Lord Larehip

No. The oldest known manuscripts of the Quran have no diacritical marks. Arabic notates consonants and long vowels but not short ones. As the vocabulary expanded and the culture of the Arabs changed and expanded, it became necessary to have a way to express short vowels because it was impossible to distinguish words. Ten words could be spelled identically but there was no way to know which word was meant. So diacritical marks--little dots and slashes--were invented to be added to these words to distinguish them from one another. This occurred about the 660s under the reign of Muawiya I of the Umayyad Dynasty. This convention did not exist in Muhammad's time since he was said to have died in 632.

Yet the Quran is written in diacritical marks. So it may be classical Arabic but of a more modern form. I did not mean to imply that it was written in Modern or Literary Arabic although I wasn't clear on that--apologies. The problem is, of course, who made the decision to add the diacritical marks and how do we know they did it faithfully? It could only have been arbitrary and done to push various agendas.

But here are a mess of other problems:

1. The Quran itself as well many hadiths say that the Quran must be in Arabic, that it was delivered in Arabic and only makes sense it Arabic. Why would these assertions even be necessary?? The only reason they would be is because the earliest texts were, in fact, not in Arabic.

2. Is there evidence of this? Yes, from the Quran itself. Sura 16: 103 makes mention of a mysterious "foreigner" (or "Persian") believed to have supplied Muhammad with his verses. Ibn Ishaq from his book The Life of Muhammad believed this foreigner was "Jabr the Christian, slave of the B. al-Hadrami, and teacher of Muhammad." Muqatil ibn Sulayman, who died in 767, identified the foreigner as Abu Fukayha Yasar whom he states was a Greek-speaking Jew. Muqatil further quotes in his work Tasfir al-Qu'ran Muhammad's chief critic, an-Nasr ibn al-Harith: "The Qur'an is naught but lies that Muhammad himself has forged...Those who help him are Addas, a slave of Huwaytib b. Abd al-Uzza, Yasar, a servant of Amr b. al-Hadrami, and Jabr who was a Jew, and then became a Muslim...This Quran is only a tale of the Ancients, like the tales of Rustam and Isfandiyar. These three [were] teaching Muhammad at dawn and in the evening." 25:4-5 of the Quran virtually restates that very accusation.

3. Since many of the Old Testament stories appear in the Quran, we either accept that they were given to Muhammad by Allah or that others reused earlier non-Arabic material to make the Quran. Many of the verses in the Quran are ambiguous if not unintelligible. About a fifth of the book falls into that category. An example occurs in 2:29 where it is written: "It is He who created for you all that is in the earth, then He lifted Himself to heaven and leveled them seven heavens; and he had knowledge of everything." The Arabic phrase uses "them" but what does it mean? Leveled them seven heavens? What or whom is the "them" the passage refers to?

4. If that isn't bad enough, 4:12 uses the word "kalala" in regards to inheritance law. What is it? It is not an Arabic word. It is, in fact, not a word known to any language. 83:7-9 mentions Sijjin. What is it? No one knows. What we do know is that it is not a word in Arabic. The Quran seems to to say that Sijjin is "a book inscribed" but what book?? 21:104 uses the word sijill--"roll up heaven as a sijill." Some have translated it as "scroll" as a very similar sentence occurs in Revelation in the New Testament. This may be its meaning, it certainly seems so, the problem is--where did the word come from and why is it in the Quran at all?? Again, it is not Arabic and does not belong to any known language. Some have theorized that it is a corruption of the Greek word sigillon or "imperial edict" but that would only prove the Quran was not inspired by god and was not originally written in Arabic. 112:2 uses the phrase Allahu as-samad and there are as many translations of this phrase as there are translators. Quite simply, no one knows what it means.

5. The very title of chapter (sura) 108 is "Al-Kawthar". What is that? It is not used anywhere else in the Arabic language. There are literally dozens of possible translations by various scholars as to its meaning which only verifies that it has none. Yet, the Quran itself has the audacity to proclaim that it itself is written in "Arabic, pure and clear" as it says in 16:103 and that god would not have sent the Quran in any other language than Arabic (41:44) yet we see this is bulls-hit, pure and clear.

6. All the names of the Old Testament prophets that appear in the Quran are in Syrian and specifically the Aramaic dialect. Much of the sentence structure of the Quran is Syraic and not Arabic. In Syriac, the very word "quran" is a reading from scripture for liturgical purposes. The very title of the book appears to be Syriac.

7. There is no Arabic paganism to be found in the Quran not even statements or polemics against it and yet, this is was what the majority of Arabs worshiped in Muhammad's day--what he himself would have been taught as a boy. Why doesn't the Quran mention it? Likely, because the Quran was not written in Arabia at all but in Syria or an Aramaic-speaking people who were not Arabs.