Kitab fihi Lughat al-Quran
- Author died
- 207 AH
- Editions
- Jābir ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Sarī‘
Kitab fihi Lughat al-Quran (The Book Containing the Dialects of the Quran) is an early grammatical treatise on Arabic dialectal variants and phonetic phenomena in the Quran, dictated by the Kufan grammarian Yahya ibn Ziyad al-Farra (144–207 AH / 761–822 CE) .
Attribution and Transmission
The text represents the dictations (imla') of al-Farra', transmitted down through his student Muhammad ibn al-Jahm al-Simmari, and from al-Simmari by Abu Bakr ibn Mujahid . The bibliographer Ibn al-Nadim listed it under the title Kitab Lughat al-Quran among the early specialized works on Quranic tribal dialects .
Content and Method
The work examines words and morphological variations across regional and tribal dialects of Arabia, attributing phonetic and morphological usages to tribes such as Quraysh, Kinana, Tamim, Asad, Qays, Rabi'a, Kalb, and Banu Amir . It analyzes linguistic features attested in Quranic readings (qira'at), such as:
- Prefix vocalization in imperfect verbs, distinguishing the standard Hijazi fat-ha used by Quraysh and Kinana (e.g. نَسْتَعِينُ ) from the kasra favored by Tamim, Asad, Qays, and Rabi'a (e.g. نِسْتَعِينُ ) .
- The vocalization of pronominal suffixes, such as pronouncing the letter ha with a damma (e.g. عَلَيْهُم ) among the people of the Hijaz and Yemen versus kasra (e.g. عَلَيْهِم ) among the tribes of Najd .
- Phonetic shifts and consonant realizations in lexical items, such as reciting al-sirat with sad, sin, or zay .
To corroborate these linguistic explanations, al-Farra' adduces narrations from earlier authorities, hadiths cited with chains of transmission via scholars such as Sufyan ibn Uyaynah, Abu Bakr ibn Ayyash, and Khazim ibn Husayn al-Basri, as well as lines of pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry from poets including al-A'sha and Abu al-Najm .
Preservation and Editions
The text was preserved in an ancient manuscript witness characterized by disordered folios, gaps at both ends and within the text, and some effaced wording, which had been collated against another copy in antiquity . It was reordered, vocalized, and prepared for publication by Jabir ibn Abd Allah al-Surayyi' in Sha'ban 1435 AH .
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