Abū Naṣr Aḥmad ibn Ḥātim al-Bāhilī (d. 231 AH/846 CE) was an Arabic-language poet and scholar.
Life and works.
Little is known of Abū Naṣr's life. His tribal surname "al-Bāhilī" associates him with a tribe from Najd. He is known to have had a number of students who themselves became successful scholars, especially Abū l-ʿAbbās Thaʿlab, and at least some of his works circulated as far east as Persia and as far west as al-Andalus. He was active in Isfahan. He had a widely reported dislike of his nephew Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Ziyād Ibn al-Aʿrābī.
Ibn al-Nadim's "Kitāb al-Fihrist", a major catalogue of books from c. 998 CE, records the following works for al-Bāhilī; none survive, at least not in their original form and under al-Bāhilī's name. Several, indeed, seem likely to have been al-Bāhilī's own adaptation of earlier works of the same name by al-Aṣmaʿī:
The closest we have to a complete surviving text by al-Bāhilī seems to be a commentary on the poems of Dhū l-Rumma, in a greatly altered recension by Abū l-ʿAbbās Thaʿlab (d. 291/904) which draws on al-Bāhilī's commentary alongside other commentaries. Al-Bāhilī's "Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī", which probably drew on al-Aṣmaʿī's "Kitāb Maʿānī al-shiʿr" but was a distinct work, was quite widely quoted, which allows for fairly good insights into its content; these quotations have been collected, and translated into English, by David Larsen.
References.
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