Gharib al-Qur'an (the rare words of the Qur'an)

Gharib al-Qur'an is the science "devoted to explaining the words whose meaning is obscure and remote from understanding", as the foreword of the general supervisor of the King Fahd Complex to al-Muyassar fi gharib al-Qur'an al-karim puts it. ¹ The authors of that book's introduction call knowledge of these words "the first building block in understanding God's speech" and quote al-Suyuti in al-Itqan that this art is indispensable to the commentator. ² Muhammad ibn Abd al-Aziz al-Khudayri opens his al-Siraj by saying that knowing individual words "is the first step" in understanding speech, and quotes al-Raghib al-Isfahani that the first Qur'anic sciences one needs are the verbal ones, among them establishing the meanings of single words. ³

The introduction quotes al-Rafi'i that the rarity of a Qur'anic word is not oddness, harshness or anomaly, "but the rare word is one that is fine yet strange in interpretation, so that its own people and others are not equal in knowing it". ⁴ It traces the root gh-r-b to three related senses: distance, so that the gharib of the Qur'an is what lies far from its reader's grasp; obscurity, what is hidden and subtle to understand; and novelty and rarity, the meaning that seldom comes first to mind. ^{4 5} It notes that authors differed on its criteria, what one counts as rare being familiar to another, so that no exact definition was reached, and that al-Samin al-Halabi faulted al-Raghib for omitting much-needed words. ^{5 2}

The introduction says that the Prophet ﷺ explained to the Companions words hard for them to grasp, citing the Companions' question about "wrongdoing" in the verse of al-An'am and Adi ibn Hatim (may God be pleased with him)'s story of the white and black thread. ^{2 6} Some Companions refused to give their own opinion, as Abu Ubayd relates of Abu Bakr when asked about the word abb. ⁶ Ibn Abbas was regarded as the pioneer in explaining rare words and supporting them from poetry, and Nafi' ibn al-Azraq tested him with questions numbering about two hundred, later called "the questions of Nafi' ibn al-Azraq". ⁷ The general supervisor's foreword adds that the need arose as Arabs mixed with the non-Arabs who entered Islam at the time of the conquests. ¹

Writing on it, the introduction says, began early in the second Islamic century; the sources credit the first works to Aban ibn Taghlib (d. 141), Muhammad ibn al-Sa'ib al-Kalbi (d. 146) and Abu Rawq Atiyya ibn al-Harith al-Hamdani (may God be pleased with him) (d. after 100), "and we have no text settling which of them came first"; the works then multiplied until al-Suyuti said "countless people have written on it separately". ^{7 8}

The introduction classifies the methods:

• By the order of the suras, the oldest and most common: Abu Ubayda Ma'mar ibn al-Muthanna's Majaz al-Qur'an, Ibn Qutayba's Tafsir gharib al-Qur'an, Makki ibn Abi Talib, and Ibn al-Turkumani's Bahjat al-arib. ⁸
• As a dictionary, in three forms: by the first letter and its vowel, as in al-Sijistani's Nuzhat al-qulub (d. 330), followed by al-Iraqi's verse Alfiyya; by the first root letters, as in al-Raghib al-Isfahani's Mufradat and Abu Hayyan's Tuhfat al-arib; and by the last root letters, as in Abu Bakr al-Razi's Tafsir gharib al-Qur'an al-azim, followed by al-Turayhi's Majma' al-bahrayn. ^{8 9}
• Combined with other sciences: the rare words of both Qur'an and hadith, as in Abu Ubayd al-Harawi's al-Gharibayn and Abu Musa al-Madini, or rare words with abrogation, as in al-Khazraji's Nafas al-sabah. ⁹
• Selected from larger books, like Ibn Sumadih, who drew the rare words out of al-Tabari's commentary, and Ibn al-Jawzi's Tadhkirat al-arib abridged from his Zad al-masir; and in verse, like Ibn al-Munayyir al-Iskandari's poem. ¹⁰

The introduction observes that some authors cited the commentators among the Companions and Successors, like Ibn Qutayba, while others took a mainly philological approach, like Abu Ubayda; that early gharib relied on pre-Islamic poetry; and it judges al-Raghib's Mufradat "the mature stage" of dictionary writing up to the start of the fifth century. ¹⁰ The titles of such books, it says, revolve around gharib al-Qur'an, ta'wil mushkil al-Qur'an, ma'ani al-Qur'an, majaz al-Qur'an and mufradat, which are synonymous or nearly so. ¹¹

The general supervisor's foreword says that the spread of Qur'an memorisation circles in Saudi Arabia created the need for a work in clear language, so the Complex was directed to prepare al-Muyassar fi gharib al-Qur'an al-karim for the margin of the Medina Mushaf. ¹² Among contemporary works is al-Khudayri's al-Siraj fi bayan gharib al-Qur'an. ¹³