Mukhtasar Sharh Ibn Jama'a ala al-Qawaid al-Sughra - ضمن "Athar al-Muallimi
- Author died
- 1386 AH
- Editions
- Dar Alam al-Fawa'id lil-Nashr wa-al-Tawzi'
Mukhtasar Sharh Ibn Jama'a ala al-Qawaid al-Sughra (Abridgment of Ibn Jama'a's Commentary on al-Qawaid al-Sughra) is a grammatical treatise by the Yemeni scholar Abd al-Rahman al-Muallimi al-Yamani (d. 1386 AH / 1966 CE) that summarizes an unpublished commentary on Arabic syntax and sentence analysis .
Background and Composition
The base text of the work is al-Qawaid al-Sughra (also known as Nukat al-I'rab), an abridgment prepared by Ibn Hisham al-Ansari (708–761 AH) from his own grammatical manual al-I'rab an Qawaid al-I'rab . The Shafi'i scholar Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ibn Jama'a (749–819 AH), known as Ibn Jama'a al-Hafid, authored several commentaries on Ibn Hisham's al-Qawaid .
Al-Muallimi selected one of Ibn Jama'a's unprinted commentaries and condensed its analytical determinations alongside Ibn Hisham's base text . The manuscript carries no explicit date of composition, but it is estimated to have been written during the 1330s AH, when al-Muallimi was in his late teens in Yemen and intensely engaged in the study of Arabic grammar . Al-Muallimi subsequently rendered the contents of this abridgment into a 200-verse didactic poem in the rajaz meter titled Nazm Qawaid al-I'rab al-Sughra .
Structure and Method
Al-Muallimi did not assign an independent formal title to the treatise; instead, he inscribed on its opening page: "Al-Qawaid al-Sughra by Muhammad ibn Hisham, with some determinations from its commentary by Ibn Jama'a, as indicated" . To distinguish between the text and commentary, he placed the letter mīm (م) over passages belonging to Ibn Hisham's base text (matn) and the letter shīn (ش) over Ibn Jama'a's commentary and glosses (sharḥ) .
The text follows the tripartite division of al-Qawaid al-Sughra:
- The sentence (al-jumla), its classifications (nominal, verbal, major, and minor), and its grammatical status with respect to inflection .
- Adverbs and prepositional phrases (al-ẓarf wa-l-jārr wa-l-majrūr) and their syntactic dependency (taʿalluq) .
- Particles and instruments frequently recurring in discourse (adawāt yakthur dawruhā fī al-kalām) .
Manuscript and Publication
The work survived in al-Muallimi's personal holographic notebook (kashkūl), occupying pages 29 to 35 in regular naskh script . It was edited by Usama ibn Musallam al-Hazimi and published under the title Mukhtasar Sharh Ibn Jama'a ala al-Qawaid al-Sughra li-Ibn Hisham within the 20th volume (devoted to treatises on grammar and linguistics) of al-Muallimi's collected works, Athar al-Shaykh al-Allama Abd al-Rahman ibn Yahya al-Muallimi al-Yamani .
Answer updated