ARAB-ISLAMIC MYTHS

Submitted by IamJoseph (Australia), May 18, 2010 at 20:03

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), May 18, 2010 at 07:57

Our dear iam Muslims tell us that history can be explained through a process of historical discontinuity or al-jahiliyya wa al-islam. But this is far from the truth as nothing drops from the sky not books, not people and not ideas or religions and that history is about continuity. The Arabs and their language or even their religion did not drop from the sky and as I said to you if you would have said that there is no extant evidence to attest to the existence of a certain group or their language then you are making a good point.

# Something cannot drop from the sky when the evidence on the ground contradicts this: the Quran contains precedent descriptions and this had to come from the Hebrew bible. No alternatives exist. The Hebrew bible being the only source which contains the life and history of Abraham and Moses - centuries before Islam appeared. The term 'REVELATION' means something new - or it has no meaning. Rocket science.

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Now the following is really for the readers

1. The Arabic language has a very long history behind it and historians that study the history of Arabic as a language and also study lingusitics tell us (see Garbini) that we have the following about the linguistic source of Arabic

# If you mean oral history which is not provable - it is varied from the provability of a host of other ancient languages.

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proto-semitic-------> West Semitic-------> Central Semitic------> this splits into

A. Aramaic

B. Arabo-Canaanite and this splits into Arabic and Canannite

Now this took place in the so called linguistic Syrian area or what we call now al-hilal al-khaseeb that borders the Syria desert. Now this is what Gabrini is saying:

the arabic type of semitic language originated when groups of speakers detached themselves from the syrian area that bordered on the desert and became isolated from the innovative area. the completion of this process of bedouinisation took place at the earliest in the second half of the second millennium BCE.

This means that the Arabic language based on lingusitic analysis can be traced back to 1500BCE!!

# No, it does not mean what you conclude. The language could have equally been derved from an admix of older languages and bear the same imprints you mention - without being ancient to 1,500 BCE. The facts we have favors my premise. The English language is also an admix of many older languages, but we cannot say that english is 4000 years old: we have no imprints of English before it emerged some 500 years ago. The same applies to written Arabic.

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Oh there is more

the common features shared by arabic and north west semitic must therefore represent innovations that had been introduced in the syrian area before bedouinisation took place

And this indeed makes lots of sense as Arabs now have a uniqe semitic language and they do not speak for example Aramaic now do you get it our dear iam?

# This is also faulty. Both the common and new features display only an admix and innovations of a new cultural input, not a cntinuous thread from 1,500 BCE. There is nothing that is new relating to the 1,500 date, only to new adaptations. There is also no imprints of an Arab race existing 1,500 BCE.

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Oh there is more

it appears indeed that there are no archaisms in arabic (eg: the name 3Amr is still written as the Archaic 3AMRU) that do not occur in the north west semitic languages of the second millennuim BCE

Do you know what this means our dear iam? It means that Arabic became a unique language as far back as 1500BCE!! and thru the porcess of isolation of the Arabs in the desert and away from the Syrian area Arabic became a unique language.

# Imposible. Otherwise, the Arabic would not spell Abraham with a 'B' - signifying it is post-Latin. The variations from the Aramaic is new - we do not see those variation in ancient times.

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Now you have another task: Prove that Gabrini is wrong

2. The first literary sources that tell us about the Arabs can be dated back to 900BCE and it is a fact

# Its not a fact. The term ARAB does not appear anywhere pre-500 BCE, nor any imprints of Arab or Arabic.

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3. The first Arabic texts comes from Qaryat al-Faw and is dated 100BCE-300BCE and this is a fact

# This is also not a fact. An ancient, living language must possess an ancient thread of imprints. The reference given does not contain the word ARAB or Arabic writings.

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4. Texts can be written in foreign alphabets but the text is still an Arabic text and here is an example

ina al-ustaz iam ghalabawi kabeer

Well this is an Arabic text written in Latin alphabet but this is Arabic nontheless and this is what our dear iam cannot understand. The Arabs did that and that was a common practice back then

# This proves my premise: there was no Arabic writings pre-400 CE. This is grasping at the notion of an oral language, while there are no ancient oral indicators to align with it. Compare with Aramaic, a ;anguage frequently transcribed in Hebrew - but with ancient imprints of the Aramaic - this is not the case with the Arabic.

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5. The origin of the Arabic alphabet is unkown however I believe that it must be from Syriac and the earliest Arabic text albeit defective Arabic alphabet must be the one from Om al-Jimal dated about 270CE

# No duspite with this. Syriac is an ancient language which could have been adapted from, as the Arabs were known to be in this region. But even the Syriac is not 4000 years old, itself derived from still older languages. The Hebrew is older than the syriac.

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6. Now the text of the Qur'an that we have is supposed to have been revlealed as rasm which means that it took another 300 years and the efforts of the Muslim masorites to fix the text of the Qur'an (language, syntax, adding the missing short as well as long vowels and shadda and hamza and explaining the defective grammar that was at variance with what was regarded as classical Arabic). So this brings us to about the year 900CE.

# No sir. There are no imprints from 900 BCE. The emergence of the Quran is in a language which contains new language writings, like that of the Latin, which never existed 900 BCE. As well, some 80% of the Quran contains narratives which are already established and seen in the Gospels, the Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew bible - these too never existed 900 BCE.

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7. But this was not all Arabic was still a defective language and with the help of the great Sibawayhe (D 790CE) we are now able to understand Arabic grammar and with the great work of Hunein ibn Ishaq (Around 815CE) and his translations of the Greek learning from Greek to Syriac and then to Arabic the vocabulary of the Arabic language expanded and many words (eg: balgham, tuhal, safra) that were no more than Arabized words and these words would have had no meaning to Muhammad and his generation

# The dates you mention here align with new materials, not ancient material dating to 900 BCE. It says the Quran was written and improvised after the advent of Christianity, containing descriptions from the Gospels, which are post first century and thus not ancient. Names such as Abraham, Moses, Jesus are not from the syriac.

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8. The last step in the evolution of the Arabic language was the great Arabic language dictionary by ibn Mnazur: Lian al-3Arab in the year 600AH (around 1300CE) but one can very much argue that this dictionary is really not of classical Arabic but of Middle Arabic as by then the languages of the conquered people affected the Arabic language

# 1,300 CE does not impact, except that it affirms my premise only.

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9. And this is how EA came about it was the language of the Arabs that became Egyptian and not the other way around as it is all boaut continuity and not discontinuity

# No sir. A reference of 1,300 CE cannot apply as proof of anciency.

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So it took about 3000 years for us to have the Arabic language we have today

# Yes, this is plausable as the time required for a new language to develop. However, we are talking 300 years after Christianity emerged.

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>ARVI is not Arab.

I will leave this remark to the readers to judge you.

# It is also an admission you are relying totally on a stray word which is not 'ARAB' but Arvi, and which does not have any Arab context in the said reference, and which appears once in a long period of history with no continuity of imprints. I remind that ancient writings was a severe task, requiring great time and cost, and was very fastidiously adhered to - it is not plausable a word would be mispelled, replacing a B with a V [AVDOT/ABDOT]; it is more feasable that the word is not Arabic - a language which did not contain the Hebrew 'V' alphabet. BTW - none of the ancient languages contain the V alphabet, except for the Hebrew. Phoenecian and Canaanite did not contain the 'V'. The net conclusion is that the charges made by Arabs and Muslims about the Hebrew writings, the Jerusalem temple being a myth, the history of the Jews and their homeland - is false:

"AND I SHALL PROVE ALL YOUR ACCUSATIONS AGAINST THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL TO BE FALSE" [The Tanach].

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