Asās al-Balāghah ("The Foundation of Eloquence")Wen-chin Ouyang, Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition, pg. 202. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. is a thesaurus and dictionary of figurative speech (Ilm al-Bayan), a branch in Arabic rhetoric authored by Al-Zamakhshari.John Esposito, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, pg. 346. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Avigail S. Noy, Don't Be Absurd: The Term Muhal in Sibawayh's Kitab. Taken from The Foundations of Arabic Linguistics: Sībawayhi and Early Arabic Grammatical Theory, pg. 34. Ed. Amal Elesha Marogy. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2012. Zamakhshari authored the work, in part, to reconcile what he viewed as the miraculous nature of the Qur'an with his theological views.Kenneth Setton, Norman P. Zacour and Harry W. Hazard. A History of the Crusades, pg. 32. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Notable as the earliest fully alphabetical Arabic lexicography,Muhammad Zubair Siddiqi, Khuda Bakhsh Lectures, Indian and Islamic. Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library, 1993. and in addition for the metaphorical content Zamakhshari includes with his literal definitions.Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, vol. 2, L-Z, pg. 468. Eds. Paul Starkey and Julie Scott Meisami. London: Routledge, 1998. Zamakhshari's system lists words in alphabetical order according to the first component of their tri-radical consonant letters to the last. He excludes complicated derived and rare forms, such quadrilaterals and quintilaterals.John A. Haywood, Arabic Lexicography: Its History, and Its Place in the General History of Lexicography, pg. 106. 2nd ed. Leiden: Brill Archive, 1960. Zamakhshari's goal was to catalog both the literal and figurative meanings of Arabic words, and he used examples from the Qur'an and hadith for both. He viewed words almost as living organisms that were given life by the way they were used in rhetoric.Haywood, Arabic Lexicography, pg. 107.
References