Ibn Warraq - Koranic Allusions: The Biblical, Qumranian, and Pre-Islamic Background to the Koran

Transliteration and Other Technical Matters

There is no universally accepted system of transliteration (transcription) of the Semitic scripts. The authors in this anthology use two different systems for the Arabic alphabet. As some editors in whose journals the articles first appeared insisted that we not change one single letter as a precondition for allowing us to reproduce them, I was unable to standardize all the articles and adopt just one system. However, the two systems are not that difficult to come to grips with. For Arabic they are:

(1) , b, t, th, j, , kh, d, dh, r, z, s, sh, , , , , , gh, f, q, k, l, m, n, h, w, y. Short vowels: a, u, i. Long vowels: , ,

(2) , b, t, , , , , d, , r, z, s, , , , , , , , f, q, k, l, m, n, h, w, y. Short vowels: a, u, i. Long vowels: , ,

The journal Studia Islamica uses and recommends system (1). On the whole I have used this system in my own introduction and translations.

The journal Arabica, on the other hand, uses system (2); thus, the articles from this journal included in this anthology follow suit. (Readers are also likely to encounter, though not often in this anthology, the following variations: dj for j, and for q, for example, in EI2 [the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Islam].)

For the Hebrew and Syriac, I use the following:

, b, g, d, h, w, z, , , y, k, l, m, n, s, , p, , q, r, /, t

All long vowels are overlined. The small raised e stands for a hurried or neutral vowel. Underlined letters (as in b) are pronounced as fricatives, thus = English th as in thin; = ph as in phial.

Right up to the 1930s, Western scholars used the edition of the Koran by Gustav Flgel (sometimes spelled Fluegel), Corani Textus Arabicus (1834), whose numbering of verses differs from what has now become the official or Standard Egyptian edition, first published in 1924. Again, not only was it obviously much easier for me to leave the original Flgel numbering in the pre-1924 articles included in this anthology, but in some cases it was even essential not to interfere with the original numbering, since some pieces only referred to Flgel's edition. As one scholar reminded me, attempting to change the numbering would only have increased the possibility of further errors.

TRANSLITERATION OF UMAYYA B. AB AALT

Every editor of Arabic and Islamic texts, many of which must be translated from the German and French, and some of which date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is faced with the problem of the scientific transliteration of Arabic words and names. Conventions varythere is still no absolute consensus on the best way to transliterate Arabic. I have not always kept the transliteration used in the original article. For instance, the name of the pre-Islamic poet, usually transliterated in modern times as Umayya b. ab a-alt, has been transliterated in many different ways. Aloys Sprenger, writing in the nineteenth century, originally transliterated the poet's name as Omayya b. Aby-l-alt, which I changed to Umayya B. Ab al-alt. Clement Huart, writing in 1904, transliterated the name as Omayya ben Abi-alt, which I have changed to Umayya B. Ab al-alt. Friedrich Schulthess, writing in 1906, transliterated the name in the German fashion as Umajja b. Abi-alt, which I have changed to Umayya b. abi-alt. I have kept E. Power's transliteration: Umayya ibn Ab-alt; D. S. Margoliouth's original transliteration: Umayyah b. Abi'l-alt; Tilman Seidensticker's Umayya Ibn Ab al-alt, and Gert Borg's Umayya b. Ab al-alt. It seems to me that despite the slight variations in the transliteration there is very little possibility of confusion as to which poet is being referred to.

TRANSCRIPTION/TRANSLITERATION

Consonants

Vowels

Preface, Acknowledgments, and Advertisement for Myself

In 2004, I sent to Prometheus Books, along with my own longish introduction on variants and a short essay on pre-Islamic poetry, approximately forty-five articles by distinguished scholars in the form of photocopies, some barely legible, as they were copies from fragile journals dating from the early 1900s; many contained Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Greek scripts. The staff at Prometheus Books made two decisions: first, they decided to divide the book into two; forty-five articles would have made for a book of over a thousand pages. The two volumes are