Following practices of respect and priority normative to the Islamic scholarly tradition, the first volume of IEQ begins with the entry on the Supreme Name, "Allah," followed by "Aḥmad," the second of the Prophet's two proper names in the Qurʾān, and proceeds thereafter in alphabetical order. The volume ends with the entry on the "Beautiful Names of Allah". Thus bounded by entries on the Divine, this inaugural volume of the seven-volume IEQ brings to an English readership a wealth of scholarly material not found in any other reference work on the Qurʾān. The first volume also includes a contextual introduction situating the project in the broader history of discourse on the Qurʾān. The forty-seven entries of this volume provide extensive original translations of source material and tap into a vast range of resources to present comprehensive and authoritative articles on concepts, persons, events, things, and places mentioned in the Qurʾān and its commentary tradition.