While teaching Hidayat al-Nahw this last year, I chose to stick to the actual book as the text and not the Irani, revamped version entitled Al-Hidayah fi ‘l-Nahw which basically simplifies the text in certain places, adds practice questions and summaries, and inserts neat little charts for visualizing divisions and categories.
Because al-Hidayah fi ‘l-Nahw is relatively hard to find, I decided to retain Hidayat al-Nahw as a text, but instead chose to use Al-Bushra Publication’s version of the book which includes most of the exercises and summaries from the Irani version while essentially retaining the original text (with a few minor changes here and there). The only disadvantage of Bushra’s rendition is that it does not include the charts in the Irani version.
I had some students scan the charts and make a pdf of them. Special thanks to Adam Oraefo for scanning and Wali Shaheed for editing the scan to include only the charts.
Please see the following short work on the history of Balaghah, entitled appropriately al-Mujaz fi Tarikh al-Balaghah. Although the book is not as well-organized as others on the history of Arabic literature, it is short and concentrates on the Balaghah aspect of Arabic literature. The work tends to emphasize certain points of the history of rhetoric more than others in accordance with the author’s taste of topics, but is still quite comprehensive and useful for the beginner. More than anything, the relatively small size of the book is reason enough for a beginner of Balaghah to read through it, if even only briefly.
at-Tahawi 