Ma'mar was originally of
Persian Jewish descent. In his youth, he was a pupil of
Abu 'Amr ibn al-'Ala',
Yunus ibn Habib and
Al-Akhfash al-Akbar, was later a contemporary of
Al-Asmaʿi, and in 803 he was called to
Baghdad by the
Caliph Harun al-Rashid. In one incident recounted by numerous historians, the Caliph al-Rashid brought forth a horse and asked both Al-Asmaʿi and Abu 'Ubaida (who had also written extensively about zoology) to identify the correct terms for each part of the horse's anatomy. Ma'mar excused himself from the challenge, saying that he was a linguist and anthologist rather than a veterinarian; Al-Asmaʿi then leaped onto the horse, identified every part of its body and gave examples from Bedouin Arab poetry establishing the terms as proper Arabic vocabulary. Among his students was the noted musician
Ishaq al-Mawsili. He was one of the most learned and authoritative scholars of his time in all matters pertaining to the
Arabic language, antiquities and stories, and is constantly cited by later authors and compilers.
Al-Jahiz held him to be the most learned scholar in all branches of human knowledge, and
Ibn Hisham accepted his interpretation even of passages in the
Qur'an. Although Ma'mar couldn't recite a single verse of the Qur'an without committing errors in pronunciation, he was considered an expert on the linguistic meanings of the verses, especially in regard to rarely used vocabulary. The titles of 105 of his works are mentioned in the
Fihrist of
Ibn al-Nadim, and his
Book of Days is the basis of parts of the history of
Ibn al-Athir and of the
Kitab al-Aghani of
Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, but nothing of his (except a song) seems to exist now in an independent form. He died in
Basra in 825. ==Legacy==