Badr al-Din Ibn Malik
- Died
- 686 AH
- Born in
- Damascus
Badr al-Din Ibn Malik (d. 686 AH / 1287 CE) was a Syrian grammarian, rhetorician, and Shafi'i scholar, best known for authoring one of the earliest and most authoritative commentaries on his father's grammatical poem al-Alfiyya.
Life and career
His full name was Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Abd Allah ibn Malik, bearing the kunya Abu Abd Allah and the honorific Badr al-Din, with the ancestral lineage traced to Tayyi' and Kinana. Often referred to as Ibn al-Nazim or Ibn al-Musannif, he was the son of the eminent grammarian Jamal al-Din Ibn Malik. He received his primary education under his father. Following a disagreement that arose between them, he relocated to Baalbek, where he resided and taught for several years, attracting students such as Badr al-Din Ibn Zayd.
After his father's death in 672 AH, he was summoned to Damascus to assume his father's teaching post, where he settled permanently and devoted himself to instruction and writing.
Scholarly standing
Biographers described him as possessing exceptional intelligence, a sharp mind, and broad competence across Arabic grammar, semantics, rhetoric, metrics, logic, jurisprudence, and legal theory. Al-Yunini recorded that scholars of the era considered him to have rivaled his father and surpassed him in certain disciplines. Al-Safadi noted an irony in his scholarship: despite his mastery over the disciplines and mechanics of versification, he was entirely unable to compose poetry of his own.
His prominent writings include Sharh Alfiyyat Ibn Malik (also known as Sharh Ibn al-Nazim), completed in Muharram 676 AH, which critically analyzed the verses and corrected his father's views on select grammatical questions. In rhetoric, he authored al-Misbah fi ikhtisar al-Miftah, an abridgment of al-Sakkaki's work, and in morphology he composed a commentary on his father's Lamiyyat al-af'al.
Death
He suffered recurrent, severe bouts of colic, which eventually brought on his final illness. He died in Damascus on Sunday, 8 Muharram 686 AH, and was buried the following day in the Bab al-Saghir cemetery.
Answer updated
List of Works
Sharh Ibn al-Nazim ala Alfiyyat Ibn Malik, commonly known as Sharh Ibn al-Musannif, is a major Arabic grammatical commentary on the celebrated didactic grammatical poem al-Alfiyya (also known as al-Khulasa). Completed in Muharram 676 AH, the work employs an analytical approach supported by extensive textual evidence, particularly from Quranic verses, to elucidate the grammatical verses while critically evaluating their choices and formulations.