Arabic–English Dictionary of Qur'anic Usage edited by Elsaid M. Badawi and Muhammad Abdel Haleem (review)

The present work stands as the first comprehensive dictionary of Qur'ānic Arabic to appear in English. The usefulness of such an erudite and well-researched source for those who work in the field of Arabic and Islamic studies cannot be overstated. That a reference work of such importance would take so long to finally appear remains a mystery, particularly when we consider the tremendous growth of scholarship that the discipline of Islamic studies has witnessed in the last few decades. Until recently, serious English-speaking students and scholars of Islam who wished to probe into the subtleties of Qur'ānic lexicography had to rely, for the most part, on either Edward Lane's (d. 1876) Arabic–English Lexicon or John Penrice's Dictionary and Glossary of the Koran, both of which were published in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although Lane's work has the benefit of being an extremely comprehensive lexicon of classical Arabic, its sheer length renders it somewhat cumbersome for those interested simply in the language of the Qur'ān. Moreover, even though Lane worked indefatigably for almost thirty-five years on his magnum opus, he was unable to complete it in his lifetime. While the work was later completed by his nephew, Stanley Lane-Poole (d. 1931), the quality of the later entries is not as good as those of Lane himself, creating a sort of unevenness within the text. In all fairness to Lane-Poole, no immediate successor among Lane's contemporaries could match the sheer breadth of his expertise along with the painstaking exactitude he brought to the lexicon. In contrast to Lane's work, Penrice's Glossary of the Koran had the benefit of being fully completed by someone who appears to have been a very competent scholar of the language. (We know next to nothing about the author.) But it had the disadvantage of being far too brief. While it contains all the roots of Qur'ānic terms, it does not provide enough examples to illustrate the polyvocal semantic range of Islam's scripture. Students of Qur'ānic Arabic are often forced therefore to turn to Lane or other sources in the absence of what they are looking for in Penrice. There have been a few other Arabic-English dictionaries of Qur'ānic Arabic, but these are not scholarly or comprehensive enough to be of much use to those interested in exploring the fullness of Islam's sacred text. Among condensed scholarly works, we may note Mir's Verbal Idioms of the Qur'ān (1989) and more recently, Ambrose's A Concise Dictionary of Koranic Arabic (2004).

With the aforementioned considerations in mind, Professors Badawi and Abdel Haleem should be commended for producing a reference text that fills a lacuna in Qur'ānic scholarship. As graduates of Azhar University in Egypt who then went on to obtain doctorates in Arabic and Islamic studies in the West, they bring to the dictionary excellent credentials. At present, Elsaid Badawi heads the Arabic language department at the American University in Cairo, one of the most reputed Arabic language departments in the Middle East. Muhammad Abdel Haleem, author of numerous academic works on the Qur'ān, teaches Arabic and Islamic studies at the London School of African and Oriental Studies. Their shared knowledge of Arabic and the Qur'ān enables them to bring to the project a vast reservoir of learning and years of experience.

The dictionary is based on the Ḥafṣ reading of the Qur'ān as it appears in the Egyptian printed text. The work is divided into twenty-eight sections, each of which is devoted to a particular letter of the Arabic alphabet. The organization of the dictionary, like that of other standard dictionaries, follows the root system. The entry for each root lays out its semantic field, even though the full range, as one would expect, is not always used...