• الأدب

In modern Arabic, adab is often associated with “literature” and “politeness.” During the formative period of Arabic literature (second/eighth to third/ninth centuries), however, it denotes a broad concept of ethical erudition. Although one may assume some proximity to “humanism,” “paidea” or “Bildung” in their all-encompassing sense of multidisciplinary education, the authors of adab usually emphasize its relevance for both this world and the hereafter, thus linking it to Islamic conceptions of knowledge production. In more general terms, in the writings attributed to early ʿAbbāsid authors like the state scribe Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and the polymathic theologian al-Jāḥiẓ, adab refers both to teaching the particulars of general morality, which may derive from a variety of sources (e.g., scripture, wise men, former civilizations, sometimes in the plural: ādāb), and to the very relation of these particulars to the human intellect (al-ʿaql), which alone is able to use and assess them. The early theologian al-Muḥāsibī, one of the first Sufi writers on adab, alludes to a similar understanding grounded in a relational definition. In this early stage, adab is typically defined through images, often drawn from the natural world, that express the very interdependence of moral instructions and a “fertile” human faculty of intellection (al-ʿaql), which itself needs to be “nurtured” by adab in order to “grow.” By drawing on the interplay between moral particulars and the human intellectual disposition, adab connects ethics with epistemology, thereby suggesting a universal dimension of literature.

This article traces the conceptual history of the Arabic term badīʿ from its early usage in the second/eighth century to the end of the seventh/thirteenth century. Initially, badīʿ referred to a controversial “new style” associated with the “modern” ʿAbbasid poets (al-muḥdathūn) and characterized in particular by its innovative metaphorical language. Ibn al-Muʿtazz’s Kitāb al-Badīʿ provided the first influential attempt to define the concept by identifying it with a limited number of linguistic art forms, while at the same time defending badīʿ by arguing that these forms were not genuinely “new” but already present in earlier poetry and the Quran. From the fourth/tenth century onwards, the term underwent a significant semantic shift. Later scholars progressively expanded the corpus of badīʿ forms, equating badīʿ with linguistic embellishments (maḥāsin) and applying the concept across discussions of poetics, literary criticism, and Quranic hermeneutics. This development was accompanied by a gradual change in the attitude toward badīʿ: while its association with innovation had initially invited criticism, it increasingly came to be regarded as a positive stylistic quality, even as concerns about excessive artificiality remained an important theme in literary criticism. The article argues that the history of badīʿ during this period is best understood not merely as an expansion of a catalogue of rhetorical devices, but as a transformation in the concept’s meaning and evaluation.

• الغزل العذري

The Banū ʿUdhra have long been associated with an intense, idealized, and often tragic form of love that came to be known in the Arabic literary tradition as ʿudhrī love. Drawing primarily on narratives and poetic accounts preserved in Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s Kitāb al-Aghānī (The Book of Songs), this article examines the origins, development, and literary construction of the ʿudhrī tradition. It investigates the cultural and literary conditions that shaped theʿudhrī ghazal, while also addressing questions concerning the historical authenticity of its narratives and the role of ruwāt (transmitters) in shaping, transmitting, and elaborating the stories of ʿudhrī lovers. Particular attention is given to the narrative structure of the ʿudhrī love story and to the distinctive conventions and characteristics through which it is constituted. The article concludes by tracing the enduring influence and transhistorical circulation of the ʿudhrī tradition in world literature, highlighting its contribution to the representation of idealized, unattainable, and tragic love across different literary and cultural contexts.

• 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.

• اللف والنشر

Al-laff wa-l-nashr (اللفّ والنشر) is a rhetorical figure of arrangement in classical Arabic poetics that operates through the sequential distribution of corresponding elements. Literally meaning “wrapping” and “unfolding,” the device evokes the image of folding multiple elements together (laff) and subsequently spreading them out through explanation or attribution (nashr). First systematically defined by al-Sakkākī as a meaning-based beautifying device, laff wa-nashr requires the audience to infer the correct correspondence between paired elements. The figure is central to Arabic rhetorical theory owing to its prevalence in both Qurʾanic discourse and poetry. Al-Qazwīnī provided its most influential typology, dividing it into separated (mufaṣṣal) and composite (mujmal) forms, with further subdivisions based on order. Subsequent rhetoricians refined these categories and debated exceptional cases, particularly in Qurʾanic exegesis. Historically, the function of laff wa-nashr predates its formal naming, appearing implicitly in the works of grammarians and philologists such as al-Mubarrad and Ibn Jinnī. Its later theorization reflects exegetical efforts to resolve semantic ambiguity in the Qurʾan, a process that also shaped its relationship with the earlier rhetorical device tafsīr. While both figures move from summarization to elaboration, tafsīr is author-centered and explanatory, whereas laff wa-nashr is reader-centered and organizational. The device later expanded beyond Arabic into Persian and Ottoman rhetorical traditions, demonstrating the multilingual scope of Islamic rhetoric. Comparative scholarship has also noted affinities with European correlative verse forms. Ultimately, laff wa-nashr exemplifies how arrangement, symmetry, and reader participation generate aesthetic complexity in classical poetics.

A significant portion of the rich Islamic manuscript tradition consists of majmūʿāt (sg. majmūʿ, majmūʿa, turkish mejmua), multi-text and composite manuscripts written primarily in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian. This article focuses exclusively on Arabic-language majmūʿāt. As a manuscript type filled with mixed contents, a majmūʿa offers valuable insights into medieval literary history and culture that would otherwise be overlooked. In many manuscript catalogues, this rich material remains inadequately documented and has therefore received little attention in Arabic scholarship. Only recently has research on majmūʿāt begun to flourish. Majmūʿāt can take many different forms and fulfill many different functions, whether in their production or during circulation. These forms include, for example, collections of homogenous or heterogeneous works, either in full or excerpted form, compendiums, notebooks and, as a borderline case of classification, anthologies. Majmūʿāt were composed and used for personal purposes, or were commissioned by educational or religious institutions. In addition, a majmūʿa can permanently remain in a private library, or circulate through time and space. This article aims to demonstrate the extent to which multiple-text and composite manuscripts can be “primary vehicles” (Nichols and Wenzel, The Whole Book) for exploring central elements of medieval manuscript cultures. Several examples are taken from the field of Ismaili studies. The first illustrates the function and use of majmūʿāt from Syria as reflected in the mixed content of esoteric works in prose and poetry. These works may also provide clues as to the owners and compilers of the manuscripts. Another example focuses on evolution, variance, and the fluidity of a text collection in the course of its transmission. The final example, a nineteenth-century Indian Ismaili scholar’s notebook, provides insight into his intellectual profile and working style. These aspects will be illustrated on the basis of manuscripts from the rich collection of the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London.

This article examines the riḥla (Arabic travelogue) as a literary genre from the early modern Mashreq through the Nahḍa period, proposing a formal definition that accounts for the genre’s diversity across several centuries. While riḥla literature emerged in the west of the Arab World in the twelfth century, comparable narratives did not appear in the Mashreq until the fifteenth century, resulting in a remarkably varied corpus. The study draws on a selection of largely unedited texts spanning from 1481 to the early twentieth century, including works by Muslim and Christian authors whose travel writing developed along distinct confessional lines. The article proposes distinguishing between travel writing broadly conceived and travelogues specifically—texts centered around particular journeys with a narrative framework bounded by departure and return. This formal approach accommodates the genre’s topical and formal variegation, from terse pilgrimage itineraries to exuberant Sufi imagery, from career-motivated Istanbul journeys to encyclopedic displays of erudition. The analysis demonstrates how the riḥla evolved from early modern compilations emphasizing patronage, pilgrimage, and confessional identity to Nahḍa-era texts focusing on comparative observation and social reform. This morphological approach invites further exploration of the genre’s stylistic diversity and its social underpinnings.

• الترجمة

Rooted in Aramaic targum, tarjama was used in the early history of Arabic both for interpretive explication and interlingual, primarily oral translation; early sources show the term’s meaning expanding to accommodate material practices, anticipating its consolidation as a standardized practice in Abbasid Baghdad. Focusing on Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq’s Risāla, this article reads tarjama as a patronage‑driven, materially constrained, and philologically self‑conscious practice. The Risāla inventories translated and untranslated works, names translators and patrons, records revisions and retranslations, evaluates competence, and links the quality of Arabic versions to the availability and condition of Greek exemplars. Translation appears here (1) as proprietary labor, commissioned, revised, and circulated as owned textual goods within courtly and professional medical contexts and (2) as iterative work of collation, correction, and verification. Unfolding against the backdrop of rigorous contemporary standards, such as those articulated by al-Jāḥiẓ, Ḥunayn’s practice frames tarjama as a term conceptualizing a critical, curatorial, interpretative, and self-evaluative practice requiring a specific translator profile. This practice, the article ultimately suggests is distinct from simple linguistic transfer, often associated with the term naql.

This entry explores the different meanings of taḍmīn in the Arabic sciences, namely, in grammar (naḥw), prosody (ʿarūḍ), and eloquence (balāgha), especially in the science of poetic devices (ʿilm al-badīʿ). It suggests a tripartite schema for taḍmīn in these three sciences, all of which, nonetheless, relate to the lexical meaning of taḍmīn as “inclusion”: taḍmīn as implication, taḍmīn as enjambment, and taḍmīn as quotation, respectively. After outlining these three kinds of taḍmīn, it explores in some detail the aesthetic purchase of taḍmīn as quotation, as discussed by theorists and critics of poetry.

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.