/lit/ - Literature

Reminder that Henri Lammens (pbuh) has never been refuted.

"Some Orientalists have alleged that it has been touched up in order to bring the language to the standard of perfection set by the pre-Islamic poets. In that case we must suppose that these purists in their revision have paid no attention to the extremely primitive rhymes of the most recent Suras and above all that they have passed over slight faults of grammar and style which it would have been so easy to rectify. (Qoran 20, 66: inna followed by a nominative; 49, 9, dual subject of a plural verb.) In 2, 106; 4, 40-41, the predicate is singular in the first clause of the sentence, and in the plural in the second although relating to the same grammatical subject. In 27, 61; 35, 25, passim, Allah speaks in the third person; then, without transition, in the first. Thus in 2, 172, the celebrated philologist Al-Mubarrad read al-barr instead of
al-birr, in order to avoid this singular construction: ‘piety is he who...’ In spite of all this there is no occasion for surprise in the fact that the Qoran, especially the Medinese Suras with their more polished phrases, less interspersed with ellipses and anacolutha than the pre-Hijran ones, has served as the standard for fixing the rules of national grammar...