Ahad(un) and the Mis­sion­ary’s Folly

Recent­ly we were intro­duced to a new, amus­ing polemic by the mis­sion­ar­ies, name­ly with regard to the word ​“ahad(un)”. To quote the mis­sion­ar­ies, the use of the word ahad :

…shows that the Quran is far from being a mas­ter­piece, or the pin­na­cle of Ara­bic elo­quence. The wrong use of a word in a very cru­cial text which relates to the nature of Allah is clear proof that God is not the author of the Quran.

To achieve this end, the mis­sion­ar­ies cite an online text from a Chris­t­ian Arab polemi­cist who claims that the word does not mean ​“one”, but ​“one of”. 

Is it true what they claim ? 

We seek to answer this alle­ga­tion in the fol­low­ing, insha’allah.

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Does ​“Ahad” real­ly mean ​“One of”?

Accord­ing to the missionaries :

Amaz­ing­ly, the actu­al Ara­bic of verse 1 does not say that Allah is One, but lit­er­al­ly says Allah is One of. This is due to the word used for one in the sen­tence, name­ly ahad.

What is actu­al­ly ​“amaz­ing” in this state­ment is their extreme idio­cy and igno­rance with regard to the mean­ing of the word ​“ahad”, which is actu­al­ly an adjec­tive, as opposed to ​“one of” which is a pro­noun. The mis­sion­ar­ies in their haste to twist the mean­ing of ​“ahad” has failed to dis­tin­guish between these two obvi­ous opposites !

First, let us refer to the estab­lished mean­ing of ​“ahad” as estab­lished by the lex­i­cal authorities. 

Hans Wehr in his def­i­n­i­tion says that :

J.M. Cow­an (ed.), The Hans Wehr Dic­tio­nary of Mod­ern Writ­ten Ara­bic, Spo­ken Lan­guage Ser­vices, NY, (1976)

Note that the mean­ing of ​“ahad” varies from ​“one” to ​“some­one”, but cer­tain­ly they all agree on the same mean­ing, which is the adjec­tive ​“one”, and not the pro­noun ​“one of”! 

Elias & Elias also con­curs with Wehr in their fol­low­ing entry :

Elias A. Elias & Edward E. Elias, Elias’ Pock­et Dic­tio­nary Arabic/​English, Elias Mod­ern Pub­lish­ing House, Cairo (right column)

Hence we have estab­lished that ​“ahad(un)” does indeed mean ​“one” and the debate should just stop there. 

How­ev­er, the mis­sion­ary has com­piled a list of vers­es, which he claims mean ​“one of”, occur­ring in the Qur’an­ic text. To add a fur­ther blow to the mis­sion­ary pro­pa­gan­da, we pro­duce the fol­low­ing entry from a Qur’an­ic con­cor­dance which dis­tin­guish­es between the word ​“ahad” and ​“ihda”, accom­pa­nied by the Qur’an­ic verse num­bers in where they occur.

Ahmad Ibrahim, Al-Qur’an Malay-Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary : Denot­ing Books and Vers­es, Pus­ta­ka Bina Insani, Kuala Lumpur (1989), p. 18

It is indeed clear from the above that the mis­sion­ary has no case to fol­low. ​“Ahad” does indeed mean ​“one” and it occurs fre­quent­ly through­out the Qur’an­ic text. Where­as the word ​“ihda” (which means ​“one of”) only occurs thrice in the Qur’an.

What About ​“Wahid”?

The mis­sion­ar­ies have charged the fol­low­ing regard­ing the usage of the word ​“ahad”:

In every sin­gle case, ahad is used to refer to one of some­thing, to one mem­ber of a spe­cif­ic group. None of the exam­ples used this word to mean one, alone, sin­gle etc.

Iron­i­cal­ly, this alle­ga­tion of the mis­sion­ary is only true for the very word which the mis­sion­ary is try­ing hard to pro­mote, i.e. ​“wahid”!

The fol­low­ing entry from Wehr shows the def­i­n­i­tion of ​“wahid”:

J.M. Cow­an (ed.), ibid.

Has the mis­sion­ary con­fused him­self ? The above entry clear­ly states that wahid can mean “…each one of them” or ​“every one of them” which cer­tain­ly shows that it can refer a mem­ber of a spe­cif­ic group. What is the mis­sion­ary try­ing to say and what exact­ly does he want to achieve by this point­less polemic ?

With regard to the mis­sion­ary alle­ga­tion that ​“wahid” is a bet­ter sub­sti­tute for ​“ahad”, we say that the mis­sion­ary has cer­tain­ly nev­er heard this Sura’ being recit­ed when he made this idi­ot­ic claim. 

To lis­ten to Sura’ al-Ikhlas, we implore our read­ers to down­load and lis­ten to the Sura’ recita­tion by Sheikh Abdul Rah­man As-Sudais here [ .mp3 for­mat].

Read­ers can eas­i­ly note how the Sura’ is struc­tural­ly pro­nounced and the over­all tone of the Sura’ is rhyth­mi­cal­ly con­sis­tent in the usage of the word ​“ahad”.

Hence, this mis­sion­ary polemic is dis­mis­si­ble and can now be dis­card­ed as noth­ing more than inflat­ed nonsense.

“Echad” and the Mis­sion­ary’s Folly

In their futile attempt in try­ing to ​“deter­mine” the ori­gin of ahad, the mis­sion­ary made the fol­low­ing laugh­able claim :

One pos­si­ble, and even prob­a­ble, expla­na­tion as to why Muham­mad, or the author of the Quran, used the word ahad is because of his inter­ac­tion with the Jews. Muham­mad may have heard the Jew­ish She­ma, the monothe­is­tic creed of faith found in Deuteron­o­my 6:4, recit­ed which uses the word echad to refer to Yah­we­h’s unity.

Any stu­dent of the Semit­ic lan­guages will be gap­ing in awe at this sweep­ing state­ment. It is known that Ara­bic and Hebrew are sis­ter lan­guages, hence there are many words in both lan­guages which share the same lan­guage. Brown-Dri­ver-Brig­gs’ lex­i­con exhibits this under­stand­ing with the fol­low­ing entry :

F. Brown, S. Dri­ver and C. Brig­gs, The Brown-Dri­ver-Brig­gs Hebrew and Eng­lish Lex­i­con : With An Appen­dix Con­tain­ing The Bib­li­cal Ara­ma­ic, Hen­drick­son Pub­lish­ers, Mass­a­chu­setts (2001)

Please note that the BDB have includ­ed ahad in its entry of ​“echad”, and both are iden­ti­fied as adjec­tives. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for the mis­sion­ary, there is no mean­ing ​“one of” record­ed by this cel­e­brat­ed lexicon.

With regard to the word echad, Strong’s con­cor­dance also agrees with the BDB :

James Strong, The New Strong’s Exhaus­tive Con­cor­dance of the Bible, Thomas Nel­son Pub­lish­ers, Tenessee (1996)

Con­clu­sions

In his sum­ma­ry, the mis­sion­ary made the fol­low­ing fatu­ous claim :

In any case, Mus­lims are in a dilem­ma. Since the data shows that the lit­er­al ren­der­ing of Sura 112:1 is that ​“Allah is one of,” the ques­tion remains one of what ? Is he one of many gods ?

We had shown in the above that the mis­sion­ary is con­fused between an adjec­tive (“ahad”) and a pro­noun (“ihda”), two dif­fer­ent Ara­bic words that have lit­tle cor­re­la­tion to each oth­er and cer­tain­ly the lat­ter does not exist in Sura’ al-Ikhlas (Qur’an, 112). Hence from where did this mis­sion­ary got his ​“lit­er­al read­ing” from if the word ​“ihda” is non-exis­tent in the above-men­tioned Sura’? Cer­tain­ly, the mis­sion­ary is hard-pressed to pro­vide such evi­dence apart from his blink­ered view of Islam. It is indeed under­stood that God is, as explained by Ibn Katheer in his inter­pre­ta­tion of Sura’ al-Ikhlas :

“He is the One and Only with­out equal, nor any min­is­ter or part­ner, nor any like or par­al­lel ; and this descrip­tion can­not be applied to any­one save Allah^(T) because He^(T) is Per­fect in all His Attrib­ut­es and all His Actions.“Sameh Strauch (transl.), Select­ed Qur’an­ic Vers­es Explained From The Tafseer of At-Tabari, Ibn Katheer & Ibn Al-Qayy­im, IIPH, Riyadh (1999), p. 130

It is also equal­ly obvi­ous that the mis­sion­ary is des­per­ate enough to ​“read into” the Qur’an­ic text for evi­dence of the non-exis­tent Trini­tar­i­an doc­trine as held by Chris­tians. Worse still for the mis­sion­ary, we have shown from his own Bible that the Hebrew echad (which is also an adjec­tive) is under­stood as ​“one” and is syn­ony­mous with the Ara­bic ahad, and its accom­pa­ny­ing inter­pre­ta­tion from Jew­ish schol­ars. There is no room for a Trini­tar­i­an inter­pre­ta­tion for ​“echad”, and like­wise, there can­not be any form of the pseu­do-monothe­is­tic Trin­i­ty in its sis­ter equiv­a­lent, ​“ahad”.

And only Allahu Ahad knows best.