Fath al-Mutaal ala al-Qasida al-Musamma b-Lamiyyat al-Afal
- Author died
- 1250 AH
- Editions
- Majallat al-Jami'ah al-Islamiyyah bi-al-Madinah al-Munawwarah
Fath al-Mutaal ala al-Qasida al-Musamma b-Lamiyyat al-Afal (The Opening of the Exalted over the Poem Named Lamiyyat al-Afal) is a commentary on Ibn Malik's didactic poem on Arabic morphology, Lamiyyat al-Afal, authored by the Maliki scholar Hamad bin Muhammad al-Saidi (d. c. 1250 AH / 1834 CE) .
Author and Context
The author identifies himself in the opening lines as Hamad ibn Muhammad al-Saidi al-Maliki, while some manuscripts record his nisba as al-Raiqi al-Saidi . Biographical details about his life remain scarce in classical dictionaries, but internal textual evidence suggests he lived approximately between 1170 and 1250 AH (c. 1756–1834 CE) . In the work, he cites Ahmad al-Sujai (d. 1197 AH) from his Fath al-Jalil and references Muhammad al-Amir al-Kabir (d. 1233 AH) as an esteemed contemporary verifier, while an extant non-autograph manuscript is dated to 1248 AH . The orientalist Carl Brockelmann listed the commentary in his survey of Arabic literature based on Munich manuscript 719, recording the author's nisba with a sin as "al-Suaidi" .
Sources and Method
In his prologue, al-Saidi describes the work as a concise gloss intended to elucidate the vocabulary of the poem, explain its underlying meaning, and draw attention to omissions in its treatment of morphological rules . He explicitly notes that the primary source of his commentary is the extensive commentary (al-Sharh al-Kabir, also known as Fath al-Aqfal) by Bahrag al-Yamani (d. 930 AH), whom he denotes simply as "the commentator" (al-sharih) whenever cited without qualification .
Al-Saidi adopted an integrated method of commentary, interweaving the verses of Lamiyyat al-Afal directly into his prose explanations rather than presenting full verses followed by distinct commentaries . Under this structure, individual verses are divided into separate phrases and grammatical units—sometimes separating connected elements such as prepositions from their objects—so that the poetic text and commentary form a continuous reading .
Publication History
The commentary was published unedited by the Mustafa al-Babi al-Halabi press in Cairo in 1367 AH (1948 CE) as a small volume of sixty pages . It was later edited by Ibrahim ibn Sulayman al-Buaymi and published in the journal of the Islamic University of Madinah across issues from 1417 to 1418 AH .
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