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...
