Once Again on the Earliest Christian Arabic Apology: Remarks on a Palaeographic SingularityAuthor(s): Juan Pedro Monferrer-SalaSource: Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 69, No. 2 (October 2010), pp. 195-197Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/597764 .Accessed: 26/01/2011 15:15

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195

Once Again on the Earliest Christian

Arabic Apology: Remarks on a

Palaeographic Singularity*

JUAN PEDRO MONFERRER-SALA, University of Cordoba

Some years ago Samir Khalil Samir presented a Christian Arab apologetic text contained in the codex sinaiticus arabicus 154 during the Third Congress of Christian Arabic Studies held at Louvain-la-Neuve.1 The text of this Melkite Arabic apology was not totally unknown to scholars since it was edited by Marga-ret Dunlop Gibson in the last year of the nineteenth century.2

This ancient parchment, cataloged by the expedi-tion to Mount Sinai,3 was dated to the end of the eighth century or the beginning of the ninth century

*This is a study done in the framework of research project HUM200764961 (Study and Edition of Biblical and Patristic Greco-Arabic and Latin Manuscripts) subsidized by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science.

1Samir Khalil Samir, Une apologie arabe du christianisme dpoque umayyade? in Actes du troisime congrs international dtudes arabes chrtiennes, ed. Samir Khalil Samir, Parole de lOrient 15 (1990): 85105.

2Margaret Dunlop Gibson, Studia Sinaitica (London, 1899), 7: 74107 (in Arabic), 236 (English translation). On the peculiarities of this edition, see Samir Khalil Samir, The Earliest Arab Apology for Christianity (c. 750), in Christian Arabic Apologetics during the Abbasid Period, 7501258, ed. Samir Khalil Samir and Jrgen S. Nielsen (Leiden, 1994), 58.

3On this mission, see Aziz Suryal Atiya, The Monastery of St. Catherine and the Mount Sinai Expedition, Proceedings of

by Atiya,4 and to the ninth century by Kamil.5 This dating was considered by Samir to be correct in a broad sense.6 Although he could not give a precise date for the manuscript due to the unknown system used in the treatise,7 he ventured three possible dates based on the starting point of the Christian religion according to this Melkite author: 737/738 C.E., 767/768 C.E., and 770/771 C.E.8 Only one of the three possible dates proposed by Samir has been ixed, by Swanson: the year 738 C.E.9 Griith, for his part, has proposed the year 755 as the terminus post quem

the American Philosophical Society 96 (1952): 57886, especially 58286 for the manuscripts.

4A.S. Atiya, A Hand-List of the Arabic Manuscripts and Scrolls Microilmed at the Library of the Monastery of St. Catharine, Mount Sinai (Baltimore, 1955), 6, n. 154.

5Murad Kamil, Catalogue of All Manuscripts in the Monastery of St. Catharine on Mount Sinai (Wiesbaden, 1970), 16, n. 111 (154).

6Samir, Earliest Arab Apology, 59.7Ibid., 61.8Ibid., 6264.9Mark N. Swanson, Some Considerations for the Dating of f

Talth Allh al-wid (Sinai ar. 154) and al-mi wu al-mn (London, British Library or. 4950), Parole de lOrient 18 (1993): 11541, and Beyond Prooftexting: Approaches to the Qurn in Some Early Arabic Christian Apologies, The Muslim World 88 (1998): 297319.

196 F Journal of Near Eastern Studiesfor the date of the manuscript.10 Whatever the case may be, there is absolutely no doubt that, as Samir stated, this manuscript . . . is a very old parchment.11

The antiquity of the codex is also conirmed by the handwriting through some graphological features that have been set out by Samir.12 All the graphologi-cal features he put forward are acceptable with only one exception: the alleged phenomenon of beginning a word at the end of one line and continuing it at the beginning of the next is documented not only in the early Christian Arabic manuscripts (eighthninth centuries), but in manuscripts of later periods. For instance, Suppl. grec 911 of the Bibliothque na-tionale de France, a manuscript dated in the year 6551 of the creation of the world13 (that is, 1043 C.E.),14 contains a number of examples of split words.15

The purpose, however, of the present article is not to critique the assessments of one of the foremost scholars in the ield of Christian Arabic studies, manu-script editions included. Rather, my intention is to revisit the request of Samir, which reads as follows:

The way the qf is written seems to be absolutely unique in the Arabic script. It is always written like this []. This is in fact the Maghribi f. I irst thought it was a mistake, but it is undoubtedly a qf. And here is a double mystery: irst, the fact that we ind in the Mashriq this kind of f, which is normally only attested in the Maghrib; second,

10Sidney H. Griith, From Aramaic to Arabic: The Languages of the Monasteries of Palestine in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997): 25. Cf. S.H. Griith, The Monks of Palestine and the Growth of Christian Literature in Arabic, The Muslim World 78 (1988): 18. For a summary of Griiths contributions to this discussion, see his recent The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque (Princeton, 2008), 8990.

11Samir, Earliest Arab Apology, 58.12Ibid., 60.13In accordance with the preference of the Melkite scribes to

date their works or copies, see Sebastian Brock, The Use of Hi-djra Dating in Syriac Manuscripts: A Preliminary Investigation, in Redeining Christian Identity: Cultural Interaction in the Middle East since the Rise of Islam, ed. J.J. van Ginkel, H.L. Murrevan den Berg, and T.M. van Lint (Leuven, 2005), 276.

14Cf. ngel Urbn and Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, Some Re-gards on Textual Criticism in a Greek-Arabic MS (BnF Suppl. Grec 911, A.D. 1043), Parole de lOrient 30 (2005): 80, n. 3, and a photo of the colophon on p. 102.

15J.P. Monferrer-Sala, Descripcin lingstica de la columna rabe del Suppl. Grec 911 BnF (ao 1043), Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 2 (2005): 99 1.1.

the fact that in the manuscript it is a qf and not a f. I would be very grateful if somebody could ofer me an explanation or produce another example of these two peculiarities.16

The aforementioned peculiarities as framed by Samir will be explained by following the order of the two questions he posed. At the outset, let me start with a short remark about the question of the dots17 in connection with both f and qf. An idea commonly accepted among some scholars is that writing the f and qf with a dot below and above the grapheme, respectively, is a palaeographic feature of the Marib script. However, such a phenomenon is also attested in Eastern manuscripts, both Christian and Muslim.18

In any case, the writing of the f and the qf in the Middle East was not only limited to the morphology as just referenced, but it changed between the eighth and the ninth centuries, as has been stated by Imamuddin:

Towards the end of the irst and beginning of the second century one dot of qaf was placed in Egypt sometimes above and at other times beneath the letter and in Palestine it was put below while fe was given no dot. In the second century fe was given one dot beneath the letter fe and later above it and thereupon qaf was given two dots. The Maghribi still retains the old punctuations of qaf = fe and fe with one dot below.19

Therefore, the graphological peculiarities exhibited by f and qf in the codex sinaiticus arabicus 154 fall within the context of the Palestinian handwriting type of the eighth and ninth centuries, that is, the geographical and chronological context to which this Melkite codex has been assigned.20

Regarding the second question connected with qf, a series of examples of this grapheme written with

16Samir, Earliest Arab Apology, 60.17For the dots, see E.J. Revell, The Diacritical Dots and the

Development of the Arabic Alphabet, Journal of Semitic Studies 20 (1975): 17890. Cf. Beatrice Gruendler, Arabic Script, in Encyclopaedia of the Qurn, ed. Jane Dammen McAulife, 10 vols. (Leiden, Boston, 20032006), 1:13544, esp. 140.

18See, e.g., Nabia Abbott, An Arabic Papyrus in the Oriental Institute: Stories of the Prophets, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 5 (1946): 170b.

19S.M. Imamuddin, Arabic Writing and Arab Libraries (Lon-don, 1983), 1011.

20Samir, Une apologie arabe, 85105.

Earliest Christian Arabic Apology F 197a dot below are attested in some plates of the new inds from St. Catharine cataloged by Meimaris. This is the case, for example, with MS Sinai ar. NF perg. 17 in transitional Kf handwriting. This manuscript contains Antiochuss questions together with the cor-responding answers by Athanasius,21 in which the fol-lowing readings, containing a qf written with a dot below, are documented:22

qidds (recto, line 14)al-qiddsn (recto, line 16)r al-qudus (recto, line 18).

These, however, are not the only examples from old Sinaitic materials in St. Catharine. In fact, examples occur in the oldest manuscript containing Old Testa-ment books in Arabic from the Pet codex sinaiticus arabicus 1, dated circa ninth century A.D.,23 although examples of qf written with two dots above are also attested:24 for example, alaqa for the correct alaqa (Job 28:24b; fol. 1r, line 4), inalaqa (Dan. 1:1, fol.

21Yiannis E. Meimaris, (Athens, 1985), 27 (Greek) and 25 (Arabic).

22Ibid., 83, pl. 22.23Atiya, Hand-List of the Arabic Manuscripts, 3, n. 1; Kamil, Cat-

alogue, 11, n. 1; Russell A. Stapleton, An Edition of the Book of Daniel and Associated Apocrypha in Manuscript Arabic 1 (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1989). The irst chapter of the book of Daniel, together with linguistic observations, has been transliterated by Joshua Blau, A Handbook of Early Middle Arabic (Jerusalem, 2002), 9596.

24See J.P. Monferrer-Sala, Liber Iob detractus apud Sin. Ar. 1: Notas en torno a la Vorlage siriaca de un manuscrito rabe cristiano (s. 9), Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 1 (2004): 123.

11v, line 18). Here is a small sampling of in stances in which qf is written with one dot below:25

uruq (Job 28:23a; fol. 1r, line 2)qla (Job 28:28; fol. 1r, line 8)qla (Dan. 1:3; fol. 11v, line 19)anqaa (Dan. 3:88; fol. 17r, line 1 )inalaqna (Ezek. 1:21, 24; fol. 96r, lines 15, 23)qul (Ezek. 2:4; fol. 96v, line 19).

One interesting feature is that, sometimes, a single grapheme contains two distinct diacritics marking it as a qf, but in diferent fashions. Such a feature occurs, for instance, in Ezek.1:3 with the noun qawl in the sentence kna qawl min al-Rabb al fam azkiyl f ar al-kaldniyyn al nahr bar [there was a word from the Lord on Ezekiels mouth in the land of the Chaldeans by the river bar]. Perhaps a later hand added the two dots above the qf without deleting the earlier dot below, as can be inferred from the afore-mentioned example. This hypothetical explanation of the interference of a later hand could also be applied to the translation of Jeremiah contained in this codex.

To conclude, it seems obvious that the position of the dot below the qf represents a palaeographic feature characteristic of early South Palestinian texts from the end of eighth and beginning of the ninth centuries as shown in a number of examples from the oldest codices of St. Catharine on Mount Sinai.

25The foliation given by the expedition to Mount Sinai is followed.