(Re-)Forging the Science of Bayān

Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies • 23 (2023): 45-76 © Mostafa Najafi, Chair of Philosophy at the Theology Faculty of the University of Lucerne / CH ISSN 0806-198X DOI 10.5617/jais.10416 (Re-)Forging the Science of Bayān: ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ǧurǧānī in the Early Twentieth Century* MOSTAFA NAJAFI (University of Lucerne) Abstract ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ǧurǧānī took center stage in the field of bayān (called as well balāġa) during the first half of the twentieth century thanks, above all, to the efforts of Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Hellmut Ritter. As similar as they are in their approach, ʿAbduh and Ritter came to represent two mutually dismissive scholarly traditions with respect to Ǧurǧānī and the science of bayān. These two apparently divergent traditions, wittingly or unwittingly, contributed to forging one and the same image of Ǧurǧānī and bayān. As I attempt to show in this paper, this image that still prevails in the scholarly discourse was built under the shadow of falsafa. Keywords: ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ǧurǧānī, bayān, falsafa (philosophy), Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Hellmut Ritter, historiography Introduction But into the subtleties of the mythologists it is not worth our while to inquire seriously; those, however, who use the language of proof we must cross-examine. [Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1000a, 18-20] The science of bayān (lit. expressiveness), also called balāġa, 1 first gained momentum around the twelfth century, when numerous scholars across the Islamic world transformed it * Acknowledgement: This article is the result of my research in the framework of the ERC Project MEMOPHI (Medieval Philosophy in Modern History of Philosophy, ERC-2013-CoG 615045) financed by the European Research Council (FP7). I would like to express my gratitude to Catherine KönigPralong and Nadja Germann for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper. 1 Bayān commonly refers both to this science as a whole, and also to one specific part of it, along with maʿānī (and badīʿ), in the bipartite (or tripartite) conception of this science, especially after al-Sakkākī. In this study, I use this designation at the expense of the more popular balāġa. Even though both are supported by textual evidence, balāġa has been often associated with the Aristotelian Rhetoric (usually translated as ḫaṭāba), as its Arabic counterpart. For a brief account on the concept and history of this science see Thomas Bauer, “Rhetorik: arabische Kultur,” in Rhetorik: Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2007), 111-37. For an incisive study on the concept Mostafa Najafi • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 46 by summarizing, further elaborating on, or criticizing the two works by ʿAbd al-Qāhir alǦurǧānī (d. 1078), Dalāʾil al-iʿǧāz (Proofs of the Inimitability) and Asrār al-balāġa (Mysteries of Eloquence). 2 The numerous works written during this first flourishing of bayān subsequently overshadowed Ǧurǧānī’s own writings for centuries. Even though the intellectual engagement with Ǧurǧānī’s works was diverse and calls for further investigation, one particular line beginning with Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sakkākī’s (d. 1229) Miftāḥ al-ʿulūm enjoyed popularity and pre-eminence until the early twentieth century. 3 Then, in the first half of this century (roughly speaking), two scholars from two different continents forcefully brought Ǧurǧānī back into the foreground within their respective contexts: Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849-1905) from Egypt and Hellmut Ritter (1892-1971) from Germany. Due to their persistent efforts, Ǧurǧānī took center stage and remained central in a new era of bayān scholarship. Aside from acknowledging this undeniable achievement, I will connect these two figures, as far as necessary, with their immediate and more distant scholarly contexts, in Egypt and Europe respectively, to bring out more clearly their innovations and also borrowings, whether acknowledged or not. As similar as these two influential figures are in their approach, ʿAbduh and Ritter came to represent two divergent and mutually dismissive scholarly traditions with respect to Ǧurǧānī and the science of bayān. ʿAbduh, for his part, exemplifies those scholars who identify themselves with Ǧurǧānī or even see themselves as his rightful heirs, aspiring to revive his heritage. One might dub them the “insiders.” By contrast, Ritter represents those non-native experts of Arabic (or orientalists) aiming to undertake a scholarly study of Ǧurǧānī’s works. These figures could be labeled the “outsiders.” 4 The “outsiders” suspect the “insiders” of lacking critical vision. 5 Then again, the “insiders” see the “outsiders” as of bayān from a new perspective with a focus on Ibn Wahb, see Nadja Germann, “Was ist der Mensch? Zu Isḥāq b. Ibrāḥim b. Wahbs Begriff von bayān,” forthcoming. 2 For the editions of these two works, see ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ǧurǧānī, Asrār al-Balāġa: The Mysteries of Eloquence, ed. Hellmut Ritter (Istanbul: Government Press, 1954) and ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ǧurǧānī, Dalāʾil al-iʿǧāz, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad Šākir (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-madanī, 19841, 19923). 3 For a list of traditional authors in this line up to the twentieth century, see Aḥmad Muṣṭafà al-Marāġī, Tārīḫ ʿulūm al-balāġa wa-l-taʿrīf bi-riǧālihā (Cairo: Muṣṭaf al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1950), esp. 58ff. For a standard history of the development of this science in the Islamic world, see Šawqī Ḍayf, al-Balāġa: taṭawwur wa-tārīḫ (Cairo: Dār al-maʿārif, 1965), esp. 160-270 (= ch. 3) and 271-367 (= ch. 4). In a special issue of the Journal of Abbasid Studies, a group of scholars problematized this monolithic history of Ǧurǧānī’s reception, see Joseph E. Lowry, Monique Bernards and Alexander Key (eds.), Journal of Abbasid Studies, 5.1-2 (2018), special issue on ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī; see there in particular Avigail Noy, “The Legacy of ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī in the Arabic East before al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ,” Journal of Abbasid Studies, 5.1-2 (2018), 11-57. 4 For a collective scholarly effort to go beyond such ungrounded and mutually exclusive categorizations that have marred the apologetic, polemic and even the supposedly non-partisan academic approach in the study of the various strands of thought in the Islamic world, see Majid Daneshgar and Aaron W. Hughes (eds.), Deconstructing Islamic Studies (Boston: Ilex Foundation, 2020). 5 The French orientalist Régis Blachère, for instance, refers to the “édition égyptienne” of Ǧurǧānī’s Asrār as “très mediocre.” See Régis Blachère, “Review of Asrār al-balāġa, by ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ǧurǧānī, ed. Hellmut Ritter,” Arabica, 4.3 (1957), 314. Hellmut Ritter, the German editor and translator of the Asrār, however, remains neutral on the “Egyptian” edition and makes use of it for his own edition. See Hellmut Ritter, “Introduction,” in Asrār al-Balāġa. The Mysteries of Eloquence, ed. Hellmut Ritter (Istanbul: (Re-)Forging the Science of Bayān • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 47 alien to Ǧurǧānī’s indigenous cultural space and accordingly portray them, even in their greatest scholarly endeavors, as merely groping their way up the dark and slippery paths of the Arabic language. 6 I will show in this study how these two apparently divergent groups of “insiders” and “outsiders”, wittingly or unwittingly, contributed to forging one and the same image of Ǧurǧānī, an image which still prevails in the scholarly discourse about him. Through the example of Ǧurǧānī, moreover, I aim to demonstrate the inseparability of the history and historiography of falsafa (an Arabicized loan word from the Classical Greek philosophia designating the Greek-inspired philosophical tradition in the Islamic world) and bayān. 1. Bayān in the Islamic World 1.1. Reviving the “Queen of Sciences” to Revive the Islamic World People of our lands [western Islamic lands, particularly the author’s homeland Egypt…] could dispense with that [i.e. the acquisition of bayān] thanks to the innate sound taste (al-ḏawq al-salīm) bestowed to them by God […]. Peoples of the eastern lands, however, who have the upper hand in sciences, particularly rational sciences and logic, exhausted their high-aspiring endeavor in the acquisition of this science [i.e. bayān]. [Subkī, attempting to justify the rarity of eminent scholars of balāġa in western Muslim lands]. 7 At the turn of the twentieth century, Muḥammad ʿAbduh renounced the eight-century-old tradition of bayān-scholarship that predominated in his time in the Islamic world and set out to claim pride of place in this domain for Ǧurǧānī’s two works instead. To achieve this aim, he had to eliminate the widely disseminated products of this longlived scholarship from circulation: Its roots reached back to Miftāḥ al-ʿulūm, the celebrated work of Abū Yaʿqūb alSakkākī (d. 1229), and its most recent offshoot, within a still-thriving commentary tradition, was the work of ʿAbduh’s contemporary and fellow Azharī scholar Šams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Inbānī (d. 1896) on the commentary by Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 1390) on al-Ḫaṭīb alQazwīnī’s (d. 1338) abridgement of Sakkākī’s above-mentioned work. The supercommentator Inbānī happened to also be the Grand Imam, the rector so to speak, of al-Azhar, one of the most influential educational centers in the Islamic world. 8 No change in the curriculum of al-Azhar was possible without his permission, as its highest authority. At the time, the official textbook for the study of balāġa, which was allocated during three academic years from the eighth to the tenth grade in the thirteen-year study plan of al-Azhar, was Government Press, 1954), 25; Hellmut Ritter, “Einführung,” in Die Geheimnisse der Wortkunst (Asrār al-balāġa), transl. by Hellmut Ritter (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1959), 17. 6 This is how the third Egyptian editor of Ǧurǧānī’s works, Abū Fahad Maḥmūd Šākir describes Hellmut Ritter; see Maḥmūd Muḥammad Šākir, “Muqaddima,” in Asrār al-Balāġa, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad Šākir (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-madanī, 1991), 8-9. 7 Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-Subkī, ʿArūs al-afrāḥ fī šarḥ Talḫīṣ al-Miftāḥ, ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Hindāwī (Beirut: alDār al-namūḏaǧiyya, 2003), 1: 20-1. 8 Inbānī was the Grand Imam of al-Azhar for two terms, 1881-1882 and 1886-1895. Mostafa Najafi • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 48 Taftāzānī’s commentary along with that of Inbānī. 9 ʿAbduh had attempted to convince him to introduce new textbooks into its curriculum, albeit with no success; to the Grand Imam, the firmly established “practice” was not open to negotiation. 10 ʿAbduh began teaching Ǧurǧānī’s Dalāʾil and Asrār at al-Azhar only after the death of Inbānī, thus marking the beginning of an incremental academic interest in the theoretical output of Ǧurǧānī in the century to come. ʿAbduh’s canonization of Ǧurǧānī’s works over the last decade of his life through the creation of a critical edition, their oral analysis and explication in lecture courses, and their broad dissemination at the expense of the established textbooks written by later commentators, was at the core of his lifelong struggle to reform the Arabic language. In his autobiography, ʿAbduh counts linguistic reform and religious reform as the two great reforms that he called for and endeavored to achieve throughout his life. 11 However, these two aspects of his program for reform, together with a third political aspect that he mentions on the side, are deeply interwoven. ʿAbduh firmly believed that the attainment of Islam’s urgently needed sound religious reform, crucial for its political existence, hinged solely on linguistic reform and the revival of the Arabic language. 12 He thus intertwined the linguistic, religious, and political elements in his reform program to an extent that distinguishes him from other religious reformers both inside and outside the Islamic world. 13 If we contrast him with Martin Luther, for instance, to whom he has been often compared, one main difference stands out. 14 While Luther brought his people’s holy scripture down from the heavens of Latin by translating it into vernacular German, thus freeing it from the hands of priests and putting it within reach of the faithful, ʿAbduh set out to elevate the language of his people towards the unreachable heavens of Quranic language; Ǧurǧānī 9 See, for instance, the table of subject matters at al-Azhar from May 1900 in Muḥammad ʿAlī Ḥilla, alAzhar fī l-aršīf al-Miṣrī: waṯāʾiq min al-qarnayn al-tāsiʿ-ʿašar wa-l-ʿišrīn (Cairo: Dār al-kutub wa-lwaṯāʾiq al-qawmiyya, 2015), 406-12, here 410. 10 Ever since his early days at al-Azhar, especially after his association with Ǧamāl al-Dīn al-Afġānī, ʿAbduh has been seeking to reform this institution. For his attempts to convince Inbānī, see Mohammad ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl al-kāmila, ed. Muḥammad ʿImāra (Beirut: Dār al-šurūq, 1993), 3: 193. 11 ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 2: 310. Only recently, ʿAbduh’s emphasis on language reform has begun to attract some scholarly attention, see now Ahmed El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020), esp. 147-58. 12 Al-Aʿmāl, 1: 867: “inna mā yaḥtāǧuhu l-kiyān al-siyāsī al-islāmī laysa muǧarrad al-iṣlāḥāt wa-innamā liṣlāḥ al-dīnī al-ṣaḥīḥ.” 13 In his study on the concept of ‘society’ within the context of Islamic reformism, Florian Zemmin delves into various aspects related to ʿAbduh’s role in shaping this discourse, with a particular focus on the influential journal al-Manār, see Florian Zemmin, Modernity in Islamic Tradition: The concept of ‘society’ in the journal al-Manār (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2018). 14 For representing ʿAbduh as the Martin Luther of the Islamic world, see, for instance, ʿAbdallāh al-ʿArwī, al-Īdiyūlūǧiyyā al-ʿarabiyya al-muʿāṣira (Beirut: al-Markaz al-ṯaqāfī al-ʿarabī, 1995), 61. From another perspective, Assem Hefny emphasizes the closeness of ʿAbduh’s concept and agenda of reformation (iṣlāḥ) in the Islamic world with Martin Luther from various perspectives; see Assem Hefny, “Die islamische Rezeption der Reformation,” in Reformation im Islam: Perspektiven und Grenzen, ed. Jörgen Erik Klußmann et al. (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019), 45-58. ʿAbduh himself was critical of Luther and a Protestant approach to religious reform, see, for instance, al-Aʿmāl, 3: 292-3. (Re-)Forging the Science of Bayān • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 49 provided him with the ladder he needed to take them to that height. 15 But then again, in contrast to his own mentor Ǧamāl al-Dīn al-Afġānī (d. 1897), who never shied away from directly confronting the sources of the Muslim world’s political plight, ʿAbduh focused his energy on remedying what he saw as the cause of this suffering from the inside, as well as on religious authorities and institutions that he blamed for the continuation of this suffering. Accordingly, his anti-imperialist and Pan-Islamist program fundamentally differed from that of Afġānī. For ʿAbduh, the cause of suffering was nothing other than the prevailing tendency towards blind following (taqlīd) and intellectual stagnation (ǧumūd), both of which he viewed as symptoms of a severe, historically rooted malady, namely the de-Arabicization of Islam under the lasting dominion of non-Arabs, including, among others, Turkic and Iranian peoples (al-turk wa-l-daylam). 16 While reducing ʿAbduh’s whole reform agenda to linguistic reform might be a stretch, for him, language was literally a matter of life and death, as he once emphasized: “A nation with a dead language has no life.” 17 In this spirit, ʿAbduh saw Ǧurǧānī’s works as a fountain of life that could revitalize the Arabic language and through this Islam, as an originally Arabic religion. To put it in ʿAbduh’s own terms, to be an Arabic religion was the highest distinction of Islam. It was only due to this distinction that Muslims gained the highest glory—during the so-called Islamic Golden Age—and were able to assimilate Greek science within the space of a mere century, naturalizing it as Arabic science. Unlike their European counterparts, who required ten centuries, “Arabs could not accept to be mere students of Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, and Ptolemy for a long time.” 18 The decadence of Islamic civilization began when Muslims lost this Arabic element. ʿAbduh even pinned down the precise beginning of this decline: the decision of the Abbasid caliph al-Muʿtaṣim (d. 842) to mobilize non-Arab peoples in his army and to include them in his government at the expense of the Arabs, who were presumably sympathetic to the ʿAlawites who opposed him, on account of their closer kinship with the prophet of Islam. This was the beginning of the process of “de-Arabicization of Islam and thus making it unintelligible” (hunāka stuʿǧima l-islām wa-nqalaba ʿaǧamiyyan). The power this caliph thus conferred on foreigners gradually expanded, growing until the sack of Baghdad in 1258. The harmful consequences of this policy, however, extended far beyond this date. It implanted in people’s minds—to cite one major harmful consequence—the idea that “the antecedent shall not hold anything but what the precedent held.” 19 This idea turned 15 By reviving the original language of the Muslims, ʿAbduh aspired as well to grant Muslims an unmediated access to their holy scripture, the Quran, the return to which was central in his reform. The consequent centrality of the Quran in the scholarly activities of both ʿAbduh and Riḍā is often overlooked. Johanna Pink incisively highlights this aspect in both scholars at various stages of the scholarship; see Johanna Pink, “ʿAbduh, Muḥammad,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Washington DC: Georgetown University, 2015), consulted online on February 17, 2022, via http: //dx.doi.org/10. 1163/1875-3922_q3_EQCOM_050483; Johanna Pink, “Riḍā, Rašīd,” ibid., consulted online on February 17, 2022, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1875-3922_q3_EQCOM_050503. 16 ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 3: 335-6. 17 ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 4: 16: “lā ḥayatᵃ li-ummatin mātat luġatuhā.” 18 ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 3: 323. 19 ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 3: 336: “qarrarū anna l-mutaʾaḫḫir laysa lahu an yaqūlᵃ bi-ġayrⁱ mā yaqūlᵘ lmutaqaddim.” Mostafa Najafi • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 50 into a doctrinal belief in the Islamic world and caused the total cessation of thought and the stagnation of minds, or as he puts it elsewhere, blind following (taqlīd) and intellectual stagnation (ǧumūd). 20 All branches of Islamic knowledge were thus corrupted. In the same manner, bayān too underwent a process of decline. In the view of ʿAbduh, the works that he strove to remove from circulation were the product of such a stagnant historical period and of a mindset conditioned and contaminated by this fundamental dogmatic idea lying behind the prevalent phenomenon of de-Arabicization or foreignness (istiʿǧām, ʿuǧma). ʿAbduh’s persistent struggle for educational reform under the influence of his mentor Afġānī caused—in part due to his relation to Afġānī—fierce conflict between him and his conservative Azharī peers. They were quick to depict his denunciation of these authorities as unprecedented innovation (bidʿa). ʿAbduh, however, saw things the other way round: They say seeking to change paths is looking after the recently developed (alǧadīd) and craving inventions [with no past precedent] (bidʿa) [...]. This is not true. The recently developed, the [unprecedented] invention is what we see them following, with its obvious repercussions and prevailing harm. After throwing their charge back at them, he states: What we call for is what was truly established in ancient times (al-qadīm alḥaqīqī). Without our reliance on that, we shall have no success. 21 Since such sources and authors had been lost or were inaccessible, ʿAbduh sought to rehabilitate them by reviving the heritage of the “intermittent centuries” (al-qurūn almutawassiṭa) of Islamic history. This fluid “intermittent” period included a set of scholars and works from different eras which, in ʿAbduh’s eyes, offered a unique vantage point from which to look at the lost heritage of the earliest Islamic centuries, which were not yet contaminated by later developments suffering from ʿuǧma and taqlīd. “By going back to the sources from the intermittent [Islamic] centuries,” he states on one occasion, we are accomplishing a step towards reforming the books […]. As long as we are constrained to the expressions of the currently circulating books, as the only sources of our religion and knowledge, we will gain nothing but more ignorance. 22 Al-Muḫaṣṣaṣ, the linguistic encyclopedia of Ibn Sīdah al-Mursī (d. 1066), Maqāmāt, the literary work attributed to Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamaḏānī (d. 1007), and al-Baṣāʾir al-Naṣīriyya fī l-manṭiq, the logical work by Ibn Sahlān al-Sāwī (early twelfth century) all belonged to this 20 ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 3: 335-6. 21 ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 3: 161: “yaqūlu l-qāʾilūn inna ṭalab taġyīr al-ṭuruq iʿtināʾun bi-l-ǧadīd wa-wulūʿun bi-lbidaʿ aw nuzūʿun lahā. Wa-laysa l-amr kaḏālik, fa-inna l-ǧadīd wa-l-bidʿa huwa mā narāhum ʿalayhi waqad ẓahara aṯaruhu wa-ʿamma ḍararuh. Fa-l-qadīm al-ḥaqīqī huwa mā nadʿū ilayh wa-lā naǧāḥa lanā illā bi-l-taʿwīl ʿalayh.” 22 ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 3: 214: “iḏā raǧaʿnā ilà kutub al-qurūn al-wusṭà [...] nakūnu qad ḫaṭawnā ḫuṭwatan liiṣlāḥ al-kutub wa-l-fiqh, wa-mā dumnā muqayyadīn bi-ʿibārāt hāḏihi l-kutub al-mutadāwila wa-lā naʿrif al-dīn wa-l-ʿilm illā minhā fa-lā nazdādu illā ǧahlan.” (Re-)Forging the Science of Bayān • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 51 collection. However, his editorial output also included earlier classical works, such as the juridical Mālikī work al-Mudawwana or the Nahǧ al-balāġa of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib. In the field of balāġa, the works of Ǧurǧānī represented for ʿAbduh this pristine state of Islamic knowledge. Just like the numerous other central texts mentioned above, the edition and publication of Ǧurǧānī’s two works were accomplished within the framework of the activities of The Society of the Revival of Arabic Science (Ǧamʿiyyat iḥyāʾ al-ʿulūm alʿarabiyya) that ʿAbduh founded in 1900, one year after becoming the grand mufti, or the highest legal authority, of Egypt in 1899. 23 He was the main theorist and scientific authority behind the project to edit, publish, and disseminate Ǧurǧānī’s two works, even though he enjoyed the selfless support of his disciples. Rašīd Riḍā (1865–1935), to name but one, was the main executive director behind this collective achievement. 24 When the latter moved to Egypt in 1898 to found the periodical al-Manār (The Lighthouse), 25 ʿAbduh was already engaged in the edition of Ǧurǧānī’s Dalāʾil. He had fetched two manuscripts from Medina and Baghdad to compare them with the one available to him in Cairo to prepare his edition of this work, as Riḍā reports. 26 It appears, however, that his first choice had been Ǧurǧānī’s other work, the Asrār. He had settled on Dalāʾil due to his failure to find any manuscripts of the former work. Hence, as soon as Rašīd Riḍā informed him of the existence of a manuscript of that work in Tripolis, a copy owned by a friend of his, the literary scholar ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Maġribī, ʿAbduh urged him to procure it and prepare it for publication. Riḍā set to work, found a second manuscript from Istanbul, and prepared the edition of Asrār in a couple of years. In 1901, he published the work with Taraqqī Press in Cairo and distributed it in April 1902. ʿAbduh’s lectures at al-Azhar, first on this work and then on Dalāʾil, before, during, and after the whole process, functioned as a parallel laboratory for their edition and reworking of the two works. In addition to a host of advanced students, other scholars and lecturers at al-Azhar, as well as teachers of public schools enthusiastically attended these lectures. One year later, in 1903, Dalāʾil was published with ʿAbduh and Muḥammad Maḥmūd al-Tarkazī al-Šinqīṭī as joint editors, in collaboration with Rašīd Riḍā. The rationale behind this whole project that was accomplished in a relatively short time was the following: In contrast to those conservative ʿulamāʾ who fought to preserve the long commentary tradition on Ǧurǧānī’s works, ʿAbduh, and others under his influence, completely dismissed this commentary tradition as corrupted by non-natives and Greekinspired scholars, calling for the restoration of long-lost Arabic taste. They depicted these works that had been developed based on the writings of Ǧurǧānī as an unnatural hypertheoretical and overly philosophical interpretation of bayān by “a crowd of people settled and rooted in falsafa.” While seeing their dominance in the educational curricula as a sign of “corruption of taste in language,” they devalued these textbooks as marred by ʿuǧma and 23 ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 1: 34, 198, for instance. 24 Consider ʿAbduh’s letter to Rašīd Riḍā, from August 28, 1901, instructing him to write the introduction to their edition of Asrār with some additional remarks concerning the process, in: ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 1: 878. 25 For a study on the historical establishment of al-Manār in the context of religious reform, see Umar Ryad, “A Printed Muslim ‘Lighthouse’ in Cairo: al-Manār’s Early Years, Religious Aspiration and Reception (1898-1903),” Arabica, 56 (2009), 27-60. 26 Aside from these basic descriptions, no further information is given concerning the manuscripts that were used for the edition. Mostafa Najafi • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 52 went so far as to represent them as “dead inscriptions that ignorance had named science.” Hence, they called for abandoning these imitations and returning to the original lively sources of the Arabic language, thus rehabilitating the natural Arabic taste. They struggled, however, to revive the works of those earlier scholars whom they saw as the only source that could convey “uncorrupted taste” (al-ḏawq al-salīm). 27 We got confused from looking into technical meanings and exploring them excessively, to the extent that what lay behind them turned into a misfortune for our sciences and minds, ʿAbduh diagnoses, emphasizing that, in a nutshell, the aim behind such Arabic sciences [meaning the linguistic sciences of naḥw and ʿilm al-maʿānī wa-l-bayān] is to reach the same degree that Arabs possessed by natural disposition (salīqa). 28 From this perspective, ʿAbduh sets out to reconstruct Ǧurǧānī’s project, in order to undo the harm and restore the natural disposition and linguistic taste of the Arabs, thus enabling them to re-Arabicize Islam. This emphasis on taste and gustation (ḏawq, taḏawwuq), fundamentally linked to the natural disposition of the Arabs, entails the centrality of the Arabic language in bayān. Ironically, due to this emphasis, ʿAbduh comes close to Sakkākī, from whom he wanted to radically distance himself. Sakkākī, too, thought that the cognitive source for understanding the miraculous inimitability of the Quran, the presumed aim behind the science of bayān, “is nothing but taste” (al-ḏawq laysa illā). 29 ʿAbduh also echoes Sakkākī when he laments what the muwalladūn, those who are not pure Arabs, had done to the Arabic language. 30 In doing so, he considers himself to be expressing the lament of men of taste (ahl al-ḏawq) and their concern for the queen of all sciences: balāġa. 31 Furthermore, when ʿAbduh set out to edit the Ǧurǧānian texts equipped with his “Arab disposition and literary taste (ṭabʿ ʿarabī wa-ḏawq adabī),” 32 he adopted a theoretical framework and structure for them that is Sakkākian in its core. ʿAbduh introduces these works as the foundational works of the science of balāġa, 27 For ʿAbduh’s relevant observations, see, for instance, his eulogy (taqrīẓ) of his student ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Barqūqī, published in the latter’s edition of al-Ḫaṭīb al-Qazwīnī’s al-Talḫīṣ; see Ǧalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Qazwīnī al-Ḫaṭīb, al-Talḫīṣ, ed. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Barqūqī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Nīl, 1904), 23-4. Also see Barqūqī’s introduction to the same edition (al-Qazwīnī, al-Talḫīṣ, 2-22) as well as Rašīd Riḍā’s prologue and epilogue to the editions of Asrār and Dalāʾil, respectively; see Muḥammad Rašīd Riḍā, “Muqaddima,” in Asrār al-balāġa: fī ʿilm al-bayān, ed. Muḥammad Rašīd Riḍā (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-taraqqī, 1902), bāʾ-ḥāʾ; Muḥammad Rašīd Riḍā, “Ḫātima,” in Dalāʾil al-iʿǧāz: fī ʿilm al-maʿānī, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Muḥammad Maḥmūd al-Tarkazī al-Šinqīṭī, in collaboration with Muḥammad Rašīd Riḍā (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-mawsūʿāt, 1913), 402-4. 28 ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 3: 156. 29 Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sakkākī, Miftāḥ al-ʿulūm, ed. Naʿīm Zarzūr (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 19831, 19872), 416. 30 Al-Sakkākī, Miftāḥ, 416. 31 ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 1: 190-1. 32 ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl, 1: 198. (Re-)Forging the Science of Bayān • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 53 which, according to his bipartite conceptual framework, consists of bayān and maʿānī as its two main branches. Accordingly, he designates Asrār and Dalāʾil with the subtitles “concerning the science of maʿānī” and “concerning the science of bayān,” respectively. This bifurcation can be traced back at least to al-Zamaḫšarī (d. 1144), whom ʿAbduh praised for his “precise linguistic analysis,” 33 just as the tripartite conceptualization of balāġa (maʿānī, bayān, badīʿ) is a residuum of the Sakkākian reading of Ǧurǧānī in ʿAbduh. 34 Moreover, by submitting to this Sakkākian influence, ʿAbduh turns out to also perpetuate the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” This fundamental and unbridgeable divide between the language of proof and the language of taste, prevalent in the tradition of falsafa, derives from the distinction between intellect and imagination and their corresponding separate epistemic spheres. This distinction dates back as far as Plato’s differentiation of the philosopher and the rhetorician/sophist in his Gorgias and Phaedrus. 35 In the Greek context, this conceptual pair distinguished philosophy from literature, and it lived on within the falsafa tradition in the Islamic world. Major thinkers in this tradition, from Kindī (d. 873) through Fārābī (d. 950) to Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037), elaborated a theoretical account building on the distinction between the corresponding two faculties of the soul to distinguish philosophy not only from literature, but more specifically from religion, which was conceptualized as existing within a contrasting literary domain. 36 Thinkers in this 33 El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics, 152. Maḥmūd al-Zamaḫšarī (d. 1143) indicates this bipartite conception of the science of balāġa, as consisting of ʿilm al-maʿānī and ʿilm al-bayān, both in his well-known exegetical work al-Kaššāf as well as his Asās al-balāġa. See Maḥmūd al-Zamaḫšarī, Asās al-balāġa, ed. Muḥammad Bāsil ʿUyūn al-Sūd (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1998), 1: 16; Maḥmūd al-Zamaḫšarī, al-Kaššāf ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tanzīl wa-ʿuyūn al-aqāwīl fī wuǧūh al-taʾwīl, ed. Ḫalīl Maʾmūn Šīḥā (Beirut: Dār al-maʿrifa, 20093), 23. In neither occasion is there any mention of Ǧurǧānī. He does cite him once by name, but only in reference to his poetry; cf. Zamaḫšarī, al-Kaššāf, 1048. 34 In the third part of his Mafātīḥ al-ʿulūm, al-Sakkākī divides the science of balāġa into the sciences of meanings (ʿilm al-maʿānī), and expressiveness (ʿilm al-bayān) and a third section under the title “manners employed to enhance the speech” (wuǧūh yuʾtà bihā li-taḥsīn al-kalām) that is later dubbed “al-badīʿ,” probably for the first time in al-Miṣbāḥ of Badr al-Dīn b. Mālik (d. 1287); see Badr al-Dīn b. Mālik, alMiṣbāḥ fī l-maʿānī wa-l-bayān wa-l-badīʿ, ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Hindāwī (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2001), esp. 99. 35 The thematic connection between Gorgias and Phaedrus and their focus on the nature and limitations of rhetoric is commonly acknowledged. For a systematic study on this thematic interconnectedness, see Tushar Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); cf. Seth Benardete, The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy: Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Marina McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Concerning the oscillation of scholars as to the profession of Gorgias between rhetorician and sophist, see Jacqueline Tusi, “Between Rhetoric and Sophistry: The Puzzling Case of Plato’s Gorgias,” Apeiron, 53.1 (2020), 59-80. For a general analysis of Plato’s discussions on rhetoric and poetry in Republic and Ion besides the two mentioned great dialogues on rhetoric, see Charles L. Griswold, “Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (spring 2020 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, consulted online on February 17, 2022, via https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/plato-rhetoric/. 36 For the psychological account of prophecy in the philosophical works of these thinkers see Richard Walzer, “Al-Fārābī’s Theory of Prophecy and Divination,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 77.1 (1957), 142-8; M. E. Marmura, “Avicenna’s Theory of Prophecy in the Light of Ašʿarite Theology,” in The Seed of Wisdom: Essays in Honour of T. J. Meek, ed. William Stewart McCullough (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 165-74; James Winston Morris, “The Philosopher-Prophet in Avicenna’s Political Mostafa Najafi • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 60 2. Bayān in Europe 2.1. Learning Arabic to Dethrone Arabic Wir sehen also die Hauptgründe dafür, daß die Aufnahme des griechischen Erbes im Orient zwar nicht minder tiefgreifend und umgestaltend war als bei den Römern, aber von einer ins Innerste hinabreichenden, nicht anders als tragisch zu nennenden Unfruchtbarkeit. [Becker’s student Hans Heinrich Schaeder, Der Mensch in Orient und Okzident] 69 In Europe, Ǧurǧānī first attracted scholarly attention as a grammarian, that is, as an expert in the domain of Arabic grammar or naḥw. His fame as a theoretician in the domain of bayān followed a couple of centuries later. Corresponding to Europe’s early endeavors to attain mastery of the Arabic language within the context of international cultural and religious politics, it was the grammarian Ǧurǧānī who engaged early modern European scholars thanks to his treatise on proper grammar, Miʾat ʿāmil (“One Hundred Agents,” also known as alʿAwāmil al-miʾa). This work proved particularly handy as a highly systematic and concise toolbox and was a perfect complement to another widely used grammatical work in Europe, al-Āǧurrūmiyya by Ibn Āǧurrūm (d. 1323). Ǧurǧānī’s clear and jargon-free style in this work facilitated a smooth introduction to Arabic grammar for Western scholars, who were well versed in Latin grammar but unfamiliar with the syntactic and morphological terminology of Arabic grammar. Two scholars showed particular interest in this work at the turn of the seventeenth century: Giovanni Battista Raimondi (d. 1614) and Thomas Erpenius (d. 1624). The former was an enthusiast linguist directing the scholarly programs, as well as the practical works, of the Medici Oriental Press (the Typographia Medicea), which granted him access to a large collection of oriental manuscripts. 70 This Catholic press had been founded in Rome with Pope Gregory XIII’s support in 1584 and, under his direction, sought to meet missionary and commercial needs through the publication of scholarly classics, grammars, dictionaries, holy scriptures, and a polyglot Bible in the languages of the Middle East, as well as selling these books throughout the world. Raimondi left behind an unpublished, partial, East into the Western world… He saw a common root, and therefore a common ground for hermeneutic understanding: the Greek heritage.” Josef van Ess, “From Wellhausen to Becker: The Emergence of Kulturgeschichte in Islamic Studies,” in: Kleine Schriften (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 25. 69 Hans Heinrich Schaeder, Der Mensch in Orient und Okzident: Grundzüge einer eurasiatischen Geschichte, ed. Grete Schaeder (Munich: Piper, 1960), 116: “Thus, we observe the primary reasons why the reception of the Greek heritage in the Orient, while no less profound and transformative as that among the Romans, suffered from a profound barrenness that extended deep into its core, which cannot but be called other than tragic.” 70 Guglielmo E. Saltini, “Della Stamperia Orientale Medicea e di Giovan Battista Raimondi,” Giornale Storico degli Archivi Toscani, IV (1860), 257-96. For a collection of studies on the role of the Medici Grand Dukes in the East-West relations in the early modern age see, Marta Caroscio and Maurizio Arfaioli (eds.), The Grand Ducal Medici and the Levant, Material Culture, Diplomacy, and Imagery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2016). For a more general history of the major library collections in the languages of those countries with Islam as the principal religion, mainly in the Middle East, in western European countries (the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Denmark) and North America, see Stephan Roman, The Development of Islamic Library Collections in Western Europe and North America (London and New York: Mansell, 1990). (Re-)Forging the Science of Bayān • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 61 interlineal translation of Ǧurǧānī’s Miʾat ʿāmil. 71 Thomas Erpenius was the first professor of Arabic in the Dutch Republic, at Leiden University, and “translated and edited numerous basic Arabic texts especially for the purpose of teaching and for the Protestant missions.” 72 Based on a unique manuscript that he probably acquired during his post-studies travels (ca. 1608) to the main centers of oriental studies in Europe, 73 he published a Latin translation of Ǧurǧānī’s Miʾat ʿāmil in Leiden in 1617 under the title Grammatica Arabica 74 together in a single volume with al-Āǧurrūmiyya. As Erpenius reports, Raimondi intended to publish the book himself along with a Latin translation, “however, prevented by death, he did not publish it.” 75 Despite his great respect for Raimondi, Erpenius apparently saw himself as even more qualified to carry out such a task. 76 In general, Raimondi shows more interest in and seems more preoccupied with the Persian language. 77 His deep fascination with this language is manifest in his ranking of beautiful languages, in which Persian stands above all others, followed by Greek and then Arabic, particularly thanks to its expressive capacity of poetic concepts. 78 Even though Arabic only ranked third on Raimondi’s list of beautiful languages, his partial translation of Ǧurǧānī’s book shows that he had a better grasp of the contents of the book than Erpenius. As Jones shows, the latter fails to grasp fundamental syntactic concepts in his translation. However, deciphering a work on Arabic grammar, even one as uncomplicated as that of Ǧurǧānī, posed a challenge to European scholars who were limited in their Arabic learning to the sources available to them in Europe. 79 Erpenius completed the unfinished task of 71 Jones’ study of the development of Arabic studies in early modern Europe contains a detailed study of Raimondi’s interlinear translation of Ǧurǧānī’s Miʾat ʿāmil. See Robert Jones, Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe (1505-1624) (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2020), 227-35. 72 Arnoud Vrolijk and Richard van Leeuwen, Arabic Studies in the Netherlands: A Short History in Portraits, 1580–1950, transl. by Alastair Hamilton (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2013), 33. 73 For Erpenius, see Vrolijk and van Leeuwen, Arabic Studies in the Netherlands, 29-40. 74 Thomas Erpenius, Grammatica Arabica dicta Gjarumia & Libellus Centum Regentium cum versione Latina & Commentariis (Leiden: Typographia Erpeniana Linguarum Orientalium, 1617). 75 Erpenius, Grammatica Arabica, 1617, A4r: “Promisit aliquando hoc opusculum in suo /taṣrīf/ Romae excuse, Doctissimus Io. Baptista Raimundus, sed morte praeventus non dedit.” Translation from Jones, Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe, 230. 76 For Erpenius’ evaluation of Raimondi’s work on Arabic grammar see Jones, Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe, 229-35. 77 On Raimondi’s Persian studies, see Angelo Michele Piemontese, “The Emergence of Persian Grammar and Lexicography in Rome,” Rivista degli studi orientali, 83.1/4 (2010): 399-415. 78 Jones, Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe, 274. 79 None of the two scholars apparently made it to the Middle East in person. Farina shows in her linguistic and text-critical analysis of an account of a journey by land from Hurmuz to Venice dated to 1575 and attributed by nineteenth century Italian historiography to Giovanni Battista Raimondi, that the latter did not make such a travel, nor did he compose the account, but merely copied the document in the context of the preparation of a mission to Egypt and Persia of Giovanni Battista Vecchietti (1552-1619), who left to Alexandria in 1584, as a papal envoy; see Margherita Farina, “Giovanni Battista Raimondi’s Travel in the Middle East: A Case of Sixteenth-Century Portuguese-Italian Interference,” Oriente Moderno, 98.1 (2018), 52-72; cf. Roberto Almagià, Giovan Battista e Gerolamo Vecchietti, viaggiatori in Oriente (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1956). The brothers Giovanni Battista and Gerolamo Vecchietti collected many important oriental manuscripts during their diplomatic and scientific missions in Egypt, Mostafa Najafi • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 62 translating Ǧurǧānī’s book after Raimondi’s death. In his translation, he innovatively adopted the form and terminology of Latin grammars familiar to the students of Arabic in Europe, in order to provide them with a suitable textbook that was to replace similar earlier works and remain the standard reference work until the early nineteenth century. 80 Besides the desire for knowledge, numerous other motivations played a role in the scholarly activities of learned men such as Erpenius and Raimondi. The agenda of the Catholic Raimondi, for instance, corresponded to the objectives of Pope Gregory XIII, namely supporting the teaching of foreign languages to “nurture and discipline the dogmas of the Catholic faith.” 81 This was, in turn, a step in the struggle of the Catholic Church to win over the Arab Christians to the bishop of Rome, as well as the re-Christianization of some Muslim lands and convert Christians. 82 The Protestant Erpenius enumerated various motivations for studying the Arabic language in a lecture in 1620 to the students at the University of Leiden, including the motivations touching on theology and polemics: Those of you who are candidates in Sacred Theology, consider what it would be to learn this language without the help of which your Sacred Language (and in my judgement you do not deserve to call it yours unless you lay claim to and acquire Arabic) cannot be fully and perfectly understood, or the impious doctrines of the Muhammadans be examined and beneficially refuted. 83 The time of the Crusades was over, and political, economic, or religious objectives of this kind motivated the engagement with oriental languages in general and with Arabic in particular, even though they did not distort the content of Ǧurǧānī’s work. On the contrary, one can safely assume that it remained intact. This was mainly due to the conventional Syria, Armenia, Persia, and India (1584-1608), at first as envoys of Pope Gregory XIII. During these travels, Giovanni Battista Vecchietti learned Persian together with Hebrew from native teachers in Persia and later laid the foundation for the study of Judeo-Persian literature. 80 ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ǧurǧānī, Grammatica arabica, transl. by Thomas Erpenius (Leiden: n.p., 1617). 81 Saltini, “Della stamperia orientale medicea e di Giovan Battista Raimondi,” 259. 82 Looking further back, one could see this as a belated practical step toward realizing the pertinent decree of the Council of Vienne (1311-1312). In this Council the Catholic Church states clearly that “We desire earnestly that holy church should be well supplied with catholic scholars acquainted with the languages most in use by unbelievers. These scholars should know how to train unbelievers in the Christian way of life, and to make them members of the Christian body through instruction in the faith and reception of sacred baptism.” It, thus, calls for establishing schools for Arabic, among other languages, at Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca. The aim, as the document reveals, was to produce experts who “shall direct the schools, make faithful translations of books from these languages into Latin, and teach others those languages with all earnestness, passing on a skillful use of the language, so that after such instruction these others may, God inspiring, produce the harvest hoped for, propagating the saving faith among the heathen peoples.” See Council of Vienne (1311-1312), in Papal Encyclicals Online, consulted online 17.02.2022, via https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum15.htm, decree no. 24. In practice, this decree was not consequential; c.f. Karl H. Dannenfeldt, “The Renaissance Humanists and the Knowledge of Arabic,” Studies in the Renaissance, 2 (1955), 96-117, esp. 97-8. 83 From the English translation of Erpenius’ Latin oration. See Robert Jones, “Thomas Erpenius (1584– 1624) on the Value of the Arabic Language,” Manuscripts of the Middle East, 1 (1986), 22. (Re-)Forging the Science of Bayān • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 63 character of the science it contained, which did not leave any room for interpretation-at least, not at this early stage of Arabic studies in Europe. 84 However, there was no possibility to study the Arabic language for its own sake in this highly charged context. This strand of scholarship on the grammatical heritage of Ǧurǧānī had no interest in the author of the work, although it was repeatedly translated, let alone in his other intellectual profile as a theorist in the field of bayān. Erpenius did not even care to know the name of the author of the work he was translating. 85 Later translators did not do any better. Ǧurǧānī’s work simply served as a useful instrument. Furthermore, one can also discern in this context a certain predilection for Persian over other languages of the Middle East, one that aligned with papal politics at the time, which sought to establish an alliance with Safavid Persia to face the Ottoman empire and to favor the activities of Catholic missionaries. Such issues conferred on the study of Persian more direct and practical urgency as compared to other oriental languages, including Arabic. 86 When the same text by Ǧurǧānī was translated again at the turn of the nineteenth century, this time into English, Europeans with an interest in Arabic were no longer confined within the boundaries of Europe, but were rather present all over the Middle East, this time not (only) in search of knowledge, but above all as an exercise of power and political dominance. Furthermore, during the two intervening centuries, the conceptual context had completely changed, and a narrative of the dominance of the Greek culture in all the traditions that came into contact with it had become established, along with all the ensuing theoretical misconceptions. Abraham Lockett, the English translator of Ǧurǧānī’s work in 1814, 87 still knowing “little or nothing” 88 about its author, had no doubt—despite his uncertainty concerning the source of his judgment—when considering the achievements of not only Ǧurǧānī, but Arab grammarians more generally, that the merit of originality must be transferred to the Stagyrite, whose dialectics, if I am not much mistaken, will be found to contain the most remarkable facts that distinguish the philosophical grammar of the Arabs. 89 In a parallel line of scholarship, men of learning in Europe extended their scholarly attention from Arabic language to Arabic literature. This shift can be seen as the further development of the struggle to acquire perfect knowledge of this language by mastering its highest literary 84 Cf. Abraham Locket, “Preface,” in: The Miˌut Ạmil, and Šurḥoo Miˌut Ạmil; Two Elementary Treatises on Arabic Syntax, transl. by Abraham Lockett (Calcutta: The Hindoostanee Press, 1814), i-xxv. 85 Erpenius, Grammatica Arabica, A4r. 86 See the introductory section of Herbert Chick’s detailed chronicles, in Herbert Chick, A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia and the Papal Mission of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 19391), 1: 3-65. 87 ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ǧurǧānī, The Miˌut Ạmil, and Šurḥoo Miˌut Ạmil; Two Elementary Treatises on Arabic Syntax, transl. by Abraham Lockett (Calcutta: The Hindoostanee Press, 1814). 88 Ǧurǧānī, The Miˌut Ạmil, xv. 89 Ǧurǧānī, ibid., viii-ix. Mostafa Najafi • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 64 form, namely poetry. 90 Arabic literature also offered the most promising path to knowledge of the character of the Arabs, especially in the absence of direct contact with them. This line of scholarship, however, chose a path towards Arabic literature which went through Persian literature. Around the time when Friedrich Schlegel (d. 1829) and later Franz Bopp (d. 1867) were laying the philological foundations for constructing the Aryan man, German orientalists gave pride of place to Persian literature among the literary traditions of the “nations of the orient.” 91 Hence, the Persian literary tradition, despite its intellectual debt to the earlier Arabic tradition, constituted their primary interest and, as a result, their (anachronistic) commencement point for the analysis of the literary tradition of the Arabs. What justified this preference was merely the racial affinity of the Persian and German peoples, whose languages not only had the same origins, but also a similar fate in being elaborated through “Rhetorik und Poesie.” 92 2.2. Germanizing the Šayḫ to Civilize the Islamic World Hellmut Ritter’s initial interest in Ǧurǧānī was no exception in this context. He came to engage with Ǧurǧānī’s Asrār during his endeavors to bring out what he saw as the main characteristic of the Persian poetry of Niẓāmī (d. 1209), namely the aesthetic function of the metaphorical expression. Nonetheless, Ritter was one of the first scholars to highlight the preposterousness of studying Neo-Persian literature independently and without any linkage to Arabic literary history. In this regard, he found Ǧurǧānī’s discussions of verses from the Abbasid Arabic poets, such as Ibn al-Muʿtazz and Ibn al-Rūmī (d. 896), in his Asrār to exhibit, from an aesthetic perspective, the same peculiarity that he was seeking in Niẓāmī. 93 After all, Ǧurǧānī, too, was “ein Perser” and remained far removed from the Arabic context, 90 Silvestre de Sacy, for instance, argued for the utility of the study of Arabic against Reiske who disapproval of it; see, for instance, Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, De l’utilité de l’étude de la poésie arabe (Paris: Librairie Orientale, 1826), 10. 91 Schlegel had argued in his Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, that “[d]as alte indische Sonskrito […] hat die größte Verwandtschaft mit der römischen und griechischen so wie mit der germanischen und persischen Sprache,” and the later Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache of Bopp came to be known as one of the founding building blocks of comparative historical linguistics. See respectively, Friedrich von Schlegel, Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1808), 1; Franz Bopp, Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache: in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache; nebst Episoden des Ramajan und Mahabharat und einigen Abschnitten aus den Vedas (Frankfurt am Main: Andreäische Buchhandlung, 1816). 92 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens mit einer Blüthenlese persischer Dichter aus zweyhundert persischen Dichtern (Wien: Heubner und Volke, 1818), VIII: “Durch gründliches Sprachstudium ist die nächste Verwandtschaft der persischen und deutschen Sprache schon längst außer Zweifel gesetzt, und der bekannte Vers Seneca’s bewahrt, der die Perser vom Orus und Arares an die Elbe und an den Rhein versetzt. Wenn die Geschichte der persischen schönen Litteratur sich in der europäischen überhaupt einen freundlichen Empfang versprechen darf, um wie günstiger muß derselbe nicht im deutschen Vaterlande ausfallen, da beyde Sprachen nicht nur gleichen Ursprungs, sondern auch in ihrer Ausbildung durch Rhetorik und Poesie eines ähnlichen Schicksals theilhaftig geworden, von der ältesten Zeit an bis ans die neueste.” 93 See Hellmut Ritter, Über die Bildsprache Niẓāmīs (Berlin, Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1927), 2; id., “Einführung,” in: Die Geheimnisse der Wortkunst (Asrār al-balāġa), transl. by Hellmut Ritter (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1959), 1-2. (Re-)Forging the Science of Bayān • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 65 as he “hat seine heimat 94 niemals verlassen und hat daher bei keinem der berühmten meister der arabischen sprachgelehrsamkeit studiert.” 95 However, this indirect interest in Ǧurǧānī at this stage developed into Ritter’s lifelong fascination, giving rise to a significant scholarly output that marks a turning point in scholarship on Ǧurǧānī in Europe. Like the Egyptian reformist ʿAbduh, Ritter represents in his own context the first direct scholarly engagement with the work of Ǧurǧānī himself, in contradistinction to the sporadic and often indirect treatment of his intellectual heritage among earlier European scholars. Up to that point, to study Ǧurǧānī, in both the fields of naḥw and bayān, European scholars were forced to go through the commentary traditions on his works stemming from later centuries, which were partly imbued with Greek intellectual heritage. 96 This presence of Ǧurǧānī in the shadow of his commentators went back a good three centuries in Europe, before Ritter stumbled upon his works during his explorations in Persian literature. Against this backdrop, Ritter’s decision to edit and translate Ǧurǧānī’s own work into German represents a departure from this dominant anachronistic praxis. In 1959, Ritter finalized and published his translation of Ǧurǧānī’s Asrār, the first—and so far only complete—translation into a European language, after more than three decades of disconnected but persistent work (he had finished the full translation already in 1925). 97 In the introduction to his edition, Ritter, following in the footsteps of Ḫalafallāh, opposes Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s claim, cited earlier, concerning the fundamental indebtedness of Arabic bayān and adab to its presumed Greek predecessors. Ritter argues that, to the contrary, the development of Arabic poetry in terms of formal elements, such as “simile, metaphor, antithesis, paronomasia, ploke, [etc.],” 98 can hardly be imagined as having developed among the Arabs under Greek influence, especially that of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics. These two Aristotelian works were “very little to the taste of the Arabs,” as Ritter notes. 99 Highlighting the lack of textual evidence for Ḥusayn’s thesis concerning “the Hellenization of the Arabian world,” Ritter emphasizes that authors in this tradition seem, in fact, to fall back exclusively on Arabic sources. 100 In his introduction to the German translation of the same work some years later, he underscores once again that Ǧurǧānī’s Asrār and its discussions on various 94 Here, and throughout, I have retained the original orthography of German sources, as it is no impediment to comprehension. 95 In addition, Ǧurǧānī is introduced as having studied with no well-known master of Arabic grammar on the ground that he supposedly never left his hometown Ǧurǧān—his only master being thus the student and sister’s son of Abū ʿAlī al-Fārisī (d. 987) (Ritter, Geheimnisse, 5-6). Though the claim might be true, there seems to be some textual evidence against the justification. Al-Bāḫarzī seems to indicate in the entry on Ǧurǧānī in his Dumya that the latter had indeed left his hometown going on a pilgrimage to Mekka: “wa-lastu fī-mā fātanī min karīm mušāhadatihi… illā ka-man waddaʿa l-māʾ wa-l-ḫuḍra… falammā ḫallafa hāḏihi l-ḫiṭaṭ wa-šārafa min bayni sāʾir al-ḫiṭaṭ al-kaʿba…” See ʿAlī b. al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Abī l-Ṭayyib al-Bāḫarzī, Dumyat al-qaṣr wa-ʿaṣrat ahl al-ʿaṣr, ed. Muḥammad al-Tūnaǧī (Beirut: Dār al-ǧīl, 1993), 1: 578. 96 See, for instance, August Ferdinand Mehren, Die Rhetorik der Araber nach den wichtigsten Quellen dargestellt (Kopenhagen: Otto Schwartz, 1853). 97 Ritter, “Einführung,” 1. 98 Ritter, “Introduction,” 2. 99 Ritter, Bildsprache, 4. 100 Ritter, “Introduction,” 3-4. Mostafa Najafi • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 66 “rhetorical” issues contain “so viel eigenartiges und originelles” and also “spezifisches ‘arabisches’.” 101 By denying the reducibility of bayān to some Greek ancestor, Ritter disagrees with Ḥusayn concerning his Hellenization thesis and subsequently his critique of the authenticity of the Ǧāhiliyya. In this disagreement, he goes even further than Ḫalafallāh. However, despite his comprehensive denial of Greek influence in the domain of bayān, Ritter takes over the emphasis on taste and goes on to develop his own understanding of the work within the paradigm of the polarity between philosophy and poetry. Between these two domains, he saw the originality of the Arabs in poetry. As for philosophy, Ritter joins numerous orientalists of the period in thinking that “Ġazālī’s Tahāfut stellt einen Schlußpunkt dar, den Schlußpunkt unter die philosophische[n] Erörterungen im Islam.” 102 Evidence shows that he relied on this narrative both a few years before and a couple of years after publishing his own edition of Ǧurǧānī’s Asrār al-balāġa, half a century after ʿAbduh’s edition. 103 In the same spirit, he finds the field of bayān void of philosophical competence, where the “judgements passed are often subjective and arbitrary and sometimes unsupported.” 104 Following Spuler, from whom he probably took over the thesis concerning the death of philosophy in the Islamic world after Ġazālī, 105 Ritter makes a distinction between Christianity and Islam in terms of their relation to Hellenism. He writes: Bei der Entstehung des Christentums hat schon der Hellenismus mitgewirkt. Das Christentum ist dem Ursprunge nach eine orientalische, semitische Religion, ist aber erst zu dem geworden, was es ist, durch den Einfluß der hellenistischen Kultur… Die Grundlagen der islamischen Kultur waren schon vor dem Beginn des hellenischen Einflusses gelegt; eine islamische Dogmatik war auch ohne eine völlige Durchtränkung mit hellenistischem Geiste denkbar, anders als im Christentum. 106 101 Ritter, “Einführung,” 2-3. 102 Hellmut Ritter, “Hat die religiöse Orthodoxie einen Einfluss auf die Dekadenz des Islams ausgeübt?,” in Klassizismus und Kulturverfall, ed. Gustav E. von Grunebaum and Willy Hartner (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1956), 121. See also Hellmut Ritter, “L’orthodoxie a-t-elle une part dans la décadence?,” in Classicisme et déclin culturel dans l’histoire de l’Islam : Actes du symposium international d’histoire de la civilisation musulmane (Bordeaux 25-29 Juin 1956), ed. Gustav E. von Grunebaum and Robert Brunschvig (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1977), 168: “Ainsi finit non seulement la vie personelle de Ghazālī, mais aussi l’histoire spirituelle de l’Islam au Moyen âge en général. Le Tahāfut de Ghazālī est un point final, le point final aux débat philosophiques originaux dans l’Islam.” 103 In both cases, he was delivering lectures concerning the cultural decline and decadence of Muslim civilization. See Gustav E. von Grunebaum and Willy Hartner (eds.), Klassizismus und Kulturverfall (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1956), 1-2. 104 Ritter, “Introduction,” 5. 105 In a more nuanced defense of this thesis, Spuler writes: “Die offizielle Anerkennung der Mystik hat zusammen mit al-Ghazzālīs ‚Destructio philosophorum‘ (Tahāfut al-falāsifa) für den Osten des Islams weithin sichtbar den Schlußpunkt unter diese Periode der philosophischen Erörterungen gesetzt.” See Bertold Spuler, “Hellenistisches Denken im Islam,” Saeculum, 5 (1954), 188. 106 Ritter, “Religiöse Orthodoxie,” 129-30. (Re-)Forging the Science of Bayān • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 67 It was for this reason that Hellenism met a tragic end in the Islamic world, in contrast to its splendid development in the Christian West. As Ritter writes: “Daher sei das hellenistische Gedankengut allmählich, wenn auch nicht völlig, aus dem Islam ausgeschieden worden.” 107 However, unlike numerous other affiliates of Becker who followed his analysis of Islamic “civilization,” Ritter did not conclude the impossibility of a renaissance in the Islamic world. On the contrary, he attempted to devise a new concept of renaissance and humanism, falling back not on the ancient Greek, but rather on the pre-Islamic Arabic literary tradition, thus demonstrating the possibility of a renaissance in the Islamic world that was natural to it. He wrote: Die Renaissance in Italien war ein Zurückgreifen auf die eigene heidnische, aber kulturell hoch entwickelte Vergangenheit. Auch die Araber hatten eine heidnische Vergangenheit, auf die sie zurückgreifen konnten: die Ǧāhilīya. Was enthielt diese Vergangenheit an kulturellen Elementen? Die Poesie. Sie ist das einzige Kulturelement Altarabiens, das weiter gewirkt hat. Man sieht auch im Zeitalter der großen Grammatiker, wie sich eine Art humanistisches Interesse an der altarabischen Poesie entwickelt. 108 Poetry was the idiosyncratic trait of the Arabs in contrast to other nations. In this sense, Ritter falls back on longstanding presuppositions concerning the nature of the Arabs among orientalists, within the paradigm of the polarity between literature and philosophy. His representation of Arabs as masters of poetry and natural-born lords of imagination is one side of a coin whose other side is the utter rejection of their intellectual adeptness, as indicated above. In this light, he does not hesitate to locate Ǧurǧānī in a tradition of literary criticism. It was commonly assumed by the time Ritter published his critical edition of Asrār that Arabs were distinguished by their “remarkable talent for literary art.” 109 His emphasis at the beginning of the introduction to his edition of Ǧurǧānī’s Asrār on the prominent aptitude of the ancient Arabs and the Bedouins “for literary art,” clearly connects him with scholars in his own tradition. A century earlier, for instance, August Ferdinand Mehren held the same view concerning the linguistic maturity of the Arabs in his Die Rhetorik der Araber (published in 1853) writing: Diese im Verhältnisse zu dem Standpuncte der übrigen Cultur so frühe Ausbildung der Sprache liegt in der geistigen Natur der Araber tief begründet, weswegen bei ihnen diese als der erste Gegenstand der wissenschaftlichen Studien in einem weit höheren Gerade als bei anderen Nationen hervortritt, und die Bestrebung, sie rein von allen fremden Einmischungen zu halten, von Alters her sich geltend machte. 110 107 Ritter, ibid. 108 Ritter, ibid., 130. 109 Ritter, “Introduction,” 1. 110 Mehren, Die Rhetorik der Araber, 1. Mostafa Najafi • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 68 This discipline is, according to such views, profoundly grounded in the geistige Natur of the Arabs. Ritter’s emphasis on taste, in line with ʿAbduh, approximates this position, leading him to understand bayān as poetics. He describes the literary art of the Arabs as “rich, though one-sided.” By “one-sided,” he means that it “consists mainly of poetry.” Thus, he narrows down the scope of intellectual engagement with the Islamic world, even in its rudimentary stages, to the domain of poetry and poetic criticism. 111 Against this background, Ritter gives a brief sketch of the development of this line of intellectual pursuit in the Islamic world up to, more or less, the tenth century, when “eloquence (balāġa)” and “aesthetic criticism” took center stage at the hands of scholars such as Abū Hilāl al-ʿAskarī (d. 1005), Ibn Rašīq (d. ca. 1071), Abū l-Qāsim al-Āmidī (d. 980), and Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Ǧurǧānī (d. 1002), authors who are considered to be among Ǧurǧānī’s main sources. Up to this point, according to Ritter, the “standards according to which the Arabian critics rated poetry” were elaborately worked out, manifesting “[a]n astonishing connoisseurship […] a vast knowledge of poetic works and a highly developed taste.” The emphasis on “taste” as the main cognitive source in this tradition of “literary” or “aesthetic criticism” and “poetry” as the subject matter of this type of study is present throughout the introduction. Ritter perceives the general aim of Ǧurǧānī’s project, its significance, and its place within sciences against the background of such a reductionist conception of the scope of Asrār. He introduces this work as a “quite new approach” in the tradition he sketches, which, together with Ǧurǧānī’s other work, Dalāʾil, “have become in the sphere of poetic and rhetoric basically important for subsequent generations.” According to him, even though the announced purpose of the latter work is “to prove that the rhetorical style of the Koran is inimitable […] in reality it is a very subtle theory of syntactic stylistics.” He considers this work “an important supplement to the theory of syntax as presented by Sībawayh and his successors.” In sum, he emphasizes that “[t]hese two books revolutionized the studies of rhetoric in the East.” 112 Furthermore, he published his translation of Ǧurǧānī’s Asrār six years after his edition, considering it “eine psychologische Begründing ästhetischer Werturteile über Poesie.” 113 Thus, on the one hand, Ritter readily falls back on the psychological approach, initiated by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and further elaborated by Ḫalafallāh, within the sphere of ḏawq or taste to analyze Ǧurǧānī’s intellectual heritage in “the sphere of poetic and rhetoric.” For him, Ǧurǧānī’s whole project is consequently nothing but “stylistics.” 114 On the other hand, he uses a conceptual apparatus that closely corresponds to the tradition of European scholarship on Arabic literature, assuming a natural link between this discipline and the Arabs. It vividly reminds us, for instance, of Becker’s mentor, the Hungarian orientalist Ignác Goldziher (d. 1921), who employs a similar constellation of concepts in his Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie, published in 1896, to analyze thinkers such as Ibn Rašīq and Ibn al-Aṯīr as “ästhetischer Kritiker,” “Stilisten,” or “belletristische Schriftsteller” in the “Gebiete der 111 Ritter, “Introduction,” 1. 112 Ritter, ibid., 6. 113 Ritter, ibid., 1. 114 Ritter, ibid., 1. (Re-)Forging the Science of Bayān • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 69 Poetik,” who with their “ästhetische Betrachtungsweise” represent a significant moment in the history of discussions on poetry. 115 In both cases, he sees bayān in the context of the polarity between imagination and intellection, as a discipline opposed to falsafa. Thus, Ritter seems to be closer to ʿAbduh, who saw the decadence of the Islamic world in its being de-Arabicized and advocated for its re-Arabicization, than to Ḥusayn, who saw the decadence of the Islamic world in its de-Hellenization and wanted to re-Hellenize it. For Ritter, the Islamic world had an Arabic origin, in line with ʿAbduh’s view, and it had been de-Hellenized, in accordance with Ḥusayn’s understanding. However, having witnessed the Second World War and the nefarious consequences of technological and scientific progress in the West, he was not so sure whether the same path taken in the West would lead to renewed flourishing in the East. Acknowledging that the Islamic world rejected the alien Greek element from its body after a few centuries, he sought to find the originality of the Arabs in the field of imagination and taste, in bayān, thanks to which Arabs could be formed into a unified civilization developing towards a flourishing of its own, without joining the West in progress that was taking it into an unknown future, probably to “self-destruction.” 116 Concluding Words For each speech that you find worthy of praise and [for] each utterance that you consider excellent, your judgement must rest on a cognizable reason and an intelligible cause. Furthermore, we must have a way for expressing that and a proof for the correctness of our claim. [Ǧurǧānī, Dalāʾil, 41] Considering ʿAbduh and Ritter in their engagement with Ǧurǧānī shows how inextricably the historiographical fates of bayān and falsafa are intertwined. The latter has constituted the implicit background against which the former has been conceptualized and studied. From the very beginning, when the theoretical engagement with the language of the Quran and poetry gradually became recognizably systematic during the first few centuries of Islam and formed into the science of bayān, it was contrasted with the intellectual tradition of falsafa. To falsafa belonged the sphere of intellect, the domain of truth and rational proof and, in one word, rationality. Bayān, in contrast, was assigned to the domain of imagination revolving around imitation and taste and, in effect, restrained within the bounds of irrationality. Due to this close link, the unexamined assumptions and prejudices concerning falsafa in the Islamic world have been consequential, not only in the field of falsafa, but also in defining the historiographical ups and downs of the other tradition, i.e., bayān. Despite being considered fundamentally separate, no history of bayān can be written in detachment from falsafa. While scholarship, especially during recent decades, has thoroughly examined the deleterious consequences of prejudiced historiography in the field of falsafa, the collateral misconceptions in the field of bayān remain sorely ignored. 117 115 Ignác Goldziher, Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1921), 155-81. 116 Ritter, “Religiöse Orthodoxie,” 142-3. 117 For an insightful account of different approaches in the historiography of philosophy in the Islamic world, see Ulrich Rudolph, “Introduction,” in Philosophy in the Islamic World Online: 8th–10th Centuries, ed. Ulrich Rudolph, Rotraud Hansberger and Peter Adamson, trans. by Rotraud Hansberger Mostafa Najafi • 23 (2023): 45-76 Page | 76 WALZER, Richard. 1957. “Al-Fārābī’s Theory of Prophecy and Divination.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 77.1: 142-8. ZALTA, Edward N. (ed.). [2020]. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2020 edition. Consulted online on February 17, 2022, via https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/ plato-rhetoric/. al-ZAMAḪŠARĪ, Maḥmūd. Asās al-balāġa / ed. Muḥammad Bāsil ʿUYŪN AL-SŪD. 2 vols., Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1998. — . al-Kaššāf ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tanzīl wa-ʿuyūn al-aqāwīl fī wuǧūh al-taʾwīl / ed. Ḫalīl Maʾmūn ŠĪḤĀ. 1 vol. in 4 tomes. Beirut: Dār al-maʿrifa, 20093. ZEMMIN, Florian. 2018. Modernity in Islamic Tradition: The concept of ‘society’ in the journal alManār. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. © Mostafa Najafi, University of Lucerne, Chair of Philosophy at the Faculty of Theology ◄ [email protected] ►