The Qur’an An Abiding Wonder
The Qur’an —The Prophet’s Miracle
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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 Huraira said that he had never heard
the word ‘sikkin’ until he heard it in the chapter,
‘Joseph’, of the Qur’an. ‘We always used to call a
knife
‘mudiya’,
he said.
As Jalaluddin Suyuti has pointed out in
Al-Itqan,
many words were pronounced differently by
various Arab tribes. The Qur’an took some of these
words, and used them in their most refined literary
form. The Quraysh, for instance, used the word
a’ata
for he gave’, while the Himyaris used to
pronounce it ‘anta’. The Qur’an preferred
a’ata
to
anta.
Likewise it chose
‘asabi’
rather than
shanatir
and
dhi’b
instead of
kata.
The general trend of
preferring Qurayshi forms was sometimes reversed,
as in the phrase ‘layalitkum min a’amalikum’ -
‘nothing will be taken away from your actions’ -
which was borrowed from the Bani’ Abbas dialect.
In giving old Arabic words and expressions new
depth and beauty, the Qur’an set a standard of
literary excellence which no future writer could
