مِـن فَيْـضِ أبْحُـرِ عِلْمِـهِ القاموسـا مُـذْ مَـدَّ مَجْـدُ الديـنِ فِـي أيَّاَمِـهِ سِحْـرُ المَدائِـنِ حيـنَ ألْقَـى موسَـى ذَهَبَـت صِحـاحُ الجَوْهَـري كأنَّهـا
Ever since Majd al-Dīn supplied from the copious seas of his knowledge the Qāmūsal-Jawharī’s Ṣiḥāḥ vanished like sorcery in the cities when Moses threw the staff
This anonymous distich, quoted by Jalāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Abī Bakr al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505) in al-Muzhir fī ʿulūm al-lugha wa-anwāʿihā (“The Florid on the Disciplines of Language and their Types”) and by ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn Aḥmad al-Kawkabānī (d. 1207/1792) in Fulk al-Qāmūs (“The Ship to Navigate the Ocean/Qāmūs”),1 suggests that one famous dictionary, Majd al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Fīrūzābādī’s (d. 817/1415) al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ (“The Encompassing Ocean”), ultimately superseded another famous dictionary, al-Jawharī’s (d. ca. 400/1010) Tāj al-lugha wa-ṣiḥāḥ al-ʿarabiyya (“The Crown of Language and the Correct Uses of Arabic”), to the point that the latter disappeared entirely. Together with ʿAlī ibn Ismāʿīl Ibn Sīda’s (d. 458/1066) al-Muḥkam wa-l-muḥīṭ al-aʿẓam (“The Masterly: The Greatest Comprehensive Dictionary”), al-Jawharī’s Ṣiḥāḥ was considered the best in its genre. Both dictionaries were products of the late fourth/tenth century. Considering the lexicographical production of the post-formative period, why did later authors make the effort to add their own dictionaries to those masterpieces? If all had been said on the matter, why did established scholars keep returning to it? And if the Qāmūs did indeed replace the Ṣiḥāḥ, as these verses suggest, then how come the Ṣiḥāḥ remained so popular?
One part of the answer to this question, I will argue, lies in the controversies that lexicographers of the post-formative period addressed; another part lies in the objectives they pursued and the forms they adopted. In the first part of this chapter, I will guide the reader through the different kinds of lexicographical engagement in the post-formative period to show how these controversies, objectives, and forms kept the genre alive and generated a vibrant intellectual culture of language scholarship. I will also touch upon the practical role of lugha as opposed to its theoretical treatment in dictionaries. For lexicographers, ʿilm al-lugha may have been an aim in and of itself, and one of the possible scholarly paths to perennial fame. However, most of their audience did not read dictionaries for the sheer fun of it, but to apply the acquired knowledge to their own fields. What did these scholars use knowledge of lugha for, and how did they work with it? The example of ḥadīth scholarship will illustrate the role of dictionaries in knowledge production during the post-formative period.
To understand how Arabic lexicography worked, particularly in the post-formative period, I will first sketch a somewhat broader picture of the prevalent form of intellectual production during this period: the commentary. I argue that all lexicographical activity can ultimately be understood as commentarial activity, and that viewing it in that way is immensely helpful for accessing the genre.
1 The Commentary Tradition
A commentary, in its broadest sense, is the interpretation of a text (often called the master text, base text, or hypotext).2 A commentator selects keywords or key phrases (lemmata)3 to comment upon because they find them ambiguous, altogether unclear, or because they know that different opinions about the interpretation circulate and they wish to collect these opinions, possibly to follow up with their own position on the matter. In a stricter sense of the term, a commentary discusses an entire master text, word by word or line by line.
In a definition proposed by Eric van Lit, any text that displays “structural textual correspondence” with a hypotext could be termed a commentary; it is this definition that informs his use of the term “commentary tradition.” A commentary sensu stricto is a hypertext that “shows structural textual correspondence and contains the complete hypotext.” I propose an even broader definition: a commentary is any text that shows “intentional textual correspondence” with a hypotext. This definition includes all forms of engagement with a hypotext that are common in lexicography.4
Commentary was the prevalent form of Arabic scholarly literature in the post-formative period.5 Long regarded as the product of intellectual stagnation and decline, the commentary tradition has undergone a reassessment in recent decades.6 In the field of Arabic and Islamic studies, scholars such as Walid Saleh and Asad Q. Ahmed have argued that commentaries are by no means the product of fossilised scholarly culture but rather reflect lively and complex debates “in the margins” that deserve serious study.7 These debates can only be traced through careful reading of the commentary or gloss (sharḥ/ḥāshiya) with the master text (matn), analysing how a commentary interacts not only with the master text but also with other first-order commentaries (horizontally); or, in case of a gloss,8 how it interacts with a commentary and a master text (vertically) (see Figure 1).9 It has been noted that commentators and glossators did not often explicitly mention whose opinions they were engaging with,10 which, as we will see in this chapter, may complicate analysis. This also indicates that commentary was not simply about quoting and refuting one’s direct predecessors but rather presupposed a thorough knowledge of the entire tradition.
As for its form, a commentary is generally conceived as a work in its own right, framed by an introduction and possibly also by a concluding statement. Roughly, three forms of commentary can be distinguished: the running commentary, which explains the master text word by word or line by line; the lemmatic commentary, which picks out keywords or key phrases to comment upon; and the interwoven commentary (sharḥ mamzūj), which integrates the master text into the commentary.11
The introduction to a commentary often states the author’s reasons for penning the text. A motivation may be that no commentaries on the master text in question yet existed, or that the commentator deemed the existing commentaries insufficient. Often, the author claimed to write upon request, which may also be the case when the commentary is written by the same author as the master text (auto- or self-commentary).12 A commentary quotes the relevant portions (lemmata) of the master text so that the reader may understand the commentary without having to consult another book containing the master text. In the manuscript book, the lemmata are often rubricated, i.e., highlighted in red ink, or overlined with red or black ink. Conversely, a gloss—a second-order engagement with the master text—is typically written in the margin of a manuscript, referring directly to the passage next to it. In early printed books, commentaries and glosses considered authoritative were printed in the margins or added as footnotes to the master text or commentary.13
A common way of commentating was a layered treatment of the lemma: the commentator would start with the lexical level (lugha/lafẓ), then move to the grammatical (iʿrāb) and semantic (maʿnā) levels; depending on the type of text, these might be followed by a metaphorical level (majāz).14 Figure 2 shows an example of glosses on the famous poem Bānat Suʿād by the poet Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr (d. ca. 26/664). The example highlights three different levels of commentary (al-alfāẓ, “the vocal forms,” iʿrāb, “inflection,” and al-ḥāṣil, “the purport/meaning”), using a red caption for each of these levels.
Figure 2
Glosses on Bānat Suʿād relating to al-alfāẓ and al-iʿrāb (on the right), and al-ḥāṣil (on the left). According to a note on fol. 10b, the glosses were written in the year 833/1430. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – PK, Landberg 873, fol. 4a
1.1 Forms of Commentary
The commentary form may not be what first comes to mind as a practical way of engaging with word lists, which ultimately constitute the content of lexicography. More practical forms would be the supplement (takmila, dhayl) or abridgement (mukhtaṣar). Supplements are often regarded as essential additions to a master text. Cases in point are al-Takmila wa-l-dhayl wa-l-ṣila li-kitāb Tāj al-lugha wa-ṣiḥāḥ al-ʿarabiyya (“The Completion, Appendix and Continuation to the Crown of Language and Correct Uses of Arabic”) by Raḍī al-Dīn al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad al-Ṣaghānī (d. 650/1259) and the Ḥawāshī (“Glosses”, also known as al-Tanbīh wa-l-īḍāḥ ʿammā waqaʿa fī al-Ṣiḥāḥ, “The Information and Clarification on What is Going on in al-Ṣiḥāḥ”) by Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Barrī (d. 582/1187). Both supplement Ismāʿīl ibn Ḥammād al-Jawharī’s (d. ca. 400/1010) Ṣiḥāḥ, and later authors cite them in conjunction with the master text. A mukhtaṣar, on the other hand, can serve as a suitable replacement of an unwieldy master text. In some narratives of the history of lexicography, Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Zubaydī’s (d. 379/989) Mukhtaṣar al-ʿAyn (“Abridgement of al-ʿAyn”) replaced Kitāb al-ʿAyn.15 This goes to show that derivative works can become part of the canon.
In my understanding of commentary and the commentary tradition, all these engagements with a master text can be viewed as first-order commentaries (Figure 3).
1.2 The Dictionary as a Commentary
It may seem counterintuitive to understand dictionaries as commentaries, but, as I will show here, their form is distinctly commentarial. We often think of dictionaries as bulky volumes containing the entire lexicon of a given language. However, arguably, the discipline of lugha arose from much more modest origins: the urgent need to explain obscure words.16 This aetiology is supported by the first Qurʾān commentaries which explained gharīb (“rare” or even hapax, singular) expressions and figurative meanings of Qurʾanic words.17 It is also supported by the fact that commonly used words, when included in the dictionaries, often did not receive a definition but were merely followed by the word maʿrūf (“known”). One of the first dictionaries, Abū ʿAmr al-Shaybānī’s (d. 206/821) Kitāb al-Jīm (“The Book of the Letter Jīm”), technically belongs to the gharīb genre, as the author confines himself to discussing rare words from Arabic dialects.18 In the seventh/thirteenth century, al-Ṣaghānī, the aforementioned author of a takmila to al-Ṣiḥāḥ, also wrote several independent dictionaries, the most voluminous of which was al-ʿUbāb al-zākhir wa-l-lubāb al-fākhir (“The Abundant Floods and the Absolute Prime”). In its introduction, al-Ṣaghānī provides a list of all his sources, starting with a number of gharīb al-ḥadīth works—not because their authors come first (there is no alphabetical or chronological order), but because al-Ṣaghānī obviously considered rare expressions from ḥadīth to be central for the conception of his dictionary.19 A dictionary constitutes a selection of these lemmata, diligently plucked out of the flower field of language—and the body of each entry serves as the commentary.
Another argument for viewing dictionaries as commentaries is the fact that they explicitly engage with one another. The introductions often set the stage: authors mention previous works whose errors they intend to correct and whose omissions they aim to supplement. Even if an author does not explicitly name his sources and objects of criticism in the introduction, any dictionary can still be regarded as a commentary, as they all discuss multiple strands of a tradition that had not been combined before (see Figure 4 for some examples; the titles will be discussed later in this chapter).
Figure 4
Dependency relations between dictionaries from the formative (black) and post-formative (blue) periods
1.3 Functions of the Commentary Form
We can therefore understand lexicography as the practice of commentating on words that require explanation, with the dictionary serving as a commentary on those words. This is further evident from the structure and content of a lemma in lexicography, which explains a word on a lexical, grammatical, semantic, and metaphorical level—mirroring, as shown above, the ways in which a commentary may discuss its lemmata.
I highlight this again because seeing a dictionary in this way can help better understand the Arabic lexicographical tradition of the post-formative period and its significance for intellectual history. This perspective helps us grasp how this genre remained so vibrant even after the ‘classical’ dictionaries secured their place in the canon. The commentary form provided multiple advantages for lexicography. But what role did the dictionaries as commentaries play in the post-formative period? I identify three main functions: a) consolidating the corpus, b) (re-)arranging content, and c) ensuring the transmission of content.
1.3.1 Consolidation of the Corpus
A discussion of critical points of disagreement between the authorities in lugha of the formative period was needed to consolidate the Arabic lexicon. As mentioned in the introduction, the possibility of ‘discovering’ new lexical items expired after the epochs of reliable usage (ʿuṣūr al-iḥtijāj).20 Among the last lexicographers to obtain their material directly from Bedouin informants were Abū Manṣūr Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Azharī (d. 370/980), the author of Tahdhīb al-lugha (“The Refinement of the Language”), and al-Jawharī, the author of al-Ṣiḥāḥ.21 After the corpus was fixed, language specialists compared between transmitted works of lugha to establish the data and arguments they found most convincing.22 This motive to compare and consolidate is what drove the bulk of the commentaries written on certain dictionaries—mainly those on al-Ṣiḥāḥ and al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ.
1.3.2 (Re-)Arrangement of Content
In tandem with the consolidation of material, new perspectives emerged as to how much of the corpus should be presented and how it should be arranged. To achieve this, the authors considered the users of their work, as can be gleaned from texts on the classification of the disciplines that proliferated in the post-formative period. The eighth/fourteenth-century scholar and physician Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm Ibn al-Akfānī (d. 749/1348) wrote a compendium of the sciences entitled Irshād al-qāṣid ilā asnā al-maqāṣid (“Guiding the Seeker to the Most Radiant Aim”). For each discipline, he lists examples of its best books, categorising them into three types: mukhtaṣar (“abridgement”), mutawassiṭ (“medium length book”), and mabsūṭ (“elaborate treatment”).23 It stands to reason—as evidenced most saliently in the introduction to al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ (discussed further below)—that a lexicographer made a deliberate choice for one of these formats, depending on how they wished their work to be used and received. Even when the author aspired to create a multi-volume work, they might opt for a shorter discussion.24
Another issue to be solved before a lexicographer could begin writing was the question of arrangement. As mentioned in the Introduction, lexicographers of the post-formative period could choose between at least three different arrangements: rhyme order, alphabetical order by the first (root) letter, and phonetic-permutative order. Although rhyme order was most popular since al-Jawharī, relevant sources using other arrangements existed, such as Ibn Sīda’s Muḥkam, which followed al-Khalīl’s phonetic-permutative arrangement.25 Incorporating the content of such a dictionary into another structure required a complete rearrangement of the lemmata—an intervention that also involved decisions about the placement of certain roots. The choice of a specific arrangement was often explained and justified in the introduction and paired with a critique of other arrangements.26
1.3.3 Concern for the Transmission of Content
Another motive for engaging with earlier texts and the often verbatim incorporation of older material—which, to my mind, has not been stressed enough—is the simple need to secure the (correct) transmission of the material. Manuscript books were fragile carriers of information; in the case of multi-volume dictionaries, they were also expensive and hard to come by. Moreover, their content needed to be checked for misspellings and other errors by an expert. In the introduction of al-ʿUbāb al-zākhir, an instance of misspelling (taṣḥīf) found in another dictionary prompts al-Ṣaghānī to say: “I blame [the mistake] on an error made by the copyists, not the specialists.”27 In the process of copying for private use, as many scholars did, they could also decide to rework the text into a dictionary of their own. The most striking example is surely Ibn Manẓūr’s (d. 711/1311) Lisān al-ʿarab, which constituted a five-in-one compilation of earlier lexicographical sources.
The oral-aural instruction practice of the formative period also continued to play a role in the transmission of (lexical) knowledge in later times. However, while lexicographers such as Majd al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Fīrūzābādī (d. 817/1415), the author of al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, certainly taught their own works, they could not have collected all their data from oral instruction alone. It is clear that they used manuscript copies for their own compilations. This is demonstrated by the extensive, though often not exhaustive, lists of sources in the introductions to some dictionaries, such as al-Ṣaghānī’s al-ʿUbāb al-zākhir and, much later, Muḥammad Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī’s (d. 1205/1790) Tāj al-ʿarūs min jawāhir al-Qāmūs (“The Bridal Crown from the Jewels of the Qāmūs/Ocean”).28 Al-Zabīdī’s list of sources even provides details on the status of the manuscripts (draft or fair copy) he had at his disposal and the libraries from which he obtained them.29 Al-Ṣaghānī similarly devotes part of his introduction to addressing incorrect riwāya (“transmission,” in this case also attribution) found in some lines of poetry cited by the lexicographers al-Azharī, al-Jawharī, and Aḥmad Ibn Fāris al-Rāzī (d. 395/1004), therefore using the framework of his own new dictionary to amend the errors he found in others.30 Thus, in many cases, transmission also entailed correction.
These three motives propelled the production of Arabic dictionaries during the post-formative period. However, the situation was more complex. The field of lexicography engaged with a well-known and widely circulated body of texts and words, whose correctness had been confirmed in the fourth/tenth century at the latest—it seemed there was nothing new to uncover. How, then, could all these new dictionaries receive any attention? How did the lughawiyyūn of the post-formative period ensure that their own texts were transmitted, circulated, and meaningfully engaged with? In the following section, we will look at how lexicographers secured their place in posterity by equipping their work for further engagement.
2 How to Invite Commentary
An author knows that the success of their book is only achieved through engagement—that is, continued reception through transmission, which not only involves oral transmission but also the physical act of copying, engagement through commentary, controversy, etc. Regarding philosophical texts, Asad Q. Ahmed argues that “the author of a lemma deliberately presents his argument in a truncated and allusive form, so that it may serve as a prompt for perpetuating a living philosophical dialectic.”31 Eric Van Lit takes issue with this suggestion, stating that “[a]t best this is an interesting possibility that could be tested, but so far it has remained an unfounded notion.”32 While I cannot assess the validity of this assertion for the field of philosophy, I find it applicable to the discipline of lexicography in the post-formative period. It is reasonable to assume that a scholar considers the reception of their text already during the writing process.33 A prime example of a lexicographical text employing the “truncated and allusive form” that Ahmed describes—practically begging for explanation—is al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, the late eighth/fourteenth-century dictionary we have already encountered a few times now. Its form, along with its author’s justification for its form and size, make it particularly suited for commentary and critique.
2.1 Keeping It Short: al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ
Born in the town of Kārizīn near Shīrāz on Ilkhanid territory in the year 729/1329, Majd al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Fīrūzābādī studied in Shīrāz, Wāṣiṭ, Baghdad, and Damascus. He later resided in Jerusalem, Mecca, and the Yemen, where he became closely acquainted with the Rasūlid sultan al-Malik al-Ashraf Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAbbās (r. 803/1377–927/1400). During this time, he served as a qāḍī in Zabīd and married the sultan’s daughter.34
Al-Fīrūzābādī was a prolific writer, with his extant and lost works reflecting contributions across disciplines that include adab, fiqh, ḥadīth, and lugha.35 However, the number of al-Fīrūzābādī’s works that strictly belong to the realm of lugha surpasses his contributions to all other disciplines.36 Vivian Strotmann identifies twelve shorter, topical lexicological treatises among his work, including Anwāʾ al-ghayth fī asmāʾ al-layth (“The Rainstorm on the Names of the Lion”), al-Jalīs al-anīs fī asmāʾ al-khandarīs (“The Sociable Companion on the Names of Old Wine”), and several treatises on muthallathāt, words that have three different meanings depending on their vocalisation with ḍamma, fatḥa, or kasra.37
Al-Fīrūzābādī’s masterstroke is undoubtedly al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, the dictionary that, according to the distich quoted at the outset of this chapter, rendered al-Ṣiḥāḥ obsolete.38 In its introduction, the author explains the genesis of al-Qāmūs: he began by writing a dictionary that combined the finest two works in the field,39 Ibn Sīda’s al-Muḥkam and al-Ṣaghānī’s al-ʿUbāb al-zakhir. Both lexica were appreciated for their comprehensiveness, but al-Fīrūzābādī soon realised that compiling such a work would amount to a dictionary of about sixty volumes, “which would render students unable to attain it; and so I was asked to prioritise a concise book of the same arrangement.”40 If we take this statement as more than a topos, it suggests that the author of al-Qāmūs was requested to produce a mukhtaṣar of his originally intended work. Moreover, it reflects his intention to make his work widely used. He made deliberate pragmatic decisions to achieve concision and comprehensiveness. The result, as he terms it in the introduction, is an extract (khulāṣa) of both dictionaries, condensing the initially devised sixty volumes into two.
The most striking intervention al-Fīrūzābādī made, compared to the works of his predecessors in the field, was undoubtedly the omission of shawāhid (probative quotations or proof texts) from his entries. As noted, the need to explain rare words was the rationale behind the early manifestations of Arabic lexicography. To show how these words were used in context—and no less importantly, to prove their usage—single or multiple lines of poetry were cited within a lemma. The inclusion of a host of verses in a dictionary also served a practical function. Often the rhyme word was the rare word needing explanation, because it might be recherché for the sake of rhyme or have an unusual form for the sake of metre. On a manuscript page, lines of poetry were set apart in the layout, mostly by marking them (e.g., with red dots, and/or indenting them; see also Figure 7). They more easily caught the eye of the reader than the surrounding running text and could thus function as a finding aid.
The fact that al-Fīrūzābādī felt at ease deleting almost all of the shawāhid demonstrates just how much the corpus of the ʿarabiyya had been established by the eighth/fourteenth century. Quotations that had formerly served to prove that a word belonged to kalām al-ʿarab were apparently no longer needed for this purpose—at least in the view of the author of al-Qāmūs.41 By contrast, Ibn Manẓūr, the author of Lisān al-ʿarab, who had completed his masterpiece roughly a century earlier, chose to retain not only the shawāhid but all source material, even at the cost of stark redundancy in many lemmata. As we will see in subsequent chapters, later lexicographers also continued to retain poetry quotations as a central feature of both comprehensive and specialised lexicons.
Another method of saving space, as announced by al-Fīrūzābādī in his muqaddima, was the introduction of new abbreviations. These included not just the mīm for meanings that are known (maʿrūf)—an abbreviation that was already used by al-Jawharī—but also the letter ʿayn for mawḍiʿ (“place,” i.e., a toponym), dāl for balad (“town”), tāʾ marbūṭa for qarya (“village”) and jīm for jamʿ (“plural”).42 Al-Fīrūzābādī also announced his adoption of a consistent method of mentioning regular feminine forms and verb vocalisation, all aimed at saving space:
And among the novelties of its brevity and the elegant layout of its concision is the fact that, whenever I mention the masculine form, I follow it up with the feminine by saying “and it is with hāʾ [i.e, tāʾ marbūṭa]” and I do not repeat the form itself; and whenever I mention the maṣdar exclusively or the perfect without the imperfect, this means that the verb follows the pattern of kataba [i.e., kataba—yaktubu] and if I mention the imperfect without further qualification [i.e., of the vocalisation of the second root letter], it follows the pattern of ḍaraba [i.e., ḍaraba—yaḍribu].43
This encoding of morphological information through the presentation of a lemma was a novelty introduced to Arabic lexicography by al-Fīrūzābādī, reflecting how keen he was on achieving brevity. For the reader, however, this innovation made reading the introduction (or studying it with a teacher, or even reading a commentary on it) indispensable for using the dictionary. Al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ is arguably the first and only Arabic dictionary that requires such instruction. By omitting the need to spell out the vocalisation of verb forms, the lemmata indeed became considerably shorter. A way to avoid spelling out the vocalisation of a noun was to use words with well-known and uncontested vocalisation as paradigms for the form explained in the lemma. A random example is al-kurrāth: ka-rummān wa-kuttān, “al-kurrāth: [vocalised] like rummān and kuttān.”44 The particle ka‑ places the form of a word in parallel with a more familiar word; al-Jawharī used the longer expression mithāl … to signal the same pattern.
The interventions al-Fīrūzābādī made to reduce the size of his dictionary had an additional advantage for the reader: even comparatively longer entries of al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, where one might look for a specific form or usage, became much easier to navigate than those in other dictionaries. One example suffices to illustrate the difference in proportions of the same lemma, ʾ-b-z, between al-Ṣiḥāḥ (on the right) and al-Qāmūs (on the left):
|
al-Qāmūs, s.r. |
al-Ṣiḥāh, s.r. |
|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Even though al-Fīrūzābādī’s lemma is much shorter (38 words versus 78 words in al-Ṣiḥāḥ), it contains more morphological information, such as the maṣdar and derived nouns, and gives a broader range of meanings for abaza and related nouns. (In this case, al-Fīrūzābādī opted not to omit the imperfect/perfect form, likely because abaza (“to jump”) is a hamzated verb.) By contrast, al-Jawharī cites two different poets—whose names he does not mention but who were probably easily identified by his audience—on the meaning of abāz and abūz. He then clarifies the correct reading of ḥamala/jamala bni kūz with a reference to the Baghdadī grammarian Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad Ibn Kīsān (d. 299/912), who, in turn, cites his teacher Thaʿlab (d. 291/904). Al-Jawharī thus provides an isnād here, though on a topic unrelated to the lemma itself. While sharḥ of poetry quotations and other extraneous aspects was part and parcel of a dictionary entry, al-Fīrūzābādī freed himself of the need to explain obscure verses by leaving out the poetry altogether.45
The pithy prose of the Qāmūs puts into focus a function of the text that is often neglected and somewhat difficult to imagine in the context of lexicography: its use as a curricular text. It may seem far-fetched to think of the Qāmūs as a schoolbook, but it certainly must have been taught; it can even be argued that its language is a testimony to such use.46 Once again, Asad Q. Ahmed’s observations on philosophy may serve as a useful template. Referring to an eleventh/seventeenth-century treatise on logic, Sullam al-ʿulūm (“The Ladder of the Disciplines”) by Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī (d. 1118/1707), Ahmed notes that “[t]he allusive and packed language of the Sullam suggests that it was very likely written as a curricular text, one whose lemmata were prompts that allowed space for philosophical elaboration, exploration, dispute, and controlled digressions in the teaching sessions.”47 Similarly, the “allusive and packed language” of the Qāmūs allowed space for these functions. It is reasonable to assume that many of the commentaries written on the Qāmūs were (by)products of teaching and studying. In 2004, Robert Wisnovsky observed that “the shorter an original text is, the more likely it is to attract the interest of commentators,” and took a “guess at several reasons for this:”
(a) with short works there is much to decompress, in other words, much exegetical work remains to be done; (b) underdetermined texts offer the commentator greater opportunity to try out new ideas and arguments; (c) short works are useful as introductory texts in school settings; (d) commenting on a short work requires less of a commitment of time and energy than commenting on a long work; (e) short works are easier to transport when one goes on a study-abroad trip (riḥla fī ṭalab al-ʿilm); and (f) short works are cheaper and quicker to copy than long treatises.48
The combination of comprehensiveness and concision, described as “on the verge of rendering one incapable” (ʿan ḥadd al-iʿjāz),49 is an important aspect that made the Qāmūs particularly attractive for later scholars.50 Its terseness, while potentially obscure, became an asset rather than a hindrance to further study. The Qāmūs-commentary of Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā al-Qarāfī (d. 1008/1600), an Egyptian jurist,51 was aptly called al-Qawl al-maʾnūs bi-fatḥ mughlaq al-Qāmūs (“The Intimate Talk on Unlocking the Qāmūs”).52 Its obscurity, however, was by no means the only aspect that caught the attention of later scholars.
2.2 Al-Qāmūs’ Claim to Superiority
In the middle of his introduction, al-Fīrūzābādī mentions another pursuit, one that was bound—and likely intended—to spark controversy. He realised that people were appreciative of al-Jawharī’s Ṣiḥāḥ, even though its author had “missed half of the language or more, either through omitting the lemma or leaving out rare and deviating usages.”53 Consequently, he selected al-Ṣiḥāḥ to be his object of engagement, noting that “despite the obvious errors and embarrassing mistakes in most part of it, it is widely circulating and famous; teachers rely on it for its transmitted content and proof texts.”54 This statement suggests that al-Fīrūzābādī believed that the fame of his predecessor’s work could rub off on his own dictionary through direct engagement. He sought to demonstrate the superiority of the Qāmūs by “indicating with red ink the lemmata that al-Jawharī had omitted” (see Figure 5 for an example).55
If one regards comprehensiveness as the main objective of a dictionary, as al-Fīrūzābādī obviously did, his criticism of al-Jawharī is not unwarranted. The title al-Ṣiḥāḥ (full title: Tāj al-lugha wa-ṣiḥāḥ al-ʿarabiyya, “The Crown of lugha and the Correct Uses of Arabic”) is indicative of method: al-Jawharī never intended to include everything, but only that which he deemed correct.56 Of course such an approach can lead to controversy, because, contrary to ḥadīth studies, where the label ṣaḥīḥ is used for ḥadīth whose trustworthiness is established beyond doubt through an impeccable chain of transmission (isnād), there is no such formal categorisation in lexicography; isnāds were indeed used in the discipline, but not in a consistent manner.57 Al-Jawharī’s short introduction does not give us much to work with. His only reference to his method of selection is that he “laid down in [the book] what [he] found to be correct from this language whose position was elevated by God.”58 In contrast, al-Fīrūzābādī, as apparent from both the title of his book and the introduction, wishes that his work encompasses the correct (fuṣaḥ) as well as the rare (shawārid) usages.59
Figure 5
A copy of al-Qāmūs in which the lemmata “missing” from al-Ṣiḥāḥ are written in red, whereas the lemmata also present in al-Ṣiḥāḥ are written in bold black. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – PK, Landberg 83, fol. 331b, copied 946/1540
By the time al-Fīrūzābādī voiced his criticism of al-Ṣiḥāḥ, the book had already attained the status of a classic of lexicography. Its arrangement (the so-called “rhyme order,” muqaffā60), in specific, had been widely lauded and adopted by most lexicographers after the fourth/tenth century, most notably by Ibn Manẓūr (see below) and, of course, by al-Fīrūzābādī himself.61 Al-Ṣiḥāḥ was first abridged and translated into Persian in the seventh/thirteenth century62 and later into Turkish in the tenth/sixteenth century,63 serving as a template for other bilingual dictionaries of the Arabic language. The debate over whether to give preference to Ṣiḥāḥ or Qāmūs spilled over to Europe in the late sixteenth century, when both dictionaries were ‘discovered’ by the first orientalists.64
Not only did al-Fīrūzābādī mark the lemmata that al-Jawharī had omitted, he also took care to point out errors within individual entries, often with the phrase wa-wahima l-Jawharī fī … (“and al-Jawharī was wrong in …”). As an example, I cite the lemma ḥabanṭaʾ (“short and fat, big-bellied”) in al-Ṣiḥāḥ and al-Qāmūs. The parts of the text marked in red are common to both lemmata:
|
al-Qāmūs, s.r. |
al-Ṣiḥāḥ, s.r. |
|---|---|
|
|
|
The first point to note about this lemma is that each dictionary lists it to a different root: al-Jawharī considers it to be from the root ḥ-b-ṭ, whereas al-Fīrūzābādī identifies the hamza as the third root letter. Al-Fīrūzābādī explicitly critiques this an “error,” asserting that “al-Jawharī was wrong in citing it after the root ḥ-ṭ-ʾ”—recall that in the rhyme order, ḥ-b-ṭ indeed comes after ḥ-ṭ-ʾ. Determining a word’s correct root was, of course, a main task of a lexicographer and often sparked serious controversy, especially with four- or five-root-letter-words, as in this example. The rhyme order made it essential to identify the last root letter, as it was the primary criterion for arrangement, followed by the first letter.
For our purpose, it is neither necessary nor desirable to establish which author was “correct.” What matters is that al-Fīrūzābādī plainly stated where he found al-Jawharī to be wrong—an intervention that motivated later authors to engage with the Qāmūs through commentaries that focused on whether al-Fīrūzābādī’s critique was justified. These works painstakingly examined each of the alleged awhām wāḍiḥa and aghlāṭ fāḍiḥa attributed to al-Jawharī. By explicitly pointing out his disagreements, al-Fīrūzābādī invited such scrutiny. A recent study of his critique of al-Jawharī identifies a total of 373 points directed at al-Ṣiḥāḥ, spanning morphology, semantics, spelling, probative quotations and reliable transmission, al-Jawharī’s corrections (of older sources), and syntax.65
2.3 Counter-Criticism at al-Qāmūs
The question of who ‘got it right’ generated a significant body of texts. The first was Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī’s al-Ifṣāḥ fī zawāʾid al-Qāmūs ʿalā al-Ṣiḥāḥ (“The Frank Statement Regarding the Qāmūs’ Additions to the Ṣiḥāḥ”).66 Treatises comparing Ṣiḥāḥ and Qāmūs proliferated particularly during the eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries. The phenomenon spanned the entire region and period where Arabic served as the language of scholarship, as apparent by the treatise al-Wishāḥ wa-tathqīf al-rimāḥ fī radd tawhīm al-Majd al-Ṣiḥāḥ (“The Swordbelt and the Straight Arrows in Refuting the Accusations of al-Majd at al-Ṣiḥāḥ”) by the maghribī scholar ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿAbd al-Azīz al-Tādilī (d. ca. 1200/1785).67 How can we explain this phenomenon? One answer lies in the context of education. The Ṣiḥāḥ vs. Qāmūs debate, which the Qāmūs instigated, parallels scholarly controversies found in other fields of commentary culture, such as rhetoric. Differences of opinion between a commentator and the author of a master text were highlighted in subsequent commentary literature, becoming staples of debate in the classroom. In his analysis of the commentaries arising from Yūsuf ibn Abī Bakr al-Sakkākī’s (d. 626/1229) rhetoric manual Miftāḥ al-ʿulūm (“The Key to the Displines”), William Smyth observed that
[t]he perceived dispute between the two authors was not simply an interesting point to which the teacher might allude in class, but a topic which students were obliged to memorize along with everything else.68 […] Choosing a text in this environment meant something like taking sides, and the competitive element must surely have added life to what was a difficult and abstruse curriculum.69
The question of whether the Qāmūs was given preference over the Ṣiḥāḥ must have fulfilled a similar function in the madrasa. From today’s perspective, seeing these commentaries as part of a lively debate instead of a dull repetition of arguments (or even part of a “difficult and abstruse curriculum”) may help us understand their popularity and the continued engagement with the same topic.
The truncated and therefore often obscure lemmata of al-Qāmūs were noted and criticised by the twelfth/eighteenth-century Yemeni grammarian al-Kawkabānī, who authored a short treatise titled Fulk al-Qāmūs (“The Ship to Navigate the Ocean/Qāmūs”). While the treatise offers practical tips for using the Qāmūs, as promised by its title, it also indulges in criticism explaining why the Qāmūs has not superseded the Ṣiḥāḥ, despite its popularity as evidenced by the distich quoted at the outset of this chapter. Among the nine flaws (ʿuyūb) of the Qāmūs al-Kawkabānī identifies, “the first is the fact that its author, God have mercy on him, overdid it with concision, to the point that he added to it puzzles and riddles that only few brilliant minds understand.”70 He clearly did not consider al-Qāmūs better than al-Ṣiḥāḥ, arguing:
As for the Qāmūs: even if today people rely on it, they cannot attain the status of one of those scholars. However, I have traced much of what al-Majd [Majd al-Dīn al-Fīrūzābādī] and others have claimed that al-Jawharī was wrong about—and I have found it to be correct.71
This critique also serves to direct positive attention to the critic. Al-Kawkabānī was not one to blindly follow his contemporaries; he critically engaged with the content of the Qāmūs and compared it to the Ṣiḥāḥ, believing that a re-assessment was in order.
According to al-Kawkabānī, the fact that al-Fīrūzābādī strongly criticised the Ṣiḥāḥ in his introduction makes him even more culpable for the errors in the Qāmūs:
He said that al-Jawharī overlooked half of the language or more, either because he omitted the lemma or by leaving out the rare meanings in Arabic. After such a statement he should not have omitted anything that al-Jawharī did mention!72
2.4 Ottoman Engagement in the Debate Ṣiḥāḥ-Qāmūs
A few decades before al-Kawkabānī, in the centre of the Ottoman Empire, another scholar countered the criticism of al-Fīrūzābādī. Muḥammad ibn Muṣṭafā ibn Kamāl ibn Dāwūd al-Rūmī, known in Turkish as Karadāvudzāde Meḥmed (d. 1169/1756), spent most of his life in Istanbul as a teacher, with a brief period serving as a judge in Damascus.73 Karadāvudzāde wrote poetry in Turkish, composed a Turkish commentary on Muḥammad al-Jazūlī’s (d. 870/1465) famous prayer book Dalāʾil al-khayrāt (“Waymarks of Benefits”), authored an Arabic treatise on Persian proverbs, and produced a commentary on Ibrāhīm Ibn al-Ajdābī’s (d. 650/1077) popular treatise on synonyms, Kifāyat al-mutaḥaffiẓ wa-nihāyat al-mutalaffiẓ fī al-lugha al-arabiyya (“The Mindful’s Sufficient and the Articulate’s Ultimate on the Arabic Language”).74 Evidently versed in the three languages of the Ottoman empire, he also contributed to the Ṣiḥāḥ and Qāmūs debate, writing a treatise entitled al-Durr al-laqīṭ fī aghlāṭ al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ (“The Picked-up Pearl on the Errors of al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ”). In many entries, he shows how the errors of al-Ṣiḥāḥ caught by al-Fīrūzābādī had already been identified by two earlier commentators of al-Ṣiḥāḥ, Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Barrī (d. 582/1187) and al-Ṣaghānī.75 This is a salient observation, as it detracts from the achievement of the author of al-Qāmūs, who could be accused of neglecting to credit these earlier scholars with their original corrections.
As mentioned earlier, dictionaries and their commentaries were a means of gathering and preserving knowledge, even when this knowledge was not pertinent to the primary discussion or was anecdotal rather than strictly informational. An illustrative example is Karadāvudzāde’s lemma ḥabanṭaʾ, previously discussed in the rendering of al-Jawharī and al-Fīrūzābādī, and which I now cite from Karadāvudzāde’s treatise:
Ḥabanṭaʾa: al-Fīrūzābādī: “Ḥabanṭaʾtun and ḥabanṭā and muḥbanṭiʾ: short and fat. […] And iḥbanṭaʾa: his insides were inflated, or he was filled with anger; and al-Jawharī was wrong in listing it after the lemma ḥ-ṭ-ʾ.” End of quote.
And the shaykh Ibn Barrī said it is correct to mention ḥabanṭā in the section ḥ-b-ṭ, “because the hamza is an augment, not part of the root; and therefore, they say ḥabiṭa baṭnuhu (‘his stomach was bloated’) if it was inflated, and likewise al-muḥbanṭiʾ, that is someone with inflated insides.” End of quote.
Al-Jawharī mentioned it there as well, but his mentioning it here after the lemma ḥ-ṭ-ʾ is not correct. Al-Fīrūzābādī mentioned it there [under ḥ-b-ṭ] as well. So go figure!
And Abū Zayd [al-Anṣārī] said: “[I asked] a Bedouin: ‘What does al-muḥbanṭiʾ mean?’
He said: ‘al-mutakaʾkiʾ.’
I asked: ‘What does al-mutakaʾkiʾ mean?’
He said: ‘al-mutaʾazzif.’
I asked: ‘What does al-mutaʾazzif mean?’
He said: ‘You’re stupid!’ and went off.”
The shaykh Abū Ḥayyān [al-Gharnāṭī, d. 745/1344] said in al-Irtishāf: “The school of Sībawayhi holds that the pattern afʿalnā is not transitive, and Abū ʿUbayd [al-Qāsim ibn Sallām, d. 224/838] and Abū al-Fatḥ [Ibn Jinnī] held that it may be transitive, as are aghrandā and asrandā.”76
With the help of Ibn Barrī, Karadāvudzāde shows that al-Fīrūzābādī was wrong in placing ḥabanṭaʾa in bāb al-hamza, expressing some indignation that al-Fīrūzābādī also (additionally) listed it under ḥ-b-ṭ after criticising al-Jawharī for doing the same. The lemma includes a funny story from the field work of the lexicographer Saʿīd ibn Aws Abū Zayd al-Anṣārī (d. 214–215/830–831) and details about the grammatical status of the verb pattern of ḥabanṭaʾa, drawn from two authoritative grammarians. This inclusion shows that Karadāvudzāde held space in al-Durr al-laqīṭ to preserve and pass on such anecdotes, both to sustain the Arabic linguistic tradition and to assert his own role, as a Turkish poet and teacher from Istanbul, within it.77
Another Ottoman poet and qāḍī, Üveys bin Meḥmed (d. 1037/1628), also known by his pen name Veysī,78 wrote a treatise titled Maraj al-baḥrayn fī ajwibat iʿtirāḍāt al-Qāmūs ʿalā al-Jawharī (“The Rocking of the Two Seas: Answers to the Objections of the Qāmūs to al-Jawharī”).79 In this work, Veysī compares the statements of al-Fīrūzābādī and al-Jawharī, offering his judgement on their correctness. Like Karadāvudzāde after him, he refers to the ḥawāshī of Ibn Barrī and the multiple works of al-Ṣaghānī on al-Ṣiḥāh to show that, when al-Fīrūzābādī’s opinion was correct, it was often taken from al-Ṣaghānī. This pattern is also evidenced in his lemma ḥabanṭā. Veysī first cites the Qāmūs, then follows with his own position with aqūlu (marked in red ink, see Figure 6). He states that “the author of the Qāmūs was preceded in this [i.e., in suggesting that the lemma be put under ḥ-ṭ-ʾ] by al-Ṣaghānī in Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn.”80
Figure 6
Veysī’s Maraj al-baḥrayn: the lemma ḥabanṭā begins on the third from last line on fol. 6b. The word aqūlu (“I say”) is rubricated and written larger (line 4 on fol. 7a). Istanbul, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, Ragıp Paşa 1415, fol. 6b–7a
2.5 Tāj al-ʿarūs: The Commentary to End All Commentaries?
In 1188/1774, after fourteen years of work, the Egyptian lexicographer, biographer, and ḥadīth scholar Muḥammad Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (d. 1205/1790) completed his Tāj al-ʿarūs min jawāhir al-Qāmūs (“The Bridal Crown from the Jewels of the Qāmūs/Ocean”).81 Spanning ten volumes,82 this dictionary was conceived as a commentary (sharḥ) on al-Qāmūs. Consequently, al-Zabīdī referred to al-Fīrūzābādī as al-muṣannif (“the author [of the master text]”), as al-Qarāfī had done in al-Qawl al-maʾnūs.83 In contrast, Veysī consistently referred to al-Fīrūzābādī as ṣāḥib al-Qāmūs.
While Tāj al-ʿarūs was labelled a commentary by its author, the master text of al-Qāmūs constituted only a very small part of the work. Highlighting the re-insertion of the shawāhid as one of his objectives, al-Zabīdī extracted or derived (mustamiddan, istimdād) all material deleted by al-Fīrūzābādī from a wide array of sources that he listed in his introduction.84 The list begins with al-Ṣiḥāḥ, of which he possessed an eight-volume copy in the hand of Yāqūt al-Rūmī (d. 626/1229), the author of Muʿjam al-buldān—an authoritative and often cited source for lexicographers. This copy, discovered in the library of al-amir Uzbek, also contained the Ḥawāshī of Ibn Barrī and Abū Zakariyyāʾ al-Tibrīzī.85 This example shows al-Zabīdī’s meticulous approach to citing his sources, often mentioning their provenance. However, the book list in his introduction is not exhaustive. Ḥāshim Shallāsh’s study of Tāj al-ʿarūs notes that many more sources are hidden in the lemmata of the dictionary itself.86
In addition to incorporating material from other works to fill in the shawāhid, al-Zabīdī also supplemented (mustadrak, istidrāk) the lemmata of the Qāmūs with meanings that al-Fīrūzābādī did not use. These definitions are added at the end of each lemma to distinguish them from the commentary portions of the lexicon.
The most striking feature of Tāj al-ʿarūs is that it was conceived as an interwoven commentary (sharḥ mamzūj), a method that grants the commentator both control and freedom. As Matthew Ingalls has pointed out:
By weaving commentary into a base text, a commentator exercises a unique measure of control over the latter text and is able to redeploy it subtly into the interpretive direction of his choosing.87
This approach enables the author, while formally writing a commentary, to do as he pleases with the master text. For instance, by adding a negation into a sentence from the master text, he can turn its meaning around entirely while still technically preserving the base material. As shown in Figure 7, the master text is written in red ink (print editions usually put it in round brackets) and accounts for only a very small portion of the entire text. Moreover, al-Zabīdī often cuts the master text up into chunks of one or two words—a mere wāw (“and”), for instance!—rendering it barely recognisable as originating from al-Fīrūzābādī.
Figure 7
Page from an (incomplete) manuscript copy of Tāj al-ʿarus. The rubricated words indicate the master text, al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ; poetry is indented and marked with red dots. Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Vollers 465, p. 307
It seems as if the master text could easily have been replaced with al-Zabīdī’s own words, but instead, he chose the much more complex form of interwoven commentary. Why? Because the master text functions as a familiar foundation, a canonical, authoritative point of departure. The tradition is left intact while its ‘deficiencies’ are addressed through commentary.88 In other words, maintaining the master text in an interwoven commentary respects the tradition, while also enabling space for discussion and even refutation.
As can easily be seen in Figure 7, the text of the Qāmūs constitutes only a very small quantitative portion of the many sources that make up Tāj al-ʿarūs. The (relatively short) entry abaza, for instance, contains 284 words, of which the Qāmūs’ text only accounts for 38, or 13 %. Al-Zabīdī supplements everything else with material from other sources, drawing significantly from al-Ṣaghānī in this case. Using the Qāmūs as a template, even if only formally, allowed al-Zabīdī to implicitly criticise al-Fīrūzābādī by subtly qualifying his statements through commentary.89 This was the exact opposite approach to that of al-Fīrūzābādī, who, when working with the Ṣiḥāḥ, explicitly stated wahima l-Jawharī fī … (“al-Jawharī was wrong in …”), thereby consciously evoking controversy.
Al-Zabīdī’s choice of interwoven commentary in conceiving his dictionary made a much less polemical impression. By providing all the additional information he could muster, al-Zabīdī obviated the need for readers to consult other sources to understand and evaluate any given controversy—and, as we have seen, there most certainly was one.
The author of Tāj al-ʿarūs could also have taken a less peaceable path, as made clear by another work of his, written in tandem with Tāj al-ʿarūs:90 a second dictionary that more critically engaged the content of the Qāmūs. The title al-Takmila wa-l-dhayl wa-l-ṣila li-mā fāta ṣāḥib al-Qāmūs min al-lugha (“The Supplement, Appendix, and Complement on What the Author of the Qāmūs Missed of the Language”) is programmatic and, not coincidentally, modelled on al-Ṣaghānī’s Takmila. In the introduction, al-Zabīdī boldly states that he used red ink to mark al-Fīrūzābādī’s omissions, “just as he did with al-Jawharī.”91
2.6 After Tāj al-ʿarūs
The publication of al-Zabīdī’s giant, exhaustive commentary did not stop the stream of commentaries on the Qāmūs. One famous example of further engagement with the Arabic lexicographical tradition beyond Tāj al-ʿarūs and on the Qāmūs in particular, is Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s (d. 1887) al-Jāsūs ʿalā al-Qāmūs (“The Spy Spying on the Qāmūs”). In twenty-four topics of critique (naqd), al-Shidyāq points out the flaws of the Qāmūs, for instance, by accusing al-Fīrūzābādī of “obscuring” (ibhām) definitions or expressions.92 Despite the criticism that Nahḍa scholars directed at dictionaries of the post-formative period, al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ in particular remained a central source for the Nahḍa project of revitalising the Arabic language.93
As late as the early fourteenth/twentieth century, the Egyptian scholar and book collector Aḥmad Taymūr (d. 1348/1930) wrote a fifty-page treatise entitled Taṣḥīḥ al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ (“Correction of al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ”). It serves solely to correct the errors of the Būlāq edition of the Qāmūs printed in 1303/1885–1886, which, as Taymūr remarks, circulated widely and contained useful glosses.94 Its popularity is the reason Taymūr deemed it necessary to write a risāla on the edition’s errors, so that students would not be confused by them. Taymūr’s treatise is a byproduct of his own study of the Qāmūs; in it, he gathers his own marginal notes based on his collation of eight manuscripts of the Qāmūs,95 in addition to incorporating a small number of observations from other scholars.96 Without going into further detail regarding the types of errors Taymūr comments on, it is apparent that his work seamlessly carries the practice of premodern commentators on the Qāmūs into the age of print. Moreover, as Islam Dayeh has shown, the page layout and the incorporation of glosses into early printed dictionaries were adopted from textual practices of the manuscript age.97
2.7 The Counterexample: Lisān al-ʿarab
To show just how much impact the chosen form and stated aims of a dictionary could have on its subsequent reception, I will briefly discuss a counterexample to al-Fīrūzābādī’s Qāmūs. Roughly a century before the Qāmūs was completed, the Egyptian scholar Muḥammad ibn Mukarram al-Ifrīqī al-Miṣrī, known as Ibn Manẓūr (d. 711/1311), wrote a comprehensive dictionary entitled Lisān al-ʿarab (“The Tongue of the Arabs”).98 Today, it is as famous as al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, though it did not appear to have drawn nearly as much attention as the Qāmūs did in the wake of its compilation. Why could this have been the case?
Ibn Manẓūr earned his living as a secretary in Cairo and a qāḍī in Tripoli. Most of his literary production consisted of abridgements of larger works, such as the famous poetry collection Kitāb al-Aghānī (“Book of Songs”) by Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (d. 356/967) and Ibn ʿAsākir’s (d. 571/1176) Tārīkh Dimashq (“History of Damascus”).99 Lisān al-ʿarab, however, was not an abridgement; it combined five earlier works into the largest Arabic lexicon ever. Rather than discussing the number of volumes, which can differ immensely depending on layout and writing, it is more illustrative to compare the number of roots; while al-Ṣiḥāḥ contains 5,639 roots,100 Lisān al-ʿarab has 9,273.101
In contrast to al-Fīrūzābādī’s plan, Ibn Manẓūr’s stated objective was not to compile a work that supersedes its sources, but rather to accurately reflect these sources without adding anything of his own. While there is some polemic in parts of the introduction, the author outlines his selection criteria in a detached and seemingly objective manner, without reference to his own achievements:
I realised that language scholars were of two types: those who did well in collecting their material (jamʿahu) and did not do well in putting it down (waḍʿahu), and those who were good at putting it down and not good at collecting it. A good collection with a bad arrangement is of no benefit, and a good arrangement of a bad collection is of no use.102
Waḍʿ, which Ibn Manẓūr later uses synonymously with tartīb (“arrangement”) and which is equivalent to the word niẓām used by al-Fīrūzābādī, facilitates the accessibility of material in the dictionary, while jamʿ refers to the comprehensiveness and correctness of the material itself. Following this general statement, Ibn Manẓūr identifies the dictionaries he used and states his reasons for picking these. Most of these authors have already been introduced in the previous chapter:
I have found in the books of lexicography none more comprehensive (ajmal) than Tahdhīb al-lugha by Abū Manṣūr Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Azharī, and none more complete (akmal) than al-Muḥkam of Abū Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Ismāʿīl ibn Sīda al-Andalusī, God have mercy on both of them. These two are among the exemplary (ummahāt) books of lexicography with respect to critical examination (ʿalā al-taḥqīq), and they are like the mountains on the way, but each of them is a goal extremely difficult to attain, a spring on rough terrain, as if its author guided the people to a well with fresh water and then pulled them away again, or sought out a spring pasture and then blocked their access! He put in front what should be in the back and vice versa, aimed for clarification but obfuscated, and confused the brain with respect to the biliteral, the geminated, and the inverted;103 he squandered the mind as regards the weak, the quadriliteral and the quinqueliteral, and lost sight of his objective. Therefore, the people neglected both works and turned away from them; and for lack of acceptance they were no longer found in the region, for no other reason than their poor arrangement, and the confusion of sections and chapters. And I have seen that Abū Naṣr Ismāʿīl ibn Ḥammād al-Jawharī arranged his short work (mukhtaṣarahu) in an excellent manner, and the ease of its arrangement gained him wide renown across the desert and the cities, making it light on the people so that they took it up and it became more easily accessible to them; it began to circulate and to be transmitted among them. However, it is like an atom in the air of language, like a drop in its sea, and even if it is like a pearl in its stream, he nevertheless made errors in punctuation, distorted the order of letters, and made random mistakes in inflection. And then it was singled out by the shaykh Ibn Barrī, who followed its content and dictated his dictations on it, extracting its errors and documenting its mistakes. I have asked God most high, praise on him, for proper guidance in gathering this blessed book that does not partake in the breadth of His grace and does not participate in it. In it, I did not go beyond what was in these sources, and I ordered them according to the order of the Ṣiḥāḥ in chapters and sections.104
I am quoting this passage at length because it illustrates Ibn Manẓūr’s assessment and criticism of previous sources, which aligns with what we have already encountered regarding the reception of the Ṣiḥāḥ. Ibn Manẓūr also clarifies his own criteria for good lexicography, mentioning the lexica that he considered superior in terms of content: Abū Manṣūr Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Azharī’s (d. 370/981) Tahdhīb al-lugha and Ibn Sīda’s al-Muḥkam. The latter, as we have seen, was considered a pinnacle of lexicography of the formative period. The former was known because its author had spent some years in captivity among Bedouin tribes, documenting correct usages. Similar to al-Jawharī’s Ṣiḥāḥ, the author of Tahdhīb al-lugha aimed to include only material he himself had heard and verified through reliable sources.105 Both al-Muḥkam and Tahdhīb al-lugha, however, were arranged according to al-Khalīl’s phonetic-permutative system. It is no surprise, then, that while Ibn Manẓūr praised their content, he chose al-Jawharī’s Ṣiḥāḥ as the model for the arrangement (waḍʿ) of Lisān al-ʿarab.
Lisān al-ʿarab is thus the result of a re-arrangement, reflecting one of the objectives of post-formative lexicography discussed earlier. As Ibn Manẓūr hints at in this passage, “arrangement” involves more than simply opting for a certain alphabetical order; it requires the correct placement of roots that deviate from the triliteral standard, as well as the categorisation of different kinds of weak verbs. The flaws in jamʿ that the Ṣiḥāḥ contained were not only counterbalanced by the additional dictionaries Ibn Manẓūr used but also by the emendations made by Ibn Barrī in his ḥawāshī (or Amālī, as they are referred to here).106
In the body of his voluminous dictionary, Ibn Manẓūr combines his sources to long lemmata, within which the structuring principle is not immediately apparent. Contradicting opinions peacefully stand side by side, and discussions of root extensions may precede a discussion of the word’s basic meaning. There is no visible arrangement within these lemmata beyond a loose association of related meanings. Comparing an entry in Lisān al-ʿarab with one in the Qāmūs highlights the benefits of both approaches. By offering all available forms, definitions, and probative quotations, as Lisān al-ʿarab aims to do, the reader gains comprehensive knowledge of all uses of a certain root. However, if she is looking for a specific form, she might find herself lost in the maze that a lemma of Lisān al-ʿarab often becomes. Forms are not listed in the fixed order we know and appreciate today;107 instead, verb forms and nouns derived from them are mixed freely or by association. In his objective to truthfully record the observations of his sources, Ibn Manẓūr often does not bother to group together the data pertaining to the same form found in different sources, leading to the multiple appearance of the same form within a single lemma. This lack of authorial intervention is deliberate. Ibn Manẓūr himself stresses the primacy of the individual works upon which his dictionary is based and advises his readers:
If you stumble upon something right or an error, something correct or a defect, this is due to the original author, and praise and blame are for the source that I have relied on. For I have transmitted from every source its content, I have not changed anything, as it is said: “the sin rests on those who change it” [Q 2:181], rather I have exercised care to cite the sources literally, and I have not deviated from their text.108
This serves as a direct exhortation to attribute any flaws of Lisān al-ʿarab to its sources and not to its author, which is exactly what made a subsequent reception of Lisān al-ʿarab largely untraceable. Even when later lexicographers were aware of Lisān al-ʿarab and could afford a copy of it,109 they preferred to cite Ibn Manẓūr’s sources directly. This practice aligns with broader scholarly tendencies in other disciplines. In ḥadīth scholarship, for example, students would travel hundreds of miles to obtain a shorter isnād for their knowledge. Why, then, would a lexicographer choose the longer chain of transmission (e.g., quoting al-Jawharī via Ibn Manẓūr) when they could directly cite al-Jawharī? Most lexicographers after Ibn Manẓūr seem to have bypassed Lisān al-ʿarab in favour of its direct sources. Additionally, Ibn Manẓūr’s pre-emptive disclaimer in his introduction, declaring that “praise and blame are for the source that I have relied on,” likely dissuaded subsequent authors from polemically engaging with his work like they would with al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ roughly a century later.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine that the author of al-Qāmūs, who initially seemed to have had a similar plan in mind to that of Ibn Manẓūr, would have intentionally disregarded Lisān al-ʿarab in his introduction.110 I would like to contend that if Lisān had indeed been so famous and popular during the time of al-Fīrūzābādī, he would have at least mentioned it in his introduction. It is likely that our perception of Lisān al-ʿarab as extremely popular stems from later accounts, particularly those of European lexicographers.111 Whether al-Fīrūzābādī was aware of the work or chose to deliberately “overlook” it, he was not the only scholar who failed to acknowledge Ibn Manẓūr’s achievement. For instance, Lisān al-ʿarab is neither mentioned by Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm Ibn al-Akfānī (d. 749/1348) in his book list of works of lugha,112 nor by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406) in his elaborate discussion of the discipline in the sixth book of the Muqaddima.113 While Lisān al-ʿarab may be the first premodern dictionary that comes to mind for contemporary Arabic speakers and learners, it apparently did not always hold this status. How widely known was Lisān al-ʿarab between the eighth/fourteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries?
It is difficult to assess the popularity of Lisān al-ʿarab based on references in other dictionaries and mentions in encyclopaedic works. In al-Suyūṭī’s Bughyat al-wuʿāt fī ṭabaqāt al-lughawiyyīn wa-l-nuḥāt (“The Advertent People’s Object of Desire on the Generations of Lexicographers and Grammarians”), a work specifically devoted to language scholars, the life and contributions of Ibn Manẓūr occupy a single page.114 The exact same account is repeated by Aḥmad ibn Muṣṭafā Ṭaşköprüzāde (d. 968/1561) in his encyclopaedia of the disciplines, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa-miṣbāḥ al-siyāda fī mawḍūʿāt al-ʿulūm (“The Key to Happiness and the Lamp to the Mastery of the Topics of the Disciplines”), suggesting that Ṭaşköprüzāde did not have personal knowledge of Lisān al-ʿarab.
The bibliographer Muṣṭafa ibn ʿAbd Allāh Ḥājjī Khalīfa (d. 1017/1657) was familiar with Ibn Manẓūr’s dictionary, as apparent from its entry in Kashf al-ẓunūn. In addition to citing the methodological passage from its introduction, Ḥājjī Khalīfa mentions that the theologian Muḥammad ibn Abī Sharīf (d. 906/1500) saw an autograph of Lisān al-ʿarab in Cairo.115 This remark indicates rarity rather than familiarity. Copies of bulky dictionaries may have been difficult to come by on account of their size and price. The general view regarding the circulation of premodern Arabic dictionaries is that “only with the Qāmūs did copies proliferate to the extent that it might be called a best-seller.”116 The difference in popularity between Qāmūs and Lisān seems to be confirmed by the account of al-Fīrūzābādī in al-Suyūṭī’s Bughya, which is three times longer than that of Ibn Manẓūr.117
If we examine the use of Lisān al-ʿarab as a source for other dictionaries and treatises on lugha, it initially seems to be ignored. The earliest explicit citation I found in lexicological treatises is in Veysī’s (d. 1037/1627) Maraj al-baḥrayn (see above), which cites Lisān al-ʿarab to support al-Jawharī against al-Fīrūzābādī—nearly three and a half centuries after the compilation of the Lisān.118 References start to appear more frequently thereafter. For instance, Ibn Abī al-Surūr (d. after 1062/1652) quotes Lisān al-ʿarab in al-Qawl al-muqtaḍab fīmā wāfaqa lughat ahl Miṣr min lughāt al-ʿarab (“The Condensed Statement on the Concurrence of the Language of the People of Egypt with the Dialects of the Arabs”) his mukhtaṣar of Yūsūf al-Maghribī’s dictionary Dafʿ al-iṣr ʿan kalām ahl Miṣr (“Removing the Fetters from the Speech of the People of Cairo”).119 The earliest mujannas dictionary mentioning it, to my knowledge, is Aḥmad Ibn Maʿṣūm al-Madanī’s (d. 1120/1707) al-Ṭirāz al-awwal wa-l-kanāz li-mā ʿalayhi min lughat al-ʿarab al-muʿawwal (“The Top-Notch Treasures of What is Reliable in the Language of the Arabs”).120 Ibn Maʿṣūm, who was born in Medina but spent most of his life in India,121 wrote a dictionary intended to be comprehensive, though it remained incomplete.122 His primary references were al-Qāmūs and al-Ṣiḥāḥ, and his familiarity with Lisān al-ʿarab is apparent from the list of sources he provided in the introduction to al-Ṭirāz al-awwal.123
Several explanations can account for this seeming lack of engagement with Lisān al-ʿarab before the eleventh/seventeenth century: lexicographers may simply not have known it, lacked access to it due to its size or cost, or consciously opted for the shorter isnād. The immense popularity of al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ provides another potential reason for the dismissal of Ibn Manẓūr’s compilation: unlike other dictionaries, Lisān al-ʿarab did not engage in polemics. It neither critiqued or refuted its sources, instead listing the statements of five different lexicographers without expressing a preference for any of them. Unlike al-Qāmūs, Lisān al-ʿarab simply did not instigate debate.
The introduction of Lisān al-ʿarab makes it clear that its author believed that the last word in Arabic lexicography had already been said by the fourth/tenth century. His own contribution to the field was to not add material or to choose sides, but rather collect and rearrange existing data. Ibn Manẓūr’s approach to lexicography differed markedly from that of al-Fīrūzābādī in terms of format. While the latter chose to condense and contest the findings of his predecessors, the former preferred to combine them to the point of redundancy and contradiction within one lemma. Today, Lisān al-ʿarab remains one of the best-known Arabic monolingual dictionaries, offering users the convenience of accessing five separate lexica in one place. Yet, the title Qāmūs, which is technically speaking a loanword from Greek meaning “ocean” (
While the brevity of the Qāmūs ensured the book’s long-term circulation and its author’s fame, Ibn Manẓūr had to wait for the age of print to secure his deserved place on the bookshelves.
3 A Focus on ḥadīth
Early practices of Qurʾanic exegesis and ḥadīth commentary laid the foundations for the lexicographical genres of gharīb al-ḥadīth and gharīb al-Qurʾān. As mentioned in the Introduction, the desire to explain rare words was an important motivation of early lexicographical activity. In the post-formative period, however, the direction seems to change and comprehensive dictionaries are increasingly assessed and valued for their treatment of ḥadīth. In this section, I will explore how lexicographers and their critics evaluated the value and significance of lexicography for the study of ḥadīth.
During the formative period, the incorporation of ḥadīth into the corpus of the ʿarabiyya slowly increased. Reports on the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muḥammad did not initially enjoy the same status as the language of the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic poetry. One reason was that ḥadīth was often not quoted verbatim, as is apparent from the existence of the same ḥadīth—in terms of content—in different wordings (matn). Moreover, transmitters of ḥadīth, who were often non-native speakers of Arabic, did not qualify as informants for the validation of correct speech. The muḥaddithūn’s requirement to be ethically sound (ʿadl) and a reliable source (thiqa) pertained to their characters rather than their linguistic abilities. On the other hand, if Muḥammad was considered afṣaḥ al-ʿarab (“the most eloquent among the Arabs”), surely his sayings should be part of the corpus of the ʿarabiyya. While its status for grammarians remained somewhat dubious,125 ḥadīth gradually began to be included in dictionaries.126
3.1 Ḥadīth as an Asset of the Dictionary
The changing role of ḥadīth in the lexicographer’s corpus toward the end of the formative period is apparent from a discussion found in al-Ṣaghānī’s al-ʿUbāb al-zākhir. Al-Ṣaghānī criticised his predecessors’ dictionaries for failing to indicate whether a quotation was from the Prophet himself or from a Companion: “They said ‘in the ḥadīth,’ ” so he complained, “without distinguishing between a prophetic ḥadīth and a saying of a Companion, or between a saying of a Successor and that of a Companion. Sometimes they even equated a ḥadīth with a proverb or a proverb with a ḥadīth. Sometimes they would say: ‘And they said…,’ even though it came from the sound ḥadīth collections.”127 In response, the author of al-ʿUbāb intended to do better, emphasizing the subject of ḥadīth in his introduction:
I have quoted the ḥadīth that contain rare meanings and difficult forms in full and if there are several difficult forms in one ḥadīth, I have given it in full and explained every form in its chapter and lemma, and I have mentioned that the whole of the ḥadīth is mentioned in a given lemma, so that the context of the ḥadīth is known and reference and lookup is warranted.128
Note that al-ʿUbāb is a comprehensive (mujannas) dictionary, not a specialised lexicon of ḥadīth. Nevertheless, al-Ṣaghānī underscores his thorough treatment of ḥadīth, suggesting its significance as a major field of reference. An example from the body of the dictionary illustrates what he means by his statement on methodology. Let us examine the lemma ḥ-b-ṭ-ʾ, which we previously encountered in al-Qāmūs and al-Ṣiḥāḥ:
a ḥabanṭaʾun man and ḥabanṭaʾatun and ḥabanṭā, without hamza: short and fat with a big belly, also muḥbanṭiʾun, either with or without hamza, and they say: “he is filled with rage.” Abū Zayd said: The man iḥbanṭaʾa if his insides are inflated, and from this comes the Prophet’s ḥadīth on the miscarried fetus: “It remains muḥbanṭiʾ on the threshold of Paradise.” And in another ḥadīth: “The miscarried fetus will surely break off in anger from its Lord; if He leads its parents into the Fire, it draws them by its umbilical cord (bi-surarihi) so that they are led into Paradise,” i.e., it is upset with Him; al-surar is that which the midwife cuts off from the navel.129
Al-Ṣaghānī fulfils his promise of not only explaining the ḥadīth with respect to the lemma at hand but also by incorporating other related ḥadith and explaining uncommon words within them—in this case al-surar. And indeed, the ḥadīth “It remains muḥbanṭiʾ on the threshold of Paradise” is also quoted in the lemma s-q-ṭ, where siqṭ is explained as meaning “miscarried fetus.” Neither al-Jawharī nor al-Fīrūzābādī included a ḥadīth in the lemma ḥ-ṭ-ʾ/ ḥ-b-ṭ.130
The problem of confusing ḥadīth with proverbs, as mentioned by al-Ṣaghānī, may lie not in the negligence of certain lexicographers but rather in the development of the word ḥadīth as a technical term. In al-Durr al-laqīṭ, a twelfth/eighteenth-century treatise on the debate regarding the superiority of al-Qāmūs over al-Ṣiḥāḥ,131 Karadāvudzāde defends al-Jawharī against this critique of confusing ḥadīth with other statements:
Al-Fīrūzābādī said: “… and al-Jawharī was wrong when he said: ‘and in the ḥadīth.’ ” End of quote.
It is possible to say that by ḥadīth he meant the common speech of the people, its status being like a proverb, as was his habit. That is also the practice of al-Muṭarrizī in his book al-Mughrib: he doesn’t mean by it a saying of the Prophet; so that the counterargument is the statement that those were the words of Aktham [a tribal chief] and not a ḥadīth, with the definition of ḥadīth proper being the common and approved sayings of the Companions and those of the generation after them, as the venerable Shaykh ʿAlī (known as Muṣannafak) mentioned in his commentary on the Maṣābīḥ, where he said: “The muḥaddithūn have stated that ḥadīth are the sayings, the doings and the legal decisions of the Companions and those of the generation after them, and ḥadīth is more general than khabar and athar, as khabar means that which is transmitted from the Prophet of God and athar that which is transmitted from a Companion, and ḥadīth comprises both.”132
This passage illustrates that a broader definition of the word ḥadīth could be used to defend al-Jawharī against al-Fīrūzābādī’s accusations of errors—a definition that had largely fallen out of use by the time of Karadāvudzāde. Rather than siding with al-Fīrūzābādī and asserting that al-Jawharī had indeed mislabelled a common saying as ḥadīth in the technical sense, Karadāvudzāde chose to defend al-Jawharī. He corroborated his position by referencing the perspective presented in a highly popular dictionary of technical terms, al-Mughrib fī tartīb al-Muʿrīb (“The Amazing Work on the Arrangement of al-Muʿrib”) by Abū al-Fatḥ Nāṣir ibn ʿAbd al-Sayyid al-Muṭarrizī (d. 610/1213). Al-Mughrib was itself a reworking of an earlier dictionary by the same scholar, al-Muʿrib fī gharīb alfāẓ al-fuqahāʾ (“Clarifying the Rare Expressions of the Jurisprudents”), which focused on legal terminology.
3.2 Integrating ḥadīth and lugha
In the ninth/fifteenth century, al-Suyūṭī notably applied ḥadīth terminology and its scholarly practices to the discipline of lugha in his handbook of language scholarship, al-Muzhir fī ʿulūm al-lugha wa-anwāʿihā. Across fifty chapters, he described all aspects of the field in terms of ḥadīth terminology. The chapters mostly contain quotations from earlier scholars, which al-Suyūṭī assembled to form a coherent discussion of the discipline. Three centuries later, al-Zabīdī summarised al-Muzhir’s section ādāb al-lughawī in his introduction to Tāj al-ʿarūs:
Knowledge of the etiquette of the language specialist
There is an admonition in this. Al-Suyūṭī said in al-Muzhir: “The first requirements are devotion and the examination of one’s intention, then to make sure to gather from reliable sources, with persistence and perseverance, and to write down everything one has seen and heard, because that is the most accurate, and to travel in pursuit of rare expressions and useful lessons like the authorities did, and to occupy oneself with memorising the poetry of the Arabs with an understanding of its adages, sermons, and moral lessons that may be relied on for explaining Qurʾān and ḥadīth.”133
These requirements (which are only the beginning of a longer list) closely resemble the behaviour rules for a good muḥaddith. By applying terminology and method of ḥadīth scholarship—described by Ibn al-Athīr as “the noblest of Islamic disciplines”134—to the field of lugha, its status was heightened, while also highlighting how lugha functioned for ḥadīth studies. With the increasing use of ḥadīth as a source for lexicography, the dictionary attained more relevance for ḥadīth scholarship.
3.3 Ḥadīth in Lisān al-ʿarab
To illustrate the importance of ḥadīth in lexicography of the post-formative period, we briefly return to Lisān al-ʿarab. Ibn Manẓūr mentioned four primary sources in his introduction: al-Muḥkam, Tahdhīb al-lugha, and al-Ṣiḥāḥ with Ibn Barrī’s Ḥawāshī. His fifth source was a work of gharīb al-ḥadīth: Abū al-Saʿādāt al-Mubārak Ibn al-Athīr’s (d. 606/1210) al-Nihāya fī gharīb al-ḥadīth wa-l-athar (“The Final Stop in Ḥadīth and Sayings of the Companions”). Unlike the other sources, used because of their principles of collection or arrangement, Ibn Manẓūr included this work to adorn (tawshīḥ) his entries with Prophetic sayings:
And I aimed to adorn it with weighty reports and pretty traditions, to add to the verses from the noble Qurʾān and the talk about the miracles of the wise Book it contains, so that its necklace is embellished with an inlay of their pearls, and its significance hinges on the verses, reports, traditions, sayings, and poetry. And I saw that Abū al-Saʿādāt al-Mubārak Ibn al-Athīr al-Jazarī had attained this with the Nihāya: he had crossed the finish line in terms of excellence, except that he did not put the words in their proper place and did not distinguish between the augment (zāʾid) of the words and their root (aṣlihā), so I put each of them in their place and provided them with evidence.135
Al-Nihāya, then, is neither superior in its arrangement nor comprehensive in its coverage of the Arabic language. Instead, it focuses on obscure expressions within a relatively limited corpus and, as Ibn Manẓūr pointed out, even fails to adhere to proper alphabetical order. Why, then, did the author of Lisān al-ʿarab use Ibn al-Athīr’s material at all? The answer lies in his intent to supplement his entries with ḥadīth quotations, which would lend them greater significance (ḥalluhu wa-ʿaqduhu, lit. “the untying and tying”). Ibn Manẓūr apparently opined that his other sources did not contain sufficient ḥadīth to achieve this aim.
Interestingly, the criticism Ibn Manẓūr directed at Ibn al-Athīr regarding his arrangement of the lemmata mirrors a concern that Ibn al-Athīr himself voiced in the introduction of his Nihāya. He complained that even students of ḥadīth could not distinguish roots from their augments, which prompted him to list some words under their prefixes to better accommodate ḥadīth scholars.136
3.4 Judging Dictionaries in Terms of Their Handling of ḥadīth
The role of lugha in ḥadīth studies in the post-formative period is also illustrated by criticism directed at lexicographers. When ḥadīth scholars looked up rare words in the dictionaries, they came across ḥadīth mentioned by lexicographers, as in the example of muḥbanṭiʾ above. This interaction is obviously where critique arose. Some critics of the Qāmūs stressed al-Fīrūzābādī’s treatment of ḥadīth. Ḥājjī Khalīfa even said that al-Fīrūzābādī was ignorant of ḥadīth, resulting in many incorrect isnāds.137 Conversely, in Fulk al-Qāmūs, al-Kawkabānī—who was otherwise quite critical of al-Fīrūzābādī—acknowledged the utility of al-Qāmūs for ḥadīth science, devoting some discussion to explaining why shorter works (mukhtaṣar) and versifications (naẓm) are more practical than longer ones (muṭawwalāt), as they consolidate information that would otherwise require searching across multiple entries. Nevertheless, he added, “one cannot dispense with al-Qāmūs for the many priceless additions it contains which are not found in other works, among which is the accurate mention of ḥadīth transmitters.”138
I have not found similar assessments of the utility of lugha for fields of study other than ḥadīth. The focus on ḥadīth underscores that dictionaries were expected to meet certain demands in this field or else risked criticism. Lexicographers cleverly catered to these expectations by highlighting their service to ḥadīth scholarship in their introductions, as seen in the introduction of Lisān al-ʿarab. Another notable statement in this regard comes from Ibn Maʿṣūm, a scholar and poet who traveled between the Hijaz and Hyderabad.139 Ibn Maʿṣūm’s dictionary, al-Ṭirāz al-awwal, would likely have been as bulky as Lisān al-ʿarab, had the author completed it. The work did not make him particularly famous—he is better known for a literary anthology of his contemporaries.140 While Ibn Maʿṣūm refers to the Qāmūs in his introduction, al-Ṭirāz al-awwal is not a commentary141 but an independent dictionary, albeit with a pronounced focus: in his introduction, the author stresses the importance of lugha for ḥadīth and outlines a structure for his lemmata that reflects this importance: “I start each section of a chapter with the general and the specific language in the Book, then I follow suit with the athar, then with technical terms and proverbs.”142 The role of lugha in ḥadīth studies influenced the conception, marketing, and reception of dictionaries in the post-formative period.
4 Conclusion
فإن التصنيف مضمار تنصب إليه خيل السباق من كل أوب ثم تتجارى …The profession of compiling books is a course onto which racers from all places enter to run against each other.143
When al-Zabīdī compared authoring a dictionary to competing in a horserace, he focused on the author’s many rivals. Post-formative Arabic lexicography is best understood within the context of its tradition, shaped by its authors and works. Often, we can only grasp the full scope and objective of a dictionary, as well as the issues discussed in individual lemmata, when we read them alongside entries in earlier dictionaries. To fully understand a lemma, we must immerse ourselves in the tradition, identify the questions being debated and negotiated, determine whose positions are being refuted, and discern what exactly is at stake for the author.
To understand how Arabic lexicography worked, particularly in the post-formative period, it is helpful to approach the genre as we would approach a commentary. The keywords are the lemmata from the master text, which consists of the entire lexicographical tradition or a selection of sources as announced by the author in the introduction. The dictionary at hand can be regarded as one out of many commentaries, engaging vertically with its master text (or texts) and horizontally with other commentaries. This means that premodern Arabic dictionaries are not for the uninitiated: often, they do not even provide a definition of the word that is discussed. Entries can be like riddles or puzzles. When al-Zabīdī compiled Tāj al-ʿarūs, he intended to solve this puzzle, obviating the need for consulting earlier dictionaries by gathering all available sources and weaving all strands of the tradition into one commentary. Even this act, however, could not silence the debate instigated by the Qāmūs.
As the first layer of commentary in any discipline was always at the lexical level, the dictionary was indispensable to commentary culture. A significant role for lugha lay in ḥadīth, with clever lexicographers highlighting the importance of their dictionaries for ḥadīth scholarship, which may also have to do with the increasing use of ḥadīth as proof texts in post-formative lexicography. Pragmatic considerations often prevailed in the choice of dictionary. The handy format of the Qāmūs made it extremely popular, despite its oft-discussed flaws. Widespread commentaries on the Qāmūs show how well the book was used. These commentaries were the byproducts of critical engagement with the Qāmūs and other dictionaries, not only by lexicographers but also by ḥadīth scholars, jurists, and poets. The many treatises detailing and assessing its flaws thus became the companions to the Qāmūs, just as the Ḥawāshī of Ibn Barrī and the Takmila of al-Ṣaghānī had become the close companions to al-Ṣiḥāḥ. A premodern reader would not consult just one Arabic dictionary while disregarding all others. This is something we should keep in mind today.
Viewing the dictionaries of the post-formative period as commentaries makes it easier to understand their place in the tradition and to appreciate the multiple functions of commentaries. For their authors, they served as a space to assert authority, explore new ideas, and insert themselves into the ongoing tradition. This last point will be developed further in the following chapter, which deals with the lexicographical genre of treatises on laḥn al-ʿāmma, “speech errors of the commoners.”
Al-Suyūṭī, al-Muzhir fī ʿulūm al-lugha wa-anwāʿihā, 1:102–103; ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn Aḥmad al-Kawkabānī, Fulk al-Qāmūs, ed. Ibrāhīm al-Samarrāʾī (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1414/1994), 46.
While commentary, like text, can of course be strictly oral, I focus here on written (reflections of oral) commentary.
“Lemma” comes from Greek
See L.W.C. (Eric) Van Lit, “Commentary and Commentary Tradition. The Basic Terms for Understanding Islamic Intellectual History,” MIDÉO. Mélanges de l’Institut Dominicain d’études Orientales 32 (2017): 3–26,
Most of the research on the genre of commentary has been done in the fields of classical studies, Bible studies, and (classical) philosophy. Important theoretical work has been done by Aleida and Jan Assmann: see the introduction of Jan Assmann and Burkhard Gladigow, eds., Text und Kommentar, Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation IV (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995). As for the genre of commentary in the post-formative period (or “Middle Ages,” if we use the term which is still applied to Europe), the focus has mainly been on philosophy, in casu commentaries on Aristotle. Matthew Ingalls has done great work summarising different types of commentaries and their functions. See Ingalls, The Anonymity of a Commentator, chap. 1, and below.
See, for instance, Islam Dayeh, ed., Commentary Cultures: Technologies of Medieval Reading, Special issue of Philological Encounters 3, no. 3 (2018); Robert Wisnovsky, “The Nature and Scope of Arabic Philosophical Commentary in Post-classical (ca. 1100–1900 AD) Islamic Intellectual History: Some Preliminary Observations,” in Philosophy, Science and Exegesis in Greek, Arabic and Latin Commentaries, ed. Peter Adamson, Han Baltussen, and M.W.F. Stone (London: Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advance Study, 2004), 2:149–191. The fact that commentaries reflect actual debates was noted in the field of rhetoric, for instance, by William Smyth, “Controversy in a Tradition of Commentary: The Academic Legacy of al-Sakkākī’s Miftāḥ al-ʿUlūm,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 112, no. 4 (1992): 589–597. The importance of the commentary tradition for understanding reception processes in adab is illustrated by Matthew L. Keegan, e.g., in “Throwing the Reins to the Reader: Hierarchy, Jurjānian Poetics, and al-Muṭarrizī’s Commentary on the Maqāmāt,” Journal of Abbasid Studies 5 (2018): 105–145.
Walid A. Saleh, “The Gloss as Intellectual History: The Ḥāshiyahs on al-Kashshāf,” Oriens 41, no. 3–4 (2013): 217–259; Asad Q. Ahmed, “Post-Classical Philosophical Commentaries/Glosses: Innovation in the Margins,” Oriens 41 (2013): 317–348. Also, Blecher, Said the Prophet of God, 13: “The first facet of this book’s methodological intervention is to challenge the notion that the medium of commentary is merely a derivative and rarefied literary practice.” A succinct overview of different recent understandings by scholars of Islamic Studies of the genre of commentary in the post-formative period is given by Van Lit, “Commentary and Commentary Tradition.”
The Greek
The terms “first-order commentary,” “second-order commentary,” etc., are used by Robert Wisnovsky, who studied the commentary tradition in the field of Arabic philosophy and identified up to fifth-order commentaries. “Commentary” in this classification can, of course, also indicate a gloss. See Wisnovsky, “The Nature and Scope of Arabic Philosophical Commentary,” 158.
See Van Lit, “Commentary and Commentary Tradition.”
For this distinction, see also Ingalls, The Anonymity of a Commentator, 15 ff. More on the interwoven commentary (sharḥ mamzūj) below, in the discussion of Tāj al-ʿarūs. There seems to be no Arabic technical term for the first two types of commentary (cf. Ingalls, 17 n. 27). To my knowledge, paraphrastic commentary, which summarises the purport of the master text, is not found in Arabic language scholarship. Van Lit, Commentary and Commentary Tradition, mentions the “paraphrasing” commentary but seems to have a different definition of paraphrasing: “[It] usually cites the hypotext passage by passage, then after each passage it goes over the passage again in almost identical language, here and there changing, adding, or dropping something. Occasionally a larger expansion (or digression) is included.”
Kevin Blankinship and Aglae Pizzone have discussed several motivations for penning a self-commentary, including the protection of one’s own work from the appropriation by others and the fear of incorrect interpretation. See Kevin Blankinship and Aglae Pizzone, “Self-Commentary as Defensive Strategy in the Works of John Tzetzes (d. 1180 CE) and Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 1057 CE),” Philological Encounters 8, no. 1 (2023): 1–37. According to Assmann, self-commentary is “weniger eine Form der Rezeptionssteuerung als vielmehr der Selbstinszenierung als ‘klassischer Autor’.” See Assmann and Gladigow, Text und Kommentar, 19. This hypothesis must be tested for the many self-commentaries in the field of Arabic philology (grammar and lexicography, for instance).
This practice continues until today, mainly in the field of tafsīr and ḥadīth commentaries.
An overview of this practice can be gleaned from Wilhelm Ahlwardt’s catalogues of Arabic manuscripts in the Berlin State Library. In volumes 6 and 7, which gather manuscripts of grammar, lexicography, and poetry, Ahlwardt describes many commentaries as explicitly distinguishing these different levels of explanation. This strategy was not only used in commentating, but also in the act of reading itself, at least in the post-formative period. As Khaled El-Rouayheb (Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century, 111) has pointed out, the reading instructions in a manual for students by the Ottoman court astrologer Aḥmad ibn Luṭf Allāh Müneccimbāşı (d. 1113/1702) contained exactly these levels:
On encountering a passage, [the student] should start by paying attention to its language: lexically, morphologically, syntactically, semantically, and rhetorically. He should then turn to the level of “second intentions” (al-maʿqūlāt al-thāniya), that is, second-order concepts, which are the province of logic. He should pay attention to what kind of definitions are being adduced, what kinds of propositions, and the logical structure of any arguments. In general, Müneccimbāşı noted, a student would find the disciplines of logic and syntax to be especially helpful in his efforts to understand demanding scholarly texts.
Mukhtaṣar al-ʿAyn is mentioned in the book list of Ibn al-Akfānī (on which more below) as an important concise treatment of lugha. See Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm Ibn al-Akfānī, Irshād al-qāṣid ilā asnā al-maqāṣid, ed. ʿAbd al-Munʿim Muḥammad ʿUmar (Cairo: Dār al-fikr al-ʿarabī, [1990]), 112.
For the notion of obscurity as a productive starting point for commentary, see Ineke Sluiter, “Obscurity,” in Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, ed. Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 34–51. Sluiter, studying Greco-Roman texts, suggests (46) “that the discourse of obscurity may be more culturally and historically specific than I would have thought when I began working on it.” I believe an investigation of the notion of “obscurity” in Arabic commentary tradition may be just as worthwhile.
On gharīb in early Arabic lexicography, see Ramzi Baalbaki, “The Notion of gharīb in Arabic Lexica,” Journal of Abbasid Studies 6, no. 2 (2019): 185–208. On the role of the Companion Ibn ʿAbbās for gharīb, see Baalbaki, The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 39–41. Another genre involved is that of aḍdād, words that can also mean their own opposite. The earliest treatise on this subject, Kitāb al-Aḍdād of Muḥammad ibn al-Mustanīr, known as Quṭrub (d. 206/821), shows that many of these words were taken from the Qurʾān, and their antonymic meaning was contingent upon their context, e.g., in the case of ẓann, which, when said of God, cannot mean “guess,” because God’s knowledge is always certain (yaqīn). Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad ibn al-Mustanīr Quṭrub, Kitāb al-Aḍdād, ed. Ḥannā Ḥaddād (Riyadh: Dār al-ʿulūm li-l-ṭibāʿa wa-l-nashr, 1405/1984), 71–73.
See Baalbaki, “The Notion of gharīb in Arabic Lexica,” 193. Baalbaki argues that al-Shaybānī’s Kitāb al-Jīm is probably older than al-Khalīl’s Kitāb al-ʿAyn in The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 333.
Al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad al-Ṣaghānī, al-ʿUbāb al-zākhir wa-l-lubāb al-fākhir, ed. Pir Muḥammad Ḥasan, vol. 1 (Baghdad: al-Majmaʿ al-ʿilmī al-ʿirāqī, 1398/1978), 7.
See my Introduction and Baalbaki, The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 29–36.
Baalbaki, The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 31.
Assmann has identified three important conditions for commentaries to emerge: a) Schließung, i.e., closure or canonisation of the text to enable the process of commentating; b) semantische Verschiebung, i.e., a shift in the accessibility of a text’s interpretation according to the reader’s context. This can, of course, be easily applied to the understanding of (pre-Islamic) Bedouin terminology within an urban context—and if this goes for third/ninth-century Basra, it most certainly can hold true for eleventh/seventeenth-century Istanbul as well; c) Hodegetik (“guidance”) und Hermeneutik, i.e., oral instruction in which a student recites the text and a teacher provides the commentary. See Assmann and Gladigow, Text und Kommentar, 28–31.
Ibn al-Akfānī, Irshād al-qāṣid ilā asnā al-maqāṣid, e.g., 111–112 on books of lugha.
Joel Blecher (Said the Prophet of God, 51) discusses this decision with respect to al-Nawawī’s (d. 676/1277) commentary on Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim:
[…] Nawawī weighed his responsibility to serve the needs of the market against his desire to devote himself entirely to the never-ending work of interpreting a sacralized text, producing volume after volume over many years. In this case, Nawawī had his cake and ate it too: he resigned himself to writing a “midsize commentary” (sharḥ mutawassiṭ) but nevertheless produced a ten-volume work.
Considerations regarding size are also a topic of al-Zanjānī’s (d. 656/1258) Mukhtaṣar Ṣiḥāḥ al-Jawharī. For the latter, see Wilhelm Ahlwardt, Verzeichniss der arabischen Handschriften, vol. 6, Die Handschriftenverzeichnisse der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin: A. Asher & Co., 1899), 233, No. 6943.
The suitability of the rhyme order was never put into question by critics of al-Qāmūs and al-Ṣiḥāḥ. See, for instance, Ibn Maʿsūm, who praises their tartīb as “the most popular and the most convenient,”
For example, in Ibn Manẓūr’s Lisān al-ʿarab, for which see below.
Al-Ṣaghānī, al-ʿUbāb al-zākhir wa-l-lubāb al-fākhir, 1:19:
وما حملت ذلك على الغلط إلا من الناسخين لا من الراسخين .
Regarding al-Ṣaghānī’s dictionary, Baalbaki (The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 382) notes that
[t]he abundance of sources used by Ṣaġānī is not surprising given that, at a time when the Bedouin fuṣaḥāʾ on whom earlier sources relied for correct usage were something of the distant past, the only recourse authors had in their task of checking the validity of data was the massive philological literature available to them.
Muḥammad Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī, Tāj al-ʿarūs min jawāhir al-Qāmūs, ed. Muhammad Farāj and ʿAbd al-Sattār Aḥmad, vol. 1 (Kuwait: Maṭbaʿat ḥukūmat al-Kuwayt, 1965), 5–9. While to us today it seems hardly possible that one single person should have conceived and compiled a multi-volume dictionary, we have no evidence of collaborative projects in the field of premodern Arabic lexicography—unless, of course, one would want to view the reception and incorporation of earlier material as a form of collaboration.
Al-Ṣaghānī, al-ʿUbāb al-zākhir wa-l-lubāb al-fākhir, 1:12 ff.
Ahmed, “Post-Classical Philosophical Commentaries/Glosses: Innovation in the Margins,” 320.
Van Lit, “Commentary and Commentary Tradition.”
This contradicts Assmann’s statement (Assmann and Gladigow, Text und Kommentar, 19), which is more pertinent to belles-lettres:
In der Regel ist eine sprachliche Äußerung, z.B. ein Gedicht, nicht als “Text” gemeint; es will Gegenstand jeglicher Art von Genuß, Vergnügen, Belehrung und Bewunderung, aber nicht philologischer Arbeit sein. Diese gehört in einen Horizont, der der sprachlichen Äußerung gegenüber sekundär und nachträglich ist.
For an exhaustive account of all available biographical data, see Strotmann, Majd al-Dīn al-Fīrūzābādī, chap. 3. Al-Fīrūzābādī himself mentions Kārizīn as his birthplace in the Qāmūs s.v. k-r-z.
Strotmann, Majd al-Dīn al-Fīrūzābādī, 171 ff.
Other works also had a strong linguistic component, such as al-Ishārāt ilā mā fī kutub al-fiqh min al-asmāʾ wa-l-amākin wa-l-lughāt (“Pointing out the Names, Places, and Dialects in the Books of fiqh”).
See Strotmann, Majd al-Dīn al-Fīrūzābādī, 196 ff.
According to Strotmann, the author began work on the Qāmūs when he was in his thirties. It existed in two versions, because it was reworked for “political reasons.” Strotmann, Majd al-Dīn al-Fīrūzābādī, 72, 76:
The first edition of the Qāmūs was probably begun around the year 759/1357–1358. It was half finished by the year 768/1366–1367 and concluded around 790/1388. The time at which al-Fīrūzābādī began the second version is unknown. It is likely that this version was concluded after the year 803/1400–1401.
That the question of the two versions occupied a premodern audience as well is apparent, for instance, from al-Kawkabānī, Fulk al-Qāmūs, 49 ff. Al-Kawkabānī mentions twelve lemmata that may be used to tell the first from the second version of the Qāmūs.
On this work, which had the title al-Lāmiʿ al-muʿallam al-ʿujāb al-jāmiʿ bayn al-Muḥkam wa-l-ʿUbāb and of which allegedly five volumes were completed, see Strotmann, Majd al-Dīn al-Fīrūzābādī, 72–74.
Al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, 1:3:
غير أني خمنته في ستين سفراً يعجز تحصيله الطلاب وسئلت تقديم كتاب وجيز على ذلك النظام .
Al-Fīrūzābādī was not the first to delete the shawāhid. The bibliographer Muṣṭafa ibn ʿAbd Allāh Ḥājjī Khalīfa (d. 1017/1657) mentions that Ibn al-Ṣāʾigh al-Dimashqī (d. 720/1320) wrote a mukhtaṣar of al-Ṣiḥāḥ without the probative quotations. One could argue, however, that an abridgement fulfilled a different function than a comprehensive dictionary such as al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ. See Ḥājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, 2:1072.
Al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, 1:4.
Al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, 1:4:
ومن بديع اختصاره وحسن ترصيع تقصاره أني إذا ذكرت صيغة المذكر أتبعتها المؤنث بقولي وهي بهاء ولا أعيد الصيغة .وإذا ذكرت المصدر مطلقاً أو الماضي بدون الآتي ولا مانع فالفعل على مثال كتب وإذا ذكرت آتيه بلا تقييد فهو على مثال ضرب .
Al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, 1:179, s.r. k-r-th. Similarly, in al-ʿUbāb al-zākhir al-Ṣaghānī had indicated the vocalisation patterns of certain words with bi-wazn … (“of the pattern of …”). See Baalbaki, The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 384.
The same lemma in Lisān al-ʿarab has 313 words, of which a large portion is devoted to explaining rare words from the quoted poetry.
We know that al-Fīrūzābādī taught at the Niẓāmiyya in Baghdad and later founded his own schools in Mecca and Medina. See Strotmann, Majd al-Dīn al-Fīrūzābādī, 124 ff. One famous student was the biographer Khalīl ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363), who also penned multiple lexicological treatises. See for a list of “further pupils” Strotmann, 126–128. Ingalls points out that a mukhtaṣar was never meant to be read without a teacher. Ingalls, The Anonymity of a Commentator, 16.
Ahmed, “Post-Classical Philosophical Commentaries/Glosses: Innovation in the Margins,” 323.
Wisnovsky, “The Nature and Scope of Arabic Philosophical Commentary,” 159.
This was the assessment of al-Zabīdī: “As his presentation was of the utmost succinctness, and his succinctness was on the verge of rendering one incapable, men of knowledge engaged with uncovering his obscurities and subtleties, thank God for their pursuit!” See al-Zabīdī, Tāj al-ʿarūs, 1:2:
ولما كان إبرازه في غاية الإيجاز وإيجازه عن حد الإعجاز، تصدى لكشف غوامضه ودقائقه رجال من أهل العلم، شكر الله سعيهم .
The same was noted by Ingalls (The Anonymity of a Commentator, 156) regarding the popularity of two of Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī’s legal commentaries:
The Tuḥfat al-ṭullāb and the Fatḥ al-wahhāb stand as al-Anṣārī’s shortest complete commentaries in substantive law, which, on the one hand, makes them particularly useful in later teaching circles while creating, on the other, the need for subsequent commentaries to unpack their pithy prose.
The eleventh/seventeenth-century biographer al-Muḥibbī does not enumerate al-Qarāfī’s works because they are too many to count. See Muḥammad al-Amīn ibn Fadl Allah al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athar fī aʿyān al-qarn al-ḥādī ʿashar (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1446/1986), 4:259.
The work is preserved, for instance at Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Pococke 221,
Al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, 1:3:
ولما رأيت إقبال الناس على صحاح الجوهري، وهو جدير بذلك، غير أنه فاته نصف اللغة أو أكثر، إما بإهمال المادة أو بترك المعاني الغريبة النادة …
Al-Fīrūzābādī’s critique of al-Jawharī—that he “missed half of the language or more”—was taken up by al-Suyūṭī (al-Muzhir fī ʿulūm al-lugha wa-anwāʿihā, 1:103) with regard to the Qāmūs:
Al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, 1:4:
واختصصت كتاب الجوهري من بين الكتب اللغوية، مع ما في غالبها من الأوهام الواضحة والأغلاط الفاضحة، لتداوله واشتهاره بخصوصه واعتماد المدرسين على نقوله ونصوصه .
Al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, 1:3:
Baalbaki, The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 281 notes that
[c]ontrary to al-Ṣaḥāḥ’s method, most later lexica […] aimed at exhaustiveness although they followed its rhyme system of arrangement which only took into account the order of the radicals in the root. Accordingly, Ǧawharī’s influence on the tradition was primarily related to the formal aspect, rather than the essential feature of excluding incorrect or doubtful material, irrespective of the fact that he nowhere explains the bases on which he relied in the choice of his material.
Examples include the frequent mention of an isnād for certain knowledge or for the transmission of a certain book in Abū al-Ḥusayn Aḥmad Ibn Fāris’ al-Ṣāḥibī fī fiqh al-lugha wa-sunan al-ʿarab fī kalāmihā or in the introduction of a book, such as in al-Jawālīqī’s al-Muʿarrab min al-kalām al-aʿjamī ʿalā ḥurūf al-muʿjam (on which see Chapter 3).
Abū Naṣr Ismāʿīl ibn Ḥammād al-Jawharī, Tāj al-lugha wa-ṣiḥāḥ al-ʿarabiyya, ed. Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Ghafūr ʿAṭṭār, 2nd ed. (Cairo: Dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī bi-Miṣr, 1956), 33:
فإني قد أودعت في هذا الكتاب ما صح عندي من هذه اللغة التي شرف الله منزلتها …
Contrasting this statement to the frequent assertion of Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan Ibn Durayd (d. 321/933) in Jamharat al-lugha that he cannot confirm the correctness of a certain word, shows that al-Jawharī’s method was indeed to include only those words for which he had first-hand proof. See Baalbaki, The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 26–27. A list of Ibn Durayd’s “unsound” entries is given by al-Suyūṭī, al-Muzhir fī ʿulūm al-lugha wa-anwāʿihā, 1:108 ff.
Al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, 1:3: …
This is the term used, for instance, by Ibn al-Athīr in al-Nihāya fī gharīb al-ḥadīth wa-l-athar, ed. Ṭāhir Aḥmad al-Zāwī and Maḥmūd Muḥammad al-Ṭannāḥī (Qum: Muʾassasat Ismāʿīlīyān, 1364/1985), 1:8 ff.
This important feature, which distinguishes al-Fīrūzābādī’s most prized models al-Muḥkam and al-ʿUbāb from his object of criticism al-Ṣiḥāḥ, is not explicitly mentioned in the introduction of the Qāmūs. What al-Fīrūzābādī does mention about his arrangement is the fact that he, contrary to al-Jawharī, clearly distinguishes between wāw and yāʾ (al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, 1:4:
Al-Ṣurāḥ min al-Ṣiḥāḥ (“The Clarity from al-Ṣiḥāḥ”) was compiled in 681/1282 in Turkestan by the historiographer Cemal Ḳarşī (Abū al-Faḍl Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad, d. after 702/1303). See Mustafa Budak, “Cemâl-i Karşî,” in TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 1993,
Ḥājji Khalīfa reports that Muḥammad ibn Muṣṭafā el-Vānī (d. 1000/1592), known as Vanḳulu, chose to translate the Ṣiḥāḥ because it was “widely acknowledged by the scholars who mattered” (maqbūlan musallaman ʿinda l-fuḥūl). See Ḥājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, 2:1023. On Vanḳulu, see Mustafa S. Kaçalin, “Vankulu,” in TDV İslam Ansiklopedisi, 2012,
See Colinda Lindermann, “Al-Fīrūzābādī togatus: Arabische Wörterbücher in der europäischen Frühmoderne,” Geschichte der Germanistik 51/52 (2017): 66–74.
See ʿĀmir Bāhir Asamīr al-Ḥiyālī, Abḥāth fī al-muʿjamiyya al-ʿarabiyya (Beirut: al-Dār al-ʿarabiyya li-l-mawsūʿāt, 2015), 7–76, especially 14 ff. Some scholars attributed the errors in al-Ṣiḥāḥ to the fact that its author died before he could finish it: in an attempt to fly, he jumped off the roof of the Great Mosque in Nisapur with the wings of a door attached to his arms. Al-Ḥiyālī puts forward the explanation that the lemmata these errors mainly concern are those containing ḥurūf al-dhalāqa (the liquidae, i.e., the “liquid consonants” b, f, l, m, n, and r), which are especially prone to taṣḥīf (misspelling), as well as the hamzated and weak letters. See al-Ḥiyālī, Abḥāth fī al-muʿjamiyya al-ʿarabiyya, 16.
Al-Suyūṭī’s treatise is not extant. See Ṭāhir S. Ḥammūda, Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī: ʿAṣruhu wa-ḥayātuhu wa-āthāruhu wa-juhūduhu fī al-dars al-lughawī (Beirut, 1989), 212.
Muḥammad ʿAṭṭār, Muqaddamat al-Ṣiḥāḥ, 176 lists eight such texts. Sukayna al-Kuḥlānī mentions ten treatises comparing Ṣiḥāḥ and Qāmūs, see Sukayna bint ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad al-Kuḥlānī, “Kitāb al-Durr al-laqīṭ fī aghlāṭ al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, taʾlīf Muḥammad ibn Muṣṭafā Dāwūdzāda” (MA thesis, Mecca, Umm al-Qura University, 1417/1997), 15–16.
Smyth, “Controversy in a Tradition of Commentary,” 594.
Smyth, “Controversy in a Tradition of Commentary,” 596.
Al-Kawkabānī, Fulk al-Qāmūs, 44:
الأول أنه رحمه الله بالغ في الإيجاز فيه حتى ألحقه بالمعميات والألغاز فلا يفهم كثيرا منه إلا القليل من أرباب الفطنة الوقادة والطبيعة المنقادة .
The nine flaws are: 1) Al-Fīrūzābādī overdid it with concision (al-ījāz); 2) he was unique in including words that were not found in other dictionaries and which were too specific, such as a fortress in Yemen (al-kawkabān) and a type of bread eaten with laban (al-luḥūḥ); 3) For many loanwords, he only provided an etymology without any additional information; 4) What is marked as maʿrūf by him may not be maʿrūf for most people, such as plant names; 5) Gharīb is explained by even more obscure (aghrab) expressions—this is a flaw also present in al-Ṣiḥāḥ and other books; 6) Al-Fīrūzābādī mixed up majāz (“figurative meaning”) and ḥaqīqa (“literal meaning”)—again, a flaw also present in other books; 7) He sometimes does not adhere to the principles he detailed in his introduction; 8) He got the number of dārāt wrong (holes in the ground that were counted and named by the Arabs, and apparently transmitted from dictionary to dictionary; al-Kawkabānī says that al-ʿUbāb got them right); 9) He is not consistent in providing grammatical information.
Al-Kawkabānī, Fulk al-Qāmūs, 32:
وأما القاموس وإن اعتمده أهل عصرنا فليس فيهم من بلغ رتبة أحد أولئك الأئمة على أنا تتبعنا كثيرا مما ادعاه المجد وغيره أن الجوهري وهم فيه فوجدناه صحيحا .
Al-Kawkabānī, Fulk al-Qāmūs, 34:
وقال إنه فات الجوهري نصف اللغة أو أكثر إما بإهمال المادة أو بترك المعاني العربية النادرة فكان عليه بعد هذا الكلام أن لا يهمل شيئا ذكره الجوهري .
Al-Kuḥlānī, “Kitāb al-Durr al-laqīṭ fī aghlāṭ al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ,” [Study] 22.
Al-Kuḥlānī, “Kitāb al-Durr al-laqīṭ fī aghlāṭ al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ,” [Study] 26–27.
E.g., in the entries ʾ-b-ʾ and ʾ-t-ʾ, see al-Kuḥlānī, “Kitāb al-Durr al-laqīṭ fī aghlāṭ al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ,” [Text] 4–5.
Al-Kuḥlānī, “Kitāb al-Durr al-laqīṭ fī aghlāṭ al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ,” [Text] 10–11:
الفيروزابداي :حبنطأة وحبنطى ومحبنطئ :قصير سمين . […]واحبنطأ :انتفخ جوفه أو امتلأ غيظاً، ووهم الجوهري في إيراده بعد تركيب ح ط أ انتهى .
وقال الشيخ ابن بري رحمه الله :صوابه إيراد ذكر حبنطى في فصل حبط، لأن الهمزة زائدة ليست بأصلية، ولهذا قيل حبط بطنه إذا انتفخ، وكذلك المحبنطئ وهو المنتفخ جوفه .انتهى .
والجوهري ذكره هناك أيضاً، لكن ذكره هنا بعد تركيب ح ب ط ليس بجيد والفيروزابادي ذكره هناك أيضاً فتدبر .
وقال أبو زيد [قلت ]لأعرابي :ما المحبنطئ؟ قال :المتكأكئ .قلت :ما المتكأكئ؟ قال :المتأزف .قلت :ما المتأزف؟ قال :أنت أحمق !وتركني ومر .
وقال الشيخ أبو حيان في الارتشاف :ومذهب سيبويه أن بناء افعلنى لا يتعدى، وذهب أبو عبيد وأبو الفتح إلى أنه قد يتعدى، وذلك :اغرندى واسرندى .
The anecdote is well known and attributed to the third/ninth-century grammarian Abū ʿUthmān al-Māzinī in Lisān al-ʿarab, s.r. ḥ-b-ṭ-ʾ. The verb iḥbanṭā is mentioned by Abū Zayd al-Anṣārī in Kitāb al-Nawādir (“Book of Rare Expressions”). See Saʿīd ibn Aws Abū Zayd al-Anṣārī, Kitāb al-Nawādir, ed. Saʿīd al-Khūrī al-Shartūnī (Beirut: al-Maṭbaʿa al-kāthūlīkiyya li-l-ābāʾ al-mursalīn al-yasūʿiyyīn, 1894), 198.
For his biography, see Ahmet Tunç Şen, “The Dream of a 17th-Century Ottoman Intellectual: Veysî and His Habname” (MA thesis, Istanbul, Sabancı University, 2008), 24 ff.; Theodor Menzel and Edith G. Ambros, “Weysī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam. Second Edition, ed. P.J. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 11:204–205.
Istanbul, Ragıp Paşa Kütüphane 1415. The manuscript, an autograph, has no muqaddima; it starts with the words abāʾ: qāla ṣāḥib al-Qāmūs al-abāʾa etc.—cf. the first lemma of the Qāmūs: al-abāʾa.
See Veysī, Maraj al-baḥrayn, fol. 7a.
On Zabīdī’s life and his other writings, see Reichmuth, The World of Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (1731–91). The most comprehensive study of Tāj al-ʿarūs is Shallāsh, al-Zabīdī fī kitābihi Tāj al-ʿarūs.
The ingenious title Tāj al-ʿarūs min jawāhir al-Qāmūs reflects the form of the interwoven commentary: the “gems found in the ocean/Qāmūs” are worked into the crown of the bride. For further interpretation of the title, see Reichmuth, The World of Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (1731–91), 227.
A complete manuscript copy mentioned by Reichmuth comprises 10 volumes; in total, he lists 9 exemplars (one of which contains only the introduction). See Reichmuth, The World of Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (1731–91), 132.
See Princeton, Princeton University Library, MS Garrett 286H, passim.
Al-Zabīdī, Tāj al-ʿarūs, 1:5:
…
والتقاط أبيات الشوهد له، مستمداً ذلك من الكتب التي يسر الله تعالى بفضله وقوفي عليه، وحصل الاستمداد عليه منها، ونقلت بالمباشرة لا بالوسائط عنها …
Al-Zabīdī, Tāj al-ʿarūs, 1:5.
Shallāsh, al-Zabīdī fī kitābihi Tāj al-ʿarūs, 272–383.
Ingalls, The Anonymity of a Commentator, 149.
Cf. Ingalls, The Anonymity of a Commentator, 151–152: “… ascribing authority to a canonical base text functions to preserve social efficiency and cohesion inasmuch as the canon’s deficiencies can be sidestepped through commentary, thereby obviating the need to reascribe authority elsewhere.”
This method is also used by al-Anṣārī: see Ingalls, The Anonymity of a Commentator, 149 ff.
Reichmuth, The World of Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (1731–91), 134.
Muḥammad Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī, al-Takmila wa-l-dhayl wa-l-ṣila li-mā fāta ṣāḥib al-Qāmūs min al-lugha, ed. Muṣṭafā Ḥijāzī, vol. 1 (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-ʿāmma li-shuʾūn al-maṭābiʿ al-amīriyya, 1406/1986), 71.
Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, al-Jāsūs ʿalā al-Qāmūs (Damascus: Dār al-nawādir, 1434/2013), 7.
Also see Nadia Bou Ali, “Collecting the Nation: Lexicography and National Pedagogy in al-Nahda al-ʿArabiyya,” in Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World, ed. Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and John Pedro Schwartz (London–New York: Routledge, 2016), 33–56.
Aḥmad Taymūr, Taṣḥīḥ al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Salafiyya, 1343/1924–1925), 3. He did the same for the Būlāq print of Lisān al-ʿarab: Aḥmad Taymūr, Taṣḥīḥ Lisān al-ʿarab, 2 vols (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Jamāliyya 1334 [1915–1916] / al-Maṭbaʿa al-Salafiyya 1343 [1924–1925]).
Taymūr, Taṣḥīḥ al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, 4.
One item is taken from the Indian scholar Muftī Muḥammad Saʿd Allāh al-Murādābādī’s (fl. thirteenth/nineteenth century) treatise al-Qawl al-maʾnūs fī ṣifāt al-Qāmūs, which was printed in India in 1287 (1870).
See Islam Dayeh, “From Taṣḥīḥ to Taḥqīq: Toward a History of the Arabic Critical Edition,” Philological Encounters 4, no. 3–4 (2019): 245–299. Many early print editions were works of lugha.
The date of completion as noted down by the author was 689/1290. See Baalbaki, The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 385.
See Ramzi Baalbaki, “Ibn Manẓūr,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2016),
See ʿAlī Ḥilmī Mūsā, Dirāsa iḥṣāʾiyya li-judhūr Muʿjam al-Ṣiḥāḥ (bi-stikhdām al-kompyūtir) (Kuwait: Jāmiʿat al-Kuwayt, 1973), 11.
See ʿAlī Ḥilmī Mūsā and ʿAbd al-Ṣabūr Shāhīn, Dirāsa iḥṣāʾiyya li-judhūr Muʿjam Tāj al-ʿarūs (bi-stikhdām al-kompyūtir) (Kuwait: Jāmiʿat al-Kuwayt, 1973), 9. I have found no numbers for the roots in al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ; they must be between Ṣiḥāḥ and Lisān.
Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿarab, 1:7:
ورأيت علماءها بين رجلين :أما من أحسن جمعه فإنه لم يحسن وضعه، وأما من أجاد وضعه فإنه لم يجد جمعه، فلم يفد حسن الجمع مع إساءة الوضع، ولا نفعت إجادة الوضع مع رداءة الجمع .
Reference is to the different types of Arabic verbs. As mentioned before, the correct arrangement of biliteral and geminated roots was a regular matter of disagreement. The “inverted” (maqlūb) refers to qalb, interchanging root letters, while roughly retaining the meaning.
Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿarab, 1:7:
ولم أجد في كتب اللغة أجمل من تهذيب اللغة لأبي منصور محمد بن أحمد الأزهري، ولا أكمل من المحكم لأبي الحسن علي بن إسمعيل بن سيدة الأندلسي، رحمهما الله، وهما من أمهات كتب اللغة على التحقيق، وما عداهما بالنسبة إليهما ثنيات للطريق .غير أن كلا منهما مطلب عسر المهلك ومنهل وعر المسلك، وكأن واضعه شرع للناس مورداً عذباً وجلاهم عنه، وارتاد لهم مرعىً مربعاً ومنعهم منه؛ قد أخر وقدم وقصد أن يعرب فأعجم .فرق الذهن بين الثنائي والمضاعف والمقلوب، وبدد الفكر باللفيف والمعتل والرباعي والخماسي فضاع المطلوب، فأهمل الناس أمرهما وانصرفوا عنهما وكادت البلاد لعدم الإقبال عليهما تخلو منهما .وليس لذلك سبب إلا سوء الترتيب، وتخليط التفصيل والتبويب .ورأيت أبا نصر إسمعيل بن حماد الجوهري قد أحسن ترتيب مختصره، وشهره بسهولة وضعه شهرة أبي دلف بين باديه ومحتضره، فخف على الناس أمره فتناولوه، وقرب عليهم مأخذه فتداولوه وتناولوه، غير أنه في جو اللغة كالذرة وفي بحرها كالقطرة، وإن كان في نحرها كالدرة وهو مع ذلك قد صحف وحرف وخزف فيما صرف، فأتيح له الشيخ أبو محمد بن بري فتتبع ما فيه، وأملى عليه أماليه مخرجاً لسقطاته، مؤرخاً لغلطاتـه؛ فاستخرت الله سبحانه وتعالى في جمع هذا الكتاب المبارك الذي لا يساهم في سعة فضله ولا يشارك، ولم أخرج فيه عما في هذه الأصول، ورتبته ترتيب الصحاح في الأبواب والفصول .
See Baalbaki’s discussion of Tahdhīb al-lugha in The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 311–319.
This work is also known as al-Tanbīh wa-l-īḍāḥ ammā waqaʿa fī al-Ṣiḥāḥ. For a recent study, see Carlo Alberto Anzuini, “Ibn Barrī al-Miṣrī e il suo Kitāb al-Tanbīh,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 13 (2018): 191–216.
I.e., the root, followed by the forms that are constructed by geminating root letters and adding augments; followed by the verbal nouns of these forms, and then by the active and passive participles of these forms.
Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿarab, 1:8:
ومن وقف فيه على صواب أو زلل أو صحة أو خلل فعهدته على المصنف الأول وحمده وذمه لأصله الذي عليه المعول .لأنني نقلت من كل أصل مضمونه ولم أبدل منه شيئاً فيقال فإنما إثمه على الذين يبدلون، بل أديت الأمانة في نقل الأصول بالقص وما تصرفت فيه بكلام غير ما فيها من النص .
In Ḥājjī Khalīfa’s account, a copy of the Lisān consisted of six large volumes. From the way Ḥājjī Khalīfa discusses the work, it appears that he had not seen a copy himself:
Baalbaki (The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 393) cannot imagine that al-Fīrūzābādī did not know Lisān al-ʿarab:
But it is unlikely that Fīrūzābādī could not have known of a famous lexicon such as al-Lisān, which was authored about a century earlier. It is more conceivable that he overlooked al-Lisān because it was not an original work, rather the result of the merger of five earlier lexica, one of the most important of which was al-Muḥkam, from which Fīrūzābādī derived much of his own material.
See, for instance, Helmut Gätje’s discussion of Lisān al-ʿarab as “das bekannte, häufig benutzte Gesamtwörterbuch des Ibn Manzūr,” Gätje, “Arabische Lexikographie. Ein historischer Überblick,” 119.
See Ibn al-Akfānī, Irshād al-qāṣid ilā asnā al-maqāṣid, 93 ff.
Ibn Khaldūn, al-Muqaddima: al-juzʾ al-awwal min Kitāb al-ʿIbar wa-dīwān al-mubtadā wa-l-khabar fī ayyām al-ʿarab wa-l-ʿajam wa-l-barbar (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Taqaddum, 1322/1904), 453 ff.
Jalāl al-Dīn Abū al-Faḍl ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Abī Bakr al-Suyūṭī, Bughyat al-wuʿāt fī ṭabaqāt al-lughawiyyin wa-l-nuḥāt, ed. Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm, vol. 1 (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1384/1964), 248.
Ḥājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, 2:1550.
John A. Haywood, “The Entry in Medieval Arabic Monolingual Dictionaries,” in The History of Lexicography: Papers from the Dictionary Research Centre at Exeter, March 1986, ed. R.R.K. Hartmann (Amsterdam–Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1986), 110. The “almost proverbial saying” that there is a Qāmūs manuscript in every library in the world, is mentioned by Strotmann, Majd al-Dīn al-Fīrūzābādī, 205 and n. 59.
Al-Suyūṭī, Bughyat al-wuʿāt, 1:273–275.
Veysī, Maraj al-baḥrayn, fol. 4b.
See Chapter 2, section 4.3. Other works by Ibn Manẓūr were well-known and are referenced in works on laḥn, e.g., by Ibn al-Ḥanbalī, see Chapter 2, section 2.
Ibn Maʿṣūm, al-Ṭirāz al-awwal, 1:9. Other comprehensive dictionaries mentioned are al-Jamhara, al-Muḥkam, al-ʿUbāb, al-Tahdhīb, and Abū al-Ḥusayn Aḥmad Ibn Fāris’ (d. 395/1004) al-Mujmal.
On Ibn Maʿṣūm, see Joseph E. Lowry, “Ibn Maʿṣūm,” in Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1350–1850, ed. Joseph E. Lowry and Devin J. Stewart, Mîzân. Studien zur Literatur in der islamischen Welt (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), 174–184; Joseph E. Lowry, “Ibn Maʿṣūm,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2017),
The modern edition has twelve volumes and two index volumes; the dictionary breaks off with the root q-m-ṣ.
Ibn Maʿṣūm, al-Ṭirāz al-awwal, 1:10–11.
This is not only the case in Arabic, but also in languages of other Islamicate cultures, such as Indonesian and Malay. It would be interesting to trace the point in time at which qāmūs commonly acquired the meaning of “dictionary.” Al-Zabīdī mentions the meaning al-baḥr and refers to the title of al-Fīrūzābādī’s work but does not go further than that. See al-Zabīdī, Tāj al-ʿarūs, 16:401. When Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq wrote al-Jāsūs ʿalā al-Qāmūs, he was still referring to al-Fīrūzābādī’s work only.
In grammar, ḥadīth was used from Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Mālik (d. 672/1274) onward. See Aryeh Levin, “The Status of the Science of Grammar among Islamic Sciences,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 29 (2004): 7.
Baalbaki (The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 72) distinguishes between the attitudes of grammarians and lexicographers:
The grammarians and lexicographers obviously did not see eye to eye on whether this state of affairs affected the value of Ḥadīṯ as linguistic evidence, for whereas early grammarians such as Sībawayhi (d. 180/796) only sparingly quoted Ḥadīṯ, lexicographers as early as Ḫalīl (d. 175/791) cited it much more frequently. […] In all cases, the existence of a whole genre on ġarīb al-Ḥadīṯ proves that the lexicographers generally did not share the early grammarians’ concerns regarding the way Ḥadīṯ was transmitted.
Al-Ṣaghānī, al-ʿUbāb al-zākhir, 1:2:
وقالوا :في الحديث، غير مبيني النبوي من الصحابي والصحابي من التابعي .وربما أطلقوا لفظ الحديث على المثل، ولفظ المثل على الحديث، وربما قالوا :وقولهم، وهو من صحاح الأحاديث .
Al-Ṣaghānī, al-ʿUbāb al-zākhir, 1:2:
وقد سردت الأحاديث الغريبة المعاني، المشكلة الألفاظ تامةً مستوفاةً فإن كان في حديث عدة ألفاظ مشكلة أتيت به تامةً وفسرت كل لفظة منها في بابها وتركيبها وذكرت أن تمام الحديث مذكور في تركيب كذا، ليعلم سياق الحديث ويؤمن التكرار والإعادة .
Al-Ṣaghānī, al-ʿUbāb al-zākhir, 1:39:
حبطأ :رجل حبنطأ وحبنطأة وحبنطى، بلا همز أي قصير سمين ضخم البطن وكذلك المحبنطئ، يهمز ولايهمز، ويقال :هو الممتلئ غيظاً .أبو زيد :إحبنطأ الرجل إذا انفتخ جوفه ومنه حديث النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم في السقط :يظل محبنطئاً على باب الجنة .وفي الحديث الآخر :إن السقط ليراغم ربه إن أدخل أبويه النار فيجبرهما بسرره حتى يدخلهما الجنة أي يغاضبه، والسرر ما تقطعه القابلة من السرة .
Al-Fīrūzābādī accused al-Jawharī of putting the lemma ḥabanṭaʾa under the wrong root, namely ḥ-ṭ-ʾ. See above, Chapter 1, sections 2.2 and 2.4.
See above, Chapter 1, section 2.4.
Al-Kuḥlānī, “Kitāb al-Durr al-laqīṭ fī aghlāṭ al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ,” [Text] 15–16:
الفيروزابادي : …ووهم الجوهري فقال في الحديث .انتهى .
ويمكن أن يقال :أراد بالحديث كلام الناس المتدوال، الحال بينهم محل المثل كما هو دأبه، وكذا ديدن الإمام المطرزي في كتابه المغرب، ولا يريد به حديث النبي صلى الله عليه وآله وصحبه وسلم، حتى يرد عليه بأنه قول أكثم وليس بالحديث، مع أن إطلاق الحديث على كلام الصحابة والتابعين شائع سائغ، كما ذكره الفاضل الشيخ علي (الشهير بمصنفك )رحمه الله في شرح المصابيح حيث قال :قد صرح المحدثون بأن الحديث يطلق على أقوال الصحابة والتابعين لهم بإحسان، وآثارهم وفتاهم، فالحديث أعم من الخبر والأثر، إذ الخبر :ما يكون مروياً عن رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم، والأثر :ما يكون مروياً عن صحابي، والحديث يشملهما .
Al-Zabīdī, Tāj al-ʿarūs, 1:29–30:
في معرفة آداب اللغوي
وفيه تنبيه، قال السيوطي في المزهر :أول ما يلزمه الإخلاص وتصحيح النية، ثم التحرى في الأخذ عن الثقات، مع الدأب والملازمة عليهما، وليكتب كل ما رآه ويسمعه، فذلك أضبط له، وليرحل في طلب الغرائب والفوائد كما رحل الأئمة، وليعتن بحفظ أشعار العرب، مع تفهم ما فيها حكماً ومواعظ وآداباً يستعان بها على تفسير القرآن والحديث .
Ibn al-Athīr, al-Nihāya fī gharīb al-ḥadīth wa-l-athar, 1:3: “The discipline of ḥadīth and reports is among the noblest Islamic disciplines in terms of its standing, the best in terms of renown, the most complete in terms of utility and the grandest in terms of reward.”
علم الحديث والآثار من أشرف العلوم الإسلامية قدراً، وأحسنها ذكراً وأكملها نفعاً وأعظمها أجراً .
Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿarab, 1:7–8:
وقصدت توشيحه بجليل الأخبار وجميل الآثار، مضافاً إلى ما فيه من آيات القرآن الكريم والكلام على معجزات الذكر الحكيم، ليتحلى بترصيع دررها عقده ويكون على مدار الآيات والأخبار والأثار والأمثال والأشعار حله وعقده؛ فرأيت أبا السعادات المبارك بن محمد بن الأثير الجزري قد جاء في ذلك بالنهاية وجاوز في الجودة حد الغاية، غير أنه لم يضع الكلمات في محلها ولا راعى زائد حروفها من أصلها، فوضعت كلاً منها في مكانه وأظهرته مع برهانه؛
See Ibn al-Athīr, al-Nihāya fī gharīb al-ḥadīth wa-l-athar, 1:11. Cf. also Baalbaki, The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition, 80–81.
Ḥājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, 2:1310.
Al-Kawkabānī, Fulk al-Qāmūs, 52:
وبعد ذلك فإنّه لا يستغنى عن القاموس لما فيه من الزّيادات النفيسة الّتي لا توجد في سواه منها ذكر رجال الحديث وغيرهم مع ضبطهم .
On his biography, see Lowry, “Ibn Maʿṣūm.”
Lowry, “Ibn Maʿṣūm,” 175.
However, Ibn Maʿṣūm also wrote a treatise on the flaws of al-Qāmūs, titled Risāla fī aghlāṭ al-Fīrūzābādī fī al-Qāmūs (“Treatise on the Mistakes of al-Fīrūzābādī in the Qāmūs”). See Lowry, “Ibn Maʿṣūm,” 175.
Ibn Maʿṣūm, al-Ṭirāz al-awwal, 1:11:
فإني أبدأ الفصل من الباب باللغة العامة ثم الخاصة بالكتاب، ثم أجيء على الأثر بالأثر ثم المصطلح فالمثل، هذا إذا اشترك الجميع في المادة واشتبك في سلوك تلك الجادة …
Al-Zabīdī, Tāj al-ʿarūs, 1:1.