Andreas Knöll

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.