Page 141 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

THE HISTORY OF ARABIC PALAEOGRAPHY 121

call his people for the worship of the one true God Allah, to establish
prayers and pay alms to the poor.l? Since Allah sends every messenger in
the language of his own people.t" Isma'il must have preached in Arabic.
Genesis credits Isma'll with twelve sons," among them Nebajoth/Nabat;
born and nurtured in these Arabian surroundings they must have adopted
Arabic as their mother tongue. These sonsmay have preserved their father's
message by using the prevailing Arabic script; certainly they would not
have resorted to whatever script was then current in Palestine (Ibrahim's
homeland), since two generations had already lived in Arabia. When Nabat
subsequently migrated northwards hemusthave taken the Arabic language and
alphabet with him. It was his descendants who established the Nabataean
Kingdom (600 B.C.E - 105 C.E.)22
Commenting on the sounds of certain Arabic characters which are not
represented in Aramaic, Gruendler declares, ''Asthe writers of Nabataean
texts spoke Arabic, and given the close relation between the two languages,
[these writers] could find Nabataean cognates to guide them in the ortho-
graphy of Arabic words with such unusual sounds."23 Or to put it more
directly, that the Nabataean language and script were in fact a form of
Arabic.
If the Nabataeans spoke Arabic, who named their language Nabataean?
Is there any proof that they called their language this? Or does this stem
perhaps from the same tendency that labels Muslims as 'Mohammedans',
Islam as 'Mohammedanism', and the Qur'an as the 'Turkish Bible'? If this
so-called Nabataean script had been properly named as 'Arabic' or 'Naba-
taean Arabic' (just as we sometimes speak of 'Egyptian Arabic' or 'American
English'), then the whole research may have taken a different turn, and
hopefully a more correct one for that. The Arabic language and script,
in their primitive forms, gave birth to the Nabataean and most probably
predated the Syriac.

19 Qur'an 19:54-55.
20 Qur'an 14:40.
21 KingJames Version, Genesis 25:12-18.
22 There are different opinions regarding the origins of the Nabataeans. In jawad
'All's view, the Nabataeans are Arabs who are even closer to Quraish and the Hejazi
tribes than are the tribes of Southern Arabia. Both had common deities and their script
bore a close resemblance to that which was used by the early scribes for recording the
Qur'an. (The Syrians and Nabataeans were different cultures, the latter residing not
in Syria but in present-day Jordan.) According to historians Nebajoth is Nebat or
Nabatian, the eldest son of Isma'il. These are the facts which lead jawad 'Ali:to his
conclusion. [jawad 'All, al-Mufassalfi Tankh al-'Arab Qgbl al-Islam, iii:14.J
23 Gruendler, TheDevelopment ofthe Arabic Script, p. 125. Italics added.