Nahw Mir = Mabadi Qawaid al-Lugha al-Arabiya
- Author died
- 816 AH
- Editions
- Maktabat al-Faysal
Nahw Mir (also translated into Arabic as Mabadi Qawa'id al-Lugha al-Arabiya) is an introductory manual on Arabic syntax (nahw) authored by the scholar al-Sharif al-Jurjani (d. 816 AH / 1413 CE) .
Purpose and Scope
Originally composed in Persian, the treatise was designed as an accessible primer for beginning students of Arabic who have already acquired vocabulary and mastered fundamental morphology (tasrif) . Its primary objective is to instill an intuitive grasp of Arabic sentence structure, declension (i'rab), and indeclinability (bina'), enabling students to accurately analyze and construct Arabic phrases .
Contents and Method
The work begins by categorizing the elements of Arabic speech:
- Individual words (mufrad or kalima): Divided into the three foundational parts of speech: nouns (ism), verbs (fi'l), and particles (harf) .
- Compounds (murakkab): Classified into informative/complete (mufid, forming a jumla or kalam) and non-informative/incomplete (ghayr mufid) .
- Complete sentences are divided into declarative sentences (khabariyya), comprising nominal sentences (ismiyya) made of a subject (mubtada') and predicate (khabar), and verbal sentences (fi'liyya) made of a verb (fi'l) and subject (fa'il); and non-declarative utterances (insha'iyya), covering categories such as commands, prohibitions, interrogations, wishes, hopes, contractual formulas, vocatives, offers, oaths, and exclamations of wonder .
- Incomplete compounds include possessive phrases (murakkab idafi), numerical compounds (murakkab 'adadi), and indeclinable/diptote compounds (murakkab man' al-sarf) .
The text emphasizes the essential minimum for forming sentences, the distinction between governing agents ('awamil) and governed words (ma'mulat), and how grammatical relations define sentence meaning .
Pedagogy and Editions
Nahw Mir became a staple introductory textbook across traditional Islamic madrasa curricula, particularly in South Asia, where students regularly studied it at the beginning of their Arabic grammatical training before advancing to intermediate works .
The treatise has been translated from Persian into Arabic under the title Mabadi Qawa'id al-Lugha al-Arabiya by Hamid Husayn, with explanatory footnotes added by Abd al-Qadir Ahmad Abd al-Qadir, and prepared and edited by Mujahid Saghir Ahmad Chaudhury (published in Chittagong, 1408 AH / 1987 CE) .
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