Abū Zakariyā Yaḥyā b. Ziyād b. ʿAbdallāh b. Manzūr ad-Daylamī, called al-Farrāʾ (born in 144/761 and died in 207/822), was a prominent member of the Kūfan school of Arab linguistics and author of a series of writings in the field of Qurʾānic philology. His most significant work, written just before his death, is usually known under the title: Maʿānī l-Qurʾān. The first page, however, calls it Tafsīr muškil iʿrāb al-Qurʾān wa-maʿānīhi (i.e. the book of problematic places of the Qurʾān). The book was first edited by a group of Egyptian scholars in Cairo (vol. I: A. Y. Naǧātī & M. ʿA. an-Naǧǧār, 1955; vol. II: M. ʿA. an-Naǧǧār, 1966; vol. III: ʿA. Šalabī & ʿA. an-Naǧdī, 1972). The present volume is an index and concordance of this work.

All the indices have been prepared on a computer. The whole text of the Cairo edition, containing 1207 pages and more than a quarter of a million words in three volumes, was typed in and then analyzed by OCP (Oxford Concordance Program).

The Cairo edition does not contain a useful index of Qur’ānic references. Vols. I. and III. are equipped with a table of contents, but vol. II. is not. However, even these tables of contents cannot be regarded as reference indexes because they do not contain a reference to a verse if it is not mentioned in its proper place but within the explanation of another verse. Our index is a complete reference index of the Qur’ānic verses in the book. Its only deficiency is that it does not differentiate between reference to a complete verse and reference to only a part of the verse.