Irab Lamiyyat al-Shanfara
- Author died
- 616 AH
- Editions
- al-Maktab al-Islāmī
Irab Lamiyyat al-Shanfara (Grammatical Analysis of Shanfara's Lamiyyah) is a grammatical commentary by the Hanbali grammarian and jurist Abu al-Baqa al-Ukbari (d. 616 AH / 1219 CE) dedicated to the grammatical parsing (iʿrāb) and linguistic explanation of Lāmiyyat al-ʿArab, the renowned pre-Islamic poem attributed to al-Shanfara al-Azdi .
Structure and Method
The work proceeds through the poem sequentially, starting from its opening verse:
أقيموا بني أمي صدور مطيكم ... فإني إلى قوم سواكم لأميل "Set upright, sons of my mother, the chests of your mounts, for I am inclined toward a people other than you."
Al-Ukbari organizes his commentary around two main textual categories:
- Lexical definitions (al-lughah): Clarifying unusual vocabulary, rare Arabic terminology, and specific names used by the poet, such as terms for desert fauna, weapons, and traveling conditions .
- Grammatical analysis (al-iʿrāb): Parsing sentence components, clarifying governing agents (ʿawāmil), identifying circumstantial clauses (aḥwāl), and addressing morphological derivation and declension variants .
To corroborate his syntactic interpretations, al-Ukbari frequently adduces Quranic parallels—such as citing وَإِنَّ كَثِيرًا مِّنَ النَّاسِ بِلِقَاءِ رَبِّهِمْ لَكَافِرُونَ regarding the corroborative particle lām, وَلِكُلٍّ دَرَجَاتٌ and وَكُلاًّ نَّقُصُّ عَلَيْكَ for the usage of kull, and وَكُلُّهُمْ آتِيهِ يَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ alongside وَكُلٌّ أَتَوْهُ دَاخِرِينَ concerning agreement in number . He also cites poetic evidence (shawāhid) and discusses the opinions of early grammarians, such as Sibawayh and al-Akhfash .
Scholarly Context
Lāmiyyat al-Shanfara received extensive attention from classical Arabic philologists and commentators. Al-Ukbari's grammatical parsing stands within a broader tradition of dedicated expositions on the ode, which includes earlier and contemporary commentaries by scholars such as al-Mubarrad (d. 285 AH), Ibn Durayd (d. 321 AH), and al-Zamakhshari in his commentary Aʿjab al-ʿAjab fī Sharḥ Lāmiyyat al-ʿArab .
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