Literary Form Of The Quran
“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?