Les arabisants et la catégorie De ‘inšā’

What is it about?

The post-classical Arabic category of ’inšā’ (“performative utterance”) oc¬cupies a central position in several traditional fields of Islamic culture, thereby serving as a link between them. However, The Encyclopaedia of Islam men¬tions it in neither of its two editions. The term is not even translated or rather is not well translated in a key text like the Muqaddima of Ibn Ḫaldūn. It is as¬similated instead to its subcategory ṭalab (“ǧussive utterance”). We must go back as far as Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) to understand the reasons for this silence, or rather this semi-silence. As an advocate of General Grammar, he saw the opposition between ’inšā’ and ’iḫbār (“assertion”) in terms of the ‘modes’ (in the sense of ‘forms or ways of thinking’). This interpretation may also have been influenced by the work of Ibn al-Ḥāǧib, who sees the opposi-tion which gave rise to the classification of utterances according to the cate¬gories of ḫabar (“affirmation”) and ’inšā’ (wathever is not affirmation), in terms of a two-fold difference: that of the assertive as opposed to the performa¬tive use of a given sentence, on the one hand, and, that of the imperative as opposed to the performative, that is of the ‘expression’ of the ṭalab as opposed to its ‘representation’, on the other hand. By concentrating on a single facet of the problem, Sil-vestre de Sacy misses the legal origin of the category as well as its conceptual originality. Likewise, Massignon (1883–1962) mentions only the reduction of the ’inšā’ to a ’iḫbār ‘ammā fī l-bātin (“the assertion of one’s inner thoughts”) and the ’iḫbār to a ’iḫbār ‘ammā fī l-ḫāriǧ (“the assertion of what is in the outside world”) which corresponds to a difference in referential worlds. The moral of all this is that personal and contemporary theories of historians of linguistics, as well as the personal authority of one specialist or another can be the best or the worst of things. Nonetheless, if Arabists had paid more attention to this pluridisciplinary category, they might have played a leading role in writing the history of linguistics. To the extent that the end of history is the transcendence of that history, they might even have foreseen the emergeance of the ‘enunciation’ movement, which permeates the Arabic lin¬guistic tradition.

Featured Image