This book is a comprehensive study of the Kitāb of Sībawayhi (d. 180/796), undoubtedly the most authoritative work in the long history of Arabic grammar. It carefully examines the methodological concepts and methods that underline Sībawayhi’s analysis of Arabic and the way in which these methods evolved at the hands of later grammarians. Placing the Kitāb within the context of early Arabic philological activity, this book analyzes a wide range of its passages and demonstrates the coherency of its author’s system of grammatical analysis and the interrelatedness of his analytical tools and notions. In particular, Sībawayhi’s huge influence on the overall Arabic grammatical tradition is highlighted throughout the book. This notwithstanding, it is argued that most later grammarians largely neglect the semantic dimension which vividly features in Sībawayhi’s approach to language as a social behavior and his reconstruction of the internal thinking of the speaker and the listener.

This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.

Arabic is one of the world's largest languages, spoken natively by nearly 300 million people. By strength of numbers alone Arabic is one of our most important languages, studied by scholars across many different academic fields and cultural settings. It is, however, a complex language rooted in its own tradition of scholarship, constituted of varieties each imbued with unique cultural values and characteristic linguistic properties. Understanding its linguistics holistically is therefore a challenge. The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics is a comprehensive, one-volume guide that deals with all major research domains which have been developed within Arabic linguistics. Chapters are written by leading experts in the field, who both present state-of-the-art overviews and develop their own critical perspectives. The Handbook begins with Arabic in its Semitic setting and ends with the modern dialects; it ranges across the traditional--the classical Arabic grammatical and lexicographical traditions--to the contemporary--Arabic sociolinguistics, Creole varieties and codeswitching, psycholinguistics, and Arabic as a second language - while situating Arabic within current phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexicological theory. An essential reference work for anyone working within Arabic linguistics, the book brings together different approaches and scholarly traditions, and provides analysis of current trends and directions for future research.

The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS) is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes a wide variety of scholarly research on all facets of Islam and the Muslim world: anthropology, economics, history, philosophy and metaphysics, politics, psychology, religious law, and traditional Islam. Submissions are subject to a blind peer review process.

The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Sociolinguistics comprises 22 chapters encompassing various aspects in the study of Arabic dialects within their sociolinguistic context. This is a novel volume, which not only includes the traditional topics in variationist sociolinguistics, but also links the sociolinguistic enterprise to the history of Arabic and to applications of sociolinguistics beyond the theoretical treatment of variation. Newly formed trends, with an eye to future research, form the backbone of this volume. With contributions from an international pool of researchers, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of Arabic sociolinguistics, as well as to linguists interested in a concise, rounded view of the field.

This book explores the long history of the Arabic language, from pre-Islamic Arabic via the Classical era of the Arabic grammarians up to the present day. While most traditional accounts have been dominated by a linear understanding of the development of Arabic, this book instead advocates a multiple pathways approach to Arabic language history. Arabic has multifarious sources: its relations to other Semitic languages, an old epigraphic and papyrological tradition, a vibrant and linguistically original classical Arabic linguistic tradition, and a widely dispersed array of contemporary spoken varieties. These diverse sources present a challenge to and an opportunity for defining a holistic but not necessarily linear Arabic language history. The geographical breadth and chronological depth of Arabic make it a fertile ground for a critical appraisal and application of perspectives from a range of subdisciplines including sociolinguistics, typology, grammaticalization, and corpus linguistics. Jonathan Owens draws on these approaches to investigate more than 20 individual case studies that cover more than 1500 years of documented and reconstructed history: the results demonstrate that Arabic is a far more complex historical object than traditional accounts have assumed. This complexity is further explored in a comparison of the historical morphology of three languages that can be compared over roughly the same period (500 AD-2022 AD): Icelandic, English, and Arabic. Icelandic and English are diametrically opposed on a parameter of linearity. Icelandic is effectively alinear: the morphology of the earliest Icelandic writings is the morphology of today. English is linear, having undergone a drastic change in morphology from its Old English stage to the Middle English period. Arabic is shown to be alinear in many important respects, but multilinear in others, with different sorts of linguistic changes being spread across many individual historical speech communities.

The Arabic grammatical tradition is remarkable for having organized a large amount of descriptive material within a sophisticated formal framework. The present study seeks to elucidate the early development of this system from a theory-internal perspective; it is mainly concerned with the development of the syntactic theory as a formal object, as system of rules. This endeavor is constituted of four sub-goals: a description of early developments, their periodization, their relation to the traditional account in terms of the Basran and Kufan schools, and their relation to modern linguistic theory.

The civilisation of medieval Muslim Spain is perhaps the most brilliant and prosperous of its age and has been essential to the direction which civilisation in medieval Europe took. This volume is the first ever in any language to deal in a really comprehensive manner with all major aspects of Islamic civilisation in medieval Spain.

From Sībawayhi to ʾAḥmad Ḥasan al-Zayyāt: New Angles on the Arabic Linguistic Tradition, a volume edited by Beata Sheyhatovitch and Almog Kasher, brings together nine articles written by leading scholars of the Arabic linguistic tradition. These articles trace the development of the tradition, from Sībawayhi to modern Arabic language academies. The authors shed light on lesser-known aspects of this tradition, such as little-investigated grammatical structures, and problematic spots of the ʿamal theory and the grammatical terminology. They explore the discipline’s relations with stylistics and logic, the Arab grammarians’ influence on Jewish Bible exegesis, and modern applications of medieval Arabic grammatical theory. This volume showcases the richness of the medieval Arabic linguistic literature and the diversity of ideas found within it.

There is no doubt that we are far away from the self-evident concepts of Sirius binary system (Samawaati wal-Arz), natural magnetism (Nuurun Alaa Nuur), upright rectangular universe (end of proof), immovable hexagonal world (asterisk), appearing pentagonal earth (star operator), three ascending stairs, Upright-West region of the appointed kaba, straight Middle-East region of Eartha 3D, four Galilean moons, visual binaries, four basic forces, four cardinal directions, nine planets as nine eye opening evidences, equal and opposite stages of journey of the manifested signs and two clear proofs of natural magnetic directions, and the like due to historically prevailing learning gaps objectively in the reading materials of basic sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences spoiling sanctity of education, significance of scientific certainty, and existential import of legitimacy as well as violating first generation— natural & environmental rights, second generation—essential & fundamental rights and social & cultural rights, third generation—un-interfering & inviolable rights and four foundational solidarity rights in Islam, and uncompromising constitutional rights of our fresh generation. Publication of the ‘The War of Authenticity’ along with Significant Crucial Instances is an experimentum crucis (crucial experiment) before responsible chairs, legitimate authorities, religious scholars, scientists, philosophers, astronomers, astrophysicists, so-called mystics, sufis, intelligent bureaus, crime detectives, diplomats, lawyers, judges, writers, publishers, journalists, media persons, political leaders, so-called imams, social reformers, and mankind in general with a view to manifest the existential imports of the searched out “equal and opposite” findings of an illiterate Indian Banii-Israa-iil (an ordinary Indian Muslim) in each and every aspect of human persons living in societies as well as three core normative teachings of Bhagvat Gita, namely, (1) do what is right, (2) choose what is good, and (3) sticking to what is truth. Failure or success to recognize and confirm the searched out “equal and opposite” findings of an ordinary Hindustani will provide significant crucial instances on the basis of which we can distinguish possessors of balanced good sense (innate idea of Rene Descartes) from cursed human persons of Peter Singer (tabula rasa of John Locke) removing all doubts.