SOURCE: "Al-Jahiz," in Abbasid Belles-Lettres, Julia Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, R. B. Serjeant and G. Rex Smith, eds., Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 78-95.

[In the following essay, Pellat discusses the unique contributions that al-Jahiz made to Arab literature.]

Al-Jahiz

Abu Uthman Amr b. Bahr b. Mahbub al-Kinani al-Basri, known as al-Jahiz, is one of the best-known and most prolific of early Abbasid prose-writers and Mutazili theologians, and also one of the most controversial. Little is known of his origins, apart from the fact that he was born in Basra, probably around 160/776, to a humble family of freedmen (mawali) who were clients of the Banu Kinanah (a tribe related to Quraysh). Jahiz's forebears were probably of African descent; his grandfather was black, and he himself retained some of the pigmentation of his ancestors; his ugliness, caused by his bulging eyeballs, became proverbial and earned him the nickname oïjahiz (popeyed). Nothing is known of his father, who died soon after his birth, and little of his mother, to whom Jahiz must have been a source of considerable anxiety; she had managed to send him to the local Quranic school, but when he left he refused to be tied down to any regular work. It is said that he was once seen selling fish, and this, if true, confirms what other anecdotal sources say about his idle way of life. His idleness, however, was to give him an exceptionally broad experience of human nature. As he strolled around Basra he made an assortment of friends who doubtless fed and sheltered him, and who also gave him the opportunity to indulge his precocious fondness for observation, argument and reading, for despite his intelligence and insatiable thirst for intellectual and factual knowledge, he had no access to any kind of formal training higher than that given in his Quranic school. However, other kinds of education were freely available to him. He mixed with the groups of educated idlers which were springing up all over Basra, especially at the mosque, and which discussed all manner of topics, and he watched what was going on around him in the streets of Basra. He also went to the Mirbad, the great open space on the outskirts of the city where the bedouin halted and were questioned by the philologists, whom Jahiz would then follow to the Friday mosque to hear their public lectures on the information they had collected. Among these scholars were such well-known figures as the great "triumvirate" of al-Asmai, Abu Ubaydah and Abu Zayd al-Ansari, who played a key role in the development of Arabic culture: the material that they amassed on hadith, lexicography and ancient poetry was classified into monographs which became the nucleus of the Arabic humanities, handed down by their pupils to later generations. Merely to listen to their teaching was, for Jahiz, to master contemporary literary and historical learning and to gain a thorough grounding in the Arabic language. But besides being, together with Kufa, the main centre of philological research, Basra was also the home of Mutazilism¹ and of a form of rationalism which was in sharp contrast to a nascent trend towards conformism (a trend which was later to find its embodiment in Jahiz's younger contemporary, the Sunni apologist and adib, Ibn Qutaybah, d. 276/889). For grammar and lexicography were not the only interests of Basran intellectuals; they also held lively discussions on less dry, more general subjects, such as the harmonization of faith and reason, the legitimacy of the Abbasid caliphate, the part played by the Kharijis² and Shi is in shaping Muslim history, and the threat posed to Arab supremacy in the Muslim world by such opposition as that of the Shuubis. It was probably through the friends he made among the early Mutazilis that Jahiz gained entry into "good" society and was able to attend, and later to take part in, a great many often heated debates on such general topics, which he later remembered vividly enough to be able to make extensive use of them in his own works. His contacts with affluent and educated circles also gave him the opportunity to read voraciously, in particular the translations from Greek and Pahlavi that were then beginning to appear. But all this while, unlike middle-class intellectuals, Jahiz remained in contact with people of his own background, the lower classes, artisans and seamen, still mixed with idlers, and even took an interest in the activities of the underworld to which a city as cosmopolitan as Basra was bound to give birth. These were the basic influences on Jahiz's development; it was perhaps inevitable that a city as intellectually advanced as Basra undoubtedly was should produce a genius marked with its stamp, and Jahiz was in every way a true representative of his birthplace; Basra was a microcosm whose every facet Jahiz knew and was able to translate into literature.

We do not know when Jahiz began to write, but his first works must certainly date from before the end of the second/eighth century, since by that time he must already have been a writer of some standing, to judge by a passage in one of his later works,³ which reveals that, through the good offices of a Basran grammarian called al-Yazidi, who was in favour at the court of Baghdad, Jahiz had been encouraged, if not actually commissioned, to write on the imamate, and that his efforts had been very well received by the caliph al-Mamun; this was in about 200/815-16. At that time Baghdad was attracting many talented men from the provinces, eager to make their mark on the new capital and to win fame and fortune; grammarians dreamed of being made tutors to princes, poets hoped to obtain great rewards through their panegyrics, and ambitious men of letters were gratified to receive a post as a clerk (katib) in the administration. Jahiz, who was neither a grammarian nor a poet, nor even ambitious, was nevertheless well enough educated to have become a katib, but was of too independent a nature to endure the constraints of an official post. After receiving the caliph's congratulations for his tract on the imamate he duly settled in Baghdad, but it seems that in the whole of his career he only worked as a katib for three days, at some indeterminate date (he may also briefly have acted as assistant to Ibrahim b. al-Abbas al-Suli⁴ in the chancellery). According to some accounts, he earned a meagre living as a teacher and, in his old age, the caliph al-Mutawakkil once engaged him as tutor to his children—but cancelled the appointment when he saw how ugly Jahiz was. As against this last, probably fanciful story, the only precise information we have as to how Jahiz earned his living is that he received substantial gratuities from various Abbasid officials for books dedicated to them, some of which, however, seem to have been too slight to merit such generosity. There is reason to believe that he was paid a pension during the caliphate of al-Mutawakkil, and he may well have drawn a state salary or received secret payments for unofficial services to the government. For his career was largely determined by his early writings on the imamate, writings which led to a series of works designed to legitimate the Abbasid caliphate or to justify important government measures; these were assured of a ready market, and, in addition, Jahiz also wrote letters and reports to those in charge of government policy, which at this period assumed a frankly religious garb. In other words Jahiz acted as an adviser to and apologist for the government, and seems to have exercised this role quite openly, for though he was not the intimate of caliphs, he maintained close ties with the vizier Ibn al-Zayyat (d. 233/847) and the caliph's adoptive brother, general and katib, al-Fath b. Khaqan (d. 247/861),⁵ as well as with the chief qadi (qadi l-qudah), Ahmad b. Abi Duad (d. 240/854-5), and his son and deputy Muhammad (d. 239/854), despite occasional differences of opinion. He is also known to have been closely involved with leading Mutazili figures such as al-Mamun's adviser Thumamah b. Ashras,⁶ as well as with some less prominent members of the movement. Meanwhile he kept in close touch with his native city through the large colony of Basrans who were more or less permanently settled in Baghdad, and he returned to Basra itself on several occasions. During his stay in Baghdad he also spent a short time in nearby Samarra, which became the seat of government from the time of al-Mamun's successor al-Mutasim,⁷ but his travels never seem to have taken him any further afield than Syria, unlike so many of his contemporaries who travelled tirelessly "in search of knowledge", in accordance with the Prophetic injunction to "seek knowledge though it be in China". We do not even know if he ever performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, and a geographical work of his, Kitab al-Amsar (see below), was criticized by later geographers for its numerous blunders, resulting from his lack of first-hand knowledge. In fact, travel was superfluous to Jahiz; the experience that he had gained in Basra and built up in Baghdad was all he needed. He earned what was probably a comfortable living by his pen, all the while adding new knowledge to his store and broadening his outlook by reading the new translations from the Greek made during al-Mamun's reign; at the same time he continued to elaborate the theological doctrine which he had begun to develop under his master Abu Ishaq Ibrahim b. Sayyar al-Nazzam (d. between 220-30/835-45). Al-Mutawakkil's reaction against Mutazilism was very likely the reason why Jahiz, already old and paralyzed, decided to leave Baghdad and retire to Basra, where he died in Muharram 255/December 868-January 869. A late tradition claims that Jahiz, who had written so affectionately and eloquently of books, was smothered to death under an avalanche of books; se non è vero…

The quantity of Jahiz's output is by no means unique in Arabic literature, but it is remarkable that he managed to produce so much at a time when writing materials were very expensive and paper only just coming into use: the most recent published catalogue of his works lists 231 authentic works,⁸ of which, however, only two dozen have survived intact. In range as well as quantity, Jahiz's output is unusual for the period, and displays a remarkable breadth of intellect. This may not always have appealed to later generations; on the other hand, the elegance of his style has long been held up as an example by the best judges. Thus works of doubtful authenticity and those known to be apocryphal are generally well preserved, which shows that they satisfied public demand and that Jahiz continued to enjoy great prestige for some time after his death; while the fact that later anthologists, who probably had access to complete texts, seem often to have reproduced only extracts of some forty of Jahiz's works suggests that they may have found their style more interesting, or perhaps more congenial, than their content: the decline of Mutazilism must certainly be one of the reasons why comparatively few of Jahiz's works have survived; many lost works are the very epistles and short treatises which would have contained the most information about Jahiz's doctrinal position. However, but for the efforts of the anthologists, a still greater proportion of Jahiz's short works would have been lost; Jahiz himself and, at the end of the following century, Ibn al-Nadim,⁹ refer to a large number of works which have disappeared completely. Most of those which are now considered lost are unlikely ever to be recovered, and texts which to date have simply been overlooked are most probably minor works, to judge by Kitab al-Bursan (see below), which was discovered in Morocco fairly recently. In fact the likeliest sources for surviving fragments of important texts are manuscripts of later works, in which they may occur as quotations; we may take heart from the results of a piece of detective work car ried out by J. van Ess, who partially reconstructed the Kitab al-Nakth of al-Nazzam through passages of the Kitab al-Futya of Jahiz which in turn are preserved only in the Kitab al-Uyun of al-Shaykh al-Mufid (d. 413/1022), which is itself partially reproduced in the Fusul Mukhtarah of al-Sharif al-Murtada (d. 436/1044)!¹⁰ As for Jahiz's major works, Kitab al-Hayawan, Kitab al-Bayan wa l-tabyin, Kitab al-Bukhala and Kitab al-Uthmaniyyah have been preserved virtually intact, as have a very few shorter works, notably al-Tarbi wa ltadwir and Risalat al-Qiyan; several of the surviving epistles are also probably very little mutilated.

Editions of Jahiz's apocryphal works appeared at an early date in the East, but it was G. van Vloten who first drew attention to the authentic works by his publication of several of the treatises, and of Kitab al-Bukhala in 1900. Kitab al-Hayawan was not published until the beginning of this century, in a poor edition; today, however, a number of Jahiz's works have become widely available thanks to the efforts of eastern and western scholars to reinstate him. Some of the existing editions are of variable quality, but standards of Jahiz schol arship are steadily improving.

In attempting to establish a descriptive bibliography of Jahiz's works, it must be borne in mind that references to lost works may be cryptic or misleading and cannot be dealt with adequately in a chapter of this length. The following account is therefore almost entirely restricted to those complete works and fragments which are extant.¹¹

Brockelmann suggested classifying the works of Jahiz under the following headings: theological and politico-theological writings; history; anthropology; general ethics; professions; animals; languages; geography; anthologies; polemics; with the lost works covering the further categories of: games; plants and other substances; literary history; works of entertainment.¹² However, a reading of the works published or discovered since Brockelmann's time suggests that his classification is, if anything, too clear-cut; in order to gain a balanced picture of Jahiz's output, account should be taken of his much-criticized tendency to ramble from subject to subject within a single work. What is needed is a full and detailed listing of all the topics discussed by Jahiz in whatever context they may occur. Until this task has been accomplished, a broader classification based on a given work's overall function might prove more satisfactory than Brockelmann's listing by topic.

Jahiz had two main fields of activity; firstly, theology and politics, and secondly, adab. As a writer on matters political and theological, Jahiz's aim was to act as an apologist for the Abbasids and the Arabs respectively, on the one hand, and, on the other, to uphold and spread Mutazilism and to prove the existence of God by rational argument and the direct observation of nature. At the same time, Jahiz was an adib, a man of letters who hoped to educate his readers, and to do so by a process more attractive than that of contemporary scholarship. We may assume adab to be of three basic types, according to whether it aims to instil ethical precepts, to provide its readers with a general education, or to lay down guiding principles for members of the various professions; Jahiz was a practitioner of all three types. By adding to these functional criteria a further, purely formal distinction between those works which are built around quotations upon which Jahiz provides a commentary, and original works which give an unhampered view of his own style and opinions, we may, provisionally, classify his writings as follows: political and religious works; works modelled on, or developing out of, conventional scholarship; adab.

Political and Religious Works

Jahiz's earliest works are probably his writings on the imamate, of which there remain only fragments of Kitab Istihqaq al-imamah/Bayan madhahib al-Shiah ("The Necessity of the Imamate"/"An Exposition of the Different Kinds of Shi'ism", S, 241 8), and Jawabatfi l-imamah ("Replies Concerning the Imamate", S, 249-59). Istihqaq/Bayan madhahib argues that, at the time of the Prophet's death, the community did not unanimously favour his son-in-law, Ali b. Abi Talib, as its leader, and that the presence of a single imam, the best Muslim of his time, is necessary in every age. Jawabat deals with the qualities required of the imam (these subjects are also treated elsewhere in Jahiz's works).¹³ Abbasid propaganda was necessarily directed in the first instance against the Shiis, with their rival claim to legitimacy, and especially against the most moderate and therefore potentially attractive Shii sect, the Zaydis.¹⁴ Jahiz's largest work on these subjects is Kitab al-Uthmaniyyah; this declares the legitimacy of the first three "Orthodox" caliphs, develops Jahiz's ideas on the imamate, attacks the Alids on the ground that Ali failed to dissociate himself from the murder of Uthman, by which he himself succeeded to the caliphate, and thereby justifies the accession of the Abbasids. The defence of the Abbasids was probably further developed in a risalah (epistle) entitled Fil-Abbasiyyah ("Of the Abbasids", S, 300-3), though the only remaining fragment of this work seems unconnected with the subject. As a logical sequence to invalidating Shii claims to the imamate, Jahiz went on to attack the Umayyads and their later supporters who instituted a posthumous cult of the first Umayyad caliph, Muawiyah, in Kitab Taswib-Alifi tahkim al-hakamayn ("Vindication of Ali's Resort to Arbitration"), which recognizes the validity of the arbitration of Siffin.¹⁵ The superiority of the Abbasids to the Umayyads is further demonstrated in Fadl Hashim ala Abd Shams ("The Superiority of the House of Hashim to that of Abd Shams"),¹⁶ and the Risalah fi l-Nabitah (or fl Bani Umayyah, S, 67-116; trans. Pellat, Annales de l'Institut des études orientales, Algiers, 1952) includes a report to the son and deputy of the chief qadi Ahmad b. Abi Duad on the current political situation and the claims of the "young generation" (nabitah) of Hanbalis—followers of the Sunni theologian and jurist Ahmad b. Hanbal (d. 241/855)¹⁷—who idealize the Umayyads and Muawiyah and use theological argumentation as a weapon. Clear evidence that Jahiz acted as adviser to Abbasid officials on political and religious matters is provided by this risalah and others, particularly another epistle written for the son of Ahmad b. Abi Duad, al-Risalah fi Nafy altashbih, which condemns anthropomorphism, an anti-Mutazili tenet, Kitab al-Futya ("The Book of Legal Opinions") and a dedicatory epistle to the recipient of Kitab al-Futya, Risalah ila Ahmad b. Abi Duad yukhbiruh flha bi-Kitab al-Futya (H, 1, 313-19),¹⁸ and Kitab al-Raddala I'Nasara ("Refutation of the Christians", Finkel, Three Essays, 10-38, trans. Finkel, Journal of American Oriental Society, XL VII, 1927, 311-34), which is linked to the measures taken by al-Mutawakkil against the "People of the Book" (ahl alkitab), non-Muslims whose religions were founded on scriptures recognized by Islam and who were entitled to Muslim protection. In a similar "official" vein, Kitab Manaqib al-Turkwa-ammat jund al-khilafah ("The Merits of the Turks and of the Caliphal Army in General", H, 1, 1-85), addressed to the Turkish commander al-Fath b. Khaqan, deals with the composition of the caliph's army, particularly the Turkish troops.¹⁹

Though theological points are dealt with in several of the above works which Jahiz produced for official consumption, most of the writings in which he gives a more or less systematic account of his own doctrinal position have been lost, and it is difficult to reconstruct his Mutazili beliefs without drawing upon the writings of the later Mutazilis, al-Khayyat (d. c. 300/913) and Abd al-Jabbar (d. 415/1025),²⁰ and the heresiographers. For strangely enough, though he differed enough from his teacher al-Nazzam to give rise to a separate Mutazili school, the Jahiziyyah (which the heresiographers cite without naming its adherents), Jahiz's own writings tell us less about his own beliefs than about those of other Mutazilis, especially al-Nazzam. Apart from Kitab al-Futya, a striking example of this is Kitab al-Akhbar wa-kayfa tasihh on the authenticity of hadith, the first part of which discusses the beliefs of the pre-Islamic Arabs, the Indians, Persians and Byzantines, while the second part is given the significant title "Ein unbekanntes Fragment des Nazzam" by its German editor and translator J. van Ess. Surviving fragments of other doctrinal works include a eulogy of dogmatic theology, Risalah β Fadilat sinaat al-kalam (unpublished), another work on the authencity of hadith, Kitab Hujaj alnubuwwah ("Proofs of Prophethood", S, 117-47), which also discusses the inimitability (ijaz) of the Quran, and Kitab Khalq al-Quran (S, 147-54), which tackles the thorny issue of the createdness (khalq) of the Quran and the persecution of Ahmad b. Hanbal, who opposed the official Mutazili doctrine of createdness, by the Inquistion (mihnah) of al-Mamun.²¹ Finally, Kitab al-Masail wa ljawabatfi l-marifah ("Questions and Answers on the Subject of Knowledge") must have been an account of the teachings of the different Mutazili schools on the knowledge of God, the only surviving fragment of which suggests that Jahiz believed that God can only be known by a process of ratiocination and not by intuition, which implies that Ali b. Abi Talib could not have had an innate knowledge of God, and could not therefore be seen as having had an intrinsically better claim than other Muslim converts the imamate after the Prophet' death²²Fil-Sharib wa l-mashrub ("Drinkers and Drinks", S, 276-84), an epistle on the licitness of date-wine (nabidh), must be included among Jahiz's writings on religious matters proper, though another epistle on the same subject, Fi Madh alnabidh ("In Praise of Date-Wine", S, 285-91), should probably be treated as a work of adab.²³

Scholarly Works

In terms of form, Jahiz's political and religious writings fall into the category of works which include but are not structured around quotations. Jahiz's scholarly works are more mixed in form, some making sparing use of quotation while others rely heavily on secondary material, but all can be viewed as marking a transition between conventional scholarship and Jahiz's own branch of adab. Both literary and scientific topics are discussed and analyzed; Jahiz sifts through the mass of lore and tradition collected by his predecessors, examines their authenticity and, in so doing, suggests the framework within which general culture should evolve and expand. His aim being to instruct without tedium, Jahiz's approach tends to be digressive and untidy; he switches from topic to topic by simple association of ideas and intersperses even the most serious material with comic anecdotes. Because of his playful style and often mordant wit, Jahiz has often been considered something of a joker, even a buffoon; but his works have a serious undertone. The "scientific" writings are theological too in so far as they are intended to prompt the reader to reflect and discriminate when making use of existing knowledge (and, in the case of the lengthiest work, Kitab al-Hayawan ("The Book of Beasts"), to draw edifying lessons from the observation of nature); the "literary" writings are likewise designed to stimulate the reader's critical faculties. An example of this approach is Kitab al-Tarbi wa l-tadwir ("The Square and the Round"), a short treatise now mutilated and interspersed with fragments of other works, in which Jahiz, while remaining just within the bounds of religious prescriptions and the pronouncements of the Quran, probes the accuracy of conventional interpretations of natural phenomena and questions "established" facts and generally credited legends; the work is an invitation to leave the ranks of the conformists and join those of the Mutazilis, who exercise their powers of reason and accept nothing without critical examination. In al-Tarbi Jahiz avoids giving answers to the issues he raises, but he does propose some solutions in one of his two crowning works, Kitab al-Hayawan, an anthology supposedly centred on a number of animals, but which in fact covers so vast a range of subjects as to make it a veritable encyclopaedia.²⁴ The ostensible aim of al-Hayawan is to prove that the early Arabs knew as much about zoology as did the Greeks, and especially Aristotle, who is often quoted and criticized; but the main idea which emerges from the work is that everything in nature has a meaning and a use, and that everything proves the existence and wisdom of God. Quotations from archaic poetry and comic stories rub shoulders with passages of philosophy, metaphysics, sociology and anthropology, providing invaluable source-material for modern research, and there are observations on animal psychology, the evolution of species and the influence of climate on animals and man that often have quite a modern ring to them, though how many of these ideas are Jahiz's own it is difficult to establish; many are clearly borrowed from his contemporaries. As a good rationalist, Jahiz even carries out experiments to check the validity of conventional wisdom about animals, though he does not always interpret the results correctly or realize that the conditions of the experiment are faulty, as when he accepts the idea of spontaneous generation on the evidence of seeing flies hatch in a sealed bottle. The monumental al-Hayawan, which Jahiz never completed, was followed by a short work, Kitab al-Qawlfi l-bighal (H, II, 211-378), which deals with the mule, a hybrid well-calculated to arouse Jahiz's curiosity.

Altogether different is Kitab al-Amsar wa-ajaib albuldan ("Metropolises and Geographical Curiosities"), only a fragment of which has survived.²⁵ This cannot be called a geographical treatise in the true sense of the word, for, though it deals with cities and countries, Jahiz presents them in literary rather than scientific terms, describing the tales and legends surrounding them; nevertheless, the work could be seen as an early specimen of human geography. The notion of the influence of soil and surroundings on their human inhabitants which is common to this work and to al-Hayawan is also developed in a curious text, Kitab Fakhr al-Sudan ala l-Bidan (H, I, 173-226), in which Jahiz vaunts the superiority of the black races to the white.²⁶ Despite his origins, it seems unlikely that Jahiz genuinely wished to disparage the whites; rather it seems that his aim was obliquely to undermine Persian Shuubi pretensions to racial and cultural superiority to the Arabs; by using the kinds of argument employed by the Persians themselves, Jahiz shows that mere racial characteristics are not a mark of divine favour or displeasure, but of climatic conditions. Also to be included under the heading of ethnology is the last chapter of Kitab al-Bukhala, which is probably identical with Kitab Atimat al-Arab; this deals with the foodstuffs of the ancient Arabs, whose curious and sometimes revolting nature is set against the bedouins' proverbial hospitality and is explained in terms of environment—a dig at those Shuubis who mocked the supposedly barbaric habits of the Arabs. The work is similar to a conventional lexicographical monograph, with an added dash of irony, for the mate rial includes verses on cannibalism and provides a good example of Jahiz's slyly humorous method:

It was customary among the early Arabs to attribute the wrongdoing of a single individual to his entire tribe; similarly, a whole tribe might win commendation for the acts of one man alone. Thus…tribes would vilify each other as dog-eaters or man-eaters on the strength of an isolated incident—which might itself, upon examination, prove to have been perfectly excusable…A poet accordingly mocks the tribe of Bahilah thus:

Ghifaq got eaten by Bahilah; fie!

They sucked his bones and skull quite dry;

Now Ghifaq's mother pipes her eye.

…And the whole tribe of Asad were stigmatized as cannibals because of what happened to Ramlah bint Faid…who was eaten by her husband and her brother Abu Arib (who for their part declared that they only ate her out of exasperation at her unsuitable behaviour). The poet Ibn Darah upbraids them thus:

Ramlah was wife to one of your family, sister to another; now her name spells infamy.

Abu Arib! is this your clan's style of blood relationships, bloated as you all are on the flesh of the lady's hips?

and thus:

After what happened to Ramlah Faid, no Faqash man can find a bride;

A newly-wed but yestere'en, her flesh now graces your tureen.²⁷

A similar spirit of irony informs Kitab al-Bursan wa l urjan wa l-umyan wa l-hulan, a selection of anecdotes, verse quotations and items of vocabulary relating to lepers, cripples, the blind, cross-eyed and otherwise physically defective.

The remaining works in this section deal with literary topics. Kitab al-Bayan wa l-tabyin ("The Book of Eloquence and Exposition") is an anthology of poetry and oratorical prose which constitutes a kind of selective inventory of the Arabic humanities, by means of which Jahiz tries to demonstrate Arab superiority to all other nations in the literary field, and so to add to the arguments directed against members of other cultures who claimed that the Arabs were barbarians, unfit to lead the Muslim community.²⁸ Although Jahiz does little to explain his choice of literary material, he sketches an outline of poetic theory, leaving the reader to define the rules of literary criticism. Kitab al-Bayan is such a rich source of material that it has tended to overshadow other shorter but equally interesting works, such as the epistle Fi l-Balaghah wa l-ijaz ("Of Eloquence and Concision", unpublished), the brief surviving fragment of which shows that Jahiz was anxious not to neglect prose as a subject of literary discussion, and to lay down one fundamental rule of composition for Arabic prose-writers, namely concision (ijaz). In a short essay with the enigmatic title, Fi Sinaat al-quwwad ("The Skills of the Guild-Masters", H, I, 375-93), Jahiz represents several people using the jargon of their professions to describe a battle and compose love poetry; the effect is comic and illustrates the dangers of professional conditioning, over-specialization and the lack of a broader culture. Jahiz himself favours all-round development, and expounds his views in Kitab al-Muallimin ("Schoolmasters"), the surviving portion of which is a serious treatise on teaching, though the lost portions may well have presented schoolmasters in a satirical light.²⁹

In al-Hayawan and al-Bayan Jahiz acted as a compiler, arranging notes and using his own personal observations to link them, but in the shorter treatises he emerges as a constructive critic and—himself at best a mediocre poet—an advocate of prose as an equal and a rival to verse. He himself sets the example by writing an elegy (rithd) in prose, Fi Mawt Abi Harb al-Saffar, and a prose satire (hijd) of a well-known member of the Barmakid family, Hija Muhammad b. al-Jahm al-Barmaki. Other, unpublished fragments of the same type have survived in manuscript. Finally, Fi Dhamm alzaman (S, 310-11) is a veritable prose poem on the "evils of the age".³⁰

Adab

Moral decline and neglect of customary practices are recurrent themes both of paraenetic and of professional adab. To the latter category doubtless belonged a lost Kitab Akhlaq al-wuzara, which must have been a manual for the use of viziers. The surviving Kitab al-Taj ("The Book of the Crown"), which deals with rules of conduct for the great, is clearly apocryphal, as may also be Kitab al-Hijab (H, II, 25-85), on the office of chamberlain (hajib). Good manners are the subject of Risalat al-Maad wa l-maash fi l-adab watadbir al-nas wa-muamalatihim ("Epistle for the Next World and This on Manners, Managing Men and Social Relations", Majmu, 1-36, French trans. Vial, Quatre Essais, I, 33-66). This treatise falls to some extent under the heading of adab as Ibn al-Muqaffa for example conceived it, and Jahiz sets a still more individual stamp on paraenetic adab and the study of manners and morals, analyzing character and emotion and building up pictures of entire social groups characterized by some particular moral or psychological feature.

To judge by the titles to which references have survived, Jahiz must have devoted a number of epistles to such qualities as forgiveness and clemency, energy and resolve, etc., and he makes tantalizing allusions to these themes in other works. Some works of this kind survive; the keeping of promises is discussed in the fragmentary Fi stinjaz al-wad (II Risalab, 173-7), anger and its consequences in Fi l-Jidd wa l-bazl ("Earnestness and Jesting")—the title describes the tone of the epistle rather than its contents (Majmu, 61-98, French trans. Vial, Quatre Essais, I, 99-148), envy in Fi Fasl ma bayn al-adawah wa l-hasad ("On the Difference Between Enmity and Envy", trans. Beeston, Journal of Arabic Literature, XVIII, 1987) and in Fi l-Hasid wa lmahsud ("The Envier and the Envied", II Risala, 1-13),³¹ indiscretion in Kitab Kitman al-sirr wa-hifz allisan ("On Keeping Secrets and Guarding One's Tongue", Majmu, 37-60, French trans. Vial, Quatre Essais, I, 67-97), whose overly dogmatic assertions Jahiz tones down in Tafdil al-nutq ala l-samt ("Speech is Better than Silence", II Risalah, 148-54),³² where the value of speech is acknowledged. Snobbishness and pride are discussed in al-Nubl wa l-tannabbul wadhamm al-kibr ("Real and Assumed Superiority and a Condemnation of Arrogance") and narrow-mindedness in Fi l-Wukala wa-muwakkilin ("Of Stewards and Those Who Appoint them," II Risalah, 170-2).³³ But by far the most famous and extensive work in this category is Kitab al-Bukhala ("The Book of Misers"). It consists of anecdotes and epistles which illustrate the vice of avarice, and begins with an introduction in which meanness is illustrated in great depth. By stressing the greed of the protagonists—many of them Persians—Jahiz seems to be trying to accentuate, by implication, the proverbial generosity of the Arabs, but what makes the book a masterpiece is Jahiz's gift for sheer story-telling:

A man from Marv [in Persia] used constantly to be travelling on business and pilgrimages; he used to stay with an Iraqi, who would entertain him liberally and see to all his needs. Often and often the man from Marv would say to the Iraqi: "How I wish you would come to Marv, so that I could repay all the kindnesses you've done me and the goodness you show me every time I come here. Of course here in your home town, by God's grace, you have no need of my hospitality." Now it so happened, a long while after, that the Iraqi had some business in that quarter [Marv], and he found the hardships of travel and the loneliness of being away from home considerably alleviated by the fact that he knew his friend was there. When he arrived in Marv he made straight for his house in his travelling dress, in his turban and tall hat and cloak, all ready to deposit his baggage and take up residence as a man does with a trusted friend and intimate. When he saw the man from Marv sitting among his cronies he threw himself into his arms and embraced him; yet the man gave no sign of recognition and was as unforthcoming as if he had never set eyes on him before. The Iraqi said to himself, "Perhaps he can't recognise me through my dust-veil", so he took off his veil and began to ask his friend how he was; but the man was more offputting than ever. Then the Iraqi said to himself, "Most likely it's because of my turban", so he pulled it off, said who he was and renewed his enquiries; but his friend was as chilling as could be. "Perhaps it's because of my hat", said the Iraqi [and began to remove it]. The man from Marv saw that the game was up and that it was impossible to feign ignorance any longer. He said, "If you were to take off your skin I still wouldn't recognise you!"³⁴

Kitab al-Bukhala also contains an entire chapter on vaga-bonds, a subject also treated in the lost Hiyal almukaddin ("Mendicants' Tricks"), of which two pages have been preserved by a slightly later writer, Ibrahim b. Muhammad al-Bayhaqi, as has one page of Hiyal al-lusus ("Robbers' Tricks"),³⁵ to which Jahiz refers in al-Bukhala. These texts could be considered forerunners of the maqamah and of Hikayat Abi l-Qasim by Abu 1- Mutahhar al-Azdi, and bear an affinity to the later genre of the qasidah sasaniyyah;³⁶ as transmitted via Spain through the quotations in al-Bayhaqi, they may even be related to the picaresque novel. Kitab al-Bukhala, which has already proved a stimulus to literary and linguistic research,³⁷ would clearly repay further study.

Probably earlier in date than al-Bukhala, Kitab al-Qiyan ("The Book of Singing Slave-Girls") contains a study of the manners and morals of the type as embodied in a seductive coquette and gold-digger, whose feigned or real feelings are analyzed with great subtlety:

The singing-girl is hardly ever sincere in her passion, or whole-hearted in her affection. For both by training and by innate instinct her nature is to set up snares and traps for the victims, in order that they may fall into her toils…But it sometimes happens that this pretence leads her on to turning it into a reality, and that she in fact shares her lover's torments…Sometimes she may renounce her craft, in order for her to be cheaper for him [to buy]…or she may allege that she is really a free woman, as a trick to get herself into the lover's possession, and out of anxiety for him lest her high price should ruin him…Yet for the most part singing-girls are insincere, and given to employing deceit and treachery in squeezing out the property of the deluded victim and then abandoning him. Sometimes a singing-girl may have three or four such victims with her, in spite of their own anxiety to avoid such an encounter, and their mutual jealousy when they do meet each other. Then she weeps with one eye to one of them, and laughs with the other eye to the second, and winks at the latter in mockery of the former…When they leave, she writes letters to all of them in identical terms, telling each one how much she dislikes the rest, and how she longs to be alone with him without the others.³⁸

The epistle is ostensibly an apology for the rich businessmen who own, train and hire out the singing-girls, and, though bolstered by a typology of the affections and a history of the relations between the sexes in Arab society, is surely satirical in intent; but, though paradoxical and daring at times, it could hardly be considered shocking, unlike an anthology on natural and unnatural love, Kitab Mufakharat al-jawari wa l-ghilman ("Boasting-Match between Girls and Boys"; H, II, 91-137), in which Jahiz displays a marked hostility to homosexuality, as he also must have done in a lost work, Dhamm al-liwat ("Condemnation of Sodomites"), and as he does in a witty essay, Fi Tafdil al-batn ala l-zahr ("On the Superiority of the Belly to the Back").³⁹ Passionate love is described at length in al-Qiyan and is also the subject of an epistle, Fi l-Ishq wa l-nisa ("Of Love and Women"); this has survived only in mutilated form in combination with Fasl ma bayn al-rijalwa lnisa ("The Difference between Men and Women", S, 266-75), an examination of the respective roles of men and women in which Jahiz shows himself to be resolutely feminist in a far from feminist environment.⁴⁰

Several of the above works, al-Bukhala and al-Qiyan in particular, depict social classes, as do the epistles Fi Madh al-tujjar wa-dhamm amal al-sultan (II Risalah, 155-60)⁴¹ and Dhamm al-kuttab (Finkel, Three Essays, 40-51, French trans. Pellat, Hesperis, XLIII, 1956, 29-50); as their titles indicate, the former compares merchants, very favourably, to civil servants, and the latter is an attack on the bureaucracy. The fact that a treatise in praise of civil servants is also attributed to Jahiz, and that several other sets of antithetical titles are listed in the sources, gave rise to the idea that Jahiz was particularly fickle and quite prepared to defend in turn "a case and its opposite", as Ibn Qutaybah says in a famous passage.⁴² In fact this "fickleness" can be explained both in terms of literary convention⁴³ and of Jahiz's idiosyncratic ability to see the good and bad in everything. One last work, which should perhaps be included under the heading of portrayals of social groups, is a year-book of the singers of Baghdad for the year 215/830-1, Fi Tabaqat almughannin ("Classes of Singers", II Risalah, 186-9); Jahiz declares his intention of bringing it up to date each year, but only a short fragment has survived.⁴⁴

As the above bibliography shows, in compilations such as Kitab al-Hayawan or Kitab al-Bayan Jahiz seems to follow the pattern of conventional scholarship, but he moves well beyond convention when he uses traditional material as a vehicle for his own tastes and convictions. What is more, Jahiz always sets his own personal and utterly distinctive stamp on his source-material, however neutral. In the field of the Arabic humanities, it could well be said that while Jahiz's predecessors collected and sifted the raw materials, Jahiz himself was the artist who brought an original touch to the whole edifice. He raised the study of manners to the level of psychological enquiry and brought an analytical approach to scholarly and professional adab. Moreover, the structure of Arab-Islamic culture as presented by Jahiz is not merely founded on the traditions of the past corrected by the logic that Jahiz learned from the Greeks; it is an open culture, based on the recognition that the Arabs were not the first race to become civilized and that the progress of the human spirit did not cease with the Revelation. Unique in his own time, Jahiz, like Bacon or d'Alembert, embodies a process of development which can best be expressed in the formulae "memory, imagination, reason" or "scholarship, belles-lettres, philosophy". Since the chronology of his writings cannot be established precisely we cannot, perhaps, speak of his personal development in these terms; but his works take scholarship as their point of departure, enrich it with imagination, and are consistently rationalist in outlook. Though Jahiz is in no way comparable to the Muslim philosophers and thinkers of succeeding centuries, he nevertheless occupies a prominent place in the early history of Muslim thought. He was not, perhaps, a profound thinker, but he observed widely, and his shrewd comments are inspired by solid good sense and sound reason. Above all, though, Jahiz was a man of letters whose technical achievements mark a high point in the history of Arabic literature. Other writers before him had used a more sophisticated prose than that of the scholars and preachers, but Jahiz showed that the Arabs and Muslims, as the heirs of preceding civilizations, had attained an intellectual level which required its own medium of expression, at once more flexible than the prose of the early orators and simpler than that of the scribes—an unadorned prose which would be capable of conveying subtle shades of meaning and would derive its aesthetic quality from its own resources, without recourse to po etic ornamentation. Few writers were talented enough to follow his lead, and artistic prose soon drew upon rhyme and tropes and, once its original inspiration had dried up, lapsed into affectation and verbal acrobatics. The best critics have always rightly considered Jahiz as the greatest of Arabic prose-writers, though their judgement has been based less on precise analysis than on general impressions. But it must be conceded that Jahiz's style is hard to characterize. His sentences, which almost always dispense with internal rhyme, are often complex and extremely long, so long indeed as to mislead some editors who fail to grasp their flow into breaking them up at the wrong point. They are balanced by the juxtaposition of units of similar quantity and by the repetition of the same idea in two different forms, so that the reader may be sure to grasp its sense. His vocabulary is rich and as precise as the state of the language at that period allowed; foreign terms and neologisms are used with discrimination, and many passages seem quite modern. Nevertheless, Jahiz is a difficult writer to translate, so much so that, whenever the present writer has little trouble in turning into French a work attributed to Jahiz, he is inclined to consider it of doubtful authenticity. The difficulty stems from the often defective state of the texts, the richness of the vocabulary, and from Jahiz's untidy and confusingly digressive method of composition. But the untidiness is intentional and is, perhaps, less a result of Jahiz's pen trying to keep pace with his ideas than of his desire to vary his rhythm and subject-matter, to break down his reasoning into easy steps, and to make room for witticisms, anecdotes and pithy reflections. In an environment seemingly hostile to frivolity, Jahiz tackles the most serious questions, but at the same time gives the impression that he sees everything in relative terms and takes nothing wholly seriously. No reader can fail to be struck by the frequency with which Jahiz discusses laughter and feels the need to justify it, as though it were generally felt to be unnatural. To be sure, he repeats that the serious and the comic both have their place in the scheme of things, but to many Jahiz is still a mere entertainer whose only object is to raise a laugh. Some early writers were more clear-sighted and dubbed him mu allim al-aql wa l-adab, "the teacher of reason and polite learning", and for Jahiz adab was indeed a process of building up a new culture in which reflection, doubt, observation and even experiment were involved; but he also showed that man has the right to cast a satirical eye on the world about him and openly to enjoy such harmless pleasures as frank and healthy laughter.

Jahiz was bound to attract admirers, one of the most distinguished of whom was Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi; he also inspired forgers and clumsy imitators but did not found a literary school as such, for his talents were too unique. However, the isolated position that Jahiz occupies in Arabic literature can largely be blamed on the ground lost by Mutazilism to Sunnism and on one of Sunnism's chief apologists, Ibn Qutaybah, who served the Sunni policy of the caliph al-Mutawakkil much as Jahiz himself had earlier served Mutazilism, and who played a prominent role in shaping later Muslim thought. Ibn Qutaybah's understanding of the aims of adab, as well as his theology, was radically different from Jahiz's; he consequently misunderstood Jahiz, and succeeded in caricaturing him in the eyes of posterity.⁴⁵ In the long term, he can be said to have succeeded in ousting Jahiz's conception of adab as progress and pluralism and in winning acceptance for his own tendency towards a safe and unadventurous singleness of outlook.

Notes

¹ See p. 5.

² See pp. 186-8.

³Bay an, III, 374-5.

⁴ Poet, katib, and an influential figure in government circles (d. 243/857). His (originally Turkish) family produced several men of letters, notably Abu Bakr al-Suli (d. c. 335/946), who edited the diwans of several Modern poets, including that of Abu Nuwas.

⁵ He was also an important figure in literary circles, see EI,² "al-Fath b. Khakan".

⁶ See EI,¹ "Thumama b. Ashras"

⁷ See p. 5.

⁸ Pellat, "Nouvel essai d'inventaire".

⁹Fibrist, Tajaddud, 210-12/Dodge, 1, 402-9.

¹⁰ Van Ess, K. al-Nakt.

¹¹ Details of editions are given in the Bibliography to this chapter. In the case of works published as part of a collection, page references are given in the text of the chapter and translations are referred to in brackets. References to English versions of extracts from otherwise untranslated texts are given in the footnotes.

¹²GAL, S1, 241-7.

¹³ Pellat, Jahiz, 62-4, 64-6; see Pellat, "L'imamat".

¹⁴ The Zaydis put forward a pragmatic theory of the imamate: it could be held by any male member of the Prophet's House (ahl al-bayf), and any imam could be ousted by a better-qualified candidate; the presence of single imam in every age was not necessary: there could be several, or none.

¹⁵ Pellat, Jahiz, 72-82, 56-8, 66-72; on the arbitration of Siffin, cf. p. 186, below.

¹⁶ See Pellat, Jahiz, 58-62.

¹⁷CHALUP, 216. Ahmad b. Hanbal opposed the Mutazili doctrine of the createdness of the Quran and taught that the attributes of God, which the Mutazilis interpreted allegorically, were real; for the political significance of this stance, see pp. 5-6.

¹⁸ Pellat, Jahiz, 51-2.

¹⁹ Ibid., 91-7.

²⁰ See ch. 5.

²¹ See Pellat, Jahiz, 32-3, 38-48, 48-50.

²² Pellat, Jahiz, 33-7; see Vajda, "La connaissance naturelle de Dieu", and van Ess, Ashab al-maarif.

²³ Pellat, Jahiz, 52-4, 54-5.

²⁴ Ibid., 130-85.

²⁵ Ibid., 185-8, 188-95.

²⁶ Ibid., 195-8.

²⁷Bukhala, 234, 236; trans. J. Ashtiany (hereafter J. A.).

²⁸ Pellat, Jahiz, 100-11.

²⁹ Ibid., 11-12, 114-16, 112-14.

³⁰ Ibid., 116-21, 122, 122-4.

³¹ Ibid., 221-2.

³² Ibid., 230-1.

³³ Ibid., 235-6.

³⁴Bukhala, 22, trans J. A.

³⁵Mahasin, 521-3, 622-4; see Pellat, Jahiz, 255-6, 253-4.

³⁶ See p. 101.

³⁷ E.G. Mubarak, Fann al-qasas; Blau, "Syntactic phenomena".

³⁸ Trans. Beeston, Singing-Girls, 31-4.

³⁹ Pellat, Jahiz, 270-1, 269.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 257-9.

⁴¹ Ibid., 272-3.

⁴²Mukhtalif al-hadith, 71-2.

⁴³ See Geries, al-Mahasin wa l-masawi, and p. 28, above.

⁴⁴Pellat, Jahiz, 124-5.

⁴⁵ Lecomte, Ibn Qutayba, 433-6; Ibn Qutaybah, Mukhtalif al-hadith, 71-3; trans. Lecomte, Le Traite des divergences, 65-6.