ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī

This profile is being prepared. This voice is cited across the library’s debates. A full profile will be published here as it is completed.

Background

ʿAbd al-Qāhir ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jurjānī (c. 1009–1078) was a Persian grammarian and literary theorist working in Jurjān (modern Gorgan, NE Iran), regarded as the most sophisticated classical theorist of Arabic rhetoric. His Dalāʾil al-iʿjāz and Asrār al-balāgha developed the doctrine of naẓm — that the Qur'an's inimitability resides not in isolated words or ornaments but in the precise, meaning-driven ordering of its syntax and construction — which became the standard account of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān in later Islamic scholarship.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Inimitability of the Qur'an (i'jaz) as Evidence for Islam — cited as the theorist whose naẓm-based account gave the inimitability doctrine its most rigorous linguistic articulation.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: None of al-Jurjānī's works are ingested. His position is currently named but not sourced from primary text. source pending

Principal critics

• John Medows Rodwell — the in-corpus nineteenth-century translator whose Preface dissents from the inimitability estimate of the received text.

See also

• Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī — the Ashʿarī theologian in whose framework the miracle grounds revelation's authority.
• Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī — the earlier systematizer of the i'jaz doctrine.