Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s seminal version of Kalīla wa-Dimna from the eighth century CE has traditionally been read as one of the oldest prose texts in Arabic. Scholarship often overlooked the fact that a great many copies of the book date to the early modern period (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries). When considering the vast amount of variation among the seventy (at minimum) extant copies of the book that were produced during that period, one can assume that Kalīla wa-Dimna had a place in court culture, in learned circles, among amateur readers, and in popular storytelling. The focus of this chapter is to investigate the book’s variation from a linguistic and stylistic angle, with particular regard to the often-used category of Middle Arabic. Placing under scrutiny the use of Middle Arabic in three different manuscript copies from the early modern period, I shall argue that its use cannot be explained solely by some sort of deficiency, nor by simply resorting to scribal conventions, but rather by the artful practice of relating the written tradition to oral storytelling. Hence, changes in orthography and grammar are mostly to be considered deliberate choices, as they reflect practical functions and the artistic use of the texts. In a first step, this chapter shall shed light on different approaches to Middle Arabic as a historical idiom. Second, I will categorize the linguistic features apparent in three manuscripts of the Kalīla wa-Dimna tradition—from the Vatican Apostolic Library (Sbath 267, seventeenth century), the British Library (BL 3900, eighteenth century), and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Wetzstein II 672, nineteenth century). After highlighting the conspicuous features of these manuscript texts, such as the use of vocalization, shifts in agreement, and the orthographic system, I will finally show how the variation in a textual tradition bears concrete didactic and performative dimensions. Elaborating on this hypothesis, I will, therefore, propose a reading in terms of the early formalist approach developed by Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984). Since Middle Arabic functions as a fusion of standard classical (fuṣḥā) and dialect features, I shall demonstrate how Kalīla wa-Dimna copyists adopt some linguistic proximity to everyday prose while still maintaining a transmitted written standard. I will call the dynamic between these two poles: the poetic moment.
