The Vocabulary of the Qurʾān and Multilingualism in Arabia

This article examines five Qurʾānic lexical items—surādiq (Q 18:29), qiṭṭ (Q 38:16), ḥiṭṭah (Q 2:58; 7:161), fūm (Q 2:61), and yaqṭīn (Q 37:146)—through a theoretical framework that combines multilingualism in Arabia before Islam with muqārana, understood as comparative philological practice. Rather than simply asking whether each word is Arabic or foreign, the article evaluates each case through Qurʾānic context, Arabic morphology and lexicography, phonotactic markedness, comparative Semitic, Iranian, and Mediterranean evidence, variant readings (qirāʾāt), and early exegetical reception (tafsīr). Surādiq illustrates Iranian–Aramaic mediation in eschatological imagery; qiṭṭ and ḥiṭṭah show how documentary and religious-formulaic semantics may preserve older Semitic contact strata; fūm demonstrates how a Qurʾānic food term can be pulled between an archaic Arabic grain/bread meaning, non-canonical reading tradition, and harmonisation via Biblical comparison; and yaqṭīn functions as a control case against the over-identification of borrowings. The article argues that Qurʾānic vocabulary is best studied as multilingual lexical memory: a field in which etymology and exegesis interact without collapsing into a binary opposition between Arabic and foreign vocabulary.