The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’ān

Since the beginning of Islam, the foreign words of the Qur’ān have raised numerous investigations both in the Islamic tradition, and much later by Western scholars. The former placed them at the heart of the ideological debate around the Arab identity of the sacred text. The latter studied them in the framework of research on the influences of Judaism and Christianity on the origins of Islam.

The last study completed about Qur’ānic loanwords is Arthur Jeffery’s The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’ān (1938), which comprises all the previous works about this subject. Since then, the study of the Qur’ānic loanwords has only little advanced so that today, it needs to be updated. The progresses made in comparative linguistics and the discovery of thousands of inscriptions in the Arabian Peninsula invite us to reconsider Qur’ānic loanwords in their linguistic and historical contexts.

While lexical borrowings from Hebrew and Judeo-Aramean have been recognized since long, their study suffered, since the beginning of the 20th century, from an overestimation of the Syriac sources. Through a reevaluation of the loanwords in the light of all the materials now available – linguistics, epigraphy, history, lexicology, philology – it appears that while the Jewish neighborhood undeniably formed part of Islam’s early environment, many loans may in fact be common to the Semitic languages and that some of the Jewish terms and concepts were already known in Arabia, long before Islam.