The word sabab literally means ‘a cord or ligature’, often ‘a tent rope’, signifying the tight structural bond between the fabric of the tent and the peg. In the Arab sciences, this concept has been exploited metaphorically in a number of ways, in prosody as the name for part of a metrical unit (another element being the watid lit. ‘tent peg’), in philosophy to denote a logical ‘cause’ or ‘reason’, and more generally (e.g. in law) for anything connected with or providing access to something else, such as relatives, dependents, or assets. In grammar it…