Hama al-Hawami fi Sharh Jam al-Jawami
- Author died
- 911 AH
- Editions
- al-Maktabah al-Tawfīqiyyah
Ham' al-Hawami' fi Sharh Jam' al-Jawami' (The Pouring Down of Torrential Clouds: Commentary on the Gathering of Collections) is a comprehensive Arabic grammatical and morphological commentary written by the Egyptian scholar Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (849–911 AH / 1445–1505 CE) on his own text, Jam' al-Jawami' . The work serves as an extensive encyclopedia of grammatical principles, divergent scholastic opinions, rationales, and morphological rules .
Composition and Purpose
al-Suyuti originally authored the base text, Jam' al-Jawami' fi al-Nahw, as a compendium compiled from approximately one hundred grammatical works, primarily summarizing and expanding upon Tashil al-Fawa'id by Ibn Malik and Irtishaf al-Darab by Abu Hayyan al-Andalusi . He noted that although Jam' al-Jawami' was about two-thirds the length of the Tashil, it contained twice as many grammatical issues and scholastic disagreements . When al-Suyuti showed the base text to his teacher, Taqi al-Din al-Shumunni, it met with his admiration .
In the introduction to the commentary, al-Suyuti relates that he initially intended to write a massive, expansive commentary filled with citations, extensive textual evidence (shawahid), grammatical rationales (ta'alil), critical appraisals of arguments, rules, and subdivisions . However, observing a decline in scholarly ambition among contemporaries, combined with urgent requests from students who needed an accessible guide to untangle the condensed phrasing of Jam' al-Jawami', he composed this intermediate commentary to resolve its structures, clarify its meanings, and elucidate its reasoning .
Structure and Contents
The book is structured into introductory matters followed by seven distinct books, an arrangement inspired by the categorization used in legal theory (usul al-fiqh) and deliberately grouped into seven parts in reference to the prophetic report narrated by Ibn Hibban stating that God loves odd numbers :
- Preliminaries (al-Muqaddimat): Covers definitions of the word (kalima), its classifications, speech (kalam), kalim, sentence (jumla), utterance (qawl), inflection (i'rab), indeclinability (bina'), declinability, and definite and indefinite nouns .
- Book 1: Essential syntactic elements (al-'umad), covering nominative nouns (marfu'at) and the accusatives associated with governing cancellers (mansub al-nawasikh) .
- Book 2: Supplementary syntactic elements (al-fadlat), detailing accusative nouns (mansubat) .
- Book 3: Genitives (al-majrurat), along with jussives (al-majzumat), non-jussive conditional tools, and operative particles of meaning (huruf al-ma'ani) .
- Book 4: Operative agents (al-'awamil), focusing on verbs and verbal derivatives, and concluding with structural competition (tanazu') and preoccupation (ishtighal) .
- Book 5: Syntactic dependents (al-tawabi'), as well as syntactic phenomena such as framing (al-ikhbar), quotation (al-hikaya), naming (al-tasmiya), and poetic licenses (dara'ir al-shi'r) .
- Book 6: Morphological structures and patterns of nouns and verbs (al-abniya) .
- Book 7: Morphological changes affecting individual words (taghyirat al-kalim al-ifradiyya), including augmentations, elisions, substitutions (ibdal), vocalic movements (naql), and assimilation (idgham), concluding with a treatment of Arabic orthography and script (al-khatt) .
The first five books encompass syntax (nahw), while the final two address morphology (tasrif) and orthography .
Method and Reception
Ham' al-Hawami' is considered among the most exhaustive reference works in the Arabic grammatical tradition . Throughout the commentary, al-Suyuti synthesizes diverse viewpoints across grammatical schools, systematically attributing opinions to early grammarians, weighing competing views, and providing rationales for his chosen positions .
Because the work was geared towards advanced scholars, al-Suyuti frequently cited truncated hemistichs of poetic evidence or cited only the opening words of proverbs, assuming the reader possessed the memory and background to recognize them . To resolve these obscurities for later students, the Mauritanian scholar Muhammad al-Shinqiti authored an extensive supercommentary entitled al-Daw' al-Lami' 'ala Ham' al-Hawami', in which he completed the partial poetic citations, clarified abbreviated proverbs, and explained passages that assumed prior knowledge .
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