Abu Hilal al-Askari

Abū Hilāl al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAbdallāh b. Sahl al-ʿAskarī (d. c. 400 AH/1010 CE), known also by the epithet al-adīb ('littérateur'), was an Arabic-language lexicographer and literatus of Persian origin, noted for composing a wide range of works enabling Persian-speakers like himself to develop refined and literary Arabic usage and so gain preferment under Arab rule. He is best known for his Kitāb al-ṣināatayn, Dīwān al-maāni, and the Jamharat al-amthāl. However, he composed at least twenty-five works, many of which survive at least in part.

Life Abū Hilāl's epithet al-ʿAskarī indicates that he came from ʿAskar Mukram in the Persian province of Khūzistān. He was taught by his father and the similarly named Abū Aḥmad al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAbdallāh ibn Saʿīd al-ʿAskarī (with whom later scholars sometimes confused him). He was a cloth merchant, and his journeying enabled him to develop a wide knowledge of Arabic-language culture. A thematically arranged thesaurus. Al-ʿAskarī presents this work as a step to attaining the level of Arabic needed for religious study and a full appreciation of the Qur'an. It disagrees with the claim of previous authorities (such as Sībawayh [d. c. 796 CE], al-Aṣmaʿī [d. 828 CE], and al-Rummānī [d. 994]) that complete synonymity (tarāduf) could exist between words within a single dialect of Arabic. It deploys around 1,200 examples. The work focuses on the speech of fuqahāʾ and mutakallimūn, alongside more common usages. The text was abridged and edited into a question-and-answer format under the title al-Lumaʿ min al-Furūq. Under the title Muʿjam al-furūq al-lughawiyya, the work was also arranged alphabetically and supplemented from the eighteenth-century Nūr al-Dīn al-Jazāʾirī's Furūq al-lughāt. A collection of terms denoting different kinds of remainders, aimed at an audience of fuqahāʾ and muḥaddithūn.

Al-ʿAskarī also wrote a number of treatises on poetics:

Kitāb al-Ṣināʿatayn al-kitāba wa-l-shiʿr (originally named Ṣanʿat al-kalām). This was al-ʿAskarī's most influential piece, influencing Ibn al-Athīr's al-Mathal al-sāʾir and abridged by Muwaffaq al-Dīn al-Baghdādī (d. 628/1230) around the thirteenth century CE, and influencing Ibn Ḥijja al-Ḥamawī's Khizānat al-adab in the fifteenth. In the assessment of Beatrice Gruendler, it was 'a foundational text for the state of rhetoric at the close of the fourth/tenth century ... Abū Hilāl was more a perceptive practical critic than a theorist, and his merit is that of assembling the accepted rules and principles of literary criticism in a more coherent, detailed, and comprehensive way than ever before ... Nonetheless, he placed prose and poetry on a par for the first time, and he expanded Ibn al-Muʾtazz's list of seventeen tropes (five badīʾ figures and twelve maḥāsin al-kalām) to twenty-nine, some of which he claimed to have invented himself. His most original chapter, even if inspired by the ʿIyār al-shiʿr of Ibn Ṭabāṭabāʾ (d. 322/934), is the one on literary borrowing (sariqa, akhdh, ittibāʿ), which he considered successful so long as the second author concealed the theft by a transfer across genres or between prose and poetry, or if he enriched the wording, the meaning, or both.' The work drew on al-Jāḥiẓ, Qudāma ibn Ja'far and Ibn al-Muʿtazz, along with (without acknowledgement) Ibn Qutayba, Ibn Ṭabāṭabāʾ, and al-Rummānī. A catalogue of literary conceits and motifs — the first maʿānī written in Arabic from the perspective of literary criticism rather than lexicography. Al-ʿAskarī reproduced this text in individual fascicles, each on a specific theme, for ease of reference. Sharḥ Dīwān Abī Miḥjan al-Thaqafī. al-Risāla al-māssa fīmā lam yuḍbaṭ min al-Ḥamāsa (a.k.a. al-Risāla fī ḍabṭ wa-taḥrīr mawāḍiʿ min dīwān al-Ḥamāsa li-Abī Tammām).

Literature

al-Awāʿil. The first monograph in Arabic on inventions and their inventors in Arabic cultural history (adab). An alphabetised collection of turns of phrase (muḥāwarāt), parables, adages, and proverbs — the most comprehensive in Arabic up to that time. al-Kuramāʾ (Faḍl al-ʿaṭāʾ ʿalā l-ʿusr). This excursus on learning reveals much about al-ʿAskarī's pedagogical conception of his writings, focusing on methods of memorisation and learning, and on the purpose of knowledge. In this short book, the author relates a series of cases in which caliphs submitted to a qadi's judgement.