Abstract
There are two different readings of Al-Sakkaki’s role and achievement in the history of Arabic rhetoric. The first is represented by the ancients’ celebration of the third section of (Al-Miftah), and their adoption of it as the final formula of Arabic rhetoric. In the second reading, many contemporaries considered his work in complicating rhetoric, arranging its topics, and dividing it into its three sciences, as killing the spirit of literature, that reached its peak in Al-Jurjani’s books: “Dala'il Al 'Ejaz” and “Asrar Al-Balagha,” and they blamed him for the stagnation and dryness that afflicted rhetorical research in the centuries following the era of Al-Sakkaki. The research tried to balance Al-Sakkaki’s eloquence, which has been proven over centuries, and continues to delineate its method for Arabic rhetoric , and controlled its movement, and among the severe criticisms directed at it, and attempted to undermine the foundations on which it was founded.
The research presented a new reading of the history of rhetoric with its multiple tributaries, the paths of each of them, the efforts made in it, and its impact on rhetorical research. It was seen - in light of this reading - that contemporaries reduced the history of rhetoric to one of its tributaries, which is rhetorical criticism, which was titled “Al-Badi'” and therefore they focused on taste and rejecting the traditionalism and standardization that eloquence led to at the hands of Al-Sakkaki.
