Juhūd al-ʻUmānīyīn fī al-Naẓm al-Taʻlīmī al-Naḥwī: Manẓūmah Unmūdhajan - Nadābī, Maḥmūd ibn ʻAlī; al-Muʼtamar al-Duwalī: al-Dawr al-ʻUmānī fī Khidmat al-Lughah al-ʻArabīyah (2015) (Kuwālā Lumbūr) (Kuwālā Lumbūr : Markaz Dhākirat ʻUmān, 2015)
Didactic versification is among the features that distinguished the Islamic sciences in their teaching, easing memorisation and comprehension for students; and scholars across the fields competed in composing and shaping such verse, between brevity and length, summary and detail. After the sciences of the sharīʿah, the Arabic sciences claimed the largest share of didactic poems, and the grammatical manẓūmah attributed to al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī may well be the oldest didactic grammatical poem in the Arabic sciences. Omanis have worked in the Arabic sciences from al-Khalīl to the present day, composing, versifying, commenting upon and abridging the major works of Arabic. The great number of didactic poems in the Arabic heritage reflects the care Arabic scholars took to simplify grammar and ease its teaching, and to encourage learners by casting the material in an easy and appealing form that would stay present in the learner's mind — which may explain why a considerable number of Omanis worked in didactic grammatical verse alongside didactic verse in the religious sciences. This paper gives a general picture of didactic grammatical verse in the Arabic heritage and its importance, lists the principal such poems in chronological order, and then turns to the Omani contribution.
Permanent citation identifier: MHF-ARABICLANG-018.
Text in Arabic; title also romanized (ALA-LC); abstract and keywords in English.
Keywords: Didactic verse; Arabic grammar; Manẓūmah; Omani scholarship; Teaching tradition; al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad