EXISTENCE OF ARABIC ‘ADAB’ (BELLES-LETTRES): A LINGUISTIC STUDY

In Arabic language the term ‘adab’ bears the sense of literature; and it has gradual development in the passage of times and periods. In the Pre-Islamic period, it carried only the sense of ‘banquet’ or ‘feast’ and in the Islamic period, the term ‘adab’ started to mean “polite manners” or “culture” signifying the importance of acquiring knowledge for socio-cultural affairs of the human society. In fact, from the period of the Umayyad dynasty, the term ‘adab’ is meant for literature; as and when different genres of literary works came to existence. In this connection, it has been observed that the Arab lexicographers happened to mean the term ‘adab’ as ‘culture’, of which testimony finds in all the literary works of prose and poetry that accepted by the human hearts and finally it leads to the meaning of aesthetic literature, known as ‘belles-lettres’.