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Monday 12 April 2010

What makes a Piece of Text Eloquent & in Perfect Form?

al-Salāmu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullāh wa barakatuh.

 What makes a Piece of Text Eloquent & in Perfect Form?


One aspect of the miraculousness of the Qur'anic language lies in the precision of its words. As al-Suyuti said in al-Itqaan fee 'Uloom al-Qur'aan,

"It is possible to convey a single meaning with a variety of words, some more expressive than others. Likewise for the two parts – subject and predicate – of a sentence; each may be expressed in the most eloquent manner when taken alongside the other.
Thus, it is necessary [in good composition] to; 
1) Consider the overall meaning of a sentence,
2) Then to consider every single word that may be used to convey that meaning, and then
3) To use the most appropriate, expressive and eloquent of those words. 
This is impossible for man to do consistently, or even most of the time, but it is well within the Knowledge of Allaah [whose knowledge is boundless], and thus the Qur'an was considered the best and most eloquent of all speech…"

One example of this usage lies in the morphological forms found in the Qur'an, which will sometimes reflect the deeper meaning of the word itself, and upon reflection it can be found that not a single word in the Qur'an can be changed for another without it affecting the depth of meaning conveyed by the original word.


One example of this is in Yusuf, verse 23:

وَرَاوَدَتْهُ الَّتِي هُوَ فِي بَيْتِهَا عَن نَّفْسِهِ وَغَلَّقَتِ الأَبْوَابَ وَقَالَتْ هَيْتَ لَكَ
And she, in whose house he was, sought to seduce him. She closed the doors and said: "Come, you."

In this verse, Allaah used the verb form ghallaqa غلَّقَto mean 'closed'. Another form from the same root also means 'closed' – aghlaqa أغْلَقَ- yet there is a very eloquent reason for which Allaah used the previous form: the connotations of the pattern followed by the form ghallaqa are ones of repetitiveness and intensity of the action's performance, and thus the word form itself would give the reader who has knowledge of the Arabic language an idea of the intensity of the emotion and desire which drove the wife of al-'Azeez to rush around closing the doors of her house (some mufassiroon (exegetes) commented that there were seven doors that she closed, and hence the form also indicates the repetition of her going to door after door closing it) so she could quickly try to seduce Yusuf. None of this would have been reflected through the use of the alternative word form aghlaqa.



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