Manners · a Light

Manners and literature are the same word in Arabic

Adab today means good manners, courtesy, knowing how to behave. It also means literature. A professor of Arabic adab teaches poetry and prose, and a faculty of adab is a faculty of arts. The lexicographers connect the root with ma'duba, a banquet to which people are invited, so that adab began as the conduct proper to somebody invited to a table and widened into the whole body of things a cultivated person should know. Medieval books of adab teach both at once: how to sit, what to quote, how to open a letter, when to stay quiet. The manners and the reading were never filed as separate subjects.

Root a d b, banquet, manners, letters