Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1013) was a preeminent scholar and an influential participant in a diverse range of Islamic discourses. His texts are often studied within the context of individual disciplines, but I argue that a more comprehensive reading of his work uncovers significant connections between his various texts. This paper explores a major site of such interdisciplinary thinking through looking at al-Bāqillānī’s discussions of bayān in his writings on legal theory and the inimitability of the Qurʾān. In his book of legal theory entitled al-Taqrīb wa-l-irshād fī uṣūl al-fiqh, al-Bāqillānī defines bayān as being equivalent to dalīl (indicant). This definition of bayān is broad enough to include any meaningful utterance—not only those that clarify other opaque utterances, as many scholars including al-Shāfiʿī claimed. Al-Bāqillānī employs his broad definition of bayān to theorize a system of language where all utterances clarify meanings and are understandable according to the same rules. Thus, whereas for some exegetes, Q 3:7 excludes some verses from human understanding, for al-Bāqillānī all sound utterances are clear, both in human and divine speech. Al-Bāqillānī also expounds on the idea of bayān in an important but often overlooked part of his Kitāb Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān in which he draws a distinction between rhetorical features that contribute to the Qurʾān’s miraculous inimitability as compared to those that do not. Bayān is one of the categories of textual features where al-Bāqillānī says iʿjāz is found. Building on his assertion that the entire Qurʾān is bayān, here too al-Bāqillānī argues that the Qurʾān is clear, understandable, and entirely interpretable by humans. In both discourses, al-Bāqillānī theorizes bayān in ways that support his larger scholarly goal of synthesizing Islamic disciplines to create a consistent Islamic system of thought. By using the concept of bayān to assert the clarity of the whole Qurʾān, al-Bāqillānī sets Islamic exegetical discourses on solid footing. Theorizing revealed language as understandable to humans renders scriptural interpretation valid. This paper brings to light al-Bāqillānī’s contribution to developing conceptions of bayān, taking into account his adaptation of earlier definitions and the elements of his thought on bayān adopted by his successors, including ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī. By way of conclusion, I offer some thoughts on bayān’s prominent role in medieval discussions of Qurʾānic style and Islamic legal theory as well as al-Bāqillānī’s role in furthering the development of bayān as a key concept in Arabo-Islamic thought.

Most Muslim scholars and theoreticians since the time of Faḫr ad-Dīn ar-Rāzī, pace Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim, shared one unified theory of tropicality. The earlier views, however, seem to be quite diverse. The later hegemony of the unified theory, together with the discursive nature of scholarly traditions in Islam, resulted in a complete distortion of earlier accounts. A good example of such distortion is the way later tradition treated ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ğurğānī's (d. 1078) Dalāʾil al-iʿğāz and Asrār al-balāġa. Rāzī, Sakkākī and Qazwīnī were responsible for giving Arabic stylistics its definitive form, but they portrayed themselves as disseminators and organizers of the material that Ğurğānī left, and commentators upon its details. Nevertheless, they read him from the perspective of what I called the unified theory. In my paper, I argue that the veridicality-tropicality dichotomy in Ğurğānī occurs mainly at the pragmatic level. Later commentators acknowledged the pragmatic aspect, but thought of it as an external element that needs to be isolated and neutralized. This resulted in forcing some semantic or logical content upon Ğurğānī’s classifications. But, in doing so they failed to fully appreciate his project. Furthermore, I argue that by contrasting Ğurğānī’s account with later commentators’ accounts of the dichotomy, one can reach a better understanding of his whole project. He was not simply adding two new “sciences”, namely those of maʿānī and bayān, to the established “sciences” of morphology and syntax, but, he was rather, I argue, creating in Dalāʾil al-iʿğāz a framework that allows rewriting the whole Arabic syntax in terms of semantics, and in Asrār al-balāġa a framework that facilitates rewriting the whole Arabic syntax and semantics in terms of pragmatics. The science of bayān, in that sense, is the most encompassing field that was meant to replace grammar rather than to complement it. In that sense also, although Ğurğānī’s work provided later commentators with a certain framework for Arabic stylistics, he himself never adhered to this framework. His job remains unfinished.

The notion of bayān lit. ‘clarity, distinctness’ in classical Arabic-Islamic writings is, as Wolfhart Heinrichs noted, “not clear and distinct at all and in dire need of a monograph.” Although his words still largely hold true, there have been advances in the study of this term, especially with regards to the legal work of al-Shāfiʿī (Lowry, Montgomery, Vishanoff) and the literary-linguistic work of al-Jāḥiẓ (Montgomery, Skarżyńska-Bocheńska, Suleiman, Behzadi). The phrase ʿilm al-bayān ‘the science/knowledge of bayān’, however, has yet to be studied. In this paper I discuss the nature of ʿilm al-bayān as a discipline heading and explore its relation to the indigenous understanding(s) of the term bayān. I show that the phrase ʿilm al-bayān denotes two scholarly endeavors rather than one, and that each one stems from a different conception of the term bayān. The phrase ʿilm al-bayān seems to have appeared ex nihilo in the introduction to the work Dalāʾil al-iʿjāz by the literary theorist ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (5th/11th c.), and scholars have correctly taken it as a non-technical designation (Abu Deeb, Larkin). I examine how the phrase was later used in the work of al-Zamakhsharī and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (6th/12th c.), and how it was subsequently appropriated in the 7th/13th century by al-Sakkākī on one hand and Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Ibn al-Athīr on the other. For al-Sakkākī, bayān was associated with the study of imagery – a reading that is not borne out in the earlier works of al-Zamakhsharī and al-Rāzī. Unraveling this association is complicated by the fact that none of the numerous commentators in the “Sakkākian” tradition explain the specific technical meaning of the term bayān in the phrase ʿilm al-bayān; this information must be gleaned from earlier philological works. In the case of Ibn al-Athīr, textual evidence suggests a separate understanding of the term bayān in the larger ʿilm al-bayān, one pertaining to scribal writing style and conventions. Ibn al-Athīr’s version of ʿilm al-bayān triggered a flourishing of works on ʿilm al-bayān in the Arabic East which lasted well beyond the time of the Syrian al-Qazwīnī (8th/14th c.).

Among the various ideas debated in classical Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh), the concept of bayān was considered to be very controversial. Due to the ambiguity of the term bayān, discussions about its numerous definitions and applications fill many chapters in the legal theoretical texts of classical Islamic scholars. In early works on legal theory, bayān was taken to denote hermeneutical relationships between religious sources of Islamic legal rulings, i.e. the way in which Qurʾān and Sunna interact with each other in the course of deriving legal rulings from them. However, the concept of bayān developed to represent a hermeneutical hierarchy in which revelational language was classified with regard to its level of clarity. The technical terms used in this framework became the subject of detailed discussions that attempted to classify a revelational expression as being clear or unclear, as being unambiguous or polysemic, as having a plain meaning or being in need of explanation. Scholars in the field debated such issues in their quest for a systematic and internally consistent vision of Islamic law: How are such labels as ẓāhir, mujmal, mubayyan, or muʾawwal to be defined, what is their place in the hierarchy of clarity, and what does such a label mean for the legal ruling? In his work on Islamic legal theory, entitled al-Maḥṣūl fī ʿilm al-uṣūl, the polymath Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) gives an extensive answer to these questions, systematizing this hermeneutical vocabulary in the context of discussions on bayān by drawing on the works of his predecessors in the fields of legal theory (e.g. Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī), rhetoric (ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī), and logic (Ibn Sīnā). In this systematization, he brings together the different terminologies that denote several states of clarity, unclarity, and polysemy in these disciplines, thereby merging several labeling systems into one. This paper aims to present Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s innovative new systematization of hermeneutical vocabulary, analyze the different strata and disciplines on which this systematization is built, and explore the impact it had on subsequent works within the context of bayān.