Concordance et indices de la Tradition Musulmane (8 vols)

This paperback edition of Wensinck's Concordance et Indices de la Tradition Musulmane serves a double purpose, one of a practical, the other of a more ideal nature. When the seventh and final volume of the Concordance was published in 1969 (followed in 1988 by the eighth volume which contains the Indices), both muslims and islamologists agreed that here was the completion of an enterprise of the highest importance. More than forty years of international academic team-work had resulted in a key to that highly diverse and far from homogeneous corpus that constitutes the canonic and most authoritative texts of Islamic Tradition, itself a major source for Islamic theology and law, and besides that, a goldmine of information on the history of ideas in the formative period of Islam.
Under the guidance of Wensinck and his successors many thousands of pages of sometimes poorly accessible works were indexed and an enormous amount of catchwords were recorded together with their context. With the combined efforts of editors, authors, sponsors, typographers and the publisher an extraordinary book was produced, in which three generations of scholars were involved.
This work has proven to be extremely useful for all those who professionally or confessionally are concerned with the Tradition literature of Islam. Much of the recent ḥadīt studies could not have been accomplished if no such work as the Concordance had existed. Wensinck's Concordance will continue to play its role as an essential research tool for quite a time.
The paperback edition is more modest in size but otherwise it is a complete and unabridged reprint of the first edition.