المعجم المفهرس لألفاظ القرآن الكريم بحاشية المصحف الشريف

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.