Abstract

Despite the fact that Ibn Hisham is well-known in the domain of syntax, yet when it comes his work Explanation of Bänet Su’äd, he emerges as a knowledgeable linguistic critic. This exceptional tendency gets crystalized in his citations of the scholars of linguistics, his investigations of lexical phenomena like synonymy, polysemy, and lexical derivation. Additionally, in his linguistic interpretations, Ibn Hisham has not only approached vocabulary semantically but syntactically as well. Ibn Hisham , in this approach, was only implementing a criterion that he had set in his work Al-Mughni as he found it necessary when parsing to deal with a lexicon both individually and in chunksThe present study is an attempt to sketch out the integrated scientific personality of Ibn Hisham as a linguistic critic with specific reference to his Explanation of Bänet Su’äd. In this work, he perspicuously behaved as a professional critic via his reliance on the Arabic dictionaries in general and Al-Ṣihäh of Al-JawharY in particular. Nonetheless, even though Ibn Hisham used to heavily rely on Al-Ṣihäh as a reference, he never hesitated to attack its compiler, Al-Jawhary the distinctive linguist, when his ideas were not agreement to Ibn Hisham. Ibn Hisham embraced such rigorous views that he despised any dissimilar ideas; thus, he criticized Al-Jawhary severely. His critiques were sometimes of subjective sense and sometimes quite objective.