Key Terms of the Qur’an: A Critical Dictionary

It should almost go without saying that the Qur’an is a fundamental text not only for Islamic studies but also the study of Arabic, given the Qur’an’s status as Islam’s sacred scripture and one of the first substantial works of Arabic literature. Approaching the text from scratch can often seem daunting. Lexicons of the Qur’an have appeared before, but Nicolai Sinai’s work is substantively different. This dictionary by Sinai (who was my tutor for a course on the Qur’an that I took during my undergraduate degree in Classics with Oriental Studies at Oxford University) does not aim to list English translations of every Arabic word that occurs in the Qur’an but rather provides detailed entries on what he considers to be “key terms” within the work.What constitutes a “key term” will inevitably lead to a debate on issues of selectivity, but as Sinai puts it, his approach is to “concentrate on words, and phrases” that are deemed to be of “significant theological, anthropological or cosmological weight” and “occur at least several times across different Qur’anic surahs” (x), with prominent examples including the terms Allāh (“God”), al-Raḥmān (“the merciful”—used as a title for God), al-yahūd (“the Jews”), Banū Isrāʾīl (“Israelites”) and the verb jāhada (“to contend”) and its derivative jihād. A minority of entries concern terms that give rise to potential linguistic difficulties, such as the demonstrative dhālika (“that”), and accordingly focus on the question of translation rather than religious significance.Crucially, it is to be noted that this dictionary seeks to discuss the meaning and significance of these terms in their original historical context. That is, Sinai attempts to elucidate the meaning and significance of the terms in the context of the Qur’an’s emergence in late antique Arabia, rather than concentrating on how terms have been understood and interpreted by Muslim exegetes and commentators over the course of Islamic history. However, this does not mean that Sinai disregards the views of the commentators in trying to understand certain terms.Here, there should be some explanation of how Sinai views the original historical context of the Qur’an’s emergence. Sinai’s understanding can generally be seen as rather conservative and traditional on the spectrum of the wider historical debate about the emergence of the Qur’an and Islam. In other words, Sinai is content to accept that the Qur’an, if not believed to be the word of God, is the work of a single author called Muhammad and that sections of the Qur’an can be divided into “Meccan” and “Medinan” according to whether they were revealed by Muhammad during the initial phase of his prophetic career in Mecca or the subsequent period in Yathrib/Medina, to which he migrated from Mecca with his followers. In turn, the Meccan period can itself be divided into early and late. This sort of view of the Qur’an’s compositional chronology is to be contrasted with more revisionist hypotheses, which postulate that only part of the Qur’an can be attributed to Muhammad, with the rest being the result of the community’s expansion and development in the first few or several decades following his death.Even so, Sinai is willing to countenance the possibility that at least one verse—namely, 3:7, which states that some verses are ambiguous with their true meaning known only to God—is an insertion that postdates Muhammad’s lifetime, given that it jars with the Qur’an’s repeated emphasis on clarity and the internally observed tendency for later verses to clarify potential ambiguities in earlier verses (155–58). In addition, there may be cases where verses deemed to be Medinan have been inserted into a Meccan cluster. One notable example discussed in the dictionary is 29:46, which would appear to be the only Meccan reference to the ahl al-kitāb (“people of scripture,” referring to Jews and/or Christians), but which Sinai suggests is a subsequent Medinan insertion, attempting to advise believers on how to deal with Jews and/or Christians who reject belief in the Qur’an as revealed scripture. As Sinai explains, 29:46 was likely inserted in light of developments in Medina where, contrary to the expectation conveyed by 29:47, the believers encountered “people of scripture” who did not accept the validity of the Qur’an (114–18).Sinai’s approach does not necessarily mean naïve and credulous reliance on the considerable detail about the Prophet Muhammad’s life as contained in the post-Qur’anic sīra and ḥadīth literature. Indeed, it is striking that Sinai’s dictionary lacks any reference to most of the very well-known events recounted in the sīra literature, such as the Quraysh’s Boycott of the Hashemites (Meccan period) and the battles of Badr, Uhud, and the Trench (Medinan period). Instead of detailed reliance on the sīra and ḥadīth, Sinai’s approach on the chronology of the Qur’an’s development is largely based on internal Qur’anic data points, such as shifts in vocabulary, stylometrics (e.g., mean verse length) and theological positions. Thus, for example, polemics against Jews in the Medinan sections—which are absent in the Meccan sections—are to be explained as the result of the relations between Muhammad’s community and Jewish clans of Medina who largely refused to accept Muhammad’s message, eventually culminating in violent confrontation and expulsion of the Jews from Medina (112–13).Turning more specifically to the contents of individual entries, Sinai provides discussion on issues such as translation of particular terms in different contexts, the broader cosmological and theological ideas conveyed by terms, possible etymologies for certain terms, and how the Qur’an’s use of certain terms compares (where applicable) with the use of the same or corresponding terms in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphy, and Jewish and Christian literature. The entries make impressive use of comparative materials in a variety of languages, including Syriac, Greek, Hebrew, Jewish Aramaic, Ethiopic, and Sabaic. Furthermore, the entries are up to date in terms of their engagement with the latest secondary literature where relevant. Yet Sinai also reminds us that works of older Western scholarship that are at risk of being fashionably dismissed as “Orientalist” can also provide useful insights. For instance, besides the fact that Sinai’s general chronological approach to the Qur’an is one that rose to prominence in Western scholarship thanks to the work of the German scholar Theodor Nöldeke, Sinai also broadly agrees with Nöldeke’s positions on certain controversies over particular terms and verses: most notably, the contention that the earlier referenced 29:46 is a Medinan insertion into a Meccan cluster and that the combinations of letters that appear at the beginning of some chapters are “mystical allusions to the [Qur’an’s] celestial textual original” (53–59).If you pursue a line of research in which there is frequent use of or reference to the Qur’an, Sinai’s dictionary may be particularly useful in helping you rethink how some common terms and phrases should be translated. Consider, for example, the designation of God as rabb al-ʿālamīn, which most notably appears in 1:2 (“Praise be to God the rabb al-ʿālamīn”). That verse is frequently quoted in jihadist statements and writings that I translate and analyze. I must say that prior to reading Sinai’s dictionary, I had always assumed rabb al-ʿālamīn to mean “Lord of the Worlds,” in the sense of God being lord of both this world and the hereafter. However, Sinai makes a convincing case, based on internal Qur’anic data, that ʿālamīn (nominative form: ʿālamūn, which does not appear in the Qur’an) should not be translated as “worlds” but rather “world-dwellers” (520): thus, “Lord of the World-Dwellers” and not “Lord of the Worlds,” contrary to many well-known modern English translations of 1:2.Of course, it should be noted that Sinai’s translation is not wholly novel. For example, in the tafsir of the eleventh century Andalusian commentator Ibn ʿAṭīya, ʿālamīn is explained as follows: “al-ʿālamīn is the plural of ʿālam, and it is everything in existence besides God Almighty, with its entirety called an ʿālam, and its parts consisting of men, jinn and other things besides them called an ʿālam, and on this basis is the pluralisation of al-ʿālamīn.”1 In addition, an early, generally literal Latin translation of the Qur’an by Mark of Toledo gives a rendering of ʿālamīn as gentes (“peoples”) in various instances where the term occurs as cited by Sinai.2 Given how ubiquitous “Lord of the Worlds” has become in English translation, Sinai’s entry on the term ʿālamīn is a very useful reminder for reconsideration of the rendering of rabb al-ʿālamīn.A broader reservation that may be raised about Sinai’s dictionary is whether a strict boundary can be drawn between historical critical analysis of the Qur’an and exegesis. Is it possible for Sinai or another non-Muslim author to produce a work like this without essentially doing theology? Some of the entries—particularly ones that tackle terms connected to theological issues—give the impression that Sinai is himself doing a tafsir or acting as an arbiter of what constitutes the correct interpretation of the Qur’an, something that struck me most when reading his discussions about whether the Qur’an teaches predestination. Sinai formulates a rationale that the Qur’an should not on balance be seen as teaching predestination and that ultimately those who are guided by God deserve to be guided by virtue of the free choices they have made, and vice-versa for those who go astray (445–50, 700–706). While the rationale he gives would forge a coherent vision out of verses that might be seen as contradicting each other, there is an obvious question about whether the Qur’an’s original audiences would have understood the text in the same way that Sinai does, and if so, why the concept of predestination subsequently became widespread in Islam. Further, if the Qur’an is accepted to be a work of human composition, then is it simply the case that the author was inconsistent on the matter, and consequently Sinai is trying to impose a coherence on the text that is not there. Inconsistency in argumentation seems to be an all too human flaw! Should the Qur’an be excluded from that possibility if it is deemed to be a product of human composition and thought?In another instance, Sinai writes that the “Arab conquerors’ project of subjugating and exacting tribute from an agriculturalist monotheistic population, of the sort encountered in Byzantine Palestine, while resonant with Q 9:29 and 33:27, has only a weak scriptural foundation” (204, emphasis added). Here again, this feels like a theological pronouncement by Sinai. On what basis is there “a weak scriptural foundation” for those conquests? Not only do those conquests to the north seem to accord with the general tone of 9:29 as an injunction to fight the “people of scripture” (with no particular geographical specification) until they are subjugated and pay the poll-tax, but they can also fit with an interpretation of 9:123 as entailing a general axiom of fighting the disbelievers nearest to the believers in any given place—a verse that Sinai cites but interprets as going against the spirit of a global campaign to spread Islam (2024). If one accepts the general traditional outline of Muhammad’s life, it seems a very reasonable historical supposition that Muhammad’s message (as Sinai himself acknowledges) evolved into one presented as being for all humankind, that his success over his pagan rivals in Mecca and his Jewish rivals in Medina led him to call to expand beyond the Arabian Peninsula in a vision of uniting the world under the authority of his Ummah, and that the conquests immediately following his death were driven by this exhortation. The near contemporary Greek-language source document—the Doctrina Jacobi—gives the same impression in speaking of the “prophet” who emerged among the “Saracens” (Muslims) and the warning that one would not find any truth in this prophet but only “massacres of men” (surely a reference to a doctrine of holy war against disbelievers).3However, whatever reservations I have expressed here are minor in nature and should not detract from the overall appraisal of this work as an important scholarly contribution that is likely to be an essential reference work on the Qur’an for decades to come, being of great value to specialists and general readers alike.