Fairūzābādī, variants: el-Fīrūz Abādī or al-Fayrūzabādī was a lexicographer and was the compiler of al-Qamous, a comprehensive and, for nearly five centuries, one of the most widely used Arabic dictionaries.
Name
He was Abū al-Ṭāhir Majīd al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Ya'qūb ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Shīrāzī al-Fīrūzābādī, known simply as Muḥammad ibn Ya'qūb al-Fīrūzābādī. His nisbas "al-Shīrāzī" and "al-Fīrūzābādī" refer to the cities of Shiraz and Firuzabad in Fars, Persia, respectively.
Life
Fairūzābādī was born in Fars, Persia, and educated in Shiraz, Wasit, Baghdad and Damascus. He spent ten years in Jerusalem before travelling in Western Asia and Egypt, and settling in 1368, in Mecca for almost three decades. From Mecca he visited Delhi in the 1380s. He left Mecca in the mid-1390s and returned to Baghdad, then Shiraz and finally travelled on to Ta'izz in Yemen. In 1395, he was appointed chief qadi of Yemen by Al-Ashraf Umar II, who had summoned him from India a few years before to teach in his capital. Al-Ashraf's marriage to a daughter of Fairūzābādī added to Fairūzābādī's prestige and power in the royal court. In his latter years, Fairūzābādī converted his house at Mecca, and appointed three teachers, to a school of Maliki law.
Fairūzābādī composed several poems lauding Ibn Arabi for his writings, including the وما علي إن قلت معتقدي دع الجهول يظن العدل عدوانا. Ibn Arabi's works inspired Fairūzābādī's intense interest in Sufism.
Selected Works
Al-Qamus al-Muhit ; his principal literary legacy is this voluminous dictionary, which amalgamates and supplements two great dictionaries; Al-Muhkam by Ibn Sida and Al-ʿUbab by al-Saghānī. Al-Saghānī's dictionary had itself supplemented the seminal medieval Arabic dictionary of Al-Jawharī, titled al-Sihah. Fairūzābādī also produced a concise simplified edition using a terse notation system and omitting grammatical examples of usage and some rarer definitions. The larger-print-two-volume concise dictionary proved much more popular than the vast Lisan al-Arab dictionary of Ibn Manzur with its numerous quotations and usage examples.
