This is a sensationally interesting post that one of the Leiden guys put up a couple days ago regarding the Arabic of the Qur'an, part of a series of articles he is writing on the quranic rasm (QCT, more or less). It is complicated, but the point is that the noun "Thamud" is given an artificial grammatical reading by Islamic tradition, and artificial case endings, that conflict with the rasm of the Qur'an. The rasm consistently and clearly treats Thamud as a 'triptote' noun, but the Hafs recitation (Cairo Qur'an) inflects it as a 'diptote' noun, insisting on following the grammatical rules of Classical Arabic---where the noun is stated in the accusative by the Qur'an, as indicated with a triptote case ending, the tradition puts a sukun, a null-marker, over the final alif to tell the reciter 'pretend this alif is not here and treat it as if it is a diptote' when reciting it. Even weirder, the Nafi' tradition correctly reads the word like a triptote in such accusative contexts, but then inflects it as a diptote (!) in genitive contexts, giving the word its own artificial hybrid grammar, different from any other word.
http://phoenixblog.typepad.com/blog/2016/08/thamudic-triptotes-and-the-issue-of-discontinuity.htmlSo the discontinuity question is simple: How can these kinds of bizarre re-readings have happened? Why are Islamic recitation and quranic text so different?
And if such strangely artificial misreadings of the Qur'an's grammar could be imposed without anybody seemingly noticing or objecting, how can the text ever have related to early Islam? This discontinuity is only possible if (a) the Qur'an was written down very early in popular dialect and then artificially misread by later tradition (my view) in a classical dialect (this is like Vollers' thesis), or (b) if the Qur'an was written down late under Uthman in a 'wrong' vulgar dialect, and then--for some bizarre reason--nobody objected to that, and the 'wrong' dialect was permanently retained in the manuscript, against its 'correct' prophetic recitation, as retained by Islamic tradition.
"This raises a variety of questions: Why was a 'Classical Arabic' framework imposed over the original Quranic composition? Where did this Classical Arabic-like dialect come from? How big would this "linguistic conspiracy" have to be, to plausibly not show up at all in the traditional Muslim historical narrative? Are we not seeing the "conspiracy", because we have not looked at the historical texts with this question in mind, or has it really been covered up?
A more charitable stance towards the traditional historical narrative presented by Muslims, would allow us to assume that the readings, with all their Classical Arabic-like case vowels, are 'more correct' than the QCT orthography. Even if we assume this, we must still admit that the confused case of ṯamūd as presented here, is a later artificial intrusion. If the readings are 'correct' while the QCT somehow represents a much more advanced Arabic dialect that lost its final short vowels, one might imagine why ʕabdullāh ibn Masʕūd was critical of the canonized Quranic Consonantal Text commissioned by the third Caliph Uthman, which would be the reflection of a spoken dialect very far removed from the Arabic dialect in which the Quran had been revealed. [2]
This approach raises many questions: Why would the Caliph have allowed the Quran to be written down in such a vulgar reading? Was it an attempt to make the Quran more accessible to the 'lay man'? Why did this canonical text gain such traction, while the language of the popular readings remained squarely opposed to the orthography presented in the canonical text? Why was the dialect in which the QCT was written down so different from the real dialect of the Quran, while it must have been canonized mere decades after the death of the prophet?
Either scenario brings along a lot of enormous questions, which I don't think will be answered any time soon. But the fact remains, that the fundamental disconnect between the language of the reading traditions, and the language of the Quranic Consonantal Text needs to be explained in some way. I hope my previous articles on the disconnect between the QCT and the modern readings are felt, by my readers, also to be so fundamental as to require an explanation e.g. as the developments and loss of *ʔ, the diptosy of the feminine ending, the loss of nunation, retention of ē, (and also ō?) etc."
Btw, my own view on these questions remains rather simple ... the Qur'an was never particularly integral to the early spread of Islamic rule (which does not mean it did not exist!), and its association with the historical Medinan prophet was far more tenuous and limited than is usually understood. It was written down quite early in 'vulgar' Arabic dialect (IMO), and the later conquest-era polities retained little clarity about how to correctly recite it or what its earliest textual layers meant/how they originated. As the archaic texts gained importance as a compiled religious text, the Islamic tradition exalted it with archaizing recitation traditions that had little authentic connection to the text's originating context. This is why goofball errors like the mispointing of had as gadd in Q 72:3 could go completely unnoticed ... the rasm was correct, and was accurately preserved, but there was no authentic preservation of how you recited that text or what much of it meant.
This is one reason why I favor the 'early Qur'an' theory. I can't see how it's even possible that such discontinuities could emerge unless the base texts were written down quite early. Otherwise you have to postulate the bizarre scenario, outlined by the Leiden guy above, where the Qur'an was much later written down by Uthman in a vulgar dialect that conflicted with how it was normally recited at that time. And then you also have to explain why so much of the Qur'an's language and references (e.g. the mysterious letters) were incomprehensible for the later tradition. That would seem almost impossible if it was composed very late. People would have retained a much better understanding of what it meant and how it was recited.
Topic: The Conflict Between Islamic Recitation of the Qur'an and the Quranic Text