MA, Lianyuan.

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Tianfang zhangju jie ("Explanations of Arabic Composition and Phrasing"). First edition of this book on Arabic rhetoric, the fourth and last from the Al-Muttasiq series - "a pioneering masterpiece of Arabic linguistics" (Ma). This is a rare woodblock imprint attributed to an Islamic publisher from Kunming, Yunnan, in south-west China. We have traced no institutional copies. The work was published under the patronage of Ma Rulong (1832-1891), a powerful Muslim military commander from Yunnan. A major promoter of Islamic scholarship, he belonged to the Hui ethnic group, of Arab, Persian, and Central Asian origins. Since the late 16th century, Hui scholars had established new avenues for the study and teaching of Arabic and Islamic studies, based on foundational Arabic grammar books adapted for Chinese speakers. Al-Muttasiq was compiled by the accomplished Hui intellectual Ma Dexin (Yusuf, 1794-1874), who had performed the Hajj in 1841 and spent almost a decade in the Middle East, and his Hui student Ma Lianyuan (Muhammad Nūr al-Haqq,1841-1903), "one of the greatest Islamic educationists in the history of Chinese Islam" (Lin, p. 106). It is a major achievement of this tradition, with four volumes on al-sarf (morphology), al-nahw (syntax), al-mantiq (logic) and al-balāghah (rhetoric).Praised by a scholar from Medina in the introduction, this fourth book examines the three parts of Arabic rhetoric: 'ilm al-ma'ānī, the science of meaning in context; 'ilm al-bayān, the science of fig

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