The First Historical Thesaurus of Arabic is to be produced in Doha

Inspired by HTOED or The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies is preparing the the first Historical Thesaurus of Arabic. An academic linguistic institution with corporate personality under the authority of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, which is lead by Azmi Bishara,  was established specifically for this purpose.  It's Aims, according to their website are:

1. To produce a Historical Dictionary of the Arabic language.
2. To create a comprehensive Corpus of Arabic.
3. To derive sub-dictionaries from the Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language.
4. To publish lexicographical research and studies.​​​

A very much needed Dictionary indeed, but a huge task, I have to say.They are however taking it seriously. This is evident by their publication of a book called Towards an Arabic Historical Dictionary ​(439 pages).

To learn more about this project, s. here http://www.dohadictionary.org/EN/Pages/default.aspx