perfect order. Within the perfect order resides sheer beauty, the source of all beauty. And sheer beauty is the garden of the elegant and refined sayings that are the flowers of eloquence. This flower-filled garden is where the nightingales wander who are known as the poets and lovers of blooms. And what imparts to the sweet, soft songs of those nightingales their spiritual harmony is the meanings' arrangement. But while this was the case, the non-Arab newcomers, spongers, and novices tried to enter the ranks of the literary masters of Arabic rhetoric, and the matter went off the rails. For a nation's temperament is the source of its emotions and its language reflects those emotions. Just as the temperaments of nations differ, so does the rhetorical capacity of their languages differ, especially a grammatical language like Arabic. It was due to this that because they turned from the ordering of the meanings, the natural channel of ideas, to the ordering of the words, which is much too deficient, dry, and infertile to be the channel for the flow of ideas and garden for the flowers of eloquence, they threw rhetoric into disorder. For the newcomers, due to ill choice or driven by need, and because they had need to learn the words' literal meanings and their positioning and enhancement, and because since the words are channels, they are easier, clearer, and more familiar to the superficial view, and more suitable for popular display and drawing the people's attention, the newcomers expended all their efforts on the words. That is to say, however much they progressed, they kept their minds from becoming immersed in the ordering of the meanings before them, which may reveal dazzling vistas, and wandered around chasing the words.

After imagining the meanings, their ideas bifurcated on pursuing the words. Using mere words, these by degrees came to predominate over the meanings, and since the natural function of words, serving the meanings, was reversed, a vast distance opened up between true eloquence and the art of those word-worshipping braggarts, or rather, their artificiality. If you wish, consider a literary genius like al-Ḥarīrī; [^2] take a look at his Maqāmāt: he was

[^2]:Abū Muhammad Qāṣim b. 'Ali al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122). Author of the celebrated literary work, al-Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīriyya. Born and died in Basra.