Grammarian and philosopher of language, Abû l-Fath ‘Uthmân Ibn Jinnî, was not a native speaker of Arabic but Greek by birth, son of Byzantine slaves. Born in Mosul in about 932, he lived for a while in Aleppo, but spent the most influential part of his life in Baghdad, where he died in 1002.

Now no less devout a Muslim than his peers, in his Kha â’i (Origins of Speech), Ibn Jinnî nevertheless asks,

Is the origin of speech [divine] revelation or [human] agreement? This is a subject that requires a lot of consideration, although there is a consensus among most speculative philosophers that the origin of speech is mutual agreement and convention rather than revelation and inspiration. On the other hand, ’Abû ‘Alî [al-Fârisî, another grammarian] – may he rest in peace! – said to me one day: “It comes from God.” He argued by referring to God’s words [in the Qur’an] “He taught Adam all names.” But this verse does not put an end to the controversy, because it may be interpreted in the sense that He enabled Adam to give names.¹

For centuries, the intellectual and cultural universe of Islam struggled to reconcile the strictly congruent sacredness of its authoritative text – the truth of God as revealed in the Qur’an^§MS3a– with the fluid, historical, and to this extent humanly contingent character of meaning.

Ibn Jinnî’s Baghdad was at the time the largest city in the world, with a population perhaps of a million people. For all its riches, this was also a city of periodic famine, disease, rioting, and intercommunal conflict. It was nevertheless a place of intellectual ferment. Under the patronage of powerful caliphs and wealthy viziers, thinkers debated and teachers taught science, philosophy, theology, and grammar.

There were numerous bookstores and libraries, including the largest library the world had yet seen, the “House of Wisdom,” with some 400,000 volumes.

This had been made possible in part by the technology of paper, invented in China^§AS1.4.7b and introduced to the Arabic-speaking world in about 800. By 1000, a large amount of previously written knowledge, mainly the Greek classics, had been translated into Arabic and could be found in the libraries of Baghdad.² It was little wonder that thinkers should also be prompted to think, not just about the meanings in their intellectual work, but also the meanings of these meanings.

Ibn Jinnî opens up what other grammarians of his time, al-Fârisî included, would consider heresy. In a tradition already lasting centuries, they had developed grammars on the premise that speech had its origins in tawqîf, “revelation,” as expressed in the ideal form of the Arabic of the prophet Muhammad and the forms of his native Bedouin speech.

Strict grammarians guided users towards idealized speech and away from error in everyday speech. A person might say somewhat ungrammatically or inelegantly, “it was Amr that Zayd hit,” and when this happened, the grammarians would remind the speaker of an underlying agent–verb–object structure in order to direct them toward correct usage.³

Rather than attribute the source of correct meaning to revelation, Ibn Jinnî argued that speech was contingent, varying according to human tawâ u, or “agreement.” Speakers have the freedom to modify their speech according to their capacities as agents of meaning. They have scope for error.

For, unless granted free will, how could people be held to account for their sins? Without free will, how could they be held responsible to correct their speech? One who speaks, brings his own meanings into being.⁴ This position was consistent with Ibn Jinnî’s rationalist “Mu‘tazilite” theology, a view that stood opposed to more orthodox Islamic understandings of the revealed meanings of God and the ideal of a reverential and obedient humankind.

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¹ Kees Versteegh, 1997, The Arabic Linguistic Tradition, London, UK: Routledge, p. 75, quoting Ibn Jinnî’s treatise on grammar, Kha â’i.

² Jack Goody, 2010, Renaissances: The One or the Many?, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–23, 103–7; Joel L. Kraemer, 1986, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival During the Buyid Age, Leiden, NL: E.J. Brill, pp. 26–27, 47–49, 55–57.

³ Kees Versteegh, 1997, The Arabic Linguistic Tradition, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 80, 77.

⁴ Ibid.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 260–261. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Ibn Jinnî’s "Kha â’i" (Origins of Speech) §MS3.0a