Fairuzabadi

Name

Fairuzabadi (Persian: فیروزآبادی‎‎) is also known as El-Firuz Abadi or al-Fayrūzabādī (Arabic: الفيروزآبادي‎‎). His full name was Abu Tahir Majid al-Din Muhammad ibn Ya'qub ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Shirizi al-Fairuzabadi (أبو طاهر مجيد الدين محمد بن يعقوب بن محمد بن إبراهيم الشيرازي الفيروزآبادي). The shorter form is Muhammad Ibn Ya'qub al-Firuzabadi (محمد بن يعقوب الفيروزآبادي). The nisba "al-Shirazi" refers to the city of Shiraz, Fars, Persia, and the nisba "al-Firuzabadi" refers to the city of Firuzabad, also in Fars.

Life

He was born in Fars, Persia, and educated in Shiraz, Wasit, Baghdad and Damascus. He lived in Jerusalem for ten years and then traveled in Western Asia and Egypt, before settling in Mecca in 1368. He remained there for the bulk of the next three decades, spending some time in Delhi in the 1380s, and finally leaving Mecca in the mid-1390s to return to Baghdad, Shiraz (where he was received by Timur), and finally travelling to Ta'izz in Yemen. In 1395, he was appointed chief qadi (judge) of Yemen by the sultan. In Yemen either he married a daughter of the sultan or else the sultan married a daughter of his.

During the later years of his life, Fairuzabadi converted his house at Mecca into a school of Maliki law and established three teachers in it.

Works

Fairuzabadi produced many writings but he is principally remembered for the dictionary Al-Qamus Al-Muhit (Arabic: القاموس المحيط‎‎) ("The Surrounding Ocean"). In the preface to this dictionary Fairuzabadi acknowledges that the bulk of it was formed as a merger and compilation from two pre-existing dictionaries, the al-Muhkam dictionary of Ibn Sida (died 1066) and the al-ʿUbab dictionary of Al-Saghani (died 1252). Al-Saghani's dictionary (ar:العباب الزاخر واللباب الفاخر) was an expansion of the al-Sihah dictionary of Al-Jawhari (died c. 1008), which is a core dictionary of medieval Arabic. Initially upon the merger, Fairuzabadi's dictionary was huge. He then greatly reduced its size by eliminating examples of usage, eliminating some grammatical aspects of usage, and leaving mostly only simple definitions, and eliminating some lesser-used definitions. He made it more concise with a set of terse but effective notation conventions. The abridgement was still a large and comprehensive dictionary occupying two large volumes in print. It proved to be much more popular with users than the huge Lisan al-Arab dictionary of Ibn Manzur (died 1312) which contains a huge number of quotations and examples of usage.