al-ʿAskarī

• 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.

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.