The Quran—The Miracle Given to the Prophet

THE QURAN—THE MIRACLE GIVEN TO THE PROPHET Although the Quran was revealed mainly in the language of the Quraysh, words used by other Arab tribes were also included. ‘Abdullah ibn al-’Abbas, a Qurayshi Muslim, was puzzled when the word fatir appeared in the Quran. “I did not know what the expression ‘Originator of the heavens and the earth’ meant,” he explained. “Then I heard an Arab saying that he had ‘originated’ a well when he had just started digging it, and I knew what the word fatir meant.” Abu Hurayrah said that he had never heard the word sikkin until he heard it in the chapter, ‘Joseph’, of the Quran. “We always used to call a knife (mudiyah),” he said. As Jalaluddin Suyuti has pointed out in al-Itqan, many words were pronounced differently by various Arab tribes. The Quran used some of these words in their most refined literary form. The Quraysh, for instance, used the word a’ata for ‘he gave,’ while the Himyaris used to pronounce it anta. The Quran preferred a’ata to anta. Likewise, it chose ‘asabi’ rather than shanatir and dhi’b instead of kata’. The general trend of preferring Qurayshi forms was sometimes reversed, as in the phrase la yalitkum min a’malikum-” nothing will be taken away from your actions”—which was borrowed from the Banu ‘Abbas dialect. In giving old Arabic words and expressions new depth and beauty, the Quran set a standard of literary excellence that no future writer could improve on. Moreover, it revised certain metaphors, rephrasing them more eloquently than