The Qur’an An Abiding Wonder
The Qur’an —The Prophet’s Miracle
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in large, cosmopolitan cities, where there was more
intermingling of races. First it was the rank and file,
those who did not pay much attention to the finer
points of linguistics, who were affected. But the
cultural elite did not remain immune either. A man
once came to the court of Ziyad ibn Umayya and
lamented. ‘Our fathers have died, leaving small
children,’ with both ‘fathers’ and ‘children’ in the
wrong grammatical case. Mistakes of this nature
became commonplace, yet the Arabic language
remained essentially the same. Shielded by the
Qur’an’s supreme eloquence, written Arabic was
not corrupted by the degradation of the spoken
version. It remained cast in the mould of the
Qur’an.
For proof of the Qur’an’s miraculous nature, one
has only to look at all the traumatic experiences that
Arabic has been through over the last 1500 years. If
it had not been for the protective wing of the
Qur’an, the Arabic language would surely have
been altered. The unsurpassable model that was
established by the Qur’an remained the immutable
touchstone of standard Arabic.
