The Quran—The Miracle Given to the Prophet

THE QURAN—THE MIRACLE GIVEN TO THE PROPHET The 8th century A.D. was an age of Muslim conquest. The Romans were forced to take refuge in Constantinople, which became the capital of the eastern half of the Empire, until in 1453, the Turks took Constantinople and banished the Romans from this, their last stronghold. The decline of the Roman Empire enabled various local languages to flourish, notably French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Latin, the parent language, strongly influenced all of them but remained only as the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. No longer a living tongue, it retained only historical interest and continued to be used to explain technical, legal and scientific terms. For instance, without a good grasp of Latin, one cannot read Newton’s Principia in the original. Every classical language followed much the same pattern, changing along with social circumstances until, eventually, the original language gave way to another, completely changed one. Ethnic integration, political revolutions, and cultural clashes always left a deep mark on the language they affected. These factors have been at work in Arabic over the last 1500 years, but amazingly, it has remained intact. This extraordinary resilience of the Arabic language is entirely due to the miraculous spell the Quran has cast on it. In A.D. 70, some Jewish tribes left Syria and settled in Madinah, where the Arabic-speaking ‘Amaliqah tribe lived. Along with the ‘Amaliqahs, the Jews took Arabic as their language, but the Arabic they spoke differed from