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Article In: Journal of Historical Pragmatics: Online-First Articles

Wanting or asking?

Polite and impolite requests in Arabic papyrus letters

 | Leiden University
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Abstract
Requests are a type of directive speech act in which the speaker aims to get someone to do something that that person might not have done without being asked. In the case of Arabic papyri, the scholarly attention requests have received has been limited mainly to petitions addressed to government officials and other figures of authority (Khan, Geoffrey. 1990a. “The Historical Development of the Structure of Medieval Arabic Petitions”. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 53 (1): 8–30. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 1990b. “A Petition to the Fatimid Caliph al-Amir”. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 122 (1): 44–54.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; . 2020. The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Weitz, Lev. 2022. “The Long Arm of the Provincial Law. A Custody Battle in a Qāḍī Petition from the Medieval Fayyūm”. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 201: 47–78.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), and to commercial and private letters exchanged between equals (Grob, Eva Mira. 2010. Documentary Arabic Private and Business Letters on Papyrus: Form, Function, Content and Context. Berlin: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). In petitions, expressions inquiring about the addressee’s willingness or ability to carry out the desired action, in raʾayta (‘if you think it a good idea’) or ra raʾyaka (‘think it a good idea’), are regularly invoked to mitigate the request’s sense of imposition. Similarly, Arabic papyrus letters exhibit a predictable epistolary structure with fixed expressions signalling the correspondents’ common background as a technique to mitigate the abruptness of requests formulated with an imperative (Grob, Eva Mira. 2010. Documentary Arabic Private and Business Letters on Papyrus: Form, Function, Content and Context. Berlin: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 119). This paper examines another request formulation, regularly attested in Arabic papyrus letters, that of employing a verb with the meaning ‘to want’ (arāda; aḥabba) used in the first person. By tracing attestations of this formula diachronically from the seventh to the tenth century and analysing its use in context, it can be shown that constructions with I/we want in the papyri change over time from an expression of genuine desire to a conventional nicety. This change can be related to the important role of patronage and socially inter-dependent relationships in the medieval Islamic empire. It confirms a third-wave understanding of politeness as socially construed and conditioned by time and place.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data: The potential and limits of Arabic papyri
  • 3.Formal aspects of wanting to ask in Arabic papyrus letters
  • 4.Requests between equals
  • 5.Requests in authoritative relationships
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
References (48)
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