▪ Jeffery1938: »Only in the plural form
maqālīdᵘ in the phrase ‘His are the keys of heaven and earth’, where the use of
mafātīḥᵘ in the similar phrase in vi, 59, proves that it means ‘keys’, though in these two passages many of the Commentators want it to mean
ḫazāʔinᵘ ‘storehouses’.
1
It was early recognized as a foreign word, and said by the philologers to be of Pers origin.
2
The Pers
kelīd to which they refer it is itself a borrowing from the Grk
kleís,
kleîda (Vullers,
Lex, ii, 876), which was also borrowed into Aram
ʔqlydʔ, Syr
qulīḏā or
ʔaqlīḏā. In spite of Dvořák’s vigorous defence of the theory that it passed directly from Pers into Arab
3
we are fairly safe in concluding that the Ar
ʔaqlīd is from the Syr
ʔaqlīḏā,
4
and the form
miqlād formed therefrom on the analogy of
miftāḥ, etc.
5
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