|
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. | 
