jawharah. It therefore belongs to the Arabised stratum of the language rather than to pristine, native Arabic—just like the words sijjīl (baked clay), istabraq (silk brocade), and other such borrowed terms. This word does not appear in the Qur’an; nevertheless, once it was adopted, its lexical meaning in Arabic remained the well-known sense of a precious stone.

Calling that which subsists in itself—or that which occupies a spatial locus—a “jawhar” (substance) is purely terminological. It is found neither in classical vocabulary nor in everyday usage, and it is not a designation established by the Sacred Law.

Some have even claimed that the term was taken from the writings of the ancients, such as the Greeks and others, for it