The Arabic language, from revelation to composition

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The Craft of Arabic: From Revelation to Composition by Charbel Dagher... Scholars have never ceased studying the Quran, whether in ancient or modern times, Arabs and Muslims alike, as well as non-Arabs. Indeed, in some aspects of its corpus, the Quran seems more amenable to study than other established religious texts. The complaints some Muslims have about the need for "excessive scrutiny" of the Quran's structure do not necessarily stem from a skeptical tradition, particularly in ancient Europe and later Orientalism, but rather—at least in part—from the availability of a vast corpus of Quranic texts, thus open to examination, scrutiny, and study. The purpose of this book is not to delve into the history of the Quran, but rather to address a matter that has received little attention from scholars, both past and present: the competence of those who compiled the Quran, and the capacity of the Arabic language, or the extent to which it possessed the necessary rules and tools for regulating its vocabulary and grammatical forms. The study has established that the problems of revelation—the scripture—and the problems of its codification and variations in its forms, can largely stem from deficiencies in the scribes' competence, and from the lack of clearly defined and unifying rules governing the written Arabic language and its reading. The Quran was a momentous event in the lives of the Arabs, yet the Islamic religious-political power, in its initial formation, lacked the necessary linguistic strength (in "illiterate" communities, unable to write), or the appropriate and regulating competence or "competence." The book, in its analysis, draws upon a vast library (in multiple languages) of sources and references to examine the Arabic corpus (its revelation; its compilation; the linguistic debates surrounding it; and the interpretations concerning the "unity" of the Quran and the "proliferation" of Arabic) regarding the reasons for its emergence, its formations, its conflicts, and its dilemmas. The book aspires to deal with this corpus (which collects what has reached us without necessarily being sound or complete) in a thoughtful manner, considering what it thought about, how it thought about it, and what it ended up with, without necessarily ending it: The difficulties of the current Arabic language lie in an “accumulated accumulation” of attraction between an “old” Arabic language, contentious between the transcendent and the tribal, and a temporal Arabic language, colloquial and classical, in the custody of interacting and diverse linguistic “environments”; and the book ends with the difficult and urgent question: When will Arabic be reformed?