The Discourse on Laḥn in Arabic Philological and Literary Traditions

Abstract

The Arabic terminological tradition is remarkably unique for the application of a single referential word to a variety of concepts across subjects. One such term is laḥn, which, in the sense of a terminus technicus, became a familiar topos in philological, jurisprudential, literary, and Qur'ānic discourses. The present study re-examines the referential terrain of the term, taking as its point of departure, Johann Fück's (d. 1974) seminal discussion of it. An entirely new area to which the term came to be applied relates to the aesthetic genres; namely, the poetic and prose forms where particular manipulation of meanings or expressions became interpretable as rhetorical laḥn. From Ibn Durayd (d. 321/933) down to Ibn Rashīq (d. 456/1063), this study examines the trajectory of the evolution and formalization of the term laḥn in the context of allusive tropes established by theorists and literary legislators. The study also demonstrates that, its strong referential attachment to incorrect idiom notwithstanding, the application of the term laḥn to other phenomena in the scholarly discourse was all the more remarkable in regard to the literary, theoretical tradition where the elasticity of the terminological convention is once more established.