Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Clinical · 02-17-2009, 03:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fatpie42

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clinical

Allah does not have "99 names". He has 70+ titles/descriptions in the Quran.

So what, in your opinion, is the reason for the 99-beaded rosaries? If they aren't for counting 'names of God', what are they for?

Those 70+ (I believe 77) words are descriptions of God. God is the Gracious in the Quran, but the word Gracious is not His name. It is a praise of His majesty. Same goes for the rest of His titles such as Light, Merciful etc...

fatpie42 · 02-17-2009, 07:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clinical

Quote:

Originally Posted by fatpie42

So what, in your opinion, is the reason for the 99-beaded rosaries? If they aren't for counting 'names of God', what are they for?

Those 70+ (I believe 77) words are descriptions of God. God is the Gracious in the Quran, but the word Gracious is not His name. It is a praise of His majesty. Same goes for the rest of His titles such as Light, Merciful etc...

Yes, but Islamic rosaries have 99 beads, not 77. I'm not doubting that 'attributes' is probably a better term than 'names'. What I am saying is that, whatever is being counted, it must add up to 99....

dog-on · 02-18-2009, 03:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fatpie42

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clinical

Those 70+ (I believe 77) words are descriptions of God. God is the Gracious in the Quran, but the word Gracious is not His name. It is a praise of His majesty. Same goes for the rest of His titles such as Light, Merciful etc...

Yes, but Islamic rosaries have 99 beads, not 77. I'm not doubting that 'attributes' is probably a better term than 'names'. What I am saying is that, whatever is being counted, it must add up to 99....

Maybe they sing '99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall"...

avi · 02-18-2009, 05:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clinical

And there is no punishment for blasphemy in Islam.

Sorry to disagree.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dr. Zakir Naik's blog

“The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter;” (Surah Al-Maidah 5:33). In Islam, a person who has committed blasphemy can either be killed or crucified, or his opposite hands and feet can be cut off, or he can be exiled from that land. On the other hand, in other religions there is no other option except capital punishment. Islam at least has four options of punishment for an act of blasphemy.

avi · 02-18-2009, 05:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clinical

Allah does not have "99 names".

Wrong.

Here are the 99 names of Allah, in honor of which the Islamic rosary has been constructed with 99 beads.

avi · 02-18-2009, 05:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clinical, referring to the improbability of Christian missionaries traversing the Arabian Peninsula, who wrote

There could not be some in between because it was all deserts and mountains.

I disagree fundamentally.
The Eastern halves of Syria and Iran are desert, that did not prevent Alexander of Macedonia, or Christian missionaries, from traversing them, en route to India, nor did these desert areas prevent Genghis Khan from waging war across their breadth and length. What about the Gobi desert traversing Silk route caravans traveling from XiaMen to Antioch, even before Alexander? The desert areas of the Arabian peninsula are certainly harsh, but no match for the Gobi, which exhibits a temperature range of 80 degrees centigrade, plus minus 40 degrees centigrade, length: 1000 miles, annual precipitation: 4 inches. The Arabian peninsula is hotter, up to 50 degrees centigrade in summer, but not nearly as cold in winter, (-10 Centigrade) and with twice as much precipitation as Gobi.

avi · 02-18-2009, 05:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clinical

Muhammad was literate, and he wrote the Quran as it was dictated to him.

Nonsense. Where is your source of information for this fairy tale?
Muhammed was an illiterate drover of camels, who robbed caravans traveling along the great north south routes connecting Antioch and Damascus with Mecca.

Quote:

Originally Posted by this blog

...an inscription and a Greek account leads Lawrence Conrad to fix Muhammad's birth in 552, not 570. Crone finds that Muhammad's career took place not in Mecca but hundreds of kilometers to the north. Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren find that the classical Arabic language was developed not in today's Saudi Arabia but in the Levant, and that it reached Arabia only through the colonizing efforts of one of the early caliphs.
Startling conclusions follow from this. The Arab tribesmen who conquered great swathes of territory in the seventh century were not Moslems, perhaps they were pagans. The Koran is a not "a product of Muhammad or even of Arabia," but a collection of earlier Judeo-Christian liturgical materials stitched together to meet the needs of a later age.
Most broadly, "there was no Islam as we know it" until two or three hundred years after the traditional version has it (more like CE 830 than 630);

Net2004 · 02-18-2009, 06:35 AM

http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Qur...Mss/vowel.html

Quote:

As mentioned earlier, Mingana claimed ignorance about the evolution of the Arabic script and the presence of an Arabic alphabet during the advent of Islam. He then went on to say that in Makkah and Madinah, the written language "must have been" either Syriac or Hebrew. As for Luxenberg, he claims that:

When the Koran was composed, Arabic did not exist as a written language; thus it seemed evident to me that it was necessary to take into consideration, above all, Aramaic, which at the time, between the 4th and 7th centuries, was not only the language of written communication, but also the lingua franca of that area of Western Asia.

As far as the history of Arabic as a written language is concerned, it is best depicted by the following pre-Islamic as well as early post-Islamic Arabic inscriptions that show the progressive development of the Arabic script. The inscriptions below show that the Arabic script before the advent of Islam clearly had a well-developed alphabet.

Raqush Inscription (Jaussen-Savignac 17): The Earliest Dated Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscription (267 CE).

Healey and Smith have hailed it as the earliest dated Arabic document.[10]

Jabal Ramm Inscription: A Fourth Century Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscription.

This inscription is the second oldest so far discovered in the Arabic alphabet after the Raqush inscription. The grammar in this inscription is straightforward classical Arabic.[11]

A Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscription At Umm Al-Jimal.

The grammar in this inscription is straightforward classical Arabic.[12]

Zebed Inscription: A Pre-Islamic Trilingual Inscription In Greek, Syriac & Arabic From 512 CE.

As the name suggests, it is a trilingual inscription. The Arabic, though, does not translate the Greek but merely lists six names, not all of which are mentioned in the Greek.

Jabal Usays Inscription: A Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscription From 528 CE.

This is the only pre-Islamic Arabic inscription with historical content.

Harran Inscription: A Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscription From 568 CE.

A Greek-Arabic bilingual inscription from Harran, near Damascus, Syria.[13]

Inscriptions Near Madinah Of The Early Years Of Hijra [c. 4 AH].

Quote:

These inscriptions detailed above provide ample evidence of a well articulated Arabic alphabet and are sufficient to refute the speculative assumptions of Mingana and Luxenberg. Furthermore, Bellamy commenting on the inscriptions from Jabal Ramm, Umm al-Jimal and Harran says:

Anyone who takes a close look at these inscriptions and compares them with the sample of Koran... will discern a great many letterforms that have not been changed at all, or very little, in the sixteen hundred years that have elapsed since the earliest one was written.[16]

We should also point out that Nabia Abbott also refuted the arguments of Mingana using the earliest known Arabic papyrus PERF No. 558 [22 AH] originating from Egypt. If Arabic was indeed so primitive in its homeland during the advent of Islam, as claimed by Mingana, how can one rationalize its practical use in Egypt in such a short time and that too in a well-developed cursive script? Abbott says:

The condition of Arabic writing in Muhammad's time is indicated by PERF No. 558 (our plates iv-v), an Arabic papyrus of the reign of ‘Umar dated AH 22 and written in a fairly well developed manuscript hand in the distant province of Egypt, where Greek and Coptic were the written languages in general use. If written Arabic was so primitive and rare in its own homeland at the time of Muhammad's death, how do we account for its practical use in Egypt only a short dozen years after that event? Again to grant the incomplete development of orthography would give us reason to suspect only the orthographic accuracy of early Qur'anic editions but not the possibility of their existence. In this connection it is interesting to note that nowhere in the traditions of the earliest transmission of the Qur'an is there any hint of serious orthographic or vowel difficulties; rather it is the differences in the Arabic tribal dialects and differences arising out of foreigner's use of Arabic that seem to demand attention. The foregoing considerations lead one to believe that, if we allow for such common mistakes as writers and copyists are liable to make, the Arabic writers of Muhammad's time and of the time of early Caliphs were able scribes capable of producing an acceptable edition of a written Qur'an despite the lack of all the improvements of modern written Arabic.[17]

Quote:

Luxenberg mentions the pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in Grohmann's classic Arabische Paläographie.[18] Deducing from the early form of Arabic alphabets, he says that it is safe to assume the cursive syro-aramäische script [i.e., Syriac] served as a model for the Arabic script.[19] What now becomes almost unbelievable is that Luxenberg uses Grohmann's Arabische Paläographie as a source to support his argument that the syro-aramäische script served as a model for the Arabic script. Grohmann in this book, in fact, was one of the earliest scholars to refute the origins of Arabic script from Syriac script.[20] T. Nöldeke was the first to establish the link between the Nabataean and Arabic scripts in 1865, which later confirmed against J. Starcky's Syriac thesis by Grohmann. The affiliation between Nabataean and Arabic scripts has now been fully documented by J. Healey. He says:

The development of the Nabataean script in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. is usually seen as a progression from form derived from earlier Aramaic towards forms out of which the early (western cursive) Arabic script developed, though we should note the view of J. Starcky, based partly on the observation that Nabataean script, unlike the Syriac and Arabic scripts, is essentially suspended from an upper line, that the origin of the Arabic script is to be sought in a Lahmid form of the Syriac script. This view has met with little support. The Nabataean origin of the Arabic script is now almost universally accepted.[21]

It has been claimed by scholars, with some reservations, that the origins of diacritical and vowel marks originate from Syriac.[26] We have already seen the opinions of Mingana earlier.[27] Luxenberg opines that the diacritical dots for ܕ (dolath) and ܪ (rish) in Syriac may have served as the basis for the Arabic alphabet.[28]

In the Syriac alphabet, only two characters possess diacritical dots: ܕ (dolath) and ܪ (rish). By comparison the Arabic alphabet contains a total of fifteen dotted characters: ب، ت، ث، ج، خ، ذ، ز، ش، ض، ظ، غ، ف، ق، ن، ة. Imagining that the Arabs borrowed their multitudinous dots from the Syriac becomes a difficult proposition.[29] Moreover, we have clear pre-Islamic evidence of the usage of diacritical dots, e.g., the Raqush Inscription [267 CE] has diacritical points on the letters د، ش and ر; the Jabal Ramm Inscription [4th century CE] has diacritical points for the letters ج، ي and ن; and a curious inscription from Sakakah contains dots associated with Arabic letters ب، ت and ن.

Coming to the time of the advent of Islam, the earliest dated papyrus PERF No. 558 [22 AH / 642 CE] shows numerous diacritical dots on the letters ج، خ، ذ، ز، ش and ن. Dotting is also seen for the letters ز، ق and ن in P. Mich. 6714 - a bilingual papyrus from 22 - 54 AH / 642 - 674 CE. There are also examples of diacritical dots in the Islamic inscriptions, e.g., an inscription at Wadi Sabil [46 AH / 666 CE] shows a dot below ب; and an inscription near Ta'if on a dam built by Caliph Mu‘awiya [58 AH / 677 CE] shows the use of consonantal points for ي، ب، ن، ث، خ، ف and ت.

Given the fact that all of the above material was published before Luxenberg published his book, it is surprising to see his claim (quoting Blachère) that Islamic tradition is unable to pinpoint when the diacritical points were finally "fixed" - a process that took over three hundred years.[30] If we take evidence from the inscriptions and papyrus that predate ‘Uthman's mushaf we find that there are ten dotted characters (out of fifteen) that have the same dot pattern as used today. Not surprisingly, Gruendler, a specialist in Arabic script, using the examples of inscriptions, papyri and coins from early Islamic times, says:

The diacritic system had completed its development in the first half of the first Islamic century, although points (or strokes) were used selectively and sporadically - being regarded rather as an additional clarification than as an integral part of the alphabet.[31]

We know that the origins of Arabic script and the diacritical dots has nothing to do with the syro-aramäische script of Luxenberg. Consequently, it would not be too surprising that the diacritics may have come from the Nabataean script to the Arabic script. Healey says:

... we may suspect that the concept of diacritics came to the Arabs with the Nabataean script, ...[32]

It is clear that Luxenberg is already incorrect on two counts, i.e., the origin of the Arabic alphabet as well as the diacritical dots to differentiate between the letters sharing in the same skeleton. Let us now see how he fares over the issue of vowel marks.

Roger Pearse · 02-18-2009, 07:21 AM

[QUOTE=Net2004;5806990]http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Qur...Mss/vowel.html

Quote:

As mentioned earlier, Mingana claimed ignorance about the evolution of the Arabic script and the presence of an Arabic alphabet during the advent of Islam. He then went on to say that in Makkah and Madinah, the written language "must have been" either Syriac or Hebrew.

He wrote, of course, well before the discoveries of inscriptions cited in the above link, since he died in 1936.

Quote:

Raqush Inscription (Jaussen-Savignac 17): The Earliest Dated Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscription (267 CE).

Healey and Smith have hailed it as the earliest dated Arabic document.[10]

Jabal Ramm Inscription: A Fourth Century Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscription.

This inscription is the second oldest so far discovered in the Arabic alphabet after the Raqush inscription. The grammar in this inscription is straightforward classical Arabic.[11]

A Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscription At Umm Al-Jimal.

The grammar in this inscription is straightforward classical Arabic.[12]

The thing that struck me about these three was the presence of obvious Syriac letters in them; far more like Serto or Estrangelo, than the modern Arabic script alongside.

We know that Syriac and Arabic are very closely related languages. Inscriptions, by their very nature, tend to be somewhat formulaic. So I wonder to what extent these claims about grammar really refute the claims.

Quote:

The affiliation between Nabataean and Arabic scripts has now been fully documented by J. Healey. He says:

The development of the Nabataean script in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. is usually seen as a progression from form derived from earlier Aramaic towards forms out of which the early (western cursive) Arabic script developed, though we should note the view of J. Starcky, based partly on the observation that Nabataean script, unlike the Syriac and Arabic scripts, is essentially suspended from an upper line, that the origin of the Arabic script is to be sought in a Lahmid form of the Syriac script. This view has met with little support. The Nabataean origin of the Arabic script is now almost universally accepted.

Seems reasonable. I don't know a sausage about Nabatean.

Quote:

It has been claimed by scholars, with some reservations, that the origins of diacritical and vowel marks originate from Syriac.[26] We have already seen the opinions of Mingana earlier.[27] Luxenberg opines that the diacritical dots for ܕ (dolath) and ܪ (rish) in Syriac may have served as the basis for the Arabic alphabet.[28]

In the Syriac alphabet, only two characters possess diacritical dots: ܕ (dolath) and ܪ (rish). By comparison the Arabic alphabet contains a total of fifteen dotted characters: ب، ت، ث، ج، خ، ذ، ز، ش، ض، ظ، غ، ف، ق، ن، ة. Imagining that the Arabs borrowed their multitudinous dots from the Syriac becomes a difficult proposition.

I don't think that dalat and resh have "diacritical dots"; the dots are part of the consonant, although not always written at an early date. Arabic has the same feature.

But what we're discussing here is vowels, surely? The swarms of dots for vowels is a feature of East Syriac, and appears also in Arabic. (In West Syriac in the 7th century the scholar Jacob of Edessa induced his countrymen to use a version of Greek vowels instead). I don't understand why the writer supposes that a feature of one script cannot be extended when borrowing it to create another. It's hard to believe that any sane person would have adopted the system of dots for vowels except by tradition, particularly when you know that at least three consonants in Arabic differ only in the dots.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Solo · 02-18-2009, 08:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Roger Pearse

Quote:

Originally Posted by Net2004

Quote:
It has been claimed by scholars, with some reservations, that the origins of diacritical and vowel marks originate from Syriac.[26] We have already seen the opinions of Mingana earlier.[27] Luxenberg opines that the diacritical dots for ܕ (dolath) and ܪ (rish) in Syriac may have served as the basis for the Arabic alphabet.[28]

In the Syriac alphabet, only two characters possess diacritical dots: ܕ (dolath) and ܪ (rish). By comparison the Arabic alphabet contains a total of fifteen dotted characters: ب، ت، ث، ج، خ، ذ، ز، ش، ض، ظ، غ، ف، ق، ن، ة. Imagining that the Arabs borrowed their multitudinous dots from the Syriac becomes a difficult proposition.

I don't think that dalat and resh have "diacritical dots"; the dots are part of the consonant, although not always written at an early date. Arabic has the same feature.

But what we're discussing here is vowels, surely? The swarms of dots for vowels is a feature of East Syriac, and appears also in Arabic. (In West Syriac in the 7th century the scholar Jacob of Edessa induced his countrymen to use a version of Greek vowels instead). I don't understand why the writer supposes that a feature of one script cannot be extended when borrowing it to create another. It's hard to believe that any sane person would have adopted the system of dots for vowels except by tradition, particularly when you know that at least three consonants in Arabic differ only in the dots.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

I don't understand it either but I don't think it's at all critical. The writer criticizes the diacritics connection to Syriac, in the context of the argument of Mingana and Luxenberg, which asserts that Islam and the Arabic alphabet were wholly derived. There is a simpler way of arguing the genealogies by pointing out that the first known versions of Quran were in the kufic script, which is free of dots. So it is quite possible that the vowel dots indeed originate with Syriac but were gradually imported into the arabic alphabet after the Islamic conquest of Syria (CE 636).

Jiri

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