9th-century Arab scholar, poet and grammarian
Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qūb Ibn as-Sikkīt () was a Persian philologist tutor to the son of the Abbasid caliph Al-Mutawakkil and a great grammarian and scholar of poetry of the al-Kūfah school. He was punished on the orders of the caliph and died between 857 and 861.
Life.
He was the son of al-Sikkīt, a philologist of the Kūfī school of grammar, a man of science, and an associate of the scholars al-Kisā’ī and al-Farrā’. Where the father excelled in poetry and linguistics, the son excelled in grammar. His father originated from the village of Dawraq, Ahwaz Khuzestan (Iran),
Ya‘qūb was a scholar of Baghdād, which followed the Kūfī school tradition in grammar, Qur’anic science and poetry. He studied and recorded the pure Arabic language from the Desert Arabs. He tutored the sons of al-Mutawakkil, who were Al-Muntasir and Al-Mu'tazz.
Ya‘qūb’s surname was Abū Yūsuf and his son, Yūsuf, was a court companion and personally close to the caliph al-Mu‘taḍid.
He was a disciple of Abū ‘Amr al-Shaybānī, Muḥammad ibn Muhanna, and Muḥammad ibn Subh ibn as-Sammāq. He taught the philology of al-Asmaʿi, Abū Ubaidah, and al-Farrā’.
Isḥāq al-Nadīm records that he was a pupil of Naṣrān al-Khurāsāni. Naṣrān had transmitted the poetry of al-Kumayt with ‘Umar ibn Bukayr and Ibn al-Sikkīt, who had memorised Naṣrān's books had a bitter disagreement about Naṣrān‘s teachings with the Kūfī scholar, al-Ṭūsī. 
The account of al-Sikkīt, related by al-Nadim through the classical "isnād" source-system, cites the narrator-chain of Abū Sa‘īd, Abū Bakr ibn Durayd and al-Riyāshī, in an account illustrative of the active intellectual exchange between the two rival schools of Baṣrah and Kūfah in the 9th century. A group of "wārraqūn" of al-Kūfah gathered for a reading aloud by a "warrāq" of al-Baṣrah, of Ibn al-Sikkīt’s "Book of Logic". Al-Riyāshī was at the event and attested that Ibn al-Sikkīt had told him, that he had learned the vernacular dialects of Southern ‘Irāq from Ḥarashat al-Ḍibāb and Aklat al-Yarābī, and they had derived theirs from the people of al-Sawād. He mentions examples of words such as “"akalah al-kuwāmīkh"” and “"al-shawārīz"."
The tests of rivalry between schools is illustrated in another account given by al-Nadim, told as a kind of cautionary tale. When al-Athram, a young scholar from al-Baṣrah, challenges Ya‘qūb ibn al-Sikkīt, a senior scholar of al-Kūfah school, on a verse by the poet al-Rā’ī, he clearly breaks the etiquette code that always ranks seniority above juniority.
Notes.
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References.
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