and cannot be relied upon as evidence; he is Furāt ibn Abī al-Furāt. Muhammad ibn Ziyād al-Jazarī is also weak.

People have disagreed about “Abjad, Hawwaz, Huttī.” One group said that these were people’s names: according to some, the names of the kings of Midian, or of people who were tyrannical kings.

It was also said that these were the names of the six days in which Allah created the world. Al-Tabarī preferred the first view. Those who held it claimed that the original forms were “Abū Jād,” like “Abī ‘Ād,” and “Hawāzz,” like “Rawādd” and “Jawwāb,” and that they were not inflected because of the absence of linkage and composition.

The correct view is that these are not names designating particular things. Rather, they were put together to teach how words are formed from the letters of the alphabet, once the letters themselves have been learned. Their actual wording is “Abjad, Hawwaz, Huttī,” not “Abū Jād, Hawāzz.” Subsequently, many arithmeticians began using them as symbols for numerical values, assigning one to alif, two to bā, three to jīm, and so on through yā. They then say: kāf is twenty … (1)

Others, among geometers and logicians, use them as symbols for drawn lines or for the terms of constructed syllogisms. For example, they say: “Every A is B, and every B is C; therefore every A is C.” They used these expressions in their examples because they indicate the form of the syllogistic figure, while a syllogism is not restricted to any particular subject matter. Similarly, morphologists use the pattern “fa‘ala” to correspond to the root letters,