Mustansiriyah Journal of Arts

David Hare’s play Stuff Happens chronicles the lead-up to the invasion of
Iraq. The play takes its title from a notorious remark made by the U.S.
former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld when he was asked to
comment on the looting and mayhem in Iraq after the invasion in 2003.
"Stuff happens," he told reporters.
All the main characters are major world figures and leaders including
Saddam Hussein making a speech on Iraqi TV, speaking in Arabic and a
translator renders it in English:
SADDAM H: We apologize to God about any act which has
angered him in the past, and that was held
against us and we apologize to the Kuwaitis on
the same basis. (Hare, act 17, p.71)
These characters are very familiar to everybody who must know from TV
and newspapers if not from personal experience a lot about them.
In many cases, the actual words those real-life leaders said in public
statements are part of the dialogue, like the speech of Colin Powell in the
United Nations and other speeches of such kind. The excerpt from Bush on
the 29th of January 2002, known as the “axis of evil” speech, is also included
in the play:

The present paper is part of a larger project to investigate the hypothesis that traditional Arab linguists were
well acquainted with some of the main ideas and concepts of modern pragmatics. In this paper the researcher
tries to find out whether Arab linguists were familiar with one of the major tenets of speech–act theory, namely,
the analysis of a speech act (SA) into locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, which J.L. Austin used in
his analysis of speech acts. It is a commonplace assumption in the history of modern linguistics that speech-act
theory and its key features were Įrst proposed by AusƟn in the middle of the 20th century.
The aim of this paper is to question that assumption; therefore, the problem or the question that the
researcher undertakes to answer is whether Arab linguists of the past knew speech acts and were able to analyse
them before modern linguists and philosophers like Austin , and consequently to see whether these aspects of
the theory have a longer history than is assumed in the literature.
The first part of the paper gives a survey of the above concepts as they appear in modern linguistic literature
in the west . The second part deals with the Arabs' contribution to the same concepts and aspects of the theoryin
an attempt to show their familiarity with them centuries before modern linguists.
The method the researcher uses to achieve his aim is quoting˺
from traditional books of Arab and Muslim
linguists (rhetoricians and jurisprudents ) . Using samples of such quotations with special reference to directives ,
the researcher finds adequate evidence to support his hypothesis that Arab and Muslim linguists were familiar
with the above concepts and analyses . The only difference is terminological and does not affect the findings in
any significant way .
The present paper is only a first step : It is recommended that future research should be carried out along the
same lines to answer similar questions with even more adequate evidence .