The Arabic Language

ʾisnād
) and the actual 
contents (
matn
):
Ibn ʾIsḥāq said: ‘ʿĀṣim ibn ʿUmar ibn Qatāda told me on the authority of ʾAnas ibn 
Mālik’. He said: ‘I saw the cloak of ʾUkaydir when it was brought to the Messenger 
of God – may God bless him and protect him!’ – and the Muslims started to touch it 
with their hands and they admired it. The Messenger of God – may God bless him 
and protect him! – said: ‘Do you admire this? In the name of Him in whose hands 
my soul is, the kerchiefs of Saʿd ibn Muʿāḏ in paradise are more beautiful than this!’ 
(
qāla Ibn Mālik: fa-ḥaddaṯanī ʿĀṣim ibn ʿUmar ibn Qatāda ʿan ʾAnas ibn Mālik, qāla: raʾaytu 
qabāʾa ʾUkaydir ḥīna qudima bihi ʿalā rasūli llāh – ṣallā llāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam – fa-jaʿala 
l-Muslimūna yalmisūnahu bi-ʾaydīhim wa-yataʿajjabūna minhu, fa-qāla rasūlu llāh – ṣallā 
llāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam – ʾa-taʿjibūna min hāḏā? fa-wa-llaḏī nafsī bi-yadihi, la-manādīlu 
Saʿd ibn Muʿāḏ fī l-jannati ʾaḥsanu min hāḏā!
). (Ibn Hišām, 
as-Sīra an-Nabawiyya
, IV, ed. 
as-Saqā, al-ʾIbyārī and Šalabī, Cairo, 1936, pp. 169–70)
By their nature, texts of this type did not have the same kind of literary pretensions 
as, for instance, poetry. Doubtless, later historians such as aṭ-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) 
did not always content themselves with simply copying the stories which they 
transmitted from their predecessors, but they attempted to structure and stylise 
them. Compared with poetry, however, there was so much freedom in this kind of 

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The Development of Classical Arabic 
79
prose and so few restrictions with regard to the form that the Arab literary critics 
could not be expected to devote much time to them, except perhaps to deplore 
the many ‘mistakes’ against grammar that crept in. The literary critic Qudāma ibn 
Jaʿfar (d. 337/958) in his 
Naqd an-naṯr
(
Criticism of Prose
) distinguishes between two 
styles, the one low (
saḫīf
), the other elevated (
jazl
), and he gives precise instruc
-
tions on when to use the one and when the other.
What Qudāma labels ‘elevated style’ is the kind of Arabic prose we find in 
official correspondence, which is written in a florid style with a heavy emphasis 
on the form. In this kind of writing, we find the rhymed sequences that became 
so characteristic of Arabic style. Even non-literary works traditionally begin with 
an introduction in which this kind of prose is used. Take, for instance, the first 
sentence of the introduction to az-Zamaḫšarī’s (d. 538/1144) 
Mufaṣṣal
, which 
contrasts strikingly with his normal, pedagogical language:
Praise be to God for making me one of the scholars of Arabic, and for predis
-
posing me to protect the Arabs and [to maintain] the solidarity [with them], and 
for preserving me from straying from the throngs of their helpers, so that I would 
become conspicuous, and from joining the ranks of the Šuʿūbiyya, so that I would be 
isolated, and for making me immune for their ways, which bring them no gain but to 
be hurt by the revilers’ tongues and to be torn apart by the attackers’ teeth. (
Allāha 
ʾaḥmadu ʿalā ʾan jaʿalanī min ʿulamāʾi l-ʿarabiyyati wa-jabalanī ʿalā l-ġaḍabi li-l-ʿArabi 
wa-l-ʿaṣabiyyati wa-ʾabā lī ʾan ʾanfarida ʿan ṣamīmi ʾanṣārihim wa-ʾamtāza wa-ʾanḍawiya 
ʾilā lafīfi š-šuʿūbiyyati wa-ʾanḥāza wa-ʿaṣamanī min maḏhabihim allaḏī lam yujdi ʿalayhim 
ʾillā r-rašqa bi-ʾalsinati l-lāʿinīna wa-l-mašqa bi-ʾasinnati ṭ-ṭāʿinīna
). (
Mufaṣṣal
, ed. Broch, 
Christianiae, 1889, p. 2)
 
With such exuberance of style, it is small wonder that many Arab scholars believed 
that the Arabic language was untranslatable, as Ibn Fāris asserts (
aṣ-Ṣāḥibī fī fiqh 
al-luġa
, ed. Chouémi, Beirut,
 
p. 13). In the debate among literary critics on the 
question of whether ‘expression’ (
lafḏ̣
) or ‘meaning’ (
maʿnā
) is more important in 
a literary work, al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/869) argued that a literary work should be evalu-
ated according to its expression, its form, since the meaning expressed by the 
writer is universal and accessible to everyone, whereas the form is something 
that only an accomplished writer can handle. Such an attitude could, and did, 
easily lead to a formulaic style. Form came to be seen as the most important 
dimension of style, whereas content was of secondary importance. In the literary 
genre of the 
maqāmāt
, this tendency reached its apogee, and the production of 
writers such as al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122) contains pieces that are pure exercises in 
form.
There is another kind of writing in Arabic, corresponding to what Qudāma 
calls the ‘lower style’. It is found in private letters and in non-literary writing, 
such as geographical works, historiography, biographical dictionaries, handbooks 
of Islamic law and theology, and even in grammatical treatises. In such writings, 
we find a relaxation of the strict standards, the introduction of colloquialisms and 

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80
The Arabic Language
a businesslike style. Some of these authors went even further and used a kind of 
prose language that had freed itself from the bonds of Classical Arabic and came a 
long way down to the vernacular of their time. But even when these authors used 
vernacular constructions or lexical items, they never stopped writing within the 
framework of Classical Arabic. From the point of view of historical linguistics, 
texts like the memoirs of ʾUsāma ibn Munqiḏ (d. 584/1188), or Ibn ʾAbī ʾUṣaybiʿa’s 
(d. 668/1270) biographical dictionary belong to the category of ‘Middle Arabic’ 
(cf. below, pp. 157–60). There is a vast difference between this genre, in which 
intellectuals strove after a simple style, and the large quantity of documents 
written in ‘faulty’ language that are normally subsumed under the same label of 
‘Middle Arabic’.
The coexistence of, and the conflict between, a high and a low variety of the 
language in Islamic culture made its presence felt from the time of the earliest 
papyri. Through the Middle Arabic texts, this diglossia was introduced in the 
domain of literary and semi-literary products. We shall see below (Chapter 13) 
that this conflict has never disappeared since. In Modern Arabic literature, just 
like in that of the Classical age, authors have to choose the level of speech in 
which they wish to write. But the main constraint for all written production in 
Arabic is the position of Classical Arabic as the language of prestige. Whether 
in an ‘elevated’ or in a ‘lower’ style, the ultimate model remains the standard 
language, and even when authors deliberately set out to write in the vernacular, 
in the end they can never escape the framework of the written language.