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 Ṭāhir b. ʾAḥmad al-Qazwīnī al-Naǧǧār (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-Qazwīnī’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-Qazwīnī’s primer appears to be related to a much later and more widely circulated primer, entitled Lubāb al-ʾiʿrāb al-māniʿ min al-laḥn fī al-Sunna wa-l-Kitāb, composed by the prolific Egyptian Sufi ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Šaʿrānī (d. 973/1565). The author argues that Lubāb al-ʾiʿrāb is, in all likelihood, an abridgement of al-Qazwīnī’s primer, or, at the very least, of a text very similar to it.