Deciphering the foreign vocabulary of the Qur'an! al-Sarat in Surat al-Fatiha

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jul 13, 2018 at 19:48

Dr Pipes

I'm sure you must be aware that the Qur'an has its share of foreign non Arabic words

In Q1:6 it says:

اهْدِنَا الصِّرَاطَ الْمُسْتَقِيمَ

This verse can be rendered as: Guide us to the straight al-Sarat

Notice that I left the word الصِّرَاطَ or al-Sarat untranslated because it is not an Arabic word. After all if the word really means path/road then why did the author of the Qur'an not use the Arabic word al-Tariq or الطريق ?

al-Qurtubi provides a different reading for the word al-Sarat where he replaces the first Sad with the letter Arabic seen and it becomes السراط then he wrote:

وقرئ : السراط ( بالسين ) من الاستراط بمعنى الابتلاع

Or: (the word al-Sarat with a Sad) is read as al-sarat (with a letter seen not Sad) from (the word) al-Istirad and the meaning is al-ibtila'!

Very strange reading indeed

He also proposes that the word al-Sarat must be a loan word from Latin

الصراط الطريق بلغة الروم

Or al-Sarat or the road is from Latin

Indeed Western scholars of the Qur'an agreed that it must be a loan word from Latin where the word road means STRATA

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/strata

The question now would be how did a Latin word get into the Qur'an? It must have been via Syriac or ܐܗܛܪܛܐ or ISTRATA or highway in Syriac

http://www.assyrianlanguages.org/sureth/dosearch.php?searchkey=587&language=id

However, Luxenberg seems to believe that the Quranic word al-Sarat is from Syriac ܗܪܛܐ or SARTA or line

He also believes that Syriac SARTA is the Arabic سطر or Satr which means line even in today's Arabic

https://www.studylight.org/lexicons/aramaic/2101.html

He believes that the Syriac word: line or SARTA is the source of the Quranic word SARAT and that the word underwent metathesis in spoken Arabic and is now SATR or line but it retained its Syriac origin in the Qur'an

Indeed the meaning of the verse becomes very clear:

Guide us to the straight line

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