Quranic Arabic An Indepth look
To best understand the Quran we have to understand the Quran from the linguistic background that it came from. We are looing for truth here not religious interpretations. The Quran is divine (as I believe) but that does not mean that the words that it uses are. The term God's word is not talking about the langauge that these words are in but the message that is being communicated through them in the Quran. Human languages are human languages and Arabic is a human langauge. It was not invented by God. Like evolution of creation (if you believe in this) it was guided by God into existence, as were all languages. Some were even guided into extinction.
The language of the Quran is the language of Muhammad as a child (God bless him), when he wasn't yet God's prophet, his father, his mother, his uncles, his aunts, his cousins, his neighbors and of all the people who spoke Arabic then just prior to 570 when this man was born. The Classical Arabic that the Quran spoke can be traced to a few hundreds years before 570, where it was being written in Aramaic script before Aramaic script split off into scripts that we now associate with the Arabic language.
But don't get the script and the langauge confused. Any language can be written in any script as long as that script can represent the sounds that it makes (Malaysian is written in latin script and Farsi in written in a variant of Arabic script). So the mistake of professional and amateur linguists of trying to say that Arabic is a form of Aramaic or that Arabic words can be interpreted from an Aramaic or Hebrew perspective is dead wrong. Early Arabic was not Aramaic and if you go far enough back in time the language will obviously not be Arabic anymore (Arabic had its origins in distinct languages previous to it as well). If you go to far back you'll get an acestor of what came to be the Arabic of the Pre-Islamic poetries, the Quran and the Hadeeths. Trying to understand Classical Arabic from some inscriptions written in languages that are ancestors of Arabic would be like trying to interpret modern English from Old English or even Shakesperean English. These are different languages and though father and grandson may have some, or even alot of, similarities they are completely different people.
With that said Modern Arabic and the colloquials also pose a probelm to properly undersanding the Quran. Unfortunately most Arabs, due to the rampant lies of Arab nationalism and Arab Islamism (the idea that Arabs are the bearers, preservers and protectors of Islam) continue to think that their colloquials are Arabic, even though they are just Arabic based. Unfortunately, unlike most non-Arab Muslims who think of the Quran when they think of Islam, most Arab Muslims still think of the Ummayads and other Arab empires, along with the Quran when they think of Islam. That is a crippling factor as they are in the best position to clarify all that this post is going to say. They also haven't realized that Modern Standard Arabic (a term that Islamist Arabs haven't seemed to grasp) isn't half the language that real Classical Arabic is. I don't say that to be funny either. Modern Arabic is an intentional reduction of Classical Arabic to make it simpler for dialect dominant "Arabic" countries.
Modern Standard still pulls from Classical Arabic and traditionalists seem to be there to make sure that it doesn't forget its roots by using old school phrasings, words or grammar in secular settings like schools or professional arenas that have already taken onto this reduced Classical Arabic langauge (mainly used by modern Arabic media) as a way to bring the "Arab" world closer though a linguistic common understanding of a language they have found very diverse and grammatically very difficult to grasp because of the linguistic (dialectical) diversity that has been created in "Arab" countries, namely the colloquials. Those traditionalist tactics only work on Arabs with deep Islamic inclinations and Quranic sympathy. Modernist Arabs or non-Muslim Arabs (I am in contact with Arabs like these everyday) will be quick to tell you that most phrases used in the Quran are obsolete or archaic phrases, or don't mean anything to them.
Islam will continue to keep alive Classical Arabic in its mosques, schools and universities, and every friday an imam or a sheikh will make sure that this linguistic tradition survives. However, they will also continue to speak the language with the taint of various Islamic ideologies and post-quranic phenomenons that have changed and added meanings to Classical Arabic words since the advent of the Quran. (In addition to the subtle influence that their colloquials have on how they use certain words) al-aqsaa mosque wasn't built until way after the Quran, but they will still interpret the word like that in the Quran. Even the Classical Arabic dictionaries show that the word deen included the concept of religion but didn't just mean religion (most people at free-minds are aware of that now although they wrongly pidgeon-whole it with the meaning 'system' when it has two general meanings of 'dues or just dues' and 'systematic rule' a concept that applies from religions to governements, to anything that has rules and guidelines to be followed).
Through proper linguistic understanding and the proper linguistic tools we can now begin to fully understand what the Quran has been saying to us in its multifaceted entirety. Because understanding the key to a language (that is the basic principle from which it works) helps us understand all that the Quran could have been saying to Muhammad's people and subsequently to us. In every language you have the standard or most used phrases but you also have the non-standard or not so often used phrases and senses of words that follow all of the grammatical principles of the language but that are not necesarily the most used or commonly heard phrases (The debate about the word yateem is a prime example of that). That is the basis of why a homogeneous language can split up into dialects without outside influences. It is because of the basic rules of the language and how it can be expressed and those basic rules can manifest themselves in different ways.
Like in English how we can say a 'dissolver' or a 'dissolvent' Or how the word 'drag' can have two different plurals 'dragged' or 'drug.' The suffix 'ent' and 'er' are in most cases synonymous and the past tenses for one syllable verbs in English are highly unpredictable but are based off of changing the middle vowel to a 'u' an 'a' or adding 't' as a suffix or the sound 'd' as a suffix. Words like hit and spit also fall into the category but their situations are a little more complicated (but they never broke these basic principles, no English word will). Compare the English 'spelt' to the American 'spelled' and in some American dialects they say both 'spelt' and 'spelled.'
With that said Classical Arabic during the time of Muhammad had different dialects as well, but they all followed the basic principles of Classical Arabic. Principles that can be understood through the grammatical study of the language. Whether you think that a language is colloquial, common or street all languages are based off of grammar. Just because the Classical Arabic of the Quran used to be a common language and then climbed the rungs to status doesn't mean that it was not a grammatically based language, all languages are whether they are considered home-talk, street-talk or fancy-talk. Books like "A Grammar of the Arabic language" by W. Wright, 3rd addition iluminate these basic principles of Classsical Arabic.
Taking a language in a dictionary definition sense is good and must be done, because some words are not based off of grammar or have meanings that are not based off of grammar because they are loan words, or based off of the sounds of things make or archaic words whose grammar is long gone but the word still remains in the langauge. Some Arab-centric people or language purist would like for every Arabic word to have had its origins in the Arabic verb based forms which makes Arabic so logical and structured. But even the Quran uses these Arabic loan words, which came into Old Arabic from languages like old persian but which were Arabicised. It is an idiotic way of thinking because what knowledgeable English Grammarian would go around saying 'to dissolve' or 'comfort' aren't English words just because their origins are from Latin.
Understanding all these things will help us be able to interperet with precision the range of meanings that any one sentence in a Hadeeth, Islamic poetry or the Quran can have. But to train ourselves and to train others in this skill as it concerns the Quran we will have to able to produce a book that illuminates both the defintion aspect of the Classical Arabic words that the Quran uses (From a pre-Islamic perspective, eliminating meanings that have only Islamic, Midieval or Modern significance) as well as the possible grammatical depth of each word that the Quran uses even if the dictionary is not able to do that. This does not mean excluding any religious meaning of a word as if people before the Quran didn't pray, etc. That is extremism, and it denies that fact that even "pagans" pray, and that Arab Christians and Jews were rampant in Pre-Quranic Arabia. Classical Arabic was their native toungue too.
When we can accomplish that, and then accomplish the feat of developing a program that can efficiently teach that then we will be on the road to successfully implementing the Quran. Understanding all of the above and focusing these efforts on all of the words that the Qur'an uses and putting this into a compilations bypasses having to teach aspects of the language that can't be applied to the Quran, but it puts the burden on us to able to sift through all the Classical Arabic resources, record and then pass on what is relevant to understanding the Quran. It also requires any Arab who is involved in this to trust the dictionaries and grammar books and understand that although the language that they speak is similar to, and derives from Old-School Arabic it is not old-school arabic. Arabs have knowledge of commonly prefferred, modernly preferred or religiously preferred meanings of Arabic words but not necessarily all of the meanings of Old-school classical arabic words, which includes the meanings of the Qur'an's words.
I know to some people this might be very complicated but the Quran says that it is for Ulool-albaabi People of Wisdom, and for those who ya'qiloona who use their logic. When the Quran was revealed to the Arabs of Muhammad's day they had all of the linguistic tools to understand the book, if they didn't it was because of their hard-heartedness and prejudices. It was because of people who cared about this message being spread far and wide that an effort was made to preserve the language, whether they were Persian, Arab or Ethiopian makes no difference. They preserved the language from the changes that it would take in the future so that we can understand the Quran without corruption. When there works don't apply to the Quran necessarily that is due to the fact that they were recording the usage of the language whether a meaning that developed because of some event after the Quran had made its way into the language or not. Examples of these incidences are clear as day for the honest person who hasn't been jaded by the deficiency of ONE dictionary that he or she might have perused through, or who didn't take the time to read and think on all that was being said in Arabic lexicons like Lane's Lexicion. It wasn't the grammarians who corrupted the language, they preserved the language as best they could. In my opinion they did a very good job. Orientalists and later grammarians improved leaps and bounds on their works, as they were not limited by stangant Islamic thought, niether were the first Grammarians. Now it is up to us to consult all of these resources, strike out post-quranic meanings which don't apply to the Quran and then we can revive the language of the Quran. In this modern era and due to the changes that have taken place in Arabic after the Quran it would be deserved to be called Quranic Arabic, and we could spread it far and wide and make it our lingua fraca.
Godbless,
Anwar
