The Equivalences between Ideas of Abd al-‎Qahir al-Jurjani and Structural Linguistics ‎and the New Criticism

Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (400 – 471 AH / 1078 AD), the ‎celebrated Persian rhetorician and grammarian, inaugurated ‎the Arab linguistic revolution through his seminal works, ‎namely Asrar al-Balaghah (The Secrets of Elucidation) and ‎particularly Dala'il al-I'jaz (Intimations of Inimitability). In ‎the recent century, after efforts of Muhammad Abduh in ‎Egypt to revive the Islamic scientific thought, editing and ‎printing of Jurjani’s scripts was prospered. Immediately after, ‎the novelty of his ideas drew the attention of many scholars, ‎and initiated a widespread quest to find the similarities of his ‎ideas with modern linguistics, in theory and practice. This ‎endeavor which perhaps is in its midway, led to find many ‎equivalences and has produced remarkable results.‎
It is the aim of this article to analyze some ideas of ‎Jurjani from Dala'il al-I'jaz which collectively are known as ‎‎“The Theory of Nazm”, and deliberate those equivalences ‎with structural linguistics and the new criticism. Word (lafẓ) ‎and meaning (maʿānī), the syntagmatic and paradigmatic ‎axes, and differences of langue and parole are the most ‎important topics that inter-relate Jurjani with contemporary ‎linguistics. The principal equality of Jurjani and structural ‎linguistics is his perception of language as a system of ‎communication.‎