al-Mufaddal ad-Dabbi

Al-Mufaddal ibn Muhammad ibn Ya'la ibn 'Amir ibn Salim ibn ar-Rammal ad-Dabbi, commonly known as al-Mufaḍḍal aḍ-Ḍabbī (Arabic: المُفَضَّل الضَّبِي), died c. 780–787, was an Arabic philologist of the Kufan school. Al-Mufaddal was a contemporary of Hammad ar-Rawiya and Khalaf al-Ahmar, the famous collectors of ancient Arab poetry and tradition, and was somewhat the junior of Abu 'Amr ibn al-'Ala', the first scholar who systematically set himself to preserve the poetic literature of the Arabs. He died about fifty years before Abu ʿUbaidah and al-Asma'i, to whose labours posterity is largely indebted for the arrangement, elucidation and criticism of ancient Arabian verse; and his anthology was put together between fifty and sixty years before the compilation by Abu Tammam of the Hamasah.