq
as the second object of the imperative udhkurū, yielding the translation, ‘And remember God’s favor
and his pledge to you’. If mithāq hu a had the superscripted iʿrāb vowel changed from / a/ to /u/, making
it the subject of a circumstantial clause beginning with /wa-/(wāw al-ḥāl), the meaning would become,
‘And remember God’s favour, his promise being what he had pledged to you’ (1971: 37, n. 26). In this
not very common case, removal of the iʿrāb renders the sentence ambiguous.

On the basis of his research, Corriente concluded that the slightly greater role that iʿrāb may have played
in pre-Islamic poetry suggests a more significant functional yield for iʿrāb in Arabic’s pre-historical
stages, than its functional yield for the Qur’an and subsequent prose. The ‘almost impeccable,
application’ of iʿrāb in these historical forms of formal discourse does not alter noun-iʿrāb’s almost
negligible functional yield in them (1971: 38). Evidently iʿrāb adds an esteem or ‘prestige’ quality to
them that is ‘indispensable (p. 282) for rhetorical purposes of high style’, yet with decreasing functional
yield. This in creasing erosion—at least in urban dialects—by the sixth century CE could account for ‘the
faults in the Qur’an itself’ (1971: 38). Furthermore, the greater functional yield of iʿrāb in the poetry
examined can be attributed to an ‘almost servile imitation of ancient models’ (1971: 40). Finally, even
though Corriente’s data suggests ‘the almost complete grammatical irrelevance of the iʿrāb in Arabic
since Muhammad’s time’, when it was all dropped for ‘other than rhetorical and didactic’ purposes
remains a mystery (1971: 40).

Corriente’s work supplies further evidence for Owens’s (2006) contention (discussed below) that the
case dimension of even Qur’anic Arabic had a weak functional yield. Corriente’s 1975 study of al-
Iṣfahānī’s (d. after 360/970–1) Kitāb al-Aghānī revealed abundant evidence of deviations from the
standards of the Classical Arabic of the grammarians. For example, the poetry made use of a dual that
did not change form in its genitive, accusative, and nominative grammatical positions (1975: 52).
Instances of the mixing upof cases also occurred in poetry (1975: 57). Of particular significance in light of
all Corriente’s functional-yield analysis is his suggestion that the lisān mubīn (understandable language)
of the original Qur’an may have been the idiolect of Muḥammad, learned among the Bedouin of his
childhood, a ‘lowest-yield iʿrab-Arabic, understandable and clear to all speakers regardless of their
vernacular features, and yet formal enough to befit a heavenly message’ (1975: 42–3).

Michael Zwettler and the Poetic Koine

The year 1978 saw the appearance of the late Michael Zwettler’s (d. 2010) detailed scholarly
contribution, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry. Zwettler examined this oral poetic tradition of
principally pre-Islamic poetry in light of Milman Parry’s (1971) and Albert Lord’s (1965) ‘ “oral formulaic”
theory of poetic composition’ (1978: ix). Particularly, but not exclusively, the works that have turned up
in textual traditions—whether biblical, Homeric, or Arab—started out in some oral form, preserved by
the prodigious memories of primarily illiterate people (Zwettler 1978: 4). The approach of Lord and
Parry entails a scenario in which the earliest written form of an originally oral creation may be a
transcript of ‘a single performance by a singer, poet, or narrator who was, at the same time, not reciting
from memory, but rather composing the work so taken down’ (Zwettler 1978: 4). In other words, the
poet or narrator was essentially a performer. Another scenario would be that the performer when
dictating at the request of a scribe or scribes learns to perform more slowly and without the stimulation
of ‘music, tempo, or audience rapport’ (1978: 5). Parry added the concept of ‘oral formula’: a group of
words used regularly, employing a consistent metrical pattern to convey a particular idea (Zwettler
1978:6). Readers familiar with the Qur’an will see immediately the relevance of this dimension of
Zwettler’s working theory. Indeed virtually everyone writing on the topic of this chapter of the
Handbook cites Zwettler’s long chapter, ‘The Classical ʿArabīya’, at some point (1978: 97–188).

Gregor Schoeler, submitting Zwettler’s book to a thorough critical analysis (2006: 87–110), presents a
number of reasons why the Parry/Lord criteria of oral poetry do not apply to ancient Arabic poetry
(2006: 88–90). Schoeler also reports that American and European literary criticism has lost interest in
oral poetry theory due to its zealous application of the Parry/Lord theory (2006: 105). Be that as it may,
Zwettler’s discussion of the topic of Classical Arabic (1978: 97–188) has endured. After extensive
interaction with other linguists, Zwettler concludes that the Qur’an was at its outset a special, inter-
tribal, and fully inflected ʿarabiyya like that of the pre- and early Islamic poetry and unlike any of the
dialects of the time (1978: 145–7). In other words, only the poetry and the Qur’an featured iʿrāb at the
time of Muḥammad (1978: 128–9).

Qur’an in Context: a Twenty-First-Century Response

The first decade of the twenty-first century and the new millennium has provided Qur’anic studies with
a rich new crop of publications: two new major reference works, The Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān (6
vols. 2001–6) and The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics (5 vols. 2006–9); and two
anthologies that explore the Qur’an in context: Reynolds (2008) and Neuwirth, Sinai, and Marx (2010).
Studies of an archive of very early Qur’anic manuscripts found in Yemen in the 1970s have appeared:
Puin (1996), Sadeghi and Goudarzi (2012). A broad consensus exists today that, at the time the Qur’an
emerged, Arab tribes, both settled and nomadic, spoke distinct dialects of Arabic, each differing from
the variety of Arabic exhibited by the ancient poetry and the Qur’an as currently known. Nevertheless,
this century also absorbed its revisionist shock.
Christoph Luxenberg and the Syro-Aramaic Ur-Qur’an

Christoph Luxenberg’s The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran (2007) brought the Syriac theme to
prominence again in the new millennium. Mass media drew attention to Luxenberg’s interpretation of
the Qur’an’s ‘virgins of paradise’ (ḥūr ʿīn) (Q. 44:54; 52:20; 56:22) as ‘white, crystal (-clear) grapes’
(2007: 250–1). Luxenberg offers a key methodology for unlocking the meaning of Qur’anic expressions
that Western translators deem obscure. In essence he examines a classic commentary such as al-
Ṭabarī’s (d. 310/923) and a dictionary such as Ibn Manẓūr’s (d. 711/1311) and different recitation
systems (qirāʾāt) to discover words or meanings translators may have missed that improve the passage’s
sense. Then he checks to see if a change in the diacritical points added to the scriptio defectiva rasm
(see Chapter 11 in this volume) based on a Syriac root provides the expression with more sense within
its context (Luxenberg 2007: 23–7). Luxenberg’s method omits a thorough search of traditional Muslim
Qur’an scholarship, (p. 284) considering it ‘fundamentally based on the erroneous historical-linguistic
conceptions of Arabic exegesis’ (2007: 11). Evaluations of Luxenberg’s work include Gilliot and Larcher
(EQ 3:129 32) and Neuwirth (2003; 2007: 13–18).

Angelika Neuwirth and a Return to the Qur’an Itself

Angelika Neuwirth bucked much of the revisionist tide of the 1970s with a myriad of treatises, including
Studien zur Komposition der mekkanischen Suren (now in a second edition 2007), a detailed analysis of
the broadly acknowledged Meccan suras of the Qur’an. She faults current scholarship for studying only
the complete, fully canonical Qur’an as a codex—while neglecting its actual details. She proposes and
engages in a micro-study of the Qur’an in a way that makes use of the Qur’an’s distinctive self-revelation
of its process of canonization. She demonstrates her pre-canonical micro-study method by examining
themes from Genesis 3 as they occur progressively in seven suras (2000a and 2000b). She distinguishes
between the liturgical role in community formation of the revelation as qurʾān, ‘recitation’, within the
context of its being identified as kitāb, ‘scripture’, alongside other monotheistic holy books (2000a: 26–
7, 37; 2007: 24–54). Neuwirth further contextualizes her proposals in Qur’anic Studies in a 54–page
introduction to Studien (2007: 1–54), examining the history of Qur’anic Studies, and charting a return to
the Qur’an itself as a focus for understanding its provenance and process of development. She views the
original Qur’an, along with pre-Islamic poetry, as Liedersprache, ‘lyric discourse’ (2007: 330), the
esteemed literary koine of this chapter.

Ernest Axel Knauf and Old Arabic Triglossia

Ernest Axel Knauf (2010) rejects both the traditional Muslim view of one inflected language unifying
Bedouin dialects and lyrical poetry and Vollers’s simple diglossia of Volkssprache und Schriftsprache
(1906). Knauf favours a triglossial context for the two centuries just prior to the time of the revelation of
the Qur’an. According to him, Nabataean Old Arabic had become ‘some sort of standard Arabic as early
as the second century BCE’ (2010: 229). At first it was an unwritten language of Arabian traders and
shippers. But sometime between the third and the fourth centuries BCE, as revealed by post-Nabataean
texts, it became a written language (2010: 229). This ‘inter-tribal lingua franca’ (Knauf’s equivalent of a
koine?) developed in spite of the absence of any political or religious unity among the Arabs (2010: 228).
Knauf believes this ‘trilingual situation’ of the supra-regional ‘Early Standard Arabic’ lingua franca of the
merchants, the literary language of poets and divines, and the tribal and regional dialects ‘requires a
reassessment of the language of the Qur’an’ (2010: 247). The Prophet, in order to produce written
scripture, employed the ‘only written form of Arabic’ available and formed it ‘as close to the Poetic Old
Arabic as possible’ (2010: 247). Knauf’s findings regarding both a trade lingua franca and a common
literary discourse, reaching back into the pre-Islamic (p. 285) period, support Corriente’s trade koine
(1975: 38–9, n. 1). Al-Sharkawi’s speculation that along trade routes from Lebanon through the Ḥijāz
down to Yemen an inter-tribal trade koine may have been in play (2010: 57, 110) fits Knauf’s scenario
also. Jonathan Owens’s thesis of two forms of pre-diasporic Arabic—one with word-end inflection and
one without (2006)—seems compatible with Knauf’s triglossia as well.

Kees Versteegh and the Force of an Absent Pseudo-correction

For Kees Versteegh, in common with most of the scholars surveyed, lisān ʿarabiyy, ‘an Arabic tongue’ (Q.
16:103), indicates a supra-tribal unity, a language that served as the binding factor for all those who
lived in the Arabian Peninsula, as opposed to the ʿAjam, the non-Arabs who lived outside it and spoke
different languages. In pre-Islamic poetry the term ʿArab indicates an ethno-cultural group (2001: 37).
But Versteegh’s view of lisān ʿarabiyy does not necessarily mean that it contrasted starkly with the
everyday language of Muḥammad. Against the koine consensus, he points out, stands the certainty of
the complete absence of pseudo-correction in the pre-Islamic poetry. Pseudo-correction refers to
people being too correct. For example, an Arab’s mother tongue offers him mā katabū, mā, a negative
particle, plus past tense ‘they did not write’. He wants to write it in the formal written high language and
knows that it can negate with lam plus the present tense of the verb. So he writes lam yaktubūna,
forgetting that the high language requires the present subjunctive tense yaktubū in this context.
Versteegh asks whether if the system of iʿrāb were limited to the poetic or Qur’anic high language and
all mother-tongue Arabic lacked it, would pseudo-correction not have been more common (2001: 51,
115–20)? He then gives evidence that Bedouin really did provide the standard for Arabic up until the end
of the fourth/tenth century (2001: 64). Since, according to Versteegh, no existing explanation for the
emergence of new dialects proves satisfactory, more must be known about how language in general
changes over time and about the sociological context of the early expansion of Islam in each particular
area (2001: 112). Owens has plenty to say about the history of Arabic (2006), and al-Sharkawi about the
social contexts or ecologies of Arabic acquisition during the expansion of the Arab Empire (2010).

Jonathan Owens and a Caseless Variety of Old Arabic

Owens uses comparative linguistics to identify characteristics of pre-diasporic Arabic, a task relevant to
discovering the nature of the Qur’an’s original language. He defines pre-diasporic Arabic as the Arabic
from the beginning of the Arab expansion (10/630) to about 174/790, the time soon after the
publication of the Kitāb of Sībawayhi (d. c. 180/796), the grammarian who recorded ‘eye witness’
reports of pre-diasporic varieties of Arabic. Owens’s comparative method involves examining the
colloquial varieties of Arabic that (p. 286) now exist and can be analysed in detail in order to describe
the probable common language variety from which they stemmed before being carried to widely
diverse areas by the Arab expansion. Pre-diasporic Arabic consists then of ‘a variety based on the results
of a reconstruction of modern dialects’ (2006: 3) ‘through a set of linguistic rules’ (2006: 8). For example,
except for creoles and pidgins, all of the modern varieties studied ‘minimally mark the first person
singular of the perfect verb with -t’: Egyptian, katab-t; Iraqi, (qultu) katab-tu; Najdī, kitab-t. Thus, their
mother variety must have done so (2006: 13). Qur’anic variant readings (qirāʾāt) and the linguist
Sībawayhi’s observations and interpretations support Owens’s comparative method. First on the
question of case endings, Owens shows that both Nöldeke and Vollers misrepresented ‘the entire
concept of the variant readings’ (2006: 121). Each assumed that his model of the original Qur’anic
language variety, the one flowing from the mouth of Muḥammad, represented the language of the
Imām Codex (see Chapter 11 in this volume) that was distinguished from an array of variant recitation
systems compatible with it. Rather, the history of the

recitation systems (qirāʾāt) entails that all of them—as decentralized, locally defined alternative readings
of the Qur’an—have equal claim to being original. Any reading from among ‘The Seven’ is ‘as old as any
other’ (2006: 120). Ibn Mujāhid’s Sabʿa (see Chapter 13 in this volume) makes this very point. In other
words, the uninflected Qur’an of Vollers and the fully inflected Qur’an of Nöldeke could both have been
viable reading systems.

Owens in fact finds support from the qirāʾāt for the results of his comparative approach. In the reading
(qirāʾa) of Abū ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAlāʾ (d. c.154–6/770–2), one of ‘The Seven’, Owens finds evidence of a
recitation system in which ‘a short final vowel was of negligible functional status’ (2006: 129). The
qirāʾāt literature singles out Abū ʿAmr’s system for ‘major assimilation’ (al-idghām al-kabīr), its
assimilation of two consonants not separated by a vowel (2006: 124). The absence of the final short
vowels of word-end inflection (iʿrāb) entails major assimilation. Abū ʿAmr’s reading was established
before case and mood endings became so important for grammarians (2006: 122). With Sībawayhi’s
help, Owens shows that the bound object pronouns of forty-nine modern dialects cannot have sheltered
the remnants of pre-diasporic case vowels. If an uninflected Arabic dialect had descended from an
inflected variety, one would expect to find in the uninflected descendant fossil traces of the mood-vowel
inflections that had once been bound between a verb and its object pronoun in the inflected ancestor,
for example, yusāʿid-u-ka, ‘he helps you’. But Owens found that in the forty-nine contemporary dialects
that he surveyed all suspected bound object pronoun vowels could be accounted for as epenthetic
vowels required by Arabic phonological laws. They were not fossils of mood-indicating inflection bound
between a verb and its suffix (2006: 257–9). An instance of how this works can be summarized as
follows: Sībawayhi reports that when a nominative -u or a genitive –I occurs before an object suffix, such
as in yaḍrib-u-hu, ‘he hits him’, and in min maʾman-i-ka, ‘from your place of safety’, the contrast in the
two vowels is neutralized, both becoming -ə: yaḍrib-ə-hā and maʾman-ə-ka. The epenthetic vowel -ə
represents a barely audible sound (2006: 60). The Arabic grammatical tradition terms this short,
centralized pronunciation of short high vowels (-i- and -u-) ikhtilās, ‘furtiveness’ (2006: 306). The
Qur’anic qirāʾāt tradition calls it takhfīf, (p. 287) ‘pronouncing lightly’ (2006: 308; Sībawayhi, Kitāb.
2.324, referring to the reading of Abū ʿAmr). Obviously, ‘the phonemic functionality of -i- and -u-, was
severely curtailed’ by ikhtilās/takhfīf, a feature ‘very well established in Old Arabic’ (2006: 61). Owens
defends the theses that both a case and a caseless variety of the Old Arabic existed in pre-diasporic
times, and that the modern dialects descend from the caseless variety (2006: 115).

Muhammad al-Sharkawi and the Ecology of Arabic Acquisition

As Versteegh advised, much more needs to be learned about the social context of Arabic in its various
historical stages (2001: 112). Al-Sharkawi steps up to that challenge with a study of ‘the Arabicisation
process of the Middle East in the seventh century’, according to the ecological factors that ‘facilitated
the process and shaped its results’ (al-Sharkawi 2010: 1). ‘Ecology’ refers to the whole environment,
external and internal, of the acquisition of Arabic in the garrison towns of the Arab conquests. For
example, the majority population in such garrison towns as Fusṭāt in Egypt were native speakers of
Arabic. Their workers came from the non-Arabic speaking, conquered people. The ecology of that
situation included that learning Arabic informally was a desideratum of both majority Arabs and
minority non-Arabs. The ecology of the mix of Arab and non-Arabs enabled the emergence of simplified
true Arabic dialects, rather than creole or pidgin varieties. Such an ecology also accounts for the striking
similarities among the modern colloquial varieties (2010: 141–3, 159–73). Al-Sharkawi gives significant
attention to varieties of Arabic at the time the original Qur’an appeared (2010: 29–86). The Qur’an’s
own al-ʿarabī al-mubīn, ‘clearly understandable Arabic’ (Q. 16:103; 26:195), refers to ‘the tongue of all
the Arabs’ and became the inclusive and ideal model for written and recited discourse (2010: 32, citing
Versteegh 2001:37). Yet variation from the standard Arabic of the grammarians shows up again and
again in Qur’anic and poetic discourse, suggesting a diglossia of tribal and regional dialects, on the one
hand, and an inter-tribal ‘poetic rendition’ (2010: 31), on the other. Given the testimony that trade and
socializing travelled between the urban centres of the Ḥijāz and Yemen (2010: 54) and that language
innovation moves along such trade routes, al-Sharkawi speculates that a process of koineization may
have been in play ‘long before the succession of conquests’ (2010: 57).

Jan Retsö: Who were the Arabs of the ʿarabiyya?

Jan Retsö argues that the name ‘Arab’ designates ‘a group of initiates of a fellowship of sanctified
warriors or guards around a divinity’ (2003: 596) with many locations whose language, the ʿarabiyya,
‘had an authority as a medium for messages from the non-human world’ (2003: 52). Along with
Wansbrough, Retsö rejects the traditional interpretation of Q. 14:4, ‘We have sent no messenger except
with (bi) the language of his people (qawm) to (p. 288) make clear’ (Retsö’s translation), in favour of
seeing the verse as undergirding ‘the authority of the message’ (2003: 46–7). The verse addresses this
closed circle of sanctified warriors (2003: 48). According to Retsö, lisān ʿarabī (Q. 16:103; 41:44) ‘is not
contrasted with Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek ... but with [lisān] aʿjamī ... probably a form of the language
we today would call Arabic’ (2003: 47). Several languages of these Arabs existed in Arabia before Islam,
according to Retsö. They all contained archaic features and were for special—not everyday—use; the
diviners (kuhhān) and the poets (shuʿarāʾ) lived among the Arabs and used them (2003: 595, 624). Retsö
defines the qurrāʾ—usually understood to mean ‘reciters’ of the Qur’an as ahl al-qurā, ‘people of the
villages’ (Q. 7:96; the word qurrāʾ does not occur in the Qur’an). He then finds mention of qurā ʿara-
biyya, ‘Arab villages’, in geographical dictionaries. This designation he believes refers to these guardian
villages in Iraq’s countryside (2003: 48–51, 61). For a thorough, fair, and constructively critical treatment
of this issue with extensive bibliography, see Mustafa Shah (2005).

Five Fruitful Avenues for Further Research

Readers of the Handbook can readily see that the language of the original Qur’an offers a fascinating
field for further research. At least five research traditions promise scholars on going and long-lasting
opportunities for productivity, service, and satisfaction.

Discovering New Materials and Rereading of Old Materials

Recent analysis of early Qur’an manuscripts found in Yemen deserves special mention (Puin 1996).
Although their discovery in a mosque in Sanaa occurred in the 1970s, their careful analysis awaited the
twenty-first century. Nicolai Sinai maintains that the analysis of one palimpsest manuscript Ṣanʿāʾ 1
(Sadeghi and Goudarzi 2012) ‘rules out the assumption that the Koranic corpus was produced any later
than the middle of the seventh century’ (2012: 27). Wansbrough’s (1977) dating of the Qur’an’s
appearance considerably later, as mentioned above, must be modified in the light of these manuscripts.
Such new discoveries are not alone in their promise for scholarship, however. The variety and the
abundance of long-standing early Muslim scholarship represent a rich vein deserving attention. It will be
wise not to ignore this scholarship. For example, there is telling evidence in Sībawayhi’s discussion of Q.
12:31, mā hādha, basharan, ‘this is no human’ (Kitāb. 1: 20, 13f.) that he knew ʿUthmān’s (r. 23–35/644–
56) Codex. The Qur’an, like the Ḥijāzī dialect, uses the negative mā here like laysa to put its object,
basharan, in the accusative case. Sībawayhi reports that the Tamīmīs using their tribal dialect read it
basharun in the nominative case, a rule congruent with Classical Arabic norms. Then he (p. 289) adds,
illā man ʿarafa kayfa hiyafī’l-muṣḥaf, ‘except the one who knows how it is in the Codex [of ʿUthmān]’.
The Codex even in its scriptio defectiva original form marks the indefinite masculine accusative
unambiguously with alif ṭawīla (‫(ٮسرا‬. Thus Schoeler observes that Sībawayhi ‘quotes ʿUthmān’s codex
precisely as it exists today, without any variations at all’ (2010: 789). Schoeler himself practices a
sophisticated sifting of historical narratives as well as their chains of authority, with attention to the
mixture of both oral and written transmission, illustrating the much needed critical use of the rich
treasure of traditional Muslim scholarship (2006). This rereading mentality will more and more
characterize successful investigation into the nature of the original Qur’an. Shah’s use of such material in
response to Retsö’s interpretation of qurrāʾ requires mention here as well (2005).

Mastering Recitation Systems

Among these old materials the canonical and non-canonical qirāʾāt, ‘readings’ or ‘recitation systems’,
frequently mentioned in this chapter, offer a rich linguistic clue to the nature of the original Qur’an.
They have played a major role in the work of such scholars as Corriente (1976: 64–5), and Owens (2006:
120–5), and Shah (2005).

Extending Dialect Studies

The prolific activity of M. C. A. Macdonald and others working in a comprehensive way on the varieties
of Old Arabic will continue. The variety of Old Arabic without word-end inflection that Owens projected
by comparing modern dialects of Arabic (2006) appears congruent with the commercial or trade koine
posited by Corriente (1971: 27, n. 9; 1975: 38, n. 1) and Knauf (2010: 227–31). Given the plethora of
modern dialects acknowledged as strikingly similar, Owens’s method foretokens a fruitful future for
dialect studies (2006).

Return to the Study of the Qur’an’s Text

Angelika Neuwirth exemplifies a recovery of attention to the text of the Qur’an itself (2007). While
admiring much of Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies (1977), she challenges his conviction that the Qur’an’s
composition consists of ‘logia of the Prophet, framed by excerpts from later polemico-apologetical
debates’ (1996: 73–74; 2003: 5). She takes a more phenomenological approach to what the Qur’an
reveals about itself, especially in its earliest suras, as an interactive engagement of a ‘charismatic leader
with his community’ (2003: 5). Neuwirth shows that Qur’anic suras do not correspond to Wansbrough’s
‘concept of logia, isolated sayings, at all’ (2003: 5–6). This conviction flows from her detailed inductive
study of the Qur’anic text itself in numerous publications (e.g. 2007). (p. 290) A community of scholars
under her leadership has affirmed and complemented her project in The Qurʾān in Context: Historical
and Literary Investigations into the Qurʾānic Milieu (Neuwirth, Sinai, and Marx 2010), an 864–page
volume with twenty-eight papers, including two by Neuwirth dealing with the text of the Qur’an itself
(2010: 499–531; 733–78).
In another return to the text of the Qur’an, treated elsewhere in this Handbook (Chapter 19), Michel
Cuypers, using a method known as Semitic rhetorical analysis, demonstrates a holistic and consistent
compositional form for the many spans of text he has analysed, especially his lengthy commentary on
Sūrat al-Māʾida, Q. 5 (2009).

Nuancing the Qur’an’s Uniqeness

Finally, more attention can profitably be focused on the Qur’an’s unique diction termed in this chapter
‘esteemed literary koine’. Did the Qur’an feature a basic trade koine (Corriente 1975: 41) with its literary
esteem enhanced by the word-end case and mood markers, but its meaning not limited by them
(Corriente 1976: 64–5)? Was its powerful Lieder sprache (Neuwirth 2007:330) different from classical
Arabic poetry in a way more indigenous to its audience? Sprinkled with lexical and syntactic features
from Old Arabic dialects was the Qur’an even more relevant in its impact?

Corriente’s expression of the inimitability (iʿjāz) of the Qur’an beckons in the direction of such a research
project suggesting that Muḥammad’s idiolect, nurtured among Bedouin, may have offered him more
than did his Ḥijāzī dialect alone. Corriente sees the Qur’an as a clever linguistic compromise in the form
of lowest-yield iʿrāb Arabic, understandable and clear to all speakers regardless of their vernacular
features, and yet formal enough to befit a heavenly message (1975: 43).

One may hopefully be excused for referring to ‘a heavenly message’ as ‘clever’; but one should likewise
not experience surprise when the original language of a holy book of prophetic discourse in ‘esteemed
literary koine’ turns out to be outstanding in its ability ‘to make things clear’ (Q. 14:4)!