Al-Ājurrūmiyyah

The universal starting point for Arabic grammar study, covering the core categories of irab, nouns, verbs, and particles in an ordered dense prose format that has been memorized and commented upon for seven centuries. From West Africa to Southeast Asia, this is the text every student of Arabic grammar begins with with over 400 commentaries written on it.

Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Daaud al-Sanhaji, known as Ibn Ajurrum (1273-1323 CE), was a Moroccan Maliki grammarian and scholar from Fes who studied in both Morocco and Egypt. He composed the Muqaddimah (now universally called al-Ajurrumiyyah) as a concise pedagogical primer for grammar students. A well-known tradition holds that upon completing it he cast the manuscript into the Atlantic Ocean as a test of his sincerity, saying: "If I composed it purely for Allah, it will not perish." It returned undamaged a story that lent the text an almost legendary status among students of the Arabic language for seven centuries.

• Foundations of Arabic irab (grammatical inflection): raff, nasb, khafd/jarr, jazm
• The three grammatical categories: ism (noun), fiil (verb), harf (particle)
• Markers of irab: dammah, fathah, kasrah, and sukun and their substitutes in weak nouns
• Strong (murab) vs. fixed (mabni) words
• Verb tenses: madi (past), mudari (present/future), amr (imperative)
• Particles governing nasb (accusative) and particles governing jazm in the mudari
• The nominal sentence: mubtada (subject) and khabar (predicate)
• The verbal sentence: fiil (verb) and fail (doer) and the mafuul (object)
• Annexed constructs (idafah), adjectives (naat), and grammatical conjunction (atf)