Al-Zamakhshari

Abu al-Qasim Mahmud ibn Umar al-Zamakhshari was born in the month of Rajab 467 AH (March 1075) in the village of Zamakhshar in Khwarazm; the ruins of this ancient settlement now lie in the Dashoguz region of Turkmenistan. His family was of modest means, and he received his first schooling from his father, Umar. As a young man he lost a leg and walked on a wooden one for the rest of his life; the sources explain this differently — a fall from a horse, or frostbite in the harsh Khwarazmian winter. Unfit for manual work, he turned to learning and earned his living thanks to his fine handwriting.

In Gurganj, the capital of Khwarazm, he studied Arabic, grammar and literature under Abu Mudar Mahmud ibn Jarir al-Dabbi (d. 1113), and literature and prosody under Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Muzaffar al-Naysaburi; Abu Mudar also supported his pupil financially. In law he followed the Hanafi school, and in theology he belonged to the Muʿtazila. In search of learning he visited Bukhara, Merv, Nishapur, Isfahan and Baghdad, and he dedicated panegyric odes to officials at the court of the Seljuq sultans in the hope of their patronage.

After a serious illness in 1118 he changed his way of life, gave up service at court and devoted himself entirely to scholarship and teaching. He twice travelled to Mecca and lived there for long periods under the patronage of the Meccan emir and man of letters Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Hamza ibn Wahhas; living beside the Kaaba earned him the byname Jar Allah, “God’s neighbour”. On his way back he visited Baghdad, Damascus and other cities and met the leading scholars of his day. He taught many students in Khwarazm, Samarkand and elsewhere, among them the writer Rashid al-Din Vatvat.

Al-Zamakhshari wrote more than fifty works on Arabic grammar, lexicography, rhetoric, prosody, proverbs, hadith, law and geography, of which more than twenty survive. His grammar “al-Mufassal”, completed in 1121, was for centuries one of the main textbooks of Arabic in the East thanks to its concise and orderly presentation; some grammarians ranked it second only to Sibawayh’s “Book”. His dictionary “Asas al-balagha” explains the literal and figurative meanings of words in alphabetical order, with examples. The Arabic–Persian dictionary “Muqaddimat al-adab”, dedicated in 1137 to the Khwarazmshah Atsiz, was given Turkic and Mongol glosses in later copies, which makes it a source for the history of the Turkic languages as well.

His best-known work is the Quran commentary “al-Kashshaf ʿan haqaʾiq al-tanzil”, completed in Mecca in 1134. It analyses the verses of the Quran in order from the grammatical, semantic and stylistic points of view, setting out its explanations as questions and answers: “If you say… I reply…”. The commentary is written from a Muʿtazili standpoint, reflecting the doctrines of the createdness of the Quran, the rational interpretation of God’s attributes and divine justice; it is the only Muʿtazili commentary to survive complete. Even so, Sunni scholars valued its linguistic analysis highly: many commentaries and glosses were written on it, some of them refuting its Muʿtazili views, and al-Baydawi’s commentary draws heavily on it.

Al-Zamakhshari also wrote literary works: the moral admonitions “Atwaq al-dhahab” (“Golden Necklaces”) in rhymed prose, the collection of maxims “Nawabigh al-kalim”, the “Maqamat”, the anthology of anecdotes and sayings “Rabiʿ al-abrar”, the collection of Arabic proverbs “al-Mustaqsa” and a diwan of poems.

Late in life he returned to Khwarazm and died in the month of Dhu al-Hijja 538 AH (June 1144) in Gurganj (now Kunya-Urgench in Turkmenistan), where he was buried; in the fourteenth century the traveller Ibn Battuta wrote of seeing his domed tomb there. In his lifetime he was already called Fakhr Khwarazm, “the pride of Khwarazm”. Manuscripts of his works are held in libraries around the world, including the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan in Tashkent. In 1995 Uzbekistan marked the 920th anniversary of his birth, and a street in Tashkent bears his name.