It now remains for me to speak of those qualities of Ḥarîri’s work which give it so great a linguistic value, and have made it, wherever the Arabic language is studied, the text-book of those who would obtain a profound and scientific knowledge. It is not too much to say that whoever has read the Assemblies and their commentators, will have formed a notion of every department of purely Arabic and Moslem culture. Grammar, lexicography, rhetoric, poetry, history, antiquities, biography, popular customs and sayings, theology, religious traditions, civil and ecclesiastical law,—all enter into the work; which is, as it were, a compendium of “leading cases,” in all sorts of studies. The student is placed on the track of almost every kind of learning, and if he follows the indications of the author, and seeks, with the help of the commentators, to explain his allusions, penetrate his intentional obscurities, overcome his cunningly-devised difficulties, verify his endless quotations, and keep in memory the multifarious information on language and grammar, he will have been initiated into all the learning of the author’s age, and in his subsequent studies will have only to build on a foundation which has been solidly and securely laid.
The first peculiarity of the Assemblies is the use of
words which are rare but ancient, classical, and remarkable
in the eyes of the learned, from their having been
found in some esteemed composition, and become the
subject of doubt or contention. In the time of the
author the language was much corrupted among the
people, by long intermixture with foreign races. The
Arabs had always held the belief that seclusion from the
rest of mankind was necessary to preserve the purity of
their language. The undefiled speech of the race was
only to be found among those tribes of Ḥijâz or Nejd
which had lived remote from Persian or Greek influence,
and developed the Semitic tongue into the matchless
idiom of the Mo‘allaḳât and the Koran. Ibn Khaldûn,
an acute and reflecting writer, and in critical power
above most of his countrymen, speaks in a well-known
passage of the corruption of the Arab language. He says
that the descendants of Moḍar, who used the classical language,
lost the faculty of speaking it in purity by dwelling
among people of other races, since they borrowed of
them forms and words. And for this reason, he continues,
the speech of Ḳoraysh was the most eloquent
and pure, since they were most remote from the abodes
of foreigners. Next in excellence was the speech of
Thaḳîf and Hothayl and Khozâ‘ah, and the Benû
Kinâneh and Ghaṭafân and the Benû Asad, and the
Benû Temîm. But as for the tribes more remote from
Ḳoraysh—as Rabî‘ah, and Lakham, and Jothâm, and
Ghassân, and Iyyâd, and Ḳoḍâ‘ah, and the Arabs of
Yemen, their speech was imperfect, through their mixture
with the Persians and the Abyssinians; and thus,
in the opinion of Arabic linguists, the greater or less
distance of a tribe from Ḳoraysh was the measure of its
deflection from the pure language of Moḍar. It may be
noticed here that this opinion concerning the conservation
of the language in the heart of the peninsula has
acquired an irresistible argument from the travels of Mr.
Palgrave, who has satisfied scholars that the language of
the Koran, with all its inflections and syntax, is still the
dialect of the secluded Nejd. But in the days of Ḥarîri,
and in the city of Basra, the chaste speech of the Arabs
was the possession of only a few. The unlettered
Bedouin, who came with camels or horses from the
desert was, for the use of words and their precise pronunciation,
a greater authority than the most learned
grammarian. For the corruption that had set in immediately
after the first conquests of Islam, had so transformed
the speech of Irak and Syria, that the classic
language, in its refinement, was obsolescent, and had
become the artificial study of the lecture-room and the
mosque. Even so early as the close of the first century
of the Hijra, the great Khalif, Welîd ibn ‘Abd el Melik,
spoke so corrupt a dialect that he could not make himself
understood by the Arabs of the desert.*
Great scholars
like Sîbawayh and Zamakhshari, are said to have
possessed in perfection the idiom of Moḍar, though not
even of Arab blood, but Ibn Khaldûn relates that they
had acquired this by mingling from infancy with men of
the tribes who spoke a chaste language. To the great
number, even of the educated, the speech of Ḳoraysh and
of the great poets was almost a dead language, not only
as regarded its desinences and constructions, but even as
to the use of individual words. Now this ancient
speech, which every day became less understood of the
people, was the principal study of the learned. Grammatical
researches began in the first century of Islam,
through the necessity of explaining doubtful passages of
the Koran. It was then that the diacritical points were
added to certain letters, the Arabs having originally, in
the little that they wrote, expressed more than one
sound by the same character,—a practice which filled
the sacred text with ambiguity. The tyrant Ḥajjâj ibn
Yûsuf was, according to Ibn Khallikân, the first who
attempted to remedy this defect, but his system differed
from that which was afterwards introduced by Abû ’l
Aswad. As the vocabulary of the language increased,
through a sort of fusion of the dialects of the tribes,
which took place in the non-Arabian provinces; as
various forms of the same word, of greater or less
authority, came to be indiscriminately used; and as the
multitude borrowed from the Persian, the Syriac, or the
Greek, so much more did the learned think it incumbent
upon them to separate the chaste idiom from the corrupt,
to show what was Arab and what was A‘jamî or foreign;
to determine the most genuine form of any word that
was spelt or pronounced in more than one manner, to
declare whether
Theirs was no easy task. The European, who launches out into the vast ocean of the Arabic language, knows how long and weary is the voyage, and yet he has to guide him the grammatical luminaries of a thousand years. The doctor of Basra or Kufa did, indeed, speak the language which he commented, but this very familiarity in some respects increased his difficulties. He dwelt amid a Babel of conflicting forms and vocables, and had to decide—from a Koran of imperfect orthography, from poems which, for the most part, were only orally transmitted, or from the diverse utterances of various tribes—what was the pure Arabic form of this or that noun or verb. It is impossible for one who has not perused the writings of these acute and indefatigable scholars to imagine the labour they expended in the determination of the classic tongue. For the proper form and signification of a word they looked primarily to the Koran as the absolutely perfect standard of speech, and then to the productions of the early poets. In this they had the sanction of the Prophet himself, who, according to a tradition, had said, that when a man was in doubt as to the language of God’s word, he would do well to take the poets to counsel. Poetry was especially fitted to fix the form of a word, since the sacnsion of a line would depend on the vowelling and on the inflection of the words of which it was composed, and thus insure an approximation to exactness. The shawâhid, or proofs of lexicography and grammar, were therefore chiefly verses of the poets, and these are to be found imbedded in endless numbers in all commentaries and grammatical treatises. But only the earlier poets were of high authority. Within a century of Mohammed’s flight from Mecca, the Moslem empire stretched from Kashgar and Moultan to Morocco and the Pyrenees, and the Arab man of letters was exposed to the corrupting propinquity of men of many different races. Only a poet of the Ignorance, that is, one who had died before the preaching of Islam; or a Mukhaḍram, that is, one who was contemporary with it, was looked upon as of paramount and unquestionable authority. An Islâmi, that is one who was born after the rise of Islam, was of less consideration, and after the first century, the poets are called Muwelledûn, and are only quoted for their literary beauties, and not as authorities for the Arab tongue.