Al mufradaat by Ragib al asfahani

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Hope this'll help you all as well.


Ragib al Asfahani:

His name is al imam abi qasim husain bin Muhammad bin al mifazzal know by al ragib alasfahani.
His date of birth and death and place of birth are not known also there is no account for his early education or any educational records.

Books:

1. Tafseel al nashatain wa tahseel al saa^datain : this book talks about the worldly life and the life here after.

2. Alzaria^h ila makaram al shariah: this book talks about the importance of Islamic law and that it is totally divine in nature. It said that imam ghazali always kept this book with him during his travels.

3. Mahadaraat al Udaba.

4. Kitab fi tafseer: he could not finish it in his life but imam al baizawi has taken much from this book for his tafseer.


Al mufradaat:

Since the revelation of Quraan Muslims have been pondering and studying its verses, words and their meanings in order to fully understand the massage of Allah. They have written tafaseer so as to explain the meanings with their rhetoric and eloquent attributes, grammatical placement and the effect of this placement on their meanings. The scholars have written the explanatory books, faharis(), dictionaries, encyclopedias etc, which explain the meanings of unknown words in Arabic literature, having different meanings in Quraan. The research in the similar context is still going on in the contemporary literary circles because quraanic literature is so rich in meaning that every explorer finds a new dimension in the same words even after 1400 year, which opens a new way of thinking and a new life style, emerges out of it.

These books have different origins for explanation such as, philosophy, fiqh etc. But many Ulema have used the fields of literature and tafseer as the origin of the compilation of the extraordinary words in Quraan.the book Al Mufridaat fil Quraan by al ragib al asfahani is one of this category. He has classified the words alphabetically. And to find the desired word one has to look for the first letter of its root word in the book like we look up for a word in oxford dictionary. Then he explains the root words and other extracted words from that root word plus its uses. Then its grammatical uses and where, when and in how many places it exists in Quraan.

The author has mentioned in the foreword of the book that his sole purpose to write the book is to provide the understanding of the origin of the words in the verses of Quraan. It is quite similar to the fact that for constructing a building one has to use the bricks to build the bases and the wall . so the brick supports in structuring an architecture similarly to develop a strong understanding of Quraan it is very essential to understand the words of this miraculous book.

This understanding of words through this book not only helps in the tafseer of Quraan but also in various the fields of literature, which is rich in Arabic culture and heritage such as poetry, prose and story telling, fiqh ,which has to deal with the legislation etc. So it is of vital importance to work in this field and he has given it a start.

1. The book has only one volume and the recent published version has 1247 pages.

2. the writer starts with the praise to be Allah and defiens the importance of the words of Quraan and that they are divine plus miraculous in nature. He ends the foreword with the aspiration that the coming generations of Ulema will benefit from this book and work scrupulously in the field of Quraanic studies.


3. example:

سلم: السَّلْم والسلامة: التعري من الآفات الظاهرة والباطنة قال تعالى: بقلب سليم( [الشعراء : 89] أي متعرٍ من
الدَّغْل فهذا في الباطن وقال تعالى: مسلمة لاشية فيها( [البقرة : 71] فهذا في الظاهر، وقد سَلِمَ يَسْلَمُ سلامة سلاماً وسلَّمه الله قال تعالى: ولكن الله سلم ( [الأنفال : 43] وقال تعالى: ادخلوها بسلامٍ آمنين( [الحجر : 46].
أي: سلامة، وكذا قوله تعالى: اهبط بسلام منا ( [هود : 48]

The underlined words are the meanings of the word and the rest is the explanation of those words with examples from Quraan.


Scholarly recommendation:

Many scholars his and our contemporaries have acclaimed the high value of this scholarly achievement. E.g haji khalifa says, “ this book is the most benefited in the field of Ulum al shara^.” Also many have regarded this book as “gold” which could be used for selling cuz it’s a priceless piece of intellect which can be used as weight blocks for selling and buying things. Some said that it is a treasure full of pearls and priceless jewels. According to safwan dawudi, “ it could be considered as small encyclopedia because it consist of language and grammar, tafseer and ilm al qiraa^t, fiqh and logic, wisdom and literature, jurisprudence and theology.”


P.S: all this information has been taken from the Arabic internet sources and the book originally which has been worked on by Muhammad Khalil Aitani. So we can give his reference to the information given about the books and early life.