ABSTRACT
It is obvious that al-Qur'an in the later, fixed meaning of God's Word as written down in the masahif is necessarily a usage that is post-'Uthman as well as post-Muhammad. The linking of the verbal-noun/masdar form qur'an to the Syriac qeryana has been stressed by virtually all major Western Qur'an scholars, even though all have done so without specific reference to even one historical attestation of the Christian liturgical usage in a pre-Islamic Syriac source. The first important consideration in recovering the earliest meaning of qur'an for Muslims is that God's revelatory process was apparently understood by the Prophet and Companions and by the next several generations of Muslims in a relatively dynamic rather than static fashion. Modern scholarship has identified the last derivation as the correct one linguistically and has rightly stressed the primacy of the meaning "to proclaim, recite, read aloud" over any more literal sense of "to read" in a silent or purely cognitive sense.
