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
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
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
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