ABSTRACT
The present discussion is concerned with the linguistic pre-requisites of the exegete. For both mainstream and non-main stream scholars, the exegete of the Qur’an should possess advanced linguistic and stylistic competence in order to qualify for the elucidation of the Qur’anic text. The exegete is expected to be a professional linguist dexterous to provide an encyclopaedic bird’s-eye analysis of Qur’anic expressions. As a Qur’an scholar, the exegete should be acquainted with linguistic resources that deal with semantic syntax such as
(i) those that account for expressions that are not commonly used and also for the grammatically ambiguous expressions, that is, words which may have more than one grammatical analysis in terms of case ending or morphology, as well as
(ii) those which investigate the semantically ambiguous words and polysemous expressions.
