The Quality of Spoken, As Opposed to Written, Communication. the Arabic Qur Ān Emerged

Orality

The quality of spoken, as opposed to written, communication. The Arabic Qur’ān emerged against the backdrop of a long history of oral poetic composition and recitation (see poetry and poets; orality and writing in arabia ). It is a composite text consisting of oral recitations born in ¶ an oral culture of great refinement and long tradition. It is hard to over-emphasize the importance of oral poetry among the northern Arab tribal nomads (q.v.) of the pre-Islamic world (see pre-islamic arabia and the qur’ān; arabs; bedouin). Their major art form was the spoken word of poetry, and in particular their three-part ode, or qaṣīda. The recitative chanting of their poetry was their music and the highest expression of their eloquence. Every tribe had a poet who could compose and recite verses in praise of it or in denigration of its opponents. Perfection of oral poetic composition and recitation was something much admired and much desired. It was in this oral poetic milieu that the qur’ānic recitations arose and became a new standard of oral literary and religious excellence and beauty (el Tayib, Pre-Islamic poetry; Zwettler, Oral tradition, 3-88; see recitation of the qur’ān).

Although the Qur’ān has had a rich and central role in the history of Muslim piety and faith as “sacred book,” it has always been preeminently an oral, not a written text — as strikingly so as any of the world's great religious scriptures except the Vedas. In the history of Islamic piety and practice, the role of the written scriptural text has always been secondary to the dominant tradition of oral transmission and aural presence of the recited text. The qur’ānic revelation (see revelation and inspiration) recognized by Islamic tradition as the first given to Mu ḥ ammad, q 96, begins: “Recite (iqra’) in the name of your lord (q.v.) who created.” This signals clearly that the revelations were from the outset meant to be oral repetitions of the revealed word of God himself (see word of god; speech). The Prophet is quoted in one ḥadīth (see ḥ adīth and the qur’ān) as saying, “Embellish the recitation (al-qur’ān) with your voices, for the beautiful voice increases the beauty of the Qur’ān” ¶ (al-Dārimī, Sunan, 23.33.14; cf. 13). This underscores the centrality of the oral and aesthetic dimensions of the Qur’ān in Muslim tradition. As Stanley Lane Poole put it, “from first to last the Koran is essentially a book to be heard, not read” (Zwemer, Translations, 82; although note that this judgment is anachronistic, in that there was no “book” of the Qur’ān until long after the early revelations to be recited were proclaimed by the Prophet; see mu ṣḥ af; collection of the qur’ān; codices of the qur’ān; book; manuscripts of the qur’ān ). In Muslim tradition, the highly developed system of rules for proper recitation (tajwīd) “is believed to be the codification of the sound of the revelation as it was revealed to the Prophet…. Thus the sound itself has a divine source and significance, and, according to Muslim tradition, is significant to the meaning” (Nelson, Art, 14). The only way to understand the Qur’ān and its place in Muslim history and contemporary life is to grasp the centrality of its role as oral text par excellence.

There can be little argument that the scripture (al-kitāb) of Muslims has been functionally a “spoken book” — the divine “word” itself, the very discourse of God ipsissima vox, given to Mu ḥ ammad as “an Arabic recitation” (qur’ān `arabiyy; cf. i.e. q 12:2; 20:113; see arabic language). This has lent immense importance to the Arabic text of the Qur’ān, its verbatim memorization, and its artful and reverent recitation — so much so that the rejection of recitation of any translation of the Qur’ān (above all in the daily worship rituals, or ṣalāt, see prayer; ritual and the qur’ān; translations of the qur’ān) has been almost total in Islamic societies.

Theologically, the Qur’ān as “word of God” in Islam compares not to the Bible in the Christian tradition (see scripture and ¶ the qur’ān) but to the person of the Christ as the logos tou theou, the divine Word (Söderblom, Einführung, 117; cf. Graham, Beyond, 217 n. 3; Kermani, Gott, 465 n. 195; see createdness of the qur’ān): the closest comparable Muslim practice to the Eucharist would consequently be either the ubiquitous practice among Muslims of oral recitation of the Qur’ān or that of learning the text by heart, ḥifẓ al-Qur’ān (Smith, Some similarities, 52, 56-7; see memory ). One of the most respected religious titles a Muslim can bear is that of ḥāfiẓ(a), one who knows the entire Qur’ān by heart. Qur’ān recitation and memorization have always been central to deep spirituality as well as to everyday life in Muslim societies: “The discipline of qur’ānic memorization is an integral part of learning to be human and Muslim” (Eickelman, Knowledge, 63; see everyday life, qur’ān in).

Historically, the original meaning of the very word qur’ān testifies to this fundamental orality of the text from its inception: the qur’ānic revelations were oral texts meant to be rehearsed and recited, first by Mu ḥ ammad (as witness the more than 300 occurrences of Qul!, “Say! [oh Muḥammad],” before particular passages of the sacred text), then by the faithful to whom Mu ḥ ammad was to recite them. They were explicitly not revealed as “a writing on parchment” (q 6:7; see writing and writing materials). The word qur’ān is a verbal noun form derived from the root q-r-’, “to recite, read aloud,” and hence the proper translation of al-qur’ān is “the Reciting” or “the Recitation” (Graham, Earliest meaning). The Arabic word qur’ān is not attested prior to the Qur’ān itself and it was likely derived from, or influenced by, the Syriac cognate word qeryānā, “lection, reading,” used by Syriac-speaking Christian communities (see christians and christianity) both for the oral liturgical reading from scripture (lectio, anagnosis) and ¶ for the scripture passage that is read aloud (lectio, perioché, anagnøsma) in divine service (Bowman, Holy scriptures; A. Neuwirth and K. Neuwirth, Sūrat al-fātiḥa; cf. Graham, Beyond, 209 n. 36; see foreign vocabulary; names of the qur’ān ). Both the Muslim and Christian usages have parallels also in the rabbinic use of the Hebrew cognates qerī’ā and miqrā’ to denote the act of scripture reading and the pericope read aloud, respectively (J. Horovitz, Qur’ān, 67; Nöldeke, gq, i, 32; Graham, Beyond, 209 n. 37). In the qur’ānic text itself, there are a number of uses of the word qur’ān that can best be taken as verbal- noun (maṣdar) usages: e.g. “the dawn (q.v.) recitation” in q 17:78 and “…Ours it is to collect and to recite it (qur’ānuhu), and when we recite it, follow the recitation of it (qur’ānahu)” (q 75:17-8). These readings are bolstered in the ḥadīth at various points, such as when Mu ḥ ammad speaks well of whoever “is constantly mindful of God during [his] reciting” (qur’ān, Ibn Ḥanbal, Musnad, iv, 159). Other examples: when Mu ḥ ammad explains to a companion who witnessed a horse trying to bolt during his night recitation, “That was the divine presence (sakīna, see sechina) that descended with the reciting” (al- qur’ān, Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, 66.11), and the report that Mu ḥ ammad “raised his voice in the recitation (qur’ān) in his prayer” (ṣalāt, Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ, 4.145; cf. 4.149, 154; 6.232-37). These examples of the early understanding of qur’ān as a verbal noun remind us of the strong historical basis for the ongoing orality of the Qur’ān in Muslim usage down the centuries to the present moment. This orality has always been a striking element in both Muslim religious practice and even in quotidian life in Islamic societies, where the use of qur’ānic formulae has been a permeating reality of everyday speech, even down to small repeated phrases that have passed into everyday ¶ usage (see slogans from the qur’ān). One thinks of the basmala (q.v.) and Fāti ḥ a (q.v.), or the many qur’ānic phrases such as mā shā’a llāhu (q 18:39) or al-ḥamdu lillāhi (q 1:2; see laudation ) as only the most evident (for examples of such usages, see Piamenta, Islam in everyday speech, 10, 73, 75, 86-7; Jomier, La place du Coran). The five-times-daily ritual of prayer (ṣalāt) is the most obvious place to look for daily recitation of the Qur’ān, since without some qur’ānic recitation the ṣalāt is legally invalid (see lawful and unlawful ). But well beyond penetration of qur’ānic phrases into everyday speech and the formal demands of the rites of daily worship, the recited word of scripture has always been prominent in Muslim communities. Recitation of the Qur’ān is woven into the very fabric of life in Muslim communities. A ḥadīth has Mu ḥ ammad say, “the most excellent form of worship (q.v.; `ibāda) among my people is reciting the Qur’ān” (Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 1.8.1). Qur’ān recitation has been a, if not the, major form of entertainment in Muslim societies, and it has for centuries been raised to an art form (see Nelson, Art; Kermani, chap. 3). Qur’ān memorization, recitation, and study have formed the core of Muslim education at all times and around the world in Islamic societies (see teaching and preaching the qur’ān). Centuries ago, Ibn Khaldūn (d. 784/1382; Muqaddima, iii, 260; Ibn Khaldūn-Rosenthal, iii, 300; cf. Graham, Beyond, 215 n. 35) noted that “teaching the Qur’ān to children is one of the marks of the religion that Muslims profess and practice in all their cities,” and a still older ḥadīth text claims that “knowledge shall not perish so long as the Qur’ān is recited” (Dārimī, Sunan, 1.18.8; see knowledge and learning ).

In sum, the oral presence of the Qur’ān is a constant source of inspiration to Muslims in all walks of life. Al-Ghazālī ¶ (d. 505/1111; Iḥyā’, 1.8.1) put it well: “Much repetition cannot make it [the Qur’ān] seem old and worn to those who recite it.” The importance and power of the oral qur’ānic word are captured in the hyperbolic and metaphorical, but still acute, observation of the modern Iranian scholar, Mu ḥ ammad Taqī Sharī`aṭī- Mazīnānī, about the aural impact of the recited text: “The Qur’ān was a light [q.v.] that extended through the opening of the ears into the soul; it transformed this soul and as a consequence of that, the world” (as cited in Kermani, Gott ist Schön, 44). See also language and style of the qur’ān.

William A. Graham

Bibliography

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Citation:

Graham, William A. "Orality ." Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān. General Editor: Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Georgetown University, Washington DC. Brill, 2008. Brill Online. DUKE UNIVERSITY. 11 February 2008