رسالة البلاغة للمبرّد: دراسة وتحليل

The Azd lineage has never ceased to furnish the Arabic tradition with works of rare value and to fill the storehouse of heritage with its finest materials, in an unbroken succession across the generations. Among the earliest fruits of that noble stock is al-Mubarrad, the crowned master of Arabic, to whom the leadership of the Basran school passed. Although he is remembered as the last of the Basran masters — deeply influenced by Sībawayh and al-Māzinī, and author of al-Muqtaḍab — his contributions to rhetoric and criticism were considerable, the more so given that he studied under al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255 AH) and was a contemporary of Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276 AH). His best-known rhetorical contribution is his treatment of simile: he was the first to devote an independent chapter to it, in al-Kāmil, gathering there valuable texts on which later scholars of rhetoric and exegesis drew. This study examines his Risālat al-Balāghah, in which he defines the term balāghah and weighs the eloquence of poetry against that of prose, of the Holy Qurʾan and of the Prophetic hadith.