al-Qistas fi Ilm al-Arud
- Author died
- 538 AH
- Editions
- Maktabat al-Ma‘ārif
al-Qistas fi Ilm al-Arud ("The Scale in the Science of Prosody") is a classical treatise on Arabic prosody and poetic meter composed by the philologist and exegete Abu al-Qasim Mahmud ibn Umar al-Zamakhshari (467–538 AH / 1075–1144 CE) .
Overview and Classification
The text opens with the doxology: «أسأل الله الذي عدل موازين قسطه» ("I ask God, who has leveled the scales of His justice") . In the work, al-Zamakhshari classifies the disciplines of the literary arts into twelve distinct branches: lexical vocabulary (matn al-lugha), morphological structures (al-abniya), etymology (al-ishtiqaq), syntax and inflection (al-i'rab), semantics (al-ma'ani), rhetoric (al-bayan), prosody (al-'arud), rhyme (al-qawafi), prose composition (insha' al-nathr), poetic composition (qard al-shi'r), scribal correspondence (al-kitaba), and conversational discourse (al-muhadarat) .
Commentaries and Transmission
The treatise attracted grammatical and prosodic commentaries in subsequent centuries:
- Tashih al-Miqyas fi Tafsir al-Qistas (also referred to as Sharh al-Qistas), authored by Izz al-Din Abd al-Wahhab ibn Ibrahim al-Zanjani (d. after 655 AH), who completed it in Baghdad in 655 AH (with another transmission dating its completion to 665 AH) .
- A commentary bearing the title Tashih al-Miqyas fi Sharh al-Qistas is also attributed in manuscript records to Ibn al-Khabbaz (d. 639 AH) .
Manuscript copies of al-Qistas are preserved across several international collections, including the Leiden University Library, the Berlin State Library, the Princeton University Library (Garrett Collection), the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna, and the Egyptian National Library (Dar al-Kutub) in Cairo . The text was edited by Bahija Baqir al-Hasani and published under the title al-Qistas al-Mustaqim fi Ilm al-Arud in Najaf in 1970 .
Answer updated