E D I N B U R G H S T U D I E S I N C L A S S I C A L A R A B I C L I T E R AT U R E

AL-JAHIZ:
IN PRAISE OF
BOOKS
James E. Montgomery

S E R I E S E D I T O R S : W E N - C H I N O U YA N G A N D J U L I A B R AY
 Edinburgh Studies in Classical Arabic Literature
Series Editors: Wen-chin Ouyang and Julia Bray

This series departs from conventional writing on Classical Arabic Literature.

It integrates into its terms of enquiry both cultural and literary theory and
the historical contexts and conceptual categories that shaped individual
writers or works of literature. Its approach provides a forum for path-
breaking research which has yet to exert an impact on the scholarship.
The purpose of the series is to open up new vistas on an intellectual and
imaginative tradition that has repeatedly contributed to world cultures and
has the continued capacity to stimulate new thinking. 

Books in the series include:

The Reader in al-JāªiÕ

Thomas Hefter

Al- JāªiÕ: In Praise of Books

James E. Montgomery

Al- JāªiÕ: In Censure of Books

James E. Montgomery

www.euppublishing.com/series/escal
Al-Ja-h.iz.: In Praise of Books

James E. Montgomery
 For my children, Natasha, Sam and Josh, with love and admiration

© James E. Montgomery, 2013

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 8332 1 (hardback)

ISBN 978 0 7486 8333 8 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8335 2 (epub)

The right of James E. Montgomery to be identified as

author of this work has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the
Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
 Contents

Preface 3

Part 1  Physiognomy of an Apocalyptic Age

1.1 Cataclysm 23
1.2 Eristics and Salvation 33
1.3 A Self-chronicling Society 46

Part 2  The Book of Living

2.1 The Totalising Work 55
2.2 The Treatise as Totality 60
2.3 Parsing Totality 64
2.4 The Articulation of The Book of Living 70
2.5 Analogues? 98

Part 3  The JāªiÕian Library Under Attack

3.1 Introducing the ‘Introduction’ 107
3.2 Translation 111
3.3 Commentary 129
3.4 The Argument 144

Part 4  The Salvific Book

4.1 Biobibliographies 175
4.2 The Form of the ‘Introduction’ 193
4.3 The Enigma of the Addressee 224
 vi | al-jĀh. i z. : i n pra i s e o f b o o k s

4.4 Invective 239

4.5 The Cohesiveness of Society 256
4.6 An Encyclopaedia to Save Society 266

Part 5  The Architecture of Design

5.1 Governance of the Cosmos 277
5.2 The Grateful Response, 1 319
5.3 The Grateful Response, 2 333
5.4 Obliquity 364

Part 6  Appreciating Design

6.1 An Eristical Contest 391
6.2 Translation 394
6.3 The Argument 418
6.4 Conclusion 423

Postface 427

Appendix: The Praise of Books 430

Notes 470
Bibliography 534
Index 571
PREFACE
 Preface

H ow many books are published each year? Include ephemera and the dig-
ital word, the internet, the blogosphere, social networking, ‘tweeting’
and ‘texting’. Our world is filled with words. Some say this produces infor-
mation overload and anxiety. Some say people are changing how they think.
By just after the middle of the third century of the Hegira (i.e. around
850 AD), something similar was taking place in Baghdad. Rag-paper books
were all the rage. A book market, with its professionals: stationers, copyists,
booksellers and authors, soon emerged. A cosmopolitan society responded
enthusiastically. Al-JāªiÕ had, for most of his long life, earned his living as
an influential counsellor to the elite. When he died in 255/868–9 (at the
age of ninety?), he had become what we would recognise as a professional
author.
Al-JāªiÕ: In Praise of Books and Al-JāªiÕ: In Censure of Books is a study
in two volumes which seeks to introduce the reader to the writings and
textual world of Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baªr al-JāªiÕ, the ‘father of Arabic
prose’. They tell one version of the story of how al-JāªiÕ viewed, represented,
encouraged and discouraged his society’s responses to the paper book. These
responses touched all aspects of intellectual life – from interpreting the
Qurʾān to reading Aristotle in Arabic. The books are written as independ-
ent but interconnected studies of al-JāªiÕ, his society and its writings, and
are aimed primarily at scholars and students and those with a prior reading
of Arabic. I have also tried to make my books presume only a minimum
of familiarity with the author and his society, though they (sadly) pose a
daunting read for the newcomer to the study of the classical Arabic textual
heritage.

3
 4 | al-jĀh. i z. : i n pra i s e o f b o o k s

A. Life

Al-JāªiÕ was a bibliomaniac, a master of the dialectical method of thinking

about God and reality (material and moral) known as Kalām, an intellectual,
a spokesman for influential members of the political and cultural elite, a
writer who lived, counselled and wrote in Iraq during the first century of the
ʿAbbasid caliphate.
He came to prominence during the reign of Caliph al-Maʾmūn (r. 198–
218/813–33), famous for its promotion of the Arabic translations of Greek
philosophical and scientific learning, and died shortly after the caliphate of
al-Mutawakkil (r. 232–47/847–61). In the intervening years he advised,
argued and rubbed shoulders with the major power brokers and leading
religious and intellectual figures of his day, from the caliphs and the brutal
vizier (but accomplished epistolographer) Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik
al-Zayyāt, to the forbidding Chief Judge Aªmad Ibn Abī Duʾād (and his
deputy, his son Abū al-Walīd Muªammad) and the cultured courtier al-Fatª
b. Khāqān, from the brilliant dialectician al-NaÕÕām and the Neoplatonising
­philosopher al-Kindī to the pious scholar Aªmad b. Óanbal.
At one time or another al-JāªiÕ acted as counsellor and adviser to these
masters of the political universe, often expressing views with which they
did not agree. And at one time or another he crossed swords in debate and
argument with the architects of the Islamic religious, theological, philosophi-
cal and cultural canon. He did not agree with most of them either. His
many, tumultuous writings engage with these figures, their ideas, theories
and policies and thus afford an invaluable but much neglected chronicle of
the ­anxieties, values and beliefs of this cosmopolitan elite.
ʿAbbasid society was swamped with a proliferation of new types of
knowledge, most of it coming from translations of Greek and Indian sci-
ence and philosophy, and was challenged by new ways of disseminating and
devouring the knowledge to which it was already so deeply attached. Books
became an obsession.
The introduction of papermaking techniques into second-century Iraq
heralded a third-century technological revolution in the refinement of rag-
paper and the preparation of books written on rag-paper rather than leather
or parchment (although there was a period of overlap in which all three
 pref a ce | 5

media continued to be used). It quickly became no longer acceptable simply

and without justification or premeditation to rely on predominantly oral
forms of disseminating knowledge.
Al-JāªiÕ was at the vanguard of this ‘knowledge revolution’, an insatiable
reader and writer of books who would hire out a bookshop overnight in order
to consume its stock of volumes without being disturbed. Indeed in one late
source he is said to have died on one such occasion, when, a frail and elderly
man suffering from paralysis, he was crushed by a collapsing pile of books.
The popularity of this story in modern scholarship attests to the power of its
appeal.
In many ways al-JāªiÕ has become the icon of this ‘revolution’. Books
feature prominently in his work, be it as sources, as references or as artefacts
to be explained or theorised. Al-JāªiÕ: In Praise of Books and In Censure of
Books seek to explore the centrality of books to al-JāªiÕ’s oeuvre, with a view
to uncovering the range of stances and opinions he articulates, from glowing
adoration to profound mistrust and outright rejection. Al-JāªiÕ was a biblio-
maniac. He was addicted to books. But like most addicts he was dismayed
and unsettled by the very thing to which he was addicted.

B. Al-JāªiÕ: In Praise of Books

The first volume is devoted to al-JāªiÕ’s most important work: The Book of
Living, Kitāb al-Óayawān. This work contains the most sustained praise of
books in his corpus of writings. I set out to answer the following question:
why did al-JāªiÕ praise books as he does in The Book of Living?

Part 1: Physiognomy of an Apocalyptic Age

The Book of Living was written over more than a decade marked for al-JāªiÕ
by personal catastrophe (a debilitating stroke) and political danger (the death
of two patrons). Work on it was begun before 232/847. The latest events
it refers to are in 244/858. This was a decade which expected that the End
Time was imminent. It witnessed a turning away from Kalām theology when
the Caliph al-Mutawakkil banned debate and so endangered the dialectical
method for ascertaining the truth which al-JāªiÕ considered central to the
ordering, stability and preservation of his society. He wrote The Book of
Living in response to these expectations and concerns.
 6 | al-jĀh. i z. : i n pra i s e o f b o o k s

Part 2: The Book of Living

The enterprise began as an attempt to fulfil a moral imperative – the need to

thank God for His creation by producing a comprehensive inventory of it.
The production of such an inventory involved the proper application of the
special gift which God had given to man: the reasoning intellect.
To this end al-JāªiÕ sought to codify his inventory in the form of a
totalising book. Yet the process was paradoxical: in order to write it, al-JāªiÕ
had somehow to become the ideal writer. This meant that he had to mimic
God, while fully aware that he could never be such an ideal writer. Al-JāªiÕ
was also required to fashion an audience of ideal readers able to read and
respond to such a book. He must also have wondered whether his book could
ever be complete. Yet his notion of moral obligation (taklīf ) required that he
undertake the task. He produced possibly the longest, and probably the most
complex, book written in Arabic at the time. But it seems that the struggle
for completeness resulted in the work being unfinished. (The problem of
mimicking God will be addressed in Part 5).

Part 3: The JāªiÕian Library Under Attack

Not all of his contemporaries agreed or approved of the enterprise. The Book
of Living was subjected to a withering criticism that extended beyond its con-
tents to engulf most of his public writings and become a categorical rejection
of the benefits which the book as an artefact brought to society.
Al-JāªiÕ reverts throughout The Book of Living to this criticism. The
initial 200 pages of the first volume (in its modern edited version) constitute
an ‘Introduction’ (I write it in scare quotes like this because it is not identi-
fied in the book as an introduction) and engage specifically with the attack.
Parts 3 and 6 follow the details of the critique by offering a translation, with
­commentary, of the passages which engage explicitly with the criticism.

Part 4: The Salvific Book

Why were al-JāªiÕ’s books rejected in this manner? What was the point of
the critique? What exactly was attacked? Was it the author’s style of thinking
(Kalām) or writing? Did the work unsettle the attacker, resolutely determined
not to be fashioned as al-JāªiÕ’s ideal reader? Who was the attacker? Why
 pref a ce | 7

is he unnamed? And what did al-JāªiÕ hope to achieve by rehearsing his

attacker’s arguments and refuting them by his praise of books?
Part 4 considers these questions by putting The Book of Living in the
textual environment of the third century, by reviewing attitudes to biogra-
phies and bibliographies, book writing and patronage, and by contrasting
the formal indeterminacy of the ‘Introduction’ with contemporary works. I
conclude that al-JāªiÕ designed his book to save society from the competitive
strife in which argument and debate had engulfed it. Debate could now be
internalised in the soul of the reader. This was made possible because books
encouraged solitary reading and interior debate.

Part 5: The Architecture of Design

How could someone think that a book could save society? Al-JāªiÕ’s answer
lay in an appreciation of God’s design in the universe. The third century
abounded in books on the subject. Part 5 puts The Book of Living into con-
versation with them. It excavates the theological premise of the work: that
God has put in man a primary appreciation of His design. Al-JāªiÕ’s book
explores this primary appreciation of design and so directs its appeal at the
monotheists in his audience. By participating in the process of becoming his
ideal readers, this audience will be led to recognise that creation can only
fully and properly, however imperfectly, be appreciated through al-JāªiÕ’s
(Islamic) account of design.
Appreciation of design took two forms: the proper use of the ʿArabīya,
Arabic in its loftiest register; and a conception of composition which permit-
ted an author to aspire to mimic God without thereby becoming God. And
so here I explore the second tension in the composition of a totalising work
that emerged in Part 2: the aspiration to completeness if not to omniscience.
And yet, if The Book of Living has this didactic and salvific purpose, why
does al-JāªiÕ make it so difficult for his audience to become ideal readers
by his regular use of obliquity and misdirection? Part 5 concludes with a
­consideration of this question.

Part 6: Appreciating Design

This part reverts to a consideration of al-JāªiÕ’s dispute with the Addressee.

It presents a translation of the debate that rounds off the ‘Introduction’. It
 8 | al-jĀh. i z. : i n pra i s e o f b o o k s

unearths one of the fundamental features of the disagreement – the ten-

dency of some Kalām Masters to debate the principal topics of theology by
means of subjects which seem to have nothing to do with these topics. It
transpires that the maligned Debate of the Dog and the Cock that so upset
the Addressee was really a debate about human responsibility and capacity
for action.

Appendix: The Praise of Books

This book demonstrates a certain way of reading al-JāªiÕ through some basic
techniques, including the identification of who is speaking and when and the
arrangement of akhbār (micro-structures), and the determination of the extent
and sweep of an argument (such as the 200-page-long ‘Introduction’; macro-
structures). The Appendix is a look at mezzo-structures by ­schematising the
components of a key argument, his praise of books.

C. My Readers

Another way of approaching this book and how its argument is (perhaps idio­
syncratically) developed is to think of it in terms of the kinds of scholars and
their interests I have had in mind as I wrote each part.
At an early stage of thinking about this book I had the enormous good
fortune to make the acquaintance of Professor Rebecca Stott of the University
of East Anglia. Rebecca was writing a book on Charles Darwin’s predecessors
in evolutionary thought. She was keen to include al-JāªiÕ in her study. I urge
readers of my book to consult her marvellous appreciation of al-JāªiÕ: ‘The
worshipful curiosity of Jahiz – Basra and Baghdad, 850’, in Darwin’s Ghosts.
I wrote Parts 1 and 2 with Rebecca in mind. I have learned more than I can
express from my conversations with her.
Parts 2, 3, 6 and 7, I wrote for the graduate students in whose company
over the years I have explored the writings of al-JāªiÕ. The emphasis is on
translation and on developing a sensitivity to how his arguments unfold,
often through extensive textual structures.
In Part 4, I had in mind those scholars who read al-JāªiÕ predominantly
in terms of belles-lettres and rhetoric and shy away from his engagement with
the major developments of his age (be they political, scientific, theological or
philosophical). In Part 5, I had in mind those who work on the intellectual
 pref a ce | 9

history of the third and fourth centuries but seem not to know what to do
with or make of the JāªiÕian corpus. At some point in their thinking, both
sets of scholars seem to me to agree – they straitjacket his writings within the
confines of Adab, a type of writing and a style of thought which, at the point
in the third century when al-JāªiÕ composed The Book of Living, I do not
think existed in exactly the form which modern scholarship has reconstructed
and which these scholars think his books represent.
I also set out to write a simple book but The Book of Living just would
not let me. Despite such a multiplicity of audiences and (a cacophony?) of
writerly practices, I have tried to provide this book with a strong storyline.
Inevitably, of course, many rough edges remain and the story may often seem
to vanish from the page. I would like to apologise to my readers for this. I am
sure that one day a simpler book can and will be written about The Book of
Living. Whether it will, or can, be written by me is another matter.
One thing I have learned about writing from my reading of al-JāªiÕ
is that the writer is in no sense extrinsic to the process but is the principal
mediator between the subject of the book and the reader. I have been
emboldened by this to include myself in the story I am telling of this third-
century masterpiece and its remarkable composer. This is why I have noticed
that a symmetry often emerges: my reading of al-JāªiÕ’s Book of Living mir-
rors al-JāªiÕ’s reading of God’s creation. My attempt to write a book about
The Book of Living comes to mirror al-JāªiÕ’s attempt to write The Book of
Living. That this was not what I originally set out to do I take to be another
indication of the extraordinary power and gravitational pull of The Book of
Living.

D. The Title

The Arabic title of the work is Kitāb al-Óayawān. This is usually rendered
as The Book of Animals. As we begin to appreciate the centrality of man to
al-JāªiÕ’s vision for the book, more and more scholars are beginning to refer
to it as The Book of Living Beings or Living Things. This was the translation I
first used when I started the project. I soon found myself becoming more and
more dissatisfied with it though. I developed a deep sense of the relevance of
the word ªayawān in Qurʾān ʿAnkabūt 29: 64, a verse in which the word
carries the meaning of ‘living’:
 10 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s

This life down here is nothing but frivolity and dalliance. The next dwelling
– it is living (ªayawān), if only they knew.

And in fact al-JāªiÕ himself alludes to this meaning:

If someone says, ‘So and so has produced a book on the classes of living
things (ªayawān) but does not include the angels and the jinn, yet that is
how people use language’ – there is another occurrence (maw∂iʿ) of the
word ‘living’ (ªayawān) – the words of God (Great and Glorious!) in His
Book: ‘The next dwelling – it is living’ [Óayawān 5.286.4–7].

I am now convinced that al-JāªiÕ meant his title to evoke this unique
Qurʾanic use of the word. In this I follow Saʿīd Ó. Man‚ūr in his excellent,
sensitive and intelligent study The World-View of al-JāªiÕ, pp. 301–4.

E. Translation

The emphasis in Al-JāªiÕ and His Books is on what al-JāªiÕ has to say and
so the book features numerous translations, many of which are rendered
into English for the first time, in order that the reader may gain access to
al-JāªiÕ’s words. In this respect, Parts 3 and 6 can function as a sort of
primer for anyone who wants to learn how to read al-JāªiÕ. The translations,
designed to be readable on their own, are at the same time effected in such a
way as to guide readers with the Arabic text in front of them. They oscillate
­uncomfortably between two target audiences.
The first audience is those who have al-JāªiÕ’s Arabic to hand. Thus
my rendering is close to the original and I have sought to phrase it in such
a way that it is clear to see how I extracted my English version from the
original. It is for this reason that I have added, in square brackets at the end
of each paragraph, very precise page and line references; I have followed the
conventions of my discipline in transliterating in parentheses those words
whose rendering may be contentious, uncertain or unusual; but I do not
denote with any kind of brackets words supplied to complement in English
the sense of the original, though I do occasionally use curved brackets to
furnish a few basic explanations when required by the sense. I have also
imposed my own paragraph divisions upon the original and have not always
followed the divisions proposed by the editor of the best available edition,
 pref ace | 11

ʿAbd al-Salām Muªammad Hārūn. (Arabic manuscripts contain very mini-

mal punctuation and rarely entertain customs such as marking text off into
paragraphs).
Equally, however, I nurture the wild hope that even a text presented like
this, and revealing such abundant interference on my part as translator, might
still be of remote interest to readers who do not have access to the Arabic.
To such a reader, I apologise for cluttering the page like this, with paragraph
numbers, intrusive markings and precise references. I also apologise if at
times the English seems a bit cumbersome.
Of course, the translation itself is basically nothing other than al-JāªiÕ as
re-presented in English by Montgomery, but we are all so familiar with the
notion of translation as betrayal and deformation as not to be unaware of this.
There is one particular aspect, however, for which I feel I must apologise to
al-JāªiÕ and to those who want to read him. In order to fulfil the demands
of a book such as this in as economic a fashion as possible, and to guide
the reader of both inclinations through what I understand al-JāªiÕ’s train
of thought to be, I have often placed my own words on a par with those of
the author. I mean of course the paraphrases, explanatory paragraphs and
commentaries in which the text abounds. (As what I seek to achieve in these
paragraphs is to paraphrase what I take al-JāªiÕ to be saying, I would be
overjoyed if any of my readers were to recognise al-JāªiÕ manipulating me as
his ventriloquist’s dummy.)
I have presented this mass of material often as separate sections and
have imposed upon the reader an enormous burden of flitting between and
across pages of my book. I realise that the disruption may be too great – or in
al-JāªiÕ’s terms, may be deleterious to the reader’s psychic energy. The reader
who wants to read al-JāªiÕ and not me can simply skip these parts.
Conceivably, too, this book may fall into the hands of some readers
who, having no need of my mediation in order to gain access to al-JāªiÕ’s
words, may want to skip the translations and will instead concentrate on my
interminable wrestling bouts with al-JāªiÕ. Let them be in no doubt as to the
outcome. He is always the victor. As underdog, I am always out-manoeuvred.
I have though relished the opportunity to enter the ring with him. I have
regularly received a drubbing at the hands of one of the most remarkable
writers it has been my good fortune to be able to read.
 12 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s

Translation is not something which can be done successfully in isola-

tion. Through my involvement in The Library of Arabic Literature I have
become deeply conscious of the transformative and enabling power of close
collaboration. In this instance, I owe an especial debt of gratitude to my
friend Professor Geert Jan van Gelder, the Laudian Professor Emeritus at
the University of Oxford. With his customary erudition and diligence, he
patiently (and quickly) read through more than 100 pages of my renderings
of al-JāªiÕ, and saved me from many a bloomer. I am also grateful to him for
his permission to include some of his comments in my notes.

F. Prosopography

Al-JāªiÕ often goes to great lengths to point out that he is quoting and/or rep-
resenting the words of others. He explicitly states that these pronouncements
are not his. Therefore, they are often unaccompanied by any comments,
because the identity of the individual or group making the pronouncement
was supposed to orient the audience to a proper appreciation of the value of
the statement. Commentary was thus superfluous.
The ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living, for example, throngs with many
personages and sects who speak or are spoken to or about. They would have
been familiar to al-JāªiÕ’s audience. Needless to say, they are not familiar
to us today. The inclusion in my commentaries of the many identifications
required would have made it impossible for me to sustain the precarious bal-
ancing act between al-JāªiÕ’s words and my words. My readers then may find
themselves constrained to consult the Second Edition of the Encyclopaedia of
Islam, if they want to find out more.

G. Strategies of Argumentation

Access to al-JāªiÕ’s words is not enough, however, for it is not an easy task
to work out how al-JāªiÕ puts his words together so as to form arguments,
explore contradictory positions, and promote his own theories. Therefore
in the commentaries which accompany the translations I have included
analyses which seek to reveal to the reader how I think al-JāªiÕ constructs
a position or presents a case. In fact the whole of this volume, In Praise of
Books, is an exploration of an argument sustained over the course of the
‘Introduction’.
 pref ace | 13

H. Texts and Contexts

Is any book hermetically sealed? No writer lives or writes in a vacuum.

Al-JāªiÕ’s writings engage fully and with conviction with the writers and
books of the day. This is how I position The Book of Living and his other
texts – I approach al-JāªiÕ as a lens with which I can bring into focus what
I discern to be several principal features of third-century ʿAbbasid society.
To achieve this I establish conversations between his corpus and many of his
contemporaries and their books, as well as compositions from the later tradi-
tion, when appropriate.
In this way I hope that my book may become a sort of advanced intro-
duction to the textual and intellectual history of the third and early fourth
centuries. It appraises the third-century book as a site of cultural encounter
and proposes that in our appreciation of these encounters we should not seg-
regate philosophy from juridical thought, alchemy from poetry, belles-lettres
from theology.
Inevitably there are texts and contexts which I have omitted. I know I have
placed too much emphasis on the Greek-Arabic, Christian Arabic and scien-
tific materials and not enough on exegetical and legal and juridical thought.
Al-JāªiÕ’s presentation of the notion of istidlāl, of the inference of con-
clusions from signs, is coterminous with the emergence of cognate interests in
the juridical tradition, as ably studied by Anver Emon in Islamic Natural Law
Theories. In Chapter Four of her recent PhD thesis at New York University,
‘More than the sum of its parts’, Dr Jeannie Miller explores many of the legal
and epistemological ramifications of the Dog and Rooster debate in The Book
of Living.
I have also concentrated on aspects of the Greek-Arabic materials which
are not the most immediately obvious for The Book of Living. I refer the reader
to Dr Miller’s thesis for how al-JāªiÕ read the Arabic translation of Aristotle’s
Historia Animalium and Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s epitome of Porphyry’s Isagoge.
In a book like this, devoted to the study of a book in which animals fea-
ture so prominently, I have precious little to say about the animal kingdom.
Even a cursory glance at Sarra Tlili’s book Animals in the Qurʾan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012) has opened my eyes to how sensitively
al-JāªiÕ read the Qurʾān and its depictions of animals and humans. And
 14 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s

then too, I say nothing of how al-JāªiÕ’s book continues the long tradition of
philosophical and theological thinking about animals as studied by Richard
Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals. I am also aware that much of
al-JāªiÕ’s thinking on animals seems to have been taken up some fifty years
after his death by Muªammad b. Zakarīyā al-Rāzī (d. 313/925 or 323/935).
I know that Professor Peter Adamson’s current project on al-Rāzī will help us
to bring much of this into sharper focus.
And inevitably my studies will have focused too much on books and ideas
and not enough on the realities of the third century: slavery (in the discussion
of eunuchs in the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living al-JāªiÕ shows himself
to be all too expert in the valuation of slaves); social and civil coercion; tor-
ture and political turmoil; conspicuous consumption and displays of wealth;
questions of ethnicity (though in the third century I think of them more as
questions of ‘linguicity’, as it were) and race. One anonymous reviewer of
my original proposal for this book rightly pointed out that if I was going to
speak about ‘the salvific book’, then I ought to be clear that the choice of
which path to follow to salvation was often a matter of life and death. It was
a ­real-life dilemma and not a decision taken in the scholarly study.
The Book of Living and many of al-JāªiÕ’s other works are informed by,
and provide ample insight into, these and other topics. They have frequently
been (very clumsily in my view) mined for the sorts of information they
might contain on such subjects. It is my contention, however, that we must
first pay attention to and understand how and why al-JāªiÕ says what he
does, before we can cherry-pick his writings. To be in a position to do that
we must first enter into his world of ideas.
My study places one of the third century’s most representative figures at
the heart of its story, in a plea that more readers pick up al-JāªiÕ’s books and
engage with this most beguiling of writers who expressed himself in a most
intriguing Arabic. My books will be successful if they encourage their readers
to abandon them and put them to one side and pick up with some confidence
a work written by al-JāªiÕ in his original Arabic.

I. Conventions

I have occasionally appended to my commentary some bibliographical refer-

ences, to direct the reader to a few of the wider issues which I think inform
 pref ace | 15

al-JāªiÕ’s argument. I list secondary materials in the notes when they have
contributed something to the structure of the argument I have erected or
will provide further information for the reader. The bibliography does not
itemise all the works I have read and consulted in the course of writing this
book. I have tried to restrict these references to materials in English readily
available in an average university library. This has not always been possible,
however.
I usually give both Hijrī and Christian dates for an event such as the
death-date of an author, though when I refer to centuries I give only the Hijrī
reckoning. The third century AH largely overlaps with the ninth century AD
but the match is not complete.
This book is packed with cross-references. Somehow The Book of Living
demands such an approach. It is also packed with precise references to works
in the JāªiÕian corpus and other Arabic texts. Any such reference may begin
with the name of the editor if more than one edition exists, or with the name
of the work, for the sake of clarity, then proceed to the volume number, page,
and line reference: Óayawān 1.3.5, for example. It may take my readers some
getting used to, but I would argue that in order for our study of the third-
century textual tradition to advance, it is not enough simply to refer vaguely
to Óayawān volume 1, page 3. This is a corpus which generally overlaps,
shares, appropriates, steals and hides ideas from its other members. It is high
time we began to chart its networks with some accuracy.
I also refer to the Qurʾān in a modified version of the ‘Toorawa system’: I
give both the name of the Sūra (in lower case and without the definite article)
and its number, as well as the precise verse reference.

J. Bibliography

I have not been able to consult any of the manuscripts of The Book of Living.
Details are to be found in: Brockelmann, Geschichte, I, p. 153 = Supplement,
I, pp. 241–2: it is work number 2 in the list; Hārūn, ‘Muqaddima’, Óayawān
(1388/1969 edition), I, pp. 34–6; Şeşen, ‘CāªiÕ’in eserlerinin’, pp. 120–4
(for manuscripts of The Book of Living in Istanbul); Bahmān, ‘Al-Mawrūth
al-jāªiÕī’, pp. 284–5; Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, pp. 139–40, §85d.
I occasionally refer to the manuscripts (MSS) Hārūn used by his sigla. I
list the relevant ones here:
 16 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s

L: a complete MS in the Köprülü collection in Istanbul. Hārūn’s access

to it was via a photographic reproduction kept in Dār al-Kutub (no.
4285) (see Şeşen, ‘CāªiÕ’in eserlerinin’, pp. 120–3);
Sh: a complete MS in Dār al-Kutub, identified as ‘9 Shīn’;1
M: a partial MS: 556 Dār al-Kutub;
˝: al-Sāsī’s Cairo 1324–5 edition of the text.

The first printed edition of al-JāªiÕ’s work appeared in seven volumes

at the Ma†baʿat al-Saʿāda in Cairo in the years 1324–5/1906–7, edited by
Muªammad al-Sāsī. The seven volume editio princeps is by ʿAbd al-Salām
Muªammad Hārūn: Kitāb al-Óayawān. It first appeared in Cairo published
by Ma†baʿat Mu‚†afā al-Bābī al-Óalabī wa-Awlādi-hi, 1356/1937. The final
volume carries the date 1366/1947. A second printing was published in
1388/1966. I use a reprint produced in Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, which
identifies itself as the third printing and carries the date 1388/1969, though
I have also regularly consulted the first edition. Hārūn’s edition with its
fantastic indices and careful apparatus is a vital piece of JāªiÕian scholarship,
and though not without some faults, it remains indispensable and central to
my study.
In 1968, Fawzī ʿA†awī produced an uncritical edition in two volumes
published by Maktabat Muªammad Óusayn al-Nūrī in Damascus. I have
a third printing from 1408/1982 issued by Dār Íaʿb in Beirut. In 1986
the work was edited and commented on by Yaªyā ʿAbd al-Amīr, in a two-
volume printing issued by Dār wa-Maktabat al-Hilāl in Beirut, which I have
not seen. Muªammad Bāsil ʿUyūn al-Sūd annotated the text in four vol-
umes, published in 1998 by Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmīya, Beirut. In 2003, a
two-volume edition was prepared by Ibrāhīm Shams al-Dīn, published in
Beirut by Muʾassasat al-Aʿlamī li-al-Ma†būʿāt, which I have not consulted.
As far as I can determine, these are essentially reprints of Hārūn’s edition,
with different commentaries.
I know of two anthologies in Arabic: al-Bustānī, Kitāb al-Óayawān, a
chrestomathy taken from the ‘Introduction’ and the sections on ‘Snakes’ and
‘Ants and Flies’; and al-Óim‚ī and al-Mallūªī, Min Kitāb al-Óayawān. I have
been unable to consult this last work.
There are no translations of The Book of Living. Excellent short selections
 pref ace | 17

are to be had in Pellat’s Life and Works, pp. 130–85. Those readers who know
French may want to consult Souami, Le cadi et la mouche.
There are very few able studies of The Book of Living. The majority are
written in Arabic. In addition to the studies by Ibrahim Geries listed in
the Bibliography and Man‚ūr’s World-view, I refer the interested reader to:
Abū al-Óabb, Nuqūl al-JāªiÕ (for engagement with Aristotle); Bumulªim,
Al-Manāªī al-Falsafīya (on the presence of philosophical method in
al-JāªiÕ’s corpus generally); al-Nuʿmān, Mafāhīm al-Majāz (with an analysis
of al-JāªiÕ’s famous discussion of creation as a semiotic system); Bilmalīª,
al-Ruʾya al-Bayānīya (which bases a reading of the corpus on this famous
semiotics passage).
For those new to a book on this sort of subject, or those who are just
setting out to learn more about third-century ʿAbbasid society, it may be
helpful to take a look at a few other books which may help them as they have
helped me:

Amira Bennison, The Great Caliphs, an overview of the period;

Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, an indispensable
study of the political groups that dominated al-JāªiÕ’s society and
an insightful examination of how Muslim political thinkers viewed
society;
Josef van Ess, The Flowering of Muslim Theology, a vital overview of the
thought-world of al-JāªiÕ and his fellow Kalām Masters;
Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. The Graeco-Arabic
Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society
(2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries), the book that got me thinking about
how and where al-JāªiÕ fits into all of this;
Gregor Schoeler with Shawkat Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature in
Islam: From the Aural to the Read, a key and wide-ranging survey
of the various forms of orality and literacy in the second and third
centuries.

K. Acknowledgments

I have received many, many kindnesses during the writing of this book.
Firstly, Professors Julia Bray and Wen-chin Ouyang were kind enough to
 18 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s

accept it for their series with Edinburgh University Press, where Nicola
Ramsey and the staff I have encountered have been superbly supportive.
For permission to recycle two earlier works, I would like to thank the
Trustees of the Gibb Memorial Trust for some materials which appeared
in ‘Convention as cognition: on the cultivation of emotion’, in Martha
Hammond and Geert Jan van Gelder (eds), Takhyīl: The Imaginary in Classical
Arabic Poetics (Oxford: Gibb, 2008), pp. 147–78; and Taylor and Francis
and Wen-chin Ouyang, the current editor of Middle Eastern Literatures,
for some materials which appeared in ‘Speech and nature: al-JāªiÕ, Kitāb
al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn, 2.175–207, Part 1’, in Devin J. Stewart and Shawkat
M. Toorawa (eds), Arabic Literature before al-Muwayliªī: Studies in Honour of
Roger Allen, Middle Eastern Literatures, 11/2 2008, pp. 169–91.
Work on this book began during sabbatical leave for the year 2009–
10 generously provided by my institutional homes at the University of
Cambridge, the Department of Middle Eastern Studies of the Faculty of
Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and Trinity Hall. The many conversations
and exchanges with colleagues in both those places have shaped my thoughts
in ways I can no longer trace. I am also grateful to the Faculty of Asian and
Middle Eastern Studies for financial support towards the cost of compiling
the Index. The modern British university in the twenty-first century is often
not a place where it is easy to find the time and space required to think about,
begin and finish a book, let alone a book as bombastic as this. I am deeply
appreciative of how Cambridge University continues to make old-fashioned
scholarship like this possible.
I first started thinking vaguely about the subject for both these volumes
some twenty years ago. I decided to edit and ask Uwe Vagelpohl to translate
the studies by Gregor Schoeler on the wider issues involved: The Oral and
the Written in Early Islam. This book equipped me with many of the basic
analytical insights I required in order to think about a work as bewildering as
al-JāªiÕ’s Book of Living.
The immediate catalyst, however, was a wonderful invitation from the
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University
to deliver The Third K. W. & E. K. Rosenthal Memorial Lecture in Ancient &
Medieval Near Eastern Civilization, in April 2008. Beatrice Gruendler and
Dimitri and Ioanna Gutas were paragons of philoxenia. Maureen Draicchio
 pref ace | 19

arranged it all with aplomb. Dimitri and Ioanna again two years later shel-
tered me when Eyjafjallajökull decided to remind us of the power of nature.
Beatrice Gruendler was a gracious host at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin
in April 2011 and I was able to learn much from our conversations about her
current project on Arabic books and media in the second and third centuries.
Whilst working on this book, the inspired and inspiring vision for the
Arabic literary heritage of Professor Philip Kennedy at New York University
materialised as The Library of Arabic Literature. To my friends who work with
me on the Editorial Board of this project I can only say a simple ‘thank you’.
Sometimes the smallest words say the biggest things. LAL has been the single,
most exciting thing I have done in my career to date. It will be completely
transformative for the classical Arabic textual heritage. But inevitably writing
this book has postponed my edition and translation of a selection of al-JāªiÕ’s
Epistles for LAL. Philip Kennedy and the incomparable Shawkat Toorawa,
my LAL minders, supported my decision to prioritise this book over the book
I owe them. Their book is the next on my ‘to do’ list.
The work has benefited enormously from much feedback. From Wen-
chin Ouyang and Julia Bray; from Rebecca Stott; from Dr Ignacio Sánchez
and Dr Jeannie Miller; from Shawkat Toorawa and Atoor Lawandow, who
kindly read Parts 3 and 6 in conjunction with al-JāªiÕ’s Arabic; from Geert
Jan van Gelder. I have been humbled by their many kindnesses. Many of the
errors which remain are the fault of al-JāªiÕ though I accept responsibility
for all of them.
Many things have sustained my flagging spirits as I wrote the book: red
Burgundy, Manzanilla sherry and Armagnac; Moro Restaurant and the cook-
books of Sam and Sam Clark; the music of John Adams; rock and jazz, from
Whitesnake and Hawkwind to Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis; and Dad’s
Army. Two books gave me the courage to write: Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise:
Listening to the Twentieth Century; Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?
And so to my family. It is funny how, when you are writing a book,
those who give you the most are those who will benefit the least from it.
Natasha read very early drafts and was patiently supportive with her father’s
eccentricities. She also stepped in when the Bibliography was proving tire-
some. Sam and Josh have kept me going with their good humour, love of fun
and adventure, and boisterous sense of life. They even liked some of the loud
 20 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s

music I was listening to. Our dogs Jullius and Findus did not seem to mind
too much when al-JāªiÕ kept us company as we walked around Cambridge.
But I am reduced to silence when I come to express my gratitude for every-
thing that Yvonne has done to make it possible for me to be an academic and
to write this book in particular. I owe everything to her. I am very lucky in
my family – very, very lucky indeed.
 PART 1
PHYSIOGNOMY OF AN
A P O C A LY P T I C A G E
 1.1
Cataclysm1

A t about the time that an intrepid explorer named Sallām al-Tarjumān

(the Interpreter) led a scientific expedition to the northernmost reaches
of the Islamic Empire, to the outer rim of the unknown world, al-JāªiÕ
began his own intrepid exploration of the known, created world in The Book
of Living.2
Sallām had been charged with the task of discovering whether the hordes
of Yaʾjūj and Maʾjūj (Gog and Magog) had breached the wall built by the
Horned Man, Alexander the Great, to contain their onslaught. Their release
was a signal of the beginning of the End Time. The Caliph al-Wāthiq had
had a dream in 227/842 that a crack had appeared in the wall. A convinced
messianist, as all the early ʿAbbasid caliphs were, an expert dancer and profes-
sionally trained singer, as few of the ʿAbbasid caliphs were, al-Wāthiq had
been expecting something like this. He had been sworn in as caliph on 8
Rabīʿ I, 227 (26 December 841) on the death of his father al-Muʿta‚im and
would rule for just under six years, until his bizarre death in 23 Dhū al-Óijja,
232 (10 August 847), entombed in an oven built in the ground where he
would seek comfort from a debilitating oedematous condition which may
have been the result of diabetes.
He began readying his realm for the cataclysm. He had developed the
new capital of Samarra (‘The Eye’s Delight’) begun by his father, build-
ing a palace and improving the port, thereby ensuring its acceptance (and
investment) by his society’s elite and its consolidation as Baghdad’s imperial
replacement. He was vigorous in implementing the Miªna (the Trial) initi-
ated by his uncle the Caliph al-Maʾmūn (d. 218/833), who had played an
enthusiastic and formative role in al-Wāthiq’s education.
The Miªna was the caliphal policy publicly to interrogate members of

23
 24 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s

the judiciary and the imperial and religious establishment with a view to
determining their stance on the question of divine unity (tawªīd ). It sought
to do this by testing them on the question of whether the Qurʾān was cre-
ated or not (and thus was somehow co-eternal with God). Ensuring that an
uncontaminated form of monotheism prevailed not only established caliphal
legitimacy and authority, but also guaranteed that if the End Time were to
come (and the Caliphs and their entourages were convinced it would come),
the Caliph would not be judged by God to have been deficient in his pro-
motion of the one, true faith. The Caliph, after all, was responsible for the
salvation of his subjects and without a mechanism such as the Miªna for the
enforcement of belief, a rightly ordered society could not be produced.3
In a notorious incident in Muªarram 231 (September–October 845),
during an exchange of prisoners with Byzantium, al-Wāthiq extended the
reach of the Miªna beyond the literate elite to include ordinary members
of the population, decreeing that they would only be welcomed back into
the community if they testified to the uncreatedness of the Qurʾān. He also
had the inhabitants of the frontier towns along the marches with Byzantium
interrogated. But he did not stop there, for he extended the content of the
Miªna to include a denial of the divine vision in the afterlife – the moment
in Paradise when God will make Himself visible to His faithful believers.
In many ways this caliphally sponsored rejection of anthropomorphism
(tashbīh) was simply a move to make explicit an already implicit component
of the testimony to the createdness of the Qurʾān. The issue of createdness
had addressed anthropomorphism but tangentially.
A key moment in al-Wāthiq’s brief but perplexing reign was the trial
and execution of Aªmad b. Na‚r al-Khuzāʿī in 231/846. As a trial to correct
deviant belief, it may have been less eventful for the history of religious ideas
in Islam than the more celebrated trial of Ibn Óanbal by the Chief Judge
Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād in front of al-Muʿta‚im in around 220/835 (an event
of enormous repercussions which led to the emergence of a Sunnī school of
law and the virtual canonisation of its eponym). In terms of imperial politics
and social stability, however, the trial of Aªmad b. Na‚r was potentially more
explosive and divisive. The sources disagree on whether Aªmad was the mas-
termind of a plot among the ʿAbbasid elite to overthrow al-Wāthiq or was
the pious leader of a popular renunciant movement. Whatever his offence,
 cataclysm | 25

he was brought before al-Wāthiq and interrogated by the Caliph himself.

No sooner had the Caliph found him guilty than he promptly switched
roles from chief inquisitor to chief executioner. He called for Íam‚āma, the
fabled sword of the pre- and early Islamic hero ʿAmr b. Maʿdī Karib, and
attempted to decapitate Aªmad b. Na‚r. He was not strong. His aim was
not true enough to kill Aªmad with the first blow. A second blow was more
effective but no less successful. Finally Sīmā the Turk stepped forward and
finished the job. Al-Wāthiq delivered a final, gratuitous, thrust of the sword
into Aªmad’s stomach.
Throughout his caliphate, al-Wāthiq appears to have been obsessed with
The Cave, Sūrat al-Kahf, chapter 18 of the Qurʾān, one of the most demand-
ing, perplexing and uplifting sūras in the Revelation.4 In this declamatory
tour-de-force, man’s limitations are repeatedly intoned in a series of narratives
that stress God’s omniscience – a lowering celebration of God’s ­irruptions in
terrestrial existence and a dazzling exploration of the impending reality of the
Apocalypse and Judgement Day:

Praise God who sent down His Book to His slave! He made it correct and
straight, not crooked – to give warning of a mighty violence on His part
and to bring joy to the believers who do good deeds, telling them of their
blessed reward [18: 1–2].

God’s creation is both enticement and test:

We have made everything on earth attractive to them so that we may test

them and determine who are better in deeds. We will make it an empty
wasteland [7–8].

The Sūra takes its name from the Companions in the Cave, the Qurʾanic
account of a narrative also found in Christian legend and known as the Seven
Sleepers of Ephesus. In the Qurʾān, this event becomes a challenge to man’s
intellectual skills, a challenge which invites man to acknowledge the collapse
and enfolding of time when viewed from infinity:

In this way we allowed people to stumble upon them so that they would
know that God’s promise is truth and that there is no doubting the Hour.
For they disputed with each other about what had happened and said:
 26 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s

‘Build a building over them’. Their Lord knows best about them. Those
who were victorious about what had happened said: ‘Let us dedicate a
mosque to them’ [21].

The uncertainty surrounding how long the Companions were asleep and how
many Companions there were in the Cave contrasts with the certainty of the
Hour. God controls everything. Man has no agency without God:
They will say: ‘Three. Their dog was the fourth’. Others say: ‘Seven. Their
dog was the eighth’. Say: ‘My Lord knows their number. Only a few know
them so do not wrangle over them except openly5 and do not ask anyone for
a ruling about them’. And you must not say about anything: ‘I shall do this
tomorrow’, without saying, ‘If God wills’. Mention your Lord if you forget
and say: ‘Perhaps my Lord will guide me to something more righteous than
this’. They remained in their cave for three centuries and then nine more
years. Say: ‘God knows how long they remained. He possesses the secrets
of the heaven and the earth. How keen is His vision! How acute His hear-
ing! Men have no protector against Him. He allows no one to share in His
judgement [22–6].

The practice of debate and man’s querulousness will be further explored in the
Sūra, and the Qurʾanic caution will in turn exercise a hold over al-Wāthiq’s
successor, al-Mutawakkil. A key point in the preceding verses is that God
allows His knowledge to ‘a few’ (qalīl ). Al-Wāthiq, God’s representative on
Earth, would surely have considered himself one of the few.
The Qurʾān thus invites and dispels any hope of eschatological calcula-
tion. Only God knows when it will happen. Man can only know that it will
happen. The episode of the Companions of the Cave exhorts the listener to
visualise the invisible, to experience the unknowable, whilst discouraging
man and limiting his epistemic powers:
You will suppose that they are awake though recumbent. We make them
turn to the right and the left, while their dog stretches his paws on the
doorstep. If you were to discover them, you would turn away in flight and
would be consumed with terror [18].

Throughout the Sūra, vivid detail fills the listener with the terror which
would have been produced by seeing the scene. A similar effect is produced
 cataclysm | 27

by the ensuing descriptions of Heaven and Hell (vv. 29–31) and the Hour
and Judgment Day (vv. 45–53). It is little wonder that al-Wāthiq sent a
second expedition, under the leadership of the mathematician and cartogra-
pher Muªammad b. Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, to discover the cave.6
Dreams were widely thought to be sources of prophecy (often depending
on the status of the dreamer, of course). Al-Wāthiq would have responded
to his dream as prophetic. It is evocative of al-Māʾmūn’s dream of Aristotle,
figured as the inspiration for the wholesale translation of the Greek philo-
sophical and scientific heritage into Arabic.7 The immediate inspiration for
the Caliph’s dream is the following passage:

They ask you about the Horned Man. Say: ‘I will recite a tale about him
to you’. We made him powerful on earth and provided him with a way in
everything and everywhere [83–4].
So he followed one way and came to where the sun sets. He discovered
that it sets in a spring of mephitic mud. He also discovered a people there.
We said: ‘Horned Man, you can either punish them or you can treat them
with kindness’. He said: ‘We will punish those who have wronged. Then
they will be returned to their Lord and He will punish them with a fear-
some punishment. Those who believe and do good will receive the greatest
kindness as reward’. In Our commandment We will declare that they will
have prosperous ease [85–8].
Then he followed another way and came to where the sun rises. He
discovered that it rises over a people whom We have not protected from it.
So it was. We already had knowledge of what was there [89–91].
Then he followed another path and came to where the Two Peaks
meet. In front of them he found a people who could hardly understand a
single word. They said: ‘Horned Man, Yaʾjūj and Maʾjūj wreak destruction
throughout the earth. Shall we render you tribute for you to put a rampart
between us and them?’ He said: ‘The power my Lord has vested in me is
better. Help me with your strength. I will build a barrier between you and
them. Bring me lumps of iron’. When he had reached the level of the Two
Peaks he said: ‘Blow!’ When he had set it ablaze, he said: ‘Bring me molten
metal to pour over it’. So they were unable to surmount it and they were
unable to perforate it. He said: ‘This is a mercy from my Lord but when my
 28 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s

Lord’s promise comes He will raze it to the ground. My Lord’s promise is

true’ [92–8].
On that day We will have left them engulfing each other in waves.
There will be a blast on the Horn and We will have mustered them together
[99].

So the Horned Man is set three tests. In the first test, he decides to use his
God-given power wisely and appropriately (vv. 85–8). In the second test,
he does not arrogate the accomplishment of his discovery to his own doing
but acknowledges God’s prior knowledge of the unknown (vv. 89–91). In
the third test, he combines his God-given wisdom with technological and
engineering know-how (also from God, of course), not for worldly gain (he
turns down the payment of tribute) but for the betterment of mankind and
the realisation of God’s plan (vv. 92–8).
In this Sūra the prospect of ‘meeting’ (liqāʾ) with God is twice mentioned
(vv. 105 and 110). The anthropomorphists and corporealists in al-Wāthiq’s
society presumed that the meeting was to be the occasion for the divine
vision. The Caliph thought otherwise.
Sallām returned from his expedition and informed the Caliph that the
wall stood firm though a crack had begun to appear. So al-Wāthiq’s mes-
sianic expectations were correct: the End Time was beginning. They were
only cut short by his death, which, as well as being bizarre, was in the telling
reminiscent of the Qurʾanic account of the death of the prophet Solomon.
Al-Wāthiq, like Solomon, filled his retainers with such awe that they did not
dare approach him interred and immobile in his oven. They only discovered
his death by chance.8
The Cave is thus a blueprint for al-Wāthiq’s caliphate. Al-JāªiÕ was not
connected personally with al-Wāthiq according to the sources, though some
of his writings do address the question of anthropomorphism, very much
the focus of the theological anxieties of the age, and probably date from his
reign. Al-JāªiÕ did however move in the circles of the major powerbrokers
of al-Wāthiq’s reign, notably his primary patron at this period the Vizier
Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt (the Oil Merchant), the Óanafī
Chief Judge, Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād, and his son Abū al-Walid Muªammad.
He wrote treatises for all these patrons to peruse on topics of contemporary
 cataclysm | 29

import and counselled them on which course of action to take on these

issues.
Though not connected personally with the Caliph, al-JāªiÕ and
al-Wāthiq did have one peculiarity in common. They both suffered from
ocular defects. Al-Wāthiq suffered from a whiteness in one eye, the ‘terrible
eye’ of Beckford’s Vathek which immobilised onlookers, occasionally causing
them to expire from fear.9 Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baªr got his nickname
al-JāªiÕ from a condition which caused his eyes to bulge prominently from
their sockets. In an era which was so obsessed with appearances and physical,
visible defects as ʿAbbasid courtly society around the middle of the third cen-
tury was, there was something apocalyptic about the ugliness of both men.
As Sartre remarked in his biography of Tintoretto, ‘ugliness is a prophecy’, a
catastrophe so extreme that it ‘tries to take negation to the point of horror’.10
Their ugliness was a sign of the times.
Al-Wāthiq may not have suffered the cataclysm he was expecting from
Yaʾjūj and Maʾjūj, but the apocalypse was soon to come for al-JāªiÕ. With
the Caliph’s death in 232/847, his brother al-Mutawakkil was chosen as his
successor and sworn in as caliph. The new caliph wasted no time in destroy-
ing the men who had chosen him and who had ruled the empire for more
than a decade. The first to go was al-Zayyāt, who was arrested on 7 Íafar, 233
(22 September 847) and who died some forty days later on 19 Rabīʿ I, 233 (2
November 847). The Vizier’s death aped that of the previous caliph. He too
was imprisoned in an oven, though this time the oven was an iron-maiden
which the Vizier had himself devised and refined for the torture of prisoners.
This was the first of a series of cataclysms which al-JāªiÕ (probably in his
late sixties) was to endure. The death of a patron usually meant the disgrace, if
not also the death, of those members of the entourage most closely associated
with him. He was brought in chains in a pitiful state before the Chief Judge,
no friend of the now dead Vizier, berated but then pardoned and accepted
into the Chief Judge’s entourage.11 Whether this was at the intercession of the
Judge’s powerful son Abū al-Walīd Muªammad, in whose entourage al-JāªiÕ
also seems to have served, is a matter for surmise.
Al-JāªiÕ’s security was not long lived however, for at some point, and the
precise date is uncertain, Ibn Abī Duʾād was imprisoned in his own body by
a massive stroke. One authority connects his stroke with his incarceration by
 30 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s

al-Mutawakkil. Other sources give us to believe that it happened before then.

Al-JāªiÕ ‘disappears’ from the record during this period. He had dedicated
The Book of Clarity and Clarification to the Judge, and offered him a number
of works, among them one on legal verdicts, but it is not known whether he
continued to reside in Samarra or had returned to Basra. It is probably during
this stage in his life that he himself suffered the massive stroke which forced
him to postpone his work on The Book of Living, the second major cataclysm
to seek to fulfil the apocalyptic prophecy of his ugliness.12
Al-Mutawakkil appointed the Judge’s son Abū al-Walīd Muªammad as
his father’s representative. Then on 24 Íafar, 237 (27 August 851), by confis-
cating their estates, he made a move against this family which had controlled
the empire’s judiciary for so long and so closely. Abū al-Walīd Muªammad
was imprisoned on 3 Rabīʿ I, 237 (4 October 851) and died during Dhū
al-Óijjah, 240 (May–June 854). He was outlived shortly by his father who
died a month later during Muªarram (June–July). The third cataclysm had
struck. Once again, in a society where one’s well-being and chances of sur-
vival depended on one’s personal networks and the protection of a powerful
figure, al-JāªiÕ, debilitated by his hemiplegia, was without a patron.
The death of Ibn Abī Duʾād is generally recognised as the culmination
of a slow and relentless process over some seven years whereby the Caliph
al-Mutawakkil terminated the Miªna and removed the principal nodes of
the civil, bureaucratic and personal networks which sustained it. The jurist
and annalist al-˝abarī (d. 310/923), usually so garrulous a historian and so
generous with his facts, is strangely reticent, if not even evasive:

When the caliphate reached al-Mutawakkil, he forbad debating (jidāl )

about the Qurʾān and other topics (ghayri-hi). His edicts (kutub) to that
effect were despatched to the farthest reaches of the empire (āfāq).13

It seems that by forbidding public debate on the Qurʾān, al-˝abarī means

that al-Mutawakkil had ended the Miªna. But there is another consequence
of the prohibition: the Caliph’s suppression of theological debate. It is no
exaggeration to say that all theological debate of any import during this
century was, directly or indirectly, tantamount to debate about the Qurʾān.
At this point the hold over the caliphal imaginary exerted by The Cave
re-emerges. The Cave is much exercised over man’s querulous nature. In its
 cataclysm | 31

figuration of the End Time, God rebukes man for his obstinate unwillingness
to respond appropriately to the parables and scenes He depicts for them:

We have set out every figure for people but man is the most argumentative
thing [54].

Jadal, argument and debate, is the reason for man’s rejection of God’s gener-
ous signs and messages:

We despatch the envoys as bringers of good news and warnings. The ingrates
argue with falsehood to refute the truth thereby. They scoff at My signs and
the warnings they are given [56].

Argumentativeness and unbelief (kufr, ingratitude) are closely linked. Of

course, the Qurʾān is not relentlessly against debate. The central verse is Q
Naªl 16: 125, ‘debate with them in the better way!’ But The Cave presents a
powerful indictment of its ills and resonates with other Qurʾanic condemna-
tions of querulous man.14
Al-Mutawakkil’s ban on debate concerning the Qurʾān is the last in the
series of cataclysms to strike al-JāªiÕ, the most persuasive and committed
proponent of the centrality of debate and the Kalām theology (of which
debate was such a representative feature) to the right guidance of the Islamic
community. The caliphal edict must have left him pondering if, and how, he
could continue to promote his beloved Kalām.
Ponder he must have. The Book of Living represents one of his solutions
to these cataclysms, for at some point during the early caliphate of al-Muta-
wakkil we find al-JāªiÕ in the company of the caliph’s favourite courtier, the
brilliant and erudite al-Fatª b. Khāqān, now the caliph’s amanuensis and
himself a bibliomaniac. Al-JāªiÕ dedicated a revision of his treatise On the
Noble Qualities of the Turks (Fī Manāqib al-Turk) to al-Fatª and the caliph’s
favourite secured him a regular stipend from al-Mutawakkil in return for his
tract The Rebuttal of the Christians (al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā). It seems that
al-JāªiÕ and his promoter were successful in convincing the court that he was
an exponent of the sort of ‘semi-rationalism’, the middle way between the
traditionists and the rationalists, sponsored by al-Mutawakkil.15
In 244/858 al-JāªiÕ was a member of al-Mutawakkil’s journey to
Damascus, where he transferred his court and the principal secretaries of the
 32 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s

imperial bureaucracy in order to launch a sustained and protracted attack on

Byzantium. If al-JāªiÕ’s comments in The Book of Living are anything to go
by, the grandeur of this enterprise was undone by an infestation of fleas. And
following al-Mutawakkil’s murder on 4 Shawwāl, 247 (11 December 861)
at the hands of the Turkish guard in Samarra and the concomitant demise
of al-Fatª, al-JāªiÕ, by then probably in his eighties, had been able to secure
the favour of al-Mutawakkil’s vizier from 236–48/851–62, ʿUbyad Allāh b.
Yaªyā b. Khāqān, with a work on the subject of ethical discrimination: On
the Difference between Enmity and Envy, Fī Fa‚l mā bayn al-ʿAdāwa wa-al-
Óasad.16 Although ʿUbayd Allāh was exiled at the time of al-Mutawakkil’s
assassination, al-JāªiÕ was either too old or too sick to have been embroiled
in the aftermath.
This remarkable survivor, this enigmatic embodiment of his era, with-
stood the onslaught of his apocalypse. His Book of Living presents a remarkable
testament to the integrity of his intellect and the tenacity of his commitment
to debate. When he died in Muªarram, 255 (December 868/January 869)
his remarkable lifetime had coincided with at least ten, if not eleven, caliphs,
from al-Hādī (possibly al-Mahdī) through Hārūn al-Rashīd to al-Muʿtazz.
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