عَن المُقَدِّمَة

This is al-Nadwī's own introduction to his anthology Mukhtārāt min Adab al-ʿArab. He is making an argument: the dominant view of adab (Arabic literature) — the rhymed-prose tradition of al-Ḥarīrī, al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil, and their imitators — is too narrow. The truer Arabic prose lives in the books of ḥadīth and sīra (where companions like Kaʿb b. Mālik and ʿĀʾisha speak in unselfconscious classical Arabic), in the works of fiqh and tafsīr (al-Ghazālī, Ibn Khaldūn, al-Shāfiʿī, al-Sarakhsī), and in the writings of the spiritual masters (Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn al-Qayyim, ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī). His anthology is built to surface that hidden literature.

For the learner, the introduction is itself a strong piece of modern classical Arabic — long periods, careful argument, and along the way, four long quotations from ḥadīth that are gold-standard early Arabic narrative prose: (1) Kaʿb b. Mālik on his absence from Tabūk, (2) Kaʿb on the boycott that followed, (3–4) ʿĀʾisha on the ḥadīth al-ifk. Each long quotation is set off as an extended card with its own special treatment.

Author

أبو الحَسَن عَلي الحَسَني النَّدْوي

(1914–1999) — Indian Islamic scholar; Rector, Dār al-ʿUlūm, Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ, Lucknow

Place & date

Lucknow (India), 10 Rabīʿ al-Awwal 1391 / 6 May 1971

Pages in source

pp. 7–21 of the 1432/2011 Lucknow edition

Source

abulhasanalinadwi.org