Ibn Duraid

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn al-Hasan ibn Duraid al-Azdi, often known simply as Ibn Duraid (Arabic: ابن دريد الأزدي‎‎; 837 – 933 CE), was a famous Arab poet, lexicographer and philologist during the Abbasid era. He is best known for his early and influential dictionary of the Arabic language, Jamhara fi 'l-lugha, which was only the second attempt in history to compose a comprehensive dictionary of the language.

Ibn Duraid was born at what was then called "Salih street" in Basra during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Al-Mu'tasim; the year is sometimes given as 838. While his immediate tribe was Azd, he preferred to identify himself as a Qahtanite, the larger confederacy of which Azd is a part. The modern-day descendants of his tribe are the Zahran tribe residing primarily in the Al Bahah Region of Saudi Arabia. Here he was trained under various teachers, but fled in 871 to Oman at the time Basra was attacked by the Zanj, under Muhallabi. Surprisingly, Ibn Duraid was also said to have been a practicing physician though no works on medical science have survived.

After living twelve years in Oman he went to Persia, then under the protection of the governor Abd-Allah Mikali and his sons, and wrote his chief works. Abd-Allah also hired Ibn Duraid as the director of the government office for Fars Province, though the latter donated the entirety of his salary to poor people each time it was paid, keeping almost nothing for himself while in Persia. In 920 he went to Baghdad, where he received a pension of fifty dinars a month from the caliph Al-Muqtadir in support of his literary activities which continued to his death. While in Baghdad, Ibn Duraid was a personal acquaintance of Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari.

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