Abu Amr Ishaq ibn Mirar al-Shaybani


Abū ‘Amr Isḥaq ibn Mirār al-Shaybānī was a famous lexicographer-encyclopedist and collector-transmitter of Arabic poetry of the Kufan School of philology.
A native of Ramādat al-Kūfah, who lived in Baghdad, he was a mawla under the protection of the Banū Shaybān, hence his nisba. Descended from an Iranian landowner on his paternal side, his mother was a Nabaṭī and he reportedly knew a little of the Nabataean language. The biographers al-Nadīm and Ibn Khallikān quote a claim by Ibn al-Sikkit's that he lived to the age of one hundred and eighteen and wrote in his own hand up to his death, in 213/828. However this is disputed by a claim that he died in 206/821 aged one hundred and ten, and this latter is deemed credible.
Abū 'Amr's teachers were Rukayn b. Rabī' al-Shāmī, a transmitter of ḥadīth and al-Mufaddal al-Dabbi, who developed his love of poetry. His son ‘Amr relates that he collected and classed poems, diwans, from the jahiliyya period from more than eighty Arab tribes. He wrote more than eighty volumes in his own hand and deposited these in the mosque of Kūfah.
The eminent scholars Ibn Hanbal, al-Kasim ibn Sallām, and Ibn al-Sikkit, the author of the Islāh al-Mantik, learned from him.
Of his lexicographical works, often of a very specialized nature, only the Kitāb al-Jīm, survives.

Works by Abū ‘Amr al-Shaybānī