Between artifice and nature: The critical dialectic of luzūm mā lā yalzam in Arabic poetics

Abstract

: The practice of luzūm mā lā yalzam in Arabic poetics embodies a critical paradox that is celebrated as linguistic mastery yet condemned as artificial affectation. This study discusses how the Arabic rhetorical tradition dealt with this tension and provides a distinction between what would classify as legitimate works of art and those that would be viewed as merely technical excess. It examined the evolution of the core ‘adam al-kulfah (absence of strain) criterion in classical treatises and examined its enforcement through the critical reception of practitioners like al-Ma’arrī by integrating Koselleck’s Conceptual History and Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Findings indicate a dynamic criterion-based system wherein legitimacy hinges not on avoiding constraint but on subordinating it to semantic inevitability and natural flow that effectively shifts debate from whether constrained writing should be permitted or successfully executed within the parameters of its legitimacy. This study concluded that tradition resolved the paradox through an ongoing recursive dialogue between theory and criticism by offering a model for understanding how the realities of literary aesthetics are negotiated and the process by which an aesthetic norm of legitimacy is established and enforced in the traditions of literature.