Said ibn Aws Abu Zayd al-Ansari

Abu Zayd Sa'id ibn Aws ibn Thabit al-Ansari al-Khazraji, a philologist, grammarian and transmitter. He took language, grammar, recitation and hadith from the scholars of his age, and he wrote works on language ¹.

He was born around 122 AH (740 CE) and died around 215 AH (830 CE). The encyclopedia notes that the sources differ on the year of his birth. Both dates need an additional source ¹.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.) describes Abu Zayd al-Ansari, Said b. Aws, as an Arab grammarian and lexicographer of the Basran school. He belonged to the Medina tribe of the Khazraj, and was a pupil of Abu 'Amr b. al-'Ala'. He was one of the few Basrans who went to Kufa, where he collected from al-Mufaddal al-Dabbi most of the poetic material he used in his Kitab al-Nawadir. He was invited by al-Mahdi to Baghdad and died there in 214 or 215 (830-1). ²

He was a contemporary of Abu 'Ubayda and al-Asma'i, and was considered superior to them in grammar, but only two of his many treatises survive: the Kitab al-Matar, a collection of Arabic expressions about rain, and al-Nawadir fi 'l-lugha, a collection of rare poems and phrases. The latter was transmitted by his pupils Abu Hatim al-Sijistani and Abu 'l-Hasan al-Akhfash, and was published by S. Sharturi in Beirut in 1894. 'Ali b. Hamza al-Basri wrote al-Tanbih 'ala aghlat Abi Zayd fi nawadirih, a commentary on its errors. ²