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When rhetoric and poetry were counted as logic: the Arabic Organon and al-Jāḥiẓ on eloquence

Zainab Kadhim Contributor
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Rhetoric & persuasionGreek & RomanIslamicAristotelianismFalsafaAl-FarabiAl-JahizIbn RushdIbn Sina#al-farabi#arabic-rhetoric#bayan#long-organon
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I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street. People come in for poetry far more often than for logic, and they are surprised when I tell them that for centuries the two were shelved together.

In the Arabic tradition, following late-antique practice, Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics were counted as part of the logical corpus, the Organon. Al-Fārābī arranged the arts of argument by the kind of assent they produce: demonstration yields certainty; dialectic, rhetoric and poetry produce weaker or different kinds of assent, poetry working through imaginative evocation rather than belief. Ibn Rushd later wrote commentaries on both books.

Al-Jāḥiẓ comes from a different direction. His great book on eloquence, al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn, grows out of Arabic speech itself: sermons, proverbs, the speech of Bedouin and preachers. Bayān is clarity, making something manifest, and for him eloquence is a matter of fitting speech to listener and occasion.

What interests me is what follows from shelving rhetoric with logic. It suggests persuasion is not the enemy of reasoning but one of its forms, judged by its own standard. That is closer to Aristotle than to Plato's Gorgias. Does anyone know how this looked to readers at the time? And did it change how poetry was read?

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5 replies

  1. Layla Haddad

    Fellow

    It did change how poetry was read, at least among the philosophers. Ibn Sina developed the idea that poetry works by takhyīl, producing an imaginative response, rather than by producing belief. A poem can move you without your assenting to anything it says. That is a remarkably modern idea, and it lets the philosophers explain why a poem can be "false" and still be good, which the poets themselves knew perfectly well.

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  2. Mona Fathy

    Contributor

    From the manuscript side: the "long Organon" with Rhetoric and Poetics at the end was not an Arabic invention. It goes back to the late-antique commentators in Alexandria, and the Arabic scholars inherited the arrangement with the texts. I catalogue manuscripts in that city, and I like to think the shelf order travelled from here to Baghdad and back.

  3. Youssef Benali

    Fellow

    And then there is Ibn Rushd struggling with the Poetics, which Borges turned into a story, "Averroes' Search": the philosopher trying to understand what "tragedy" and "comedy" could mean with no theatre in front of him. It is fiction, but it captures the problem of reading a book about a craft you have never seen practised. I teach it to my history students in Fes as a lesson in how translation shapes thought.

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  4. Rafael Moreno Gálvez

    Contributor

    And the story continues in my city's neighbourhood. Ibn Rushd's commentary on the Poetics was translated into Latin in Toledo in the thirteenth century, and for a long time that was how Latin readers met the Poetics at all. So medieval Europe read Aristotle on poetry through an Andalusian philosopher who had never seen a Greek play. Tourists at the Mezquita love this once I explain it.

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  5. Zainab Kadhim

    Contributor

    Thank you all. Layla's point about takhyīl answers my second question beautifully: once poetry is "logic" of the imaginative kind, you can praise a poem without believing it. And Youssef and Rafael have given me two stories I'll tell customers. The Borges is already on my shelf, two shelves from al-Jāḥiẓ, which now feels right.

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