al-Asma'i

Abu Sa'id 'Abd al-Malik ibn Qurayb al-Asma'i (c. 122/740 - c. 216/831) was one of the leading scholars of the Basra school of Arabic philology - the study of language, poetry and texts. He belonged to the Arab tribe of Bahila and, by the standard accounts, was born and largely worked in Basra, a great garrison-city of southern Iraq.

He is reported to have studied with the foremost Basran masters of his day, including Abu 'Amr ibn al-'Ala' and the lexicographer al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, and he worked alongside (and sometimes against) contemporaries such as Abu 'Ubayda and the grammarian Sibawayh. Sources credit him with a vast command of classical Arabic and of pre-Islamic poetry, which he is said to have gathered partly from desert Arab informants.

Tradition holds that he was drawn to Baghdad and into the circle of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, becoming a tutor to the future caliphs al-Amin and al-Ma'mun and a favourite of the powerful Barmakid viziers; one widely-repeated anecdote describes an all-night conversation with the caliph on early Arabic verse. Such court stories are part of the later literary tradition and should be read as such.

His name survives above all in the Asma'iyyat, an anthology of early poetry, and in numerous short works on Bedouin vocabulary, animals and plants (on the horse, the camel, wild beasts and the human body), many preserved in recensions by his students. He died around 213-217 AH (828-833 CE); most reports place his death in Basra, though some say Merv.