The word's field
Iman is the verbal noun of the fourth-form verb amana, "to believe, to grant safety, to hold trustworthy," itself built on the triliteral root a-m-n, which carries the twinned senses of security and trust. The same root gives amn (safety), amana (a trust held in keeping), and amin (the trustworthy one). From the outset the word binds two things a later analytic mind might separate: to have iman is at once to give one's assent to what is true and to be made safe by that assent. The believer is the one who is secured, and the one who can be trusted.
Across the tradition iman becomes the central term of a long theological argument about what belief is and where it lives. The grammarians and theologians asked whether iman is a matter of the tongue that professes, the heart that affirms, or the limbs that act — and the classic resolution, that it is assent of the heart, profession by the tongue, and enactment by the deed, holds all three together rather than choosing among them. A second, sharper question followed: whether iman admits of increase and decrease, or is a single indivisible state one either has or lacks. Both readings find warrant in the source text, and the dispute maps a genuine feature of the word, which names both a threshold crossed and a condition that deepens. In its mature usage iman is regularly paired against kufr, the covering-over or refusal of what is true, and distinguished from islam, submission enacted, so that iman comes to name the inward reality of which outward submission is the sign.
In the corpus
The Logoi Arabic corpus is a single work, the complete Quran, and within it the lemma iman is attested 45 times. Every occurrence falls, of necessity, in that one work — the figure is not the trace of a thin sample but the full count across the whole of the received text. For a word that names the tradition's cardinal inward act, a distribution concentrated entirely in scripture is exactly what one would expect: iman is not a term the corpus reports about from outside but one the text itself defines, tests, and demands.
The surfaces recovered by the concordance show the word carried through its case endings, imani, imanu, imana, the inflectional variation of a noun that stands now as subject, now as object, now in construct with a possessor. That grammatical mobility matches the word's semantic career: iman is something one has, something that is added to or taken from a person, and something belonging to a named community of believers.
Canonical moments
At The Quran 10:9 the word stands in construct with those who hold it, marking iman joined to right action as the ground on which the believers are guided. The locus places belief not as a bare mental state but as a footing, a thing one is set upon and led by.
The count's densest cluster sits in the second sura. At The Quran 2:93 iman appears in the register of rebuke, where what a people's belief commands of them is held against what they in fact did. At The Quran 2:108 and The Quran 2:109, consecutive verses, the word turns on the exchange of belief for its refusal and on the wish of some to turn believers back from their iman — the threshold sense of the word made vivid, belief as a boundary that can be crossed in either direction.
At The Quran 16:106 the word carries its gravest weight: the case of one whose heart remains at rest in iman even as the tongue, under compulsion, professes otherwise. Here the tradition's later doctrine finds its seat in the text — the true locus of belief is the heart's settled condition, which outward duress does not by itself unmake. The verse became a standard proof that iman is, at its core, an inward reality, and the packet records this surface twice, marking its salience in the concordance.
The word's world
Iman names the securing inward assent, and its natural companions across the Arabic wing draw the map of the inner person it presupposes. Its seat is the qalb, the heart that either rests in belief or is sealed against it; the drama of 16:106 is precisely a drama of the qalb. The breast that expands to receive belief or contracts against it is the sadr, and the same idiom of an opened or straitened chest attends iman throughout. Against belief stands the restless commanding self, the nafs, whose inclinations iman must govern; and the settling that iman brings to a heart is akin to the descent of sakina, the tranquility sent down upon believers.
Beyond its own wing, iman sits in the company of the great trust-and-fidelity words other traditions grew to name the same region. It answers to the Hebrew soul that must be secured and the heart that must be steadfast, near neighbor to leb, the biblical seat of will and conviction. Where Greek thought located conviction and confidence in the breath-and-spirit vocabulary of pneuma, iman keeps the accent on trust rather than inspiration. And against the Pali analysis of mind, iman stands close to saddha, the confidence that opens the path, though the Buddhist term looks toward practice where the Quranic term looks toward the truth of what is professed — a kinship best seen beside the disciplined attention of sati and the settled heart-mind of citta. Across all of them the shared intuition holds: belief is not a thought entertained but a footing taken, a securing of the whole person upon what it has judged trustworthy.
Grounding: corpus figures and citations from the live Logoi corpus record (receipt soul-word-journey-v0). Cross-references: qalb, sadr, nafs, sakina, leb, pneuma, sati, citta.