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Literary Form Of The Quran
So I will try to explain what’s bothering me. So I have watched much of Ghamidi Sahb’s videos on the inimitable nature of the Quran, where I have understood his argument, that the literary claim is just one aspect, but the biggest aspect is the place where Quran comes from, its conviction, its flow, its philosophical depth, the topics it addresses and the way it addresses them as a word of finality, that too without a hint of evolution in its style or its ideas, which is in reality its true ijaz placing it beyond human origins. That I understand. My question is about it’s literary form. So there is a unanimous sort of agreement in academia that Quran’s literary form is saj. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4183221 This is a renowned paper that delves deep into this topic, building on the works of our own medieval exegetes and scholars like Ibn Al-Athir, who themselves did a critical analysis of the Quran’s text, and said that the Quran contains a great deal of saj, and is present in some way in almost every Surah, with some being completely in the form of saj. So now, we have generally always heard that the Quran was completely new, revolutionary, and unprecedented in every single aspect, and a huge focus has always been on its literary aspect. So content-wise, that does hold true in an absolute way, but in its structure and its literary form, it wasn’t unprecedented then? If it was in the form of saj (and yes I know it follows saj in a very free way and has some unique aspects even in the saj category but still the paper goes to great lengths in demonstrating the use of saj in Quran in a lot of places), then Allah revealed it in a literary form known to the Arabs at that time? The paper says that largely why saj has not been associated with Quran by various scholars is because it was associated with the speech of the diviners and soothsayers as they spoke in saj and it is a sign of respect. But it demonstrates that textually it is in a form of Saj. The Quran obviously refutes that it is not the saying of a poet or a soothsayer very strictly, so did the Arabs also confuse it as such because of it being in saj? How do we reconcile this with our traditional views? Was it revealed in the most eloquent form of saj, and is the literary form of the Quran not unprecedented then and was known to the Arabs? Has Ghamidi Sahab written anywhere or spoken on this topic in detail that I can access? Please shed some light. @UmerQureshi @faisalharoon @Irfan76
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Literary Form Of The Quran
updated 1 month, 3 weeks ago
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“Nothwithstanding considerable reluctance to use the term saj’ in
reference to the Qur’-an, most medieval rhetoricians realize that the
Qur’an contains a great deal of saj. The analysis undertaken in this
study makes possible some preliminary observations on the formal differences between Qur’-anic and later saj, especially that of the epistles of
al-Sahib ibn Abbad and Ibn al-Amid and the maqamat of al-Hamadhani
and al-Hariri. Qur’anic saj has a much greater tendency to mono-rhyme
than does later saj. A small number of rhymes, including un/in/um/im
and il/ir, are predominant in the Qur’an whereas rhyme in later saj shows greater variation. The Qur’an allows inexact rhymes which are
not found in later saj. The saj’ahs in Qur’anic saj are in many cases much longer than those found in later saj’, though the shorter Meccan
surahs tend to have fairly short saj’ahs. Saj’ units in the Qur’an reach
much greater lengths than those found in later saj’. The formation of saj units in Qur’anic saj’ also exhibits a greater degree of variety, saj units
of two rather short sajahs. Finally, quantitative saj units of the rubai type and the pyramid type being much more common. Later saj’ tends
to consist primarily of parallelism and multiple rhymes become much
more important effects in later saj than they are in the Qur’an.
What does this imply about our translation of the term saj’? Our traditional English rendering, “rhymed prose”, leaves much to be desired,
especially since it completely ignores the metrical qualities and constraints of saj’. Blachere’s translation, “rhymed and rhythmic prose”,
begins to make up for this defect, but retains the main source of
misunderstanding, the very word “prose”. The phrase “rhymed prose”
seems, in every-day English at any rate, to be a contradiction in terms.
This contradiction is only resolved when we realize that in the classical
Arabic literary tradition, convention has somewhat arbitrarily established compliance with the quantitative meters of al-Khalil as the fundamental criterion of division between poetry and prose. A modern view
of poetry as any text which aspires to be seen as a poem, or a view such
as that of Jakobson, according to which a poem is a text in which the
paradigmatic function of language supercedes the syntagmatic, would
allow us to include saj in the realm of poetry with relative ease. This,
however, is not the important issue. The point is rather that within traditional Arabic poetics, there was an awareness of the deeper “poetic”
nature of saj’ which many critics found difficult to state outright because
of the force of conventions such as the doctrine of ijaz al-Qur’an and that
of the supremacy of quantitative poetry, but which, with critics such as
Ibn al-Athir, led to an analysis of saj’ as a type of accent poetry. It is
this awareness which allows us to see saj’ as a complex interplay of accentual meter, rhyme, and morphological pattern, and it is this same
awareness which allowed the poet Ahmad Shawqi to assert: “Saj is
Arabic’s second poetry” (al-sajcu shicru 11-arabiyyati ‘1-tlhani).”Shared concluding remarks from the paper. Again my question would be how do we realign our thinking? After a detailed examination of the paper and its analysis of medieval critical work I wonder why are we told that the Quran introduced a completely new genre in its literary form that left the elite poets of the era dumbfounded? Nothing preceded or followed it and it is its own category? That would hold for its divine contents then right and not its literary form? So we should attest that the Quran was revealed in a form or as a type of composition known to the Arabs, and that the inimitability was due to its contents? Or is it that it introduced a new category within Saj’ or that the Saj’ it introduced was unmatched?
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@UmerQureshi @codename.AJK @Irfan76 anyone? most of my posts just get ignored :/
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Can this please be forwarded to Ghamidi Sahab? No one speaks about this while every Orientalist or western academic categorizes Quran as Saj’, but in Zavia e Ghamidi Series Ghamidi Sb said it does not fall into any structure of nazm, nasr, or sajah. Could he please detail on this for us non-Arab speakers? Why do so many academics and linguists categorize it as sajah? Can Ghamidi Sahab shed light on this question and the literary form of the Quran and why he believes it doesn’t fall into any pre existing structure? Where do those academics get it wrong? Jazak Allah
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