▪ Jeffery1938: »This curious word is used by Muḥammad to indicate an alternative to the worship of Allah, as Rāġib,
Mufradāt, 307, recognizes. Men are warned to ‘serve Allah and avoid
ṭāġūt’ (16:36, 39:17); those who disbelieve are said to fight in the way of
ṭāġūt and have
ṭāġūt as their patron (4:76; 2:257); some seek oracles from
ṭāġūt (4:60), and the People of the Book are reproached because some of them, though they have a Revelation, yet believe in
ṭāġūt (4:51, 5:60). / It is thus clearly a technical religious term, but the Commentators know nothing certain about it. From Ṭab. and Bagh. on ii, 257, we learn that some thought it meant
al-šayṭān, others
al-sāḥir or
al-kāhin, others
ʔawṯān or
ʔaṣnām, and some thought it a name for al-Lāt and al-ʕUzzà. The general opinion, however, is that it is a genuine Ar word, a form
FaʕLūt from
ṭaġà ‘to go beyond the limit’ (
LA, xix, 232;
TA , x, 225, and Rāġib, op. cit.). This is plausible, but hardly satisfactory, and we learn from al-Suyūṭī,
Itq, 322;
Mutaw, 37, that some of the early authorities recognized it as a loan-word from Abyssinian. / Geiger, 56, sought its origin in the Rabbinic
ṭāʕûṯ ‘error’ which is sometimes used for idols, as in the Jerusalem Talmud,
Sanh, x, 28d ,
ʔwy l-km w-l-ṭʕwt-km ‘woe to you and to your idols’, and whose cognate
ṭʕwtā is frequently used in the Targums for ‘idolatry’
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a meaning easily developed from the primary verbal meaning of
ṭʕā ‘to go astray’ (cf. Hbr
ṭāʕāʰ, Syr
ṭᵊʕā, Ar
ṭaġà). / Geiger has had many followers in this theory of a Jewish origin for
ṭāġūt,
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but others have thought a Christian origin more probable. / Schwally,
Idioticon, 38, points out that whereas in Edessene Syr the common form is
ṭaʕyūtā meaning ‘error’, yet in the ChrPal dialect we find the form
ṭᵊʕūtā,
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which gives quite as close an equivalent as the Targumic
ṭāʕūṯā. The closest parallel, however, is the Eth [Gz]
ṭāʕot from an unused verbal root ṭʕw (the equivalent of [Hbr]
ṭāʕāʰ, Ar
ṭaġà), which primitively means ‘defection from the true religion’, and then is used to name any superstitious beliefs, and also is a common word for ‘idols’, translating the [Grk]
eídōla of both the LXX and N.T. It is probable, as Nöldeke,
Neue Beiträge, 35, notes, that this word itself is ultimately derived from Aram, but we can be reasonably certain that al-Suyūṭī’s authorities were right in giving the Ar word an Abyssinian [Gz] origin.
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