Language as a Way Out of Quandaries: A Pragmatic Approach to al-Makhārij in Legal Stratagems within Ḥanafī Jurisprudence

As linguistic beings whose lived reality is shaped by language, people both encounter and resolve many of their problems through language. In his 1946 book People in Quandaries: The Semantics of Personal Adjustment, Wendell Johnson argues that language strongly influences human problems, and describes linguistic techniques that people use to escape predicaments. in al-Makhārij fī al-Ḥiyal [Exits through Stratagems], Ḥanafī jurist Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī (d. 189AH) studies equivocation as a means of escaping predicaments, particularly in juristic domains such as marriage, divorce, sales, and contracts, which are fundamentally speech acts in which legal rulings with tangible effects are contingent upon utterance. As legal predicament involves two aspects: being bound by legal rulings, which has an impact on these transactions, or having a communication problem; the stratagem aims to produce a linguistic modification altering the legal ruling and thereby averting sinfulness. This study examines the linguistic mechanisms al-Shaybānī uses to craft such stratagems. Adopting a semantic–pragmatic approach, it analyses two dimensions of the stratagem utterance: (1) the language and internal structure of the phrase, and (2) the speaker’s performance of language in a specific situation. Its significance lies in treating maʿārīḍ (wordplay) as speech acts wherein language interacts effectively with people’s predicaments and reflects their lived humanity. The study concludes that linguistic mechanisms employed in maʿārīḍ include phonetic devices such as substitution and assimilation, syntactic devices such as exception and conditional sentence, rhetorical devices such as tawriya (paronomasia), and devices exploiting subtle semantic distinctions in lexical items.