Irab: al-Haqqa ma al-Haqqa wa nahwuhu - ضمن Athar al-Muallimi
- Author died
- 1386 AH
- Editions
- Dār ‘Ālam al-Fawā’id lil-Nashr wa-al-Tawzī‘
Iʿrāb: al-Ḥāqqah mā al-Ḥāqqah wa-naḥwuhu (The Syntactic Analysis of “The Inevitable Reality, What is the Inevitable Reality?” and Similar Phrasings) is a short grammatical treatise by the Yemeni scholar Abd al-Rahman al-Muallimi al-Yamani (1313–1386 AH / 1894–1966 CE), published within his collected exegetical treatises (Majmūʿ Rasāʾil al-Tafsīr) in Āthār al-Muʿallimī .
Context and Origin
The treatise records a scholarly dialogue (mudhākarah) that took place between al-Muallimi and the ruler of Asir, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Idrisi . Al-Muallimi opens the work by noting that it stems from what he gleaned from the Idrisi circle, structuring the debate around his own inquiries ("I said") and al-Idrisi's responses ("Our master said") . In manuscript form, the text occupied a single folio page .
Grammatical Arguments
The treatise focuses on the syntactic parsing (iʿrāb) of recurring Quranic formulas such as الْحَاقَّةُ ١ مَا الْحَاقَّةُ [al-Ḥāqqah: 1–2] and الْقَارِعَةُ ١ مَا الْقَارِعَةُ [al-Qāriʿah: 1–2] .
Al-Muallimi reviews the standard syntactic analysis transmitted by grammarians:
- The first noun (al-Ḥāqqah) is the primary subject (mubtadaʾ).
- The interrogative particle mā is a second subject (mubtadaʾ thān).
- The repeated noun (al-Ḥāqqah) serves as the predicate of mā, and this clause forms the predicate of the first subject, linked to it by repeating the overt noun instead of using a pronoun .
Al-Muallimi suggested an alternative analysis: that the predicate of the first noun is implicit and omitted (maḥdhūf), implied as "a momentous matter" (amrun ʿaẓīm), while the clause mā al-ḥāqqah remains an independent subject and predicate . Applying this to verses such as وَأَصْحَابُ الشِّمَالِ مَا أَصْحَابُ الشِّمَالِ ٤١ فِي سَمُومٍ [al-Wāqiʿah: 41–42], he argued that mā aṣḥāb al-shimāl functions as a parenthetical sentence (jumlah muʿtariḍah) between the first subject and its explicit predicate ( فِي سَمُومٍ ), thereby avoiding the grammatical irregularity of substituting an overt noun for a pronoun .
Al-Idrisi responded that positing omission or parenthesis runs contrary to the default grammatical principle (khilāf al-aṣl), and that the magnification intended by the estimated predicate is already supplied by mā .
The discussion concluded with an alternative parsing: treating mā as an advanced predicate (khabar muqaddam) and the second noun as a postponed subject (mubtadaʾ muʾakhkhar) . They argued that because the second noun is definite (maʿrifah) and mā is indefinite (nakirah), the definite noun has priority as the subject, avoiding the problem of predicating something of itself . The interlocutors corroborated their conclusion by referring to the Quranic commentary Rūḥ al-maʿānī of Mahmud al-Alusi, who mentioned both configurations and favored this interpretation semantically .
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