Bibliotheca Polyglotta

1 to forsake, leave, desert, give up, betray. – 2 to let sink, drop. – 3 to hand over, turn over. – 4 to leave, abandon. – 5 to deliver up, surrender, expose. – 6 to commit o.s., resign o.s. (li‑llāh to the will of God). – 7 (alone:) to declare o.s. committed to the will of God, become a Muslim, embrace Islam – WehrCowan1979.

conc

▪ Lidzbarski1922 would derive ʔaslama from salām, as meaning ‘to enter in the state of [Grk] sōtēría ’ (as ʔaḥrama means ‘to enter in the state of ↗ḥarām ’). But most scholars think the original meaning was ‘to submit o.s., devote o.s. [to a new religion]’. Jeffery suggested that the use as a religious technical term was borrowed from the Christian-Jewish environment and that the vb. itself was a loan from Syr ʔašlem (with exactly this meaning). The word was used in this sense also when the new religion propagated by the prophet Muhammad emerged, and it soon came to denote specifically the submission under the God of Islam, i.e., ‘to become a Muslim’.
▪ The view that ʔaslama is an »example of a genuine Ar root which took on a secondary Christian technical meaning« (Kerr) should, however, probably be modified, given that the religious connotation was a common good in pre-Islamic Arabia of Late Antiquity.
▪ However that may be, the Ar as well as the Syr roots to which the respective vb.s belong, both go back to Sem *ŠLM ‘to be whole, sound, remain unharmed’. For the wider context, cf. ↗SLM.

hist

▪ ʔislām : ▪ eC7 1 (total surrender) Q 3:19 ʔinna ’l-dīna ʕinda ’ḷḷāhi ’l-ʔislāmu ‘True Religion, in God’s eyes, it total surrender [to Him]’. – 2 (the religion of Islam) Q 5:3 al-yawma ʔakmaltu la-kum dīna-kum wa-ʔatmamtu ʕalay-kum niʕmat-ī wa-raḍītu la-kumu ’l-ʔislāma dīnan ‘today I have perfected your religion for you, completed My blessing upon you, and santioned for you Islam [the total submission to God] as religion’. – 3 (act of surrendering, submitting) Q 9:74 wa-la-qad qālū kalimata ’l-kufri wa-kafarū baʕda ʔislāmi-him ‘but they certainly did speak the word of disbelief and became disbelievers after having submitted’.
▪ muslim : ▪ eC7 1 (one who submits [to God]) Q 2:133 naʕbudu ʔilāha-ka wa-ʔilāha ʔābāʔi-ka ʔibrāhīma wa-ʔismāʕīla wa-ʔisḥāqa ʔilāhan wāḥidan wa-naḥnu la-hū muslimūna ‘we will worship your God and the God of your fathers, Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac, one single God—we submit ourselves to Him’. – 2 (one who professes the faith of Islam) Q 22:78 huwa sammā-kumu ’l-muslimīna min qablu wa-fī hāḏā ‘He has called you Muslims—both in the past and in this [Book]’. – 3 (one showing obedience) Q 27:38 ʔayyu-kum yaʔtī-nī bi-ʕarši-hā qabla ʔan yaʔtū-nī muslimīna ‘which of you can bring me her throne before they come to me in obedience [to my bidding]?’

cogn

▪ See DISC below.

disc

▪ The wider context is of course Ar ↗SLM, from Sem *ŠLM ‘to be whole, sound’.
▪ Jeffery1938: »The vb. ↗salima is genuine Ar, corresponding with Hbr šālēm, Phoen šlm ‘to be complete, sound’: Aram šlēm, Syr šlēm ‘to be complete, safe’, Akk šalāmu ‘to be complete, unharmed’. This primitive vb., however, does not occur in the Qurʔān. Form II, sallama, is fairly common, but this is a denominative from ↗salām, and salām we shall see is a borrowed word.¹ – As used in the Qurʔān ʔaslama is a technical religious term,² and there is even some development traceable in Muḥammad’s use of it.³ Such a phrase as man yuslim waǧhahū ʔilā ’llāhi in 31:22,⁴ seems to give the word in its simplest and original sense, and then ʔSLM li-rabbi ’l-ʕālamīn (40:66; 6:71; 2:131), and ʔSLM li-llāh or ʔSLM lahū (27:45; ii, 127; iii, 77; 39:54), are a development from this. Later, however, the word comes practically to mean ‘to profess Islam’, i.e. to accept the religion which Muḥammad is preaching, cf. xlviii, 16; xlix, 14, 17, etc. Now in pre-Islamic times ʔaslama is used in the primitive sense of ‘hand over’, noted above. For instance, in a verse of Abū ʕAzza in Ibn Hišām, 556, we read lā tuslimūnī lā yaḥillu ʔislām ‘hand me not over for such betrayal is not lawful’.⁵ The Qurʔānic use is an intelligible development from this sense, but the question remains whether this was a development within Ar itself or an importation from without. – Margoliouth in JRAS, 1903, p. 467 ff., would favour a development within Ar itself, perhaps started by Musailama; but as Lyall pointed out in the same Journal (p. 771 ff.), there are historical difficulties in the way of this. Lidzbarski, ZS, i, 86, would make it a denominative from salām which he takes as a translation of [Grk] sōtēría, but Horovitz, KU, 55, rightly objects. – The truth seems to be that it was borrowed as a technical religious term from the older religions. Already in the oAram inscriptions we find that šlm as used in proper names has acquired this technical religious significance,⁶ as e.g. šlmlt, etc. The same sense is found in the Rabbinic writings (Horovitz, KU, 55), but it is particularly in Syr that we find ʔslm used precisely as in the Qurʔān, e.g. ʔašlem nap̄š-eh lᵊ-ʔalāhā w-lᵊ-ʕZT-h ‘he devoted himself to God and His Church’, or ʔšlmw lh npš-hwn,⁷ and one feels confident in looking here for the origin of the Ar word. – muslim, of course, is a formation from this,⁸ and was in use in pre-Islamic Arabia. al-ʔislām, however, would seem to have been formed by Muḥammad himself after he began to use the word.«
▪ Retsö (“Aramaic/Syriac Loanwords”, in EALL), Kerr2014, and others follow Jeffrey. Given the fact, however, that the root Sem ŠLM is attested with religious connotations already in Akk, one should not so easily discard Lidzbarski’s view that ʔaslama originally means ‘to enter in the state of salām (= Grk sōtēría)’ and refers to a practice that was a common good in pre-Islamic Arabia, namely ‘deliver o.s. in the protection (= safety, salām) of a deity’. Ar ↗salam_1 ‘prepayment’ is originally (in other Sem langs, like Akk, Ug or Hbr) a present given to s.o., or an offering made to a deity, to ensure benevolence, protection, safety, and the same word is also attested with the meaning of ‘captive’ (= who submits himself, without resisting, peacefully) and ‘captivity’ in Ar. Before declaring ʔaslama to be an originally Christian idea, one will have to check whether it has not perhaps had a religious sense already in pre-Islamic times and therefore can count as part of a shared heritage in Late Antiquity Arabia.

1. On the development of meaning in SAr slm see Rossini, Glossarium, 196. 2. See Lyall, JRAA, 1903, p. 782. 3. See Lidzbarski’s article, “Salam und Islam,” in ZS, i, 85 ff. 4. Cf. also, 2:112; iii, 18; 4:125. On the probable genesis of this, see Margoliouth in JRAS, 1903, pp. 473, 474. 5. For other examples, see Margoliouth’s article, as above. 6. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 79 ff. 7. The example given by Horovitz, viz. ʔašlem nap̄š-eh lᵊ-qaddīšā bᵊrīk hū is curiously like ʔaslama li-rabbi ’l-ʕālamīn. 8. Sūra li, 36; xxii, 77; and note Bagh, vii, 192, and Yaʕqūbī, Hist, i, 259, and its use in Safaite (Ryckmans, Noms propres, i, 239).

west

▪ From the vn. IV Ar ʔislām ‘submission’ is of course Engl Islam (first attested in 1818), and Engl Muslim (1610s as a n., 1777 as adj.) is taken from the corresponding PA IV. The older form Engl Mussulman (1560s) has entered the lang. via Tu muslimān, vulg. musulmān (nTu müsliman, müsülman), which in turn is from the Pers form musulmān (with adj. suffix ‑ān). The old Ge form Muselman(n) (C17), with secondary likening to Mann ‘man’, came in via Ital musulmano, nFr musulman (< Tu < Pers, like the Engl term).

deriv

► ĭstaslama, vb. X, to surrender, capitulate; to give way, submit, yield, abandon o.s.; to give o.s. over; to lend o.s., be a party; to succumb: originally probably requestative (*‘to ask for protection, safety, salām’).

► C ^BP#365ʔislām, n., submission, resignation, reconciliation (to the will of God); – al-~, n., the religion of Islam; the era of Islam; the Muslims: originally a vn. from ↗ʔaslama, vb. IV. See also ↗ʔislām.
► ^BP#184ʔislāmī, pl. ‑ūn, adj., Islamic; n., Islamist: nsb-adj., from ↗ʔislām.
► ʔislāmiyyaẗ, n.f., the idea of Islam, Islamism; status or capacity of a Muslim: abstr. formation in ‑iyyaẗ from ↗ʔislām.
► ʔislāmbūlī, adj.: nsb-adj., from ʔislāmbūl, pious interpretation of the name of the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul (ʔisṭānbūl, pron. ʔisṭāmbūl).
► ^BP#4250ĭstislām, n., surrender, capitulation; submission, resignation, self-surrender: vn. X.
► C ^BP#229muslim, pl. ‑ūn, adj./n., Muslim: orig. a PA IV; see also ↗ʔislām.

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