Arabic Rhetoric (Balagha) and Eloquence

What balagha adds to grammar

Grammar tells you whether a sentence is correct. Balagha tells you whether it is right: why, at this exact point, the object was fronted, the subject omitted, a nominal sentence preferred to a verbal one, a word repeated or a silence kept. Its principle fits in one formula: mutabaqat al-kalam li-muqtada al-hal, fitting the speech to its situation. This is why it is taken up only after nahw and sarf: it presupposes what it is going to justify.

The three branches

• Al-maani (علم المعاني): the states of the sentence, isnad, definiteness and indefiniteness, fronting and postposing, ellipsis, qasr, wasl and fasl, concision and amplification. The most demanding branch, and the most useful.
• Al-bayan (علم البيان): tashbih with its elements and types, lexical and compound majaz, isti'ara and kinaya. The branch that speaks most directly to a reader of poetry.
• Al-badi' (علم البديع): the figures of embellishment, tibaq, muqabala, jinas, saj', tawriya and the rest. Enjoyable, but secondary: studying it first distorts one's judgement.

The curriculum

To begin, Al-Balagha al-wadiha by Ali al-Jarim and Mustafa Amin: short expositions, well-chosen examples, worked exercises — the book that trained generations of pupils. Then Jawahir al-balagha by Ahmad al-Hashimi, denser, organised by the three branches and widely used for reference. On the classical path, Talkhis al-Miftah by al-Qazwini, an abridgement of al-Sakkaki's Miftah al-'ulum, is the reference matn, studied with the author's own commentary Al-Idah fi 'ulum al-balagha. Finally, for anyone who wants to go back to the source of the discipline, Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani's two treatises, Asrar al-balagha on the image and Dala'il al-i'jaz on word order: not manuals, but the two books that founded rhetorical thinking in Arabic.

Balagha and i'jaz al-Qur'an

The discipline did not develop for its own sake: it grew out of the debate on the inimitability of the Quran, and that remains its main field of application. Anyone who wants to understand what an exegete is doing when he pauses on a fronted word or an ellipsis needs these notions. The link is direct with the Tafsir section and with Quran in Arabic.

Choosing an edition

A balagha book is worth first what it does with its examples: verses, Quranic citations and proverbs must be vowelled and, in good editions, referenced. Then check the clarity of the hierarchy, since the subject is made of divisions and subdivisions that cramped typesetting renders unreadable, and the presence of an index of figures, which changes everything in use. Each listing states the publisher, the editor, the size and the binding.

The other language sciences

Balagha presupposes Arabic grammar (nahw) and morphology (sarf): it justifies constructions you must already be able to parse. Its natural proving ground is Arabic poetry, from which most of its examples are drawn, and the artistic prose of Arabic literature. Overview: Arabic.

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