Before getting into the issue of Arabic as the perfect medium through which the Quran could be communicated, let us first look at the location in which the Quran came.
In the ancient world, populations were most often scattered in clusters of clans and small villages with a main town close by. When warners were sent, they concentrated their efforts in the mother town so as to reach the surrounding populations more effectively 28:59. When time came for the final message to be sent to mankind, Arabia was most suited to be the place from whence the final expression of the truth would emanate from. It enjoyed a central geostrategic position with regard to the known world at that time. It had been surrounded for long by a belt of ancient civilizations; the Egyptian civilization in the west, the Phoenicians and Assyrians in the north, the Babylonians, Persians and the Indus Valley civilizations in the north-east and east. Further in that direction laid the Chinese civilization.
Arabia in ancient times was thus very much in the middle of the then “civilized” world. Only in that obscure and unbothered land of Arabia could a new state-community with a fresh ideology arise and establish itself, before the intervention of the neighboring superpowers. At the time of Islam's advent, they were the Christian Roman empire of Heraclius I and the Zoroastrian Persian empire of Chosroe II.
In 1350, the estimated population of the earth was 370 million. We are now in the 7 billion, meaning the dramatic growth of mankind has essentially occurred 600 plus years after the death of the Prophet. 4 billion+ of that population exists in Asia alone, meaning right by the Middle East. The major influx of the population of humanity has been in contact with the Abrahamic movement since the time of the Prophet and even before, through the Israelites. Through these growing demographics and population movements, Africa and Europe were also exposed, with South America coming fourth when its population started swelling in the 1500s through European influx. So when it comes to being a region to remind men of the final reckoning there can be no better place than the Middle East. Interestingly, when the first human civilization appeared, God sent in it His first messenger with a global mission. Mesopotamia, the nation from which Abraham came, is really considered one of, if not the first civilization of mankind and the Hammurabi codes, which is considered the first real legal document, arose from this nation.
The point is, when civilization reached a stage where it was set to become a global culture, the prophetic mission turned global. This is why Abraham became the spiritual imam for all of humanity 2:124. The prophetic mission then took on a collective capacity with the Israelites first and, after their divine destruction and removal from the covenant, the Ishmaelites took on this mission. This is precisely why, when Abraham fulfilled the vision of sacrifice, God promised to bless his descendants as nations.
The language itself of Arabia was most suited for the transmission of the Quranic message
12:2,41:3,26:191-196"The Faithful Spirit has descended with it, Upon your heart that you may be of the warners. In plain Arabic language. And most surely the same is in the scriptures of the ancients".
Past Revelations sent to different locations and cultures always conformed to the language of the primary addressees
41:44,43:3,14:4"And We did not send any messenger but with the language of his people, so that he might explain to them clearly"
Ezek3:4-5"And He said to me; "Son of man, go, come to the house of Israel and speak to them with My words. For it is not to a people of an unfathomable language and a heavy tongue that you are sent, [but] to the house of Israel".
Every messenger only spoke to his people with their own language, not a foreign one otherwise they might misunderstand
"so that he might explain to them clearly".
This doesnt exclude that the messenger might speak the language of another people or that he might be sent to a foreign nation. This was Yunus/Jonah's case, an Israelite who went to the neighboring Assyrian kingdom as very briefly related in Jonah1-4 but also prophecied among his own people 2Kings14:25.
The Quran doesnt say the knowledge of Arabic is a prerequisite to understand it. It says it had to be sent in Arabic because its primary addressees spoke Arabic 26:198-9,42:7,41:44. A non-Arab approaching the Quran in another language than Arabic is perfectly able to understand it, depending on the quality of the translation. The one approaching the Arabic text obviously needs to master Arabic to understand it and translate it. He must be careful in his choice of words so as to try and catch as succinctly as possible the semantic nuances of a word without upsetting any theological concept. This is no different for a Biblical scholar mastering the intricacies of Greek to aid a study of the Septuagint or learning Latin to grasp later Latin vulgates.
Revelation is not the prerogative of any race, culture or language. All languages are a blessing from God and He has dispersed His creation throughout the planet by equipping them with the use of varying tongues 30:22. The Quran appeals in most of its themes to human emotions because it is the most universal of languages. One of the main reasons the Quran has such an appeal across linguistic, cultural, and temporal divides precisely is because it conveys its message in a way that people can relate to on a basic, universal level. Its message resonates in the emotions and inner genetic spiritual fabric of mankind and that is why it keeps making sense to people from so many different cultures, across time. Translation captures the WHAT but not the HOW of a statement. It may give a sense of what is being said but not how the Speaker conveyed the speech. And it is precisely the eloquence of the Quran that mostly impacted the Arabs. This aspect will forever remain lost in translation, locked in the original language.
Besides the language, there are other things people need to become acquainted with when approaching any ancient writing, so as to avoid any misunderstandings and be able to appreciate the intent behind the words and references. The Quran for instance uses references relevant to the people of the location in which it was revealed. These references might not be necessarily known or experienced by all people of the world but their implicit meanings can still be appreciated if one studies how the primary addressees experienced these references. For example sometimes in the context of provoking gratefulness, it turns the attention to the availability of all kinds of fruits. The ones it names were typically appreciated by the Arabs of the Hijaz, like olives, dates and grapes 16:11. A foreign reader, as he gets acquainted with the culture of those first addressed by the Quran, can still appreciate the verse's portents by transposing his own taste of fruits with their tastes. There are several other examples, as in 16:81 saying how garments may be used to protect from the heat, and this is because the verse's primary addressees were desert dwellers. The description again, is not absolute; it doesnt mean garments cannot be used for warmth, since the Arabs also experienced the harsh cold of the night and used these garments for warmth. In order to make himself understood to an audience within a particular historical context, God had to make use of his addressees’ “cultural and linguistic semantic system”.
As regards the Arabic language, it had several advantages as opposed to the dominant languages of commerce and intellectual discourse of the time; Latin, Greek, Persian, Hebrew. These were so interwoven as media for the communication of various thought systems that they became unsuitable for the transmission of Islamic concepts. The Abrahamic legacy prior to Islam was polluted by the integration of such languages in the course of its transmission. Only a language free from false theological notions could bring back the Abrahamic legacy to its original intent. It is known and argued by the masters of the language since al Farabi that the Qurayshi dialect, due to its centralizing position in Arabia, had reached the peak of eloquence by acquiring the best of other tribes' speech patterns and poems. The Quraysh used to deny the inclusion into their dialect, of expressions found among tribes bordering non-Arabic lands. Arabic in the time of the prophet counted many dialects, with the most dominant being his own language, that of the Quraysh. The Quran states about itself, over and over that it is in a clear Arabic language, devoid of any crookedness. It does not specify which Arabic. A study clearly reveals that it possesses mainly the features of the Qurayshi dialect, in addition to several others spoken in the Hijaz and Najd. It is this characteristic, the fact that it was expressed in the centralizing dialect of the most influencing tribe, but allowed enough flexibility so as to integrate other dialects, that made the Quran understandable to all tribes; clear Arabic.
The Arabic of the Quraysh in particular had developed to such a level that it could transmit any verbalized message, no matter how abstract the idea. The Quran therefore was in no need to borrow any word or concept to convey any of its themes. That notion is in fact rejected, when it points in derogatory manner to the foreign tongue of one man who was at some point suspected of being the prophet's teacher 16:103. Not only was the accusation faulty from a linguistic perspective, his foreign tongue could never have inspired the matchless Arabic of the Quran, which the Arab masters of the language themselves recognized could not equal in eloquence, but was also faulty from a deeper cultural and theological viewpoint. Firstly, when they pointed to an individual or vague groups of individuals 25:4-5, they should be able to substantiate the claim considering that in those days the learned men were known, yet these people had no particular knowledge that would have been useful in forging the Quran. None of the words and concepts conveyed in the Quran can be said to have been influenced by the ideological currents of the region. Even the foreign theologies and philosophies to the Arabs, those now deemed closest to Islam and that penetrated deep inside the peninsula, from Judaism's monolatry to Christianity's dying god incarnate, have no effect from near or far, to any of the tenets of the Quran.
Also, the accusation as quoted in the Quran is that this foreign person was actively interacting with the prophet, communicating and teaching him yet he was a non Arabic speaker so how could the two have such elaborate exchanges, in addition without ever being noticed? The Quran answers that accusation in a very appropriate way; given that the person they were pointing to spoke unintelligibly (aajami is used buy the Arabs for a language they could not understand) how could the prophet learn any of the stories found in the Quran from him, then reproduce that information accurately in a language they can understand? It is the same as saying that Einstein heard a toddler explaining the theory of relativity, then reproduced that information correctly in a language any physicist would recognize. This calumny was not grounded in any reality, like many other contradictory claims the prophet's opponents used in order to tarnish his well established integrity, in the same manner as prophets before him were unjustly targeted.
The Prophet's enemies kept a close watch on him, trying hard to prove him a liar. They could not point out even a single instance when the Prophet may have had a secret encounter. Tribal life in the desert was very open making it very hard to have regular secret meetings without being noticed. That is why the prophet's critics, even as reported in the Quran, would point to various suspects that were living in everyone's plain sight, although they could not prove any of their claims and neither did these individuals ever agree with these calumnies. And yet these intellectually bankrupt individuals of the past and today want to come and argue that the most intricate of human discourses came to be through occasional chatters and hearsay around a camp fire. The Prophet did have religious discussions with the Jews and Christians but they took place in Medina more than 13 years after the revelation of the Quran had started. And they certainly werent going on in secret. The objective was to point their moral and spiritual errors as well as warn them of the consequences of their persistence in deviation. He met them as a teacher, not a student. Several of these Jews and Christians later embraced Islam, including some of their most learned figures. It should also be noted that the vast majority of verses relating the history of past prophets were revealed in Mecca, before these interactions with the people of the book occurred.
What insignificant Judeo-Christian community was the prophet interested in appeasing at that point, as sometimes suggested by the mischievious critics? His relatives who surrounded him never questioned his truthfulness instead they gave their wealth and lives for his cause, contrary to some previous prophets, such as Jesus who was rejected and treated as a madman by his closest circle. The prophet Ibrahim himself was rejected by his father who almost stoned him 19:46.
His availability, his openness for inquiries and visits was such that towards an advanced stage of the prophetic mission, revelation came down to regulate the manners of those seeking to visit him, including spending in charity at first, as well as announcing themselves prior to entering his private quarters where his wives resided. The intricate manner in which his followers, in and out of the household, observed, memorized and safeguarded every aspect of his life, everyday and in all situations further dwarfs this already untenable proposition. So, because that idea of him having secret meetings was weak, his enemies instead resorted to character assassination. They resorted to all sorts of calumnies the likes of which previous prophets were victims of, including being a liar, sorcerer or a madman demon possessed. The Quran would then plainly challenge them; if it is something man made then, with all their resources, including the riches they tried bribing the prophet himself with, the availability of masters of eloquence the likes of which the Arab world has rarely seen since then, in addition to all supposed teachers of his, they should be able to respond to the challenge without much difficulty. But the rest is history. To this day, the enemies of Islam have been conjecturing just as they had always been, trying hard to uncover the sources of the Quran. They certainly did and will continue pointing to a plethora of potential human, textual, traditional candidates. On the surface, these sources seem believable but immediately crumble when one compares them on a macro- as well as micro level to the Quran, let alone if one considers other historical facts the likes of which have been pointed to earlier.
What is undeniable, as is evidenced by the recent trend of studies on the Quranic engagement with previous traditions, is that the Quran shows a very high degree of knowledge of Judaeo-Christian tradition, written and oral, canonized or not, factual or folklore, whether restricted to the religious elite or common among the layman. Such intricate awareness is in fact among the fundamental arguments the Quran uses in support of the divine inspiration of the messenger, the gentile, unschooled Arab, a man highly unlikely to have possessed such vast array of information, let alone able to assemble the details in the form of eloquent speech, whose life whether before or after his prophethood, was known and scrutinized from every angle, day and night, by his friends, family and foes.
It is interesting however that we do read in the ahadith of a man appearing out of nowhere on several occasions in the life of the prophet and the community. Including to teach the prophet and his followers, publicly, the daily prayers, as well as to command him and the Muslim soldiers, to besiege the treacherous tribe of Bani Qurayza. These are not trivial issues, whether from the point of view of the religion, or the life of the community, showing that the prophet, although the uncontested leader of his people, was not acting from his own accord in essential matters. The ahadith relate several other encounters with the same man, unknown to the closest companions, appearing in unlikely circumstances among the people, then disappearing, and always in slightly different physical shape. He would be identified as the angel Jibril whenever the people inquired to the prophet. This "man" was around the prophet and the community from the very beginning, as the prophet was taught the first revelation, to other instances where the companions witnessed him teaching the Quran to the prophet, to when they saw him visit the prophet when he became sick. In terms of resemblance, the prophet likened him to a companion named Dihya. Someone else once confused him with Dihya too. Dihya as a side note, was not influential in the community in any way, even after the prophet's death did not attain to any leading position, neither was he among the closest companions whose decisions were considered by the prophet, nor was he knowledgeable so as to contribute to the Quran. Despite this closeness of interaction, none among the community was able to get a hold of the mysterious visitor, or could interact with him once the purposes of his visits were over. Medina's population at the time was around 20.000, the type of social life was very open and each individual had a very large network of friends and kinsfolk. It would have been impossible for this man to escape the people's grasp, let alone the numerous hypocrites who were always on the lookout to discredit the prophet, had he been known or been living in or anywhere near Medina.
"Narrated Sa`d: On the day of the battle of Uhud, on the right and on the left of the Prophet were two men wearing white clothes, and I had neither seen them before, nor did I see them afterwards".
Now we get to the issue of borrowed words.
Some polemicists have tried claiming that the Quran was heavily influenced linguistically by Syriac (syro-aramaic), mixing it with pre-islamic Arabic, which brought about what is now referred to as classical Arabic. The obvious implication of the claim being that the Quran is either a heresy produced by Syriac speaking Christians or that the Arabs were very influenced by them during the process of writing it. Archeology on the other hand has shown that classical Arabic pre-dates Islam by several centuries to the least (according to the current discoveries), with a grammar and language closer to modern Arabic than the language of Shakespeare is to modern English. As to Syriac orthography and grammar, it was still defective after the advent of Islam. The Arameans (Syriac speaking people) themselves were not able to read and write their own language correctly due to the reluctance to modify the imperfect Syriac script of Christian scriptures that didnt possess vowels. The correct reading depended on learning the proper traditional enunciation, if not, the reader simply had to make wild guesses.
As to the early stages of Syriac grammar and its development, not much is known other than through the writings of later writers who composed at a time when the Syriac tradition had undergone the influence of Arabic grammar, which had taken over most of the conceptual and terminological apparatus of that tradition. As to Syriac lexicography, the attempts to document it initiated in the 9th century, but was still a confused and incomplete work until the 10th century Syriac-Arabic lexicon of Bar Bahlul, with both Syriac and Arabic used for the explanation of a word. Arabs on the other hand already had a well articulated and detailed dictionary 2 centuries earlier. It was kitab al-ayn from al-Farahidi and up to this day, most lexicographical efforts in Arabic have been based on his work. This is not to mention all the other lexicographical activity among the Arabs even before Bar Bahlul.
Dismissing what Arabic sources have to say about the Arabs' own history, their language, as well as their religion, for the sake of non-Islamic sources and speculative opinions, these people who levelled the claim went as far as saying that the Arabic script had no notion of vowels till the late 8th century, and neither was there a written form of Arabic during the advent of Islam. It is argued that the language of writing was either Hebrew or syro-aramaic/Syriac. With more preference towards the Syriac origin of the Arabic script, some have taken the assumption further and argued for the Aramaic origin of the Meccan settlement, with its inhabitants originally speaking a kind of syro-arabic that eventually fell into oblivion with, conveniently of course, no trace attesting to its existence to be found anywhere today.
These empty speculations however are easily dismissed in light of pre and early post-islamic inscriptions available providing ample evidence of a well articulated Arabic alphabet, with most letterforms not having changed at all, or very little, since the time these inscriptions are dated to. There is Arabic papyrus dated to a few years after the prophet's death (22AH), from Egypt, attesting to a well developed written language, thus making it impossible for a supposedly rare and primitive written language at the time of Muhammad to have spread to Egypt in such a short time and be used practically there. Arabic as a language wasnt confined to southern Arabia but was spread throughout the middle east as seen from inscriptions pre-dating Islam going as far north as Zebed in the heart of the Syriac speaking region. On the other hand, the pre-Islamic Syriac inscriptions are confined to the Edessa region in modern south Turkey, a long way from the hijaz let alone Mecca. South of Damascus, pre-Islamic Syriac inscriptions are almost non-existent, except those written by travellers or pilgrims. The closest to the pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in terms of geography are the Nabataean inscriptions. Nabataeans were Arabs who spoke a non-Aramaic north Arabic dialect akin to the Classical Arabic. Their script was Nabataean-Aramaic (nothing to do with syro-aramaic) but expressed their Arabic language. As seen from a 3rd century inscription, their language included Aramaic archaisms. Like the Nabataean Arabic dialect to the north of Arabia, in the Hijaz where Aramaic had also been very influential as early as the 5th/4th centuries BCE, the hijazi dialect of Arabic too adopted some Aramaic words, but that of course does not make it a mixed language. The Nabataean origin of the Arabic script is now almost universally accepted.
In the Syriac alphabet, only two characters possess diacritical dots whereas the Arabic alphabet contains a total of fifteen dotted characters, which further stresses the untenability of Arabs borrowing their dots from Syriac, not to mention the fact that we have pre and early post-Islamic (pre-dating Uthman's Quran) evidence of the usage of diacritical dots. In fact 10 out of the 15 were already fixed in those early times. As to the vowel markings, one of the shallow evidence offered by those claiming Arabs borrowed them from Syriac is the similarity in the name and sound of a vowel in Syriac and Arabic, namely the fatha called phtaha in Syriac, which in fact didnt enter the Syrian phraseology until around the middle of the 9th century. Also, where are the corresponding appellations in Syriac for damma and kasra of the Arabic vowel system?
Vowel markings, as well as their names (fatha, damma, etc) were invented by Abu al-Aswad al-Duali, in the late 7th century. He had derived grammar from one of the 1st converts to Islam, the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet, Ali ibn Abi Talib. What prompted him to do so was the rapid spread of Islam to regions and people who had to read the non-vowelized Quranic script while they hadnt had a demonstration of the proper recital by a memorizer.
Vowel markings, as well as their names (fatha, damma, etc) were invented by Abu al-Aswad al-Duali, in the late 7th century. He had derived grammar from one of the 1st converts to Islam, the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet, Ali ibn Abi Talib. What prompted him to do so was the rapid spread of Islam to regions and people who had to read the non-vowelized Quranic script while they hadnt had a demonstration of the proper recital by a memorizer.
On a final note regarding the Quran's language, Polemicists have misconstrued a known linguistic phenomenon so as to try another weak attack against the Quran. To enforce their obsessive claims of borrowing, they have scavenged the book for supposedly "foreign" words. These words are supposed to betray the Quran's adoption of foreign concepts, as well as the fact it needed additional vocabulary to express new ideas. Firstly, all languages, including Arabic, have eventually adopted foreign words as people have interacted. Sometimes these words retain their implicit cultural or theological baggage. At other times a completely new meaning is assumed.
In the Quran's case, foreign words do not even amount to a fraction of the totality. In addition, many of those words pointed to by the critics either are in fact Arabic, with well established triliteral Arabic roots, or have been part of Arabic vocabulary since before the emergence of the prophet, or were common to other Semitic cognate languages of the region, thus rendering their tracing very difficult. Recently for instance, Wolf Leslau refuted Nöldeke's identification of certain Arabic words in the Quran as Ethiopic, like shaytan or jahannam, proving that the direction of borrowing was actually the opposite. The words that entered the Arabic language prior to revelation cannot be termed foreign. They are now Arabic words. Onus is on the critics to prove that these words were borrowed post Islam. Another case is that of the Aramaic "qeryana" meaning "recitation", which supposedly became the Arabic "Quran" which also is, by its very nature a recitation. Being cognate languages, both Aramaic and Arabic share the same triliteral root for qeryana/quran, qa-ra-a meaning to read/recite. It is thus difficult to ascertain which came from which. It has been however recently suggested that Aramaic had penetrated deep within the peninsula, until Yathrib/Medina, as far back as during the 500s BC through king Nabonidus. Thus, there must have been intra-cultural and linguistic exchanges, between Aramaic speakers and Arabs, one way or the other. Even if one were to grant the adoption by Arabs of Aramaic loanwords, then by the rise of Islam these words had become Arabic words far detached from their full technical implications.
As to the idea of Arabic having a poor vocabulary, anyone familiar with pre-islamic literature and poems knows how rich and expressive the language of the time already was. There was no need to express any of its ideas by borrowing foreign words. In fact none of the supposed words or expression do not have their synonym, either in other passages of the Quran, or in the well established Arabic language.
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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