He also said, “Namaṭ: a kind of carpet; its plural is anmāṭ. The word namaṭ is likewise used for a group of people whose affairs are of one accord. In the hadith it is stated, ‘The best group of this ummah is the middle namaṭ; those who lag behind will catch up to them, and those who go to excess will return to them’ (1).” (2)

The jurists and the grammarians sometimes adopt a technical usage in which nawʿ (species) is narrower than jins (genus). Yet they do not reserve the words ḍarb, ṣinf, and the like for either category, and at times they treat all these expressions as synonymous, just as al-Jawharī indicated. Thus, in the chapter on usury, when the jurists say, “Jins is that which possesses a distinct name yet gathers within it several anwāʿ,” nawʿ is for them more specific than jins. What they mean by jins here, however, is exactly what the Greek logicians call nawʿ. Hence “human being,” “horse,” “donkey,” “date,” “raisin,” “wheat,” “barley,” and the like are, in juristic terminology, each called a jins, whereas in Greek logic each of these would be termed a nawʿ. In this respect, the jurists’ usage is actually closer to ordinary Arabic.

The same convention appears in the chapter on zakāt. Outside those topics, however—when they say, for example, “Partnership is of four kinds,” or “The heirs fall into three classes (aṣnāf)” or “three genera (ajnas),” and the like—they draw no distinction among the terms. The grammarians follow the same pattern: when they declare that ism al-jins (generic noun) is a noun applied to a thing and to everything resembling it, the words nawʿ, ṣinf, and their counterparts are, in that context, equivalent. Thus “human being,” “horse,” “date,” “raisin,” and the like are for them generic nouns, and so too are “man,” “woman,” “tall,” “short,” “scholar,” and “ignorant person.” Their term ism al-jins therefore encompasses what the jurists call in