Person
A twentieth-century Orientalist (1892–1959) who studied the early texts and the foreign words of the Quran.
What it means
Arthur Jeffery, an Australian scholar who taught in Cairo and at Columbia University, edited early variant readings in Materials for the History of the Text of the Qur’an (1937) and wrote on foreign vocabulary in the Quran (1938). His work is used by scholars of all views.
What the sources say
Muslim scholars reply that Arabic is rich in borrowed and shared words, as the Quran itself says of Arabic as “clear” (16:103, 26:195), and that the Quran’s text was kept by memorisation and by many written copies, so that variant readings, the qira’at, are known, studied and traced to the Prophet.