Abu Ubayda Ma'mar ibn al-Muthanna

Abu Ubayda Ma'mar ibn al-Muthanna was one of the founding scholars of Arabic philology (the study of language and texts) in the Iraqi city of Basra, then a great center of learning. Tradition places his birth around 110 AH (c. 728 CE) and his death there around 209 AH (c. 824 CE); the sources give the death year variously between 207 and 213 AH, so the dates are estimates. He was a mawla — a non-Arab client attached by patronage to an Arab tribe, here Taym of Quraysh. Medieval biographers report that he was of Persian and Jewish ancestry, a detail some later writers used against him; it cannot be confirmed independently.

He is best known for Majaz al-Qur'an, an early work explaining the figurative and idiomatic language of the Qur'an — pioneering, though some later scholars disagreed with parts of his method. He also collected the "battle-days of the Arabs" (Ayyam al-Arab), pre-Islamic tribal lore and poetry; Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist lists over a hundred titles under his name, most now lost.

Around 188 AH (803-804 CE) he was summoned to Baghdad during the reign of Harun al-Rashid. Rivals accused him of Khariji sympathies (the Kharijites were an early dissenting movement) and of supporting the Shu'ubiyya, which rejected Arab ethnic superiority. Modern scholarship treats the Khariji label as a likely later misattribution rather than established fact.