One of the most important sources for our knowledge of the length of vowels in the Tiberian tradition of Biblical Hebrew is a corpus of manuscripts containing transcriptions of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic letters. In most of the manuscripts the Arabic transcription employs the orthography of Classical Arabic to represent the sounds of Hebrew. Since Classical Arabic orthography used matres lectionis systematically to mark long vowels we are able to reconstruct the distribution of long and short vowels in Tiberian Hebrew. The transcriptions show us that the main factors determining vowel length were stress and syllable structure.

The giving of gifts, though not peculiar to Persian society, is particularly common in that society. There are a large number of words designating gift or present. Among them are ḥadiya, ՙatiya, ṣilat, tuḥfa, ՙinayat, inՙām and pīshkash. Some implicitly define the status of the giver or the recipient. ՙInāyat implies a favour conferred by the giver; inՙām defines the superior status of the giver in relation to the recipient and often amounts to a gratuity. Pīshkash, which may originally have had a fairly neutral meaning, came to mean a present from someone of an inferior status. In the ninth/fifteenth century, if not before, it came to be used also in the sense of a due or tribute paid to the ruler or his officials. Tashrīf, pāy-andāz, taՙāruf, taṣadduq, khidmatī and taqdīmī usually signify an inferior status on the part of the one who offers the gift.

Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr read the lectures which were published after his death under the title al-Madrasa al-Qur՚āniyya a few months before his arrest and execution, without trial, by the authorities in Baghdad. John Wansbrough, it is said, received threats following the publication of Quranic studies and The sectarian milieu. These two episodes of the late 1970s, in places as far apart as London and Najaf, show how fraught discussion of the Qur՚ān might be by the late twentieth century. That discussion of the literature of the sacred has always been a delicate exercise may be a truism, but at least there is solace in placing the writings of authors such as ?adr and Wansbrough in the long perspective of such threats to creativity. It provokes the soothing thought that even in this domain, the creative contribution will, sooner rather than later, establish itself against the hostility of ‘ la bêtise au front de taureau’. Such comfort may be drawn from the famous precedent of a cause célèbre in which creative novelty found itself on trial:

The Sīrat YAntar conceals within its narrative identifiable literary sources.This is especially so in those sections which describe the adventures of the ՙAbsī hero in Byzantium, Italy, al-Andalus, ՙUmān, Egypt and Ethiopia. Its I use of such sources is without parallel in the sister siyar. Though the fact was not ignored by Bernhard Heller or by Rudi Paret, it is insufficiently appreciated elsewhere, especially in the Arab world itself. So pervasive is the literary treatment as it draws upon Arabic geographical works, and the exploring of ‘wonder books’ (kutub al-ՙajā՚ib) for source material so apparent, that it is doubtful, nay unacceptable, that this particular Sīra (others may bide our question) can be accurately described as Arabic oral and formulaic ‘coffeehouse entertainment’, or as being outside the corpus of classical Arabic literature. That part of the giant work, categorized by Maḥmūd Dhihnī as al-Marḥala al-malḥamiyya, which describes these adventures, is unquestionably post-twelfth century in date, marked as it is by Crusading proper names and by those of Mamlūk offices. That the text is not earlier than the late thirteenth century will here be shown.

The rise of political consciousness in the Arab Provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century has long been referred to as an era of rebirth or resurrection (nahḍa), and from its earliest stages this period saw a dual process of aspirations to political emancipation and creative waves of cultural regeneration. Thus George Antonius was moved to attribute the beginnings of the Arab national movement to the foundation of a modest literary society in Beirut in 1847; the two figures who dominated the intellectual life of Syria in the mid nineteenth century—Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī and Buṭrus al-Bustānī—were ded icated to the resurrection of the lost world of classical Arabic literature, to the virtual re-creation of Arabic as one of the languages of the modern world, and to preaching the virtues of education based on inter-confessional tolerance and patriotic ideals. The most distinguished area of the early history of modern Arabic literature is neo-classical poetry, whose revival of the achievements of the golden age of the ‘Abbāsids provided the foundation on which the first tentative steps towards the renewal of the great tradition were to be based. Indeed the technical excellence of the neo-classical mode was such that it dominated poetry in Egypt at least until the late 1920s, and for even longer in Iraq and the rest of the Levant.

Puns stand as a bridge between rhyme and metaphor. Sound—that characteristic of rhyme—combines with the explosion of semantic implications associated with metaphor into the form of word play or punning. The quality of blending of sound together with meaning remains the best definition of what constitutes a pun. Certainly it is possible to create a classification system for puns which will lead to a workable description of the phenomenon. Interesting attempts along this line have been made working with Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, and English material, for example. Such efforts tend to rely on the formal aspects of the words used in the puns in order to produce their classificatory systems. That is, they speak of puns using the ‘literal’ meaning of two words, puns relying on ‘metaphoric’ meanings, and so forth; or they speak of the formal relationship between the words in question in terms of the combinations and permutations of letters and sounds. The aim of this paper, however, is not to circumscribe the use of puns in the Qur՚ān, although certainly a number of formal ranges of punning employment will emerge in the course of the treatment. Rather, the goal is to see what puns convey to the reader of the Qur՚ān, to see how the sound of music combines with sound argument within the text of scripture. Leaving the definition of word play or pun open (indeed, even using those two words interchangeably) allows the broadest view of the phenomenon to be embraced.