Wanting or asking?

Abstract Requests are a type of directive speech act in which the speaker aims to get someone to do something that that person might not have done without being asked. In the case of Arabic papyri, the scholarly attention requests have received has been limited mainly to petitions addressed to government officials and other figures of authority ( Khan 1990a , b ; Rustow 2020 ; Weitz 2022 ), and to commercial and private letters exchanged between equals ( Grob 2010 ). In petitions, expressions inquiring about the addressee’s willingness or ability to carry out the desired action, in raʾayta (‘if you think it a good idea’) or ra raʾyaka (‘think it a good idea’), are regularly invoked to mitigate the request’s sense of imposition. Similarly, Arabic papyrus letters exhibit a predictable epistolary structure with fixed expressions signalling the correspondents’ common background as a technique to mitigate the abruptness of requests formulated with an imperative ( Grob 2010 : 119). This paper examines another request formulation, regularly attested in Arabic papyrus letters, that of employing a verb with the meaning ‘to want’ ( arāda; aḥabba ) used in the first person. By tracing attestations of this formula diachronically from the seventh to the tenth century and analysing its use in context, it can be shown that constructions with I/we want in the papyri change over time from an expression of genuine desire to a conventional nicety. This change can be related to the important role of patronage and socially inter-dependent relationships in the medieval Islamic empire. It confirms a third-wave understanding of politeness as socially construed and conditioned by time and place.