Muhammad a Prophet For all Humanity
15. The Qur’an—The Prophet’s Miracle
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malakut
from Armaic and
kafur
from Hindi. The
Qur’an tells us (25:60) that the idolators of Makkah
were baffled at the word
rahman.
They used to say,
“What is this
rahman?
This was because the word
was not Arabic. It had been taken from the Sabaean
and Hamiri languages. The Christians of Yemen and
Abyssinia used to call God
rahamnan.
The Makkans
considered the word foreign when it appeared in the
Qur’an in an arabicized form. They enquired what
rahman
meant, being unaware of its linguistic
background. Over one hundred non-Arabic words of
this nature were used in the Qur’an, taken from
languages as far apart as Persian, Latin, Nabataean,
Hebrew, Syrian, Coptic and many others.
Although the Qur’an was revealed mainly in the
language of the Quraysh, words used by other Arab
tribes were also included. ‘Abdullah ibn al-’Abbas,
a Qurayshi Muslim, was puzzled when the word
fatir
appeared in the Qur’an. “I did not know what
the expression ‘Originator of the heavens and the
earth’ meant,” he explained. “Then I heard an Arab
saying that he had ‘originated’ a well, when he had
just started digging it, and I knew what the word
fatir
meant.” Abu Hurayrah said that he had never
