It was as if a scientific storm blew from the Chinguetti desert and its valleys. He is the first professor of the Arabic language in Al-Azhar Al-Sharif, and at the forefront of those who worked to revive the mothers of the heritage of the Arabic language, he is Muhammad Mahmoud bin Al-Talamid Al-Shanqeeti.
An episode (6/8/2021) of the “Reflections” program introduced Shanqeeti, whose student Ahmed Hassan al-Zayat said that he is “one of the signs of God in preserving language, hadith, poetry, news, proverbs, and genealogy. No chain of narrators, no narration.”
He was known as Ibn al-Talamid because he was a descendant of a family that was a host for students of science, and thus he is proud:
The seed of knowledge nourished me, being kind to a father and merciful to a mother, who did not repent of me in grief
He did not wean me from him until I narrated it from the father, then the brother, the maternal uncle, and the uncle.
And other of them, from every ink that is precipitated, pious, pure, without blindness or blood.
After his family educational upbringing, he mastered the Arabic language in his teens at the hands of grandfathers bin Aktushni Al-Alawi Al-Shanqeeti in the Qibla area.
And it was authorized in the honorable hadith by the scholar Mukhtar Ibn Al-Amash Al-Jikni in “Tindouf” (southern Algeria), during his journey to the Hajj, which began in 1280 AH, and his arrival to Mecca in 1283 AH, where he performed the Hajj, and he frequented between Mecca and Medina.
And he won the appreciation of the Emir of Mecca, Sharif Abdullah bin Muhammad, who is known for his love and honor for the people of knowledge.
And his radiance extended to Astana, so Sultan Abdul Hamid II summoned him, honored him and knew his destiny. He chose him in the year 1304 AH for the greatest embassy to search for Arabic books in Spain. The Bedouin Al-Shanqeeti felt lonely and alienated, when he was a guest of honor on the mothers of the capitals of Europe; London, Paris and Madrid, he said:
What is the night of “soul”, nor the night of perfection together, the night of Paris, or the night of Andalusia
Nevertheless, he did the task and wrote the book “The Most Famous Arabic Books in the Libraries of Spain”.
In 1306 AH, the King of Sweden and Norway sent Oscar II to Sultan Abdul Hamid asking him to send to him a delegation of Arabs asking them about the Qur’an, language and Arab poetry, to participate in the Eighth Conference of Oriental Sciences in Stockholm, and that the delegation be headed by Muhammad Mahmoud bin Al-Talamid, and the Swedish ambassador was assigned to supervise on flight requirements.
Ibn al-Talamid returned to Cairo in the year 1307 AH, and he stayed with the captain of the nobles, Muhammad Tawfiq al-Bakri, who honored him, and got acquainted with Sheikh Muhammad Abduh. Al-Azhar – according to al-Zayyat – had a long tradition of neglecting language and literature from its curricula until Professor Imam Muhammad Abdo included it in free study, and made Study the language of Sheikh Al-Shanqeeti.
Here, Taha Hussein and Ahmed Hassan al-Zayyat were students of him, and they wrote about him in awe; The first is in his book “Al-Ayyam”, and the second is in “The Revelation of the Message”, and Muhammad Rashid Rida wrote about it, and was proudly translated by his student, the scholar Ahmed Taymour Pasha, and it was approved by Abdul Jawad Al-Asma’i, who collected his corrections for the book “Al-Aghani”, and Ismail Hafez, the owner of a printing press, testified to him uniquely. Encyclopedias in Cairo, and even the Swedish ambassador to Egypt, who was an orientalist, admitted that he “was a rude Arab man, from the heart of the Arabs in language, habit, origin and residence.” The most distinguished from the elites of the Hijaz, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt were taken from him.
In 1904 AD, and after attending the funeral of his close friend Mahmoud Sami al-Baroudi, Sheikh al-Shanqiti, the martyr of books, and “the murderer of al-Mukhasas,” died, as he used to say in his life, after his respiratory system weakened the bad atmosphere of the house in which he was receding the manuscripts of the Arab heritage. He left behind a rich harvest of literature, some of which came from his sharp linguistic debates, with Akish al-Yamani, and his pleas about the exchange of “Omar” and “Thal”, in addition to correcting the mothers of dictionaries, bureaucracies, and literary books, and in this he hereditarily says:
I remembered those who weep for me, and I found nothing but books about being circumcised after me or my knowledge.
The printed “Muhasshasha” testifies Mufasha of my reservation, when omitted, amputated, and punctured
And its famous “dictionary” bears witness to that sacrifice, and in the white of nights, and in the attack.
The “Reflections” program also dealt with many paragraphs, including: the public’s eloquence, linguistic reflections, a story such as “Say What She Said,” and common mistakes.