badīʿ

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.

• 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.