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Kenncode: 3=!L.vK9 

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Abstract

The polymath Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505) is not primarily known for his contributions to linguistics. Thus, it is all the more surprising that he made expertise in this field a touchstone for true Islamic scholarship. In his autobiography, he posed seven questions on letters and challenged scholars by claiming that they had to be able to answer these questions, in fact, to qualify as learned men: “[…] he who is unable to differentiate alif, bāʾ, tāʾ, thāʾ accurately proves to be too young to be equal to (these) studies. […] He who can answer the questions is one of the (learned) men. But if not, he has no advantage over the children.” (Suyūṭī, al-Taḥadduth bi-niʿmati llāh). It took more than half a century for the Cairine scholar Abū Bakr al-Shanawānī to accept this challenge and respond in an as-yet unedited work to Suyūṭī’s questions. These included, for example: Is Hamza or Alif the first letter of the alphabet? Are the letter names generic or proper names? Who actually introduced the alphanumeric abjad system? This paper examines the sources of the Arabic linguistic tradition that Shanawānī engaged with, viewed through the lens of al-Suyūṭī. By integrating paratexts into the analysis, it further investigates how the author’s responses were received between the 17th and 19th centuries. Finally, the paper argues that by asking the right questions, Suyūṭī even contributed to a new genre within the Arabic linguistic tradition: letter semiotics.

Bio

PD Dr. Berenike Metzler is an Islamic Studies researcher, currently based at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, working on a DFG-funded project on Arabic letter semiotics for the Orient Institute Beirut. She worked in the fields of Qurʾānic studies and early Islamic theology and mysticism, and her dissertation was published as Den Koran verstehen: Das Kitāb Fahm al-Qurʾān des Ḥāriṯ b. Asad al-Muḥāsibī, in 2016. Afterward, she sought to approach art historical objects of investigation from a terminological perspective and joined a DFG-funded project on text-image relationships in Islamic art at the University of Bamberg (2017-2021). Her habilitation at the Chair of Oriental Philology and Islamic Studies in Erlangen on concepts of visuality in Islamic cultures, Kulturen des Sehens: Begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Visualität im Islam, was published in late 2024.

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