whereupon everyone present offered him tashmīt, saying, “yarḥamuka Allah” (may Allah have mercy on you), but ʿĀfiyah remained silent. Al-Rashīd said to him, “Why did you not join the others in invoking mercy for me?” He replied, “Because you did not praise Allah.” He then cited the relevant prophetic hadith as evidence. Al-Rashīd said, “Go back to your office. By Allah, a man who would not overlook my failure to praise Allah after a single sneeze could never have done the things they claim about you.” He reinstated him to his judgeship with gracious favor.

In this same year there also died: Sibawayh (1) – the pre-eminent imam of the grammarians. His name was ʿAmr ibn ʿUthmān ibn Qanbar, Abū Bishr, famously known as Sibawayh, the client (mawlā) of the Banū al-Ḥārith ibn Kaʿb; some say he was the client of al-Rabīʿ ibn Ziyād. He was called Sibawayh because his mother would rock him and sing that name to him, and the word means “the fragrance of apples.”

At the outset of his studies he kept company with the scholars of hadith and the jurists, and served as an amanuensis for Ḥammād ibn Salamah. One day he committed a grammatical slip while reading, whereupon Ḥammād corrected him; feeling slighted, he attached himself to al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad, mastered grammar, went to Baghdad, and debated al-Kisāʾī. Sibawayh was a handsome, well-groomed young man who had taken a share of every branch of learning and of every circle of letters despite his youth. He authored a book on grammar whose rank is unsurpassed; the leading grammarians after him wrote commentaries on it, plunging into the depths of its ocean and drawing out its pearls, yet never reaching its floor.

Thaʿlab claimed that Sibawayh did not compose the work alone, but that some forty scholars—himself among them—assisted him; that it was really the foundational material of al-Khalīl which Sibawayh then claimed for himself. Al-Sīrāfī, in his “Classes of the Grammarians,” considers this unlikely. He adds that Sibawayh took the dialects from Abū al-Khaṭṭāb, al-Akhfash, and others.

Sibawayh used to say, “Saʿīd ibn Abī al-ʿArūbah—and al-ʿArūbah is Friday; whoever says ʿUrūbah has erred.” When Yūnus was told of this he said, “He is right—may Allah reward him.”

He travelled to Khurāsān hoping for favor with Ṭalḥah ibn Ṭāhir, who had a passion for grammar, but there he fell ill with the sickness from which he died. As death approached he recited:

He pinned his hopes on a world to endure for him—
yet the hopeful one died before the hope.
Eagerly he watered the roots of a sapling—
the sapling lived on, but the man passed away. (2)

It is said that when he was on his death-bed he rested his head in his brother’s lap; his brother’s eyes filled with tears. Sibawayh regained consciousness, saw him weeping, and said: