In July 2025, my friend and fellow linguist Professor Basil Hatim set up his soapbox on LinkedIn. He promised that he would be “sharing … thoughts, opinions, and maybe even a few rants on the issues that get me thinking.” Ten months on, we are blessed with an impressive suite of more than thirty essays ranging from the first, which calls for a new text-linguistics approach to translating the Holy Qurān, to a recent one on the text-linguistics concept of informativity. This particular essay is built around the notion of divine provision, incidentally bringing into play a Blind Snake and a Devoted Cat.

Along the way we have seen the development of the concept of rhetorical intelligence, a desperately needed glossary of rhetorical and text-linguistic terms, and the launch of the ship nūn: a joyful graphic rendering of the Arabic letter ن (n) metaphorically carrying us along our journey of intellectual discovery. Colleagues have contributed comments and sometimes essay of their own in response. Prof Hatim has humbly taken these on board, issuing clarifications and explanations. For example, I had some misgivings about the early definition of rhetorical competence; a much more elaborated version soon appeared (which I’m sure was already in the pipeline).

The ship nūn is a good reminder that many of Prof Hatim’s essays are all built on the notion that the Holy Qurān (and the Arabic it was revealed in) provides unique examples of the workings of rhetorical and text-linguistic devices. The Arabic letter nūn for example isn’t marshalled as transport because it looks like a boat; rather, Prof Hatim extracts layers of signification for nūn from the Holy Qurān itself: It is linked to ‘the act of recording destinies and truths’ and ‘the act of creation, bringing words/worlds into being’. nūn is the first letter of Surah 68, which is concerned with oath and inscription.

As I watched the ship nūn sail through 2025 into 2026, I reflected on why my friend’s work left such a positive impression on me. On the surface, the writing – in Prof Hatim’s stately English prose – is joyful, reverent, crisp, and deeply insightful. What struck me more deeply through was its creative character and its liberation from academic convention*. I was struck by the parallel with my own post-retirement journey from Professor of Linguistics to a writer of fiction, the joy of being my own literary boss, along with the discovery that my literary creativity in later life has been a powerful impetus to self-discovery and, as Jung would have put it, individuation. More of Jung later.

In Prof Hatim’s work I have seen that same joy in creating not just new work but a new kind of work. In my view these essays represent a unique genre of writing located at the intersection of linguistics, theology and a third point that lies somewhere between oratory and dialectic. Let me go back to the Blind Snake and the Devoted Cat to illustrate my point.

Prof Hatim’s recent essay Informativity: A Frequently Misunderstood Concept is structured roughly as follows:

1. Informativity is defined with reference to Beaugrande and Dressler’s seminal text.

2. We are told that Sacred Hadith on divine provision (al-arzāq) will be used to exemplify informativity.

3. We learn that a discussion on divine provision by the Sheikh Abdal-Hamid Kishk employs a fable on the Blind Snake and a Devoted Cat. A translation of the fable is provided.

4. A beautifully written section follows, in which Prof Hatim argues that God deploys his ‘unseen agents’ (e.g. the snake and the cat) to make visible the ‘divine signature’. The entire fable challenges ‘reductive paradigms’ like Darwinism. The cat ‘is nothing more than a soldier of God’.

5. We return to the Sacred Hadith referred to by Kishk and its ‘moral force’ and its value in illustrating informativity.

6. The definition of informativity is mentioned again, along with the comment that the conditional consequence (jawāb ash-sharț) will be the focus of the argument.

7. The Hadith is provided in English translation with the final sentence suppressed.

8. The final sentence is revealed. While the text has guided us towards an expected conclusion – that God will disapprove if we do not meet his demands (loosely interpreted), the actual conclusion ‘overturns this expectation with disarming grace’ by revealing God as merciful.

9. The essay concludes with a reminder that ‘God’s dealings with his servants exceed the logic by which we deal with one another’.

This essay breaks all the genre rules of academic writing, and in this rupture lies its magic, its force and its call to action.

My actions were: To check the definition of informativity; to look up Robert de Beaugrande’s unusual (to say the least) biography; to check some Arabic terms in my battered Hans Wehr dictionary; to look up Sheikh Kishk; to look up and read a commentary on Surah 68. Then, in the early hours of the morning to lose sleep thinking about the fable and the parallels with Jung’s archetypes; to think about a story I might write; to think about a story I wrote about a man condemned to solitary confinement who is visited in his dreams by a green bird and an eyeless girl; to spend fifteen minutes on the cross-trainer in the gym listening to a podcast on Jungian analysis and thinking how this might influence how I might write a response to Prof Hatim’s essay.

A final word about informativity: I recently read George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain where the renowned author analyses short stories by four Russian authors and (to my mind) demonstrates that writing fiction is all about informativity, ‘the strategic orchestration of expectation and its deliberate violation’, as Prof Hatim puts it in this essay. For a writer of fiction, informativity is seen in such things as subverting a stale metaphor, the use of bathos, and betting how long you can string out the reveal. How we writers strive to achieve the ‘minimal linguistic shift that yields maximal ethical insight’!

Stuart Campbell

Sydney, March 2026