The Basran and Kufan schools of grammar

مدرستا البصرة والكوفة في النحو

The quarrel began quietly between al-Ru'asi at Kufa and al-Khalil at Basra, then flared between al-Kisa'i at Kufa and Sibawayh at Basra, each school gaining a standard the partisans rallied to — scholarly asabiyya founded, it seems, on the two towns' political rivalry. The core difference: the Basrans held that general rules must be laid for the language and kept with rigour — an attested anomaly was 'kept, not analogised', and they dared fault even al-Farazdaq's speech when it broke the rule — prizing qiyas and its sovereignty; the Kufans honoured everything transmitted from the Arabs and licensed its use even against the rules, making the anomaly itself the basis of new rules — whence al-Suyuti's charge that al-Kisa'i 'heard what is only permissible from necessity and made it a principle and analogised on it, corrupting grammar', and the Andalusi's jibe that a Kufan who heard one verse licensing what breaks the norms would make it a principle and build a chapter on it.