Abstract

Grammatical agents (al-awamil al-nahwiyya) constitute one of the fundamental pillars upon which Arabic syntax is built. Grammarians relied on this concept to explain inflectional phenomena and to regulate the relationships among the components of the Arabic sentence. Since the emergence of this notion within the Basran school and its subsequent development in Kufa, the issue of the “agent” has remained a fertile field for syntactic disagreement and a point of distinction between grammatical schools in their methods of analysis and deduction. Within this context, Al-Tabyin an Madhahib al-Nahwiyyin al-Basriyyin wa-l-Kufiyyin by Abu al-Baqaʾ al-Akbari offers rich scholarly material worthy of study. The author presents in this work the views of both the Basran and Kufan schools on numerous syntactic issues, outlines the evidence of each side, and demonstrates his own methodological approach in addressing these opinions. The significance of this study lies in the fact that it sheds light on an applied aspect of syntactic disagreement and highlights the impact of the theory of the grammatical agent on guiding syntactic analysis within one of the most important classical sources. The study also aims to determine the extent to which al-Akbari adhered to one of the two schools or followed an independent method of his own. It adopts the descriptive-analytical method in examining the contexts in which al-Akbari employed grammatical agents, analyzing their structures and functions within the text. Moreover, a comparative approach is used to present the Basran and Kufan views as cited in the book and to compare them with al-Akbari’s own preferences and evaluations. The inductive method is likewise employed to trace the various uses of agents and to identify the author’s syntactic inclinations through numerous textual examples. Through this analysis, the scholarly and methodological value of Al-Tabyin is reaffirmed, particularly in its treatment of contentious issues related to the agent. This positions the work as a significant reference for comparative syntactic studies and provides modern researchers with a clear understanding of how earlier grammarians engaged with this theory in practice, not merely in theoretical formulation.