Little further advance can be made in the 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. The Qur’an is the first Arabic book, for through there was earlier poetry, it was not written down till much later. For the interpretation of this first Arabic book, we have been content 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 lucubrations 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 utterances. This present essay attempts to make a contribution to the subject by studying a number of the non-Arabic elements in the Qur’anic vocabulary. Emphasis has been placed in recent years on the too long forgotten fact that Arabia at the time of Muhammad was not isolated from the rest of the world. There was at that time full and constant contact with the surrounding peoples of Syria, Persia and Abyssinia and through intercourse there was a natural interchange of vocabulary. The book’s essential focus is to place in the hands of students a list of these foreign words which are recognized as such by our modern scholarship, with an indication of their probable origin and of the sources to which the student may turn for fuller discussion.
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