Muhammad a Prophet For all Humanity
15. The Qur’an—The Prophet’s Miracle
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Abu ‘Amr ibn al-’Ula’ was moved to remark that
the “Himyar tribe do not speak our language; their
vocabulary is quite different from ours.” ‘Umar ibn
Khattab once took before the Prophet an Arab
whom he had heard reciting the Qur’an. The Arab
had been pronouncing the words of the Qur’an in
such a strange manner that ‘Umar was unable to
make out what part of the Book of God he was
reading. The Prophet once spoke to a visiting
delegation of some Arab tribe in their own dialect.
It seemed to ‘Ali as if the Prophet was speaking in a
foreign tongue.
The main reason for this difference was variation in
accent. For instance, the Banu Tamim, who lived in
the eastern part of Najd, were unable to say the
letter ‘j’, (jiim) and used to pronounce it as ‘y’ (Ye)
instead. The word for mosque
(masjid),
they used to
pronounce
‘masyid’,
and instead of’
shajarat’
(trees),
they would say’
sharat’.
‘Q’ (Qaaf) they pronounced
as ‘j’, (je) calling a
‘tariq’
(road)
a ‘tarij’,
a
‘sadiq’
(friend) a
‘sadij’, ‘qadr’
(value)
‘jadr’
and
‘qasim’
(distributor)
‘jasim’.
According to normal linguistic
patterns, the coming together of tribes who spoke
such varying dialects should have initiated a fresh
