Oral Platforms

«The Most Compassionate, Taught the Qur’an, Created man, [And] taught him eloquence.»

[Qur’an 55:1-4]

The revelation of the Qur’an has been sent down progressively to Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) through the Archangel Gabriel (peace be upon him) who was appointed to deliver the word of Allah. When a Muslim memorizes the Qur’an, he or she is given the approval to recite the Qur’an through the chain of tellers, that is- their teachers through the Prophet companions and successors, through the Prophet (PBUH), through Gabriel, and from Allah. This oral witness of the message and transmission is the model of methodology in Arabic and by extention, Islamic studies.

Text is a fundamental archival tool in Arabic and Islamic civilization due to the importance of the Our’anic and Hadith text. The linguistic contact phenomenon, at early Islam when the message of the Islam spread, provoked, and encouraged researcher to ensure the authenticity of the text. The process of preserving the maintaining the originality of the text had not been done in any other civilization in the same level- leading to the standardizing of its script, how it’s recited, and how it’s transmitted amongst Muslims to this date.

In Qur’an, Allah (SWT) mentions seven times that this Qur’an has been delivered in Arabic and in “clear Arabic tongue” when he could say it was delivered to the language of Quraish or in the tongue of people of Makkah. This indicates, which has been historically the case, that being Arab is not an ethnicity but rather a well-spoken tongue. That this Qur’an as it is miraculous in its narratology, style, and tongue. Sibawayh (a Persian grammarian and a renounced Arabic language scholar) refers to this distinction between the language as pure indications of meaning and language in the act of speech to deliver information.

Since the Qu’ran and Hadith are both in the act of speech, early Arabic and Islamic scholars understood that to deal with this corpus is not to merely deal with its dictionary collection and structure analysis, but to follow all clues that might entangle with the act of speech between two entities. The orality of the Arabic culture kept the language spontaneous and alive amongst its people, early scholars went to the first historical field research to witness the language being spoken by the people and assemble the largest corpus to date.

This massive research has been taken place in all fields of Arabic, Quranic, and Hadith studies; the same methodology of witnessing the spoken language and investigating the chain of tellers. This attitude taught us Arabs and Muslims to see the world collectively, and be guided by a continued memory to avoid being subjected to history.