al-Bāqillānī

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.

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.