ABSTRACT
In keeping with the traditional exegetical and normative method of Qur’ānic and philological sciences, early aesthetic thought in Islam pursued a validation that may be called “argument by example and illustration”. In this mode, critics advanced an account of the nature of poetry by examining the grammatical and philological rules present in works that were accepted as models of good poetry. They do refer to the different mental states of subjects, the play of different causal factors or the play of imagination, but these remain dependent on linguistic factors.
