CHAPTER TWO The Quran — The Prophet’s Miracle

instead. The word for mosque (masjid), they used to pronounce ‘masyid’, and instead of ‘shajarat’ (trees), they would say ‘sharat’. ‘Q’ (Qaaf) they pronounced as ‘j’ (Jim), calling a ‘tareeq’ (road) a ‘tareej,’ a ‘sadiq’ (friend) a ‘sadij,’ ‘qadr’ (value) as ‘jadr’ and ‘qasim’ (distributor) as ‘jasim’. According to normal linguistic patterns, the coming together of tribes who spoke such varying dialects should have initiated a fresh process of change in the Arabic language, but this was not to be. The supreme eloquence of the language of the Quran guarded Arabic from any such transformation. What happened instead has been explained by Dr. Ahmad Hasan Zayyat: “After the coming of Islam, the Arabic language did not remain the monopoly of one nation. It became the language of all those who entered the faith.” Then these Arab Muslims left their native land, conquering territory extending from Kashghar in the east to Gibraltar in the west. Persian, Qibti, Berber, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Suryani were among the languages spoken by the peoples they came into contact with. Some of these nations were politically and culturally more advanced than the Arabs. Iraq, bastion of an ancient civilization and the cultural centre of major tribes, was one of the countries they entered. They mingled with the Iranians, masters of one of the world’s two great empires. The highly advanced Roman civilization, and an expanding Christian religion, were two of the forces that they clashed with. Among the countries they occupied was Syria, where Phoenician, Ghassanid, Greek, Egyptian and Cana’anian tribes had left behind outstanding traditions in literature and ethics. Then there was Egypt, the meeting place of oriental and occidental philosophy. These factors were more than enough to transform the Arabic language, as had been the case with other tongues exposed to similar forces. But they were rendered ineffective by the Quran, a specimen of such unrivalled literary excellence that no power could weaken the hold of the language in which it had been written. With the conquests of Islam, Arabic no longer belonged to one people alone; it became the language of several nations and races. When the ‘Ajamis, (non-Arabs) of Asia and Africa accepted Islam, they gradually adopted Arabic as their language. Naturally, these new converts were not as proficient in speaking the language as the Arabs of old. Then the Arabs in their turn were affected by the language spoken by their new co-religionists. The deterioration of Arabic was especially evident in large, cosmopolitan cities, where there was more intermingling of races. First it was the rank and file, those who did not pay much attention to the finer points of linguistics, who were affected. But the cultural elite did not remain immune either. A man once came to the court of Ziyad ibn Umayya and lamented. ‘Our fathers have died, leaving small children,’ with both ‘fathers’ and ‘children’ in the wrong