al-Jubbi

Died
450 AH
Born in
-

al-Jubbi (d. c. 450 AH / 1058 CE) was a Maliki scholar and lexicographer, best known for authoring Sharh Gharib Alfaz al-Mudawwana (Explanation of the Obscure Words of al-Mudawwana) .

Biography and Scholarly Contribution

Little is preserved in historical and biographical sources regarding al-Jubbi's early life, ancestry, teachers, or exact dates of birth and death, with later bibliographers noting that his detailed biography remains largely unknown . He flourished around the fifth century AH and is counted among the early authorities who addressed the obscure vocabulary of Maliki jurisprudence .

al-Jubbi's primary contribution is Sharh Gharib Alfaz al-Mudawwana, a specialized legal-linguistic lexicon dedicated to clarifying the obscure, difficult, and technical expressions occurring in al-Mudawwana . Rather than following an alphabetical dictionary arrangement, al-Jubbi structured the work according to the thematic chapters and sections of al-Mudawwana (beginning with the chapter on ritual purification, Kitab al-Wudu'), allowing students and jurists to cross-reference terms directly while reading the legal text . In it, he provided precise morphological weights, phonetic vocalizations, lexical roots, and technical juristic meanings for complex terminology .

Answer updated

List of Works

  • Sharh Gharib Alfaz al-Mudawwana is a legal-linguistic dictionary dedicated to explaining the rare, obscure, and technical terminology found in al-Mudawwana. Rather than following an alphabetical order, the work is organized according to the thematic chapters of al-Mudawwana to help readers cross-reference terms while studying specific legal subjects, providing linguistic definitions, root derivations, precise vocalizations, and morphological patterns for each entry.