A Good Editing of an Arabic Dictionary

The Arabic Dictionary of Ali Safi, authored by Fakhruddīn Ali Ṣafī (839-939 AH), is the son of Mullah Hussein Wāiz Kāshifī. This book is apparently an Arabic-Persian dictionary; However, it is arranged in the alphabetical order of Persian words and their equivalents in Arabic, and is in fact a Persian-Arabic dictionary that includes a number of nouns, prepositions and proper names. In compiling this work, the author has used other dictionaries such as al-Maṣādir, Tāj al-Maṣādir and Muḥadhbab Al-Asmā '. His effort in choosing Persian equivalents was more focused on the use of eloquent and scholastic words of his time, rather than the living spoken language of Herat in the ninth and tenth centuries AH.
This dictionary has been revived with a precise and scholarly editing by Dr. Massoud Ghasemi, which you will read about in this brief introduction.