ASMA'I, AL-


Meaning of ASMA'I, AL- in English

in full Abu Sa'id 'abd Al-malik Ibn Qurayb Al-asma'i born c. 740, , Basra, Iraq died 828, Basra noted scholar and anthologist, one of the three leading members of the Basra school of Arabic philology. A gifted student of Abu 'Amr ibn al-'Ala', the founder of the Basra school, al-Asma'i joined the court of the 'Abbasid caliph Harun ar-Rashid in Baghdad. Renowned for his piety and plain living, he was a tutor to the caliph's son and a favourite of the Barmakid viziers. Al-Asma'i possessed an outstanding knowledge of the classical Arabic language. On the basis of the principles that he laid down, most of the existing divans, or collections of the pre-Islamic Arab poets, were prepared by his disciples. He also wrote an anthology, Al-Asma'iyat, displaying a marked preference for elegiac and devotional poetry. His method and his critical concern for authentic tradition are considered remarkable for his time. Some 15 monographs written by al-Asma'i, mainly on the animals, plants, customs, and grammatical forms in some way related to pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, are extant, generally in recensions made by his students. The Fihrist (Catalog) of an-Nadim, the 10th-century Arabic bibliographer, lists 20 such works by al-Asma'i.

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