اللغة وعلم الكلام عند أبي بكر ابن العربي
Six hundred and fifteen pages devoted to a major Andalusi commentary on legal theory: the book that earned its translator the 2024 Sheikh Hamad Award.
A qāḍī between Seville and the East
Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 543/1148) is one of those figures known by name. A Mālikī jurist, judge of Seville, a traveller in the East where he frequented al-Ġazālī's circles, he brought back to al-Andalus a way of thinking about law that was not familiar there. The Nukat al-maḥṣūl are one of the fruits of that transfer.
Language before law
The book's central thesis is simple to state and difficult to establish: for Ibn al-ʿArabī, legal theory is first of all a theory of language. Before knowing what the Law commands, one must know what a command is, how a general term is restricted, what a statement implies without saying it. Grammar and logic are not auxiliaries: they constitute the very matter of the reasoning.
Editing the text
The volume offers the critical edition of the Arabic text from the surviving manuscripts, its complete French translation and a continuous commentary. The apparatus records the significant variants and identifies the borrowings, notably from Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī's Maḥṣūl and al-Ǧuwaynī's treatises.
Translating a technical language
Rendering into French terms such as ʿumūm, taḫṣīṣ, mafhūm al-muḫālafa requires choices that must be made explicit. The option taken here is one of transparency: preserving the difficulty of the text, signalling it in a note, and refusing modern equivalents that give the illusion of understanding.
International recognition
In December 2024, this translation received the international Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation, Arabic-French category, ex aequo with Professor Tahera Qutbuddin (Oxford). The same work was also selected among the finalists of the Ibn Khaldoun – Senghor Prize of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.
