Asila wa Ajwiba fi Irab al-Quran
- Author died
- 761 AH
- Editions
- Deanship of Scientific Research at the Islamic University
Asila wa Ajwiba fi Irab al-Quran (Questions and Answers on Quranic Parsing) is a grammatical treatise by the Egyptian grammarian Ibn Hisham al-Nahwi (708–761 AH / 1309–1360 CE) addressing grammatical parsing queries and syntactical difficulties in select Quranic verses and traditions .
Composition and Purpose
Ibn Hisham composed the work to record questions directed to him during his travels in the Hejaz in 747 AH, providing concise solutions alongside related grammatical issues that arose during that journey . Written two years before he commenced his major grammatical treatise Mughni al-Labib in Mecca in 749 AH, thirty of the forty-four Quranic verses analyzed in this work were subsequently addressed in Mughni al-Labib .
Contents and Method
The work comprises forty-six grammatical questions and answers: forty-four focus on problematic verses of the Quran, two analyze Prophetic traditions, and the work concludes with a dedicated inquiry examining the syntax and conditional particle law in the tradition نعم العبد صهيب لو لم يخف الله لم يعصه ("What an excellent servant Suhayb is! Had he not feared Allah, he would not have disobeyed Him") .
Ibn Hisham structures his responses through concise syntactical determinations while extracting various viable parsing possibilities (awjuh al-iʿrab) . He supports his explanations by cross-referencing analogous Quranic passages, noting variant Quranic readings (qiraʾat), citing Hadith, and adducing textual evidence (shawahid) from both Arabic poetry and prose .
Manuscript and Publication
The text is preserved in a manuscript consisting of twelve folios written in clear Naskh script, housed at Osmania University in Hyderabad, India (MS 15432/297, Quranic Sciences) . It was edited by Muhammad Naghash and published in 1403 AH (1983 CE) by the Scientific Council of the Islamic University of Madinah .
Answer updated