According to the prevailing consensus, the Quran originated in the ¯ first third of the seventh century CE in the towns of Mecca and Medina. Its author (in Muslim eyes, its transmitter) was Muh. ammad who ‘published’ his revelations in segments which he later rearranged and edited, in large measure himself. Yet he did not leave a complete and definitive recension. The canonical text such as it has been known for centuries was not achieved until twenty years after the Prophet’s death. The quranic material which ¯ had been preserved in written and oral forms was then carefully collected at the behest of the third caliph, Uthman, who published it as the only officially authorised version of the Quran. The stylistic uniformity of the ¯ whole proves its genuineness. This historical account is based on evidence found in the Quran itself as interpreted in the light of the Muslim tradition, ¯ i.e., the biography (s¯ıra) of the Prophet and traditions on the collection of the Quran after his death (W. M. Watt, Bell’s Introduction to the Quran¯ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970), chs. 2 and 3).
Most Western Islamicists reject Muslim traditions about a first collection of the Quran made on behalf of the caliph Ab ¯ u Bakr shortly after the ¯ demise of the Prophet as unlikely because the details in these accounts are unconvincing. They accept, however, the traditions about the official collection during the caliphate of Uthman, although these reports also contain ¯ problematic details. The text achieved under Uthman is the Qur ¯ an as we ¯ now have it as far as the consonantal text and its structure is concerned. Variant readings of earlier collections made by other Companions and suppressed by Uthman are transmitted that suggest that ‘there was no great ¯ variation in the actual contents of the Quran in the period immediately ¯ after the Prophet’s death’, only the order of the suras was not fixed and ¯ there were slight variations in reading (Watt, Bell’s Introduction, ch. 3).
That does not mean, however, that all words contained in the Quran¯ are ‘pure Arabic’, i.e., derived from the reservoir of Arabic roots. Western scholars have identified many loanwords from other languages, most of them belonging to the Aramaic-Syriac group of Semitic languages. The list published by Arthur Jeffery in 1938 contains about 322 loanwords (A. Jeffery, The foreign vocabulary of the Quran¯ (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1938) that amount to 0.4 per cent of the complete quranic vocabulary (proper names ¯ included). A large portion of these loanwords are already found in preIslamic Arabic texts and can be considered part of the Arabic language before the Quran (Watt, Bell’s Introduction, pp. 84–5). That means that the loanwords found in the Quran¯ do not contradict the common assumption that its language is essentially a literary Arabic close to that of the pre- and early Islamic poetry and to the classical Arabic of prose texts written in the Islamic period.
Marijn van Putten:
It seems quite clear to me that the vast majority of the loanwords in the Quran are loanwords just like the English words “basically”, “agree”, “clear”, “majority”, ” just” and indeed the word “language” are. That is: words that had been borrowed into the Arabic language well before Muhammad’s lifetime. al-Suyūṭī basically already made that point centuries ago: just because these words are of foreign origin doesn’t make them not Arabic. They are Arabic, and of foreign origin. Even when we don’t have a certain word attested in pre-Islamic poetry, I think it is clear that most of these words were already familiar to the Quranic audience, simply because the Quran never finds it necessary to explain what any of these words mean.
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