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What makes the Kitāb worthy of our attention? After all it is a mere grammar, by most reckoning, and grammars are boring. Nobody reads a grammar for pleasure; we consult grammar books when we need to answer specific questions about a language. In fact the Kitāb is much more than a (reference) grammar, if it is a grammar at all (in my view it is not), but it is undeniably very narrowly focussed on the Arabic language, and there are plenty of other proper grammar books available to help the student learning Arabic. So the question remains: why bother?

For students of Arabic or the Arabic/Islamic intellectual tradition, the answer is obvious: the Kitāb quickly became the authoritative source of knowledge about the Arabic language and thus arguably the most influential book (outside of the Quran) in the Arabic tradition. Like Euclid in the West, Sībawayhi is so prestigious in the Arab world that just about everybody has a least heard of him, even if nobody reads him. Virtually all books on Arabic grammar, ancient and modern alike, are based on the ideas first expressed in the Kitāb, so if you want to really learn Arabic, you might as well go to founding document.

Professional students of language – linguists, obviously, but also anthropologists, philosophers, and others – will also find the Kitāb worthy of study. Sībawayhi's way of thinking and talking about Arabic is very different from the way modern linguists think and talk about language. His account of Arabic is so thorough and so subtle that even the most erudite contemporary scholars are sure to find new and surprising insights into the ways we humans find to think about languages.

But there are other reasons to study the Kitāb, even for those unfamiliar with Arabic. For one thing, it wasn't merely the first grammar in the tradition; it was the first book produced expressly with written dissemination in mind. Prior to the Kitāb, knowledge production and transmission in the Arabic/Islamic work was oral/aural. That's not to say that writing was not used; on the contrary it was commonly used - but only (or at least primarily) in the service of oral transmission of knowledge. The student did not learn by acquiring and reading a book, but by sitting at the feet of the master and learning by listening (and asking questions). Both teacher and student may have used writing to assist learning, but the written word was never authoritative. Sībawayhi was the first to sit down and compose a proper book with the intention that the text itself would be the ultimate source of authority for its content. The Kitāb thus marks a major turning point in the history of Arabic/Islamic culture.

Furthermore the Kitāb is not in fact a grammar. Grammar is about writing, as the etymology of the word suggests: Greek gramma "letter". Greek and Latin grammars, such as the famous Τέχνη γραμματική (Tékhnē grammatikē) of Dionysius Thrax, were primarily concerned with correct writing. Sībawayhi, by contrast, was exclusively concerned with the speech (كلام, kalām) of the Arabs. The significance of this difference can hardly be overstated. The conceptual structure of Sībawayhi's thinking is radically different than that of the Greek grammarians (and philosophers). The differences are usually papered-over by modern Western scholarship, if they are even noticed, which sometimes results in grossly misleading or simply wrong interpretations of the Kitāb. One of the goals of this site is to address such errors.

But what makes the Kitāb truly extraordinary is what it tells us about the intellectual life of Sībawayhi and his contemporaries, who were engaged in laying the intellectual groundwork for what we now call Islamic Civilization. Sībawayhi was born some time around 750/760 (132/142 AH). The Abbasids seized power in 750 and ushered in the Golden Age of Islam. Baghdad was founded in 762 (144 AH). The great Islamic scholars who created the "Islamic Sciences" (jurisprudence, hadīth) were just getting started. The دار الحكمة House of Wisdom, which was to serve as the center of the great translation movement that brought Greek works into Arabic, was established in the late 8th/early 9th century CE, right around the time Sībawayhi died. So he lived in an exceptionally dynamic and fecund intellectual and cultural environment. Arabic-speaking muslims had been engaged in vigorous discussion and argumentation about a variety of topics since the beginning of Islam, and these efforts had begun to coalesce into "sciences", schools, etc. right around the time of Sībawayhi's birth.

The Kitāb is a window through which we can witness the unfolding, through a process of discursive inquiry and argumentation, of a distinctive kind of linguistic self-awareness. Remember that there was no literary tradition - no genres - from which Sībawayhi could take any model for the form of his composition. So the form of his book is unlike that of books in the Greek tradition. To a large extent it reads almost like a transcription of a seminar (or series of seminars). He did not work out his ideas and then present them as finished products, with all the scaffolding removed. On the contrary he often makes a point of recording the argumentation that justifies his claims, and that often means recording the debates and question-answer sessions he had with his teachers and colleagues. So we can see in the Kitāb not only what he and they thought, but how they went about arriving at their knowledge – by argumentation, debate, making, challenging, and defending claims. The task Sībawayhi set himself was not to expound theory, but to present arguments, arguments that rationally justify the Arabic way of speaking.

In summary: in the Kitāb we see a language community gradually developing, by a process of argumentation, a set of concepts and modes of thinking that ultimately constituted the Arabic way (نحو) of speaking as an object of reflection and debate. To see what an amazing achievement this is (the Greeks never came close) just imagine how you might have discussed, say, the meaning of a Quranic verse had you been born before this "grammatical" vocabulary had emerged. You would have no way of saying, for example, that some word functions as an adjective, or a subordinate clause, etc., because you would have had no words for such concepts, if you had the concepts at all. And without some kind of metalinguistic vocabulary you would have had a hard time defending your explanation against challenges.

Sībawayhi's great achievement was the elaboration of the concepts and arguments that constituted "Classical" Arabic as an explicit object of reflection and debate, thus enabling rational explanations of what Arabic speech means, and how it means it. (Note that this is not the same as a "theory" of Arabic, or of language in general.)

The goal of this website is to make Sībawayhi's great work easily accessible and understandable.

The first step is to produce an online hypertext version of the text. To make the text readable even to those not fluent in Arabic, the text is (or will be) fully annotated with tashkīl diacritics. Furthermore the text is segmented and typographically organized to show clearly the conceptual structure (parsing) of the text; in particular, quoted passages are clearly identifiable by special formatting. This task is not yet complete, but the first section of the book (on syntax) plus a few dozen articles from the second part are complete enough to be useful. For details on the organization of the text see About this site.

The second step is to produce a translation and notes. This is obviously a tall order. I've translated a handful of articles but have not yet published them since they require some revision. Going forward, the plan is to publish translations one article at a time, on a reasonably regular basis. It will take months if not years to complete this.

Finally, to satisfy the goal of making the Kitāb understandable even to those not fluent in Arabic, my plan is to regularly publish short blog articles and more detailed "user guides" addressing topics that arise in the reading of the Kitāb.