- Plenty of Arabists have responded, either with curt dismissals or with lengthier responses (C. Burgmer, Streit um den Koran (Verlag Hans Schiler: Berlin, 2004) .
- Luxenberg begins by discussing the examples غبريل and ميكيل, which, he claims must reflect the transcriptionally identical Syriac spellings and [39-40] rather than the ‘official’ later Arabic pronunciations, Mīkāl and Ğibrīl. This explanation, however, is defective in a way we shall often meet with, namely that the Syriac evidence does not really support the weight of the argument, for neither of these are in fact the regular Syriac spellings of the names in question, which are (or ) and , the shortened spelling being known only in late sources which may anyway be secondary to the Arabic usage.5 So with these two examples we are left with a definite problem – why, if the Qur’ānic spellings are taken from Syriac, were the alaphs systematically ignored?
- This particular argument (e some Arabic words may have ended with ē by the process known as ’imāla, these may reflect the ē of the Syriac emphatic masculine plural) has been criticised by Corriente and de Blois on the basis that the resulting Arabic is not grammatically correct (the verb should now be singular), and by Stewart on the basis that the unemended text is unproblematic, for which he adduces parallels (Corriente, On a Proposal, 311; De Blois, Review, 93-4; Stewart, Notes, 237-238). The latter seems to be true of the next examples as well, in which سجدا) usually taken as an internal plural suğğadan) is linked with [44-5]. It is important to note that Luxenberg’s implication is that the Qur’ān was transmitted only in written form, since the original pronunciation sāğdē, graphically represented as سجدا was later interpreted as representing suğğadan. This is a point to which we shall return. Again, however, it has been observed that this particular form is actually attested in the Qur’ān, and is always to be expected in these context (Stewart, Notes, 238).
