Classification of Simile by Its Two Terms: Sensory, Intellectual, Imagined, and Supposed

1. The first basis for classifying similes

The four analytical elements of tashbīh are the mushabbah, mushabbah bih, shared aspect, and comparison marker. Different features of these elements generate different classifications. Here the first question concerns the two compared terms, the mushabbah and the mushabbah bih.

تقسيم التشبيه
The classification of simile.

We ask whether each term is sensory or intellectual. Four pairings result: both sensory, both intellectual, the first sensory and the second intellectual, or the reverse. This is a classification by the nature of the terms, not by the intensity of resemblance or whether the marker is expressed.

2. The four combinations of the two terms

1. Sensory–sensory: Comparing a cheek with a rose; both can be seen.
2. Intellectual–intellectual: Comparing knowledge and life in the sense discussed here; both are grasped intellectually.
3. Sensory–intellectual: Comparing fragrance with a noble moral quality; one is perceived by a sense, the other intellectually.
4. Intellectual–sensory: Comparing death with a predator; death in the relevant respect is intellectual, while the predator is sensory.

The first term is mushabbah and the second is mushabbah bih. A simile may place a sensory and an intellectual term together; the classification simply records their differing kinds.

3. Sensory does not mean merely visible

Sensory (ḥissī) means accessible through an external sense, not merely through sight. Hearing, smell, taste, and touch also qualify. Thus redness of a face, softness of a sound, fragrance of perfume, and smoothness of silk may all be sensory features.

إما حسيان كالخد والورد
Or both terms are sensory, like a cheek and a rose.

Their shared colour or delicacy can be perceived visually, so the pairing exemplifies sensory-to-sensory simile. Yet two things perceived through another external sense are sensory in exactly the relevant technical respect.

4. Sight: the cheek and the rose

الخد والورد
The cheek and the rose.

Both can be seen. In “the cheek resembles a rose,” the point of likeness might be redness, freshness, or beauty, depending on the context. Sensory classification of the terms does not imply identity in every respect.

Human skin and rose petals are different things. A simile selects one relevant feature without equating their natures. The same distinction applies throughout the remaining sensory examples.

5. Hearing: a faint voice and a whisper

الصوت الضعيف والهمس
A faint sound and a whisper.

Their similarity is recognized through hearing. Low volume, subdued delivery, and softness of sound are audible qualities. They therefore count as sensory even though no visible form or colour is involved.

There is a difference between hearing the softness of a voice and inferring the speaker’s grief or intention from it. Classification follows the feature actually serving as the point of comparison.

6. Smell: fragrance and ambergris

ريح الفم والعنبر
Fragrant breath and the scent of ambergris.

The shared aspect here is fragrance, detected by smell. Sensory status does not require the compared things to be visible; the relevant likeness belongs to the olfactory sense.

Distinguish an object from the property perceived in the comparison. A perfume bottle can be seen, but if the comparison concerns its smell rather than its shape, the analysis must attend to smell.

7. Taste and touch

The source gives al-rīq wa-l-khamr as a comparison of tastes, an analytical example rather than a statement about permitted conduct. For touch it gives al-jild al-nāʿim wa-l-ḥarīr, smooth skin and silk.

Taste: a resemblance discerned by the tongue.
Touch: softness or smoothness discerned through contact.

Each sense reveals a different kind of property. One object may have many sensory qualities, but the classification should track the quality being compared rather than another incidental feature.

8. Conventional expressions for sensory properties

Expressions such as “I saw the rose,” “I smelled ambergris,” “I tasted sweetness,” and “I touched silk” show a useful point: ordinary speech may name an object when a particular perceivable feature is intended, or refer to the object itself.

The relevant likeness may concern colour in a cheek–rose comparison, but smell in an ambergris comparison. Since language often shifts between a thing and its characteristic property, identifying the sense from one noun alone can be misleading.

The intended quality is determined by wording and context together.

9. Intellectual terms: knowledge and life

أو عقليان كالعلم والحياة
Or both are intellectual, like knowledge and life.

Knowledge and life in the respect under discussion are grasped as meanings, not directly as a particular colour, sound, taste, or texture. Accordingly, both are treated as intellectual terms in the textbook’s example.

Their proposed likeness relates to cognition or the capacity for cognition: knowledge directly concerns awareness, while life can be linked to the possibility of awareness. This is not an assertion that life and knowledge are identical, only that a certain intellectual relation can connect them.

10. An objection concerning knowledge and life

An objection arises: if cognition connects knowledge and life, does every instance of life actually possess a particular act of knowing? A living being may lack knowledge of a particular fact, so the exact relation must be stated carefully.

Actual cognition and a condition or capacity related to cognition are not identical. It would therefore be excessive to treat the simile as saying that every living thing knows everything at all times.

The example shows that even an intellectual-to-intellectual simile requires careful formulation of its point of likeness.

11. Pairings of one sensory and one intellectual term

أو مختلفان
Or the two terms differ in kind.

With one sensory and one intellectual term, we have a mixed pairing. The source uses al-maniyyah wa-l-sabuʿ (death and a predator), and a contrasting pairing al-ʿiṭr wa-khuluq karīm (fragrance and noble character).

Comparing death to a predator presents an intellectually understood reality through a sensed model. Comparing fragrance to good character relates a sensory experience to an intellectual moral quality. The differing kinds of terms do not themselves invalidate the simile.

12. Death and a predator: intellectual to sensory

كالمنية والسبع
Like death and a predator.

Death is not literally an animal with teeth or claws. Comparing it to a predator uses force, fear, or an irresistible grasp to make its effect vivid. Death is the mushabbah and the predator the mushabbah bih; the first is intellectual in this respect and the second sensory.

The comparison does not give death a physical body. It renders a concept more readily imaginable through an object of sensory experience.

13. Fragrance and noble character: sensory to intellectual

العطر وخلق كريم
Fragrance and noble character.

Fragrance is perceived by smell, while noble character is evaluated through moral and intellectual understanding, not smelled as a physical substance. Thus comparing fragrance to virtue puts a sensory mushabbah alongside an intellectual mushabbah bih.

This direction is comparatively subtle: speakers often make an abstract meaning clearer by giving it a sensory model. The difference between intellectual-to-sensory and sensory-to-intellectual is therefore significant.

14. Why an intellectual-to-sensory comparison is often clearer

One purpose of simile is to bring a meaning closer to understanding. A perceivable object often supplies a more immediate reference, so intellectual-to-sensory comparisons are especially useful for clarification.

“Death pounces like a predator” gives an image of attack to convey the effect of an abstract event. “Perfume is like virtue” requires one first to grasp the moral concept in order to see the intended likeness.

This is a general explanatory tendency, not an absolute prohibition on comparing a sensory thing with an intellectual one. Context may reverse the expected explanatory direction.

15. A sensory term may have sensible constituent material

المراد بالحسي المدرك هو أو مادته بإحدى الحواس الخمس الظاهرة
The sensory is what is perceived itself, or whose material is perceived, by one of the five external senses.

This qualification does not require an imagined compound to exist externally exactly as described. Its constituent materials may be sensory while their arrangement belongs to imagination.

A ruby, a spear, a banner, and the wind may each be sensible, yet an elaborate scene constructed from them need not have occurred in the world. The difference between sensed constituents and an invented combination is central to the next distinction.

16. Imagined composites formed from sensed elements

An imagined composite (khayālī) may have constituents individually known by sense although their particular arrangement has no external existence. Imagination can combine, separate, and rearrange previously encountered forms.

Banners, spears, and precious stones are individually sensible; poetry can arrange them into a striking scene that has never occurred exactly as pictured.

The lack of external existence of the whole does not automatically make the figure purely intellectual. Its imagined configuration is built from sensed constituents, a distinction important to this classification.

17. Imagination through supposition: the teeth of ghouls

ومسنونة زرق كأنياب أغوال
And sharp, bluish points like the teeth of ghouls.

The ghouls (aghwāl) belong to frightening imaginative lore; their teeth are not established as externally observed things. Nonetheless, the mind grasps the sensible form of teeth and attributes them to the imagined creature.

This is called wahmī: a form is supposed that, if it existed externally, could be sensed. The comparison does not establish the creature’s existence; it conveys sharpness and terror through a hypothetical image.

18. The precise difference between khayālī and wahmī

In khayālī, sensible components are combined into an externally unreal composite. In wahmī, a sensible-looking feature is attributed to a supposed or nonexistent thing, although no externally verified instance of that thing has been perceived.

Khayālī example: an elaborate poetic scene built from known visible objects.
Wahmī example: teeth ascribed to an imagined ghoul.

Both involve the mind’s constructive activity, but combination of sensed parts is particularly salient in the former, and attributing sensible form to a supposed entity in the latter.

19. The faculties involved in imagined comparisons

In imagined comparisons, the mind does more than reproduce old sensations. It can combine, separate, and alter forms. Mutakhayyilah manipulates sensed representations; mufakkirah may arrange meanings and relations; and wahm helps account for supposed or nonsensory attributions.

To depict a ghoul’s teeth, the mind first has a sensible representation of teeth and then attaches it to a creature not observed in the external world. Sensible form and unsupported attribution operate together.

These terms explain how the figure is constructed mentally, rather than merely adding labels to a list.

20. Internal awareness: pleasure, pain, hunger, and fear

الوجدانيات
States one finds immediately within oneself.

Hunger, thirst, pleasure, pain, joy, sorrow, and fear are not simply coloured shapes seen by the eyes. A person experiences them inwardly; visible signs may accompany them, but the inward state itself is not identical with those signs.

The source distinguishes such states from ordinary objects of the five external senses. At the same time, they are not merely abstract deductions, for the person directly experiences them. That immediate inward character marks the class.

21. Internal experience versus purely abstract intellect

A person often knows pleasure and pain through direct inner experience, whereas the general concept of justice or a logical relation is articulated intellectually. Neither is an ordinary visible object, yet they are grasped differently.

Inner awareness: “I feel pain” — a state is directly experienced.
Intellectual understanding: “Justice respects each person’s due” — a general meaning or relation is grasped.

This prevents everything nonvisual from being treated as one undifferentiated class. Simile analysis may depend on whether a term is known through sense, inward experience, or abstract thought.

22. Comparison of sensory, imagined, supposed, and inwardly felt

The central question behind these categories is how the thing is apprehended and what constructive work the mind performs.

TypeDistinguishing feature
SensoryThe object or its material is available through external sense
KhayālīSensible components form an unreal composite
WahmīA sensible-looking form is attributed to a supposed entity
WijdānīA state is experienced immediately inwardly

An imagined scene can be built from sensible elements; a state invisible to the eyes need not be merely imaginary. Classification turns on the mode of cognition, not on superficial appearances.

23. Worked classification of example pairs

Begin by identifying mushabbah and mushabbah bih, then ask how each is apprehended: by external sense, intellect, supposed image, or inward experience.

Cheek–rose: both visually sensory.
Faint voice–whisper: both auditorily sensory.
Knowledge–life: both intellectual in this discussion.
Death–predator: intellectual to sensory.
Fragrance–noble character: sensory to intellectual.
Sharp blue points–ghouls’ teeth: the second is a wahmī image.

A shared feature such as colour, softness, force, effect, or fear may be identified separately; it should not be confused with the kind of thing forming either compared term.

24. Transition to the shared aspect of simile

ووجهه أي وجه التشبيه ما يشتركان فيه
The aspect of resemblance is the meaning shared by the two compared terms.

Classifying the two terms tells us what things are compared. To complete the account, we must also ask in what respect they resemble each other. Zayd and a lion are both sensible beings, but this does not attribute every leonine trait to Zayd.

If courage is intended in “Zayd resembles a lion,” then courage is the wajh al-shabah. Redness can likewise be the aspect linking cheek and rose. This prepares the separate, more detailed classification of shared aspects.

25. What the classification establishes

The classification investigates the two terms of comparison by considering the manner in which they are apprehended. Three principles follow.

First: sensory includes all five external senses, not merely vision.
Second: a sensory term and an intellectual term can be compared when a relevant shared respect is intended; their complete natures need not coincide.
Third: khayālī, wahmī, and wijdānī cases show that the mind can combine sensed forms and experience inward states beyond direct observation.

A sound rhetorical analysis identifies which two things are compared, in what cognitive capacity, and through what shared feature.