Saj'

Saj‘ (Arabic: سجع) is a form of rhymed prose described as the oldest form of artistic speech in Arabic, appearing in pre-Islamic Arabia.^[1] Saj' was also the dominant artistic speech in Abyssinia, both in the ecclesiastical poetry in Ge'ez and Old Amharic folk songs.^[2] A single clause or phrase in saj' is can be called a sajʿah (pl. sajʿāt), or a faṣl (fuṣūl), or a fiqrah (pl. fiqar), or a qarīnah (pl. qarāʾin).^[3]

Saj' has received its name because of its evenness or monotony, or from a fancied resemblance between its rhythm and the cooing of a dove. Characterized by a kind of rhythm as well as rhyme, it can engender either a highly artificial or a powerfully resonant style. Saj' is used in sacred literature, including the majority of the Quran,^[4]^[5] and in secular literature, as in the One Thousand and One Nights. In the literary and artistic history of Arabic, saj' predates the use of meter.^[6]

Saj' is also used in Persian literature, in works such as Saadi's partly prose, partly verse, book the Golestān, written in 1258 CE.

Description

In English, Saj' is commonly just translated as "rhymed prose", but as a form of writing, involved additional rules (rarely explicated by Arab critics) beyond being that prose which rhymes.^[1] Traditionally, saj' has been defined as prose (nathr, manthūr) divided into phrases or clauses, each of which end in a common rhyme. The basis of saj' prosody is formed by the word as opposed to the syllable. As such, a mistaken or misunderstood way to describe saj' would be to try to describe it by a typical number of syllables per clause, as opposed to a typical number of words per clause.^[7] Saj', and while it does not have meter, it has some metrical qualities. The length of one clause (sajʿah) is equal or nearly equal in length to its partner clause, a property that has been called "balance" (iʿtidāl), and the number of words in a clause closely corresponds to its number of syntagmatic stresses (beats). Al-Bāqillānī defends the principle of balance in saj' against his interlocutors in the following manner:^[8]

One part of what they call sajʿ has segment endings close to each other and segment cuts near each other. The other part is stretched so that its segments can be twice as long as the preceding ones and a segment can return to the original measure (wazn) only after plenty of words. Such sajʿ is not good and does not deserve to be praised. Someone might say: "When the balanced sajʿ has been stated, it ceases to be sajʿ at all. The speaker is not obliged to make all his speech sajʿ. He can say something in sajʿ, then turn away from it, and then return to it once more." Our reply is: "When one of the hemistichs of a bayt is different from the other, it leads to disorder and imbalance. And it is exactly the same, when one of the hemistichs (miṣrāʿ) of a sajʿ utterance becomes disorganized and dissimilar to the other, as it also leads to imbalance." We have shown that the Arabs blame any sajʿ which deviates from the balance of parts (ajzāʾ) so that some of its hemistichs are made of two words, and others of many words; they consider this weakness not eloquence.

Another common feature of saj' writing, also found in the Quran, is the presence of an introductory formula to the rest of the text that does not itself follow the ordinary structure of saj'. The sajʿāt proper begin after the introductory phrase.^[9] In terms of length, Ibn al-Athir distinguished between short saj', where each clause has between two and ten words, with long saj', where each clause has eleven or more words, without any set limit. Ibn al-Athir produces an example containing nineteen words per clause (Quran 8:43–44). Zakariya al-Qazwini says that there are short, middle, and long forms of saj', but without specifying their boundaries, although unlike Ibn al-Athir, he does propose a limit to the number of words in long saj' (nineteen). For Al-Qalqashandi, since the Quran represented the height of literary elegance, he recommended against composing saj' any longer than nineteen words, which is the longest example of saj' found in the Quran. Medieval critics also typically preferred shorter versions of saj'.^[10] Devin J. Stewart offers the following definition of saj':^[11]

Sajʿ, though generally considered a sub-category of prose (nathr), is a type of composition distinct from both free prose (nathr mursal) and syllabic verse (naẓm). It consists of rhyming phrases termed sajaʿāt (sing sajʿah). The rules governing the rhyme in sajʿ are slightly different from those governing the rhyme in the qaṣīdah, the most noticeable difference being that the rhyme-words in sajʿ generally end in sukūn. Sajʿ conforms to an accentual meter: each sajʿah tends to have the same number of word-accents as its partner sajʿahs. Therefore, the fundamental unit of sajʿ prosody is the word, lafẓah (pl. Iafaẓāt), and not the syllable or the tafʿīlah.

In the Quran

Medieval Arabic critics debated the presence of saj' in the Quran, although the majority believed that the Quran contained a significant amount of saj'.^[12] For Ibn Sinān al-Khafājī, the mode of Arabic in the Quran was consistent with existing custom and usage. On the other hand, those concerned with the doctrine of Quranic inimitability believed that saying saj' could be found in the Quran would muddy the distinction between the speech of God and that of humans. For example, Al-Baqillani (d. 1013 AD) in a work of his entitled Iʿjaz al-Qurʾān ("The Inimitability of the Quran"), went to great lengths to dispute that any of the Quran could be described as saj'. For some, the Quran was not saj' per se, although it was similar to saj'. Others argued that one should withhold from referring to the Quran as saj' merely out of respect for the Quran. Some proponents of the presence of saj' in the Quran solved this problem by creating a distinction between divine and human saj'.^[13] For example, Abu Hilal al-Askari argued:^[14]

Qur'anic discourse which assumes the form of sajʿ and izdiwāj is contrary to human discourse which assumes this form in its ability to convey the meaning, its clarity of expression, its sweetness and musicality.

In effect, al-Askari argued that unlike human saj', the Quran applies saj' and achieves the greatest possible elegance and meaning, even as it took on the literary limitations and formal constraints of saj'. The Arab critics also associated saj', to some extent, with the perceived nonsensical manner of speech attributed to soothsayers and diviners, which could not be associated with God or Muhammad. The hadith of the fetus played a role in this debate as well, since it involved a statement on the part of Muhammad, in the context of a blood money dispute between two factions, where Muhammad is either argued as condemning or not condemning the use of saj' in general after it is used by one of the participants of the dispute.^[13]

References

Citations

^ ^a ^b Stewart 1990, p. 101.
^ Brockelmann 2017, p. 23.
^ Stewart 1990, p. 113.
^ Stewart 1990, p. 108–109.
^ Deroche 2022, p. 29.
^ History of Muslim Philosophy, published by Pakistan Philosophical Congress online, Book 5, which is "A History of Muslim Philosophy: With Short Accounts of Other Disciplines and the Modern Renaissance in Muslim Lands" (1999) ISBN 817536145X
^ Stewart 1990, p. 111–116.
^ Frolov 2000, p. 115–117.
^ Stewart 1990, p. 116–118.
^ Stewart 1990, p. 118–120.
^ Stewart 1990, p. 132–133.
^ Stewart 1990, p. 133.
^ ^a ^b Stewart 1990, p. 102–107.
^ Stewart 1990, p. 106.

Sources

Brockelmann, Carl (2017). History of the Arabic Written Tradition Supplement Volume 1. Translated by Lameer, Joep. Brill.
Deroche, Francois (2022). The One and the Many: The Early History of the Quran. Yale University Press.
Frolov, Dimitry (2000). Classical Arabic Verse: History and Theory of ‘Arūḍ. Brill.
Stewart, Devin (1990). "Sajʿ in the "Qurʾān": Prosody and Structure". Journal of Arabic Literature. 21 (2): 101–139.