FOREIGN VOCABULARY OF THE QURAN pdf download

Foreign Vocabulary of The Quran by Jeffery, Arthur

FOREIGN VOCABULARY OF THE QURAN

Little further advance can be made in our interpretation of the Qur’an or of the life of Muhammad, until an exhaustive study has been made of the vocabulary of the Qur’an.

 It is interesting to note how recent work at Islamic origins, such as that done by the late Professor Horovitz and his pupils at Frankfurt, and in the books of Tor Andrae and Karl Ahrens, has tended to run to a discussion of vocabulary.

The Qur’an is the first Arabic book, for though there was earlier poetry, it was not written down till much later, and some doubts have been raised as to the genuineness of what did get written down.

For the interpretation of this first Arabic book, we have been contenting until recently to turn to the classical commentaries, but the tendency, of the commentators is to interpret the book in the light of the Arabic language of their own day,

and with few exceptions their philological lucubration’s are of more interest for the study of the development of Muslim thought about the Qur’an, than they are for settling the meaning the words must have had for the Prophet and for those who listened to his

Meanwhile this present Essay attempts to make one small contribution to the subject by studying a number of the non-Arabic elements in the Qur’anic vocabulary.