Journal of Arabic Language & Literature

Abstract Geographical writings and travelogues constitute invaluable repositories of knowledge regarding the ancient world, offering contemporary scholars profound insights into the intellectual paradigms, discursive practices, rituals, and belief systems of diverse civilizations. The genre of travel writing and human geography emerged around the third century AH (After Hijra) and reached its zenith during the fourth century AH. Within these texts, authors frequently—though with varying degrees of emphasis—make explicit references to linguistic phenomena. As an emerging subfield, geographical linguistics (geolinguistics) seeks to scrutinize these historical texts to reconstruct a comprehensive mapping of linguistic and dialectal varieties, alongside their spatial distribution across various regions. By extracting geolinguistic components from Arabic travelogues spanning the third to eighth centuries AH and analyzing the compiled linguistic data, this study underscores the cultural, political, and socio-economic significance of these historical records for contemporary researchers.Given the paucity of dedicated, standalone treatises on the linguistic dynamics within post-Islamic conquests, historical travelogues serve as authoritative and primary source materials. They effectively demonstrate the extent of linguistic, religious, and political hegemony exerted by various groups or ruling dynasties, particularly Islamic empires, across disparate territories—thereby necessitating this line of inquiry. The primary objective of this study is to examine the diachronic development of the linguistic elements and interrelationships reflected in travelogues from the third to ninth centuries AH. The analysis reveals that multilingualism, regional dialectal features, the geographical distribution of languages and vernaculars, comparative lexical structures, subjective aesthetic evaluations of certain dialects, and the etymological origins of toponyms and anthroponyms constitute the predominant linguistic themes embedded in these narratives. Ultimately, each of these thematic elements unravels complex social, religious, historical, and geopolitical dynamics inherent to the diverse territories of the Islamic world.    

Abstract Literature is an important context for the study of geography, especially in the tradition of humanistic cultural geography, because feelings of belonging, distance, migration, and return are all spatial experiences that are embodied in literary narratives. Travelogues, memoirs of migration, and novels of place are prominent examples of the connection between space and culture; works in which place is not a neutral background, but an active factor in shaping human experience. Meanwhile, contemporary urban novels show space beyond a purely narrative background and transform it into an active element in shaping meaning, lived experience, and emotion. Contemporary urban novels portray space as more than a merely narrative backdrop; rather, they transform it into an active element in the construction of meaning, lived experience, and emotion. The novel Matar ‘Ala Baghdad by the Egyptian journalist and novelist Hala al-Badri represents a prominent example of the modern Arabic urban novel, in which Baghdad is depicted as a multilayered network of spatial environments.This study employs a descriptive-analytical method grounded in the humanistic cultural geography approach and informed by Joël Bonnemasion’s spatial framework to examine three interconnected levels of space: objective space, lived space, and cultural-symbolic space. These spatial dimensions are explored through the major urban settings of Baghdad as represented in the narrative. The analysis first addresses Baghdad as a city of civilization and cultural memory, then investigates its old streets, and finally examines its markets and cafés as key public spaces shaping urban experience. The findings reveal that al-Badri consciously foregrounds public urban spaces- particularly streets and markets- to articulate their physical, experiential, and symbolic dimensions, thereby transforming objective spaces into lived places imbued with cultural meaning. However, some spaces, notably cafés, display limited spatial construction even at the objective level and fail to achieve a fully developed presence within the narrative. Overall, the study demonstrates that through its multilayered spatial representation, the novel highlights the crucial role of public spaces in the production of meaning, collective memory, and urban identity within contemporary Arabic fiction.
 
 
 

Abstract Meaning in literary texts emerges beyond the explicit level of words, manifesting instead within latent layers of imagery, action, and collective memory. Accessing such meaning therefore necessitates an analytical framework capable of tracing the gradual unfolding of signification across successive layers. In this regard, Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic system—with its triadic distinction of icon, index, and symbol, corresponding to the phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness—provides a robust conceptual model for examining the dynamics of meaning. Employing a descriptive-analytical method, the present study examines the internal mechanisms of signification in the Mu‘allaqa of Imru’ al-Qais, a foundational ode of the pre-Islamic Arabic poetic tradition that offers fertile ground for exploring the evolution of meaning. Guided by Peirce’s three-level model, the study analyzes linguistic elements, narrative shifts, and transformations of imagery in order to elucidate how meaning is generated and progressively transformed within the poem’s structure, while also clarifying the relation between lived experience and the represented world. To achieve this aim, six central semantic categories were extracted from the text, and seventy-seven signs were classified and interpreted across the three semiotic levels. The findings indicate that icons foreground sensory experience, indices articulate the dialectical relation between action and meaning, and symbols stabilize signification within cultural-historical horizons. Consequently, the Mu‘allaqa’s multilayered structure, through a semiotic continuum, enters a system grounded in human action and meaning-making within a social context. This process generates collective reflections that transcend individual experience, ultimately culminating in an ontological reflection on impermanence and the passage of time.
 
 

Abstract Imagology constitutes a significant subfield of comparative literature that investigates the representation of one nation or culture within the literary discourse of another. Travelogues, in particular, provide a rich source for imagological inquiry due to their inclusion of diverse and multifaceted cultural images. A notable example in Arabic literature is Ibn Hawqal’s Surat al-Ard, which offers detailed depictions of various regions of Iran during the fourth century AH (tenth century CE). This study analyzes and evaluates the positive and negative images of Iranian society constructed in Surat al-Ard, with particular attention to cultural and social indicators. Adopting a content analysis approach, the research identifies and categorizes cultural concepts embedded in the text. These images are subsequently classified as positive or negative according to linguistic markers and broader textual context. Statistical analysis is then employed to determine the frequency of each cultural category and to examine the underlying factors shaping their representation. The findings reveal that the most prominent positive cultural images are associated with the regions of Fars, Transoxiana, Jibal, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Arran, Kerman and Sistan, Daylam and Tabaristan, Khorasan, and Khuzestan. Overall, 90% of the images are positive and 10% negative, reflecting Ibn Hawqal’s predominantly favorable perspective toward Iranian culture and society in the fourth century AH. This positive orientation can be attributed to the cultural and societal affinities between Iranian society and Ibn Hawqal’s conception of an ideal society, as well as his comparative evaluation of Iranians in relation to other ethnic groups. Certain positive images also derive from inherited or stereotypical representations adopted from earlier sources. The most salient socio-cultural images in the text pertain to ethnic traits, moral characteristics, social structures, rituals, beliefs, language, clothing, and cultural figures.
 

Abstract Complimenting constitutes a pivotal speech act whose proficient execution is central to facilitating successful interpersonal communication. The pragmatic efficacy of this speech act extends beyond lexical selection, being fundamentally contingent upon extralinguistic variables such as cultural and pragmatic norms, situational contexts, interlocutors' socio-relational status, and communicative objectives. Adopting a descriptive-analytical framework, the present study examines the speech act of complimenting by extracting and analyzing empirical data from 16 Arabic and Persian narrative texts through the lens of Hymes’ SPEAKING model. This investigation aims to elucidate the operational mechanisms of compliments in Arabic and Persian, thereby underscoring the critical role of pragmatic and cultural factors in the communicative process.The findings reveal that compliments in both languages predominate within informal contexts. Notably, a convergence of data across various cohorts of Persian interlocutors—contrasted with the marked variance observed in the Arabic data—indicates that social status and social distance exert a negligible influence on the speech act of complimenting in Persian, whereas they remain highly determinative in Arabic. Furthermore, the high frequency of praise as a primary communicative function, coupled with the subtle presence of underlying negative intentions, points to deep-seated cultural commonalities between the two speech communities. Regarding emotional posture, an admiring tone was most prevalent in Persian, whereas a joyful tone predominated in Arabic. Discourse rules in both languages favor explicit compliments, with personal character and physical appearance emerging as the most frequent thematic topics. Finally, from a morphosyntactic perspective, adjectival constructions represent the primary linguistic strategy for compliment formulation in both languages, with religious concepts extensively modulating the enactment of this speech act across both cohorts.
 

Abstract In the social criticism of narrative works, the literary text is regarded as a site for the representation and reproduction of power relations, class structures, ideologies, and collective actions. In this context, Claude Duchet’s theory, through its focus on textual structure, extracts social dynamics embedded within the narrative and uncovers sociological behaviors and patterns at the core of the literary work. In his novel Umm Sa‘d (1969), Ghassan Kanafani, as a committed writer drawing upon his lived experience of occupation and exile as well as an ideological perspective, constructs a symbolic figure of the Palestinian mother, whose suffering, resilience, and political consciousness emerge within the hardships of the camp. Through a polyphonic and multi-layered narrative structure, the novel establishes a dialectical relationship between literary form and socio-political conditions, with character development and plot progression advancing in parallel with the gradual process of societal consciousness-raising. By virtue of this reciprocal interaction between text and society, Kanafani provides a realistic and critical representation of Palestinian resistance, transforming literature into a vehicle for exposing structural oppression and consolidating collective identity under occupation.The present study employs a qualitative descriptive-analytical method grounded in Claude Duchet’s theory, specifically its three components: socio-text, referential society, and sociogram. Bibliographic data from the entire novel Umm Sa‘d were extracted through systematic reading and subsequently analyzed according to the three indicators of Duchet’s theory. The results indicate that the referential society (occupation, displacement, and repression in Palestine) receives an ideological representation within the socio-text, which is organized around resistance—manifested through motherhood, sacrifice, suffering, and hope—while the sociogram objectifies this dialectical link. Therefore, resistance in the novel Umm Sa‘d constitutes a socio-cultural and historical structure rather than an individual or emotional act.