This paper analyzes Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī’s (d. 1013) approach to the issue of the interpretability of language and the Qurʾān as presented in his books entitled Kitāb Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān and al-Taqrīb wal-Irshād. Al-Bāqillānī is known as the foremost Maliki jurist of his day and an Ash‘arī theologian who contributed to the major theological debates of the time. Despite his importance, his work on language and interpretability has received limited attention. In his texts on Qurʾānic inimitability and legal theory, he puts forth a unique interpretation of two Qurʾānic keywords—muḥkam and mutashābih—in the service of supporting his thesis that language is at once clear and multivalent. The terms muḥkam and mutashābih have a rich history in the Islamic interpretive tradition, beginning with early explanations of Qurʾān 3:7, where these terms are used. The scholars Leah Kinberg and Sahiron Syamsuddin have recently shown that explanations of Qurʾān 3:7 were the location of debates about whether humans can interpret the whole Qurʾān. To summarize a diverse range of positions, some scholars held that muḥkam verses had clear meanings and precluded non-literal interpretation, while mutashābih verses were considered ambiguous and not definitively comprehensible by humans. Others scholars argued that the whole Qurʾān is composed of muḥkam verses, meaning well-worded utterances, whereas mutashābih verses mutually confirm each other’s meanings. The positions scholars took on these terms are significant because they reflect their views on humans’ exegetical capacities and the legitimacy of non-literal interpretations. Scholarship has neglected al-Bāqillānī’s exegesis of these terms, a gap I address in this paper. I draw together al-Bāqillānī’s writings from two key genres in which he exerted influence—the doctrine of Qurʾānic inimitability and legal theory—in order to describe and analyze his explanation of what muḥkam and mutashābih mean. For al-Bāqillānī, the whole Qurʾān and many (perhaps all) human-authored utterances are muḥkam, which he takes to mean clear and internally consistent. Many utterances are also mutashābih, meaning multivalent, expressing more than one meaning at once. By redefining key terms in this way, al-Bāqillānī builds a semantic field to describe language as systematic and wholly interpretable. This tactic in turn helps him establish language as a reliable and stable means of communicating law and theology. This paper contextualizes these positions and argues that al-Bāqillānī’s reframing of Qurʾānic terms constitutes an important contribution to Islamic discourse on interpretability.

Maghrebian authors such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Mouloud Mammeri, Rachid Boujedra and Mahi Binebine have used fictional narratives to expose racism in Maghrebian society. Images of Blacks in Maghrebian literature have changed over time. Early depictions of Blacks as slaves, concubines, eunuchs and domestic servants in Ben Jelloun’s, Mammeri’s and Boujedra’s writings occurred at a time when Black communities of ex-slaves remained absent from political and academic discourses. As the population of sub-Saharan African migrants in the Maghreb continues to grow, emerging literature addresses the mounting racism and escalating hate crimes against Blacks. The texts I discuss include Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Moha le Fou, Moha le Sage (1978), La Prière de l’absent (1981) l'Écrivain Public (1983), Sand Child (1985), Rachid Boujedra’s L’Insolation (1972), Mouloud Mammeri’s La Traversée (1982) and Mahi Binebine’s Le Sommeil de l'esclave (1992) and Cannibales (1999). Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Mary Louise Pratt, and Valerie Smith I argue that a common feature of these authors’ narratives is the spatialization of their Black characters’ experience in a way that is reflective of Blacks' curtailed agency. Blacks’ passive rather than active relation to space derives from their marginalization in Maghrebian society. They are positioned in a space where, in the words of Mary Louise Pratt, the colonizers and colonized exist in “radically asymmetrical relations of power.” Living on the fringes of everyday life, Blacks occupy gray areas that are ambivalent and less enabling. Such spaces are also fraught with potential violence and degeneration. This resonates with Valerie Smith’ idea that the “gray area” is a “realm of danger and terror," associated with death and violence. All these novels depict Black spaces as associated either with the desire for self-destruction or the violent destruction of others.

If dominant theories about the evolution of national literatures tend to rely on European historical models, according to which vernacular literary forms emerged from a Latin ecumenical tradition, how might the comparative study of vernacular literatures emerging from an Arabic liturgical tradition modify prevailing theoretical models? This paper considers several possibilities for reframing the comparative study of vernacular literatures from within an Arabic scriptural and liturgical context, both within and beyond the Middle East. It explores the political and cultural legacy of Arabic as a sacralized language, underscoring its changing symbolic value across the twentieth century in West African, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern contexts. In considering these issues, the paper considers the extent to which a common linguistic situation—the preservation of the Arabic language (and script) as a sacred, religious medium, and the politicization of Arabic during the late colonial period—influenced the evolution of literatures in three national cases with distinct imperial legacies: Senegal, controlled by the French, Indonesia by the Dutch, and Egypt by the Ottoman Empire and subsequently by the British Empire. Engaging with Arabic as a changing cultural symbol, as one choice among many for post-colonial writing across several regions, this paper examines how the transnational presence of Arabic illuminates the formation of national and postcolonial literatures in ways that contrast with the formation of vernacular, European literatures evolving from a Latin ecumenical context. The paper begins by tracing how the Arabic language became (in the 19th and early 20th century) a subject of political controversy across three regions and within different Imperial territories, with varying effects on the regional sustainment of the Arabic script, on the fate of local vernaculars, and on the parameters of Arabic language use in public and official domains. After tracing these developments, the paper focuses on three writers who emerged as influential literary and religious figures within their respective regional contexts (Bamba, Hamka, Qutb), writers who responded to perceived imperial coercions with a common call or tendency, a call to uphold liturgical Arabic as a shared symbol of transregional or transnational Islamic solidarity. Their writing, however, also exhibits an enduring tension between the privileging of Arabic as a liturgical language of universal vocation and the necessity to accommodate ethnic and vernacular differences within a transregional ecumene.

The current debate surrounding the language of instruction in Morocco is symptomatic of the emergence of neoliberal discourses, which Shankar and Cavanaugh (2012) argue intertwine linguistic forms with their economic value, characteristic of late modern society. This study examines overt language attitudes of Moroccan university students, where the unequal distribution of linguistic resources generates two speech communities with diverging attitudinal profiles. Language has become a commodifiable object within the global market economy, the control of which shapes spaces of participation, dominance, and marginalization (Heller, 2010; Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson, 2010; Urciuoli and LaDousa, 2013). This theoretical framework conceptualizes the role of language as a commodity that promotes socioeconomic asymmetries in the global economy. In light of the emergence of the trope of profit (Duchêne and Heller 2012), I argue that the global market economy has promoted new forms of linguistic hegemony, which bifurcates the Moroccan educational domain into two speech communities. This paper examines French-taught and Standard Arabic-taught groups, for which language of instruction emerges a marker of socioeconomic class membership and predicts respondents’ overt language attitudes. Previous research has not investigated the relationship between language of instruction and speakers’ language attitudes. The results of an overt language attitudes questionnaire, administered in Morocco in 2007 and 2008 to 464 university students, show that the trope of profit facilitates an instrumental adoption of French and English in the educational domain by French-taught respondents, in lieu of local languages. In spite of the socioeconomic mobility attached to the acquisition of French and English, Standard Arabic-taught respondents contest this trope, as maintaining Standard Arabic as a language of instruction promotes local identity and culture. The results of this study are essential to unpack the growing influence of neoliberal discourse on post-colonial countries, whose policies oscillate between asserting local identity through local languages and promoting participation within the global market economy.