ABSTRACT
Through sheer coincidence, the word Kitab has acquired special significance in the field of Arabic grammar. The sudden and premature death of Sibawayhi meant that his huge but unfinished and unnamed grammatical treatise had to be given a name by his contemporaries. The Kitab of Sibawayhi is striking in another aspect related to the concept of “book” in Arabic grammatical tradition. It is the first grammatical work written, and, at the same time, the most comprehensive and imposing among a host of grammatical works that have survived. al-Kitab, of course, did not emerge from a vacuum, but it is overwhelming in its material, technical terms, and analytic methods, given the relative scarcity of grammatical activity in the pre-Sibawayhi period. It seems absolutely clear that the concept of qiyas did not cross the minds of grammarians at this stage.
