CHAPTER TWO The Quran — The Prophet’s Miracle

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 had a strong influence on all of them, being the language from which they were all derived, but itself survived only as the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. No longer a living tongue, it was ultimately only of historical interest, although it did continue to provide the linguistic bases for technical, legal and scientific terms. Without a good grasp of Latin, for instance, 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 have always left a deep imprint on the languages of the affected peoples. These factors have been at work on the Arabic language 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. After the coming of Islam, Arabs settled in many parts of Africa and Asia where other languages besides Arabic were spoken. Their intermingling with other races, however, did not have any effect on the Arabs’ language, which remained in its original state. There are also instances of other peoples changing over to Arabic, such as the Jewish tribes who left Syria in 70 A.D. and settled in Medina where, having come in contact with the Arabic speaking ‘Amaliqa tribe, they adopted Arabic as their language, although the Arabic they spoke was different from common Arabic, retaining, a strong Hebrew influence. In the very first century after the revelation of the Quran, Arabic was exposed to the sort of forces which cause a language to alter radically. This was when Islam spread among various Arab tribes, who began to congregate in major Muslim cities. Intonation and accent varied from tribe to tribe. So much so that Abu ‘Amr ibn al-ula was moved to remark that the ‘Himyar tribe do not speak our language; their vocabulary is quite different from ours.’ ‘Umar ibn Khattab once brought before the Prophet an Arab whom he had heard reciting the Quran. The Arab had been pronouncing the words of the Quran in such a strange manner that ‘Umar was unable to make out what part of the Book of God he was reading. The Prophet once spoke to a visiting delegation from some Arab tribe in their own dialect. It seemed to ‘Ali as if the Prophet was speaking in a foreign tongue. The main reason for this difference was variation in accent. For instance, the Banu Tameem, who lived in the eastern part of Najd, were unable to say the letter ‘j’ (Jim) and used to pronounce it as ‘y’ (Ye)