Dr. Muhammad Gomaa al-Dirbi, November 7ᵗʰ, 2025
Session report
Introduction
Muhammad Gomaa al-Dirbi is a faculty member at the Faculty of Languages, Luxor University, Egypt. His lecture is devoted to an ambitious project he launched in 2023: the “Bibliogram of Sībawayh’s Kitāb.” Faced with the vast quantity of studies produced on Sībawayh and his book, the aim is no longer merely to compile lists of references, but to build an actual intellectual map of the reception of the Kitāb, capable of showing continuities, ruptures, repetitions, and unexplored areas.
From the discovery of “missing citations” to an awareness of the problem
While working on his doctoral dissertation on Tafsīr ġarīb mā fī Kitāb Sībawayh min al-abniya by ʾAbū Ḥātim al-Siǧistānī (d. 255/868?), Muhammad Gomaa came across an anomaly: ʾAbū Ḥātim comments on forms attributed to Sībawayh that do not appear in the edited text.
But ʾAbū Ḥātim is not a minor witness. Sources report that he read the Kitāb twice before al-ʾAḫfaš, a direct disciple of Sībawayh. It is therefore difficult to assume that he comments on non-existent forms or attributes imaginary statements to Sībawayh. The conclusion is clear: ʿAbd al-Salām Hārūn’s edition does not contain everything that the tradition ascribes to the Kitāb. This is what a first series of articles, published under the title “The citations of Sībawayh that do not appear in his book,” set out to examine.
This research led to a broader reflection. On the one hand, the text of the Kitāb itself calls for a new critical edition considering manuscripts and studies that have appeared since Hārūn. On the other hand, the reception of the book has unfolded over centuries, in diverse milieux and institutions, according to highly uneven logics. Muhammad Gomaa highlights a double characteristic of the scholarly production on Sībawayh: an admirable continuity of interest, but also a large number of redundant studies, often due to a lack of awareness of previous research. The idea of the bibliogramme was conceived in response to these two observations.
What is a bibliogramme?
To define the bibliogramme, Muhammad Gomaa begins with a simple formula: “the text is fixed, but its understanding is mobile.” The Kitāb is a relatively stable text, preserved in manuscripts and editions. But the readings it has inspired are multiple and constantly shifting: debates on Sībawayh’s origins, questions concerning his sources, the supposed influence of the Greek grammatical model, studies of his sources and library, analyses of his terminology, his poetic, Qurʾānic, and proverbial examples, medieval and modern commentaries, as well as recent studies even denying the attribution of the Kitāb to Sībawayh.
Faced with this proliferation of interpretations, a simple bibliography is no longer sufficient. A bibliography does not reveal the relationships between studies, nor the repetitions, nor the blind spots. The bibliogramme, by contrast, aims to provide a structured network of these studies: starting from the text of Sībawayh as a nucleus and unfolding branches toward commentaries, epitomes, criticisms, stylistic studies, manuscript tradition research, and more.
The project can be described in three stages: first, an alphabetical bibliography as exhaustive as possible in all languages; second, a thematic reclassification (on Sībawayh’s biography, his sources, the citations of the Kitāb, commentaries, attacks and defenses, editions, etc.); and third, the construction of diagrams showing how these studies respond to, extend, or correct one another in a chronological perspective.
What the bibliogramme is already revealing
Even unfinished, the bibliogramme has already begun to produce results. First, it reveals large-scale repetition. Many studies revisit the same topics without citing predecessors—sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of a desire to “claim a share” of the Sībawayh dossier. Some studies are even published multiple times without reference to the original publication. Only by tracing the genealogy of texts do such duplications emerge.
The bibliogramme also corrects hasty assertions. Muhammad Gomaa notes, for example, that presenting a modern abridgment of the Kitāb as the “first abridgment” is historically incorrect: medieval scholarship already produced abridgments, such as the now-lost Kitāb al-farḫ by al-Ǧarmī (d. 225/839). By cross-referencing the data, the bibliogramme reintegrates contemporary initiatives into a longer historical trajectory.
Finally, it highlights understudied research avenues: cases where the Kufans defend Sībawayh when his own Basran colleagues depart from his positions; passages where syntactic analysis seems to clash with the expected meaning; al-Farrāʾ’s expressions of hostility toward Sībawayh; and the role of citations absent from the edited text, which may point to lost manuscripts or to oral traditions stemming from Sībawayh’s own teaching sessions.
An institutional project and a call for cooperation
Cataloguing and analyzing everything written on Sībawayh in Arabic and foreign languages requires an enormous amount of hands-on work: it is not enough to gather titles online, one must consult the volumes, verify pagination, textual integrity, and the exact nature of the publications. It is a demanding and largely invisible task—much like cataloging—rarely acknowledged in academic discourse. Muhammad Gomaa evokes in this regard the figure of the cataloguer Issam al-Shanti, respected by manuscript specialists yet largely unknown in academic circles.
This is why he issues a call for cooperation: he invites researchers who have worked on Sībawayh—in Arabic or other languages—to share their publications, send him references, and even provide a short biographical note to help locate their work. He concludes with a wish: the organization of an international congress on Sībawayh, reserved for scholars who are actively working on the Kitāb.
Conclusion
Muhammad Gomaa’s lecture presents the bibliogramme of Sībawayh’s Kitāb as an attempt to transform a massive and fragmented body of studies into a structured collective intelligence. The bibliogramme aims to offer a tool for understanding this history of reception, for distinguishing fruitful expansion from sterile repetition, and for guiding future generations toward genuinely new research.