ABSTRACT
It is something of a truism among scholars of Syriac to say that the more deeply one is familiar with the works of the major writers of the classical period, especially the composers of liturgically significant, homiletic texts such as those written by Ephraem the Syrian (c. 306-73), Narsai of Edessa and Nisibis (c. 399-502), or Jacob of Serugh (c. 451-521), the more one hears echoes of many of their standard themes and characteristic turns of phrase at various points in the discourse of the Arabic Qur’an. Conversely, Qur’an scholars in search of the origins of what they sometimes present as the “foreign vocabulary” of the Qur’an have not infrequently called attention to what they consider to be the high incidence of Syriac loan words and cognates in the Arabic idiom of the Islamic scripture. One difficulty which has attended the study of these matters has been that while most Qur’an scholars are well trained in Islamic languages such as Arabic, Persian and Turkish, they have seldom had more than a philological grasp of Syriac and almost no first-hand acquaintance with the classical literature of the language. Similarly, most Syriac scholars are deeply immersed in the study of the classical texts of the fourth, fifth and even the sixth centuries, but their grasp of Arabic is largely grammatical and lexical and they are often not at all familiar with Qur’anic or other early Islamic literature. Put another way, Qur’an scholars have often been unwilling to consider pre-Qur’anic, Syriac religious discourse as belonging in any way within the Qur’an’s hermeneutical circle. And Syriac scholars have seldom seen any reason to think that the Qur’an belongs within the textual or discursive framework of “Late Antique” Early Christian or Patristic thought. The result has been that when scholars have posited Syriac connections for some locutions in the Arabic Qur’an, be they grammatical, lexical or even
thematic, they have done so almost in a vacuum, without much to say about their methodological and hermeneutical presuppositions. There have been few if any efforts to set forth well articulated and historically plausible sets of principles or hypotheses in the light of which the stipulated coincidences between Syriac and Qur’anic usages or modes of expression might find their most likely significance.
