30 Facts About Al-Zamakhshari

Al-Zamakhshari travelled to Mecca and settled there for five years and has been known since then as 'Jar Allah'.

Al-Zamakhshari was a Mu'tazilite theologian, linguist, poet and interpreter of the Quran.

Al-Zamakhshari is best known for his book Al-Kashshaf, which interprets and linguistically analyzes Quranic expressions and the use of figurative speech for conveying meaning.

Al-Zamakhshari was referred to as "Fakhr Khawarizm" because people travelled to Khwarazm, a large oasis, to learn from him about the Quran and Arabic language.

Al-Zamakhshari grew up in Zamakhshar and studied there for a while, then he travelled to many places in Central Asia including the city of Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan, the Iranian cities of Khurasan and Isfahan, as well as Baghdad, where he met some political officials and praised them.

Al-Zamakhshari travelled then to Makkah, where he met the prince at the time, Abi AlHasan Ali bin Hamzah bin Wahas Al-Shareef Al-Hasany, who had written extensively about Arabic prose and verse principles.

Al-Zamakhshari is reputed to have lost one of his legs, a fact that literature on his life explains variously.

In one version of the story, Al-Damaghani stated that he asked Al-Zamakhshari about his leg, and he told him that when he was a child, he put a rope on a bird's leg.

Al-Zamakhshari learned a lot from the well-known teachers at the time.

Furthermore, Al-Zamakhshari studied literature and prosody from Abu Ali Al-Hasan bin Al-Mudhaffar Al-Nisaburi.

Al-Zamakhshari drew some of his philosophico-religious ideas from his teachers Abu Mansur Nasr Al-Harthi, Abu Sa'ad Al-Shaga'I, and Abu Al-Khattab bin Al-Batar.

Al-Zamakhshari was not exclusively committed to either the Basri nor the Kufi analytical approach over the other, but took from both what validated his hypotheses.

Al-Zamakhshari said that whenever he was teaching his students and mentioning a Quranic verse, his students seemed to learn new meanings they have never come across before.

The book then concludes with two pages where the editor provided a biography about Al-Zamakhshari and praised him as a respected figure whose contributions extended to the religious, linguistic, and literary aspects of life.

Al-Zamakhshari started writing this book towards the end of 513 AH and finished it at the beginning of 515 AH, which means that it did not take him more than a year and four months.

Al-Zamakhshari believed that interpreting the Quran was not an easy task.

Since the language of the Quran is Arabic, Al-Zamakhshari thought that writing this book would help people better grasp the richness of the Arabic language and better understand its different interpretations.

Al-Zamakhshari considered Al-Zamakhshari's style to be clear, simple, and succinct.

Al-Zamakhshari believed that Al-Zamakhshari did not attempt to extensively explain his ideas unless they addressed grammatical issues raised in the Quran or poetry, in which case he provided his readers with detailed explanations.

For each word, Al-Zamakhshari provided its meaning, some of its uses in the Quran, Muhammad's sayings, poetry, or proverbs.

Al-Zamakhshari's goal was to highlight that word choice can play a significant role in enhancing the rhetoric of a text or speech.

Maqamat Al-Zamakhshari 'Al-Zamakhshari's Principles' is a literary work.

Al-Zamakhshari then provided a religious sermon followed by his fifty principles.

Al-Zamakhshari was among a group who believed that the default position of the interrogative particle is sentence-initially but argued that the sentence after the conjunction is conjoined to an elided sentence between the interrogative prefix and the conjunction particle.

In light of this, Ibn Hisham an 8th-century Egyptian grammarian argued that Al-Zamakhshari was the first one to make this analysis, arguing for an elliptical structure between the interrogative prefix and the conjunction particle.

Still, another linguist known as Al-Dosugi disagreed with Ibn Hisham's view that Al-Zamakhshari was the first one to come up with this analysis; rather, he was convinced that Al-Zamakhshari's analysis is a follow-up of what other earlier linguists had already discussed, but Al-Dosugi was not sure who first came up with this analysis.

Zamakhsharyyan Lan 'Al-Zamakhshari's Negation' was another topic that divided scholars to agree or disagree with him.

Al-Zamakhshari gave various examples to validate his analysis, such as:.

For instance, example above shows how Mu'tazile people believe that they will never be able to see God in the afterlife, and this is the approach Al-Zamakhshari followed in his semantic and syntactic analysis of the Quran.

Al-Zamakhshari defended his view by some examples from the Quran, as follows:.