4to. Volume I: [2], 514 pp. / Volume II: 564 pp. Arabic text, double column per page, modern hard back binding, few wormholes in margin, some ink annotations in margin throughout, last 4 pages of volume two repaired with tape without loss, occasional foxing, small stamp on last leaf of each volume, Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyah, Cairo, 1341 A. H./ 1922-1923.

Synopsis

Al-Zamakhshari, also called Jar Allah, (1075–1144), was a medieval Muslim scholar of Persian origin, who subscribed to the Mu’tazilite theological doctrine but later repented and converted to Sunni Islam. He was born in Khwarezmia, but lived most of his life in Bukhara, Samarkand, and Baghdad. He was a great authority on the Arabic language as well as a rationalist theologian.
Asas al-Balagha (The Foundation of Eloquence), considered one of his major works, is a thesaurus and dictionary of figurative speech, in part to reconcile what he viewed as the miraculous nature of the Qur’an with his theological views. It was the earliest Arabic lexicography to be organised in a completely alphabetical form, and was noteworthy for its attention to metaphorical meanings. Words therein are listed in order from the first of their three component letters to the last, excluding complicated forms derived from roots as well as rare roots such as quadrilaterals and quint-laterals. Zamakhshari’s goal was to catalogue both the literal and figurative meanings of Arabic words, and he used examples from the Qur’an and Hadith for both. He viewed words almost as living organisms that were given life by the way they were used in rhetoric.