al-Afal - Said al-Maafiri
- Author died
- 401 AH
- Editions
- Mu'assasat Dar al-Sha'b lil-Sihafah wal-Tiba'ah wal-Nashr
Kitab al-Af'al (The Book of Verbs) is a specialized morphological and lexicographical treatise on the Arabic verb system by the Andalusian grammarian and philologist Abu Uthman Sa'id ibn Muhammad al-Ma'afiri (d. after 400 AH / 1010 CE), known as Ibn al-Haddad . Originating from Cordoba and later settling in Zaragoza, al-Ma'afiri composed the work as a comprehensive expansion and critical revision of the earlier treatise of the same title by his teacher Ibn al-Qutiyya (d. 367 AH / 977 CE) .
Composition and Purpose
The genesis of the work arose from the teaching of Ibn al-Qutiyya, whose pioneering Kitab al-Af'al had set a standard in Andalusian linguistic scholarship but suffered from extreme brevity, making it difficult for students to utilize without intensive reference to earlier authorities . Al-Ma'afiri set out to unpack his teacher's condensed text, rectify omissions and misplaced entries, attribute transmitted views and linguistic variants to their original authorities, and provide an exhaustive repository of Arabic verbs alongside their morphological patterns, syntactic transitivity, and semantic nuances .
Structure and Method
The work is organized into two primary sections: an extensive introductory framework and the main lexicographical body .
The introduction opens with a preface addressing the merits of learning Arabic philology, followed by an analytical chapter on the science of verbs (ilm al-af'al), morphological patterns (abniya), and derivational analogy (qiyas al-tasrif) . This theoretical section outlines the fundamental rules governing sound and weak roots, bare (mujarrad) and augmented (mazid) forms, past and present stem vowel pairings, verbal nouns (masadir), active and passive participles, adjectives, and transitivity .
In the main body, al-Ma'afiri compiles verbal roots and systematically registers their forms, derivations, and definitions . His method is distinguished by its wide-ranging textual documentation:
- Evidentiary citations drawn from the Quran and variant readings (qira'at), the Hadith, classical proverbs, and extensive Arabic poetry in both ode (qasid) and meter (rajaz) forms .
- Systematic recording of tribal dialectal variants (lughat al-qaba'il) and loanwords .
- Explication of rare vocabulary (gharib), obscure locutions, historical battle days of the Arabs (ayyam al-Arab), and prosodic observations .
Transmission and Reception
The book was transmitted in al-Andalus through chains of prominent scholars; Ibn Khayr al-Ishbili (d. 575 AH / 1179 CE) recorded his transmission of it via Abu al-Hasan Yunus ibn Muhammad ibn Mughith from the judge Abu Umar Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Yahya Ibn al-Hadhdha' directly from al-Ma'afiri . Classical bibliographers, including Ibn Bashkuwal and Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, cited it under the title Kitab al-Af'al, highlighting it as the definitive expansion of Ibn al-Qutiyya's work . It formed a vital link in the Andalusian tradition of specialized monographs on verbs, which also included works by Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik ibn Tarif (d. c. 400 AH), Ibn al-Qatta (d. 515 AH / 1121 CE), and Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn Hisham al-Ansari (d. 646 AH / 1248 CE) .
Some later biographers occasionally conflated al-Ma'afiri with other contemporaries bearing similar names, such as the philosopher-logician Sa'id ibn Fathun or the physician Sa'id ibn Muhammad ibn al-Baghunish .
Manuscripts and Editions
Manuscripts of the text survived in repositories such as the Köprülü Library in Istanbul (MS 1518 and MS 1519, dated 670 AH) and in Tunisia . The text was edited by Husayn Muhammad Muhammad Sharaf and reviewed by Muhammad Mahdi Allam, published in Cairo by the Academy of the Arabic Language and Dar al-Sha'b .
Answer updated