Meaning and Captivity in Classical Arabic Philology

Abstract

Abstract This article takes a close look at the word maʿnā as analyzed by Abbasid-era authorities on the Arabic language, chiefly Ibn Fāris (d. 395/1004). The word’s context-sensitivity and polysemy are well known; less well appreciated are the lexical and morphological preconditions for maʿnā’s diversity of meanings across the disciplines. Even less well studied (though widely quoted in lexicographical literature) is the anonymous basīṭ-meter couplet that Ibn Fāris cites in al-Ṣāḥibī fī fiqh al-lugha as a locus probans for the word. The speaker in these verses boasts of ransoming a bound captive (ʿānī), using maʿnā to refer to the captive’s abject state. There is evidence to suggest that the verses once featured in a lost work of the philologist Abū Naṣr al-Bāhilī (d. 231/855) called Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī. This was an anthology of verses framed like riddles whose interpretation hinged on double meanings and rare metaphors, and its form and content may be judged by numerous outtakes preserved in later anthologies and lexica. The affiliation of Ibn Fāris’s verses to Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī would confirm that the derivation of maʿnā truly is a puzzle with multiple answers. To contemplate its parameters is to uncover a paradigm for meaning in which noetic intention and phenomenological exposure are figurative correlates of bodily captivity and duress.