IBN 'ABBAS'S AL-LUGHAT FI'L-QUR'AN

The study of Muslim lexicology concerned with the Qur'-n has a short but illustrious bibliography, the highlights of which may be summed up for the purposes of the following discussion by mentioning four people: Arthur Jeffery, whose Foreign vocabulary of the Qur'dn contains a lengthy introduction concerning various classical Muslim attempts to come to grips with the Qur'anic lexicon; 1 Chaim Rabin, who in his Ancient West-Arabian attempts to use a text which deals with dialect words in the Qur'an as one of his sources for the reconstruction of' pre-literary Arabic dialects'; 2 Lothar Kopf, who, through his articles and posthumously published dissertation extracts, exposes many of the trends and pitfalls in Arabic dictionaries, most notably those features which result from the influence of the Qur'an; 3 and John Wansbrough, who via his Quranic studies has treated us to his analysis of some of the early texts and has provided some very cogent and persuasive arguments concerning the motivations behind the compilation of such treatises.4 The primary works underlying all these studies are texts uniformly ascribed to 'Abd Allah ibn 'Abbas (d. c. 68/687), although for Jeffery and Kopf the actual texts employed were limited to those distilled primarily by al-Suyftti (d. 911/1505). Three such texts exist today and are listed by Sezgin under Ibn 'Abbds : 6