Bismika Alllahuma

Vor kurzem wurden wir zu einem neuem eingeführt, amüsante Polemik durch die Missionare nämlich hinsichtlich des Wortes „ahad (un)“. Die Missionare veranschlagen, der Gebrauch von dem Wort ahad:

… zeigt, daß das Quran weit von Sein ein Meisterwerk ist, oder der Pinnacle der arabischen Beredsamkeit. Der falsche Gebrauch von einem Wort in einem sehr entscheidenden Text, der auf der Natur von Allah bezieht, ist ein freier Beweis, daß Gott nicht der Autor des Quran ist.

Um diesen Zweck zu erreichen, zitieren die Missionare einen on-line-Text von einem christlichen arabischen polemicist dem daß das Wort nicht „ein“ bedeutet, aber „eins von“ behauptet. Ist es zutreffend, was sie behaupten? Wir suchen, diese Behauptung im folgenden, insha' Allah zu beantworten.

„Ahad“ wirklich Mittel „eins von“?

Nach Ansicht der Missionare:

Erstaunlich sagt das tatsächliche Arabisch von Vers 1 nicht, daß Allah einer ist, aber sagt buchstäblich, daß Allah ein von ist. Dieses liegt am Wort, das für eins im Satz, nämlich ahad verwendet wird.

Was wirklich in dieser Aussage ist ihr extremer Blödsinn und Unwissenheit hinsichtlich der Bedeutung des Wortes „ahad“ „überrascht“, das wirklich ein Adjektiv ist, im Vergleich mit „einem von“, das ein Pronomen ist. Die Missionare in ihrer Eile, zum der Bedeutung von „ahad“ zu verdrehen hat zwischen diesen zwei offensichtlichen Entgegengesetzten unterscheiden nicht können!

Zuerst lassen Sie uns sich beziehen die auf hergestellte Bedeutung von „ahad“, wie durch die lexikalischen Behörden hergestellt. Hans Wehr in seiner Definition sagt den:

¹

Merken Sie, daß die Bedeutung von „ahad“ schwankt von „ein“ „jemand„, aber zweifellos sie alle seien Sie über die gleiche Bedeutung, die das Adjektiv „eins“ ist, einig und nicht das Pronomen „eins von“! Elias u. Elias stimmt auch mit Wehr in ihrer folgenden Eintragung überein:

²

Folglich haben wir hergestellt das „ahad(un)“ bedeutet in der Tat, daß „einer“ und die Debatte gerade dort stoppen sollten. Jedoch hat der Missionar eine Liste der Verse kompiliert, denen er behauptet Mittel „ein von „, tretend im Qur' anic Text auf. Hence, to add a further blow to the missionary propaganda, we produce the following entry from a Qur’anic concordance which distinguishes between the word “ahad” and “ihda“, accompanied by the Qur’anic verse numbers in where they occur.

³

It is indeed clear from the above that the missionary have no case to follow. “Ahad” does indeed mean “one” and it occurs frequently throughout the Qur’anic text. Whereas the word “ihda” (which means “one of”) occurs only twice in the Qur’an.

What About “Wahid”?

The missionaries have charged the following regarding the usage of the word “ahad“:

In every single case, ahad is used to refer to one of something, to one member of a specific group. None of the examples used this word to mean one, alone, single etc.

Ironically, this allegation of the missionary is only true for the very word which the missionary is trying hard to promote, i.e. “wahid“! The following entry from Wehr shows the definition of “wahid“:

⁴

Has the missionary confused himself? The above entry clearly states that wahid can mean “…each one of them” or “every one of them” which certainly shows that it can refer a member of a specific group. What is the missionary trying to say and what exactly does he want to achieve by this pointless polemic?

With regard to the missionary allegation that “wahid” is a better substitute for “ahad”, we say that the missionary have certainly never heard this Sura’ being recited when he made this idiotic claim. To listen to Sura’ al-Ikhlas, we implore our readers to download and listen to the Sura’ recitation by Sheikh Abdul Rahman As-Sudais here [ .mp3 format]. Readers can easily note how the Sura’ is structurally pronounced and the overall tone of the Sura’ is rhythmically consistent in the usage of the word “ahad“. Hence this missionary polemic is dismissible and can now be discarded as nothing more than inflated nonsense.

“Echad” and the Missionary’s Folly

In their futile attempt in trying to “determine” the origin of ahad, the missionary made the following laughable claim:

One possible, and even probable, explanation as to why Muhammad, or the author of the Quran, used the word ahad is because of his interaction with the Jews. Muhammad may have heard the Jewish Shema, the monotheistic creed of faith found in Deuteronomy 6:4, recited which uses the word echad to refer to Yahweh?s unity.

Any student of the Semitic languages will be gaping in awe at this sweeping statement. It is known that Arabic and Hebrew are sister languages, hence there are many words in both languages which share the same language. Brown-Driver-Briggs’ lexicon exhibits this understanding with the following entry:

⁵

Please note that the BDB have included ahad in its entry of “echad”, and both are identified as adjectives. Unfortunately for the missionary, there is no meaning “one of” recorded by this celebrated lexicon.

With regard to the word echad, Strong’s concordance also agrees with the BDB:

⁶

Conclusions

In his summary, the missionary made the following fatutous claim:

In any case, Muslims are in a dilemma. Since the data shows that the literal rendering of Sura 112:1 is that “Allah is one of,” the question remains one of what? Is he one of many gods?

We had shown in the above that the missionary is confused between an adjective (”ahad“) and a pronoun (”ihda“), two different Arabic words that have little correlation to each other and certainly the latter does not exist in Sura’ al-Ikhlas (Qur’an, 112). Hence from where did this missionary got his “literal reading” from if the word “ihda” is non-existent in the above-mentioned Sura’? Certainly the missionary is hard-pressed to provide such evidence apart from his blinkered view of Islam. It is indeed understood that God is, as explained by Ibn Katheer in his interpretation of Sura’ al-Ikhlas:

“He is the One and Only without equal, nor any minister or partner, nor any like or parallel; and this description cannot be applied to anyone save Allah(T) because He(T) is Perfect in all His Attributes and all His Actions.”⁷

It is also equally obvious that the missionary is desperate enough to “read into” the Qur’anic text for evidence of the non-existent Trinitarian doctrine as held by Christians. Worse still for the missionary, we have shown from his own Bible that the Hebrew echad (which is also an adjective) is understood as “one” and is synonymous with the Arabic ahad, and its accompanying interpretation from Jewish scholars. There is no room for a Trinitarian interpretation for “echad“, and likewise, there cannot be any form of the pseudo-monotheistic Trinity in its sister equivalent, “ahad“.

And only Allahu Ahad knows best.

1. J.M. Cowan (ed.), The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, Spoken Language Services, NY, (1976) [back]
2. Elias A. Elias & Edward E. Elias, Elias’ Pocket Dictionary Arabic/English, Elias Modern Publishing House, Cairo (right column) [back]
3. Ahmad Ibrahim, Al-Qur’an Malay-English Dictionary: Denoting Books and Verses, Pustaka Bina Insani, Kuala Lumpur (1989), p. 18 [back]
4. J.M. Cowan (ed.), ibid. [back]
5. F. Brown, S. Driver and C. Briggs, The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon: Withh An Appendix Containing The Biblical Aramaic, Hendrickson Publishers, Massachusetts (2001) [back]
6. James Strong, The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Tenessee (1996) [back]
7. Sameh Strauch (transl.), Selected Qur’anic Verses Explained From The Tafseer of At-Tabari, Ibn Katheer & Ibn Al-Qayyim, IIPH, Riyadh (1999), p. 130 [back]