The Equivalences between Ideas of Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani and Structural Linguistics and the New Criticism

Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (400 – 471 AH / 1078 AD), the celebrated Persian rhetorician and grammarian, inaugurated the Arab linguistic revolution through his seminal works, namely Asrar al-Balaghah (The Secrets of Elucidation) and particularly Dalail al-Ijaz (Intimations of Inimitability). In the recent century, after efforts of Muhammad Abduh in Egypt to revive the Islamic scientific thought, editing and printing of Jurjani’s scripts was prospered. Immediately after, the novelty of his ideas drew the attention of many scholars, and initiated a widespread quest to find the similarities of his ideas with modern linguistics, in theory and practice. This endeavor which perhaps is in its midway, led to find many equivalences and has produced remarkable results.It is the aim of this article to analyze some ideas of Jurjani from Dalail al-Ijaz which collectively are known as “The Theory of Nazm”, and deliberate those equivalences with structural linguistics and the new criticism. Word (lafẓ) and meaning (maʿānī), the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes, and differences of langue and parole; are the most important topics that inter-relate Jurjani with contemporary linguistics. The principal equality of Jurjani and structural linguistics is his perception of language as a system of communication.