One Thousand Couplets on Grammar

One thousand couplets on grammar (Al-fiyeh Fi al-Nahv) is the name of an Arabic book. Alfiyeh is an Arabic term, referred to the poems with 1000 couplets, on the principles and rules of different sciences, especially applied for expressing Arabic grammar. Ibn Mu’ti (Moorish grammarian) was the first person who wrote Alfiyeh. After him, Ibn Maalek wrote a poem of 2700 couplets which was inspired by Ibn Mu’ti’s Alfiyeh.

The author
Abu Abdullah Jamal al-Din Muhammadd, known as “Ibn ####Maalek (1203 – 1274), Anadalus. He was a great Arab grammarian, poet, philologist and man of letters. Ibn Maalek learned Arabic grammar and the Koran in Andalus, then went to Egypt, but did nor reside there and emigrated to Damascus and studied in the presence of great scholars. Then went to Aleppo and started teaching Arabic grammar and the Koran. Badr al-Din Muhammad (his son), Ibn Jamaa’eh, Ibn Nahas and some others studied under him. Ibn Maalek was a follower of Shafi’I School (one of the four branches of Sunni). His proficiency in philology, Hadith, poetry and Arabic grammar makes him as eminent as Shafi’I’s scientific position in jurisprudence.

The book structure
Ibn Maalek owed his great reputation to this philological work (Alfiyeh). The book contains 71 chapters; the brevity applied in the book, as a result there were problems in topics which needed to be explained, therefore many annotations have been written to the book, by grammarians. The following are some of the grammarians who wrote annotations to the book:
- Ibn Aqil
- Badr al-Din Muhammad
- Abu Hayyan Qarnati
- Jalal al-Din Syuti

The Persian annotations:
- Muhammad Ibn Ali Kashani
- Muhammad Sadeq Broujerdi
- Bdullah Qazvini Tusi
- Zia al-Din Hossein
- Bahmanyar

Alfiyeh was translated into French and Italian and published in Paris and Tehran.