Within the framework of kalimat, the workshop – in English and Arabic – interrogates the semantic range of rhetorical and poetical terms, subsumed under khaṭāba, shiʿriyya, and balāgha in the Arabic tradition.

What is commonly understood as rhetoric in Western intellectual traditions since antiquity was expressed in the history of Arabic literature before modernity using different notions. For instance, the traditions of khaṭāba (Aristotelian rhetoric) and balāgha (Arabic rhetoric and poetics) are traditionally framed as distinct projects. Furthermore, the inception of balāgha as a defined science with its three branches (ʿilm al-bayān, ʿilm al-badīʿ, and ʿilm al-maʿānī) cannot be traced to the time before the contributions of Sirāj al-Dīn al-Sakkākī (d. 626/1229) and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Qazwīnī (d. 739/1338). However, meta-concepts like balāgha, bayān, naẓm, majāz, and ḥaqīqa were tackled earlier in various discourses highlighting the centrality of the Arabic language as well as Qurʾanic revelation and its ethical goals. In other words, there is no unified Arabic rhetoric, but different evolving traditions of thought with their own terminologies. The Arabic concepts form thus part of the larger configuration of the Islamic intellectual tradition including its various sciences with their interest in (philosophy of) language, epistemology, and theology.
The main goal of the workshop is to explore the changing semantics, the central sources as well as the various discursive and practical contexts of rhetorical and poetical concepts in the Arabic tradition before the age of book printing as well as their potential for a literary theory avant la lettre. Our main focus is the entanglement and semantic shifts of central terms and concepts in the context of various discourses of Islamic scholarship. We are interested in both the fundamental notions related to eloquence and oratory, and the stylistic repertoires, the relationship of rhetoric to poetics and poetry analysis, philosophy/falsafa, adab, Qurʾanic exegesis, legal hermeneutics/fiqh and theological discourse/kalām.

Configuration 
The first aim of the workshop is to map central rhetorical and poetical terms in their multiple relations. How does the tradition of balāgha offer a coherent system of rhetorical and poetic subdisciplines? How do the concepts, subsumed under rhetoric – such as bayān, balāgha and khaṭāba – relate to each other? Why was there a need to augment the use and significance of rhetorical or poetical notions? How is rhetoric-poetics in the Arabic tradition entangled with theological/philosophical positions, how is it related to claims about language, morality, and politics? How did/do Arabic rhetoric and poetics translate into other traditions, both Eastern and Western?

Transformation
The second aim of the workshop is to delineate fundamental transformations, that is, understanding the conceptual shifts, for instance, from early notions of rhetoric-poetics such as the qurʾanic bayān to the emergence of the linguistic sciences and to the so-called standard theory of balāgha, following ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 474/1081). What were the needs that required certain potential shifts in the rhetorical and poetical tradition and how did these changes substantiate? To what extent are many concepts, notably central figures of speech, so instable in their terminology, their use and even their precise meanings? And why? How do the shifts of significance within rhetorical terms manifest conceptual transformations in the broader intellectual tradition of Islamic thought and literature?

Detailed program: to follow soon.

Contact for more information: kalimat@geschkult.fu-berlin.de