Roger Pearse

Interesting. On what is this statement based? (Considering we are talking about 1300 years and a wide dispersion of cultures and scripts)

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

We need to actually have a lot more data before we can say anything about these issues, IMHO. There is also the issue of whether oral transmission comes into this. All these sorts of things need to be quantified before we can say very much.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

makerowner

It's always written now with the vowel diacritics. I don't know about previous ages, but a concern for accuracy was the motivation for collecting the Koran in a single text in the first place, so I would expect them to have started this fairly early. And the Koran is always written in Arabic, so it's only one script (unless you're referring to the different styles of Arabic writing?).

Roger Pearse

Thanks for the clarification. When you say "it is always written now...", may I ask what the source for this info is? Or is that your impression? How is that enforced today, if it is in fact a rule?

I recognise that possibly you may wonder whether these are polemical questions, as they could be. But actually I think that we all know less about the text of the Koran than we think we do, and I'm trying to get to whatever substratum of data underlies all this.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Solo

You don't seem to have ever heard "al Qur'an" (tr. "recitation") sung by a trained reciter, (qari). They start training early. The Koran-singing competitions date ostensibly from the times of Mohammed.

The spelling does not matter as much since the transmission chiefly aural, with emphasis on preserving the harmonious diction in the original bedoiun dialect, this including some apparent "contracting" idiosyncrcies of M. himself. E.g. it is said that God Almighty himself was mispronounced in M.'s recitation. Al-lah was the rendering of al Illah, the chief arabic pagan deity.
The purity of Islam was guaranteed by the purity of the qaris, professionally trained reciters, who were attached according to tradition to the ahl al-bait, the Prophet's household. They emerged as a political faction allied with Ali.


This, I believe, misapprehends the Qur'an. Unlike the Christian scripture which was more or less the expression of God's will via intellect (or so it was believed by the patristic philosophers and later scholastics), Islam's holy book excites the believers through sound and rhythm. The book is a series of incantations.

How important was the audio effect of the Qur'an ? Here is a true story: When the founder of the current Saudi dynasty, Abdul Aziz, brought in the first radio station to Riadh in the 1920's, the sheikhs were up in arms. No one may propagate words through the air-waves so the word is heard at a distance except a qari, they maintained. The devil would distort the sound and cause the words entrusted to a transmission to be distorted in meaning. Aziz had a quick response: he ordered a transmission of the Qur'an reading. End of technological anti-modernism in Saudi Arabia !

Jiri

Roger Pearse

Thank you for these comments, which are interesting. I hope you won't mind if I probe them a bit? Primary sources are my interest, you see.

I think that we are in general unfamiliar with this idea in the civilised world, and need to be a bit sceptical of any claims that we can't test. I'm wondering how/whether we know what is recited, today, in different cultures? (although of course we have TV and radio to standardise things) Likewise what was recited 10 centuries ago.

A few questions, to make this more concrete. Do we know that the transmission is "chiefly aural"? Where does this come from? Was it always so, and do we know?

On what source are these statements based?

And this?

I hope this doesn't sound captious. I just don't believe anything controversial in religion or politics until I can see the foundation on which it stands. I know that some misinformation circulates widely in Moslem circles (e.g. about the Council of Nicaea), and I think we must always establish on what data any statement stands.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

waked

I would like to see some proof .
spelling do matter,do you know anyting about arabic?
what is this ? there is no original dialect.
arabic evolved from very old aramic languages.
When the Quran was collected it was written with out dots .dotting the quarn was not to happen untill the time of Hajjaj ibn yusuf ath-thaqafi.
great.

Roger Pearse

No doubt; but Mohammed and his friends must have spoken something; which, I think, is what is meant by the original dialect here.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Solo

I have supplied a video of Qur'an recitation to illustrate the traditions around reading the text. There are no special claims beyond saying that the traditional "reciting" appears far more important than the spelling or later diacritical conventions, claims made by many a writer on the history of the religion.

As it appears you are somewhat short on the fundamentals, why don't you start with something like the Oxford History of Islam, or Karen Armstrong (Islam), or Malise Ruthven (Islam In The World) before you get to Norman O. Brown (Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis) ?


Yes, the recitation is called The Recitation, and it was standardized by Uthman, about 653. CE, according to traditions. Surely there will be variations of what is being recited, but I think generally smaller than in Christianity. You probably know that the Shi'a have not developed their own 'standard' text, the way the Protestants have.

Sura 53:1-6

...but then againg, it would not be apparent to some sceptics, I suppose, that the text of Shakespeare's plays assumes a stage.

And this?

Sura 36:69-70: 'We have taught him (Mohammed) no poetry, nor does it become him to become a poet. This is but an admonition: an eloquent Qur'an (recitation) to exhort the living and to pass judgment on the unbelievers.

These verses are generally taken as a Qur'anic refutation of charges made against Mohammed that he was just a regular verse-smith and kahin (prophetic seer). Whether such a charge would arise and be answered by the Book two centuries after the Moslems took Jerusalem, with sharia already operating in most places under Arab rule, is of course something which you would have to decide when dealing with the Luxenbergs and Wansbroughs of this world.

Not at all captious, Roger.

I hope I have shed some light on Islam for yous guys in the civilised world. :huh:


Jiri

Solo

No actually, it isn't. I meant the specific Quraish dialect on which the later, formal, Arabic standardized.

Jiri