A Pedagogical Grammar of Arabic by al-Qazwini al-Naggar

Almog Kasher’s study offers a critical edition of a previously unknown pedagogical grammar of Arabic, preserved in a unicum that contains neither its title nor the author’s name. Its content, however, reveals the author to be the grammarian and theologian Tahir b. 'Ahmad al-Qazwini al-Naggar (d. 575/1179 or 580/1184–1185). This treatise is of particular interest to the history of Arabic grammatical tradition, from two perspectives.
First, it exhibits various “unorthodox” features that are at variance with mainstream views in Arabic grammatical tradition. This study argues that these deviations do not necessarily reflect al-Qazwini’s own theoretical opinions but should rather be regarded as pedagogical practices. Its relatively late provenance demonstrates that the process of standardization which Arab grammar tradition underwent in the 4th/10th century did not eradicate such “unorthodox” pedagogical practices. This study thus contributes to a better understanding of the history of this genre. Second, al-Qazwini’s primer appears to be related to a much later and more widely circulated primer, entitled
Lubab al-'i'rab al-mani' min al-lahn fi al-Sunna wa-l-Kitab
, composed by the prolific Egyptian Sufi 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Ša'rani (d. 973/1565). The author argues that
Lubab al-'i'rab
is, in all likelihood, an abridgement of al-Qazwini’s primer, or, at the very least, of a text very similar to it.