The Role of Rhetoric ( balāgha ) in Teaching Arabic in Western Universities

Balāgha is an important part of the curriculum of schools and universities in the Arab world because of its vital importance to appreciation of Arabic literature and the Qur'an. This is not the case in the BA Arabic curricula in British universities, where students have only three or four years to not only learn Arabic but also cover areas such as Islam and Arabo-Islamic literature and history. Western scholars have also historically neglected to translate basic Arabic texts on the science of balāgha, especially ʿilm al-maʿānī. As a consequence, important features of Qur'anic style can be perplexing to the western student of Arabic. Conversely, it is suggested that in the Arabic curriculum the teaching of balāgha has tended to stress rules more than appreciation, and methodological approaches have remained largely unchanged for centuries. In view of this some suggestions are made of ways in which ʿilm al-maʿānī might be developed and expanded. Three crucial areas of ʿilm al-maʿānī are selected here for consideration: (i) the requirement that speech should conform to the context; (ii) the ways in which affective sentences in Arabic, which are widespread in the Qur'an, are used to engage the reader; (iii) departure from what is expected, including grammatical shifts and the whole area of the use of pronouns in the Qur'an. This article also addresses some recent trends in western studies on Qur'anic style, in the hope that they might allow the two traditions of scholarship, western and Arabo-Islamic, to engage with, and benefit from, each other

Arabic · Arabic literature · Art · Curriculum · Islam · Linguistics · Literature · Modern Standard Arabic · Pedagogy · Political science · Rhetoric · Scholarship · Sociology · Education and Islamic Studies · Families in Therapy and Culture · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology