al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī

• الحكاية على ألسنة البهائم

Neither the classical nor premodern Arabic language has a single term to denote the literary genre “fable” that is widely known in the European literatures since antiquity. Studies of the relevant genre in premodern Arabic literature mainly adopted the modern Western definition of the beast fable. Even the few existing comprehensive studies, such as those by Carl Brockelmann, Iḥsān ʿAbbās, or Robert Irwin, did not attempt to define the Arabic genre in relation to its dominantly perceived Western sibling. The present analysis and definition rely on a pragmatic bottom-up approach premised on the hypothesis that tales featuring speaking animals in premodern Arabic literature resemble the fables of the Graeco-Latin tradition in their central features. It focuses on the anonymous narratives featuring speaking animals scattered as single items or in small clusters or specific chapters in a large variety of different works of premodern Arabic literature. The presently identified corpus consists of about 160 items in a total of more than 1,000 individual attestations. The analysis of the corpus leads to a detailed definition of the Arabic fable, identified as a narrative (ḥikāya, ḥadīth, nādira, ramz) in which speaking beasts/animals (ʿalā alsinat/alsun/lisān al-bahāʾim/al-ḥayawān or equivalent) feature as protagonists. This definition is both more exclusive and more inclusive than that of its sibling genre in the Graeco-Latin tradition. On the one hand, the Arabic genre is predominantly an animal tale excluding narratives that prominently feature human beings; on the other hand, the genre also includes short linguistic exercises that lack a narrative dimension.

The term waḍʿ (from waḍaʿa, “to put down”) is central to Arabic language theory and legal theory. Used in the Qur’an to denote the “proper place” of a word (Q 4:46, 5:13, 41), waḍʿ evolved into a foundational concept in semantics, pragmatics, and jurisprudence. This article traces its historical and conceptual evolution, beginning with the fourth/tenth-century philosophical debate over the origin of language. Scholars such as Ibn Jinnī and Ibn Fāris contested whether language arose from divine revelation (tawqīf) or human convention (iṣṭilāḥ). While Ibn Fāris championed the divine origin, citing pre-Islamic Bedouin speech (kalām al-ʿarab) as authoritative evidence, Ibn Jinnī ultimately deemed the question unresolved (waqf), reflecting a pragmatic approach. In uṣūl al-fiqh (principles of Islamic jurisprudence), waḍʿ became a productive epistemological category, used to distinguish between literal (ḥaqīqa) and figurative (majāz) meaning. Abū l-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī and Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī employed waḍʿ to analyze how words are originally established through agreement, contrasting this with later metaphorical extensions. The distinction between dalīl waḍʿī (evidence based on convention) and dalīl ʿaqlī (evidence based on reason), articulated by Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī, became pivotal: the Qur’an’s authority rests not on logical deduction but on the collective agreement (muwāḍaʿat ahlihi) on the meaning of its signs. The article highlights how waḍʿ transformed from a philosophical question into a discipline:ʿilm al-waḍʿ. Centered on ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī’s al-Risāla al-waḍʿiyya (eighth/fourteenth century), this field developed a sophisticated taxonomy of linguistic signification. Later scholars like al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī and ʿAlī al-Qushjī systematized its categories, laying the groundwork for a formal science of language. Ultimately, waḍʿ reshaped the self-understanding of ʿilm al-lugha, which came to include not merely the lexical heritage (matn al-lugha) but the “discipline of the individual coinage of single words”, thus integrating the terminology of waḍʿ into the core of Arabic language scholarship.