The Quran and Arabic

The Quran and Arabic

1989 9 September 5-6 The Quran and Arabic (565) “At the time of Muhammad there was no work of the first order in Arabic prose. The Koran was therefore the earliest, and has ever since remained the model prose work. Its language is rhythmical and rhetorical, but not poetical. Its rhymed prose has set the standard which almost every conservative Arabic writer of today consciously strives to imitate.”

Throughout the Roman empire, the common language was Latin. But with the passage of time, particularly in those parts furthest from Rome, changes in accent and usage produced several variants of the original language which became quite distinct from each other, first of all as dialects, then as national languages, the most important of these (known as the Romance group) being French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Also belonging to this group is Romansch, which is spoken in parts of Switzerland. In addition to these national languages, there are the regional languages of Occitan, Catalan, Sardinian and Rhaetian, as well as the Creole languages which have developed in various colonized parts of the world. In this way, a single dominant language developed into over a dozen fully-fledged languages in a matter of a few centuries. This happened in the absence of any strong uniting factor such as a powerful literary masterpiece.

If Arabic did not change and developed in the same way into many dialects and languages, it was because of the great unifying and standardizing influence of the Quran. After all, in ancient times, marked differences could be heard in the accents and pronunciation of the various Arab tribes, just as had happened in Europe with the different Latin-speaking peoples. Even today these divergences continue to exist to a point where dialects become mutually unintelligible to their different speakers. Yet, despite these regional differences, the written language of all Arab countries has remained unaltered. This is something of a miracle and it has been entirely wrought by the Quran. It is true that people used the dialect of their own particular tribe when speaking, but whenever communication took a written form, it had to be in the language of the Quran. The powerful style of the Quran so dominated their respective dialects, that it prevented them from becoming too widely divergent from the original and ultimately becoming independent languages.

In pre-Quranic times, Arabs used to express themselves in poetry. For Arabs, the Quran was the first important work ever written in prose. Prof. Philip K. Hitti puts it in his The History of the Arabs, “Its literary influence may be appreciated when we realize that it was due to it alone that the various dialects of the Arabic-speaking peoples have not fallen apart into distinct languages, as have the Romance languages. While today an Iraqi may find it a little difficult fully to understand the speech of a Moroccan, yet he would have no difficulty in understanding his written language, since in both al Iraq and Morocco – as well as in Syria, Arabia, Egypt – the classical language modeled by the Koran is followed closely everywhere. “At the time of Muhammad there was no work of the first order in Arabic prose. The Koran was therefore the earliest, and has ever since remained the model prose work. Its language is rhythmical and rhetorical, but not poetical. Its rhymed prose has set the standard which almost every conservative Arabic writer of today consciously strives to imitate.” (p. 127)