The idea that language could ever be separated from mind and reality never occurred to
scholars working in the Arabic Language Tradition Could this have been the consequence of
genre and discipline Scholars like Ragib worked in poetics literary criticism exegesis and
literary compilation all of which required a focus on language The work of scholars in the
Classical Language Tradition on the other hand often centered on the Organon a collection of
works with logic at its core Perhaps only the question of the divine brought the two traditions
together the beliefs about the nature of the one and the spheres laid out in Book Lambada of
Aristotlersquos Metaphysics and Ragibrsquos discussions of Godrsquos unity and attributes are both
conversations about the divine However Aristotle and the generations of Greek Syriac and
Arabic commentators on him did not talk about divinity in terms of language Ragib and the
thousands of Arabic-language scholars whose assumptions he shared could scarcely mention
This opposition mirrors a culture clash Mediaeval Islamicate scholars argued about
whether their intellectual culture should turn to the inheritance passed down to them from the
Greeks through late antiquity or whether that heritage in fact represented an undesirable foreign
influence inseperable from metaphysical claims incompatible with Islam There was a persistent
division before the twelfth century between Arabist scholars working in exegetical and poetic
disciplines and philhellenic scholars working on the Greek inheritance from late antiquity and
in particular on the transmission and reception of Aristotlersquos Organon The paradigmatic text
that highlights this divide is Abū Hayyān at-Tawḥīdīrsquos (d 4141023) report of a debate between
the grammarian Abū Saʿīd as-Sīrāfī (d 368979) and the logician Abū Bisr Mattā (d 328
239
940)692 This was a debate albeit set in a court that expected Arabic to win and reported by a
follower of the victorious participant in which Arabic culture chose Arabic grammar as its
weapon in the defeat of a foreign Hellenistic logic that made false claims of universality This
summary reflects Abū Hayyānrsquos partisan reportage but the text tells us how conscious tenth-
century scholars were of the culture clash693
Nevertheless scholars such as Ragib remind us that the intellectual borders of
philhellenism and anti-hellenism were porous It was not simply the case that scholars who
692 D S Margoliouth The Discussion Between Abū Bishr Mattā And Abū Saʿīd al-Sīrāfī On The Merits of Logic
and Grammar Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland no January (1905) 79-129 Abū
Hayyān at-Tawḥīdī Kitāb al-Imtāʿ wa-l-Muʾānasah ed Aḥmad Amīn and Aḥmad az-Zayn 3 in 1 vols (Beirut Dār
Maktabat al-Hayāh 1965) 1104f For commentary on the debate see also Muhsin Mahdi Language and Logic in
Classical Islam in Logic in Classical Islamic Culture ed Gustave E von Grunebaum (Wiesbaden O
Harrassowitz 1970) Zimmermann Commentary and Short Treatise cxxiif For later Arabic consciousness of the
issue see the Ihwān aṣ-Ṣafāʾrsquos statement that anyone who wants to study philosophical logic (al-manṭiq al-falsafī)
must first know grammar Ihwān aṣ-Ṣafāʾ Rasāʾil Beirut 1415 The idea that intellectual output was either
indigenous or philhellenic and that the standard bearers of these alternatives were grammar and logic respectively
is reflected by the Christian falyasūf Yaḥyā b ʿAdī (d 363974) who described the difference between grammar and
logic and indeed in the division of all intellectual disciplines into either Arabic (including grammar) or foreign
(including logic) in the Mafātīḥ al-ʿUlūm (The Keys of the Intellectual Disciplines) of al- uwārizmī (Abū ʿAbdallāh
Muḥammad b Aḥmad fl 366976-387997) Yaḥyā b ʿAdī defined logic as ldquoa craft that is concerned with
expressions that refer to universals in order to combine those expressions in structures that reflect realityrdquo (ṣināʿatun
tuʿnā bi-l-alfāẓi ndashd-dāllati ʿalā ndashl-umūri ndashl-kullīyati li-tuʾallifahā taʾlīfan muwāfiqan limā ʿalayhi ndashl-umūru ndashllatī
hiya dāllatun ʿalayhā) Grammar on the other hand was concerned with the inflection of expressions according to
Bedouin Arab precedent Al- uwārizmī wrote that he was dividing his survey of the disciplinary landscape into ldquothe
disciplines of the [Islamic] revelation and those Arabic disciplines associated with itrdquo (li-ʿulūmi -š-šarīʿati wa-mā
yaqtarinu bihā min ndashl-ʿulūmi ndashl-ʿarabīyah) and ldquothe foreign disciplines from the Greeks and other nationsrdquo (li-
ʿulūmi ndashl-ʿa ami min ndashl-yūnānīyīna wa-ġayrihim min ndashl-umam) Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b Aḥmad b Yusūf al-
uwārizmī Mafātīḥ al-ʿUlūm ed G Van Vloten (Leiden Brill 1895 repr Cairo al-Hayrsquoah al-ʿĀmmah li-Quṣūr
aṯ- aqāfah 2004 Edited by Muḥammad Husayn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz) 5 Kees Versteegh Landmarks in Linguistic
Thought III The Arabic Linguistic Tradition (London Routledge 1997) 255-256 Yaḥyā b ʿAdī Maqālāt Yaḥyā b
ʻAdī al-Falsafīyah ed Saḥbān ulayfāt (Amman Mansūrāt al- āmiʻah al-Urdunīyah 1988) 414-424 423
693 Fritz Zimmermann wrote
The clash between Hellenists and anti-Hellenists in the controversy over logic and grammar by bringing
pride and prejudice to the fore further inhibited dispassionate discussion At the same time however this
clash is evidence of intense contact between the two subjects hellip pointed silences may have played an
important part in the debate and hellip each side may have paid far more attention to the other than it cared to
acknowledge
In this context Zimmermann discusses ldquosignificant agreementsrdquo between al-Fārābī and his grammarian
contemporary Ibn as-Sarrāg (Abū Bakr Muḥammad d 316929) Zimmermann Commentary and Short Treatise
cxix-cxxi cxxxviii Further evidence of al-Fārābīrsquos sensitivity to these dynamics can be extracted from his apparent
avoidance of Arabic grammar as a source for the consideration of indefinite nouns in Aristotlersquos logical works For
details of the avoidance see Black Aristotles Peri hermeneias 64-65 68
240
preferred Arabic grammar to Greek philosophy and who subscribed to the Arabic rather than the
Classical Language Tradition were anti-hellenic Ragib whose approach to language as
polysemic and ambiguous puts him squarely in the Arabic Language Tradition chose the
Neoplatonic inheritance of late antiquity as the source for the vast majority of his ethical work
Ragib was culturally prepared to quote Aristotle in his ethics and equally certain that Aristotle
should not be part of his Quranic exegesis Ragib was able to compartmentalize based on genre
or discipline
The boundaries between genres and disciplines and their interactions with the culture clash
described above also explain the failure of Aristotlersquos works on language and poetry to influence
scholars like Ragib As Black and others have shown694 Aristotlersquos Rhetoric and Poetics came
into the Arabic-speaking world as an integral part of an Organon centered on logic They were
therefore studied by those Arabic scholars who were working in the Organon tradition and
ignored by those working outside it695 This was in contrast to Aristotelian and Neoplatonic
ethics the transmission of which was much less tightly attached to the Organon and its logic
Furthermore one can imagine that had a scholar like Ragib come into contact with the approach
to language and its use embodied in Aristotlersquos Rhetoric in particular he would have thought it
more applicable to his ethics and adab than his hermeneutic theological and poetic
694 mdashmdashmdash Logic and Aristotles Rhetoric and Poetics
695 For example a note on the manuscript of the Rhetoric edited by M C Lyons reads ldquonot many of those who read
in the craft of logic (qurrāʾ ṣināʿati ndashl-manṭiq) have come to study this bookrdquo The thrust of this note is that students
of logic are the bookrsquos natural readership but because the book is little known and poorly transmitted they have
failed to make use of it Aristotle Aristotles Ars Rhetorica The Arabic Version ed M C Lyons 2 vols
(Cambridge Pembroke Arabic Texts 1982) 1ii xxvi The author of the note appears to have been Ibn as-Samḥ
(Abū ʿAlī Christian and pupil of Yaḥyā b ʿAdī d 4181027) but for uncertainty on this attribution see ibid iv-vi
Heinrichs albeit addressing a later period than that of Ragib remarks that ldquo[l]ogical poetics (and rhetoric) and
indigenous poetics and literary theory did not often rub shoulders Most practicioners of the latter ignored what the
logicians had to sayhelliprdquo Wolfhart Heinrichs Takhyīl Make-Believe and Image Creation in Arabic Literary
Theory in Takhyīl the Imaginary in Classical Arabic Poetics ed G J H van Gelder and Marl Hammond
(Cambridge Gibb Memorial Trust 2008) 9