Muallif al-Umda fi Irab al-Burda
- Died
- 850 AH
- Born in
- -
Muallif al-Umda fi Irab al-Burda (d. c. 850 AH / 1446 CE) was an anonymous Arab grammarian, estimated to have lived during the eighth or ninth century AH, best known for his grammatical treatise al-Umda fi Irab al-Burda.
Identity and Scholarly Contribution
The author's personal name is not preserved in the surviving manuscript tradition, though researchers place him among the prominent scholars of the eighth or ninth century AH. In his work, he produced a systematic syntactic parsing (iʿrāb) and linguistic commentary on Qasidat al-Burda, the celebrated prophetic panegyric by al-Busiri (d. 696 AH). His method aimed to parse the entirety of the poem's verses, clarify obscure vocabulary, and establish the correct voweling of ambiguous words to aid students and memorizers of the text. In his syntactical discussions, he frequently adopted standard classical positions, including the grammatical analyses of Sibawayh on particular particles.
Reception and Manuscript Heritage
The author's grammatical parsing influenced subsequent commentaries on the poem. Later scholars whose commentaries share or directly incorporate his syntactic interpretations include Khalid al-Azhari (d. 905 AH), Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi (904–984 AH), and Ibrahim al-Bajuri (d. 1276 AH), who drew extensively upon his parsing in his supercommentary on the Burda.
The text has been preserved in a manuscript in the Zahiriyya Library in Damascus (MS 8453), transcribed in 27 folios by the copyist Abd Allah al-Ghabit al-Shafi'i on 11 Dhu al-Qada 1179 AH. It was later edited by Abd Allah al-Jajah.
Answer updated
List of Works
Al-Umda fi Irab al-Burda (The Pillar in the Grammatical Analysis of the Burda) is an Arabic grammatical work, likely dating to the eighth or ninth century AH (c. 850 AH / 1446 CE), that provides a comprehensive syntactic parsing (iʿrāb) and lexical commentary on the renowned prophetic panegyric Qasidat al-Burda by al-Busiri. Its objective is to parse all of the poem's verses, clarify obscure vocabulary, and establish the correct voweling of ambiguous words to assist those who memorize the text.