Insha' (creative speech, and its legal application)

Insha' is lexically the beginning and raising of a thing. In the craft of writing it is anything that turns the writer's art into composing speech and arranging meanings; in rhetoric and usul it is one of the two kinds of speech, against khabar. ¹

A khabar is speech that admits truth or falsehood in itself; an insha' admits neither, because it has no external fact to match, and is so called because the meaning is created. ¹

• Demanding insha': question, command, prohibition, wish and call. ¹
• Non-demanding insha': praise, blame, the verbs of surprise, and oath. ¹

The jurists and usulis differ on words of contract such as ‘I sold’ and ‘I bought’, on words of dissolution such as ‘I divorced’ and ‘I freed’, and on a judge's formulas. The dispute concerns words used to create the contract, not reports of an earlier one. ¹²

• The Shafi'is hold these to be insha', because by custom they have passed from reporting to creating. ²
• The Hanafis hold them khabar, understood by implication, since the formula is set for reporting. ²
• Al-Tahanawi preferred the Shafi'i view, as did the rhetoricians. ²