▪ Jeffery1938: »In all the passages save viii, 42, it is used as though it means some sort of a Scripture sent from God. Thus ‘We gave to Moses and Aaron the Furqān and an illumination’ (xxi, 49), and ‘We gave to Moses the Book and the Furqān’ (ii, 50), where it would seem to be the equivalent of Taurah. In iii, 2, it is associated with the Taurah and the Inǧīl, and xxv, 1, and ii, 181, make it practically the equivalent of the Qurʔān, while in viii, 29, we read, ‘if ye believe God, He will grant you a Furqān and forgive your evil deeds.’ In viii, 42, however, where the reference is to the Battle of Badr, ‘the day of the Furqān, the day when the two hosts met,’ the meaning seems something quite different. / The form of the word would suggest that it was genuine Arabic, a form
fuʕlān from
faraqa, and thus it is taken by the Muslim authorities. Ṭab. on ii, 50, says that ‘Scripture’ is called Furqān because God
faraqa bi-hī bayna ’l-ḥaqq wa’l-bāṭil and as referring to Badr it means ‘the day when God discriminated (
faraqa) between the good party and the evil’ (Rāġib,
Mufradāt, 385). In this latter case it is tempting to think of Jewish influence, for in the account of Saul’s victory over the Ammonites in 1 Sam. xi, 13, where the Hbr text reads
h-ywm ʕśh yhwh tšwʕh b-yśrʔl, in the Targum it reads
ywmʔ dyn ʕbd yhwh pwrqnh b-yśrʔl, where
ywmʔ pwrqnʔ is exactly
yawm al-furqān.
1
/ The philologers, however, are not unanimous as to its meaning. Some took it to mean
naṣr; Bayḍ. on xxi, 49, tells us that some said it meant
falaq al-baḥr, and Zam. on viii, 29, collects a number of other meanings. This uncertainty and confusion is difficult to explain if we are dealing with a genuine Ar word, and is sufficient of itself to suggest that it is a borrowed term.
2
/ Arguing from the fact that in the majority of cases it is connected with Scriptures, Hirschfeld,
New Researches, 68, would derive it from [Hbr]
pᵊrāqîm, one of the technical terms for the divisions of the text of the Hbr Scriptures.
3
. This, however, is rather difficult, and Margoliouth,
Mohammed, 145 (but see
ERE, ix, 481; x, 538), while inclining to the explanation from [Hbr]
pᵊrāqîm, refers it, not to the sections of the Pentateuch, but to a book of Sayings of the Jewish Fathers, which Muḥammad heard of from the Jews, and which he may have thought of as similar to the Taurah and the Inǧīl. This theory is more probable than that of Hirschfeld and has in its favour the fact that resemblances have been noted between phrases and ideas in the Qurʔān and the well-known [Hbr]
prqy ʔbwt.
4
It also, however, has its difficulties, and in any case does not explain the use of the word in viii, 42. / Linguistically there is a closer equivalence in the Aram
prqn ‘deliverance, redemption’, and Geiger, 56 ff.,
5
suggested this as the source of the Ar word. He would see the primary meaning in viii, 29 ‘He will grant you
redemption and forgive your evil deeds,’ where the Targumic
pwrqnʔ would fit exactly (cf. Ps. iii, 9, etc.). Nowhere, however, is
pwrqnʔ used of revelation, and Geiger is forced to explain
furqān in the other passages, by assuming that Muḥammad looked upon revelation as a means of deliverance from error. / Geiger’s explanation has commended itself to many scholars,
6
but Fraenkel,
Vocab, 23, in mentioning Geiger’s theory, suggested the possibility of a derivation from Syr
pûrqānā, a suggestion which has been very fruitfully explored by later scholars.
7
Not only is
pûrqānā the common word for ‘salvation’ in the Peshitta and the ecclesiastical writers (
PSm, 3295), but it is the normal form in the ChrPal dialect, and has passed into the religious vocabulary of Eth [Gz] as
fərqān (Nöldeke-Schwally, i, 34) and Armenian as
p‘owrkan.
8
It is of much wider use than the Rabbinic
pwrqnʔ, but as little does it refer to revelation, so even if we agree that the borrowing was from Syr we still have the problem of the double, perhaps triple, meaning of the word in the Qurʔān. / Sprenger thought we might explain this by assuming the influence of the Ar root
faraqa on the borrowed word.
9
Schwally, however, has suggested that this is not necessary, as the word might well have had this double sense before Muḥammad’s time, under the influence of Christian or Jewish Messianic thought,
10
and Lidzbarski,
ZS, i, 91, points out that in Gnostic circles ‘Erlösung und Heil besonders durch Offenbarung vermittelt werden’.
11
There is the difficulty, however, that there seems to be no evidence of the use of the word in Arabic earlier than the Qurʔān, and Bell,
Origin, 118 ff., rightly insists that we must associate the use of the word for ‘revelation’ with Muḥammad himself. He links up the use of the word in the Qurʔān with the story of Moses and thinks that as in the story of Moses the deliverance was associated with the giving of the Law, so Muḥammad conceived of his Furqān as associated with the revelation of the Qurʔān. Wensinck,
EI, ii, 120, would also attribute the use of the word in the sense of revelation to Muḥammad himself, but he thinks we have two distinct words used in the Qurʔān, one the Syr
pûrqānā meaning ‘salvation’ or ‘deliverance’, and the other a genuine Ar word meaning ‘distinction’, which Muḥammad used for ‘revelation’ as ‘that which makes a distinction between the true and the false.’
12
Finally, Horovitz,
KU, 77, would make a sort of combination of all these theories, taking the word as of Syr origin, but influenced by the root
faraqa and also by the Hbr
prqym (cf. also
JPN, 216-18). / In any case it seems clear that
furqān is a word that Muḥammad himself borrowed to use as a technical term, and to whose meaning he gave his own interpretation. The source of the borrowing was doubtless the vocabulary of the Aram-speaking Christians, whether or not the word was also influenced by Judaism.«