Metaphor and Its Cognitive Mechanisms

The most extensive and original portion of Asrar al-Balaghah is devoted to metaphor (al-istiara) — its types, its mechanisms, and the principles that make some metaphors more beautiful and effective than others. Al-Jurjani's analysis of metaphor in this work is one of the most sophisticated treatments of the subject in any premodern intellectual tradition, anticipating insights that modern cognitive linguistics would develop independently in the twentieth century.

Al-Jurjani defines metaphor as the use of a word to refer to something other than its literal referent, based on a relation of similarity between the two. This broad definition encompasses what modern linguists call metaphor in the strict sense (using a term from one conceptual domain to talk about another) but also what it calls metonymy, personification, and several other figures. Al-Jurjani's interest was not primarily in categorizing figures but in understanding the cognitive mechanism they share: the activation of resemblance relations between conceptual domains.

His central question about metaphor was: what makes some metaphors beautiful while others are flat or strained? Anyone can form a metaphor by asserting that one thing is another — but not every such assertion achieves an aesthetic or expressive effect. What distinguishes excellent metaphors from mediocre ones? Al-Jurjani argued that the quality of a metaphor depends on the quality of the resemblance relation it exploits and on the fittingness of the borrowed term for what it describes.

Excellent metaphors, he argued, exploit resemblances that are real but surprising — resemblances that the reader would not have noticed without the metaphor but that, once shown, seem genuinely apt. They create a flash of recognition: 'Yes, these two things are similar in exactly that way.' Poor metaphors either exploit resemblances that are too obvious to be interesting or assert resemblances that are too strained to be convincing. The aesthetic pleasure of a good metaphor is inseparable from this cognitive element — the experience of discovering a real but hidden connection.

He applied this analysis to classical Arabic poetry and to the Quran systematically. When the Quran describes the sky as 'a preserved ceiling' (Q 21:32) or describes the Prophet ﷺ as 'a lamp spreading light' (Q 33:46), these are not random images but carefully chosen metaphors that exploit genuine resemblances in illuminating ways. Al-Jurjani's analysis of why these particular metaphors work — what resemblance they activate and why that resemblance is the right one — represents literary criticism at its most analytically rigorous.