Al-Lu'lu' wal-Marjan (Pearls and Corals), 2 Volumes

Muhammad Fuad Abd al-Baqi was an Egyptian scholar, indexer, and editor whose al-Mu'jam al-Mufahras li-Alfaz al-Qur'an al-Karim — the first comprehensive concordance to every word in the Qur'an — fundamentally transformed the practical study of the Qur'anic text in the twentieth century. Born in Cairo in 1299 AH / 1882 CE, his early career was decidedly secular: he trained at the Khedival School of Agriculture and then worked as a senior agricultural surveyor for the Egyptian government, specializing in irrigation and land surveying. His turn to Islamic scholarship was the work of self-directed study during and after his civil service career.

Abd al-Baqi's al-Mu'jam al-Mufahras, completed in 1364 AH / 1945 CE, indexes every word in the Qur'an under its trilateral root, organizing all occurrences with their full surah-and-verse references — a labor of approximately fifteen years of manual cross-referencing that became, almost overnight, the indispensable reference for tafsir scholars, Qur'anic linguists, students, and translators worldwide. He also produced the still-standard print editions of Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Sunan Ibn Majah, Mu'jam Ahadith Sahih Muslim, al-Lu'lu' wa al-Marjan (a unified compilation of hadiths agreed upon by Bukhari and Muslim), and Mu'jam Gharib al-Qur'an, a glossary of unusual Qur'anic vocabulary based on Bukhari.

Abd al-Baqi died in Cairo in 1388 AH / 1968 CE. His editorial and indexing work, undertaken with the patience of a man trained in surveying and applied to the corpus of revelation and Prophetic tradition, gave the twentieth-century Muslim world a set of reference tools that scholars have relied on continuously for nearly eighty years and that have been the silent infrastructure beneath countless tafsir, hadith, and translation projects in every major language.

Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan was a Pakistani-Saudi physician, scholar, and translator best known for producing the first complete English translation of Sahih al-Bukhari and for co-translating the Qur'an into English with Shaykh Muhammad Taqi al-Din al-Hilali — a translation widely known as the Hilali-Khan or Noble Qur'an, distributed in millions of copies through the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur'an in Madinah. Born in 1346 AH / 1927 CE in Kasur in the Punjab, his family traced its origins to the Kheshgi Pashtun tribe of Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Trained as a physician, Dr. Khan earned his MBBS from the University of the Punjab in Lahore and a Diploma in Chest Diseases from the University of Wales. He moved to Saudi Arabia in the early years of the kingdom under King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud and served for fifteen years as Director of El-Sadad Hospital for Chest Diseases in Ta'if before relocating to Madinah, where he became Chief of the Department of Chest Diseases at the King's Hospital and later Director of the Islamic University of Madinah's clinic. Encouraged by Shaykh Ibn Baz to devote his English fluency to the service of Islamic scholarship, he embarked on the translation of Sahih al-Bukhari and the Qur'an under the supervision of the scholars of Madinah.

His nine-volume Sahih al-Bukhari translation became the standard English rendition for generations of English-speaking Muslims and non-Muslim researchers alike. The Hilali-Khan Qur'an, while widely circulated through Saudi state patronage, has also been the subject of scholarly debate over its interpretive approach and parenthetical insertions. Dr. Khan died in Madinah on 14 July 2021 / 1442 AH at the age of 94 and was buried at Jannat al-Baqi'.