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Questions put to the Shaykh and answered — searchable, filed by discipline, and each one carrying the encyclopedia entry it rests on, so you can go and read the ḥadd where the encyclopedia states it.
6 answered questions
What is answered here is LANGUAGE. Every answer below is drawn from an entry published on this site and names it. A question of fiqh or ʿaqīda is not answered from an encyclopedia entry by a website — put it through the form and it goes to the Shaykh himself.
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I am a complete beginner and I cannot read a vowelled line. Where do I begin?
Not with the Ājurrūmiyya. Begin with the Madinah books, which teach you to read and to build a sentence before they teach you to parse one; then al-Ājurrūmiyya, with the foundations of Sarf read alongside it, because a student who cannot weigh a word cannot parse it either. The study path on this site sets out the four stages in the order the scholars taught them, and each stage names the text it reads. Do not open the Alfiyya because someone praised it; it is the last thing you will read, not the first.
Read the entry:Case and mood inflectionThe morphological scale
What is the difference between tashbīh and istiʿāra?
Asked by Idris
Tashbīh states the likeness and keeps both sides of it in view: 'Zayd is like a lion' — the man is there, the lion is there, and the tool of comparison stands between them. Istiʿāra takes one side away. 'I saw a lion in the pulpit' has dropped the man altogether and BORROWED the name of the lion for him; what is left of the comparison is a claim rather than a statement. Istiʿāra is, in the scholars' account, a tashbīh whose one term has been suppressed — which is exactly why it is stronger.
What is the point of the mīzān (fa-ʿa-la)? Why weigh a word at all?
To separate what is ROOT from what is added. The scale fāʾ-ʿayn-lām is set against the word: the three root letters take their places, and whatever is left over is an addition — a letter of increase, a doubling, a prefix. Once you can weigh, kātib is fāʿil and maktūb is mafʿūl and istaghfara is istafʿala, and a whole class of words becomes one pattern rather than a hundred vocabulary items. Sarf is a science of patterns, and the mīzān is the instrument that shows you the pattern.
Read the entry:The morphological scale
Both the fāʿil and the mubtadaʾ are marfūʿ. How do I tell them apart?
Asked by Aaliyah
By what raised it. The mubtadaʾ is raised by nothing that precedes it — it is ʿārin ʿan al-ʿawāmil al-lafẓiyya, bare of any governing word; it opens a nominal sentence. The fāʿil is raised BY ITS VERB and comes after it. So qāma Zaydun has a verb, and Zaydun is its fāʿil; Zaydun qāʾimun has no verb before the noun, and Zaydun is a mubtadaʾ. The rafʿ is the same mark; the reason for it is not.
Read the entry:The doer (grammatical subject of a verb)The subject of a nominal sentence
Must the mubtadaʾ always come first in the sentence?
No — and the name misleads on that point. The mubtadaʾ is the noun the sentence is built upon, marfūʿ and free of any governor before it; it is called mubtadaʾ because the judgement STARTS from it, not because it stands leftmost on the page. The khabar precedes it in a whole class of sentences, and it must precede it when the khabar is a question word: ayna Zaydun? — the khabar comes first and the mubtadaʾ follows. Read the entries on mubtadaʾ and khabar together; neither is intelligible without the other.
Read the entry:The subject of a nominal sentenceThe predicate
Why does the end of an Arabic word change — Zaydun, Zaydan, Zaydin — when the word itself has not changed?
Asked by Yusuf
Because the ending is not part of the word: it is the mark of what the word is DOING in the sentence. That change is iʿrāb — the scholars define it as the change that comes over the ends of words for the different governors (ʿawāmil) that enter upon them. Zaydun with ḍamma is the doer; Zaydan with fatḥa is the one done to; Zaydin with kasra follows a preposition. English does the same work with word order, which is why an English reader must learn to read the ending as the information it is.
Read the entry:Case and mood inflection