ABSTRACT

I t is widely recognized that the position of the Qur'an in the life of the early Arabs and the intense interest they took in its supreme qualities

generated most of the important questions about language, literature and religious belief. It has been argued that the Qur'an was the most powerful force behind the rise and development of literary criticism and the theorizing about balagha and f~alJ,a. 2 What is less widely acknowledged is that the intense interest in the Qur'an also generated the first profound contemplations of the nature of poetic imagery and the birth of the very notion of two modes of using language: one real, or literal (lJ,aqzqt), the other non-real, or non-literal (majazt)3. In very early work of mine, I tried to demonstrate that the notion of majaz crystallized in the context of questions about the nature of God and man's relationship to Him, specifically with reference to such issues as free will and predestination.4 Another factor provided a further powerful impulse, namely the notion that the Qur'an was inimitable (muJiz). Not that the Qur'an itself proclaimed this explicitly, but interpretations of its challenge to the people of Quraysh to "bring (compose or produce) anything like it,"5 steered the debate in this direction: the Qur'an is mu Jiz, that we acknowledge, but where exactly does its iJaz lie, in its words, its meanings or in ~arfa (God purposefully turning people away from competing with it altogether)?6 It is in attempts to answer questions of this nature that the wonderful work of a figure like 'Abd al-Qahir al:Jmjani was produced and the works of many of his predecessors took shape; of these al-Khanabi, al-Baqillani, al-Rummani and, especially, al-QaQi 'Abd al:Jabbar al-Asadi are of special significance.