al-Tawqif ala Muhimmat al-Taarif
- Author died
- 1031 AH
- Editions
- ‘Ālam al-Kutub
al-Tawqif 'ala Muhimmat al-Ta'arif ("Making Known the Essential Definitions") is a comprehensive Arabic dictionary of technical terminology compiled by the Shafi'i scholar and mystic Abd al-Rauf al-Munawi (952–1031 AH / 1545–1621 CE; Katib Chelebi gives his death year as approximately 1030 AH).
Scope and Content
The work gathers nearly three thousand definitions of technical terms circulating across Islamic scholarly disciplines. While terms from Sufism predominate, the dictionary also encompasses terminology from Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), Arabic linguistics, hadith, Quranic sciences, theology (aqidah), logic, theological sects, and medicine. It incorporates specialized vocabularies used by jurists, inheritance calculators (faradiyyun), hadith critics, theologians, grammarians, morphologists, exegetes, and the Mu'tazilah.
In his preface, al-Munawi states that he limited the book to concepts that are urgently needed and upon which the understanding of the inner secrets of the Sharia depends, excluding rarely needed terms even if aesthetically refined.
Structure and Arrangement
The dictionary is organized alphabetically. Al-Munawi divided the work into main chapters (abwab) according to the first letter of the word, and subdivided each chapter into sections (fusul) according to the second letter, occasionally taking the third and fourth letters into account. This structural arrangement mirrors the system used in al-Sharif al-Jurjani's lexicon Kitab al-Ta'rifat ("The Book of Definitions").
Sources
Al-Munawi notes in his introduction that the core of the work was distilled from three primary texts:
- al-Dhari'ah ila Ma'rifat Ma Ussilat 'alayhi al-Shari'ah (whose author he does not name)
- The Ta'rifat of Ibn Kamal (Ahmad ibn Sulayman ibn Kamal Pasha, d. 940 AH)
- al-Raghib al-Isfahani's vocabulary work al-Mufradat
Throughout the book, al-Munawi also quotes extensively from the Andalusian scholar al-Haralli (Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Ahmad al-Tujibi, d. 637 AH), and references theological commentaries such as al-Taftazani's Sharh al-Aqa'id and al-Sharif al-Jurjani's Sharh al-Aqa'id al-Adudiyyah.
Publication
The work was edited by Muhammad Ridwan al-Dayah and published in 1410 AH / 1990 CE.
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