Grammar of the Sufi Hearts: Abd al-Karīm al-Qushayrī’s al-Risāla fī al-Naḥw al-Muawwal

Many scholars in the past, considering various fields of knowledge as complementary of each other, engaged in multiple disciplines. Naturally there happened to be a belief that he who masters a discipline can transfer its rules into other disciplines and thus have a say in them. Likewise, someone knowledgeable in Sufism can make other disciplines talk in a Sufi tongue, that is, he can see Sufism within them and express Sufism through them. Expression of Sufism through Arabic grammar makes an extraordinary example for such intermingling of Sufism with other disciplines. This article examines the work of the famous Sufi Abd al-Karīm al-Qushayrī’s work entitled al-Naḥw al-Muawwal in terms of the way he connects Sufism with the science of naḥw (Arabic grammar). Here al-Qushayrī presents grammatical rules in a new approach by explaining them in Sufi terms. The meanings al-Qushayrī attributes to the letters makes this work all the more interesting for those interested in the “science of letters.” It also suggests that al-Ghazzālī and Ibn al-Arabī might have been influenced by al-Qushayrī in all these.