Landmarks in Linguistic Thought Volume III

The Arabic Linguistic Tradition

Kees Versteegh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134727827
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Landmarks in Linguistic Thought Vol 3 is devoted to a linguistic tradition that lies outside the Western mainstream, namely that of the Middle East.
The reader is introduced to the major issues and themes that have determined the development of the Arabic linguistic tradition. Each chapter contains a short extract from a translated `landmark' text followed by a commentary which places the text in its social and intellectual context. The chosen texts frequently offer scope for comparison with the Western tradition. By contrasting the two systems, the Western and the Middle Eastern, this book serves to highlight the characteristics of two very different systems and thus stimulate new ideas about the history of linguistics.
This book presumes no prior knowledge of Arabo-Islamic culture and Arabic language, and is invaluable to anyone with an interest in the History of Linguistics. Kees Versteegh is currently Professor of Arabic and Islam at the Middle East Institute of the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His publications include The Explanation of Linguistic Causes (1995),Ed. Arabic Outside the Arab World (1994)

Chapter 1

Linguistics and exegesis

Muqâtil on the explanation of the Qur’ân

Sufyân said: Someone who reads the Qur’ân and does not know its exegesis is like someone who upon receiving a book that is liked by many people, rejoices in it and begs someone to read it to him, since he cannot read himself, but finds no one. This is similar to someone who reads the Qur’ân and does not understand what is in it. Ibn ‘Abbâs said: The Qur’ân has four aspects: exegesis, which is known to the scholars; Arabic language, which is known by the Arabs; allowed and forbidden things, which people cannot afford to ignore; and interpretation, which is only known to God Almighty…. Muqâtil said: The Qur’ân contains references to particular and to general things, particular references to Muslims and particular references to polytheists, general references to all people; it contains ambiguous and univocal passages, explained and unexplained passages; it contains deletions and explicit utterances; it contains connective items; abrogating and abrogated verses; it contains changes in the chronological order; it contains similar utterances with many different aspects; it contains passages that are continued in a different sûra; it contains accounts of earlier generations and accounts of what there is in Paradise and in Hell; it contains references to one particular polytheist; it contains commandments, laws, ordinances; it contains parables by which God Almighty refers to Himself, parables by which He refers to unbelievers and idols, and parables by which He refers to this world, to resurrection and to the world to come; it contains accounts of what is in the hearts of the believers and accounts of what is in the hearts of the unbelievers, polemics against the Arabian polytheists; and it contains explanations, and for each explanation there is an explanation

(Muqâtil, Tafsîr al-Qur’ân, I, 26–7, ed. by ‘Abdallâh
Maḥmûd Shiḥâta, 4 vols, Cairo: al-Hay'a al-Miṣriyya
al-‘Âmma li-l-Kitâb, 1979–87)

At first sight the text presented here in translation does not seem to be very linguistic in nature and its relevance to the development of linguistic studies might appear to be doubtful. None the less, on closer investigation it turns out that it contains the seeds of scholarly occupation with the text, from which later developments of a more linguistic nature were to spring. The passage has been taken from the introduction to one of the earliest commentaries on the Qur’ân, that of Muqâtil ibn Sulaymân, who died in 767. With this text we go back to the earliest written sources of Islam.

Muqâtil belongs to a generation of exegetes whose main purpose was to explain the text of the Qur’ân for the common believers, for whom the Holy Book was the main guide in their daily life. When the Qur’ân was revealed in Mecca to the Prophet Muḥammad around the turn of the sixth and the seventh century CE, it was a fragmented message, parts of which were memorized by the believers and by professional reciters. The fragments contained a large variety of subjects, from narratives to mystic experiences, from parables to instructions about the way of life of the Muslims. Especially in the latter half of his life, when he had migrated to Medina, some of the revelations the Prophet received consisted of highly technical instructions about inheritance, distribution of booty, food, marriage, and so on. After the death of the Prophet the earliest successors or caliphs took precautions to preserve the integrity of the text. They collected the written fragments, and under the third Caliph ‘Uthmân an authoritative text was compiled, which became the basis for all later Qur’ânic codices. Codifying the Qur’ân involved a lot of philological work, such as the reform of the orthography, the sifting of variant readings, the elucidation of difficult forms, and the selection of dialectal variants. Even after the collection of the Qur’ân, professional readers continued to occupy themselves with those variant readings that survived the unifying efforts of the caliphs, each of them propagating his own readings.

Just like any other religious text the meaning of the Qur’ân is not always transparent. Right from the beginning specialists in the Muslim community must have assisted the common believers in understanding the text. Since some of the instructions contained in it are directly relevant for daily life in the community, such assistance was indispensable during the introduction of the new order, especially after the conquests when tens of thousands of neophytes had to reshape their lives according to the commandments of the new religion. Not much is known about the earliest beginnings of exegetical activities in Islam, but we do know that they all had in common a fundamental concern with the elucidation of the meaning of the text, rather than the study of its formal characteristics.

The names of dozens of commentators on the Qur’ânic text from the first two centuries of Islam are recorded in the biographical literature, but very few exegetical comments from them have been preserved. From the author of the quotation at the beginning of this chapter we have an entire commentary, which must have functioned as a unified text because it has an internal structure and contains many cross-references. Muqâtil had a bad reputation, for one thing because he was known as an anthropomorphist who had no qualms in assigning to God such human attributes as bodily parts, and for another because he was reputedly a fabricator of stories in his exegetical work. One anecdote presents him showing off about his personal acquaintance with scholars on whose authority he transmitted traditions from the Prophet, among them the famous Mujâhid ibn Jabr. Thereupon someone in the audience stands up and says: “I am Mujâhid, but I've never met you!”. Without blinking an eye Muqâtil retorts: “That doesn't matter, what matters is the contents of the story”. A third point of criticism is that he depended on Jewish sources (’isrâ’îliyyât) for his background information on the Qur’ânic narrations.

Yet, in spite of its bad reputation Muqâtil's Tafsîr on the Holy Book is one of the earliest complete commentaries and as such it presents an interesting picture of what exegesis may have been like in the first century of Islam. From commentaries such as the one by Muqâtil we can learn something about the methods used by the commentators. Their primary device of elucidation was the simple juxtaposition of text and paraphrase, sometimes introduced by explanatory notes such as “it means”, “that is to say”, “i.e.”, “the intention is”. In the following examples the Qur’ânic text that is commented upon has been put between asterisks:

*The example of those who disbelieve is like that of one who bleats* [Q. 2/171], this means: a sheep or a donkey (Tafsîr I, 155.12–13)

*He is for you a manifest (mubîn) enemy* [Q. 2/168], this means: clear (bayyin) (Tafsîr I, 155.5)

*For God is forgiving* [Q. 2/192] your idolatry (Tafsîr I, 168.7)

*And the ones who were brought the Book* [Q. 2/144], this means the people of the Torah and they are the Jews (Tafsîr I, 147.4)

As these examples show, the explanation concerns all different levels of the text: sometimes lexical elements are explained, sometimes the meaning of a phrase, sometimes a factual remark is added, sometimes the paraphrase supplements words omitted in the verse. There is no single hermeneutic method, all Muqâtil does is follow the text and explain anything that might be unclear to the reader. Interspersed in the commentary are long stories about the Biblical background of the narratives told in the Qur’ân; in these stories he demonstrates his knowledge of the Jewish Torah. For his lexical explanations he must have had at his disposal a list of difficult words: these words are always explained in the same way at each and every occurrence. The word mubîn “manifest”, for instance, is always paraphrased with bayyin “clear”, apparently because the former (which derives from the same root) was no longer current at the time Muqâtil was writing. Likewise he always replaces the word ’alîm “painful” with its synonym wajî‘, the word jannât “gardens” with its synonym basâtîn and the archaic interrogative ’ayyân “when?” with the more familiar word matâ.

At a very early stage there were also signs of a more linguistic interest in the text of the revelation. On several occasions Muqâtil adds remarks on some of the properties of the text that are of no immediate relevance for the understanding of the text and its functioning in daily life. He comments, for instance, on the provenance of words with a foreign etymology in the Qur’ânic lexicon or assigns certain lexical items in the text to pre-Islamic tribal dialects. He states, for instance, that the Qur’ânic word qisṭâs “path, road” derives from Greek (Tafsîr II, 530.12), which may be correct (some scholars believe that it comes from dikastês “judge”) and points out the Persian origin of the word ’istabraq “brocade” (Tafsîr II, 584.9), which is certainly correct. He refers to the tribal dialects of pre-Islamic Arabia in order to support his analysis of the meaning of idiomatic phrases, for instance when he explains the word ghulâm “young man” and adds that in the kalâm al-‘Arab “language of the Bedouin” this word is used for every man whose beard has not yet grown (Tafsîr II, 598). Such information has little to do with the elucidation of the message and is of no conceivable help in applying the text to the exigencies of daily life.

In later times the question of foreign origin of Qur’ânic words became a controversial issue. For many grammarians and lexicographers it was a point of dogma that all words in the Qur’ân are Arabic; they spent a lot of effort on proving that words like qisṭâs and ’istabraq belonged to an Arabic root, or, at the very least, that these words had already existed in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. The Qur’ân had been revealed in the Arabic language so that the existing loanwords in the lexicon presented no problem. But as the Qur’ân is God's literal spoken word, it was impossible for orthodox believers to accept that the Qur’ân could contain any loanwords or neologisms, since that would imply a change in the divinity.

There is nothing to suggest that the early commentators were interested in the structure of the language of the revelation. Still they must have felt a certain degree of curiosity about the linguistic properties of the language; at least that is what transpires from their use of terminology. In the quotation at the beginning of this chapter Muqâtil presents a catalogue of subjects contained in the Qur’ân. The main categories in his list are:

• narrative (expository) parts, e.g., stories about earlier generations

• legal parts, e.g., laws and commandments

• instructive parts, e.g., parables and stories about Paradise and Hell

There are several things that are remarkable in his list, above all its heterogeneity: in between the three main categories of subjects there are various subjects that are not so easy to categorize. What are we to make of “deletions”, “connections”, and so on? These elements are the first components of a structural or formal analysis of the text of the Qur’ân, and therefore, from the point of view of the history of linguistics the most interesting parts. They demonstrate how within a purely semantic analysis of the text of the revelation a linguistic analysis could originate. The difference between the primitive analysis in the early commentaries and the analysis in later commentaries is that the early commentators had almost no technical apparatus at their disposal. The fact that they remarked on certain phenomena in the text at all demonstrates, however, that they were aware of formal features of the text.

Take for instance the device of taqdîm, literally “preposing”. This term is used for three things, in the first place for a hysteron proteron, a change in the logical order of events, for instance when the Qur’ân says (Q. 3/55) yâ ‘îsâ ’innî mutawaffîka wa-râfi‘uka ’ilayya “O Jesus, I am the One who will let you die and raise you towards Me”. The commentator adds that this is taqdîm (Tafsîr I, 279.1), because, as he explains, according to Islamic doctrine the act of raising towards God precedes Jesus's natural death during the apocalypse. In the second place it is used for prolepsis, when the result of an action is presented as coexisting with it, for instance in the case of the expression “clothes of fire” (Q. 22/19), which according to Muqâtil is taqdîm, because the phrase means “clothes that are made of copper which has been set afire” (Tafsîr III, 120.10). In the third place, it indicates the occurrence of syntactic hyperbaton, a change in word order, for instance in Q. 15/61 fa-lammâ jâ’a ‘alâ lûṭin al-mursalûna “when to Lot came the people who had been sent”. In this case the meaning of the verse is perfectly clear, but still the commentator feels compelled to add “there is taqdîm here, this means: when the people who had been sent came to Lot” (Tafsîr II, 432.11). Apparently he felt that this verse does not have the canonical word order of Arabic and found it worthwhile to point this out for his readers. The varying use of the term taqdîm is also interesting because it demonstrates how at this early stage the commentators did not yet distinguish between purely linguistic and semantic analysis of the text. In its syntactic sense, the term taqdîm could, of course, develop in a linguistic direction: in later grammar we find it used exclusively for the syntactic phenomenon of fronting, for instance, of the object of a sentence, as in zaydan ḍarabtu “Zayd [accusative] I hit”.

In connection with the linguistic aspects of the commentary two other phenomena listed in Muqâtil's introduction need to be mentioned here, the deletions and the connections. In twelve passages in the commentary Muqâtil uses the term ’iḍmâr, li...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Landmarks in linguistic thought III The Arabic linguistic tradition
• ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC THOUGHT SERIES
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Linguistics and exegesis: Muqâtil on the explanation of the Qur’ân
• 2 Al-Khalîl and the Arabic lexicon
• 3 Sîbawayhi and the beginnings of Arabic grammar
• 4 The debate between logic and grammar
• 5 The development of linguistic theory: Az-Zajjâjî on linguistic explanation
• 6 The relationship between speech and thought: Al-Fârâbî on language
• 7 The ’Ikhwân as-safâ’ on the theory of sound and meaning
• 8 The origin of speech: Ibn Jinnî and the two alternatives
• 9 A new semantic approach to linguistics: Al-Jurjânî and as-Sakkâkî on meaning
• 10 The conventional character of language: The science of the “institution of speech”
• 11 Ibn Madâ’ and the refutation of the grammarians
• 12 Ibn Khaldûn on the history of Arabic
• 13 The Arabic model and other languages: The description of Turkic and Hebrew
• List of abbreviations
• Further reading
• Bibliographical references
• Index