Al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbī

Al-Mufaddal bin Muhammad bin Ya'la bin 'Amir bin Salim bin ar-Rammal ad-Dabbi, commonly known as Al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbī (Arabic: المُفَضَّل الضَّبِي‎‎), was an Arabic philologist of the Kufan school. Al-Mufaddal was a contemporary of Hammad Ar-Rawiya and Khalaf al-Ahmar, the famous collectors of ancient Arab poetry and tradition, and was somewhat the junior of Abu 'Amr ibn al-'Ala', the first scholar who systematically set himself to preserve the poetic literature of the Arabs. He died about fifty years before Abu ʿUbaidah and al-Asma'i, to whose labours posterity is largely indebted for the arrangement, elucidation and criticism of ancient Arabian verse; and his anthology was put together between fifty and sixty years before the compilation by Abu Tammam of the Hamasah.

The exact year of Al-Mufaddal's birth is not known, though his father was an authority on the Muslim conquest of Persia and it is thought that al-Mufaddal was born in that region.

Al-Mufaddal lived for many years under the caliphs of the Umayyad line until their overthrow by the Abbasid Revolution in 750. In 762 he took part in the rising led by Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah, the Alid, called "The Pure Soul", against the caliph al-Mansur, and after the defeat and death of Ibrahim was cast into prison. Al-Mansur, however, pardoned him on the intercession of his fellow tribesman Musayyab ibn Zuhair of Dabba, and appointed him the instructor in literature of his son, afterwards the caliph al-Mahdi. It was for this prince that, at al-Mansur's instigation, al-Mufaddal compiled the Mufaddaliyat.

Al-Mufaddal's exact date of death has proved difficult to determine. The Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature states that he died some time around the year 780, though the longer window between 781 and 787 has been claimed as well.

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