Tuhfat al-Arib bima fi al-Quran min al-Gharib
- Author died
- 745 AH
- Editions
- al-Maktab al-Islāmī
Tuhfat al-Arib bima fi al-Quran min al-Gharib (A Gift for the Astute on the Rare Vocabulary of the Quran) is a concise dictionary of rare Quranic vocabulary (gharib al-Quran) by the grammarian and exegete Abu Hayyan al-Andalusi (d. 745 AH / 1344–1345 CE) .
Purpose and Scope
In his introduction, Abu Hayyan divides the vocabulary of the Quran into two categories :
- Words whose meanings are readily understood by Arabic speakers of all levels, such as al-sama' (the sky), al-ard (the earth), fawq (above), and taht (below) .
- Words whose comprehension is restricted to those with deep immersion and erudition in the Arabic language, which scholars specialized in under the genre of gharib al-Quran .
Abu Hayyan designed the work as an abridgment (mukhtasar) devoted exclusively to this second class of specialized vocabulary, restricting his definitions to the specific senses in which the terms occur in the Quran .
Structure and Method
The book is arranged alphabetically according to root consonants (al-huruf al-asliyyah), discarding augmented letters . It opens with the letter hamzah (beginning with the root a-b-b for وَأَبًّا ) and concludes with the letter ya' (ending with the root y-y-s) . In ordering the entries within each letter, Abu Hayyan adopted an arrangement influenced partly by the system of al-Jawhari, organizing roots by their first and last consonants while leaving the medial consonants unsequenced .
The treatment is marked by extreme brevity, confined to concise linguistic definitions of words without quoting the full verses in which they appear and without citing the names of linguists, exegetes, or poetic evidential verses (shawahid) .
Reception and Adaptations
Due to the non-standard internal ordering of roots in Abu Hayyan's original arrangement, later scholars sought to reorganize and adapt the text :
- The Hanafi scholar Qasim ibn Qutlubugha (al-Shaykh Qasim al-Hanafi) reordered the book by the first and second root letters in his abridgment Mukhtasar Kitab al-Tuhfah fi Gharib al-Quran, preserving Abu Hayyan's wording while adding a small number of omitted words marked with the notation qillah .
- Zayn al-Din al-Iraqi arranged the vocabulary in his didactic poem (Alfiyyah) on rare Quranic words strictly by root letters from beginning to end, keeping the definitions exceptionally brief and likely drawing his explanations from Abu Hayyan's work .
- In modern scholarship, Dawud Sallum and Nuri al-Qaysi rearranged the text strictly in alphabetical order from the first to the final letter of each root, publishing it under the title Tartib Tuhfat al-Arib in Beirut (1409 AH) .
Editions
Tuhfat al-Arib has been published in multiple editions:
- An early edition supervised by Muhammad Sa'id ibn Mustafa al-Wardi al-Na'sani in 1936, who added marginal notes addressing variant Quranic readings (qira'at) and words omitted by the author; its compact definitions were laid out in a two-column table (one for the word and one for its explanation), spanning 138 pocket-sized pages .
- An edition edited by Ahmad Matlub and Khadijah al-Hadithi .
- An edition edited by Samir al-Majdhub, published by al-Maktab al-Islami (1403 AH / 1983 CE, and 1408 AH), prepared using three manuscripts from Cairo, Damascus, and Paris .
Answer updated