Balagha currents before the formation period: The case of al-jahiz

Abstract

Balagha, which consists of three main branches today, has benefited from various channels in the process of completing its formation. Before the formation of systematic balagha, it is assumed that there were two main currents, one represented by poets and lite-rati, and the other represented by scholars. This article aims to determine the place of Abu Uthman al-Jahiz (255/869), one of the main names who wrote in the field of balagha, in the pre-formation period of balagha science. The documentary analysis method will be used mainly in the research. The determinations of al-Jahiz on balagha will be analysed in accord-ance with the parameters, categories and concepts of systematic balagha. By examining al-Jahiz's rhetorical understanding through the filter of systematic balagha, the share of pre-for-mation period balagha within systematic balagha will be revealed. Another contribution of the study would be to reveal the balagha understanding of al-Jahiz with its main frames. Ex-amining al-Jahiz's concept of balagha, on the other hand, will facilitate understanding of his unique concepts of balagha and bayan. Because al-Jahiz designed a broad communication framework, which he calls bayan, and considered balagha as a sub-category within this de-sign. Balagha is the subject of verbal communication in this design. Summary: The formation of a discipline called balagha passed through several stages. Balagha as a term, which was in circulation as a qualification of beautiful and convincing words, has attracted the attention of some circles, had been dealt with it in various occasions and some thoughts had been recorded on the subject. These accumulations and records contained a number of basics and principles that formed the core of balagha science which would later be systematized. Since these recorded cumulative basics and principles cannot be called balagha science, it is possible to name them as the idea of balagha. The independent works that emerged during this period were written by poets and literary writers. Religious scholars and linguists also had mentioned rhetorical issues in their works even though they did not write specific books on the topic. It is possible to say that there are two channels from which balagha science is nourished: The literary criticism channel represented by poets and writers and the other channel which is held by various branches of science, the majority of which are religious sciences. The literary criticism channel is the product of some social and scientific developments in Arab history. When Jahiliyya (pre-Islamic) poetry became a data source to serve the emerging grammar, an intensive movement of collecting Jahiliyya poetry has begun. Compiled Jahiliyya poetry was not only a source for linguists, but also a literary legacy that poets sang and used as a model for their new styles in poetry. Innovations in poetry led to a comparison between the old and the new, and these developments have also brought about the need for certain criteria to be used in literary criticism. Eventually, these critical activities circulated many terms, including the word balagha. When it comes to religious sciences, balagha has been a concept used mostly in ijazu'l-Quran issue. The discussions of the miraculous feature of the Quran, which continued on theological grounds, must have aroused the desire to explain the eloquence of verses in concrete exam-ples. Because the scholars of these fields shifted their interest towards the use of linguistic tools. The balagha channel shaped by the pressures of religious sciences such as kalam, fiqh and tafsir could be called the balagha developed by grammar; and the channel that began to take shape with the work of poets and writers can be called the balagha developed by litera-ture. In the period after the formation of grammar and before the formation of balagha, although there was not a balagha science in the present-day sense, it is clear that there was a thought of balagha. One of the scholars who reflects the idea of balagha of the pre-establishment pe-riod is Abu Uthman al-Jahiz. Al-Jahiz did not address the issue of persuasive and beautiful speech only in his book al-Bayan wa al-tabyin. In various articles, he talks about the qualities of beautiful and impressive speeches, sometimes under different topics and sometimes under a special title. In his al-Bayan wa al-tabyin, al-Jahiz establishes a communication theory called bayan that takes into account all the means of conveying meaning. He divides the means of communication into five, which are word, sign, number, text and posture. The book puts spe-cial emphasis on balagha, which is one of the means of bayan, and its conditions of conveying meanings. Although the issues discussed in the work do not conform to the norms of the later systematic balagha, it continues to be an important source in theoretical balagha studies. Sys-tematic balagha and al-Jahiz's bayan project are different in terms of frame, but they have overlapping points and a piece-whole relationship between them. Bayan, developed by al-Jahiz's, addresses the wide range of communication that takes into account including the ges-tures and signs; while balagha is used to refer to the verbal communications only, which is part of the broader field of communication. In systematic balagha, it is important to distinguish between balagha and fasaha terms; the former used to signify the word, the speech and the speaker, and the latter to signify only the word and the speaker. We have noticed that al-Jahiz uses them interchangeably. Nonetheless, the emphasis on the factor of transmitting messages, when he talks about the clarity of mean-ing on several occasions, shows that he considers the combined words rather than the indi-vidual words, which is the same assertion of systematic balagha. According to him, the fact that a misarranged sentence is understood by the interlocutor should not mean that the sen-tence itself is capable of transmitting the meaning. The context factor, which is the determinant of systematic balagha, is also taken into consid-eration in al-Jahiz's understanding of balagha. However, al-Jahiz generally considered the context together with the length and shortness of the speeches and did not mention the as-pects reflected in the sentence sequence. Although the major concern of al-Jahiz was the transmission ability of the speech, he also dealt with the expression forms. There are some other terms that he used less frequently like ijaz, itnab, ishab and kinaya. Although some of these words are used in contexts similar to the meanings of today's term, most of them are used in such a context to meet more than one meaning. Ijaz, which is one of these concepts, is the name of expressing the meanings with little word in al-Jahiz's usage. The use of terms reflects the types of narrative and figurative usages could not reach a stable point in al-Bayan wa al-tabyin, because it was not written for the purpose of systematically analysing them. The author, who aims to examine the persuasive and beautiful words in many dimensions, under-took the issue with a view that takes into consideration the orator, and this caused his work to be designed in a way that serves speech making rather than analysing. This consideration prevented the emergence of an analysis system. Al-Jahiz mostly used balagha in the context of oral performance. According to him, the written texts and performed sermons are different in style and therefore the balagha criteria of these two species should be different as well.