This paper asks what it meant, on either side of the dawn of the twentieth century, to uphold the traditional Arabic-Islamic view that the Arabic language is exceptional in its expressive capabilities. That is, I ask, how could two thinkers equally convinced of the unparalleled supremacy of the Arabic language—and sharing an unexpected attachment and indebtedness to the same idiosyncratic tenth century theorist of language—derive from that shared intellectual lineage such vastly different poetic and (or perhaps as) political commitments? Like many other nahḍa-era intellectuals, the Lebanese-born Muslim convert and prolific author Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (d. 1887) and the Syrian Ba’athist pioneer Zakī al-Arsūzī (d. 1968) drew inspiration from pre-modern Arabic-Islamic turāth (heritage) so as to respond to the encounter of the Arab World—and the Arabic language—with Western “modernity.” And like a number of their respective contemporaries, both were concerned this issues of language reform and neologism even as they forcefully rejected any notion of a forceful epistemic rupture separating turāth from modernity. However, in their respective texts Sirr al-layālī fī al-qalb wal-ibdālī (The Secret of Nights Spent in Metathesis and Substitution) and Al-‘Abqariyya al-‘arabiyya fī lisānihā (The Genius of Arabness Is in Its Language), al-Shidyāq and al-Arsūzī both rely heavily on a less common intellectual forefather: the ‘Abbāsid-period grammarian Abū al-Fatḥ ‘Uthmān Ibn Jinnī (d. 1002). Both thinkers make the surprising move of turning to Ibn Jinnī’s fairly idiosyncratic ideas about the importance of sound in the Arabic language and the intrinsic meanings of particular sound combinations. But while al-Shidyāq mobilizes these ideas for a poetic project that is obliquely political, al-Arsūzī derives from them the foundations of the Ba’athist political project. My paper investigates this divergence and the ways in which such seemingly abstract key concepts of these three thinkers’ work as shajā‘a (bravery), ‘abqariyya (genius), and ‘ishq (passion) become activated by different political contexts. Ultimately, I also consider questions of authenticity and responsibility in nineteenth- and twentieth-century engagements with turāthī theories of language.