Posting to IMHO since it involves speculation and opinion rather than hard fact.
Inspired by this thread, about why Turkish didn’t replace Arabic.
The question is; How long before changes in Arabic become problematic with the “immutable” writings in the Koran?
English has changed considerably since the era when the Koran was written. Languages that are spoken on a daily basis essentially live, breath and change over time. They also change by culture and geography, as we see a divergence in the English language not only between Britain, the United States and Australia (each becoming their own dialect over time), but sometimes becoming really different (and perhaps no longer English) in places like Jamaica.
It’s been a while, but I remember some discussions a while back about Arabic undergoing the same kind of diversion in the regions it is spoken.
With Christianity, it started with the ‘official’ Bible being required to be in Latin, with the Church being the keepers of the keys, so to speak, and Latin no longer really being a living tongue for most of that time.
So…How long before the accumulating differences in Arabic, regional or not, become so vast that it becomes problematic for Islam to maintain a strict text based on (by then) archaic Arabic? Or will we wind up with 1,000 years or more of a situation similar to the old Catholic Church, in which the text and liturgy are maintained in a somewhat dead language practiced only by the priesthood? (Which in all honesty, is already true in some parts of the Muslim World.)
The latter. Actually, it’s already more or less the case. Arabic has evolved, and different dialects have developped. Morrocan Arabic isn’t the same as Egyptian Arabic. Some of these dialects are still relatively close to the language used in the Koran, some aren’t very much.
But along with these dialects, classical Arabic is still studied and used, more or less in the same way Latin was during, say, the Renaissance in Europe.
There are a couple more examples of languages that would be dead except for religious use.
Greek is the language of the New Testament (in spite of those who think it was written in early 17th century English), and Greek is also the liturgical language of the Greek Orthodox Church. Just as Arabic has, Greek has moved on in the last 2,000 years, but Greek Orthodox Christians can still read the New Testament in its original form.
Hebrew is the language of the Old Testament, and the liturgical language of Judaism. In this case, Hebrew has been revived from being just a dead religious language to become the language of Israel.
I guess that’s part of my curiosity. Will it take the living language of that religion diverging from the original textual language to bring a significant change in Islam and create ‘modernized’ and/or less restrictive versions, ala the Protestant Reformation.