The Qur'an is the primary religious text for one-sixth of the world's population. Understood by Muslims to contain God's own words, it has been an object of reverence and of intense study for centuries. The thousands of volumes that Muslim scholars have devoted to qur'anic interpretation and to the linguistic, rhetorical and narrative analysis of the text are sufficient to create entire libraries of qur'anic studies. Drawing upon a rich scholarly heritage, Brill's "Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an" combines alphabetically arranged articles about the contents of the Qur'an. It is an encyclopaedic dictionary of qur'anic terms, concepts, personalities, place names, cultural history and exegesis extended with essays on the most important themes and subjects within qur'anic studies. The five volumes contain nearly 1000 entries. The projected publication date for Volume Four is autumn 2004, and autumn 2005 for Volume Five.