Similarly, the journeys of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ and ʿImārah ibn al-Walīd to Abyssinia, and of al-Aʿshā to al-Ḥīrah—where he kept company with its Christians despite being an undisputed authority on Arabic—enabled the Arabs to pick up a number of foreign expressions. They altered some of these by dropping letters, lightening the burden of their foreign phonetics, and then wove them into their poetry and everyday conversation until they came to be treated as flawless Arabic, fit for the highest eloquence; and on precisely this footing they were employed in the Qur’an. Should an Arab fail to recognize such a word, his ignorance is no different from plain ignorance of vocabulary in another language—just as Ibn ʿAbbās did not know the meaning of the word “Fāṭir,” and so on.
Ibn ʿAṭiyya said: “Al-Ṭabarī’s view—that the two languages might simply have happened to share a single word—is remote. In most cases one language must be the origin and the other the derivative, although we do not absolutely rule out an occasional, anomalous coincidence.”
Another scholar remarked: “The first opinion is sounder. Declaring a word original to another people and borrowed by the Arabs is no more convincing than the opposite; for it remains perfectly possible that the Arabs were the first to use it. If that is so, the word is necessarily Arabic, for their ‘language’ and ‘speech’ consist of nothing save what they themselves employ. Nor is it far-fetched that other nations should happen to share certain Arabic words—a point already made by the great Imām Abū ʿUbaydah.”
If it is objected, “These words do not match the morphological patterns of Arabic and therefore cannot belong to it,” we reply: Who has granted you mastery of every Arabic pattern such that you may exclude these? The Judge has examined the fundamental patterns of Arabic and, by grammatical analysis, has shown how these nouns fit within them. Moreover, were it true that the Arabs neither used nor understood such terms, it would be impossible for Allah to address them with words they did not comprehend; in that case the Qur’an would not be clear, manifest Arabic, nor would the Messenger be speaking to his people in their own language. Allah knows best.
Chapter: On the Inimitability of the Qur’an, the Conditions of a Miracle, and Its Reality
A muʿjiza—a prophetic miracle—is one of the signs that attest to the truthfulness of the prophets, peace be upon them. It is called a ‘miracle’ because human beings are powerless to produce anything like it. Such a miracle has five conditions; if even one of these is lacking, the act cannot be deemed a miracle.