The earliest surviving reference to the Arabic term ‘God is great’ (Allāhu akbar) is in a Syriac text known as the Maronite Chronicle, composed in the second half of the 7th century, perhaps as early as the 660s.[1] The anonymous… Continue Reading
In a previous post I gave some general examples of how spelling and pronunciation can drift between languages: the d in Muhammad is spelt in some early sources with an emphatic t (teth) or regular t (taw), so I wanted to show that… Continue Reading
In the British Library collections is an eighth-century manuscript of a seventh-century text in Syriac, attributed to Thomas Presbyter. It’s a funny little jumble of geography, genealogy, chronicle and king-list. Why it survived I don’t know. But we’re very lucky it… Continue Reading
The name of Muhammad’s tribe, as reported in the Arabic sources, is Quraysh. It’s a word of no certain origin, and the medieval scholars offer a number of speculative and conflicting etymologies, none of which is very plausible. That’s normal… Continue Reading