43

THE FOREIGN WORDS


(abb).

lxxx, 31.

Herbage. It occurs only in an early Meccan passage describing the good things God has caused to grow on the earth by sending down rain. The early authorities in Islam were puzzled by the word as is evident from the discussion by Tab. on the verse, and the uncertainty evidenced by Zam. And Baid. In their comments, an uncertainty which is shared by the Lexicons (cf. LA, i, 199; Ibn al-Athir, Nihaya, i, 10), and particularly by the instructive story given in Bagh, vii, 175. As-Suyuti, Itq, 318 quotes Shaidhala as authority for its being a foreign word meaning grass in the language of , by which, as we gather from the Mutaw, 65, he means the Berber tongue.

There can be little doubt that it is the Aram. ( of Dan. iv, 9, where the Dagesh forte is resolved into Nun). The of the Targums is the equivalent of Heb. from to be green (cf. Cant. vi, 11; Job viii, 12). Fraenkel, Vocab, 24, thought that the Arabic word was a direct borrowing from the Targumic , but the probabilities seem in favor of its coming rather from Syr. , menaing quicquid terra product (Mingana, Syriac Influence, 88). It was probably an early borrowing from the Mesopotamian area.1

(ababil).

cv, 3.
In the description of the rout of the Army of the Elephant we read - where is said to mean flocks - Zam., or Bagh. And to be the plu. of which Khafaji, Shifa, 31, lists as a foreign word whether spelled or or . The long account in LA, xiii, 5, makes it clear that the philologers knew not what to make of the word.

1 Cf. Zimmern, Akkadische Fremdwörter, p. 55.


44

Burton, Pilgrimage, ii, 175 quotes a Major Price as suggesting that the word has nothing to do with the birds but is another calamity in addition, the name being derived from a vesicle. Sprengel indeed as early as 1794 (see Opitz, Die Medizin im Koran, p. 76), had suggested a connection of the word with smallpox, deriving it from = father and = lamentation, and stating that the Persians use the word for smallpox. This theory has some support in the tradition that it was smallpox which destroyed Abraha's army1, but it is difficult to see how the word could be of Pers. origin for it occurs in Pers. only as a borrowing from Arabic, and doubtless from this passage.

Carra de Vaux, Penseurs, iii, 398, has a suggestion that it is of Persian origin, and would take the as a mistaken reading for = babylonian arrows, which caused the destruction of the army. The suggestion is ingenious, but hardly convincing, as we seem to know nothing elsewhere of these .

Apparently the word occurs nowhere in the early literature outside the Qur'an, unless we admit the genuineness of Umayya's line - (Frag. 4, 1. 3, in Schulthess' ed.), where it also means crows. If it is to be taken as an Arabic word it may possibly be a case of , especially in view of the expression quoted from al-Akhfash . The probability, however, seems in favor of its being of foreign origin, as Cheikho, Nasraniya, 471, notes, though its origin is so far unknown.


(Ibrahim).

Occurs some 69 times, cf. ii, 118; iii, 30; xlii, 11, etc.
Abraham.

1 See Sprenger, Life, 35.


45

It is always used of the Biblical Patriarch and thus is ultimately derived from Heb. . If the name had come direct from the Heb. we should have expected the form , and as a matter of fact the Muslim philologers themselves recognized that the Quranic form, was not satisfactory, for we hear of attempts to alter the form 1, and an-Nawavi, Tahdhib, 126, gives variant forms ; and . Moreover we learn from as-Suyuti, Muzhir, i, 138, and al-Jawaliqi, 8, that some early authorities recognized it as a foreign borrowing, al-Marwardi, indeed, informing us that in Syriac it means (Nawawi, 127), which is not far from the Rabbinic derivations.

The form cannot be evidenced earlier than the Qur'an, for the verses of Umayya (ed. Schulthess, xxix, 9), in which it occurs, are not genuine, and Horovitz, KU, 86, 87, rightly doubts the authenticity of the occurrences of the name in the Usd al-Ghaba and such works. The form would thus seem to be due to Muhammad himself, but the immediate source is not easy to determine. The common Syr. form is which is obviously the source of both the Eth. and the Arm. 2. A. marginal reading in Luke i, 55, in the Palestinian Syriac Lectionary of the Gospels reads , but Schulthess, Lex., 2, rightly takes this as due to a scribe who was familiar with the Arabic 3.

Lidzbarski, Johannesbuch, 73,4 compares the Mandaean which shortened form is also found as in the Christian Palestinian version of Luke xiii, 16 (Schulthess, Lex, and may be compared with mentioned in Ibn Hisham, 352, 1. 18, and the Braham b. Bunaj whom Horovitz, KU, 87, quotes from the Safa inscriptions. The final vowel, however, is missing hero. Brockelmann,

1 Sprenger, Leben, i, 66; Syez, Eigennamen, 21; Margoliouth in MW, xv, 342.

2 Hübschmann, Arm. Gramm, i, 290.

3 The forms and found in Bar Hebracus are also probably of Arabic origin.

4 See also Ephemeris, ii. 44, n. 1.


46

Grundriss, i,. 256, would derive from as from by assuming a dissimilation form in Aramaic, i.e. . There is no trace of such a form, however, and Brockelmann's choice of as illustration is unfortunate as it appears to be a borrowed word and not original Arabic. The safest solution is that proposed by Rhodokanakis in WZKM, xvii, 283, and supported by Margoliouth1, to the effect that it has been vocalised on the analogy of Isma'il and Isra'il2. The name was doubtless well enough known in Jewish circles in pre-Islamic Arabia,3 and when Muhammad got the form from Judaeo-Christian sources he formed on the same model.


(Ibriq).
lvi, 18.
A ewer, or water jug.

Only in the plu. form in an early Meccan description of Paradise. It was early recognized as a Persian loan-word (Siddiqi, 13), and is given by al-Kindi, Risala, 85; ath-Tha'alibi, Fiqh, 317; as-Suyuti 4 and al-Jawaliqi 5 in their lists of Persian borrowings, as well as by the Lexicons, LA, xi, 299 ; TA, vi, 280, though some attempted to explain it as a genuine Arabic word derived from 6

In modern Persian the word is meaning urn or waterpot.7

1 Scheich Lectures, p. 12; see also Lidzbarski, Johannesbuch, 73; Fischer, Glossar, 163.

2 He says: "Die Form dürfte am chosen aus ihrer Anlehnung an und der Ausgleichung mit demselben zu erklären sein, nach dem bekannten kur'anischen Prinzip, dass Personennamen deren Träger in irgendwelchem zusammenhange stehn, lautlich auf eine From zu bringen strebt."

3 Horovitz, KU, 92; JPN, 160.

4 Iyq, 318; Mutaw, i, 136.

5 The text of the Mu'arrab (Sachau's ed., p 17) is defective here, giving the first but not the second. Correcting it by the Itq, we read: .

6 Raghib, Mufradat, 43; and see Bagh. on the passage.

7 Vullers, Lex, i, 8, and for further meanings see BQ, 4; Addai Sher, 6. also occurs in Pers. but only as a borrowing from Arabic.


47

It would be derived from water (=Phlv.aB i.e. Opers. api1 = Av. or : Skt. aqua), and to pour (=Phlv. from an old Iranian root *rack = linguere)2, as was suggested by Castle 3 and generally accepted since his time. It was from the Phlv. formi that the word was borrowed into Arabic, the shortening of the , being regular.4 -The word occurs in the early poetry, in verses of ‘Adi b. Zaid, 'Alqama, and Al-A'sha, and so was doubtless an early borrowing among the Arabs who were in contact with the court at al-Hira.


(Iblis).
ii, 32; vii, 10; xv, 31, 32; xvii, 63; xviii, 48; xx 115; xxvi, 95; xxiv, 19; xxxviii, 74, 75.

Iblis. - the Devil par excellence.

The tendency among the Muslim authorities is to derive the name from to despair, he being so called because God caused him to despair of all good - so Raghib, Mufradat, 59) arid Tab. on ii, 32. The more acute philologers, however, recognized the impossibility of this (an-Nawswi, 138), and Zam. on xix, 57) says - . Al-Jawaliqi, Mu'arrab, 17, also justly argues against an Arabic derivation.

That the word is a corruption of tile Gk. has been recognized by the majority of Western scholars.5 In the LXX represents the Heb. in Zech. iii, but in the N.T. is

1 In the Behistun inscription, see Speigel, Die altpersischen Keilinschriften, p. 205.

2 West, Glossary, 136; Bartholomae, AIW, 1749; and see Horn Grundiss, 141; Sayast, Glossary, p. 164; Shikand, Glossary, 265.

3 Lexicon Heptaglotton, p. 23. See Vullers, op. cit.; Lagarde, GA, 7; Horn, Grudiss, 141; but note Vollers,ZDMG, 1, 627.

4 Siddiqi, 69. On the ground of this change from a to i, Grimme, ZA, xxvi, 164, looks for S. Arabian influence, but there is nothing in favor of this.

5 Geiger, 100; von Kremer, Ideen, 226n; Fraenkel, Vocab, 24; Sprenger, Leben ii, 242; Wensinck, EI, ii, 351; Rudolph, Abhängigkeit, 35; Vollers, ZDMG, 1, 620; Sacco, Credenze, 61. However, Pautz, Offenbarung, 69, n. 3, and Eickman, Angelologie, 26, holds to an Arabic origin, though Sprenger, Leben, ii, 242 , n. 1, had pointed out that words of this form are as a rule foreign.


48

more than " the adversary ", and particularly in the ecclesiastical writers he becomes the chief of the hosts of evil. It is in this sense that appears in the Qur'an, so we are doubly justified in looking for a Christian origin for the word.

One theory is that it came through the Syriac, the being taken as the genitive particle,1 a phenomenon for which there are perhaps other examples, e.g. for (ZA, xxiv, 51), for (ZDMG, I, 620), for (Geyer, Zwei Gedichte, i, 119n.). The difficulty is that the normal translation of is the accuser or calumniator or, both in the Peshitta (cf. Matt. iv) and in the ecclesiastical literature. There is a form a transliteration of but PSm, 874 quotes this only as a dictionary word from BB. There is apparently no occurrence of the word in the old Arabic literature,2 so it was possibly a word introduced by Muhammad himself. If we could assume that some such form as was colloquially used among the Aramaic speaking Christians with whom Muhammad came in contact, the above explanation might hold, though one would have to assume that the had been dropped by his informants. The alternative is that it came into Arabic directly from the Greek, and was used by the Arabic-speaking Christians associated with the Byzantine Church.3

Grimme, ZA, xxvi, 164, suggested that it might have come from S, Arabia, perhaps influenced by the, Eth. . This, however, is apparently a rare word in Eth., the usual translation for being , though sometimes is used (James iv, 7 ; I Pet. v, 8, etc.). Moreover, even if there were anything in Grimme's theory that this was the form that crossed over into Arabia, his further supposition that the was taken to be the S. Arab: is very far fetched.

1 So Horovitz, KU, 87. Mingana, Syriac Influence, 89, thinks rather that it "'as the fault of some early scribe or copyist who mistook the initial Dat for an Alif.

2 The verses in Ibn Hisham, 318 and 516, noted by Horovitz, are from the period of the Hijra and so doubtless influenced by Muhammad's usage. They would seem fatal, however, to Mingana's theory.

3 Künstlinger, "Die Hekunft des Wortes Iblis im Kuran," in Rocznik Orjentalistycsny, vi (1928), proposes the somewhat far-fetched theory that Iblis is derived from the Jewish Belial by deliberate transformation.


49

(Ajr). of common occurrence
Reward, wages.

Besides the noun and its plu. p, there occur also the verbal forms and .

The Muslim savants have no suspicion that the word is not pure Arabic, though as a matter of fact the verb to receive hire, is obviously denominative.

Zimmern, Akkad. Fremdw, 47 1, pointed out that the ultimate origin of the root in this sense is the Akk. agru, agarru, hired servant. From this come on the one hand the. Aram. Syr. a hireling, and thence the denominative verbs and , to hire, with corresponding nouns and , hire; and on the other hand (apparently from a popular pronunciation *aggaru) the Gk. , a courier2.

It would have been from the Aram. that the word passed into Arabic, probably at a very early period, and as the word is of much wider use in Syriac than in Jewish Aramaic 3, we are probably right in considering it as a borrowing from Syriac.

(Ahbar).
v, 48, 68; ix, 31, 34.

Plu. of or - a Jewsih Doctor of Law.

The Commentators knew that it was a technical Jewish title and quote as an example of its use Ka'b al-Ahbar 4, the well-know convert

1 Cf. also Jensen in ZA, vii, 214, 215.

2 Even the latest edition of Liddell and Scott persists in repeating the statement in Stephanus' Thesaurus, that it is a borrowing from Persian. It is, of course, possible that the word may be found in the O Pers. vocabulary, but if so it was a loan-word there from Akkadian, and there can be little doubt that the Gk. with and came directly from the Akkadian, as indeed Ed. Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, iii, 67) had already recognized.

3 For its occurrence in Aramaic incantations, see Montgomery, Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur, Glossary, p. 281; and for the Elephantine papyri see Cowley, Aramaic Papyri, p. 178 (No. 69, 1. 12).

4 The plu. form of is explained by a verse in Ibn Hisham, 659, where we learn of one whose full name was Ka'b al-Ashraf Sayyid al-Ahbar.


50

from Judaism. It was generally taken, however, as a genuine Arabic word derived from to leave a scar (as of a wound), the Divines being so called because of the deep impression their teaching makes on the lives of their students; so Raghib, Mufradat, 104.

Geiger,49,53, claims that it is derived from teacher, commonly used in the Rabbinic writings as a title of honour, e.g Mish. Sanh. 60 b - ,"as Aaron was a Doctor so were his sons Doctors."1 Geiger's theory has been accepted by von Kremer, Ideen, 226 n., and Fraenkel, Vocab, 23, and is doubtless correct, though Grünbaum, ZDMG, xxxix, 582, thinks that in coming into Arabic it was not influenced by the Ar. . Mingana, Syriac Influence, 87, suggests that the word is of Syriac origin (see also Cheikho, Nasraniya, 191), but this is unlikely. The word was evidently quite well known in pre-Islamic Arabia 2, and thus known to Muhammad from his contact with Jewish communities. It was borrowed in the form of the singular and given an Arabic plural.

(Adam)

ii, 29-35; iii, 30, 52; v, 30; vii, 10, 18, 25-33, 171.; xvii, 63, 72 xviii, 48; xix, 59 ; xx, 114-119; xxxvi, 60.

Adam.
It is used always as an individual name and never as the Heb. and Phon. for man in general, though the use of in Sura, vii, approaches this usage (Nöldeke--Schwally, i, 242). it is one of the few Biblical names which the early philologers such as al-Jawaliqi (Mua'rrab, 8) claimed as of Arabic origin There are various theories as to the derivation of the name, which may be seen in Raghib, Mufradat, 12, and in the Commentaries, but all of them are quite hopeless. Some authorities recognized this and Zam. and Baid., on ii, 29, admit that it is a foreign word - .

1 Hirschfeld, Beiträge, 51 translates "Schriftgelehrte" (Cf. The N.T. = Syr. , and takes it as opposed to the .

2 It occurs in the old poetry, cf. Horovitz, KU, 63, and Ibn Hisham, 351, 354, uses the word familiarly as well known; cf. also Wensinck, Joden te Madina, 65; Horovitz, JPN, 197, 198.


51

The origin of course is the Heb. , and there is no reason why the name should not have come directly from the Jews1 though there was a tradition that the word came from the Syriac 2. The name occurs in the Safaite inscriptions (Horovitz, KU, 85), and was known to the poet Adi b. Zaid, so it was doubtless familiar, along with the creation story, to Muhammad's contemporaries.


(Idris)

xix, 57; xxi, 85
Idris.
He is one of the prophets casually mentioned in the Qur'an, where all the information we have about him is (i) that he was a man of truth (xix, 57); (ii) that God raised him to a "place on high" (xix, 58); and (iii) that being steadfast and patient he entered God's mercy (xxi, 85).

The Muslim authorities are agreed that he is i.e. the Biblical Enoch,3 a theory derived not only from the facts enumerated above, but from the idea that his name is derived from to study - both Jewish and Christian legend attributing to Enoch tge mastery of occult wisdom.4 The falacy of this derivation was, however, pointed out by some of the philologers, as Zam. on xix, 57, shows, and that the name was of foreign origin was recognized by al-Jawaliqi, Mu'arrab, 8; Qamus, i, 215 which makes it the more strange that some Western scholars such as Sprenger, Leben, ii, 336,5 and Eickmann, Angelologic, 26, have considered it to be a pure Arabic word.

1 Ibn Qutaiba, Ma'arif, 180 (Eg. ed.) notes a variant reading which may represent a Jewish pronunciation.

2 Syez, Eigennamen, 18.

3 Tha'labi, Qisas, 34.

4 of course means to instruct, to initiate (cf. ) and may have suggested the connection with . For the derivation see. Tha'labi, loc. cit.; Ibn Qutaiba, Ma'arif, S. Finkel, MW, xxii. 181. derives it from , the 7th antediluvian Kings of Berossus, but this is very far-fetched.

5 He seems to base this on the occurrence of the name Abu Idris, but Horovitz KU, 88.


52

Nöldeke has pointed out, ZA, xvii, 83, that we have no evidence that Jews or Christians ever called Enoch by any name derived from or , and though Geiger, 105, 106, thinks the equivalence of of xix, 58, with the of Heb. xi, 5, from the Midrash, sufficient to justify the identification, we may well doubt it. Casanova, JA, 1924, vol. ccv, p.358 (so Torrey, Foundation, 72) suggested that the reference was to which through a form became . Albright 1 imagines that it refers to Hermes-Poernandres, the name being derived from the final element in the Greek name , while Montgomery, JQR, xxv, 261, would derive it from Atrahasis, the Babylonian Noah. None of these suggestions, however, comes as near as that put forward by Nöldeke in ZA, xvii, 84, that it is the Arabic form of filtered through a Syriac medium.2 In Syriac we find various forms of the name and , this latter being the form in Christian-Palestinian, and from this by the coalescing of the n and d we get the Ar. Grimme, ZA, xxvi, 164, suggested a S. Arabian origin but there is no trace of the name in the inscriptions and the Eth. has nothing in its favour.


(Ara'ik)

xviii, 30; xxxvi, 56; xxvi, 13; lxxxiii, 23, 35.
Couches. Plu. of

We find the word only in passages descriptive of Paradise. The Muslim authorities as a rule take it as an Arabic word derived from but their theories of its derivation are not very helpful, as may be seen from Raghib, Mufradat, 14, or the Lexicons LA, xii, 269; TA. Vii,

1 Journal of Palestine Oriental Society, ii, 197-8, and in AJSL, 1927, p. 235n.

2 Nöldeke's earlier suggestion in ZDMG, xii, 706 was that it might stand for , but in ZA, xvii, he refers it to the and thinks the lifting him "to a place on high" may refer to the saint's crucifixion. R. Hartmann, in ZA, xxiv, 315, however, recognized this Andreas as the famous cook of Alexander the Great.


53

100. Some early philologers concluded that was foreign, and as-Suyuti, Itq, 318, says that Ibri al-Jawzi gave it as an Abyssinian loan-word, and on p. 310 has the interesting statement - " Abu ‘Ubaid related that Al-Hasan said - We used to know the meaning of until we met a man from Yemen who told us that among them an was a pavilion containing a bed.''

Addai Sher, 9, says that it is the Pers. , by which he probably means throne the colloqiual form for (Vullers, Lex, i, 141), but there does not seem to be anything in this. There is nothing in Eth. with which we can relate it, and the probabilities arc that it is of Iranian origin, especially as we find it used in the verses of the old poets, e.g. al-A'sha, who were in contact with Iranian culture (cf. Horovitz, Paradies, 15).


(Iram)
lxxxix, 6
Iram: the city of the people of 'Ad.

The number of variant readings for this in suggests of itself that the word was a foreign one of which the exegetes could make nothing. The older theory among Western scholars was that it was 1 but the story is clearly S. Arabian, as appears from xlvi, 20, and as a matter of fact Hamdani (ed. D.H. Müller p.126, 129) mentions two other Irams in S. Arabia, so that the name is doubtless S. Arabian.2 The name is frequently mentioned in the early literature.3


1 Wetstein in his Appendix to Delitzsch's Hiob, 1876; Pautz, Offenbarung, 273; Syez, Eigennamen, 54; O. Loth, ZDMG, xxxv, 628.

2 D.H. Müller Südarabische Studien, 134ff.; Burgen und Schlösser, p. 418.

3 See passages in Horovitz, KU, 89, 90.


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