The inquiry into the nature of beauty as it developed in eighteenth-century German philosophy under the term aesthetics theorized the beautiful as a judgment of taste and the senses in contradistinction to cognition and reason. Indeed, the term aesthetics was first introduced in 1735 by Alexander Baumgarten from the Greek αισθητικός (aisthētikós), meaning “of sense perception,” as a counterpart to thought and logic (Guyer 25). Accordingly, the aesthetic object produces a feeling in the perceiver that leads one to deem it beautiful. In classical Arabic culture, aesthetic judgment also depended on an emotional experience that beauty produces in the perceiver. However, the theorization of this experience in Arabic philosophy and literary theory was instead rooted in reason and logic. And it is through an understanding of تعجّب (taʿajjub; “wonder”), which is linked with discovery, that the classical Arabic conception of poetic beauty gave rise to a rationalist theory of aesthetics by the eleventh century. Not only does taʿajjub represent an alternative way of conceptualizing beauty—one that attributes aesthetic experience to cognition—but the rationalist approach through which taʿajjub was theorized also lends it a degree of universality that makes it especially portable beyond Arabic.

It is the notion of wonder—as an experience that not only is provoked by a lack of knowledge of the hidden and inexplicable but also results in a drive toward obtaining that knowledge—that underlies the aesthetic theories developed in the eleventh century by Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā; d. 1037) and ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 1078). While the former developed his aesthetics within philosophy through an understanding of Aristotle's Poetics as part of logic, the latter wrote within the field of Arabic grammar and literary theory. Nevertheless, Avicennan rationalism permeates al-Jurjānī's analysis of the poetic. This allows al-Jurjānī to develop a rationalist aesthetic theory that is rooted in the pleasures of intellectual reasoning and discovery—an aesthetic I describe as one of taʿajjub, which is in fact one of several words al-Jurjānī uses to describe the experience of the poetic. After al-Jurjānī, this aesthetic comes to define classical Arabic literary theory for centuries to come.Footnote ¹

Classical Arabic lexicons define wonder—عجب (ʿajab or taʿajjub)—as a reaction of عجب وإنكار (ʿajab wa-inkār; “awe and disbelief”) experienced as a result of seeing something unexpected, rare, unfamiliar, unusual, mysterious, magnificent, or obscure whose cause is unknown (Ibn Manẓūr). At the same time, taʿajjub also triggers a cognitive search for an explanation. The endeavor to document the marvels (ʿajāʾib) of the world in encyclopedic works, such as—most famously—Zakariyyā al-Qazwīnī's thirteenth-century عجائب المخلوقات وغرائب الموجودات (ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharāʾib al-mawjūdāt; Wonders of Things Created and Oddities of Matters Existent), was not only motivated by a desire to give the reader the thrill of learning about strange and rare matters, but it was also a call to contemplate the cause behind them: God and the nature of God.Footnote ² Taʿajjub entails the intellectual search for the hidden through the visible and for an explanation of the extraordinary, as Fāṭima Mubārak has argued (37–38).Footnote ³

Al-Jurjānī establishes this sense of taʿajjub in his influential work entitled أسرار البلاغة (Asrār al-balāghah; The Secrets of Eloquence), where he observes:Footnote ⁴

According to al-Jurjānī, pleasure in general lies in moving from ignorance to knowledge. Pleasure resulting from beautiful poetry, in turn, likewise arises from an experience of being “lifted from the hidden to the visible.” Because the aesthetic pleasure that al-Jurjānī describes is so tightly bound with an experience of gaining knowledge and discovery, I have argued in my book Arabic Poetics that this pleasure is more specifically an experience of wonder in the above sense of taʿajjub.

For al-Jurjānī, the main ways of producing this effect in poetry include the use of comparison in its various forms (simile, analogy, and metaphor) and the distancing of meaning through implication or allusion (kināyah).Footnote ⁵ One reason a simile is judged to be beautiful, according to al-Jurjānī, is that it has the potential to make an abstract idea more concretely known by comparing it to something tangible, perceptible. As established in logic, concrete things that can be perceived through the external senses give rise to a primary, instinctual kind of knowledge.Footnote ⁶ Such knowledge is easier to grasp than that which requires inference. He explains:

Following this observation, he argues that comparing an abstract idea to a concrete one will produce an experience of discovery and pleasure:

Comparing an abstract idea to something that can be immediately grasped through the senses, in other words, has the potential to produce an “aha” moment where “the puzzling snaps into sharp focus and is grasped with pleasure,” as Philip Fisher has so aptly put it in his description of the wonder and delight one experiences at the moment of discovery (21).

To illustrate this process of discovery through a tangible likeness, al-Jurjānī discusses the following verse attributed to the early-Islamic-era poet Majnūn Laylā, so called because he was driven mad (majnūn) by his love for Laylā:

In this verse, the poet expresses the unattainability of his beloved Laylā—an abstract notion—by illustrating the idea through a visual analogue. As a result, al-Jurjānī explains, the poet makes it more concretely known. It would be even more effective if the poet were next to a river performing the action as he makes the comparison, al-Jurjānī suggests (113 [9.4]). What renders the image pleasurable is not the act of seeing in and of itself; our pleasure does not stem from an appreciation of the sight of water passing through the gaps between the fingers. Rather, it is the role that visual perception plays in securing our knowledge of an abstract idea and “removing the veil” from it that causes the pleasurable taʿajjub of discovery.

An experience of taʿajjub can also take place when meaning is intentionally obscured and distanced such that the listener must go through a process of reasoning and inference in order to discover it. Following this logic, al-Jurjānī argues that expression by implication (kināyah) or metaphor (istiʿārah) is more beautiful than something expressed explicitly or literally:Footnote ⁷

This is because an explicit statement is grasped immediately and does not necessitate a process of discovery, whereas grasping secondary ideas that a word or phrase suggests metaphorically or implies indirectly requires a mental process of reasoning and inference and hence of discovery. Metaphor and implication, in other words, help to hide and distance the intended meaning in a way that an explicit statement is not able to do. This gives the listener the opportunity to uncover the meaning and hence to go through a process of moving “from the hidden to the visible,” instead of being handed the meaning directly.

A typical example found in classical Arabic sources of implied meaning (كناية; kināyah) is the description of someone as كثير رماد القدر (“having abundant ashes under his cauldron”). One must reason that a person who has a lot of ashes under the cauldron cooks a lot; cooking a lot means feeding many people; feeding many people, in turn, implies generosity: ergo, the subject of the kināyah is being described as generous. One must go through a process of reasoning to arrive at this conclusion. By pointing to a symptom of the person's generosity (the abundant ashes), the kināyah gives the listener a clue from which to deduce the original cause of this attribute. This process of reasoning and discovery is what produces the delights of taʿajjub in the listener; this is what makes the phrase poetic. If one simply stated instead, “He is generous,” the intended meaning would be handed out directly and there would be no process of discovery. The statement would not be poetic.

As later theorists of بلاغة (balāghah; “eloquence”) explained, an expression is poetic when its intended meaning is an “intellected” one (دلالة عقليّة; dalālah ʿaqliyyah) that goes beyond its lexical signification (دلالة وضعيّة; dalālah waḍʿiyyah).Footnote ⁸ Intellection takes place when an expression's literal meaning points to another meaning through some association, be it a similarity, as in metaphor, or some other connection, such as implying something by way of referring to one of its symptoms or consequences, as in the example of the kināyah above. The link between a word and its lexical meaning, on the other hand, is an arbitrary one set by convention, which one understands simply by knowing a language and which is grasped without a process of inference. Only expressions that require their meaning to be intellected allow for an experience of discovery and hence taʿajjub. The thirteenth-century theorist Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Jurjānī (no relation to ʿAbd al-Qāhir) says this perfectly:

Thus, expressions that signify their meaning indirectly are more beautiful precisely because they require a process of mental reasoning.

What about metaphors that become so common that they cease to elicit this sort of reasoning and discovery from the audience? one might ask. There are other ways of distancing meaning, defamiliarizing known metaphors, and intensifying the experience of discovery they elicit. One such way is by injecting it with the fantastic or make-believe (تخييل ; takhyīl). Take the metaphor of rain, for example, which in classical Arabic poetry was synonymous with generosity. The eighth-century Abbasid poet Abū Nuwās puts a new twist on the hackneyed metaphor in the following verse:

By saying إنّ السّحاب لَتستحي (“the clouds would be ashamed”), al-Jurjānī explains, the poet

By resorting to the fantastic, the poet develops an unexpected, novel idea out of the hackneyed metaphor of rain. The fantastic in this case also involves a kind of trickery that leads the listener to the main point in a roundabout way: the listener is obliged to make believe that the clouds feel shame in order to arrive—by accepting this false premise—at the notion of generosity which the poet ultimately intends to convey. Al-Jurjānī explains that while the verse in essence employs a mere comparison (the person's generosity is like the rain),

By tapping into the realm of the fantastic, the poet is able to breathe new life into the overused metaphor through the creation of further conditions that distance the intended meaning, which, in turn, make the audience go through an experience of inference, discovery, and hence taʿajjub.Footnote ⁹

If, by employing make-believe, the meaning of the metaphor is distanced through the use of a fantastic idea and its aesthetic effectiveness is thus enhanced, doing the opposite reduces its aesthetic effectiveness (see Harb, Arabic Poetics 195). Thus, if you state that “so-and-so's generosity is like the rain” or “is the rain,” the meaning requires less inference than if you directly refer to generosity with the metaphor of rain as in the example above.Footnote ¹⁰ Following this logic, al-Jurjānī says that metaphors are inherently more beautiful than similes because similes, by stating both sides of the comparison, make metaphors explicit and hence more obvious and less wonder-evoking.

However, not all similes work well as metaphors. Only things strongly associated with a particular characteristic can stand in for that characteristic metaphorically (e.g., rain for generosity or a lion for courage). A simile that is based on a less obvious similarity would not work well if redacted as a metaphor. Nevertheless, it can also have a wondrous effect. Here again, beauty arises from the necessity to search for and discover the intended meaning, which in this case is the similarity suggested by the comparison. The less obvious this similarity is, al-Jurjānī argues, the more beautiful the simile. In this regard, he observes:

Thus, the greater the effort required to grasp the suggested similarity, the more pleasurable its eventual discovery will be.

One way of rendering a simile puzzling or unexpected and thus requiring of more effort is by finding a similarity in extreme difference or even opposition. The paradoxical nature of such a proposition naturally means that it requires more thought to grasp as opposed to ones based on an assertion of obviously shared characteristics such as color or shape (see Harb, Arabic Poetics 144–47). Al-Jurjānī also relies on two further principles about the nature of knowledge processing to argue for additional ways of rendering a simile strange and less straightforward. First, from the principle that the whole is more easily graspable than particulars, al-Jurjānī argues that

Second, from the principle that infrequently seen things are less readily accessible in our memory, he argues that rarity also forces one to slow down and contemplate to grasp the meaning of the simile. He observes:

Finding similarity in difference, adding details, and conjuring rare images, therefore, are all ways of making similes unusual, unexpected, and strange, requiring more effort to grasp.Footnote ¹¹

What kinds of things would a scholar in the eleventh-century Islamicate world have perceived as rare? One might rightly assume that a judgment of rarity depends on the cultural and historical context as well as on individual experience. However, al-Jurjānī, true to his rational approach, does not deny us a logical way of assessing rarity. In this regard, he asks us to compare two similes in terms of the rarity of the thing to which they liken their subject (157 [10.9]). The first is from Dhū l-Rummah (d. AH 117 / 735 CE):

The second is from Abū Ṭālib al-Raqqī (d. after 967):

Al-Jurjānī finds the image to which al-Raqqī compares his subject rarer and hence more beautiful. He explains that this is because

A rare thing, therefore, does not have to be strange or puzzling: one can easily imagine pearls strewn on a blue carpet. However, the likelihood of someone's having ever actually seen pearls on a blue carpet, a situation that would probably arise only by accident, is understandably lower than the likelihood of someone's having seen silver jewelry decorated with gold, something that is regularly produced intentionally. Thus, even though it is not difficult to imagine pearls on a blue carpet, it does require one to dig deeper into one's imagination in order to visualize the image and grasp the basis of the comparison, because we might never have seen such a sight in real life. The need to dig deeper into one's imagination, in turn, means that more effort is required to grasp the image. And the more effort one must exert, according to al-Jurjānī, the more pleasing is the eventual discovery.

Regardless of whether one agrees with al-Jurjānī's assessment of the beauty of the verses above, what I have sought to highlight is that his explanations are based on a logical understanding of how the rational mind acquires and retains knowledge. This rationalism is a defining characteristic of post-tenth-century Arabic literary theory and is in line with the general turn to rationalism across disciplines in the eleventh century. This turn was especially pronounced in eastern Iran and central Asia, thriving centers of rationalist philosophy in this post-Avicennan era. It is not surprising that al-Jurjānī, who, as his arabicized name indicates, was from Gurgān on the southeast corner of the Caspian Sea, would have participated in this movement toward rationalism that surrounded him. As Frank Griffel has argued, in contradistinction to theology, philosophy in the Arabic context during this era was understood as transcending faith and religion in its methodology, requiring the rigor of apodictic proofs. As I have tried to show, al-Jurjānī's proofs are likewise well reasoned and not reducible to subjective, culturally dependent judgments. As a result, his theories are accessible to us today without our needing to understand much about the specific literary context within which he was writing. This lends his theories a degree of universality: they need not be limited to the poetic units that were of concern for Arabic culture at the time, such as metaphor and simile, but they are generalizable and have the potential to be applied to other historical and literary contexts, genres, poetic units, and art forms.Footnote ¹² Furthermore, they represent an alternative understanding and genealogy of the inquiry into aesthetics that can be contrasted with the conception of aesthetic theory that crystalized in eighteenth-century Europe. Both al-Jurjānī and Baumgarten lived in a single “post-Hellenic world,” as Alexander Key puts it in his essay in this feature, underlining a shared inheritance across the Mediterranean divide. They both explored the same questions against the backdrop of Greek logic, but they arrived at divergent answers.Footnote ¹³ I hope to have shown not only the logicality of al-Jurjānī's explanations, but also how the aesthetic experience of taʿajjub itself was premised on rational processes of knowledge acquisition and discovery: the poetic is beautiful because it stimulates the intellect.Footnote ¹⁴