Exposing Islam

🧭 “Lost in Transmission: How the Qur’an’s Aramaic Roots Were Misread as Arabic Revelation”

The Qur’an Is Not Pure Arabic
Despite its repeated claim to be in “clear Arabic” (Qur’an 12:2, 16:103), the Qur’an is riddled with non-Arabic words, phrases, and structures—primarily Aramaic and Syriac, the lingua franca of religious discourse in the Near East. Many obscure or ambiguous passages become coherent only when retranslated through an Aramaic lens. This forensic linguistic evidence undermines the Islamic claim of an unambiguous Arabic revelation, pointing instead to a mistranslation of earlier Aramaic Christian and Jewish materials that were reinterpreted—often incorrectly—as divine Arabic speech.

🧠 1. The Problem of Gharib al-Qur’an (Obscure Words)

Early Muslims were aware that the Qur’an contained hundreds of strange or unclear terms (gharīb). Classical tafsir works like al-Farra’, al-Zajjaj, and al-Raghib al-Isfahani created whole lexicons to explain these anomalies. Yet:

❗ Many of these terms do not exist in any known form of Arabic, even from pre-Islamic poetry.

Examples:

Sijjīn (Surah 83:7) — explained as a register of the damned, actually a loanword from Aramaic shijna (prison)
Zaqqum (Surah 37:62) — allegedly a hellish tree, likely from Syriac zqūmā (bad taste or bitterness)
Illiyyīn (Surah 83:18) — described as the record of the righteous, but corresponds to Syriac ʿelyāʾ (the heights)

These are not examples of "rich Arabic," but semantic gaps filled with foreign imports, often misunderstood or recontextualized.

📜 2. The Qur’an Mislabels Itself “Clear Arabic” — But Isn’t

Qur’an 16:103:

“We know they say: A man teaches him. But the tongue of the one they refer to is foreign, while this is clear Arabic.”

This verse ironically admits that the Qur’an’s content was suspiciously similar to foreign speech, yet insists it is Arabic. But:

Aramaic/Syriac was the religious language across Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia
Early Arab Christians and Jews translated prayers and scripture from Syriac into Arabic, often poorly
The Qur’an may be the result of such incomplete translations, with syntagmatic confusion (word order, declension, tense)

The insistence on “Arabic clarity” was likely a rhetorical strategy, not a linguistic fact.

🔍 3. Luxenberg’s Method: Re-Reading the Qur’an as Syriac

In “The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Qur’an”, Christoph Luxenberg shows that:

Dozens of obscure Qur’anic phrases make clear sense when back-translated into Syriac
Many supposed “revelations” are lifted from Syriac hymns, lectionaries, or commentaries
Misreadings occurred due to:
- No diacritical dots in early Arabic script (e.g., ب، ت، ن، ي indistinguishable)
- No vowels — making mispronunciations likely
- Scribes Arabized Syriac homilies they didn't fully understand

Example: Surah 108:1 – Kawthar

“We gave you al-Kawthar.”
Traditionally interpreted as “abundance” or a river in Paradise.

Luxenberg shows it likely refers to Eucharistic “blessing” from Syriac kawthārā, a common liturgical term meaning “salvation” or “blessing” — not “river”.

🍇 4. Misreading Paradise: Virgins or Grapes?

“...houris with wide, beautiful eyes” (Surah 56:22)
“hur ʿayn” is classically taken to mean virgins.

But Luxenberg and others argue:

How = white (fem. plural of ahwar )
ʿAyn = grapes in Syriac
The original phrase likely meant “white grapes”, a symbol of heavenly bliss in Syriac Christian imagery

This error arose from misreading Syriac metaphors as literal Arabic nouns. The sensualized version emerged later.

🪞 5. Self-Referential Contradictions: The Qur’an as a Mirror of Syriac Texts

The Qur’an contains repetitions, broken syntax, and mid-sentence shifts in subject. These oddities match:

Syriac homiletic structures, where meaning builds through repetition and paraphrase
Psalms, biblical canticles, and lectionaries that use parallelism, not logic

Examples:

Surah 112 (“Say: He is Allah, the One...”) reads like a creedal chant adapted from Syriac
Surah 97 (“Night of Power”) resembles Christmas midnight mass hymns in Aramaic liturgy

These are not desert improvisations—they're liturgical fragments adapted into Arabic.

📍 6. Early Islamic Writers Knew the Problem

Even early Muslims struggled with the Qur’an’s linguistic oddities:

Caliph Umar reportedly said: “Some verses of the Qur’an are poetry, others are riddles.”
Al-Tabari admits foreign words exist in the Qur’an despite “clear Arabic” claims
Ibn Abbas compiled glossaries of obscure words needing explanation from non-Arabic sources

Their efforts show the original audience didn’t understand large portions of the text without foreign reference.

🕯️ 7. Qur’anic Arabic Is a Product of Later Standardization

The Qur’an was not revealed in “pure Arabic” but likely in a hybrid dialect, full of:

Aramaic/Syriac terms
Misread foreign idioms
Local oral traditions and translations

The Uthmanic canonization and later grammatical standardization (e.g., Sibawayh) gave the illusion of linguistic unity. But the original material was garbled, and later scribes projected structure onto ambiguous oral material.

🧩 Conclusion: A Revelation Built on Mistranslation

The evidence shows that:

The Qur’an was not originally a coherent Arabic text
It contains dozens of Aramaic/Syriac theological terms, many mistranslated
Early Muslim readers struggled to understand it, creating the science of tafsir to cope
Its origins point to Syriac Christian and Jewish Aramaic texts, filtered through poor translation and scribal misreading

🧭 Islam’s supposed “clear Arabic revelation” is better understood as a Syriac religious digest, mistakenly Arabized and retrofitted into a divine message.