LA SEMANTIZZAZIONE DELLA NOZIONE DI ‘AZMA’ NEI DIZIONARI LISĀN AL-ʿARAB E TĀJ AL-ʿARŪS

In reflecting on the concept of ‘crisis’ relative to the Arab world, one runs into the problem of its definition. There are, in fact, different terms used to refer to it, depending on the geographical or temporal context. Here we reflect on the lexeme azma and, more generally, on the semantic field of the root ʾ-Z-M, the nuances of its synonyms, and some semantic patterns of its concept-process that are discernible in the phraseology offered by the dictionnaries Lisān al-ʿArab and Tāj al-ʿArūs. The two giant lexicons, whose examples are often drawn from the Qurʾān, pre-Islamic and Islamic religious and literary traditions, present us with an interesting look not only at the semantization of the concept of ‘crisis’ in pre-modern Arabic culture, but also at the contextualization and evolution ot the term. The first of the two dictionaries was compiled by the filologist Ibn Manẓūr (d. in 1331); the second, which expands on al-Fayrūzābādī’s Qāmūs (d. 1414), was compiled by Muhammad ibn Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (d. 1791), who often provides an indication of the sources from which Ibn Manẓūr himself had drawn his examples without citing their provenance.