Infidel or Paganus? The Polysemy of kafara in the Quran.

AuthorCole, Juan
PositionCritical essay

Kafara in the Quran has been taken by most exegetes to mean "to deny, reject," and the active participle kafir has most frequently been translated as "infidel, unbeliever" (these renderings are the common ones in Quran translations, which tend to translate them unvaryingly). (1) A careful observer is struck, however, by how many different meanings words derived from the triliteral root k-f-r have in the Quran. (2) Here I will argue for a set of distinctions, some grammatical and some lexical, that will help explain this variety of usages. Debates on the meaning of the verb kafara in the Quran have been hobbled in part by a failure to distinguish between two different forms of the verb--the transitive verb phrase kafara bi-, "to deny or reject," and the intransitive simple verb kafara. Until recently, Arabic linguistics paid little attention to the difference between simple and phrasal verbs. In contrast, this phenomenon has preoccupied English linguistics since the beginning of the discipline, given how rich that language is in verb-preposition combinations. We turn at the intersection but turn down an offer, or we get some food but get up in the morning. Where the preposition is key to the meaning, it is called an idiomatic phrasal verb. I propose that kafara bi-, "to deny or reject," the preposition of which takes an oblique object, is such an idiomatic phrasal verb in Arabic. (3) On the other hand, I will show that the simple intransitive verb kafara and the nouns deriving from it as used in the Quran are characterized by polysemy, whereby words with different meanings but common roots are recognized by native speakers as belonging to a family of senses. There is a difference between homonymy, where two words have the same lexical form but different meanings (e.g., "stalk" as part of a plant and "stalk" meaning to follow or harass), and polysemy, where two words derive from a common sense but carry different meanings--hence, the drink in "I want a drink" could refer to any sort of beverage or specifically to an alcoholic one, but both of these deverbal nouns derive from the same verb. (4) In turn, polysemy is of two sorts. Logical polysemy in deverbal nouns is their development in coming to denote distinct but related meetings. Idiosyncratic polysemy occurs when deverbal nouns develop semantically, through historical accident or other processes, in directions that take them away from the meaning of the original verb that generated them. Of course, if they diverge too dramatically, these words simply become homonyms. (5)

One of the motors for the semantic differentiation of deverbal nouns is the influence of other languages. Bilingual speakers often imbue words in one language with a meaning drawn from a word in another, a phenomenon called "loanshift," and sometimes entire idiomatic phrases are translated from one to the other, typically called "caiques." (6) Not only have analysts of the meaning of quranic vocabulary insufficiently attended to fine morphological and semantic distinctions, but they have often assumed it to lack a context and intertextual embeddedness in late antiquity. It seems likely that Greek, as Fergus Millar maintained, functioned as an urban standard in the late Roman Near East of the fifth and sixth centuries. (7) Greek coexisted in the Levant with Aramaic dialects, but Arabic-speakers in Syria and Transjordan had their own traditions of interacting with Greek. They had lived in the Eastern Roman empire, under Roman rule or on its peripheries, since the conquests of Trajan in 106 CE. The Petra papyri, discovered in the early 1990s and now published in five volumes, contain correspondence between the years of 537 and 593, generated by an elite Arabic-speaking family that used Greek for formal purposes. Nathanael Andrade termed Gerasa in late antiquity "a Greek city of Arabian ethnos." Archeologists have discovered bilingual Arabic and Greek inscriptions, including even some by Bedouin. (8) Arabophone Christianity was a developed and widespread tradition in places like Najran, Petra, and Nessana. (9) The educated used Greek and Syriac for theological purposes, but the large communities of Arabophone Christians in Transjordan and Syria over centuries would have developed their own neologisms and culture. (10) As they adopted Christianity, Arab preachers would have needed Arabic technical terms for theology and homilies. (11) Texts preserving this sophisticated Christian Arabic of the Levant have not survived from the fifth and sixth centuries, but it is likely that its vocabulary is visible for the first time in the Quran, given the trade and cultural ties that bound the Hijaz and the Eastern Roman empire. Arabic theological vocabulary, then, developed in part because it was influenced by Greek, Aramaic, and Middle Persian.

THE COVER-UP

Although many contemporary translators and commentators have lost sight of the polysemy of k-f-r and its derivatives, it was recognized by medieval Muslim thinkers concerned with word meaning. One of the first Arabic dictionaries, Kitab al-'Ayn of al-Khalll b. Ahmad, begins by defining k-f-r as the opposite of faith (iman) and as the opposite of gratitude (shukr). (12) He goes on, however, to give many other meanings, though in a piecemeal fashion--the root can have to do with, for instance, hypocrisy or the coronation of a king. It also refers to villages (sing. kafr) in thinly populated terrain. Hundreds of years later, the North African lexicographer and court judge Muhammad Ibn Manzur (d. ca. 1312), who settled in Mamluk Cairo, made a sophisticated linguistic argument for k-f-r and its derivatives as polysemous terms and put forward the principle by which its various forms are semantically related. (13) He saw the root's different senses as issuing from the notion of "covering up" (taghtiya, satara). In a concrete sense, the progressive particle kafir, he says, can refer to a peasant farmer, who covers seeds with earth after planting them. A kafir can also be a carrier of a concealed weapon, hidden beneath his robes. The verb kafara can mean to reject, and he argues that this sense derives from the action of covering up the truth of an assertion. It can mean to be ungrateful for a gift, inasmuch as the ingrate covers up the obligations of the heart. With a preposition, the intensive form kaffara 'an can mean "to absolve," i.e., when God covers up the past sins of the penitent. The comparative religionist Toshihiko Izutsu accepted the underlying senses of "covering up" and "ingratitude" for these words. (14)

The association of words deriving from this root with covering up obtains in other Semitic languages as well, suggesting that Ibn Manzur was on to something. The noun kafr occurs in Dadanitic inscriptions from around Ula in northern Arabia (now Saudi Arabia), likely dating to the last centuries of the first millennium BCE. The OCIANA database contains several instances of this word, meaning in these inscriptions "tomb," so that it is cognate to the Arabic qabr. Since a tomb is a means of covering up a corpse, this sense of the term is understandable. One Dadanitic inscription found in the early twentieth century on a stone in the vicinity of Ula records that one 'Abd Kharag "built this tomb for him and for his descendants, the whole of this tomb." In both occurrences, "this tomb" is inscribed h- kafr. (15)

The root appears in other Semitic languages. The Akkadian kaparu can mean "to efface" or "to cleanse." In Hebrew the root can mean to cover over, but also to propitiate (hence Yom Kippur or the day of atonement). It exists in Aramaic and Syriac in the sense of effacing or wiping clean. (16) In Christian Syriac works it can mean "to reject," "to be ungrateful," and "to blaspheme," covering some of the same terrain as the Arabic words from this root, though the Arabic family of senses does not match that of the Syriac exactly, contrary to what Edouard-Marie Gallez has alleged. (17 ) I concur with Walid Saleh that knowing the etymology of a word, and awareness of its cognates, does not provide us with its exact meaning at any particular time and place, and for this reason the below examines Quran passages contextually. On the other hand, as Saleh admits, historical linguistics can often offer useful insights. (18)

DENIAL

Let us begin by considering how and where the root gives the sense of "to reject, deny" in the Quran. The early sura al-Balad (90) condemns the Meccan elite's arrogance, pride in wealth, and disregard for the needy. It contrasts these heartless persons with moral exemplars who have believed and know the way through the difficult pass of high ethics, who free slaves, feed orphans, and provide nourishment to the poor. In contrast, "Those who have denied (kafaru bi-) our verses are companions of the left hand" (90:19). Note the preposition bi-. We have here a two-part or "phrasal" verb, which is idiomatic in that it requires for its meaning a preposition that takes an oblique object. This phrasal verb is not polysemous in the Quran for it always means to deny or reject.

The simple verb kafara has a much wider range of signification, but it does occasionally overlap in meaning with the phrasal verb, despite being intransitive, inasmuch as it is contrasted with belief. For instance, al-Kahf 18:29: "And say, the truth is from your lord. So, let the one who wishes to, believe, and let the one who wishes to, decline (yakfur)"; al-Ghafir 40:10, addressing the pagans: "When you are called to faith, you decline (takfuruna)"; and al-Hajj 22:57: "Those who kafaru and impugned the veracity of our signs, a humiliating torment awaits them." (19)

Even where words from k-f-r are contrasted with the verb "to believe" and nouns from that root, however, it cannot be assumed that they are always used as an exact antonym. After all, the impious and those who blaspheme are also the opposite of those who believe, but an impious person or...

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