Have They No Under­stand­ing Of Ara­bic Grammar ?

Bis­mil­lah…

The Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies have often raised the issue of alleged gram­mat­i­cal errors in the Qur’an. Such alle­ga­tions are per­fect­ly suit­able for the Chris­tians due to their inco­her­ent mis­guid­ance and lack of sound beliefs ; because their faith is found­ed in oppo­si­tion to log­i­cal rea­son­ing and com­mon sense, it is cer­tain­ly not strange at all to hear such alle­ga­tions from them. What sad­dens us is that some Mus­lims attempt­ed to answer these claims by try­ing to look into Ara­bic gram­mar con­cern­ing aspects or rules which jus­ti­fy an accusative word that the Chris­t­ian ​“thinks” is a bet­ter nom­i­na­tive, or a plur­al word the Chris­t­ian ​“believes” is a bet­ter sin­gu­lar !

All this is non­sense, for we are sure that the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies has no idea about the gram­mar struc­ture or even the Ara­bic lan­guage, but they win the argu­ment because they dri­ve the Mus­lim to defend the Qur’an, instead of using it as a fatal weapon against false reli­gions and beliefs. Instead of this pas­sive strat­e­gy, the Mus­lim should expose the fact that Chris­t­ian polemi­cists have no under­stand­ing of the issue they raise, and that their embar­rass­ing alle­ga­tions against the Qur’an prove their deep igno­rance. The Mus­lim should prove this to shut their mouths instead of turn­ing to text­books of gram­mar and Ara­bic language.

How is that so ?

The Holy Qur’an tells us :

“Ye Peo­ple of the Book why dis­pute ye about Ibrahim, when the Torah and the Gospel were not revealed till after him ? Have you no under­stand­ing?“Surah Al-‘Imran : 65

Ibn Kathir says in his tafsir :

Ibn ​‘Abbas ‑radiya Allah ​‘anhu- said : Chris­tians of Najran and Jew­ish rab­bis gath­ered at Mes­sen­ger of Allah (peace be upon him) and dis­put­ed ; the Jews said : Ibrahim was none but a Jew ! Chris­tians said : Ibrahim was none but a Chris­t­ian ! Then Allah has revealed : { Ye Peo­ple of the Book why dis­pute ye about Ibrahim } mean­ing how come you — Jews — claim he was a Jew while his time was before rev­e­la­tion of the Torah to Moses, and how come you — Chris­tians — claim he was a Chris­t­ian while Chris­tian­i­ty devel­oped much time after him ? That’s why Allah said : { Have you no understanding ? }

Please put into con­sid­er­a­tion the end­ing of the holy verse with the words : { have you no under­stand­ing ? } for the Jews and Chris­tians by their claims on Prophet Ibrahim (peace be upon him) have made an embar­rass­ing his­tor­i­cal error which even a child can notice ; that it is a very appar­ent his­tor­i­cal fal­la­cy as find­ing a Pep­si bot­tle in the palace of the Pharaoh ! These are peo­ple with no under­stand­ing, is it log­i­cal to attribute some­one with a reli­gion that would appear cen­turies later ?

How­ev­er, it seems that Chris­t­ian idio­cy is peri­od­ic for it appears again with their alleged gram­mat­i­cal errors of the Qur’an.

Ye Peo­ple of the Book why dis­pute ye about the Qur’an, when the laws of gram­mar were not put till after It ? have you no understanding ?

They cer­tain­ly have no inkling about the devel­op­ment of a lan­guage, whether it is Ara­bic or oth­er­wise ; gram­mar was not the machine that pro­duced the Ara­bic lan­guage, rather it is sim­ply a log­i­cal expla­na­tion to ways of Ara­bic speech. Due to their inher­ent stu­pid­i­ty, the Chris­tians do not rec­og­nize the cor­rect his­toric­i­ty of its chrono­log­i­cal order : Arabs speak the lan­guage first, then explana­to­ry rules are for­mu­lat­ed lat­er (after the advent of Islam). Con­se­quent­ly, gram­mar should agree with Ara­bic speech, not vice ver­sa. How­ev­er, those who have no under­stand­ing believe that gram­mar came first to exis­tence, then Arabs spoke accord­ing to it. Remem­ber the verse : { have you no understanding ? }

If you ask any of them about the ori­gin of rules for­mu­lat­ed by Arab gram­mar­i­ans dur­ing era of doc­u­men­ta­tion, they will answer that they orig­i­nat­ed from Ara­bic speech. So, is it sane to derive a cer­tain rule from some speech and then crit­i­cize the same speech by this rule ? This would be plain insan­i­ty, remem­ber these words again : { have you no understanding ? }

The lan­guage of the Holy Qur’an rep­re­sents the purest Ara­bic speech for it was uttered by an Arab in a pure Ara­bic soci­ety and chal­lenged by the most elo­quent Arabs who men­tioned none of its alleged errors. It is well known that the Arabs dur­ing life­time of the Prophet (P) reached the sum­mit of elo­quence and artistry of speech ; and it is known as well that those Arabs were the most aggres­sive and moti­vat­ed oppo­nents to the mes­sage of Islam.

So here, they had two impor­tant cri­te­ria : (a) they were capa­ble of refut­ing the lan­guage of the Qur’an and expos­ing its errors, and (b) were much moti­vat­ed to do so. In oth­er words, they com­bined the abil­i­ty and the motive to dis­cov­er any lin­guis­tic errors in the Qur’an. How­ev­er, they did not which means that there were no errors to dis­cov­er or to expose.

On the oth­er hand, the Prophet (P) kept chal­leng­ing them with the Qur’an time after time again, abus­ing their gods and beliefs, attack­ing their poly­the­is­tic tra­di­tions, con­quer­ing their lands and killing their fathers, broth­ers and sons in bat­tle­fields, and they were able to com­bat all this by point­ing one lin­guis­tic error such as ​“plur­al instead of sin­gu­lar” or ​“accusative instead of nom­i­na­tive”, but they did not !

Do you know why ?

Because they were elo­quent Arabs liv­ing in pure Ara­bic soci­ety, they knew that polem­i­cal argu­ments like these would bring them noth­ing but mockery.

So, what about the list of these alleged errors ?

We answer with the fact that Arabs alto­geth­er had accept­ed the Holy Qur’an as most elo­quent speech that no human being can match or even object to. Then we ask the Chris­t­ian polemi­cists : Are you more knowl­edge­able about Ara­bic lan­guage and its usage than the ancient Arabs of the Prophet’s lifetime ?

of course, not !

Those Arabs knew their lan­guage by nature, so they con­ceived it all. This is in con­trast to the mod­ern-day Arabs — let alone non-Arabs — who acquire it by study­ing and learn­ing. In spite of this, they fail to con­ceive the entire Ara­bic lan­guage, espe­cial­ly rules and uses which even­tu­al­ly died in time and is no longer used in every­day speech or writing.

So when Arab Chris­tians start to com­pare the gram­mar of the Holy Qur’an with the high-school cur­ric­u­lar of Ara­bic gram­mar, they sure­ly fall into seri­ous fal­lac­i­es ; one of them being their igno­rance of the nor­mal his­tor­i­cal sequence in the devel­op­ment of any lan­guage. Remem­ber : { have you no understanding ? }

The sec­ond fal­la­cy is their mis­er­able selec­tion of some rules of Ara­bic gram­mar, con­sid­er­ing them as absolute and reject­ing the fact that the Ara­bic lan­guage is very vast and that it involves so many rules that are not includ­ed in the high school cur­ricu­lum of Ara­bic grammar.

They indeed have no understanding !