A new emendation of surah 4:125

I thank Dr. Gerd-Ruediger Puin, Saarbrücken, who made me aware of the following emendation which he had developed from his studies of old Hijazi Qur'ans and proposed at an Orientalists Congress in Leyden, The Netherlands, in 1998.

In surah 4:125 there are both grammatical and exegetical reasons to assume that the word "Allah" better had not been substituted for a previous rasm "'lh" or – with an Alif maqSūrah as second radical, which in those old Hijazi Qur'ans is not unusual– "'lyh", meaning "ilāh" or "ālāh" (the Syriac word for the Christian God, which became "Allah" in the Arabic language). Richard Bell's interpretation of this verse, which follows the lines of the traditional understanding, is:

A         Who is better as regards religion than
B         he who surrenders himself to Allah, doing good meanwhile,
C         and follows the creed of Abraham as a Hanīf?
D         Allah took Abraham as a friend.

The main disadvantage of this understanding is that it postulates a change of the grammatical subject, from "who" (as in A, B, C) to "Allah" (as in D), although D is of a construction exactly parallel to C:

C         wa-'attaba`a millata Ibrahīma Hanīfan
D         wa-ttakhadha llāhu Ibrahīma khalīlan

Thus, for syntactical reasons – restoring the parallelism between "llāha" and "millata" –, the rasm "'lh" or "'lyh", standing for "ilāh" or "ālāh", would fit perfectly instead of "Allah"! The translation would then be:

C         and follows the creed of Abraham as a Hanīf
D         and takes the god of Abraham as an ideal.

The "god of Abraham" (or the "god of Moses") is not an unknown expression elsewhere in the Qur'an (e.g. 2:133, 20:88, 28:38), perhaps even opposed to the Biblical phrase "God Abraham's, Isaak's and Jacob's". Changing the translation of "khalīl" from the traditional "as a friend", which Bell had followed, to "as an ideal" is correct in view of the same meaning the word has in the two other verses in the Qur'an where it occurs in very different contexts (17:73 and 25:28).

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