In 610, an illiterate merchant in the Arabian town of Mecca announced that the Angel Gabriel had appeared to him in a cave above the city, revealing the word of God. This was the same Gabriel who had appeared for Daniel in the holy book of the Jews, and before the Virgin Mary in the holy book of the Christians. Today, we can name the recipient of this revelation – Muhammad – but not picture him.^§MS2.2.1b This is just one moment in a long tradition that, since the invention of writing, would prioritize speech and text over image.

Muhammad began to preach of his revelations, and his followers memorized what he said. After his death in 632, his words were recorded in writing and collected into the 114 chapters of a book titled the Qur’an, or “recitation.” A definitive text of the Qur’an had been created by about 650.⁵ Now, text was prioritized over speech, and its sources in speech subsumed as if text were a mere transliteration of speech – another moment in another long tradition.

After intense conflicts with local powers who still followed the older gods, the armies of Muhammad finally assumed control of the cities of Mecca and Medina in 630. Following the death of the prophet, Arabic-speaking Muslims rapidly conquered Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Syria. In 762 the seat of power moved to Baghdad and the Abbasid caliphs assumed control. The city became the center of an Islamic empire that lasted nearly 500 years and that at the height of its powers spanned from today’s Spain to India and beyond, far larger than the empires of the Greeks, Romans, or Byzantines before.

Following the conquest of so many lands, the speech of the formerly nomadic Bedouin became the text of empire. Arabic split into two forms, a high form of “eloquent, correct” speech, and a low variety, a “language of the people.”⁶ The high form was the lingua franca of imperial government and the Qur’an. The differences between these forms of speaking and writing delineated essential inequalities in the framework of empire.

Two hundred and something years before Ibn Jinnî,^§MS3.0a an encounter with the higher form of the language by another non-native speaker, Sîbawayh (750–793), became a reason for the writing of the first Arabic grammar, the Kitâb Sîbawayhi, or the “Book of Sîbawayh.” Sîbawayh was a Persian who had come to Baghdad to study Islamic law.

In a celebrated incident, he joined a public debate in the court of a prominent vizier. The question for discussion was the correct construction of a sentence about whether a hornet’s sting was more or less painful than a scorpion’s. Sîbawayh argued that one particular construction was correct. Then four Bedouin, native speakers of Arabic, told him he was wrong.⁷ On his own measure, Sîbawayh was humiliated, his social origins betrayed. So, he decided to write a grammar in order to master thoroughly a textual form beyond his original station in life.

This, legend has it, was the origin of the Kitâb Sîbawayhi. After the Qur’an, this was the first scholarly book to be written in Arabic, and probably the first work in Arabic to be called a “book.” As Arabic was the language chosen by God for his revelation to Muhammad, it was the task of the grammarian to analyze and describe its perfect forms. This Sîbawayh did via structural analysis of speech – its phonology, morphology, and syntax. He made into an explicit science the system in its highest, most authentic, and original practice, the speech of Muhammad and the Bedouin.

Sîbawayh introduces a concept of meaning, ma‘nâ, into his grammar, where meaning is established by the interconnection of the various elements of speech in its expression – its structure. The purpose of his grammar then is to establish compliance with the rules of correct speech, as reflected in its structurally determined rules. And behind this, there was authority that demands compliance – to the correct forms of expression established by an imperial ruling class and to the textual forms of divine revelation in the Qur’an and its practices of recitation.

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⁵ Jonathan Owens, 1990, Early Arabic Grammatical Theory: Heterogeneity and Standardization, Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins, pp. 5–6.

⁶ Kees Versteegh, 1997, The Arabic Linguistic Tradition, London, UK: Routledge, p. 2; M.G. Carter, 2004, Sibawayhi, New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, pp. 29–33.

⁷ Kees Versteegh, 1997, The Arabic Linguistic Tradition, London, UK: Routledge, p. 37; M.G. Carter, 2004, Sibawayhi, New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, pp. 56–57, 61–63, 12–15.

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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. 262–263. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Sîbawayh’s "Kitâb" (Grammar) §MS3a