The Students’ Bridge: Grammatical Answers on the Ājurrūmiyya)
Edited and annotated by ʿAlī Muṣṭafā Fye, Nacala Port, Nampula, Mozambique: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Tawḥīd wa-l-Sunna, 1st edition, 1445 AH / 2024 CE. 29 pp.; 254 verses. No ISBN printed. Arabic Reviewed by Cherno Omar Barry
By Dr Cherno Omar Barry
Sometime in the year 1364 of the Islamic calendar — December 1944 to December 1945 — a Gambian scholar in his late fifties finished a poem of 254 lines. It taught Arabic grammar by staging an argument: a student asks, a shaykh answers, and the rhyme never breaks. He called it Qanṭarat al-Ṭullāb, The Students’ Bridge. It then waited eighty years for a printer. It found one in 2024, in Nacala Port, Mozambique.
The man was Shaykh ʿAlī Badr Fye al-Bishrāwī, and the four paragraphs at the front of this edition are the only published account of his life I can find. He was born in 1885 in Ṭandanyeh, Baddibu, North Bank Region, to a Senegalese father, Kuddu Mbye, and a Gambian mother, Nyan Fye — whose name he carries. He memorised the Qur’an as a child. His first teacher was al-Ḥājj Wakeh Bah; from Shaykh Muḥammad Sarr he took prosody and rhyme, the craft this poem lives on; and he finished with al-Ḥājj Malick Sy of Tivaouane, reading logic and al-Suyūṭī’s thousand-line poem on rhetoric. He founded a village in the West Coast Region and named it Bushrā — “good news.” He died there in 1965, the year The Gambia became independent. He is said to have written eighty-two books.
What he was rewriting
The Ājurrūmiyya is the most widely taught grammar book in the history of the Arabic language. Ibn Ājurrūm of Fez died in 723/1323 and left perhaps fifteen pages; for seven centuries students from Morocco to Java have begun there, and every Senegambian dara still does. Turning it into verse so it can be memorised is an old and crowded industry; the standard versification, al-ʿImrīṭī’s al-Durra al-Bahiyya, has been in classrooms since the sixteenth century.
So Fye was not original in his subject. He was original in two other ways, both audible in the opening lines.
The first is the frame. Almost every didactic poem in Arabic is a lecture. This one is a conversation. A student puts the question — “You have answered well, shaykh. Now: what is iʿrāb*? How, and from where, does it show — in the word itself, or in its place?”* — and the master replies in the next line. The student flatters, presses, and confesses: he calls his teacher the discerning scholar, master of the art, my support, and admits that he is out of his depth — “I am the most ignorant of the ignorant.” Between chapters he blesses him: may your Lord guide you, may your Lord reward you, may God help you. A grammar primer has been written as a scene.
The second is the harder choice. Didactic poems are almost always in rajaz, the loosest metre Arabic has, because it is easy to fill. Fye wrote in basīṭ, the metre of the formal ode, and rhymed all 254 lines on a single letter, lām. That is not a teaching decision. That is a poet declining to write down to his material.
He also made his examples do two jobs. A grammar needs sentences to parse; Fye’s are instructions. Do not keep company with a quarrelsome man. Honour your father, and do not belittle the peacemaker. Beware the companion of idleness. Study, so that you may memorise the Qur’an quickly. Others are simply the weather of a Senegambian village: the two Zayds share out the honey; a shaykh is greeted with his sandals off; someone watches the road for the day a teacher will arrive. And the last line counts itself — the word rand is a cypher whose three letters total 254 in the old letter-numeral reckoning, so the poem tells you on its final breath exactly how many lines you have just crossed.
Where the bridge narrows
Against that ambition sits a cost, and the edition’s own footnotes measure it. Holding one rhyme for 254 lines drives a poet to the rare end of the dictionary, and Fye goes there: al-washal, a trickle of water; al-azal, the wolf; al-samal, a man who makes peace between people; al-jazal, quickness of mind; al-khaṭal, corruption. On several pages, most of the footnotes do nothing but tell you what the rhyme-word means. A poem written so that beginners could memorise it turns out to need a glossary. It is a bridge that needs a bridge.
The edition has a larger gap. This is the first printing of a text that survived only in manuscript for eighty years, and the editor tells us nothing whatever about the manuscript. We do not learn how many copies exist, where they are held, in whose hand, or what he did where readings differed. He lists five things he did — modernised the orthography, added commentary, glossed hard words, bracketed the poet’s examples, compiled an index — and every one sits downstream of the question he never answers: what was he editing from?
His claims also outpace his evidence. He writes that the poem adds to the Ājurrūmiyya, and that whoever called it Mutammimat al-Ājurrūmiyya, the Completion of the Ājurrūmiyya, was not mistaken. The additions are real — Fye enumerates the nine causes that make a noun diptote, which Ibn Ājurrūm never does, and separates the particles that put a verb in the accusative directly from those that do it through an implied an. But that title already belongs to al-Ḥaṭṭāb al-Ruʿaynī’s sixteenth-century supplement, and Fye’s additions are not on that scale. The eighty-two books are asserted and never listed. And the biography does not quite hold: 1885 to 1965 is eighty years, not the “nearly ninety” the page claims.
Why it matters to people who will never read it
This book is entirely in Arabic verse. Without Arabic you cannot use a page of it, and I will not pretend otherwise.
Care about it anyway, for this reason. The oldest continuous written tradition in this country is not in English. It is in Arabic and Ajami; it has been produced in our majālis and daras for centuries, and almost none of it has ever been catalogued. Qanṭarat al-Ṭullāb carries no ISBN. It is in no library I can find. Its author appears in no list of Gambian writers, and a search engine returns nothing for his name in any spelling. A man wrote eighty-two books in this country, and we cannot name one of the other eighty-one.
The manuscript also had to cross the continent to be printed. A Gambian shaykh’s poem, edited by a Gambian, was set and bound in Nampula province, Mozambique, because the network capable of carrying it was religious rather than national. That is a fact about our publishing, not about his verse.
Assessment: recommended for specialist readers
The poem would rate higher than the edition that carries it. For teachers and students of Arabic in Gambian and Senegalese schools it is usable at once and, in places, a real pleasure — a grammar lesson with two people in it. For anyone assembling a record of Gambian writing, it is both a document and a warning. It deserves a second edition with the manuscript described, the author’s works listed, and a facing translation.
The poem is called a bridge. A man built it in 1944 and left it standing in a village he had named Good News. It took eighty years and a press in Mozambique before anyone could walk across.