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This thesis offers an analysis of the Arabic Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms (9th-15th centuries AD) on three levels, (i) translation, (ii) individual styles and (iii) genre. It particularly examines meta-discursive features such as cohesion, subjectivity, hedges, the addressing of readership, and the formulation of truth statements. The analysis of these features reveals rhetorical conventions in the corpus that indicate a discursive unity of the genre of the medieval medical commentary. Yet, this study also shows considerable stylistic variation between the individual commentators which, besides its intrinsic value, is crucial for the identification of these authors’ texts. Moreover, this research examines how the rhetorical features of the later commentaries have developed after the fashion of Ḥunayn Ibn Isḥāq’s 9th-century translation of Galen’s 2nd-century Greek commentary. This study highlights significant differences between Ḥunayn’s rhetorical strategies and those in the later Arabic commentaries. Thus, this work demonstrates discontinuities between Greek and Arabic medical discourses, despite the huge influence of Ḥunayn’s translation. This thesis uses an innovative quantitative methodology combining both close reading and distant reading techniques to study Ḥunayn’s translation technique, and compare Ḥunayn’s style with that of the later commentators. Furthermore, this study advances the understanding of the ways of writing in scientific medieval Arabic. Finally, the separate studies in this thesis contribute knowledge regarding grammatical phenomena such as modals, conjunctions, and conditionals in Classical Arabic.

The dissertation examines the foundations of modern Arab national thought in nineteenth-century works of Buṭrus al Bustānī (1819-1883) and Aḥmad Fāris al Shidyāq (1804-1887) in which occurred an intersection of language-making practices and a national pedagogic project. It interrogates the centrality of language for Arab identity formation by deconstructing the metaphor "language is the mirror of the nation," an overarching slogan of the nineteenth century, as well as engaging with twentieth-century discussions of the Arab nation and its Nahḍa. The study seeks to challenge the conventional historiography of Arab thought by proposing a re-theorisation of the Arab Nahḍa as an Enlightenment-Modernity construct that constitutes the problematic of the Arab nation. The study investigates through literature and literary tropes the makings and interstices of the historical Arab Nation: the topography of its making. It covers a series of primary understudied sources: Bustānī's enunciative Nafīr Sūriyya pamphlets that he wrote in the wake of the 1860 civil wars of Mount Lebanon and Damascus: his translation of Robinson Crusoe, dictionary, and encyclopaedia. As well as Shidyāq's fictional autobiography, linguistic essays and treatise, and travel writings on Europe. The dissertation engages with these works to show how the 'Nahḍa' is a constituted by inherently contradictory and supplementary projects. It forms a moment of fracture in history and temporality – as does the Enlightenment in Europe – from which emerges a seemingly coherent national narrative.