▪ Jeffery1938: »In the Qurʔān the word has a technical sense with reference to what is opposed to Muḥammad’s conception of monotheism. Thus we find
ʔašraka ‘to give partners to God’, i.e., to be a polytheist,
mušrik ‘one who gives God a partner’, i.e. a polytheist,
šurakāʔ ‘those to whom the polytheists render honour as partners with God’, terms which, we may note, are not found in the earliest Sūras. / The root √ŠRK is ‘to have the shoe strings broken’, so
širāk means ‘sandal straps’, and
ʔašraka is ‘to put leather thongs in sandals’, with which we may compare Hbr
śārak ‘to lay cross wise, interweave’, Syr
srak ‘to braid’. From this the words [Ar]
šarak ‘net’ and
šarikaẗ ‘partnership’, i.e. the interweaving of interests, are easily derived. In the technical sense of ‘associating partners with God’, however, the word seems to be a borrowing from SArabia. In an inscription published by Mordtmann and Müller in
WZKM, x, 287, there occurs the line
w-bn šrk l-mrʔm mbʔsm w-mrḍym ‘and avoid giving a partner to a Lord who both bringeth disaster, and is the author of well being’. Here
šrk is used in the technical Qurʔānic sense of
širk,
1
and there can be little doubt that the word came to Muḥammad, whether directly or indirectly, from some SAr source.«
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