Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Jeffery1938: »The Commentators differ among themselves as to whether it stands for a Jewish, a Christian, or a Sabian place of worship. They agree, however, in deriving it from ṣamaʕa (cf. Ibn Durayd, 166), and Fraenkel agrees,¹ thinking that originally it must have meant a high tapering building.² The difficulty of deriving it from ṣamaʕa, however, is obvious, and al-Ḫafāǧī, 123, lists it as a borrowed word. / Its origin is apparently to be sought in SArabia, from the word that is behind the Eth [Gz] ṣomāʕt ‘a hermit’s cell’ (Nöldeke, Beiträge, 52),³ though we have as yet no SAr word with which to compare it.«

1. Fremdw, 269. 2. It certainly has the meaning of ‘minaret’ in such passages as Aġānī, xx, 85; Amālī, ii, 79; Ǧāḥiz, Maḥāsīn, 161, and Dozy, Supplément, i, 845. So the Judaeo-Tunisian ṣmʕʰ means ‘campanile’ (Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, 52). Lammens, ROC, ix (1904), pp. 35, 33, suggests that originally ṣawmaʕaẗ meant the ‘pillar’ of a Stylite ascetic. 3. Rudolph, Abhängigkeit, 7 n.

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