Abu Amr Ishaq ibn Mirar al-Shaybani

rdf:langString Abu Amr Ishaq ibn Mirar al-Shaybani

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rdf:langString al-S̲h̲aybānī

rdf:langString Abū ‘Amr Isḥaq ibn Mirār al-Shaybānī (d. 206/821, or 210/825, or 213/828, or 216/831) was a famous lexicographer-encyclopedist and collector-transmitter of Arabic poetry of the of philology. A native of Ramādat al-Kūfah, who lived in Baghdad, he was a mawla (client) under the protection of the Banū Shaybān, hence his nisba. Descended from an Iranian landowner (dihqān) on his paternal side, his mother was a 'Nabataean' (an Aramaic-speaking, rural Iraqi), and he reportedly knew a little of the 'Nabataean' language (an unattested form of Aramaic). The biographers al-Nadīm and Ibn Khallikān quote a claim by 's that he lived to the age of one hundred and eighteen and wrote in his own hand up to his death, in 213/828. However this is disputed by a claim that he died in 206/821 aged one hundred and ten, and this latter is deemed credible. Abū 'Amr's teachers were Rukayn b. Rabī' al-Shāmī, a transmitter of ḥadīth and al-Mufaddal al-Dabbi, who developed his love of poetry. His son ‘Amr relates that he collected and classed poems, diwans (collections), from the jahiliyya (pre-Islamic) period from more than eighty Arab tribes. He wrote more than eighty volumes in his own hand and deposited these in the mosque of Kūfah. The eminent scholars Ibn Hanbal, , and , the author of the , learned from him. Of his lexicographical works, often of a very specialized nature, only the Kitāb al-Jīm (Kitab al-Lughat or Kitab al-Huruf), survives.