October 25th, 2001
I have heard from someone on this question. Fred Field said:
<< I went to the university where I worked on Wednesday and ran into a colleague (now an assistant dean). She’s a historical linguist, trained at UCLA by Raimo Antilla, a rather well-known Indo-European scholar. She said that there is no question at all that Arabic and Arabic script predated the Qur’an, perhaps by at least a thousand years. The Western Semitic alphabet, as I said, is undoubtedly the precursor of Arabic script (also known as Proto-sinaitic). It is undoubtedly the basis upon which the Greek (then Roman) and Cyrillic scripts as well. Each language adapted it and added symbols. This is the origin of our alpha-bet (from aleph-beth).
Flinders Petrie (circa 1904), an archaeologist, is credited with “discovering” this writing system in the Sinai (inscriptions and son on). There is a proposed link between the Egyptian hieratic writing systems and this proto-script and the Phoenicians (the intermediate stage for the European languages). Old Persian had a syllabary—a syllabic writing system perhaps derived from the Sumerians, something like the Egyptian system.
It is important to note that there is a progression, from logographic systems (e.g., hieroglyphs, symbols that represent words) to syllabic writing (word symbols represent syllables, not individual phonemes) to alphabetic systems (the first or prominent sound of the syllable only). So the Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic script are characteristically composed of consonants. The vowels are completely predictable by the readers because of the nature of the language. E.g., in Hebrew, verbs in present tense may have three consonants (l-m-d, the root or radical for the verb “learn”) and the vowels are always o-e yielding ani lomed (I learn). Past tense is always a-a, so lamad means “I learned”. The Semitic languages all share this characteristic.
In sum: the Semitic writing system comes from the Sinai Peninsula; it was probably derived from Egyptian syllabaries; it spread via the Phoenicians south and east to Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic (Semitic languages) and into the European languages northward via the Phoenicians (modern-day Lebanon).
My colleague, Prof. Angela della Volpe (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) says that samples of poetry, various inscriptions, and medical treatises have been found that predate the Qur’an by centuries. That should be the final word on whether a Persian invented Arabic script. I still say that the most likely scenario is that someone (perhaps Zalman Farsi) adapted the already extant Arabic writing system to modern Persian as a result of the spread of Islam into the region of Iran. Same thing for Iraq and the languages there, except Arabic did win out over local languages. Arabic script was used for centuries by Turkish, still is for other Turkish languages (to the North and East of Iran) in Turkmenstan, Tajikistan, Kirghistan, and so forth. It was the conquering Arabs who spread their writing systems. >>
August 24th, 2002
I have heard from another person on this question. Stavros Macrakis, emailing from MIT, said:
<< You asked for names of pre-Islamic Arab literature. The Hamaasa was compiled in the 9th century AD, and includes works dating from the 6th to the 9th centuries. >>
About oral literature he says, << Of course, etymologically, “literature” relates to writing. However, a huge amount of important material—including Gilgamesh, Homer, Hesiod, the Old Testament (I don’t know about the New), Beowulf, etc.—was not originally composed in writing, was not even composed by an individual author, and was transmitted for generations before being recorded in writing. The accepted scholarly term for bodies of work like that is “oral literature”, and applies even after they are written down. Another name for it is “folk literature” (but that still includes the word “literature”) or “oral tradition”. The term “oral literature” was invented, I think, by Milman Perry in the 1920’s, and has been used since then. >>
Sourced from here: http://www.bibletranslation.ws/islam.html