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The notion of “the priority of writing over speech” goes back to post renaissance era of Europe and it became the dominant feature of western culture in 20^th century with Derrida’s deconstruction of the binary opposition of speech/writing. In the Islamic culture, Quran, the original source of the Islamic civilization, can be regarded as a turning point in the transformation of the oral culture into the written culture. In other words, it was the means of passage from the fundamental speech to the Originary writing. Needless to say, in some areas the fundamental speech remained dominant and few people overtly discussed the superiority of prose over verse. Sobh ol-a’sha fi sana’t el ensha is an exception. After briefly introducing the author and his work, we will examine his notion of the priority of the prose over the verse and its implications.

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Subh al-A'sha, written by Ahmad al-Qalqashandi 9 century (H.), elaborating official letter writing styles in Mamluk period is a valuable source for historical politeness studies. Based on Leech's politeness maxims and Beeman's approach to politeness, this paper tries to unravel the politeness strategies in official letters of the Mamluks, which depend heavily on power relations. The results show that strategies adopted in these letters are in line with Beeman's "self-lowering" and "other-raising" elements. They also confirm Leech's maxim 3 and 4, out of his six maxims, whereby individuals do their best to praise the other party during the communication. Thus, strategies applied in these letters include "exclusion," "raising the addressee," and "praising the addressee." Using a religious discourse, whose lack would be offensive, is another feature of Mamluk official letters. Finally, social discourse was also adopted in these letters through which the writer acquired his dependent / independent identity.