Those who wanted to read Aristotle...

Those who wanted to read Aristotle, use medical terms, solve mathematical problems, or embark on any intellectual discourse, had to know Arabic. The first rules of Arabic language, including its poetry metrical theory, and its syntax, morphology and phonology, were written in Iraq. This task was conducted both in Al-Basrah under Al-Khalil Ibn Ahmed Al-Farahidy and in Al-Kuufah under Abu al-Hasan Al-Kisaa'i.

During the Middle Ages Al-Khalil in his book** کتاب العين** and, his student, Siibawayh in الکتاب concluded that task. The first complete dictionary of the Arabic language was composed by Al-Khalil, who had also been involved in the reform of the Arabic script and who is generally acclaimed as the inventor of the Arabic metrical theory. The professed aim of کتاب العين , which goes under his name, was the inclusion of all Arabic roots.

In the introduction, a sketch is given of the phonetic structure of Arabic, and the dictionary fully uses available corpora of Arabic by including quotations from the Qur'an and from the numerous pre-Islamic poems, which had both undergone a process of codification and written transmission by the hands of the grammarians.

The early attempt to write the Arabic grammar began as early as the time of the fourth Well-Guided Caliphs, Ali Ibn Abi Taalib, when he commissioned a man named Abu Al-Aswad Al-Du'ali for the task.

وقال لي: إنحَ هذا النحو، واضف إليه ما وقع إليك. I came to The Leader of the Believers, Ali Ibn Abi Talib, and found that he was holding a note in his hand.

I asked, "What is this, Oh Leader of the Faithful?" He said, "I have been thinking of the language of the Arabs, and I came to find out that it has been corrupted through contacts with these foreigners.Therefore, I have decided to put something that they (the Arabs) refer to and rely on." Then he gave me the note and on it he wrote: Speech is made of nouns, verbs and particles.