The Early Islamic Grammatical Tradition

Ramzi Baalbaki, Ramzi Baalbaki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351891257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The last decades have witnessed a major resurgence of interest in the Arabic grammatical tradition. Many of the issues on which previous scholarship focused - for example, foreign influences on the beginnings of grammatical activity, and the existence of grammatical "schools" - have been revisited, and new areas of research have been opened up, particularly in relation to terminology, the analytical methods of the grammarians, and the interrelatedness between grammar and other fields such as the study of the Qur'an, exegesis and logic. As a result, not only has the centrality of the Arabic grammatical tradition to Arab culture as a whole become an established fact, but also the fields of general and historical linguistics have finally come to realize the importance of Arabic grammar as one of the major linguistic traditions of the world. The sixteen studies included in this volume have been chosen to highlight the themes which occupy modern scholarship and the problems which face it; while the introductory essay analyses these themes within the wider context of early Islamic activity in philology as well as related areas of religious studies and philosophy.

The Beginnings of Arabic Grammar

1
The Origins of Arabic Grammar

M.G. Carter

[69] The majority of scholars have long supposed that Arabic grammar derives from Greek, through the intermediary of Syriac.¹ Although Ewald could confidently state in the 1830’s that this supposition was based on ignorance.² the Greek hypothesis still has its defenders.³ and Gibb did not hesitate to declare, as recently as 1963, that the derivation of Arabic grammar from Greek logic had been “clearly proved”, though he does not say by whom.⁴ The present study has a double objective: to point out certain [70] inadequacies in the hypothesis of the Greek origin of Arabic grammar, and to propose an alternative explanation for what is, after all, an extremely important phenomenon in the history of Arabic culture. I shall suggest that while it is true that certain elements of Greek thought might have infiltrated Arabic grammar, there is such a preponderance of ethical and legal terms in the very first Arabic grammar (the Kitāb of Sībawayhi)⁵ that we are obliged to seek the origins of Arabic grammar in the vocabulary and methods of Muslim jurisprudence. It will also emerge from my hypothesis that Greek grammatical notions are completely irrelevant to the system constructed by Sībawayhi, not as a result of inevitable differences between one language and another, but because Sībawayhi’s concept of grammar bears no relation to the grammar elaborated by the Greeks.

The Greek hypothesis is based only on the chronological sequence in which Greek, Syriac and Arabic grammar developed. The urge to prove this particular progression no doubt stems from a quite understandable European prejudice which sees in Greek the source of all mediaeval scientific innovation, a prejudice supported, in this particular case, by the fact that from the ninth century AD onward the Arabs did make considerable borrowings from Greek in such disciplines as philosophy, medicine, mathematics, astronomy and even grammar.

One of the weaknesses of the Greek argument, however, is that no documentary evidence can be produced of any authentic borrowing, or even of any close contact between Syrian and Arab grammarians. It is true that Syriac literature, with its traditional attachment to Greek ideas, flourished for some five centuries after the Arab conquests; it is also well known that Syriac grammar was definitively codified by James of Edessa, who died in 708 AD. But we find no mention of James of Edessa, or of any other Syriac grammarian in the Arab histories. It could be objected that these accounts are for the most part apocryphal as far as the origins of Arabic grammar are concerned, which is true up to a point; however, the unreliability of the biographical material for the end of the seventh and eighth centuries itself weakens the Greek hypothesis still further, since this was precisely [71] the period when the potential for Syriac influence was at its highest. And if, as I shall show in due course, the beginnings of Arabic grammar can be dated fairly accurately to around 750 – a period for which we have both evidence of the Kitāb and of more detailed biographies – we have to admit that the Greek hypothesis is seriously undermined by its inability to prove any direct contact either between Arab and Syrian grammarians, or with the scholars who transmitted Greek texts, in spite of the fact that the latter were active precisely during the century and a half which elapsed between the Arab conquests and the appearance of the Kitāb of Sībawayhi. Uninterrupted activity in the domains of Syriac grammar and Hellenistic scholarhip throughout this period is easy to demonstrate with the names of Joseph Huzāya (d. 580), James of Edessa (d. 708), Athanasius of Balad (d. 686), Henānīsho’ (d. 699),⁶ Ishodenah (fl. 695),⁷ George, Bishop of the Arabs (d. 724), John of Litharb (d. 737–8), Marj Abba II (d.751), Dāwud bar Paulos (fl. 785) and the monks who edited the western Syriac Masora?⁸

However, despite the constant accessibility of Greek and Syriac grammatical works, their retlection in Arabic is strikingly limited. It is therefore of little consequence that the Hellenists considerably understated the possible historical evidence on the one hand, and on the other hand weakened their argument by evoking such unconvincing individuals as Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq.⁹ The Greek hypothesis asks us to accept that the development of Syriac grammar before James of Edessa and of Arabic grammar after Hunayn form a single continuous process. I hope to prove in the following pages that the evidence adduced by the Hellenists on the point reached by Arabic grammar in the crucial period of the eighth century should be rejected, because it [72] is applied hysteron proteron, because it is based on a dubious interpretation of the grammar of the later period, and because it is contradicted by the Kitāb itself.

The first argument against the Greek hypothesis, the lack of evidence, has already been mentioned; there is no reference whatsoever to foreign influences in the indigenous accounts of the earliest Arabic grammar. Renan made the comment, many years ago, that the Arabs were always inclined to acknowledge foreign influence if they were aware of it and furthermore, that borrowings are quite obvious in the areas where they do occur,¹⁰, which lends weight to the e silentio argument with which I began this refutation. One of the gaps in the chronicles, which would surely not have existed if the Greek hypothesis had been valid, is suspiciously filled for us by an Arabic grammar said to have been written by none other than Hunayn b. Isḥāq and composed “after the manner of the Greeks”. It is listed in the Fihrist along with other works of Hunayn. But we are surely entitled to ask ourselves why Ibn al-Nadīm did not put it in its proper place among the grammatical texts, or at the very least why he makes no mention of Hunayn there.¹¹

Ibn al-Nadīm was possibly unaware of any kind of link between Greek and Arabic grammar; it is certain that al-Zajjājī, himself a well known grammarian (d. 949), took pains to distinguish between the methods of grammarians and those of logicians, declaring, “their objective is not the same as ours, nor do we have the same purpose”.¹² Another grammarian, al-Rummānī (d. 994), had the misfortune of labouring under the reputation, probably unjust, of wanting to introduce philosophical ideas into his grammar, which induced other grammarians to say of him: “What he does with grammar is not what we do,¹³ [73] and the same criticism was made against Farrā’ (d. 822), accused of “philosophising his grammar”.¹⁴ A dramatic demonstration of the real hostility between grammarians and Hellenists is found in the acrimonious public debate in 932 between the grammarian al-Sīrāfī and the Aristotelian scholar Abū Bishr Mattā.¹⁵ It is typical of the polemics of the Greek hypothesis that this debate, obviously intended to embarrass and ridicule the Aristotelian for his ignorance of Arabic, is cited by Fischer as evidence that Aristotle had exerted a constructive influence on Arabic grammar! At least we can rule out the possibility that Abū Bishr might have shared this view, since he was apparently quite unable to find an Arabic equivalent for the word grammatikos, and was forced to transliterate it.¹⁶

The more or less constant hostility between grammarians and logicians does not, in itself, prove the independence of one group from the other, but it undermines considerably the Hellenist interpretation, where the Arab interest in Greek thought was assumed to be both unbroken and universal. I have the feeling that if the problem is approached only on the basis of the evidence above, it will be difficult to perceive the slightest predisposition among the Arabs to borrow Greek ideas for their grammar. It is impossible, furthermore, to prove these borrowings by the dubious method of post-mortem examinations of the corpus in question. In fact, it is already a gratuitous presumption on the part of the Hellenists to seek Greek origins without even considering that the Arabs might have had no compelling reason nor any conscious desire to borrow ideas from the Greeks. If we treat the Greek hypothesis [74] as a piece of detective work, it can only show that the Arabs certainly had the means and the opportunity to draw on Greek concepts via Syriac, but it cannot prove that they had any motive, nor, which is perhaps more important, any perceived need to borrow for the type of grammar they subsequently constructed.

The most obvious weakness of the Greek hypothesis is that it has never been confronted with Arabic grammar itself or rather, that the Hellenists have never defined the kind of grammar which they claim was borrowed from Greek. There are several points to be dealt with here: after describing the basic principles of Arabic grammar as formulated in the Kitāb of Sībawayhi, it will be necessary to show that the Kitāb is the first grammatical work in the Arabic language. This depends on a concept of grammar which, while not ruling out linguistic speculation before the Kitāb, distinguishes between the fully developed system of Sībawayhi, and the primitive, barely scientific grammatical notions which preceded it. I use the word “preceded” deliberately, since it reflects my hypothesis that primitive Arabic grammar did not evolve into or become absorbed into Sībawayhi’s system, but was in fact completely replaced by the type of grammar which we find in the Kitāb. Paradoxically it can then be conceded that some Greek ideas were later introduced into Arabic grammar, but only after they had been assimilated into Islamic thought as a whole, and only as a result of the inability of the Arabs to grasp the eminently functional nature of Sībawayhi’s grammatical system.¹⁷ For this reason alone the evidence ascribed to grammarians ...