A particularly important issue was the division between the literal (haqiqa) and figurative (majaz) registers of language. The sentence ‘The lion is the king of the jungle’ uses ‘lion’ in its literal sense; ‘The knight is the lion of the battlefield’ uses it figuratively. Both the literal meanings and accepted figurative uses of words were set by their uses in the Islamic scriptures, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and in the uncorrupted Arabic of the first century and a half of Islam.
