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By: Dr. Mahmoud Al Deek


  Fourteen years after the foundation of Baghdad by the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur, a prominent literary figure was born (about the year 776), in Basra, Iraq, a town that was founded earlier as a garrison citadel. By then it had turned into a major intellectual center, along with its rival city, Kufa.

  His name was Abu ‘Uthman ‘Amr b. Bahr Al-Fuqaymi Al-Basri, better own as Al  Jahiz, born to two poor parents from the Banu Kinana tribe. He owes his sobriquet to a malformation of his eyes (jahiz = with a projecting cornea). Little is known of his childhood in Basra, except that from an early age he had a great urge for learning and possessed a remarkably inquisitive mind. He preferred independence to family life and in his early youth started mixing with groups, which gathered at the mosque to discuss a wide range of questions. They attended the philological discussions conducted on the Mirbad (intellectual gathering place) and listened to lectures by the most learned men of the day on philology, lexicography and poetry, namely Al-Assma’i, Abu Obayda and Abu Zayd. In no time, he acquired real mastery of the Arabic language along with the usual and traditional culture.

  One of the most important aspects about the period of Al-Jahiz’s intellectual development and his life was that books were readily available. Though paper had been introduced into the Islamic world only shortly before Al-Jahiz’s birth, it had become so popular by the time he was in his 30’s, that it created an intellectual revolution, and the rise of a reading in public. For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire, the cities of the Middle East contained a large number of literate people - many of them of humble origin.

  At the age of 20, Al Jahiz was selling fish along one of the Basrah canals. But he tells the story of how his mother presented him with a tray of paper notebooks and told him that they would help him to earn his living.

  Al-Jahiz began his career as a writer while still in Basra. He wrote an essay on the institution of the caliphate which met with approval from the court in Baghdad. From then on he seems to have supported himself entirely by his pen. He dedicated a number of his works to ministers and other powerful functionaries. In turn, he often received gifts of appreciation from them. For example, he received 5,000 gold dinars from the official to whom he dedicated his Book of Animals.

  Al-Jahiz wrote over two hundred works, of which only thirty have survived. His work included zoology, Arabic grammar, poetry, rhetoric and lexicography. He is considered one of the few Muslim scientists who wrote on scientific and complex subjects for the layman and commoner.

  His writings contained many anecdotes, regardless of the subject he was discussing, that made his point and brought out both sides of the argument. Some of his books are The Art of Keeping One’s Mouth Shut, Against Civil Servants, Arab Food, In Praise of Merchants, and Levity and Seriousness. On the style of writing, al-Jahiz stated that: The best style is the clearest, the style that needs no explication and no notes, that conforms to the subject expressed, neither exceeding it nor falling short.

  The most important of Al-Jahiz’s works, however, is the Book of Animals - Kitab al-Hayawan - which, even incomplete, totals seven fat volumes in the printed edition. It contains important scientific information and anticipates a number of concepts that were not fully developed until the first half of the twentieth century.

  In that book, Al-Jahiz discusses animal mimicry - noting that certain parasites adapt to the color of their host - and writes at length on the influences of climate and diet on men, and plants and animals of different geographical regions. He discusses animal communication, psychology and the degree of intelligence of insect and animal species. He also gives a detailed account of the social organization of ants, including from his own observation, a description of how they store grain in their nests so that it does not spoil during the rainy season. He even knew that some insects are responsive to light; and used this information to suggest a clever way of ridding a room of mosquitoes and flies.

  An early exponent of the zoological and anthropological sciences, Al-Jahiz discovered and recognized the effect of environmental factors on animal life; he has also observed the transformation of animal species under different factors. Furthermore, in several passages of his book, he has described the concept, usually attributed to Charles Darwin, of natural selection.

  Al-Jahiz’s concept of natural selection was something new in the history of science. Although Greek philosophers mentioned change in plants and animals, they never made the first steps towards developing a comprehensive theory.

  He nevertheless retained ample independence and was able to take advantage of his new position to further his intellectual training and to travel, particularly to Syria. However, he was criticized then for writing a geography book—now almost entirely lost—without having traveled enough. In Baghdad also he found a rich store of learning from the many translations from Greek undertaken during the Caliphate of al-Ma’mum and studying the philosophers of antiquity, especially Aristotle, enabled him to broaden his outlook and perfect his own theological doctrine, which he had begun to elaborate under the supervision of the great Mu’tazilis of the day.

  Al Jahiz’s acute powers of observation, his light-hearted skepticism, his comic sense and satirical turn of mind fit him admirably to portray human types and society. He uses all his skill at the expense of several social groups (schoolmasters, singers, scribes etc.) generally keeping within the bounds of decency. His work Al-Qiyan, which is about slave-girl singers, contains pages of remarkable shrewdness.

  Meanwhile, even though Al Jahiz’s place in the development of Muslim thought is far from negligible, he is chiefly interesting as a writer and a literary figure, for with him form is never overshadowed by content; even in purely technical works. If he is not the first of the great Arab prose writers, only two of them might be controversially considered equal or better than him and they are Abdullah bin al-Muqaffa’ and Sahl bin Harun. Nevertheless, he gave literary prose its most perfect form, as was indeed recognized first by politicians who made use of his talent for the Abbasid cause and then by Arab critics who were unanimous in asserting his superiority and making his name the very symbol of literary ability.

  Al-Jahiz’s writing is characterized by deliberately contrived disorderliness and numerous digressions; the individuality of his alert and lively style lies in a concern for the exact term, a foreign word if necessary, picturesque phrases and sentences which are nearly always unrhymed, but balanced by the repetition of the same idea in two different forms. This would be pointless repetition to our way of thinking, but in the mind of a 9th century writer it simply arose from the desire to make himself clearly understood and to give ordinary prose the symmetry of verse.

  Nevertheless, for the majority of literate Arabs Al-Jahiz remains something of a jester and his place as such in legends can undoubtedly be attributed in part to his fame and his ugliness, which made him the hero of numerous essays. But it must also be attributed to a characteristic of his writing which could not but earn him the reputation of being a joker in a Muslim world inclined towards soberness and gravity; for he never fails, even in his weightiest passages, to slip in anecdotes, witty observations and amusing comments.

  His lighter touch and his sense of humor enabled him to deal entertainingly with serious subjects and help popularize them. But he realized he was doing something rather shocking and one cannot help being struck by the frequency with which he feels it necessary to plead the cause of humor and fun. The best example is in Kitab al-Tarbi’ wa ‘l-tadwir, a masterpiece of ironic writing, as well as a compendium of all the questions to which his contemporaries whether through force of habit, imitative instinct or lack of  imagination offered traditional solutions or gave no thought at all.

  Al-Jahiz returned to Basra after spending more than fifty years in Baghdad. He died in Basra in 868 as a result of an accident in which he was crushed to death by a collapsing pile of books in his private library - a fitting death for a great writer. Like many Arabic writers, Al-Jahiz had great output that lists nearly 200 titles of which only about thirty, authentic or apocryphal, have survived in their entirety; about fifty others have partially  survived, whilst the rest seem irremediably lost.

  Al Jahiz says: “In every generation, there are a few individuals with the desire to study the workings of nature; if they do not exist, those nations would perish.” Al-Jahiz himself was one of those individuals and was fortunate to live during one of the most exciting epochs of intellectual history - the period of the transmission of the Greek and the development of Arabic prose literature. Al-Jahiz was closely involved in both.

   

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