In answer to the video "The Truth about Ramadan (David Wood)"
When they raise the "foreign" words card, the misinformed critics imply that the Quran borrows foreign concepts or uses foreign expressions without which certain ideas could not be formulated using purely Arabic vocabulary. It is first to be noted that in Arabic, like every other language, foreign words have been adopted as people have interracted. In some cases, as can be seen with every language, these words retain their cultural or theological baggage, and in others, a new meaning is assumed even to the point of complete departure from the original definition.
In the Quran's case, these words which the polemicists point to and that do not even amount to a fraction of all words in the whole Book, are either not even foreign at all (they have well established triliteral Arabic roots), have been part of Arabic vocabulary since before the emergence of the prophet, or were common to Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, Hebrew and Ethiopic, they being cognate languages and thus rendering the tracing of their origin very difficult. Words of foreign origin are found in the Quran but they had entered into Arabic before the revelation and are thus now to be considered Arabic.
Onus is on the critics to prove that these words were borrowed post Islam in order to express certain notions. In their effort to blow up that issue of "foreign" words out of proportions, they have disregarded other well known facts. Anyone familiar with pre-islamic literature and poems knows how rich and expressive the language of the time already was, thus there was no need to express certain ideas by borrowing new terms from foreign languages.
In any case, whether a Quranic word truly is originally foreign to Arabic and in addition retains its original meaning, by becoming part of Arabic vocabulary and common use it necessarily, as in any language, becomes an Arabic word.
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