Pure Arabic — With Foreign Loanwords
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The Quran insists on its pure Arabic character as evidence of authenticity: “a clear Arabic tongue” (16:103; 26:195), “an Arabic Quran without any crookedness” (39:28). Yet the text contains scores of non-Arabic loanwords — Syriac, Hebrew, Greek, Persian, Ethiopic — catalogued by Muslim philologists themselves (al-Suyuti devotes a section of al-Itqan to them) and by Arthur Jeffery’s The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’an (1938): injilInjilThe Gospel, as named by the Quran — spoken of as a revelation given to Jesus and present among Christians in Muhammad's day.Full glossary → (Greek euangelion), firdaws (Persian paradayadam via Greek), istabraq (Persian), sirat (Latin strata via Aramaic), and many more.
Common Muslim Responses
Defenders answer that “Arabic” describes the language as a whole, not every lexeme; all living languages absorb loanwords, which become naturalized Arabic by use — a point al-Suyuti already made.
Counter-Rebuttal
Fair enough as linguistics, critics reply, but 16:103 is responding to a specific accusation — that a foreign informant taught Muhammad — by contrasting the informant’s foreign tongue with the Quran’s clear Arabic. If the Quran’s vocabulary is in fact saturated with the religious terminology of Syriac-speaking Christianity and Judaism, the apologetic force of the verse inverts: the loanword distribution maps precisely onto the biblical and post-biblical material the Quran retells (Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’an and the Bible, 2018), which is what one expects from human cultural contact, not pristine dictation.