For Leah: the one who is in owe of Islam! and Qur'an 9:29

Submitted by dihmmi no more (United States), Sep 1, 2006 at 18:00

I'm just going to work on the last few words as per your request of Qur'an 9:29 and the following few words have puzzled the Muslim 'Ulama back then and now. So let us read the last few words of the aya that are the source of confusion:

1. hatta (hah with a fatha teh with a shada yeh/alif maksora) means: until

2. yu3tuu (yeh with a damma the 3 stands for the letter Ayn waw alif) means: they give.

3. al-jizyatan (alif lam with a damma jeem with a kasra zain yeh with a fatha teh with a fatha and i3rab): this is also a puzzling word and you can pick and chose tribute? tax? And your guess is just as anyone else's guess and only allahu a3lam. And there is for sure an Arabic word that means tax and that is dariba and for tax on land the word is Kharaj. So why did Allah or is it Abul Qasim not use a known Arabic word here? We will never know. What is even more surpirsing is that the early Muslim masorites had no clue what this word really means. This makes you wonder that the Quranic material was already ancient in 632 CE when Muhammad died or that the Qur'an was only canonized much later than 632 CE (Wansbrough suggests the early 9th century) and the Quranic materail was circulating as oral logia and pericopes and by the time the Qur'an was canonized no one had a clue what such word really means.

In Arabic the word tirbute would mean: Kharaj and in modern dictionaries you will find the word jizya. But I cannot see one of Muhammad's followers giving him a tribute of some sort and this tribute being called jizya.

Notice that Qur'anic text never defines what this strange word really means. The word jizya puzzled the ancient Muslim 'Ulama that worked on the Muslim masora, and I suspect that this is a case where defining the word as tax or tribute is the result of the fact of just being in the text than being a known Arabic word.

I would put the word Jizya in the same class as the other very strange Quranic words as in: Ababeel, sijeel, kalala, Ilaf and 3an yad as you shall see below.

4. 3An yadin (ayn with a fatha nuun with a sukun) then (yeh with a shada then dal and i3rab)

These must be the most two difficult words in the Qur'an.

3an means upon

Yad means hand

But within the context of the sentence the meaning of the two words is indeed problematic. I will not even dare guess what this really means and there has been a lot written about these two words in both Muslim as well as Western literature and no one seems to know for sure what these two words really mean.

I do not know how good is your Arabic but Ibn Warraq devotes 70 pages to these two words in his collection: "What the Koran really says." And the final conclusion is that no one seems to know.

5. Wa hum means and they are

6. Saghiruuna: you claim that this word means "made to feel subdued" Your definition here is wrong.

Well the root of this word is: S Gh R

And word the word saghirun (saghir s.) means: "low, lowly, despised, cotemptible, _humiliated_, meek, dejected, submissive, servile" (REF: The Hans Wehr Arabic dictionary page 516A)

So I do translate this word _in this context_ as: and they are humiliated.

For further evidence you can check Zamakhshari who also reads it as: humiliated and proposes that ahl al-kitab who ever they are must pay the jizya from hand while being humiliated and he suggests that they must dismount from their donkeys and then the Muslim receiving the jizya tribute/tax must hit them on the back of the neck.

Ah the warm and fuzzy Islam.

You need to stop reading translations my dear Leah!!!

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