Al-Jahiz: In Praise of Books 9780748683338

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Al-Ja¯h· iz· : In Praise of Books

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 pathbreaking 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 digital word, the internet, the blogosphere, social networking, ‘tweeting’ and ‘texting’. Our world is filled with words. Some say this produces information 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 independent 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, philosophical 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 science 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 ragpaper 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 bibliomaniac. 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 contents 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 identified 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 biographies 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 conversation 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 permitted 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 tendency 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’; macrostructures). 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 thirdcentury 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 mirrors 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 minimal 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 isolation. 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 representing 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 balancing 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 tradition, when appropriate. In this way I hope that my book may become a sort of advanced introduction 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 segregate 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 scientific materials and not enough on exegetical and legal and juridical thought. Al-JāªiÕ’s presentation of the notion of istidlāl, of the inference of conclusions 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 feature 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; torture 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 references, 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 thirdcentury 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 twovolume 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 volumes, 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 sheltered 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 Wenchin 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 cookbooks 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 tiresome. 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 everything 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.

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 professionally 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, building 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) initiated 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 created 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 promotion 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 mastermind 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 demanding, 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 hearing! 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 calculation. 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 cartographer 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 philosophical 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 fearsome 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 messianic 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 century 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 destroying 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 confiscating 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 survival 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 generous 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 condemnations 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-Mutawakkil 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-alÓasad.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, withstood 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.

1.2 Eristics and Salvation17

B

y the time al-JāªiÕ set about writing The Book of Living, the Kalām was well established as a set of identifiable, epistemological and social practices. It could boast of a cadre of exponents, the Mutakallimūn (the Kalām Masters). It had (tacitly?) established an etiquette and code of conduct for its regularly heated and always fully committed debates (the fate of one’s soul was at stake). Excelling at Kalām had led to a number of appointments at the caliphal courts and in elite entourages. Indeed, it is regularly spoken of as a ‘craft’ (‚ināʿa) or on some occasions even a ‘business’ (tijāra). In other words, it was a profession, in both senses of the word. There were two complementary sides to the Kalām. NaÕar, ‘speculation’, was the rational and logical exploration of problems. Jadal, ‘eristics’, was the process of subjecting them to debate.18 As its name suggests, the Kalām, literally, ‘talk’, ‘speech’ or ‘discourse’, was a pronouncedly and profoundly oral activity, practised in groups, usually in the mosque but also in refined salons and in doorways to people’s houses and even on walks in the outskirts of the city. As such, it was not immediately amenable to being written down. We hear that various Kalām Masters wrote positions out on a sheet of paper or pamphlet (‚aªīfa), such as that by al-NaÕÕām on the atom (and incorporated by al-Ashʿarī in his doxography) and by Bishr b. al-Muʿtamir on speech.19 What we know about the intellectual and eristical activity we identify today as the Kalām is entirely dependent on doxographies from the end of the third century and beginning of the fourth.20 Al-Khayyā†’s (d. c. 300/913) fascinating exercise in mimetic representation, Kitāb al-Inti‚ār (The Book of Victory), is at heart a doxography. If, as it seems to be, the Book of Doctrinal Positions (Kitāb al-Maqālāt) attributed to al-Nāshiʾ al-Akbar (d. 293/906) is the work of Jaʿfar b. Óarb (d. 236/851); and if the various arguments 33

34 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s adduced by scholars on the use of earlier written sources by al-Ashʿarī in the compilation of his encyclopaedia of Kalām thought, The Doctrinal Positions of the Islamists (Maqālāt al-Islāmīyīn), are correct, the point remains: at this stage to write Kalām was to provide an account of various spoken positions on any given subject taken by rival Kalām Masters. This is precisely the format which al-NaÕÕām’s pamphlet on the atom takes in al-Ashʿarī’s ­quotation of it. From these scattered shards of incomplete debates and disputes, of voiced positions but often disembodied beliefs, it is difficult to reconstitute the systems of which they are faint echoes. The shards are themselves often laconic to the point of impenetrability. They can be obdurate in their unwillingness to share the visions they represent. The occasions which gave rise to the debates to which they belong also defy restitution. Consequently, from our reading of these texts, the impression we have of Kalām activity in the third century is little more than a congeries of conclusions (the workings of the problem are rarely shown) expressed with the pithiness of Euclidean propositions.21 Are we then to imagine that a Kalām Master would simply appear in public and pronounce his verdict, the conclusion of his and his cenacle’s thinking on a given topic, a dazzling and puzzling conundrum for other Masters to unpack and unravel in an attempt to refute? Or was this as much Kalām activity as the doxographers were willing to record? If this is all the doxographers were willing to record, surely we should be wary of defining Kalām activity solely in terms of their selective frame of reference. In other words, we should be wary lest what we identify as Kalām activity in the third century is precisely what the doxographers identified and bequeathed to us in texts which are themselves part of a separate series of debates, be it, as in the case of al-Ashʿarī, a legitimation of the system he was in the process of generating out of the Muʿtazilism he had recused, or, in the case of Jaʿfar b. Óarb, a tool for the eradication of heresy as part of the elite’s endeavour to fashion the rightly guided community. If the Kalām did not readily lend itself to writing, and if there are no texts which explicitly identify themselves as Kalām works, and if these scattered pronouncements are all the evidence we are left with, how are we to proceed? Well, we do know that the Kalām was not just the public declaration of enigmatic, oracular utterances. We hear of a myriad of debates performed in public on a cornucopia of subjects between Muslims and Manichaeans,

eri sti cs a nd sa lva ti on | 35 between Muslims and Christians, between Muslims and Muslims. The defence of the religion was widely recognised as a core component of Kalām activity. There was a close intimacy between Kalām as a profession and the conduct of forensic inquiries. The Miªna is nothing if it is not the fusion of forensic inquiry with the question and answer style upon which the Kalām and so many other intellectual activities of the period were predicated. And it has often been remarked that many early solutions to theological questions were legal solutions: as van Ess pithily remarks, ‘most Muʿtazilī theologians . . . were jurists’.22 Third-century society was omnivorous in its appetite for the spectacle of debate. There was often a disjuncture between the subject matter debated and the real topic of debate, a disjuncture which the textual tradition often conceals rather than reveals. Obliquity in approaching questions was a branch of Kalām activity and its obliquity was not always obvious to all those who witnessed or read the written representation of these debates, though we could also be forgiven for thinking that often a wilful unwillingness to recognise the real subject of debate was operative. Al-JāªiÕ anatomised the spectacle of his society. He saw it as his task to record and archive the debates which he witnessed and in which he took part. The utility of his archive is recognised by every scholar interested in Kalām activity during the formative stages of this speculative activity. But there remains an enormous reluctance to acknowledge that his extant writings constitute Kalām works, despite the testimony of his readers within the classical tradition that he was a major Kalām Master.23 After all what could all these works on mules, left- and right-handedness, the lame, the purblind and the crippled, on misers and singing-girls, have to do with corporealism and the indivisibility of the atom, with accidents and ontology, with human obligation and autonomy and capacity to act, with divine unity and anthropomorphism? Or put bluntly, what does a book of animals have to do with theology? Over the twenty-five years I have spent reading and puzzling over al-JāªiÕ’s dishevelled corpus and comparing it with the apophthegmatic pronouncements of the Kalām Masters preserved by the doxographers, I have come to appreciate the presence in the JāªiÕian corpus of this tendency the Kalām had to treat topics with obliquity. Thus, to take just one famous

36 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s example, a book on the subject of misers may not simply be about misers but may be an exercise in theodicy, a way to explore and circumscribe the question of the generosity of God and how man should respond to God’s generosity.24 Let us turn briefly to one of the most acute readers of al-JāªiÕ’s works and one of his sharpest critics, his younger contemporary Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889): Abū Muªammad said: Now we come to al-JāªiÕ, the last of the Kalām Masters, the one whereby his predecessors are gauged (muʿāyar).25 He was easily the best of them at arguing to his own preference, and the most prodigiously clever in the subtlety with which he magnified the trivial so that it became important, and diminished the important so that it became trivial. His ability for this was such that it enabled him to establish one thing and its opposite. Therefore, he would argue in favour of superiority of the blacks to the whites, and you will find him at one point supporting the ʿUthmānīya against the Rāfi∂a, and at the next supporting the Zaydīya against the ʿUthmānīya and the People of the Sunna. At one point he would establish the superiority of ʿAlī for the Imamate (May God be pleased with him!) and at another point he would demote him. He would say, ‘God’s Emissary (May God bless and cherish him!) said’, but would follow this immediately with, ‘Ibn al-Jamāz said’, or ‘Ismāʿīl ibn Ghazwān said’, and other similar outrages. God’s Emissary (May God bless and cherish him!) is far too important to be mentioned in the same book as those two, so what do you think about mentioning him on the same sheet of paper or in the next line or two? He produced a treatise in which he lists the arguments of the Christians against the Muslims, but when he comes to rebut them, he patiently allows their argument to stand, as if he simply wanted to teach them something they did not understand and to cast doubts on the weak-minded members among the Muslims. And in his writings you will find him purposefully making use of risible elements and nugatory trifles. What he meant thereby was to seduce the young26 and appeal to topers of date wine.27 He makes fun of the

eri sti cs a nd sa lva ti on | 37 Óadīth in a way that is obvious to the people of knowledge. For example,

he mentions the liver of the fish and the horn of Satan and notes that the Black Stone was once white and had been turned black by the Polytheists, and that the Muslims were under an obligation to return it to its former whiteness when they accepted Islam. He even mentions the sheet of writing which contained the Revelation concerning wet-nurses, kept under the bed of ʿĀʾisha, which the sheep ate, as well as various stories told by the People of the Book, such as how the cock and the crow were drinking partners, how the hoopoe buries its mother in its head, how the frog sings the praise of God, the neck-ring of the dove, and such like, which we will mention in what follows, if God wills. Furthermore, he was the biggest liar in the community and out of them all held the Óadīth in the meanest contempt – he was the fiercest champion of falsehood. God have mercy on you! Someone who knows that what he says is actually reckoned among the deeds he does will say little but what benefits him. Someone who knows for certain that he is held responsible for what he composes and what he writes does not establish one thing and its opposite, and does not devote all his energies to affirming what he considers to be false. Al-Riyāshī recited the following verse to me: Write in your own hand only that which will be a joy for you to behold   on Judgment Day.28

Few can match Ibn Qutayba as an accomplished reader of al-JāªiÕ’s work. His examples are taken from various works in the JāªiÕian corpus, including his work against the Christians (Al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā) and the Book of Quadrature and Circumference, Kitāb al-Tarbīʿ wa-al-Tadwīr. What we find here is a clear exposition of al-JāªiÕ’s favourite compositional technique, the prominence which he accords to compiling the archive of debate, yet with a complete distortion of the motives informing those techniques. What seems to irk Ibn Qutayba so much is al-JāªiÕ’s refusal to guide his reader by explicitly condemning the falsehoods of the positions he represents. Ibn Qutayba argues that by not explicitly condemning these utterances al-JāªiÕ becomes himself responsible for their errors. What we have at play here is the clash of two opposing views on how to construct the textual archive through the mimetic representation of debate. Consider the following passage in which

38 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s al-JāªiÕ declares the moral probity required of someone who writes in this manner: When providing the account (qi‚‚a) of one’s disputant, and when describing someone else’s system, one must not turn his falsehood into a truth or render his defective ideas sound. However one must speak in accordance with how the creed (niªla) can be interpreted and with what the position (maqāla) permits. And one should only quote one’s opponent’s words and provide an account of his position when at the very least one has the capacity to understand the position they have reached and the ability to grasp what they have comprehended.29

So what has so often been held against al-JāªiÕ as a lack of sincerity and a wayward delight in arguing both sides of a case, appears in fact, in light of his defence of representation (and this is just one of many similar injunctions and instructions scattered across his corpus), to have been a conscious, personally motivated, religiously justified and politically validated, stratagem. The Book of Living is a case in point. It is at first sight a jumble of an archive of lore devoted to some 350 animals which draws heavily and often unavowedly on a recently made translation of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium by Yaªyā b. al-Bi†rīq.30 It can be and has been read as such with much enjoyment by many fortunate enough to gain access to its riches. And yet I cannot stress enough the significance of al-JāªiÕ’s words to the Addressee of The Book of Living: that when the two Kalām Masters al-NaÕÕām and Maʿbad debated the merits of the dog and the rooster, ‘what they were really talking about was the topic of human obedience and disobedience’ (Óayawān 1.210.5–6). This study is an attempt to think about The Book of Living in a way which respects its author’s injunction. So when, upon becoming caliph, al-Mutawakkil forbad public debate on the Qurʾān, he banned Kalām. How could a Kalām Master such as al-JāªiÕ who had devoted his whole life to its practice and to its codification in writing respect such a ruling? Al-JāªiÕ was a thinker for whom the structure of knowledge was organised as a series of steps in a Kalām debate, with psychic tranquility as the prize. He considered the salvation of his soul and the souls of his fellow Muslims to depend on the extent to which they fulfilled God’s

eri sti cs a nd sa lva ti on | 39 injunction to use His gifts of reason and speculation to their fullest potential. Did the Caliph, the guardian of the salvation of his subjects, mean to condemn his community to eternal punishment? What should a publicly committed Kalām Master such as al-JāªiÕ do about the situation? Could he devise a remedy and so save his society? The solution he did devise was to have recourse to his society’s enthusiasm for an emergent technology – increasingly available books written on readily accessible and affordable rag-paper of good quality. There was nothing new about the book or the codex, of course. The key change was the manufacture of affordable rag-paper. By the time of the introduction of this rag-paper, ʿAbbasid society was no stranger to the public face of the book. It is easy to forget that by the third century the book actually preceded paper and the codex was in fact an innovation of considerable antiquity. Books were costly possessions: lavishly produced, multi-coloured Qurʾāns for example; or the autograph of Sībawayhī’s Kitāb, his seminal Book on grammar, which al-JāªiÕ presented as a gift to his patron the Vizier al-Zayyāt. Books belonged to the elite and were features of the courtly life, regularly being kept secluded in private libraries. Presumably the imperial administration kept at least some of its registers (dīwān) in codex form, though information is scarce and the custom of keeping loosely tied folders of documents written on small patches of leather was the norm.31 Among the wider public beyond the court, in the mosque, the marketplace and the street outside a teacher’s home, scholars regularly used jotters and notebooks in their teaching, be it as aides-memoire or for checking the accuracy of a student’s command of the text studied. These were more pedagogical conveniences than books of the type we would recognise as such, though increasingly in the course of the third century more and more books were written by scholars for use within their study circles. Increasingly, too many of these lecture notes and school texts made it into the public domain as books. The refinement in the technique of manufacturing rag-paper, presumably engendered by an increase in demand for copies of books, and its subsequent availability made the emergence of book markets possible. And so there appeared on the literary and cultural scene the warrāq, the stationer (to

40 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s borrow Gruendler’s translation of the term), a trader in paper, copyist, editor, publisher and book-entrepreneur.32 Books were obviously popular though they continued to encounter stiff opposition to their use in certain domains, notably the scholarly study of the Óadīth, the sayings and deeds of the Prophet. Al-JāªiÕ’s contemporaries and he were also eager participants in and constructors of an epistolary culture, in which letters were written among friends, in which epistles were written by scribes in the imperial administration, and in which political, theological and philosophical tractates took the form of epistles. His contemporaries and he were also keen members of a salon culture of informed debate, impassioned discussion and erudite conversation. In The Book of Living al-JāªiÕ took debate out of the public domain, enclosed it in book format, and encouraged his readers and audience to cultivate the practice of debating with the self in private. Thus the book became both salon and epistolary exchange, an artefact in which writing and reading were as much an art of conversation as a tradition of instruction. What kind of society did al-JāªiÕ (who was no egalitarian) set out to save with his Book of Living? His society was divided into the elite and the commonalty. Among the latter were included the ordinary mass of labourers, craftsmen and trades people, soldiers, bargees and merchants, who thronged the streets of Baghdad and Basra. They were to be kept very firmly and decidedly in their place, for al-JāªiÕ thought they were prone to civil unrest and riot. And for an elitist like al-JāªiÕ, the Óadīth folk belonged in no uncertain terms to the commonalty. This social vision was both static and dynamic. It advocated the commonalty as a discreet, if capaciously and somewhat amorphously defined, group whose place in society was very distinctly circumscribed. Within that place in society they were to strive to fulfil to the best of their abilities the tasks they had been created for and assigned to by God. It was in return for how they discharged these tasks that the commonalty would be recompensed in the afterlife. And yet it was possible to move from the commonalty to the elite by virtue of acquiring a consummate grasp of God’s chosen language, the ʿArabīya. It was the command of this formal language, as well as, say, the accumulation of wealth, which permitted social climbing. In order to demonstrate one’s grasp of the ʿArabīya, no-one’s native mother tongue, the

eri sti cs a nd sa lva ti on | 41 would-be social aspirant had also to master the intricacies and niceties of at least one of the recognised and established intellectual activities which were practised through the medium of the ʿArabīya. In other words, not only did the aspirant social-climber have to be the master of a scholarly craft, he had to be the master of the linguistic medium in which that craft and all other crafts were expressed. Al-JāªiÕ was probably one such upwardly mobile rhetorical paradigm. The literate elite had been generously given by God the gift of the reasoning intellect and so was charged with its proper use. It was for its proper use that its members would be recompensed in the afterlife. They had been set a great task by God, for the reasoning intellect was a difficult instrument, one as liable to misuse as it was to proper use. But it had to be used, whether one did so by serving the caliph and the imperium, or as a judge and jurist, or by studying with a religious expert. The literate elite also included non-Muslims, notably the Nestorian Christians of the Church of the East, but also Íabiʾans from Óarrān, formidable debaters, prominent members of the establishment, and inheritors of intellectual and cultural traditions of venerable antiquity. At the start of the third century, the only way to acquire this knowledge was to sit in the mosque and study with a teacher. Not everyone had access to the right kind of instruction, be it in language competence or the fine points of scholarship. Books written with the conscious aim of providing this knowledge were soon to appear. Early exponents of this approach were the grammarian al-Farrāʾ (d. 207/822), who did not write books himself but promoted the pedagogical benefits of his lectures when disseminated and published as books, and the first bookman in Arabic culture, Abū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim b. Sallām (d. 224/838), whose many monographs catered for this unquenchable scholarly thirst for knowledge and patronly enthusiasms. In the course of the third century, writing books developed from an almost exclusively religious and courtly activity to a practice which recognised few limitations beyond those of access and which catered for a society of users of the knowledge they contained. By the end of the century there had emerged what Toorawa cleverly termed ‘writerly culture’. Writers of books no longer needed patrons. The marketplace was where they earned their living. The book was omnipresent.33

42 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s Al-JāªiÕ is regularly canonised as the trail-blazer in this commodification of the book and the new style of authorship. But as a writer al-JāªiÕ was Janus-faced. The challenge was to write for two basic audiences. His audience was first and foremost the patron. Without a patron for a work, al-JāªiÕ had no public voice, and there was no occasion for writing. Many of his works recognise that the patron is overwhelmed with responsibilities and pressing demands on his time and they explain to him how to read their contents and derive benefit from skim-reading. But, if the patron decided not to lock al-JāªiÕ’s composition away in his own library for private consultation and possession, al-JāªiÕ knew that he also had to address the rest of the literate elite, theoretically from the Caliph and the ʿAbbasid family at its apex, down through the vizier and the civil, judicial and imperial functionaries to the secretaries, his own fellow Kalām Masters and their disciples, and other writers with whom he was often in competition for patronage. The Book of Living for example addresses both audiences: it is driven by the established practice of courtly and aristocratic patronage; and it presents its contents as readily accessible and utilitarian, as Abū ʿUbayd had done with his monographs and Ibn Qutayba would soon do, if he had not already begun to do so by the middle of the century. What made al-JāªiÕ different in his Book of Living was his totalising vision, his urge to capture all of creation in a single work that was both a monograph and an ‘omnigraph’. Not everyone agreed, however, with the utility and value of books. The book had its opponents. It needed to be defended. The Addressee of The Book of Living was one such opponent: You inveighed against the book, yet I know no charge more dutiful, no copartner more equable, no fellow-traveller more agreeable, no teacher less imperious, no comrade quicker to attend and less given to offend, less given to weary and vex, more scrupulous in conduct, less given to confront and affront, less given to defamation and further from calumniation, more abundantly wondrous and versatile, less given to being overbearing and over-reaching, further from quarrel (mirāʾ) and less likely to stir up discord (shaghab), more ascetic in dispute (jidāl ) or less eager to feud (qitāl ) – than a book. I know no comrade better at complying and hastier at satisfying, more helpful and less distressful; no tree longer-lived

eri sti cs a nd sa lva ti on | 43 or more productive, with fruit sweeter to taste and easier to pluck, more fructiferous or with its yield more plentiful, whatever the season – than a book. I know no offspring one can breed, which, from the moment of its birth and in its infancy, cheap in price and readily available, provides such wondrous counsels (tadābīr), unusual lessons, laudable achievements of sound minds and subtle intellects, lofty and wise insights, ways of righteous living and the wisdom of experience, information about past eons and distant lands, about sayings still in use and communities long dead and gone, as the book provides you with. God (Great and Glorious!) said to His Prophet (blessed and cherished be he!): ‘Recite, and your Lord is the most gracious and open; He who taught by the pen’.34 So He (Blessed and Exalted!) described Himself as having taught by the pen (qalam) in the same was as He described Himself as being gracious and open (karam). He counted this among His major benefactions and important donations. People have said: ‘The pen is a second tongue’. And they have said: ‘All who understand the benefaction in the clarity of the tongue understand better the superiority of the benefaction in the clarity of the pen’. Furthermore, God included this as a Recitation (qurʾān) and made it part of His first Revelation (tanzīl ), the opening of His Book [Óayawān 1.41.10–42.16].35

Strong praise for the book, indeed. But al-JāªiÕ was a bibliophile whose passion for books was not completely untempered. In his hierarchy of forms of communication, writing (kha††) ranked just below the word (lafÕ) – in other words, in his system, the spoken word was primary. He was well aware that there were problems with books. A second book, Al-JāªiÕ: in Censure of Books, will explore his bibliophobia.36 There were bad as well as good books. The books of the Manichaeans (zanādiqa) are a case in point. Al-JāªiÕ quotes Ibrāhīm b. al-Sindī’s fetishistic admiration for how they would only use pure, white paper, lustrous, black ink and superlative calligraphy in their books, to say nothing of the respect they showed for calligraphers: When I pay out a large sum of money for a book – and you know how I love money and hate spending it – my soul’s lavish spending on books becomes a sign of reverence for knowledge, and reverence for knowledge becomes a

44 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s sign of my soul’s nobility and of its being secure and free from intoxicating vices! [Óayawān 1.55.13–56.1].

Ibrāhīm was a miser but he was also a book-junkie. He was intoxicated by books and addicted to them. They were his vice. Al-JāªiÕ is swift to rectify his companion’s misplaced admiration for all this empty chatter and fairytale ‘talk about light and darkness, the copulation of satans and intercourse of demons, talk of the Archon Íindīd, the terror of the Column of Glories, mention of Shaqlūn and the Thoughtful Female (hammāma)’ (Óayawān 1.57.10–13).37 Al-JāªiÕ lived in an era of book-junkies and provides a series of anecdotes exemplifying their devotion to books and book collecting (Óayawān 1.52.12–62.8).38 His conversation with Ibrāhīm on Manichaean books is part of this series. Here are two other short examples: I heard al-Óasan al-Luʾluʾī say: ‘For the last forty years, I have not taken a siesta, reclined or passed a night without a book propped on my chest’ [1.52.16–53.1]. Ibn al-Jahm said: ‘When I am enjoying a really good book and I find it contains the benefit (fāʾida) I had hoped it would, you should see me minute by minute looking to see how many pages there are left, in fear lest I finish it too soon and the substance (mādda) of its mind (qalb)39 come to an end. If it is a thick tome (mu‚ªaf ) with many pages (waraq), my life is perfect, my joy complete’ [1.53.7–10].

Books were vulnerable. They needed to be protected: Despite what we have said about the Warashān and Rāʿibī pigeons, others said: ‘It is not the case that the compound creature does not procreate or produce unviable offspring or have young which do not conceive’. They and people like them pervert knowledge and turn books into objects of suspicion. They are seduced by their large number of followers but you will find that they are invariably the sort who are addicted to listening to bizarreries and besotted with rarities and novelties. If in addition to their addiction (istihtār) they were to be given a share of prudence (tathabbut) and a portion of caution (tawaqqī), then books would be kept safe from a great deal of perversion (fasād) [1.144.2–7].

eri sti cs a nd sa lva ti on | 45 So books are at the mercy of their readers and their authors. And authors too need to be protected from books for books are all too prone to entice them into self-delusion.40 The stiffest opposition to writing and books came from those scholars who were devoted to the collection of the prophetic Óadīth. They nurtured a profound fear and anxiety lest booklore should oust the authority of the scholar as the guarantor of the authenticity of the Óadīth. And there was a deep-rooted cultural and social predilection for the sharing of knowledge and learning in company. Learning was social cement. It kept the community together.41 Baghdad in the third century was an epistemic and cultural arena in which bibliophilia and bibliomania were confronted by, and coexisted with, stern opposition from vocal and passionate groups of bibliophobes. There is no greater indication of the ambivalent status which books and reading books occupied than in the story of how the Revelation was first given by the Angel Jibrīl (Gabriel) to Prophet Muªammad. Jibrīl brought him a tissue of cloth with a ‘writing’ (kitāb) enigmatically contained in it and suffocated the Prophet on two occasions until the Prophet was able on the third occasion to comply with the Angel’s instructions. Writing and the Book, the divine inventory, are properly the preserve of God. Little wonder then that al-JāªiÕ, who, according to later biographers, would rent out book shops overnight and read the latest arrivals while other slept, came to represent the consummate bibliophile for the tradition and yet was said in one late biographical notice to have been killed by a collapsing shelf full of books.42 So while it is important to stress the emergence of a book culture, we should also remember that this was a society which continued to prioritise and revere orality and oral practices – a hegemony present in the way in which all third-century books gesture to orality by voicing the writer’s words: ‘Abū ʿUthmān said . . .’; ‘Abū Muªammad said . . .’. Books were listened to as often as they were read. And reading itself was presumably voiced and not silent. In fact listening to books could be deadly. The traditionist Ibn Wahb (d. 197/813) listened to the reading of a book which graphically portrayed the terrors of the Resurrection. He died from shock.43

1.3 A Self-chronicling Society44

T

he Iraqi imperial and learned elite of course was nicely and precisely stratified within its own confines and was sharply aware of its ranks and classes. It was held together by many shared values: competitiveness, garrulousness, a love of spectacle, and the cultivation of the self.45 It was also addicted to compiling the chronicle and charting the anatomy of its existence. These aspects are, I think, well brought out in the following account by a centenarian whose libido will not abate, despite his decision to castrate himself in his youth: The devout Íabiʾan will sometimes castrate himself. In this respect he takes precedence over the Byzantine when it comes to making a show of his good intention and professing his religious devotion by castrating his son completely and making it impossible for him to procreate. Abū al-Mubārak the Íabiʾan did this. But he was always being summoned by our Caliphs and princes who would listen to him conversing throughout the night, because they found that he was such a skilled communicator46 and had such a fund of novel stories and marvellous booklore (nawādir al-kutub). He lived to be more than a hundred and I have never heard anyone more amorous (aghzal ) than him. And if he was telling the truth about himself, there was no one alive who had more illicit sex than he did [Óayawān 1.125.9–15]. I had the following story from Muªammad b. ʿAbbād who said: ‘I heard him speak. The subject of the discussion was women and their place in men’s hearts. The company had alleged that the eagerness of a man’s desire for women was an indication of how fully developed his virility was and of how far he had progressed in this particular aspect so fundamental to his physique (khilqa), his behaviour (maʿnā) and his nature (†abʿ)

46

a self -chroni cli ng soci e ty  | 47 – since he had been born a man and not a woman.47 Then Abū al-Mubārak addressed us: “Surely you all know that I am more than a hundred years old. Is it not the case that for a man this old, his decrepit weakness, his tired memory,48 the death of his libido (shahwa), and the cutting off of his supply of sperm must have destroyed his longing (ªanīn) for women and his thoughts of love (ghazal )?” “You are correct,” we said. “Is it not the case,” Abū al-Mubārak continued, “for someone who has habituated his soul to keep clear of women for a long time, who has kept away from them for years – for a lifetime indeed, that habit, the disciplining of his nature and domestication of his soul must have lessened the weight of struggling against his libido and the stimuli (dawāʿī) of coitus, for you know that habit is man’s second nature49 which does provide at least some good support to stop fondling women?” “You are correct,” we said. “Is it not the case that someone who has not tasted the delights of being alone with them, who has not sat in their company in wanton abandon, who has not heard them talk and beguile and seduce men’s hearts, attracting and exciting his desires, and who has not seen them uncovered and naked, who has for a long, long time kept away from them, must stop being attracted to them altogether?” “You are correct,” we said. “Is it not the case that, for someone who knows that he has been completely castrated (majbūb) and that his reason (sabab) for being intimate with them has been excised, despondency must be one of his strongest reasons for self-denial (zuhd ), consolation, and the termination of fleeting thoughts (khawā†ir)?” “You are correct,” we said. “Is it not the case that, for someone who has been led by abstention from this world and from the delights women offer, what with their beauty, their seductive appeal for the pious and the fact that the Prophets have used women, to castrate himself, without being compelled by any parent or foe or without being taken into captivity, his abstention must be powerful enough to remove all remembrance of women, and to dispel from him the pain of missing the experience of them? Is it not the case that someone who has it in his power to realise his determination and choose the decision (irāda) which will lead him to cut off that member which brings so many important pleasures, to endure the pain involved, let alone the risk, and to undergo the punishment and the damage to his physique, must no longer be subject to temptation (waswās) in this regard (bāb) or fall prey to their

48 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s attractions (dawāʿī)?” “You are correct,” we said. “Is it not the case that someone whose mind has forsaken this comfort, who has given up having children and being remembered through his goodly descendants, must have forgotten this activity (bāb) even if he can still recall some of his memories? As if this were not enough, you know that I blinded myself on the day I castrated myself, and so I have forgotten how things look (kayfīyat al-‚uwar) and how they give delight, and have no knowledge of what is intended thereby and how they may be intended. Should not the soul of a man in a condition such as this be disposed to a cheer free of care, preoccupied with the activity (bāb) for which he underwent these agonies?” “You are correct,” we said. “Now suppose I were not decrepit and I had not practised long avoidance, and my equipment were still functioning, is not the fact that I have not eaten any meat (ªayawān) for eighty years and have not filled my veins with drink lest it increase my libido and lessen my resolve – is not this enough to put an end to the stimuli (dawāʿī) I feel and to still the motion if it arises?” “You are correct,” we said. “Well then, after all I have described to you, I have only to hear a woman singing, and one minute I think that my insides (kabid )50 have melted, at another I think that they have burst open, at another I think my reasoning intellect has been snatched away, and sometimes my heart is sent into such a tizzy when I hear one of them laughing that I think it has jumped out of my mouth. So how then can I criticise anyone else about them?”’ [1.126.2–128.7]. God the Exalted keep you! If he was telling the truth about being in this state, when these aspects had come together in him, what do you think he was like say sixty or seventy years earlier? What do you think he was like only one hour before castration? No amount of agency (isti†āʿa) or ability (imkān) in any of its attributes were such that they could stop him wanting (irāda) women given that he had such a strong need and libido for them. God the Exalted is too merciful to His creation and too just to His bondsmen to impose upon them the difficulty of avoiding a thing which He had attached so closely to and placed so firmly in their hearts [1.128.8–14].

Abū al-Mubārak’s philosophically and scientifically informed cultivation of the self and his genial garrulousness as a speaker, his self-promotion as a subject worthy of scrutiny and debate are a stunning example of how ʿAbbasid

a self -chroni cli ng soci e ty  | 49 society set about composing the chronicle of itself in the middle of the third century. Abū al-Mubārak is also evidence of the eagerness with which al-JāªiÕ shaped this self-chronicling society. This was a society which valued personal testimony and eye-witness, in which everyday and mundane events demanded the attention of the man of reasoning intellect. In the following passage, I especially like the way the ancient Greek heritage, medical knowledge and personal, everyday experience are ranked side by side and provide a running commentary on each other. The first speaker is Polemon, the author of the Physiognomy (see Óayawān 3.269.2):51 He said: ‘Understand that pigeons and other birds do not respond well to being loosed (taghmīr) from great distances. Their sense of direction depends on their training and on whether they have been habituated to a particular place. The first step is for the bird to be taken up and out onto a roof top, and for a marker which it recognises to be set up. It should not fly beyond where it dwells. Food should be thrown to it on the roof, morning and evening, close by the marker set up for it, in order for it to become familiar with the spot and accustomed to returning there. Let the fancier attend to what the marker is made out of. It must never be black or anything which looks black when viewed from a distance. The bigger the marker, the better it is as a sign. He should never let it fly at the same time as its mate. He should pluck the feathers of one and let the other loose in flight. Both should be brought out onto the roof at the same time. The one with its feathers intact should be loosed in flight for it will yearn for its mate and when it knows the place, circles and returns, having become familiar with the spot, and when the feathers of the other bird have grown back, this bird should be treated in the same way. It is even better to bring them both out onto the roof with clipped wings, so that they can become familiar with the spot. Then one of them should be loosed in flight before its fellow, and the second should be treated in the same way the first had been’ [3.274.5–275.9]. How similar these words are to what Māsarjawayh52 said. In his book he gave an account of the nature of all types of milk (albān) and drinking them as medication. When he had finished his account, he said: ‘Thus I

50 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s have given you an account of the condition of these types of milk qua milk (al-albān fī anfusihā), but attend to the patients for whom you prescribe milk to drink. In the first instance, you, the patient, need to purge your stomach and you need to consult someone who knows how much milk your disorder requires, and how the class (jins) to which your disorder belongs relates to the class to which the milk belongs’ [3.275.10–14]. This is similar to what a carpenter once said in my house. I had employed him to hang a large, expensive door, so I said to him: ‘It is a difficult thing to hang a door well. Scarcely one in a hundred carpenters has the knack. Someone may have an excellent reputation for being skilled in constructing ceilings and domes but not be fully proficient at hanging a door properly. Yet ordinary people generally think that ceilings and domes are harder. There are parallels for this. For example, a servant or a maid may be adept at roasting a whole kid or a new born goat, but not at roasting a side of meat. Those who have no knowledge suppose that it is easier to roast a part than the whole’. He replied: ‘You did a good thing to let me know that you were examining my work, for now that I know what you know it will prevent me from doing a botched job (tashfīq)’. He hung the door and did an excellent job. But I did not have a ring in the house for the front of the door, for when I wanted to lock it, so I said to him: ‘I do not want to detain you until my servant can get to the market and back. So bore me a hole for the pin to go in’. When he had bored the hole and received his payment he went to leave and then turned back and said: ‘I have drilled the hole properly. But attend to the carpenter who will fit the pin (zirra) for you – if he misses with just one blow he will split the door. And a split is a defect (ʿayb)!’ Then I understood that he knew his craft inside out [3.276.2–277.4].53

Al-JāªiÕ wrote many works. A good number of them have survived. I am sure though that they pale into insignificance in comparison with the many counsels, conversations, debates, discussions and lectures he must have participated in over the many years of his long life. His sprightly mind and nimble intellect, his affable volubility as an anecdotalist, his peremptory style, his conviction in the rightness for his community of the theological position he had fashioned, made of him the perfect chronicler of his society and its

a self -chroni cli ng soci e ty  | 51 civilisation. He was the embodiment of the ‘world memory’ of which Italo Calvino wrote, the creation of which would lead to the correction of reality should reality happen to disagree with memory – after reading al-JāªiÕ’s works it becomes impossible to imagine a third century which does not accord with his world memory.54 And yet this world which he so carefully archived was for him as naught compared with the real world he hoped God would give him entry to when the apocalypse or death came.

2.1 The Totalising Work

W

hen al-JāªiÕ began working on The Book of Living, the Caliph al-Wāthiq was sure the End Time was about to come. Shortly after al-Wāthiq’s death, the Caliph al-Mutawakkil, his successor, banned debate on the Qurʾān. Thereby he endangered the public pursuit of the dialectical method for ascertaining the truth which al-JāªiÕ considered central to the religious well-being of his society. Its very hopes of attaining salvation when judged by God at the End Time were imperilled. For al-JāªiÕ, then, the End Time had begun. His response to eschatological imminence was to write the totalising work, an attempt to fulfil a moral imperative – the need to express gratitude to God for His creation by producing a comprehensive inventory of it. And yet it is not a hurried or an urgent work. Apocalyptic anxieties and chiliastic societies are often characterised not by panic but by energy.1 The production of such an inventory involved the proper application of the gift of the reasoning intellect which God had given to man. Al-JāªiÕ sought to codify his inventory in the form of a book that might somehow capture the totality of God’s benefaction. Yet the process was paradoxical: in order to write it, al-JāªiÕ had somehow to become the ideal writer and this meant that he had to be God. He would have known that he could never be such an ideal writer – for to be God would violate all of his fundamental religious and theological convictions. He may also have sensed that his book could never be complete. The impossibility of completeness resulted in the work being unfinished. His notion of moral obligation (taklīf ) required that he undertake the task. And in this respect we note that the moral and epistemological universe of The Cave, Chapter 18 of the Qurʾān, looms as a blueprint for The Book of Living. This undertaking resulted in the longest and possibly most complex 55

56 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s book written in Arabic at the time. And for his book to be read, al-JāªiÕ had to fashion an audience of ideal readers able to respond to such a book. He sought to keep Kalām alive by making his book a locus of debate. Prior to The Book of Living, books had of course been polemical. They had espoused one side or another of a particular debate on an issue. Al-JāªiÕ wrote many examples: The Rebuttal of the Christians is one. He had also developed a variation on the polemical book in which he sought to expound, record, represent and archive the relevant sides of the debates of his era. Sometimes this meant pitting two opposites against one another: slave boys and slave girls (Kitāb al-Jawārī wa-al-Ghilmān), for example; or simply exposing the arguments on a given issue, say concerning legitimate rule of the community and the nature of the Imamate (Kitāb al-ʿUthmānīya). What was new about The Book of Living was that it encouraged its readers to debate the pros and cons of reading the signs of God’s creation with themselves. Debate was to be internalised in their souls. But not all the members of al-JāªiÕ’s society were convinced of the value of books, and The Book of Living is a book aimed at all monotheists. To convince them of the rightness of his solution, al-JāªiÕ was required to convince his audience of the value of the book by intoning its praises. Al-JāªiÕ’s most sustained celebration of the book as an artefact vital for the codification of knowledge and the well-being of society thus occurs as part of an introduction to his most important work. In a complex presentation of the book, al-JāªiÕ defends a series of his compositions from attack, explains why books are the most consummate form of human communication, claims that they are more closely related to writers than their children, and establishes a close analogy between reading and writing a book and ­reading God’s act of creation. The Book of Living is in many ways al-JāªiÕ’s magnum opus, and is rightly regarded as his most characteristic work. It is a seven-volume survey of everything created by God and endowed with life, though occasionally attention is paid to inanimate matter (such as ‘fire’ in Volumes Four and Five). More than some 350 or so animals, from man to the mosquito, are mentioned or discussed, at times in great length, over the seven volumes, though marine life receives short shrift. There are no entries on animals we might naturally expect to be prominent, especially the culturally iconic animals:

the totali si ng work | 57 camels, and predators such as falcons, eagles and lions. The author’s displays of erudition are awe-inspiring as are his forays into the wondrous. His notices are drawn from quotations of poetry, from folktales and stories, from earlier lexicographic treatises devoted to the animal kingdom, from lecture courses which al-JāªiÕ had presumably attended and possibly delivered himself, from current debates in science, philosophy and theology, especially from the recently translated version of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, and from personal observation. They are informed by close observation, sometimes even based on experimentation, and are governed by the author’s relentless recourse to reasoned assessment. The book is a sprawling composition. It seems not to have been conclusively and definitively completed, though according to an account given by Ibn al-Nadīm writing towards the end of the fourth century we can conclude that it was prepared for dissemination and released in a form which al-JāªiÕ’s contemporaries would have identified as a fully fledged book. In fact it appears that the book was released even though it had not been completed. It is unfinished: it draws to a close but does not end. And despite its incompleteness we owe its survival to its having been made available to the book-reading public of al-JāªiÕ’s day. This is a work which I regularly find intimidating and which often, quite frankly, defeats me. I guess that this present study is an attempt to think about why this should be so. It is not simply because it is a very long work that it intimidates me – it is the longest work to have survived from the first two and a half centuries of Islam. (The majority of other long texts to have survived from the period up to the first half of the third century are preserved as quotations within later works.) It was also long in the making. Work on it lasted for more than a decade: it was begun sometime before the year 232/846–7 and published after 244/858. It sometimes juxtaposes, with an insouciance which I regularly find bewildering, two seemingly incompatible opposites: the casualness of oral styles of communication and the more formal and measured rhythms of written compositions. Its authority flits unsettlingly between a kind of writing which I would like to identify as ‘scientific’ and a kind of writing I would identify as impressionistic anecdotage. The work’s ambition, as a hymn to God the Creator, is so profoundly religious that the tenor of its argumentation is

58 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s frequently indistinguishable from its piety. And then there is the tumultuous cornucopia of the author’s vision, with his almost fetishistic delight in taxonomies and lists which he overturns and subverts just as regularly as he corroborates and confirms them. What I find intimidating is, I think, al-JāªiÕ’s desire somehow to capture in writing the totality of creation. The totalising impulse, the urge to enfold, rather than simply evoke, all of existence in language, pushes language to the very limit of its expressiveness. And then The Book of Living is absolutely central to al-JāªiÕ’s universe, as Interpreting Dreams to Freud, Finnegans Wake to Joyce, or Don Quixote to Borges’s Pierre Menard. These are works with which their (would-be) writers identify so closely and so passionately, works in which such a totalising vision of existence is expressed, that there ensues a sort of elision of distinction between composer and composition, a blurring of difference between a writer and his vision, and between his vision and its written encapsulation. They thus demand, in Joyce’s words, ‘an ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia’, for they eradicate all the familiar categories which we rely upon in reading.2 When we think of the poor reception which al-JāªiÕ notes in the ‘Introduction’ this and his earlier work received at the hands of the Addressee, some among al-JāªiÕ’s first audience were clearly unsettled too. So the book somehow defies reading, just as it defied writing. This is why one of the principal notions wending its way through The Book of Living is, I think, an empirical writer’s efforts to create an ideal readership – to teach the reader how to listen to and read his treatises. The work seems to demand the f­ashioning of both an ideal writer and an ideal reader. So in order to write his book al-JāªiÕ the empirical writer had somehow to become an ideal writer by providing an ideal reading of creation. And in order for his book and creation to be read he had to help his empirical readers acquire the right skills – to help them become ideal readers. Here there is a tension at work. The ideal writer of (the book of ) creation can only be God. The ideal reader of creation and of al-JāªiÕ’s book of creation is also God. It can only be He. By thus mimicking God, do the ideal writer and reader cross the chasm that separates God from man, His slave? This hesitancy was not a problem unique to al-JāªiÕ or his Book of Living. Writing was an action and so informed by notions of moral agency. Thus, in the centuries

the totali si ng work | 59 after al-JāªiÕ’s death the Basran School of the Muʿtazila came to position the derived autonomy of man as a moral agent in the light of God’s absolute autonomy and infinite power. In Frank’s phrase, they saw man as a ‘kind of absolute’ and God as ‘the exemplar’, though they were scrupulous not to assimilate man to God.3 A further complication emerges. The ideal reader of (the book of ) creation can only be the ideal writer of (the book of ) creation. Ideal writing and reading thus become indistinguishable as well as unachievable. The Cave reminds us that it is precisely because of this impossibility of achievement that man is morally obliged by God’s gift of existence and reason to ­undertake the attempt. Not to do so is to merit His wrath and Hellfire. I have found this problem especially acute in my own, personal endeavour to read The Book of Living. In order to read it, I need somehow to participate in how it fashions its ideal reader, however impossible and unachievable such an aspiration may be. A symmetry emerges. As I try to read The Book of Living, my attempt mimics al-JāªiÕ’s attempts to read God’s signs in creation. But al-JāªiÕ and I are both frustrated in our aspirations to be ideal readers and writers. Only God can achieve the inventory of His creation and only God can read His inventory. At the heart of my difficulties in reading the work lie my frustrated and frustrating efforts to respect this symmetry and recreate such an ideal reader for (and in) myself. I do not think that I am the only person over the centuries to have reacted to the book in this way. I know that I can never become the ideal reader it demands. I also wonder whether anyone, its empirical writer included, could ever be that ideal reader. So one of the things I have tried to do in this book is to look to uncover how we as empirical readers might start out on this process of aspiring to become ideal readers by considering some of the techniques, such as organisation and exhortation, al-JāªiÕ as empirical writer uses in order to encourage his readers to engage with his composition. I am sure that the need and urgency to become the ideal reader that I sense The Book of Living demands of me is not something that will be shared by all of my readers. And this is what I find truly intimidating – once I decided to try to enter its world, I have been dominated by The Book of Living.

2.2 The Treatise as Totality

T

he Book of Living exists today as a work in seven volumes. Its principal subject is God’s creation and the place of man in that creation. It is difficult for someone who has not wrestled with the text to gain an impression of the exuberance and abundance of its totality and, as far as I am aware, the complete work has, unsurprisingly, never been translated from Arabic into any other language whatsoever. So how do I convey this impression? Short of providing a translation (a lifetime’s work), I could attempt a detailed inventory, say in the form of a catalogue of the animals which al-JāªiÕ discusses, or the themes which he broaches. In other words, I could try to rewrite the work in some way. The net result would be scarcely any less compendious than the original and would, I expect, be a dismal product, entirely shorn of everything which I love about the original. A convenient solution might be to refer the reader to descriptions or summaries which others have given of the work. I mean descriptions such as the synopsis by the great expert on al-JāªiÕ, Charles Pellat, with his fine translations of selected passages contained on pages 130 to 185 of his study The Life and Works of JāªiÕ, or, for those who can read French, to Lakhdar Souami’s reorganisation of the work by means of a selection of translations into French: Le cadi et la mouche (The Judge and the Fly, 1988). The primary advantage of Pellat’s work is that it leads the reader through The Book of Living in the sequence in which it is extant today. The disadvantage of Souami’s book is that, by chopping the work up and rearranging it under thematic rubrics, Souami, perhaps inspired by Roland Barthes’s seminal 1954 evisceration of the writings of Michelet,4 renders the work confusing: or rather, the book now looks confused, random and repetitious 60

the trea ti se as totali t y  | 61 as the key subjects and ideas, as well as discussions of specific animals, which recur throughout the seven volumes, now require an editor’s arrangement to give them a spurious coherence which, to someone familiar with the original, is little more than an incoherence. Souami must have taken to heart Pellat’s censure of the treatise in the New Edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, describing it is a work dominated by ‘the greatest disorder’.5 By seeking to remedy it, and impose a new order on the work, he has misread it and has merely succeeded in producing more confusion. What I perceive to be a sustained compositional tour de force on the part of al-JāªiÕ now looks like a farrago of chaotic deployment, a perfect example of a famous characterisation of JāªiÕian style as ‘coq à l’âne’ – ­‘helter-skelter’, ‘pell-mell’ or ‘harum-scarum’. Perhaps there may be more advantage in considering what a reader operating within the classical Arabic tradition has to say? For example, the bibliographical encyclopaedist, Ibn al-Nadīm (d. between 380/990–1 and 388/998), in his Fihrist (‘The Index’), a magisterial list of the books available in his day, describes the treatise as it was available to him:6 Among his books is The Book of Living. It is well known that it is in seven parts (i.e. volumes: ajzāʾ). He appended to it another book which he named The Book of Women (Kitāb al-Nisāʾ), that is the difference between the male and the female, and a further book, which he named The Book of Mules. I personally have seen these two treatises in the hand of Zakarīyā b. Yaªyā b. Sulaymān, whose teknonym (kunya) is Abū Yaªyā, al-JāªiÕ’s stationer (warrāq). A treatise which people have named The Book of Camels (Kitāb al-Ibil ) has been appended to it but is not in the style (kalām) of al-JāªiÕ. It does not even come close to it. He composed (allafa) this book in the name of Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt.7

Ibn al-Nadīm’s observation that al-JāªiÕ later added other treatises to the seven volumes of The Book of Living is corroborated by what al-JāªiÕ himself says about his severe illness in Volume Four of the treatise (Óayawān 4.208.3–209.78) and in the Introduction to his Book of Mules (Kitāb al-Bighāl).9 Al-JāªiÕ begins his treatise on mules as follows:

62 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Praise be to God, and in the name of God. Power and strength come from God alone. May God bless our lord Muªammad in particular and His Prophets in general [2.215.1–3]. The correct way of arranging (wajh al-tadbīr) the comprehensive speech on mules is for it to be included in the comprehensive speech on all hoofed animals, so that the whole might become a complete codex (mu‚ªaf ), like the rest of the codices of The Book of Living. God is He who Ordains and Suffices [2.215.4–7]. This was prevented by the effects of the distracting affliction (hamm) and immobility (zamāna),10 accompanied by weakness of the limbs, deterioration of the humours, and by my tongue being tied with poor articulation (sūʾ al-tibyān) and an inability to speak clearly (if‚āª). These symptoms (ʿilal ) do not afflict a man all at once and leave his reasoning intellect in full health. So, there was a combined problem for the copyist (nāsikh): the dictator (mumlī) struggled to make himself understood properly and the one taking down the dictation (mustamlī) struggled to understand him properly.11 Thus it was better for the author (‚āªib) to abandon the arduous task (takalluf ) of composing (taʾlīf ) the book than to assume the arduous task (takalluf ) of arranging it (naÕm), by gathering one’s wits together (bāl ) despite the exhaustion of every faculty. And there was no way for the author to avoid falling short of his ambition (himma),12 or the scattered disorganisation of his ideas (khawā†ir) thus preventing sound cogitation (‚iªªat al-fikr) and concentrating the mind (ijtimāʿ al-bāl ) [2.215.8–16]. So please excuse this book insofar as befits this situation. God’s goodness (khīra) consists in the benefits He produces (‚anaʿa). We have learned that goodness is tied (maqrūna) to suffering (kurh). From God comes success [2.215.17–18].

So we learn that The Book of Mules was dictated, that it ought properly to have been included in the section on hoofed animals, presumably the section contained in Volume Seven of The Book of Living, that al-JāªiÕ’s paralysis made it impossible for him to dictate it clearly, and that the work on mules was postponed until al-JāªiÕ had recovered his health. In the next section we

the trea ti se as totali t y  | 63 will encounter a small piece of evidence that suggests that the Book of Living too was dictated.13 Ibn al-Nadīm notes that al-JāªiÕ earned a considerable amount of money from the dedication of three of his compositions, The Book of Living among them: Maymūn b. Hārūn said: I asked al-JāªiÕ, ‘Do you have an estate in Basra?’ He smiled and answered, ‘There is only me14 and a concubine (jāriya), a slave-girl who waits upon her, a servant (khādim: a eunuch?) and a donkey. I donated The Book of Living to Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik and he gave me five thousand dinars. I donated The Book of Clarity and Clarification to Ibn Abī Duʾād and he gave me five thousand dinars. I donated The Book of Husbandry and Date-Farming to Ibrāhīm b. al-ʿAbbās al-Íūlī and he gave me five thousand dinars. So I departed for Basra, taking with me an estate which needed neither boundaries nor fertiliser’.15

Unusually, Ibn al-Nadīm rounds off his entry on the work by providing us with the opening and closing sentences of each of the seven volumes, which I will translate later in this section. This list prompts us to ponder a third possibility for grasping the totality of the work. I mean an enquiry into the ways in which al-JāªiÕ offers us, as readers, guidance concerning how he may have figured (or may have wanted us to figure) the structure of his book. The provision of this kind of guidance would not have been so unusual in view of the likelihood that the nature, scale and ambition of the work seem not to have been paralleled in any earlier compositions in Arabic. Third-century readers must have needed some form of direction in how to read the work (in order to be able to use the work let alone aspire to ideal readership) just as we do today. Maybe what we need then is a survey of what al-JāªiÕ says in The Book of Living about the shape and form and structure of his composition?

2.3 Parsing Totality

O

ne of the enduring obstacles to any reading of al-JāªiÕ’s writings, one which is especially acute in the case of The Book of Living, is following the sequence of ideas, parsing the arguments, grasping the train of thought: perceiving the interlocking of the miniscule as a way of comprehending the totality of the totalising work. According to the advice which al-JāªiÕ from time to time offers the Addressee, the treatise is composed in such a way that it is simultaneously many, shorter, treatises, arranged so as continually to refresh the psychic energy of the reader. Perhaps, then, if the author has taken care over the organisation of the work, we might look for any indications which the text might provide to help us orient ourselves in parsing its totality. Yet, the apparent explicitness of this advice to the Addressee contrasts with the many, laconic and desultory headings which are used in the text to mark chapters and signal divisions between parts. If we take Volume One as an example (and run the risk of violating a JāªiÕian principle of avoiding boredom through repeating, in a more discursive manner, some of the matter discussed more tersely in Chapter 2.4), we note that it opens with a basic doxology: ‘In the Name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful. In Him do I trust’ (1.3.1–2). It closes with a scribal notice: The first volume is complete and the second volume is next. It begins: ‘The chapter of the well-known poems adduced by the Proponent of the Dog as proof’ (1.389.9–11).16

There are five main section markers, four designated by the term bāb, a ‘door’, ‘entry’ or ‘portal’ into a new subject or a different treatment of an 64

pa rsi ng totali ty | 65 earlier subject, one by dhikr, an ‘account’, ‘record’, ‘list’, ‘mention’ or ‘discussion’. These ‘doors’ produce six sections, although the first section, which I will refer to in this study as the first section of the ‘Introduction’ is not explicitly designated as such in the text: 1. Untitled (i.e. the first section of the ‘Introduction’; 1.3.1–106.2); 2. Chapter: the account (dhikr) of what befalls man after castration and how he was before castration (1.106.3–5); 3. Account of what has been transmitted concerning the castration of riding beasts (1.177.12); 4. Chapter containing things we have already discussed, though there is a certain difference between it and our previous discussion (1.220.11–12); 5. Chapter: what the Proponent of the Rooster mentioned by way of disparaging the dog, and enumerating its faults (maʿāyib) and vices . . . (1.222.2–3); 6. Chapter (1.267.5).17 Al-JāªiÕ’s divisions in this volume of The Book of Living are essentially pragmatic and functional. They offer little guidance for his readers in their endeavour to follow his schemes of articulation across such a voluminous treatise. Were the body of the treatise to have been lost with only its chapter headings extant, we would form a bizarre, and sketchy, notion of its contents. Mercifully, al-JāªiÕ was not oblivious to the sorts of difficulties a reader might have in apprehending his book as a totality. A major theme of Volume Six of The Book of Living is the intractability of creation, of how it resists being neatly arranged by the writer in an orderly manner. Volume Six begins therefore with a summary catalogue of the whole work, from which we can gain a bird’s eye view of al-JāªiÕ’s vision of its sweep and an insight into its fascinating simplicity: We have spoken about scripts (khu†ū†) and their advantages, about the universality of their usefulness and why there was a need to develop them; how their shapes (‚uwar) differ in accordance with the different natures (†abāʾiʿ) of the people who use them; why it was necessary for them to institute them, and why it would be a serious difficulty should they not exist [6.5.6–9].

66 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s We have spoken about using our fingers to count and why people went to the trouble of devising it, and about gesture (ishāra) and why they developed it; about why they have compared all of this with the clear expression (bayān) of the tongue, to the point that they have actually given to them the name ‘clarity’ (bayān); and about why they say, ‘The pen is one of the two tongues, and the eye betrays18 more than the tongue’ [6.5.10–12]. We have spoken about the need for reasoned speech (man†iq), the universality of its benefit and how sorely it is needed; how it has become absolutely universal in its usefulness as a basis for all of these cognate activities: they are derived from it and are predicated upon it; and about how we have converted the indication provided by mute matter into a reasoned expression (nu†q) and the proof which is contained in inanimate bodies into an expression of clarity (bayān). And in the first two volumes we recorded in a comprehensive manner the speech concerning the dog and the rooster [6.5.13–6.2]. In the third volume, we recorded in a comprehensive manner the speech on pigeons, flies, crows, black beetles and dung beetles. There is more to be said on them, but we have delayed presenting it, because it belongs in the chapter on vermin and creepy-crawlies19 and its proper place (‚awāb mawqiʿihi) is in the chapter of the speech on winged insects. And when you heard what mighty skills God the Exalted has invested them with, the uncustomary kinds of knowledge which God the Exalted has given them as their innate intelligence, what abundant benefits and immense tribulations He brings about by means of them, and such malady and remedy as He has placed in them, you considered them too important for the name of ‘insects’ and you deemed the other type (‚inf ) of insect too significant for the name of ‘creepy-crawlies’ – you understood that the value of living things is not determined by whether we think them pleasing or by consideration of monetary worth [6.6.8–12]. In the fourth volume we recorded in a comprehensive manner the speech on both small and large ants, on the monkey and the pig, snakes and ostriches and part of the speech on fire. Now, God keep you!, for a reason (sabab) connected with the account of fire and the speech determined by its properties, it turned out to be necessary to discuss fire and

pa rsi ng totali ty | 67 to provide comprehensive information about it, even if fire is not a living thing [6.6.13–7.3]. In the fifth volume we recorded the rest of the speech on fire, the comprehensive statement on sparrows, and the comprehensive statement on rats, cats and scorpions. There is a reason for bringing these classes (ajnās) together in one chapter which will be understood by those who read it and be clear to those who look at it. Then we provided the speech on lice, fleas and mosquitoes, the speech on spiders and bees, then the speech on the bustard, then the speech on sheep and goats, then the speech on frogs and locusts, and then the speech on sand-grouse [6.7.4–9]. What remains (God give you long life!) are chapters which require prolixity (i†āla) and which call for loquacity (i†nāb) – though that which does not exceed what is required and which stops when one’s aim is reached is not prolixity [6.7.11–13].

After a brief discussion (6.8.1–9.2) of words and meanings necessitated by this authorial justification of prolixity (in a work of this length, hardly a surprising leitmotif in the text), al-JāªiÕ continues with a description of Volume Six: With the aid and assistance of God the Exalted we will begin with the speech on creepy-crawlies and winged insects, small carnivores and unknown and obscure herbivores. We will put all of this in one chapter, and we will place our trust firstly in the grace of Exalted God and then in the fact that since this chapter is in fact many chapters and contains many different names, the reader will no sooner have grown weary of one chapter but that the second will move him on to its opposite. And this is how the third will stand in relation to the fourth, the fourth to the fifth and the fifth to the sixth [6.9.4–9] . . .20 . . . It maybe that there will be a few leaves to spare of the volume which we are now about to begin with the account of creepy-crawlies and winged insects so we will raise the tone and complete it with the comprehensive speech on gazelles and wolves. They are both chapters which are shorter than the long ones but are longer than the short ones [6.11.2–4]. There remain some intermediate (mutawassi†a) chapters, moderate (muqta‚ida) and justly balanced (muʿtadila), which combine a measure of

68 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s shortness for those who look for shortness and a measure of length for those who look for length. They are the speech on cows, the speech on donkeys, the speech on the big, noble carnivores – the leaders among them, those endowed with distinction, such as the lion, the leopard, the tiger and their likes [6.11.5–8] . . . . . . The big chapters are, for example, the speech on camels, the speech on the superiority of man to all living things, just as living things are superior to everything which grows, and everything which grows is superior to everything which is inanimate . . . Other big chapters are the distinction between male and female and the distinction between man and woman in particular [6.14.6–8 and 14.13–14] . . . . . . The other chapters, such as the superiority of the angel to man and the superiority of man to the jinn (comprehensive speeches on the difference of their essences, on the points of their resemblance and the points of their dissimilarity) belong with the chapters which are justly balanced in terms of shortness and length [6.15.2–5]. There is not one chapter which does not include some small feature of other chapters, depending on the subjects (asbāb) which are connected to it and whether insertion of one subject in another (ta∂mīn) occurs in the chapter. This is so that you may perhaps derive greater benefit therefrom [6.15.5–7].

From this passage we learn that the treatise is in essence a series of speeches or presentations on a variety of subjects, tantamount to separate lectures in book form, divided into small, medium and large chapters with an eye to the lessons which the reader and listener may derive from them. The large chapters which al-JāªiÕ enumerates, such as those on the superiority of man, and the difference between men and women, are no longer extant. According to Ibn al-Nadīm they were added to the (currently unfinished) seventh volume of the work after it had been composed. The contents of the chapters are not discrete or hermetically sealed, however, but are interlocking and interwoven. In short, then, what we have here in this substantial passage is a Table of Contents. It expresses how the totality of the work was envisioned by al-JāªiÕ and how he wants us to figure it. We must keep in mind the writer’s governance of his materials, of how they are discretely presented yet spill over

pa rsi ng totali ty | 69 into one another, and of how the writer intends his readers to derive benefit from his work. Of course it is typical of the strategies of misdirection which characterise so much of The Book of Living that its Table of Contents should occur in the penultimate volume of the work! Viewed in these terms, the system for organising the contents by type is simple. Its product is astonishingly complex.

2.4 The Articulation of The Book of Living

W

hen we begin to consider the work from this angle, it soon becomes evident that it is held together through various organisational techniques which are clearly distinguished, many of them very simple in nature. Looking at them will help us to reflect on some of the questions I want to consider. Is the unfinished nature of The Book of Living how al-JāªiÕ wanted it to be? Is its incompleteness significant, part of any message the work may have? Is The Book of Living a book in the sense that its final form was given to it by its author? Was it readied for publication as such? And if it is such a book, then we are entitled to wonder – what kind of book is it? So several distinct, but complementary, questions will be investigated in the following survey. Whether, and, if yes, to what extent, the treatise, in terms of the text as it survives today, indicates that it was prepared for dissemination to a reading public in a form that we nowadays would identify as a book? Which, if any, methods of organisation are applied to the topics of which it treats? What type of composition, in formal terms, is the treatise, viewed in this light? I have assumed that al-JāªiÕ wanted his book to be read. Therefore these questions and their possible answers are a necessary preliminary to thinking about how the work was used and read, even though we do not yet know enough about third-century readerly practices to be able to say whether, for example, it was designed to be read continuously (this is the impression which al-JāªiÕ sometimes gives when he describes the variegation of topics to the Addressee). Or was it structured for ease of consultation, for dipping in and out of, and for reference, sign-posted by means of chapter divisions, for example. Or even for a combination of these practices, for they are not mutually exclusive. 70

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 71 The question of dissemination will be addressed in terms of what I refer to as the paratexts in the treatise.21 The inquiry into its schemes of organisation will be conducted by means of a survey of the principal or over-arching topics which al-JāªiÕ discusses, in his to-ing and fro-ing through the welter of diverse and multifarious materials which he parades before the reader. The identification of the type of composition to which The Book of Living belongs will be attempted through a brief comparison with some other, formally cognate, large- and small-scale compositions from the second and third centuries.22 Let us briefly consider the situation some two centuries into al-JāªiÕ’s future, and view the articulation of The Book of Living from the vantage point of two seminal, totalising works from the eastern Islamic empire. We can begin to discern some of the strategies adopted by authors for the presentation of large and complex works to their intended readership. In his Cure (al-Shifāʾ), his summa, Ibn Sīnā (d. 429/1037) uses a series of divisions and sub-divisions which he deploys hierarchically throughout the four volumes of the work. Al-Bīrūnī (d. after 442/1050) provides a very detailed list of chapters and their headings as integral to his preface to The India, an attempt to give a comprehensive account of Indian ontology and chronography. He says that he did this in order to facilitate ease of access to a work which he describes as a dhakhīra, ‘an archive for those who wish to mix with the Indians’.23 In sum, both these works were articulated in such a way that they could both be read continuously and consulted as reference works. Or let us take an example closer to al-JāªiÕ’s own floruit. Ibn Saʿd, an older contemporary who died in 230/844, organises his massive Treatise of the Major Classes (Kitāb al-˝abaqāt al-Kubrā), a study of the first two centuries of transmitters of the Óadīth, sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muªammad, by ranking his some 5,000 entries according to classes based on seniority and priority in converting to Islam, and then according to standing within this criterion of seniority. He also uses the organisational principle of location (Medina, Mecca, and so on), which is then further arranged into classes. His arrangement into classes was intended to capture the transmission of know­ ledge across the centuries from the pious fathers to their modern descendants. Whilst this structure has obvious merits in facilitating use by Ibn Saʿd’s audience, it is not clear whether the structure is intended to be readily or

72 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s easily accessible to those who have not been trained in the principles of Óadīth transmission of the day. In other words, perhaps only those inducted in these principles and techniques were qualified and knowledgeable enough to understand how to use Ibn Saʿd’s book. This contrasts markedly with the ease of access to information which characterises later biographical works once their compilers had adopted the simple expedient of alphabetical arrangement.24 The case of Ibn Saʿd’s work raises one further set of questions which I can pose but not answer. Is the articulation of The Book of Living designed to facilitate an audience’s access to its riches or to prevent access to all but the initiated among the elite? Is a principal component of al-JāªiÕ’s creation of an ideal reader precisely this struggle for acquisition of the knowledge required by the reader in order to be granted initiation into its readership? A. Names and Terms I propose to begin by taking a close look at the various terms al-JāªiÕ uses to describe the work. It seems to have been quite usual for writers of what we today would recognise as books in the middle of the third century to have given those books a name, even though they may have been quite relaxed about the precise form in which the name survived. Some works appear to have been known under several titles, or under variations of a basic title. In many instances, the very act of naming a work constitutes one of our prime pieces of evidence that this work was intended for dissemination. Thus, al-JāªiÕ identifies his work by a name – the kitāb al-ªayawān (7.9.1), and refers to it elsewhere as a kitāb, a treatise or a book (e.g. 7.111.8– 9). This kitāb is divided into seven ‘parts’, ‘volumes’: juzʾ, plural ajzāʾ (7.9.1, sittat ajzāʾ), although the term juzʾ is interchangeable with kitāb, as in al-kitāb al-sābiʿ, ‘the seventh book’ (7.9.1).25 Hārūn, in his Introduction to his edition of The Book of Living proposes that this sevenfold division originates with al-JāªiÕ and suggests that the occurrence of the term mu‚ªaf (‘codex’) also originates with al-JāªiÕ.26 However it is unclear whether mu‚ªaf, which according to Hārūn’s apparatus recurs in some manuscripts as part of the concluding envoi, represents JāªiÕian or later usage (i.e. an addition by a redactor or a scribe).27 Of course, whether the current division of the parts represents al-JāªiÕ’s

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 73 own division, a partially or incompletely revised recension of an earlier division (which he himself supervised?), or a subsequent, scribal organisation of the material has yet to be determined. Compare, for example, the entries at Óayawān 4.107.4–6 and 7.71.11–72.11. Ibn al-Nadīm’s notice about The Book of Living in his Index, discussed on pp. 63 and 95–6, suggests that the division of parts in the version currently extant represents the form which Ibn al-Nadīm identified as its original (though there are some discrepancies between how he describes Volumes One and Two and their current arrangement). The contents of each volume and the whole treatise are identified as ta∂āʿīf, the ‘interstices’ of the leaves (waraq: see Óayawān 6.11.3) within the binding: 3.519.3–4; 6.38.1–4.28 The connection between the parts is called a ‚ila (1.190.10). We also learn from 6.11.3 that the contents of any one volume were not rigidly fixed in advance but were determined by considerations of space. This also lends support to my contention that the treatise was composed via dictation, as suggested by al-JāªiÕ’s preface to The Book of Mules. Each volume is variously though not uniformly segmented into an irregular number of sub-divisions identified as bāb, plural abwāb, ‘doors’, ‘topics’ or ‘chapters’; qawl, plural aqwāl, ‘speech’, ‘discourse’, even ‘disquisition’ or perhaps ‘lecture’; and dhikr, ‘account’, ‘record’, ‘mention’, ‘discussion’. The metaphor used for concluding a volume of the treatise at 5.587.2 is khatm – sealing a container, affixing a stopper to a bottle or stamping a ­document with a signet ring. B. Principal Paratexts in The Book of Living In third-century writings, the comments, indications and remarks about a work which a writer places in, and often disperses throughout, his work are significant. Cross-references, authorial directions (and I would add the cognate topos, the authorial justification of an arrangement which the reader might find unusual, or unsatisfactory, or unsystematic) and the ‘reversion’ topos, in which the author signals a return to the main topic of his discussion (as at Óayawān 4.60.11) are a strong indication that the work in question is what has come to be identified as a syngramma, a work prepared for wider dissemination. The syngramma is formally to be distinguished from the hypomnēma,

74 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s be it a private composition or a text for private use, such as a scholar’s personal notebook or a record of a lecture (or notes for a lecture), and from the gramma, a writing for use within a study circle or school by its members.29 These textual markers, which I refer to as ‘paratexts’, are important for determining which parts of The Book of Living, if any, were readied for dissemination, as well as the state of preparedness of any particular volume of the Book of Living for this purpose.30 The following overview is based upon an identification, representative though not exhaustive, of a number of key textual markers which are used to indicate the opening and closing of volumes, the opening of a new chapter, transitions from one subject, topic or animal to the next, cross-references, and a selection of cursory authorial remarks concerning the arrangement of the subject matter of the treatise.31 Each Volume begins with an ‘Incipit’, ends with a ‘(Scribal?) Envoi’ and is divided into what I have termed ‘Subdivisions’. I have also labelled some of the more important paratexts in terms of their function, which I provide within square brackets. I also provide the appropriate alternatives to these passages as found in divergent manuscripts and recorded in Hārūn’s apparatus. Of course we have no way of knowing whether these divisions and textual markers are actually those devised by al-JāªiÕ for his work. But equally, we have no way of knowing that they are not, and so I will work on the assumption that they do represent al-JāªiÕ’s own intrusions in his text.32 Volume One Incipit 1.3.1–2 ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful [Basmala]. In Him do I trust’. 1.3.3–7: [Prayer for guidance of the Addressee.] Sub-division 1 1.106.3–5 ‘Chapter (bāb): account (dhikr) of what befalls man after castration and how he was before castration’. Sub-division 2 1.177.12 ‘Account (dhikr) of what has been transmitted concerning the castration of riding beasts’. 1.190.10–11 ‘We will say what is necessary about that subject, if God the

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 75 Exalted wills. The connection (‚ila) with this discourse (kalām) will come after this, if God the Exalted wills’. Sub-division 3 1.220.11–12 ‘Chapter (bāb) containing things we have already discussed, though there is a certain difference between it and our previous discussion’. [Cross-reference and authorial justification of arrangement.]33 Sub-division 4 1.222.1–3 ‘Chapter (bāb): what the Proponent of the Rooster mentioned by way of disparaging the dog, and enumerating its faults and vices . . .’. Sub-division 5 1.267.5–6 ‘Chapter (bāb)’. 1.311.7–8 ‘If these questions excite your wonder and you find this manner of proceeding (madhhab) pleasing, then read my epistle to Aªmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb the bureaucrat (kātib), for they are collected there’. [Authorial guidance and cross-reference to another treatise, On Quadrature and Circumference, Kitāb al-Tarbīʿ wa-al-Tadwīr.] 1.327.7–8 ‘We will speak about what is omitted (al-matrūk) from this and other classes (jins), then we will return to our first topic (maw∂iʿ), if God the Exalted wills’. [Authorial guidance and proleptic ‘reversion’ topos.] (Scribal?) envoi 1.389.9–11 ‘The first volume (juzʾ) is complete (tamma) and the second volume (juzʾ) is next. It begins: “the well-known poems adduced by the Proponent of the Dog as proof”’. (MS Sh: The first codex (mu‚ªaf ) is complete and the second codex of The Book of Living follows.) Volume Two Incipit 2.5.1–4 ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’ [Basmala]. ‘Chapter (bāb): the well-known poems, current proverbs, sound reports, attested (maʾthūra) ªadīths, and empirical observations (ʿiyān) . . . adduced by the Proponent of the Dog as proof’. Sub-division 1 2.70.2–3 ‘Another chapter (bāb) on the dog and its behaviour (shaʾn)’.34

76 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s Sub-division 2 2.166.3–4 ‘Chapter (bāb): that which is compared to the dog though not of its kind’. Sub-division 3 2.280.1–2 ‘Chapter (bāb): that the knowledge of which is required’. (Scribal?) envoi 2.375.10–11 ‘The second volume (˝) (MS Sh: mu‚ªaf, codex) of The Book of Living is finished (kamila), with the praise of God the Exalted and the goodness of His assistance. There follows the third volume, God willing, the first section of which is the discussion (dhikr) of pigeons’ (˝). (MS Sh: ‘In the third, God willing, the discussion (dhikr) of pigeons follows’.) The paratextual material in the first two volumes is evidently slight. This may be because the two volumes are dominated by the debate between the Proponent of the Dog and the Proponent of the Rooster. It may also suggest that these two volumes were revised to a lesser extent than the other volumes or were worked on differently from the other volumes. Volume Three Incipit 3.5.1–4 ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’ [Basmala]. ‘Chapter (bāb): discussion (dhikr) of pigeons’. (MS Sh: ‘We will begin, by the grace of God alone, with the discussion of pigeons’.)35 (MS L: ‘God alone gives success, herewith the discussion of pigeons’.) 3.5.4–5 ‘And such various kinds of understanding and praiseworthy characteristics as God, Mighty and Glorious, has entrusted them with, in order that you might thereby understand the wisdom of the Maker and the completeness of the benefits of Him Who Governs (mudabbir)’. 3.5.7–9 ‘If we have bored you with graveness (jidd ) and with sound arguments which are in general circulation, in order to multiply ideas (khawā†ir) and whet reasoning intellects, then we will replenish your energy with some trivialities (ba†ālāt), with the record of amusing reasonings (ʿilal ) and uncustomary arguments’. [Authorial justification of arrangement.]

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 77 Sub-division 1 3.59.5–6 ‘Chapter (bāb): on the truthfulness of conjecture and excellence of physiognomy (firāsa)’. Sub-division 2 3.91.5–6 ‘Chapter (bāb) containing poetry in praise of beauty and other subjects’. Sub-division 3 3.105.7–9 ‘Another Chapter (bāb) on ire and furious rashness (junūn) in the situations (mawā∂iʿ) in which it is praiseworthy’ (MS L). (MS Sh and ˝: ‘on similar statements about ire and the record of furious rashness in the situations in which mention of it is praiseworthy’.) Sub-division 4 3.122.7–8 Chapter (bāb): natural intelligences (fi†an), comprehending unintelligible sounds (ri†ānāt) and allusions (kināyāt), and understanding (fahm) and making others understand (ifhām)’. Sub-division 5 3.139.4–5 ‘Chapter (bāb): account (dhikr) of the characteristics of the Sacred Precinct in Mecca’. (In MS L, a scribe has written the Basmala before 3.139.4.) Sub-division 6 3.144.7–8 ‘Chapter (bāb) (MS L: The speech (qawl ) on): the discussion of pigeons’. Sub-division 7 3.227.6–7 ‘Chapter’ (bāb): among the noble traits of pigeons are tameness and companionship’. Sub-division 8 3.244.8 ‘Chapter’ (bāb). (MS L: ‘The Proponent of the Pigeon said’.) Sub-division 9 3.253.8 ‘Chapter’ (bāb). (This is missing in MS L.) Sub-division 10 3.298.3–4 ‘Chapter (bāb) (missing in MS L): the speech (qawl ) on the classes (missing in MS L) of flies’.36 3.298.5–7 ‘In the name of God. God alone grants success.37 Power and

78 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s strength come from God alone. May God bless and give peace unto our lord Muªammad, the illiterate prophet, his family and his companions, and unto his pious, good and choice descendants’. [Prayer for guidance of the author.]38 3.298.8 ‘Reader (qāriʾ), you who seek to understand, and listener, you who sit attentively (MS Sh and ˝: muta‚affiª, in careful thought), in silence, I advise you never to despise anything on account of the smallness of its body or to underestimate its worth on account of its paltry value’. [Authorial guidance.]39 3.299.9–12 ‘These features (i.e. successful and erroneous speculation) constitute the totality of what is gathered together (jummāʿ) in this chapter (bāb), apart from such aspects of the topic (bāb) of inability (ʿajz) and deficiency (naq‚) in speculation which we have not recorded. This is because the subject of that which cannot be comprehended as a result of the deficiency of our created form is a topic (bāb) in its own right. We have recorded just the topic (bāb) of error and correctness, of shortcomings and perfect judgements’. [Cross-reference and authorial justification: the extent of this prefatory and cross-referential material suggests that the section on flies represents the beginning of a major section, if not actually a new volume.] 3.380.5 ‘Now the discourse (qawl ) has brought us back to the discussion of flies’. [‘Reversion’ topos.] Sub-division 11 3.409.9–10 ‘Chapter (bāb): the speech on crows’. 3.409.11–12 ‘Lord God, make us avoid over-reaching ourselves (takalluf ), protect us from error (kha†aʾ), defend us against arrogance (ʿujb) about what we are capable of and over confidence (thiqa) in our abilities, and place us among the good-doers’. [Prayer for guidance of the author: see 4.107.5–6, for a similar prayer.] 3.410.1–4 ‘We will record, after the name of God, comprehensive statements (jumal al-qawl ) on crows, and provide information about them and about the uncustomary indications of God’s wisdom they have been endowed with, and the amazing homing abilities they have been given. Now, we have recorded previously what the Arabs say about the close company (munādama) the crow keeps with the rooster and its friendship with it . . .’.

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 79 [Authorial guidance and cross-reference: see 4.461.2–5.] Sub-division 12 3.481.1–2 ‘Chapter (bāb) on those who have been vituperated and remembered for being ill-omened’. Sub-division 13 3.491.3–4 ‘Chapter (bāb): poetry in praise of the pious and the legal scholars (fuqahāʾ)’. Sub-division 14 3.496.3–4 ‘Chapter (bāb): on black-beetles and dung-beetles’. (MS L: ‘Speech concerning despised terrestrial vermin and creepy-crawlies’.) 3.496.5–8 ‘We will speak on these despised terrestrial vermin and creepycrawlies and on the males among the small birds and flying insects . . . The first of their marvels which we will mention is the friendship between dungbeetles and scorpions and the friendship between snakes and geckoes’. [Authorial guidance.] 3.510.1–5 ‘The vituperation, eulogy and vaunting contest between the darkskinned and the pale-skinned is collected together (majmūʿ).40 We have already brought forward at the beginning (‚adr) of this book (kitāb) a comprehensive statement on black-beetles and other classes of insects deemed unclean and ignoble, in the chapter (bāb) on rotten and pleasant odours, so we are disinclined to repeat it in this location (maw∂iʿ)’. (MS Sh and ˝: ‘And God, Praised be He, the Exalted, knows what is correct’.) [We have here three types of cross-reference: to another work, also listed at 1.4.10–11; cross-reference to the beginning of a kitāb, by which sub-division 14, 3.496.3–4, seems to be intended; and a reference to a chapter which is no longer extant or which formed part of another, independent work which also contained the chapter on black-beetles and dung-beetles given here. This latter explanation is prompted by the use of kitāb with the meaning of ‘book’ it tends to be given elsewhere in The Book of Living.] Sub-division 15 3.510.6–7 ‘Chapter (bāb): the speech (qawl ) on the hoopoe’. 3.519.3–4 ‘We have already included in the interstices (ta∂āʿīf ) of this book a number of poetic excerpts concerning reports about the hoopoe’. (This is missing in MS L.) [Cross-reference: by kitāb, The Book of Living as a whole seems to be intended.]

80 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s Sub-division 16 3.519.5–6 ‘Chapter (bāb): the speech on the Egyptian vulture’. Sub-division 17 3.526.10–11 ‘The speech on the bat. The first section is that the bat is a flying creature . . .’. (Scribal?) envoi 3.539.5–7 ‘The third codex (mu‚ªaf ) of The Book of Living is complete. The fourth codex is next: On Ants’.41 The analysis of Volume Three reveals a number of textual markers which indicate that considerable attention has been paid to the presentation of the materials in book form. Cross-references, authorial directions and justifications proliferate. This volume contains seventeen sub-divisions. A number seem to be self-contained, in the sense that they are brought to a close with a textual marker ( e.g. as is the case with sub-division 15 on the hoopoe). The overwhelming majority of sub-divisions, however, are open-ended, suggesting perhaps that the author may have wanted to return to them at a later stage when he had amassed more relevant proof texts, items of data or additional notices (e.g. sub-divisions 1–5). The section on black-beetles, sub-division 14, raises some interesting queries about its insertion in The Book of Living, while the introduction to sub-division 10 on flies may present a trace of an earlier articulation of its components. What is remarkable about Volume Three, however, is its symmetry. The sequence of topics discussed is regularly arranged and divided into chapter headings and sub-divisions. Thus the treatment of flies (10), crows (11), beetles (14), hoopoes (15), vultures (16) and bats (17) correspond with subdivisions while the section on the pigeon (from 3.144.7–298.2) receives three sub-divisions (6–9), each of which introduces new, distinct features relating to pigeons. Volume Four Incipit 4.5.1–2 ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’ [Basmala]. ‘May God bless and cherish our lord Muªammad, his family and his companions [Prayer]’.

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 81 4.5.3 ‘We will begin in this volume (juzʾ), through God’s help and assistance, with the speech on both small and large ants taken as a group (jumla) in accordance with the condition which we set at the end of the third volume (juzʾ)’ (MSS Sh and H) (˝: codex (mu‚ªaf )). [Authorial guidance and cross-reference bridging two parts of the work.] 4.5.4–5 ‘Power and strength come from God the Almighty On High alone’. [Prayer for guidance of the author.] 4.36.5–7 ‘They say that ants are killed by pouring tar (qa†irān)42 and yellow sulphur (kibrīt) and by inserting barley in the openings of their nests. We have tried this and found it to be false. It has finished (intahā)’. [Is the verb intahā a direction for the reader, an instruction to a copyist or a scribal indication of the end of a session of dictation, or all three?] Sub-division 1 4.36.8–10 ‘Chapter (bāb): comprehensive speech (jumlat al-qawl ) on monkeys and pigs’. 4.60.10–11 ‘We have set out in detail (fa‚‚alnā) some of this subject in this chapter (bāb). Now the discourse (qawl ) has brought us back to our place (maw∂iʿ) in the discussion (dhikr) of the pig’. [Cross-reference and ‘reversion’ topos.] Sub-division 2 4.107.4 ‘The speech (qawl ) on snakes’. 4.107.5–6 ‘Lord God, make us avoid over-reaching ourselves (takalluf ), protect us from prattling (kha†al ), defend us against arrogance (ʿujb) about what comes from us and over confidence (thiqa) in our abilities, and place us among the good-doers’. [Prayer for guidance of the author: a comparison with the prayers at the Incipit of Óayawān 3.409.11–12 and 6.5.5, suggests that the presence of this prayer renders this sub-division tantamount to the beginning of a major new section, if not a new volume.] 4.232.4–5 ‘The sounds produced by the creatures which crawl on the ground such as the lizard, the monitor lizard, the snake, the hedgehog and their like’. Sub-division 3 4.233.9–10 ‘Chapter (bāb) containing the comparison struck between the cunning man, the unassailable tribe and the snake’.

82 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s Sub-division 4 4.310.1 ‘Comprehensive statement (jumlat al-qawl ) on the male ostrich’. 4.320.1–2: ‘This is a chapter (bāb) containing the wonders of the male ostrich’. Sub-division 5 4.320.3–4 ‘Another chapter (bāb ākhar). In my opinion this is even more wondrous than the first’. Sub-division 6 4.335.8 ‘The discourse on nouns the derivation of which is from “eggs”’.43 Sub-division 7 4.461.1 ‘The speech (qawl ) on fires and their divisions into types’. 4.461.2–5 ‘We will record comprehensive statements (jumal min al-qawl) on fires, their classes and their places; and which of them are associated with the non-Arabs, which of them are associated with the Arabs. We will provide information about the fires which feature in religious and non-religious ceremonials (diyānāt), about those who venerate them and those who denigrate them, and those who go so far in venerating them that they worship them. And we will provide information about the places which are venerated on account of fire’. [Authorial guidance.] Sub-division 8 4.463.7–8 ‘Another chapter (bāb)’.44 (Scribal?) envoi 4.492.9–11 ‘The fourth codex (mu‚ªaf ) of The Book of Living is complete and the fifth codex will be next, if God the Exalted wills. Its beginning is: We will begin in this volume (juzʾ) by completing the speech (qawl ) on the fires of the Non-Arabs and the Arabs, the fires used in religious ceremonial (diyāna) and the extent to which they are valued’. This volume indicates that a certain attention has been paid to the paratextual markers which open and close its chapters and discourses. Unlike Volume Three, chapter divisions do not generally coincide with al-JāªiÕ’s treatment of animals or topics. The treatment of the ostrich, for example, as was the case with the treatment of pigeons in Volume Three, spans three subdivisions. Some of the authorial directions, such as that at 4.461.2–5, are well

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 83 developed. The prayer which opens the disquisition on snakes at 4.107.5–6 might conceivably be the textual survival of an earlier articulation. It might point to a previous division of this volume into two parts or simply indicate that at one point the disquisition on snakes was an independent work (my preferred option). The use of the verb intahā at 4.36.7 might conceivably be a verbal survival from the termination of a session of dictation, though other explanations (in terms of the processes of transmitting and copying the work over the centuries) can be countenanced. Volume Five Incipit 5.5.1–2 ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’ [Basmala]. ‘May God bless and give peace unto our lord Muªammad, his family and his companions’. (MSS H and Sh: ‘The beginning of the fifth codex (mu‚ªaf ) of The Book of Living: the discourse (kalām) concerning the remaining treatment of fires’.) (MS Sh: ‘In Him is my trust’.) [Prayer.] 5.5.3 ‘In this volume (juzʾ), we will begin by completing the speech on the fires of the Arabs and non-Arabs and the fires used in religious ceremonial (diyāna) . . .’. [Authorial guidance and cross-reference to another volume of the treatise.] Sub-division 1 5.25.4–5 ‘Another chapter (bāb)’.45 Sub-division 2 5.57.1 ‘Comprehensive speech (jumlat al-qawl) concerning opposites, difference (khilāf ) and agreement (wifāq)’.46 Sub-division 3 5.58.13 ‘Another chapter (bāb)’. Sub-division 4 5.89.1–2 ‘We will deliver, with God’s assistance and aid, a comprehensive speech on water. Then we will move on to record the speech on fire with which we began’. [Authorial guidance, proleptic cross-reference and proleptic ‘reversion’ topos.]

84 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s 5.119.10 ‘Now the discourse has brought us back to the discussion of fire’. [‘Reversion’ topos.] Sub-division 5 5.157.1–2 ‘Chapter (bāb): poetry in praise of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, riff-raff and unimportant people’. Sub-division 6 5.161.4–5 ‘Chapter (bāb): those who intended praise but vituperated instead’. Sub-division 7 5.190.3–4 ‘Chapter (bāb) on the discussion of desires’. (All other MSS apart from MS L: ‘What has come down to us concerning the censure of wishes’.) 5.203.1 ‘The classes (ajnās) of birds which frequent human dwellings’. Sub-division 8 5.286.1–3 ‘Another chapter (bāb), on the superiority of the cat to all other types of living creatures apart from man’. Sub-division 9 5.303.7–8 ‘Another chapter (bāb): the claims they make on behalf of the mouse’. Sub-division 10 5.353.4 ‘The speech on the scorpion’. (This is missing in MS L.) 5.353.5–6 ‘We will record the conclusion of the speech on the scorpion, since we have recorded some details about it in the chapter of the mouse’. [Authorial justification and cross-reference.] Sub-division 11 5.368.6–9 ‘Chapter (bāb): the speech on lice and nits (‚uʾāb). We will speak on lice and nits, for as long as we have the power of speech (tamkīnan min al-qawl), if God the Exalted wills’. (MS L: ‘in the most concise manner of which we are capable’.) [Authorial guidance: 5.368.8 is possibly an allusion to the illness to which al-JāªiÕ refers at Óayawān 4.208.5 (al-ʿilla al-shadīda) and at Bighāl 215.8– 16 as hindering his accomplishment of his full design in the treatise. I take it to be a further indication that he was dictating the material.] Sub-division 12 5.384.4–6 ‘Chapter (bāb): the flea is black . . .’.

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 85 Sub-division 13 5.401.4–5 ‘Chapter (bāb) (MS L: ‘the classes of mosquitoes’ (baʿū∂)): on gnats (baqq), midges (jirjis), sharrān flies, moths and adhā flies’. Sub-division 14 5.409.3–4 ‘Chapter (bāb) on the spider’. Sub-division 15 5.416.12 ‘Comprehensive speech (jumlat al-qawl ) on bees’ (MS L). (MS H and ˝: ‘A chapter (bāb) on bees’; MS Sh: ‘A chapter’.) Sub-division 16 5.431.6–7 ‘Chapter (bāb): it is said, “His hearing is keener than a cameltick’s” . . .’. Sub-division 17 5.444.8–9 ‘Chapter (bāb) on the bustard’. 5.444.10 ‘We will speak concisely (qawl mūjiz) on the bustard, if God the Exalted wills’. [Authorial guidance.] Sub-division 18 5.455.2 ‘The speech (qawl ) on the sheep and the goat’. Sub-division 19 5.476.4–5 ‘Chapter (bāb) on goats’. (This latter phrase is missing in MS L.) (MS Sh: ‘A chapter on the names of goats, their attributes, benefits and actions’.) Sub-division 20 5.524.8–10 ‘May God teach you useful knowledge, may He make you hearken unto your soul and give you refuge from pride, may He cause you to recognise the garb of piety and make you one of those who gain His rewards. Know, may God the Exalted have mercy on you (raªima-ka Allāh) . . .’. [Prayer for guidance of the Addressee.] Sub-division 21 5.535.7 ‘Discussion of the information concerning frogs which has come down to us in the traditions (āthār)’. Sub-division 22 5.542.1 ‘The speech (qawl) on locusts’. (MSS L and Sh only.)

86 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s 5.542.2 In the name of God, attend to me with your mind, and free your heart for what I shall direct at you . . .’. [Apostrophe of the Addressee.] Sub-division 23 5.573.7 ‘The Arabs say, “Truer than a sand-grouse”.’ [The structure is similar to sub-division 16 above: the word bāb may have been omitted.] Sub-division 24 5.587.2 ‘Record (dhikr) of witticisms, tales (aªādīth), poems and statements (kalām) with which this volume (juzʾ) will be sealed’. (All other MSS apart from MS L: ‘Record (dhikr) of witticisms from traditions, poems and statements’.) (˝: ‘with which we will complete this volume’.) (MSS Sh and H: ‘with which this volume will be completed.) (Scribal?) envoi 5.604.11–12 ‘The fifth codex (mu‚ªaf ) is complete, with praise to God and His help. The sixth codex of The Book of Living follows it’ (MS Sh). (˝: ‘The fifth volume of The Book of Living has finished and the sixth volume is next. It begins: a chapter’.) (MSS L and H have no division between Volumes Five and Six.) This is the longest volume of the work, as is reflected in its twenty-four subdivisions. Its arrangement is of the simplest and the most open-ended kind. Often we encounter a desultory and laconic notice such as ‘chapter’ (as in sub-divisions §§5, 6 and 7) or ‘another chapter’ (as in §§1, 3, 8 and 9) or simply ‘the speech’ (§§10, 18, 20 and 22) or even ‘comprehensive speech’ (as in §§2 and 15). There are some textual markers of authorial guidance (e.g. sub-divisions 4 and 10) and only one cross-reference, in the Incipit. Here al-JāªiÕ’s method of juxtaposing notebooks or earlier lecture notes or monographs on relevant topics and animals is at its most obvious. As is the case in Volume Three, Volume Five is notable for its symmetry, by which I mean the evident coincidence of advertisement of a sub-division and ­treatment of a topic.

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 87 Volume Six Incipit 6.5.1 ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’ [Basmala] (˝). (MS Sh: The beginning of the sixth codex of The Book of Living.) 6.5.2 ‘Chapter (bāb)’ (˝). 6.5.3–4 ‘In the name of God, praise be to God. Power and strength come from God alone. May God bless and give peace unto our lord Muªammad, his family and his companions. (L: ‘May God bless the Apostle of God’.) [Prayer.] 6.5.5 ‘Lord God, make us avoid excessive speech (fu∂ūl al-qawl) and over-confidence (thiqa) in our abilities. Do not make us one of those who ­over-reach themselves (al-mutakallifīn)’. [Prayer for guidance (of the author).] 6.5.6–19.8 [Table of contents, translated on pp. 65–8.] 6.38.2–4 ‘When it came to the speech (qawl) on the mountain goats, the chamois (thaytal ), the ibex (ayyil ) and their likes, we did not have to hand enough material to devote a separate chapter (bāb mubawwab) to their account. But we will mention them in the locations (mawā∂iʿ) where they should be mentioned in the interstices (ta∂āʿīf ) of this book (kitāb), if God the Exalted wills’. [Authorial justification in the form of guidance and cross-reference.] Sub-division 1 6.38.6–39.5 ‘I will begin, after the name of God the Exalted, with the speech on lizards, although I am critical of this book taken as a whole (fī al-jumla), because the poetical examples relating to every subject have been scattered about and not gathered together. If I had been able to bring them together, that would have been more effective in establishing their testimony (tazkiyat al-shāhid ), more illuminating of my proof, and more satisfying and more beneficial for the soul, because it is the most praiseworthy and pleasing arrangement (ra‚f ). That is because the book as a whole (jumlat al-kitāb) would be in a form which comprised all the decisive arguments and included all those proofs, even if part of it were to be found in the place of another

88 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s part, and something which now comes first were to come last, and something which now comes last were to come first’. [Authorial justification.]47 Sub-division 2 6.54.1 ‘Comprehensive statement (jumlat al-qawl) on the lizard’s share of uncustomary wonders’. Sub-division 3 6.77.1 ‘The speech (qawl ) on those who find lizard flesh delicious and those who detest it’. Sub-division 4 6.115.6 ‘The speech (qawl ) on the age and the lifespan of the lizard’. Sub-division 5 6.145.1 ‘The names of the games of the Arabs’. Sub-division 6 6.147.11 ‘Exegesis (tafsīr) of the ode of al-Bahrānī’. [This is an extended commentary of a poem which al-JāªiÕ has cited earlier, at 6.80.3–84.6.] Sub-division 7 6.172.1–4 ‘Chapter (bāb): the Arabs and the poets who claimed that they could see ghouls and hear the chanting of the jinn . . .’. Sub-division 8 6.264.9 ‘Serious chapter on the subject (amr) of jinn’. 6.264.10–15 ‘May God the Exalted keep you! This does not belong to the chapter we have just been concerned with, which has been relaxing and restorative. So we will declaim a chapter on the account of jinn, in order that you may gain the greatest benefit possible in your religion. It is serious throughout. The first discourse (kalām) and the mention of creepy-crawlies which followed it contained no seriousness which did not have a mixture of levity, while every genuine (‚aªīª) discourse it contained was accompanied by a tale of make-believe (khurāfa), because this is how this topic (bāb) turns out’. [Authorial justification and cross-reference.] 6.281.4 ‘Now the discourse has brought us back to the exegesis of the ode of al-Bahrānī’. [‘Reversion’ topos.]

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 89 Sub-division 9 6.351.1 ‘We will speak on the hare with the information which we have to hand, if God wills’. [Authorial guidance.] 6.351.2 ‘The speech (qawl ) on hares’ (MS Sh only). Sub-division 10 6.379.13 ‘Chapter (bāb)’. Sub-division 11 6.380.10 ‘Poems in which there are mixtures of predators, wild animals and creepy-crawlies’. Sub-division 12 6.421.4–5 ‘Chapter (bāb): those who took an oath in their zeal to defend the honour of a slaughtered man and slaked their thirst in their quest for revenge’. Sub-division 13 6.429.9–10 ‘Chapter (bāb) on cowardice and the terror of the coward’. 6.443.2–3 ‘This ode contains only that which is well-known (?), which we have mentioned in another section (maw∂iʿ) of this volume (juzʾ) in particular’. [Cross-reference.] 6.443.5–6 ‘We will discuss what material is available to us in the chapter on the hyena, the hedgehog, the tick (ªurqū‚), the monitor lizard and their likes, if God the Exalted wills’. [Authorial guidance; for the format, see 6.351.1 and 5.573.7 (possible omission of ‘bāb’).] Sub-division 14 6.482.9–10 ‘Chapter (bāb): witticisms, poems and tales (aªādīth)’. Sub-division 15 6.483.6–7 ‘Chapter (bāb): the speech (qawl) on the lame’. 6.488.5 ‘Tales concerning the wonders of slaves’. 6.496.4–9 ‘We will speak on the meteors and how the jinn tried to listen to God surreptitiously. We have avoided collecting this in one place simply because it would be too long for the reader (qāriʾ). If he has read The Superiority of Man to the Jinn and the decisive argument against those who deny the existence of jinn, he will not find this present discussion too

90 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s onerous, because then he can make straight for it (i.e. The Superiority) because it is focused exclusively on this topic (bāb). And if we included it all in the chapter of the speech on small wild animals and carnivores, insects, vermin and creepy-crawlies, upon beginning to read it, he will deem everything short far too long, since it belong to another theme (maʿnā)’. [Cross-reference to 6.264.9–281.2 and authorial justification; for the treatise referred to see Óayawān 1.6.12–15: Part 3, §8, pp. 114 and 133–5.] (Scribal?) envoi 6.512.3–4 ‘The sixth codex (mu‚ªaf ) of The Book of Living is finished. Praise be to God for His grace. The beginning of the seventh codex follows: The speech on the senses of the classes of living things’ (MS Sh). (˝: ‘The sixth volume (juzʾ) of The Book of Living is complete. Next is the seventh volume, the beginning of which is: The speech on the senses of the classes of living beings’.) Volume Six of the Óayawān contains only one instance (sub-division §9, on the hare) of the basic structure of symmetry between rubric and topic identified in Volumes Three and Five. The topic of the lizard (§§1–6) is of the type used for the longer disquisitions on flies, crows, snakes and elephants. The exegesis of the ode of al-Bahrānī is also of this type and spans most of the core of the volume. The discussion of jinn is divided into two separate sections. The presence of several substantial authorial justifications at 6.38.2–4, 38.6–39.5, 264.10–15 and 496.4–9, in addition to the long overview of the contents of the treatise at 6.5.1–15.13, suggests that the principal theme of the volume is the challenge of the organisation of The Book of Living. These paratexts also imply, of course, that considerable labour has gone into putting these materials into their present format, however unsatisfactory the writer professes to find them. Volume Seven Incipit 7.5.1 ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’ [Basmala]. 7.5.2 ‘The speech (qawl) on the senses of the classes of living things’. 7.5.3–7 ‘Lord God, we seek Your protection from the accursed Satan. We ask You for guidance to Your straight path. May God bless our lord Muªammad

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 91 in particular and His Prophets in general. We seek refuge in God lest the desire (maªabba) to complete this book incite us to join truthfulness with lying, lest we introduce the false into the interstices (ta∂āʿīf ) of the true, and lest we utter what is deceitful too often and seek to strengthen its weakness with pleasing words and to conceal its loathsomeness with delightful assemblage (taʾlīf ) . . .’. [Prayer for guidance of the author.] 7.14.6 ‘Now the discourse has brought us back to providing information about living things, about the respects in which they are superior to one another, those by which they are uniquely characterised, and how they are distinguished’. [‘Reversion’ topos.] Sub-division 1 7.48.3–5 ‘Were it not that we had already mentioned the behaviour (shaʾn) of the hoopoe, the crow and the ant and what the Qurʾān says about them, and the characteristics (khi‚āl ) of knowledge, speech and action which they have, then we would have mentioned them in this location’. [Cross-reference and authorial justification.] 7.48.6 ‘What has come down to us concerning the record (dhikr) of birds’ (MS L only). 7.52.9 ‘The names of flying creatures used as the names applied to stars, signs of the zodiac, horses, people and other things’. Sub-division 2 7.60.1–3 ‘Chapter (bāb): the poetry on the sensory perception (iªsās) of flying creatures and other living things which has come down to us’. 7.63.7–8 ‘Were it not that the explanation (tafsīr) of this had already been given in the chapter of the speech on sparrows included in The Book of Living, then we would have spoken on it’. [Cross-reference and authorial justification.] Sub-division 3 7.63.9–11 ‘Chapter (bāb): discussion (dhikr) of the difference in natures (†abāʾiʿ) of living things and the kinds of behaviour (akhlāq) that occur to them’. 7.65.10–14 ‘The jealous, the irate, the drunkard and the bellicose differ in this regard for a number of reasons (ʿilal) which we have recorded in the

92 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s speech On the Superiority of the Angel to Man and Man to the Jinn. If you wish it, seek it there. Reiteration of long tales (aªādīth) and plentiful discourse (kalām) is the sort of thing which is avoided in audition (samāʿ) and which demeans books’. [Authorial justification and cross-reference; the juxtaposition of books and samāʿ, the teaching method in which a student ‘audits’ a text recited by a teacher, is possibly a further indication of the conversion into book-form of material collected or delivered in lectures. It implies that the material thus converted was previously intended for use in the study circle.] Sub-division 4 7.65.15–17 ‘Chapter (bāb): the inferences which can be drawn from the behaviour (shaʾn) of living things about God’s benign beneficence, His consummate governance and that matters (umūr) are appropriately weighed (mawzūna) and determined (muqaddara)’. Sub-division 5 7.71.11 ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’ [Basmala]. 7.71.12–13 ‘Praise be to God. Strength and power come from God alone. May God bless our lord Muªammad in particular and His Prophets in general’. 7.71.13–14 ‘We ask Him for aid and inviolability (ʿi‚ma), and we seek refuge in Him from every occasion (sabab) which leads us to avoid obedience and incites us to disobedience, for He is near, He answers our prayers and brings about whatever He intends’. [Prayer for guidance of the author.] 7.71.15–72.11 ‘We have delivered in the beginning of this volume (juzʾ), the seventh volume, some of the speech concerning the senses which have been placed by God in all classes of living things, concerning the ways of understanding which are imprinted naturally in them and the wonders of how they have been constituted to defend themselves . . .. However, it is scattered hither and thither and not collected, divided into pieces and not strung together (manÕūm)’. [Cross-reference and authorial justification in the form of the ‘dispersal’ topos.] 7.145.4–5 ‘It is for this reason that we have put it (the horse) before all the herbivores and carnivores – we put it first as God has put it first.

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 93 [Authorial justification in the form of guidance.] 7.149.1 ‘A selection of paraenetic poems’. 7.151.8 ‘Verses by some blind poets’. Sub-division 6 7.152.5–6 ‘Chapter (bāb) on need (ªāja)’. Sub-division 7 7.153.5 ‘Chapter (bāb) on the promise, its fulfilment and breaking it’. 7.158.1 ‘Some poems by Arabs’. 7.162.4–6 ‘I am writing down for you snippets (†araf ) of every topic (bāb), because leading you from topic (or chapter) to topic (or chapter) (bāb) will preserve your energy (nashā†) for longer. If I had written them down in their entirety, it would of course have been more complete and more noble but I fear verbosity (ta†wīl ) and you are competent enough to be able to comprehend the detail (taf‚īl ) by means of the summary (jumla), the ending by means of the beginning’. [Authorial justification in the form of guidance to the Addressee.] Sub-division 8 7.239.10 ‘Chapter on hoofed animals (Õulf )’. (Scribal?) envoi 7.263.7–10 ‘The seventh codex (mu‚ªaf ) of The Book of Living is complete, and with its completion the book (kitāb) is complete (MS Sh: through the assistance of the King who Lavishes gifts). Praise be to God for the beauty of the seal. May God bless our lord Muªammad, his family and his noble companions’. (MS L: ‘The seventh volume (juzʾ) of The Book of Living is complete with praise to God for His grace. This is the end of the book (kitāb)’.) Volume Seven is clearly the shortest of the seven volumes. That it was intended as the last volume of the treatise is attested by 7.5.5 (itmām hadhā al-kitāb). It is probably correct to interpret the statement at the start of The Book of Mules (see above, p. 62) to the effect that in the course of dictation, the treatise on mules would have been included as part of the last chapter (on ungulates) of The Book of Living. The extent of the cross-references suggests that while Volume Seven is unfinished, it had at some stage been readied for wider dissemination. Thus 7.65.14 suggests that the source material on

94 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s which al-JāªiÕ drew for this part of his treatise at least was derived from and/ or designed for the style of instruction known as ‘audition’ and then later prepared for inclusion as part of the treatise. There are also several indications of a new topic or treatment without any of these explanatory accompaniments: see, for example, Óayawān 2.70.3 or 4.232.4–5. Sometimes, two of these terms are combined: see, for example, 1.106.3–4, bāb and dhikr. Of course, these words are, like the word kitāb, manifestly flexible terms which vary as much in emphasis as in meaning and in the previous survey my insistent subsuming of them under the rubric ‘sub-division’ is a grave distortion. I do think, however, that this distortion helps to uncover some patterns in the articulation of the work and so I have persisted with it. In some parts of the treatise, especially in Volumes Three and Five, there is often discernible a regular consistency and coincidence between topic and sub-division, though equally often, longer topics such as the disquisitions on flies (3.298.4), crows (3.409.9), snakes (4.107.4) or the elephant (7.71.7) support a number of sub-divisions. Interestingly, each of these cases (at 3.298.5–7, 3.409.11–12, 4.107.5–6 and 7.71.10–14, respectively) is accompanied by a prayer for authorial guidance, a standard technique for signalling the beginning of a new work. Thus the form of the treatment of these topics may be a residue of an earlier, perhaps separate or independent, exposition, say in the form of lecture-notes or as material written down and collected in one of al-JāªiÕ’s jotters or files, or as an independent monograph on the creature or topic in question, or even a new session of dictation. There are, of course, other schemes of organisation present in the work such as the debates which are conducted between the proponents of the various animals ( e.g. see 7.145.7, ‘the Proponents of the Hippopotamus’). The remarkable ‘Exegesis (tafsīr) of the ode of al-Bahrānī’ (6.147.11) requires a study in its own right. We might be tempted to see in the outburst at Óayawān 6.38.6, where the author criticises the organisation of his work (translated on pp. 87–8), an expression of frustration and impatience by the empirical author, Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baªr, though such a supposition is completely without warrant. The task of the ideal writer al-JāªiÕ, if I can force such a distinction in terms of his nomenclature, is to catalogue God’s creation. Such a task is

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 95 neither easy nor simple, nor is it lightly undertaken. In the believer’s endeavour to be a faithful reader of God’s system of signs, language and human strategies of organisation are pushed to the very limit of comprehensibility and comprehensiveness. These human schemes of articulation and organisation are intractable, an imperfect but important aspect of giving voice to the semiology of creation. But as we learn from The Cave, God’s plan and his creation constantly defeat human comprehension. There is, therefore, evidence to suggest that at least some of the text as we have it today appears, inconsistently and to varying degrees, to have been readied for general dissemination in book form. It is equally, however, a messy and uneven text, one which seems to inhabit both the world of the disseminated book and the study circle. Several of its sections may have existed previously as monographs or materials belonging to the lecture circuit. C. Ibn al-Nadīm’s Version of the Text Let us return to Ibn al-Nadīm’s entry on The Book of Living, for he quotes the opening and closing phrases of each of the seven volumes:48 The arrangement (tartīb) of the volumes (ajzāʾ) of the book (kitāb): The beginning of volume one: ‘May God keep you clear of uncertainty (shubha) and free from perplexity (ªayra)! May He establish a kinship (nasab) between you and knowledge (maʿrifa)’ [Óayawān 1.3.1]. The end is a statement by one of the Kharijites: ‘He who delivers a slashing thrust. The vein opened by it is like the decorated border of a striped ­garment’ [Óayawān 1.323.7].49 The beginning of volume two: ‘Abū al-YaqÕān spoke on something similar to this etymology’ [Óayawān 1.323.8]. The end: ‘By God, I do not know where I tossed it’, part of the story about Sahl b. Hārūn [Óayawān 2.375.8–9].50 The beginning of volume three: ‘We will begin, by the grace of God alone, with the discussion of pigeons and what God has endowed them with . . .’ [Óayawān 3.5.1–3, the text of MS Sh]. The end: ‘Thereby they (i.e. bats) do a laudable deed, successful, enormously beneficial, with obvious effects’ [Óayawān 3.539.3].51

96 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n pra is e o f b o o k s The beginning of volume four: ‘The speech on both small and large ants’ [Óayawān 4.5.3]. The end: ‘Kardabūs al-Māzī52 said’ [Óayawān 4.492.6]. The beginning of volume five: ‘We will begin, in God’s name, by completing the speech on the fires of the Arabs and non-Arabs’ [Óayawān 5.5.3]. The end: ‘When we arrived, we alighted by a lush meadow, amply watered by the rains’ [Óayawān 5.604.10]. The beginning of volume six: ‘We have spoken about scripts (khu†ū†) and their advantages, about the universality of their usefulness’ [Óayawān 6.5.6]. The end: ‘Abū al-Muthannā spoke volubly in Iraq and taught53 his people to eat creamy date pudding (khabī‚)’ [Óayawān 6.510.5].54 The beginning of volume seven: ‘The senses of the «classes of» living things. Lord God we seek Your protection from the accursed Satan’ [Óayawān 7.5.2]. The end: ‘Dressed in coats of iron chain-mail, «like a troop of camels infected with the mange, bunched together, and smeared with piss paste by a careless owner»’ [Óayawān 7.263.6].

In this inventory of opening and closing lines of the treatise, Volume One is signalled as ending at Óayawān 1.323.7 and Volume Two as beginning at 1.323.8, that is some sixty-six pages before the end of the version extant in Hārūn’s edition.55 This division is preserved in MS L. Of the opening and closing lines of the other volumes, only Volume Six reveals anything even approximating a similar discrepancy, finishing at Óayawān 6.510.5, two pages before the end of the edition, though this is not nearly as discrepant as the division which obtains for Volume One. And the opening of Volume Three of Ibn al-Nadīm’s copy is that of MS Sh. But it is reasonable to conclude that Ibn al-Nadīm’s copy of the text was, for Volumes Three to Seven, basically that which we have today, while for Volumes One and Two, his copy had a different partitioning extant in one strand of the manuscript tradition. D. Sequence of Topics There are many more topics in The Book of Living than simply a catalogue of animals. But for present purposes, the fact that a simplified, summary

t h e art i culati on of the book of living  | 97 overview of the sequence of subjects and animals discussed in each part can be drawn up will help highlight a major facet of how al-JāªiÕ has organised his material. (How these topics coincide, diverge and intersect with the other taxonomies which al-JāªiÕ rehearses in the treatise is a separate issue.) Volume One: ‘Introduction’ (1.3.1); eunuchs and cross-breeds (1.106.3); the debate between the Proponent of the Dog and the Proponent of the Rooster (1.190.12). Volume Two: The debate between the Proponent of the Dog and the Proponent of the Rooster (2.5.1). Volume Three: Pigeons (3.5.3), flies (3.298.3), crows (3.409.9), beetles (3.496.3), hoopoes (3.510.6), vultures (3.519.5) and bats (3.526.10). Volume Four: Ants (4.5.1), monkeys and pigs (4.36.8), snakes (4.107.4), ostriches (4.310.1) and fire (4.461.1). Volume Five: Fire (5.5.1), cats (5.286.1), mice (5.303.7), scorpions (5.353.4), lice (5.368.6), fleas (5.384.5), midges (5.401.4), spiders (5.409.3), bees (5.416.12), ticks (5.431.7), bustards (5.444.9), sheep (5.455.2), goats (5.476.5), frogs (5.524.7), locusts (5.542.1) and sand-grouse (5.573.7). Volume Six: Lizards (6.38.6), al-Bahrānī’s ode (6.147.11), jinn (6.264.9), hares (6.351.1), hyenas, hedgehogs, chameleons and monitor lizards (6.443.5), the lame (6.483.7) and the jinn (6.496.4). Volume Seven: Animal sensory perception and nature (7.5.2), elephants (7.71.7) and ungulates (7.239.10). In other words, amid the hurly-burly of al-JāªiÕ’s pronouncements, arguments and advice, what I think we can discern, according to this simplified schematisation of it here, is a treatise organised at a very basic level into a‚nāf, kinds or types of subjects: that is, into themes. This is the meaning of ‚inf in the Democratean octuplet of book composition Óayawān (1.101.18 and 1.102.2–3) discussed later in the present book (Chapter 5.4, pp. 376–9).56 In terms of the organisation of its themes, al-JāªiÕ’s Book of Living belongs to that class of compositions known as mu‚annafāt which began to emerge from the middle of the second to the middle of the third centuries.

2.5 Analogues?

I

am sure many readers will object to my butchery of al-JāªiÕ’s treatise. I am not too happy about it myself. After all, one of the principal pleasures of reading this work is both the surprise bought on by a perpetual encounter with the unexpected and its incessant frustration of expectation. Perhaps, though, few of my readers will disagree with me when I repeat that this treatise is a messy text. Is this merely what we have come to recognise as the gesture of orality so fundamental to third-century Arabic compositions? Is this simply what books looked like in the early stages of the Iraqi book trade? Is it because, as the largest and most ambitious treatise to have survived from the first two and a half centuries of Islam, it ‘taxed available forms of expression’ (to use Lowry’s characterisation of al-Shāfiʿī’s Risāla) and stretched the author’s abilities and the available technologies to the very limit? Or is it simply that the work could not be finished – be it because of al-JāªiÕ’s illness or because God’s creation can never be exhaustively and properly inventoried? Of course, a ‘yes’ to any one of these questions does not preclude a ‘yes’ to any or even all of the others. A. Ta‚nīf

In its articulation into a‚nāf, I have suggested that The Book of Living is a member of those works referred to as mu‚annafāt. Ta‚nīf was a way of systematically organising material by subject (‚inf ). The method of publishing mu‚annafāt remained traditional, through the usual formats of the Islamic scholarly and pedagogical tradition. These works were audited (samāʿ) or recited by their composers, or read back to them by their students (qirāʾa) or were dictated in lectures (imlāʾ). They existed and flourished in the study circle.57 This style of organisation permitted the construction of some major 98

a na log ues? | 99 second-century compilations which have survived as quotations in later works. A similar tendency towards the compilation of mu‚annafāt works is discernible in the disciplines of grammar, lexicography, Qurʾanic exegesis, and Óadīth scholarship. So in a real sense, it was the only large-scale compositional format available to al-JāªiÕ for the structure of his totalising treatise. The mu‚annafāt flourished in pedagogical contexts. The second-century ‚ annafāt which have survived are writings designed for and utilised in the mu study circle.58 Of course, we are not accustomed to thinking of al-JāªiÕ as the centre or the eponym of a ‘school’. We presume that he had students and probably also pupils whom he tutored. We occasionally hear that he gave lectures. I think that there is enough evidence in the paratexts I have assembled and the sequence of topics I have highlighted to suggest that he may at least have taught (some of ) this work, even if scholars balk at attributing a ‘school’ to him, an assertion which must for the time being remain provisional. By ‘school’ in the case of al-JāªiÕ, and for the present, I mean the study circle and it is clear that al-JāªiÕ expected his text to be studied as well as read.59 Whilst ta‚nīf can with justice be described as a scholarly phenomenon whose emergence is characteristic of the second century, by the end of the third century it had been given canonical status in the shape of five of the Six Canonical Books of Óadīth, the enduring masterpieces of Islamic scholarship devoted to the sayings and deeds of Prophet Muªammad. Chief among them are the ‘Two Íaªīªs (Sound Compilations)’ of al-JāªiÕ’s contemporaries, al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870) and Muslim (d. 261/875). For all their monumental size, these works were not published as books but were disseminated by means of the lecture system, though few would have been able to listen to them in their entirety. And yet, we can note that Muslim’s compilation gestures towards the published book, in that it has a programmatic introduction which he himself wrote (see Chapter 4.2); and that al-Bukhārī employed a scribe for the purpose of copying his Íaªīª.60 So by this time, the practice of ta‚nīf was being adapted to contemporary developments in the composition and writing of Arabic books, admittedly on a somewhat smaller scale than The Book of Living. Or equally these developments were being applied to the practice of ta‚nīf. Considered from this perspective, therefore, al-JāªiÕ’s Book of Living takes its formal place alongside the canonical compilations of the Óadīth.61

100 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s By aligning al-JāªiÕ’s work in this way with the Óadīth folk, I am of course flying in the face of received scholarly wisdom, classical and modern, and am contradicting the repeated and explicit denunciations which in many works al-JāªiÕ himself directs at the Óadīth folk, whom he often descries as the ‘stuffers’ or ‘padders’ (al-ªashwīya; those who fill their minds with ­unexamined beliefs) or the ‘commonalty’ (al-ʿāmma). B. Risāla By making this identification, I also fail to give due weight to the numerous indications and evidences in the text (and in my survey of its paratexts) that much of The Book of Living was readied for dissemination as a book. I refer to the appeal to the Addressee in his capacity as reader/listener, authorial instructions, cross-referencing, the title given to it by its author, the presence of a guiding principle, and the terminology of the Arabic book with which al-JāªiÕ describes the work. It is also an example of an ‘overtly theoretical’ text, the genesis of which Lowry connects ‘in a fundamental way with the practice of writing books’.62 After all, al-JāªiÕ could not be more explicit than when, at Óayawān 5.156.8, he addresses his patron with the words: Therefore I have written it for you and have delivered (suqtu: literally, ‘herded’) it to you and have anticipated that my recompense will come from you.63

For all its length, then, The Book of Living is informed by epistolography, the tradition and practice of risāla (epistle) writing, with letters exchanged between friends and equals or sent from one individual to a more elevated or powerful patron. It is thus a risāla predicated upon ta‚nīf and is quintessentially typical of the epistles being composed in the circles in and around the state bureaucracy, the elite and the court. We can find many examples in The Book of Living of the sort of stylised use of Arabic that we would normally associate with these compositions and it is characterised by the repeated apostrophe of the Addressee also typical of the third-century epistle. So in these respects, al-JāªiÕ’s Book of Living is best characterised as a ‘scholarly epistle’, on the model of, for example, the Kitāb al-Kharāj (Book of the Land-Tax) by Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb (d. 182/798), or as an epistle-as-book designed to be read in a restricted, elite, perhaps courtly, environment such

analog ues? | 101 as the monographs on lexicography which al-JāªiÕ’s older contemporary Abū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim b. Sallām (d. 224/838) presented as handbooks to the ˝ahirid aristocracy. One of the oldest Arabic paper codices to have survived is Abū ʿUbayd’s Gharīb al-Óadīth, dated to 252/866. His monographs were also, though, perfectly suited to the emergent paper-based book market. So these scholarly epistles were designed to satisfy both audiences: the courtly patron and the emergent book-reading public. We have noticed that such monographs are part of a tradition on which al-JāªiÕ draws so extensively for compiling his entries on individual creatures in The Book of Living.64 We probably owe the continued existence of The Book of Living today to the fact that it was formally transmitted through copying. Ibn al-Nadīm (in the passage translated above, p. 61), mentions the close involvement of al-JāªiÕ’s copyist Abū Yaªyā Zakarīyā b. Yaªyā b. Sulaymān in the disseminated version of the treatise. Presumably, al-JāªiÕ himself was responsible for transmogrifying a personal communication to an aristocratic patron or a rebuttal of an opponent into a book designed for a more extensive audience of readers. Or do we owe it to his copyist, following his author’s instructions? Ibn al-Nadīm’s information can bear both these readings. How can all these apparently contradictory assessments, that The Book of Living is both a ta‚nīf for the study circle, a scholarly epistle for the aristocracy and a disseminated book, be correct? In the course of our encounter with the ‘Introduction’ to the Book of Living, we will have many opportunities to listen to al-JāªiÕ intone the miscegenated nature of the book as artefact, an unusual, perhaps unique, phenomenon that could simultaneously be both one thing and its opposite. In this regard, the work is sited in the interstices of any public–private distinction between the study circle work of ta‚nīf or the dedicated risāla and the disseminated book: it is a book which, as al-JāªiÕ says at 1.10.7–15 (translated in Part 3, §14, pp. 116–17) meets the needs of both the pedagogical tradition of the lecture circuit and the sophisticated scrutinies of the intelligentsia and the elite. There is also ample evidence, including that provided by its paratextual materials which I have mustered, to suggest that the treatise was unfinished. The process of converting it from a collection of aides-memoire or a series of study-circle texts to a book ready for publication was incomplete. At the same time it appears not only to have been dedicated but also donated to a

102 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s dedicatee.65 The dedicatee may, in turn, have repudiated it (see Chapter 4.3, pp. 224–38). So it is both finished (in the sense of having been donated) and unfinished (in the sense of having been incompletely revised, perhaps subsequently to rejection) – The Book of Living is both one thing and its opposite. C. Gramma Let us return briefly to the entry on The Book of Living provided in the Index by Ibn al-Nadīm which I translated on p. 61 and pp. 95–6. This is how I unpick it. In his day, it was known that at least two versions of the treatise had existed. The original was in seven parts, the incipits and explicits of each part of which he quotes (from a copy in his possession?). It was known that this had been dedicated to Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt and was handsomely rewarded (though this does appear to run contrary to the rejection of the book by its Addressee which al-JāªiÕ engages with so strenuously in the ‘Introduction’ to the treatise, unless, as some scholars suggest, we see it as merely a literary device). But there was another version in circulation (one familiar to Ibn alNadim?), a version to which three other treatises had been added. Two of these, The Book of Women and The Book of Mules are genuine works by al-JāªiÕ, copied out by his stationer Abū Yaªyā Zakarīyā b. Sulaymān. The third, The Book of Camels, is recognisably spurious. It is not to be found in the hand of al-JāªiÕ’s stationer (I thus take Ibn al-Nadīm’s silence on this issue as significant) and its style is not even remotely similar to al-JāªiÕ’s. This second version, with its two genuine treatises and one spurious treatise, was, Ibn al-Nadīm implies, put into circulation, either by al-JāªiÕ or by his stationer. The notice implies that Ibn al-Nadīm thought that this extended edition enjoyed al-JāªiÕ’s blessing. We have already noted that al-JāªiÕ’s master-plan for the work was to include them in The Book of Living. Therefore perhaps the resultant version of the treatise which we have today represents one of the many stages in the process of converting the work from scholarly notes to fully fledged book and/or of the incomplete revision of the book in the light of a dedicatee’s critique. It thus also retains its identity as a gramma, a book intended for the study circle. In the third century, the syngramma and the hypomnēma are best thought of as opposite ends of a continuum, along which any given gramma might

analog ues? | 103 be situated. It could incline more to the formal book than the scholar’s jotter or it could exist at the opposite end of the continuum, as loose sheets and leaves used as aides-memoire or for scribbled notes. The gramma may even incorporate formal features of both, as is the case with The Book of the Letter ʿAyn (Kitāb al-ʿAyn) of al-Khalīl b. Aªmad (d. c. 160/776) and al-Layth b. al-MuÕaffar (d. before 200/815) or with The Book (al-Kitāb) of Sībawayhi (d. c. 180/796), which can also be identified as a mu‚annaf. Sībawayhi conceived of The Book as a treatise designed to be read and its core may originally have been an epistle commissioned by a patron. To begin with, it seems to have survived in the exclusive possession of al-Akhfash (al-Awsa†; d. 215/820). So in present terms it existed as a gramma produced in the form of a syngramma.66 The gramma then is both a formal and an informal kind of writing. As possibly the most ambitious work in the Arabic language (apart from the Qurʾān) which we know of from the first three centuries of Islam, The Book of Living represents the then pinnacle of the newly emerging technology of Arabic paper-based book-production and the scholarly advances in teaching, categorising and organising the ʿAbbasid cultural archive. In Schoeler’s terms, The Book of Living is a gramma which functioned as both a hypomnēma and a syngramma. As such, it is a messy book, pregnant with inconsistencies, ambiguities and ambivalences. It is a hybrid of the kind that al-JāªiÕ explores so insightfully in the treatise. It is also, in this respect, typical both of the texts which emerged out of the educational practices and cultivation of the traditional Islamic sciences in the second and third centuries as well as of those which were composed under the impulse of the court. D. Collage We may not be in a position to excavate the editing and dissemination history of The Book of Living as Marinelli and Mayer have done for Freud’s Die Traumdeutung (Interpreting Dreams) or as Robert Darnton has managed so magisterially for Diderot’s Encyclopédie, though there is, I hope, much to be learned about al-JāªiÕ’s book from thinking about it in this manner. At the beginning of my discussion of the treatise in this chapter, I likened The Book of Living to Freud’s Die Traumdeutung. John Forrester has proposed that we think of the ‘book as collage’. In other words, although he

104 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s does not use the terminology, Forrester describes Freud’s central publication as a gramma intended for a study circle and for use within a study circle, one which, although published in a definitive form, underwent eight editions, of which three were major revised editions, from when it first appeared in 1899 until, in the 1930 edition, it was revised by Freud at the age of 74 for the last time. Forrester describes the book as a sort of ‘“central bureau” for collective psychoanalytic work on dreams’ – Freud owed many of the later accretions and expansions to the work of his followers. Freud continued to add to the work until very late in his life. Perhaps Abū ʿUthmān could not bring himself ever to stop adding to The Book of Living?67

3.1 Introducing the ‘Introduction’

A

l-JāªiÕ’s The Book of Living did not meet with the agreement or approval of all of his contemporaries and readers. It was apparently subjected to a damning critique. Therefore the treatise begins with a catalogue of a library – the library of al-JāªiÕ’s books which have been rejected. The catalogue assumes the form of a protracted address of an unnamed individual who has criticised al-JāªiÕ’s books and has rejected the value of the book as a social, intellectual and cultural artefact, condemning it as something which inflicts on ʿAbbasid society more harm than benefit. The address is sustained initially over the first 200 or so pages of the first volume and resurfaces from time to time throughout all seven volumes. This initial encounter between al-JāªiÕ and the Addressee seems to be intended as an introduction to the treatise, though it is not designated anywhere in the extant text as a formal introduction, just as the identity of the Addressee is not revealed. Accordingly, I refer to this passage of some 200 or so pages in scare quotes as the ‘Introduction’. The ‘Introduction’ covers four principal topics: al-JāªiÕ’s defence of his library (Óayawān 1.3–37.8); the praise of books (1.37.9–106.2); a disquisition on eunuchs and geldings (1.106.3–200.4); and conceptualising the benefits of God’s creation as man’s well-being (ma‚laªa) (1.200.4–221.16). The first two topics will occupy most of my attention. The third topic (eunuchs and geldings)1 has already been studied and I offer a complete translation in Part 6 of the fourth topic, al-JāªiÕ’s observations on the benefits of creation.2 What has so unsettled the Addressee about The Book of Living? I propose that we try to understand what the Addressee has criticised al-JāªiÕ for, in order to understand why al-JāªiÕ presents his defence of both his own books and of the ʿAbbasid book in the way in which he does. So in order to present 107

108 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s the praise of books we have to enter closely into the rebuttal of an invective of books. In this way I want to bring out the close connections between the paean of books and the rebuttal of the invective and so to highlight the simplicity of the basic argument and the structures used by al-JāªiÕ in his treatment of the first two topics of the ‘Introduction’. But we can’t understand his presentation of the ʿAbbasid book unless we try to understand why al-JāªiÕ praises books and his books in particular, and what he says he intends with his book, for we will see that he means The Book of Living to save his society. Therefore Parts 4 and 5 seek to explore what it might actually mean to say that a book will save society and why al-JāªiÕ thinks that his Book of Living in particular will be able to accomplish such a thing. The ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living ends when the debate between the Proponent of the Dog and the Proponent of the Rooster begins. It is driven by and hinges upon the invective with which it opens and closes. It is a principal contention of my book that we should set al-JāªiÕ’s arguments, statements and the cases which he presents, advocates and repudiates in as maximal a context as possible. By context here, I mean primarily the treatise itself. The smallest possible context in which the invective can meaningfully be set is the ‘Introduction’ taken as a unit. Therefore I have decided to restrict myself to the ‘Introduction’. It is the principal site where books are praised. Properly, though, Volumes One and Two of The Book of Living are the primary, immediate context for these arguments and would, in their turn, have to be set in the context of the book.3 It is the first section of the ‘Introduction’ which deals specifically with books and therefore I will concentrate on this.4 My translation in this part centres largely on those sections in which the invective figures most prominently or explicitly: Óayawān 1.3.1–16.16; 1.25.1–14; 1.37.9–39.12; 1.49.14–50.4; 102.7–106.2. In Chapter 5.4, I also include a translation of the section which I call the ‘Manual of Composition’ (Óayawān 1.8896.8) and in Part 6, I offer a full translation of the concluding discussion of well-being. At an earlier stage of working on my book, I realised that when I was supposed to be writing a book entitled ‘In Praise of Books’ I was actually obsessed with exploring al-JāªiÕ’s report of the censure of his books. I relished the paradox. It felt somehow so typically JāªiÕian – in order to know

int roduci ng the ‘i ntroductio n ’  | 109 one thing you have to know its opposite; often an account of one thing can only be gained through an account of what it is not. I do not want to neglect praise in favour of censure but I do want to try to do justice to the complex encomium which al-JāªiÕ devotes to the book. Al-JāªiÕ keeps praise and censure in a delicate balance throughout the ‘Introduction’, even though praise certainly preponderates over censure. I know I should aspire to emulate him. I have therefore resorted to a combination of translation and paraphrase as a way of communicating the sections of the ‘Introduction’ where the invective stops and the praise begins. This is an unhappy compromise, I know, but a translation of the whole ‘Introduction’, however desirable, proved impractical. In the translation (Chapter 3.2) I generally begin a new paragraph or subparagraph whenever a variant of the phrase ʿibta-nī, you inveighed against me, occurs. Each of these paragraphs has been given a number, to allow for correspondence between translation and commentary. The Addressee’s attacks on works which seem, insofar as we can judge by their titles, to be devoted to topics which are roughly cognate (e.g. see paragraph §5) are numbered into sub-paragraphs. Typically the commentary (Chapter 3.3) will provide bibliographical information and glosses (and, where appropriate, it will be arranged according to separate sub-paragraphs, if this information is substantial). The Commentary also on occasion provides a short list of items for further reading, generally intended for the non-specialist reader. In the chapter entitled The Argument I then progress to a more general discussion of the argument or the substance of al-JāªiÕ’s text. A key ambition is thus not only to explain what I take al-JāªiÕ to be saying but to demonstrate to his would-be reader how I parse his arguments and understand them to be structured. His train of thought and exploration of a topic can often take a surprising turn, be based upon an unexpected opening or angle, and may not take what we might think is the most direct route. Often the connections and transitions between topics and comments remain implicit or suppressed. Sometimes the conclusions are not voiced. But they do hang together and do so compellingly and coherently and often in a very simple manner, when once we have surrendered ourselves to his premises. Hearing him speak is, I think, like listening to a lecture, sometimes an after-dinner speech, and sometimes a presentation broadcast on radio. I have in my translation tried to

110 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s capture something of the spoken modulations I hear when I read his words. But it is not easy and I know that I have failed more often than I have succeeded. I earnestly hope that a more gifted translator than I may one day be able to do justice to this aspect of his Arabic. I consider Parts 3 and 6 to be the heart of my book. If I am unable to translate al-JāªiÕ with at least a minimum of success and communicate my reading of his ideas in conversation with his words, then this book will fail. Yet I am only too conscious that this part is hardly what one might call ‘reader-friendly’. I would like to suggest that it will in fact be at its friendliest to the reader when she has the Arabic open in front of her and is able to read my English rendering and then my commentary alongside al-JāªiÕ’s Arabic.

3.2 Translation

I

n the Name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful. In Him do I trust. [1] May God keep you clear of uncertainty (shubha)5 and free from perplexity (ªayra)! May He establish a kinship (nasab) between you and knowledge (maʿrifa) and a relationship (sabab) between you and truth! May He make prudence (tathabbut) dear to you, embellish equitableness (in‚āf ) in your eyes, make you savour the sweetness of piety, and allow your heart (qalb) to sense the majesty of the truth! May He place in your breast the coolness of certainty and drive from you the submissiveness of despair! May He give you to understand how in the false (bā†il ) there is baseness and in crass ignorance (jahl) there is meanness! Yet I swear, your actions have merited a more accurate invocation than this, one more indicative of the measure (wazn) of your worth and the state that you have placed your soul in, have branded your honour with and have been content with as a fitting lot (ªaÕÕ) for your religion (dīn) and a meet form (shakl) for your virtue (murūʾa) [1.3.1–10]. [2] Yet it has come to me that you have taken against and attacked Abū Isªāq, that you have censured and spoken ill of Maʿbad, for what transpired between them on the subject of the vices and virtues of the rooster and the enumeration of the benefits and the banes of the dog and for the extent to which they both went in scrutinising this and gathering the appropriate information, in investigating it minutely (tattabuʿ) and setting it in order (naÕm), in weighing (muwāzana) the two animals up and seeking a j­udgement (ªukm) on them [1.3.10–14]. [3.1] Then you inveighed against me for The Treatise on the Stratagems of Thieves and The Treatise on Swindling in Crafts and you inveighed against me for The Treatise on Pleasantries and Rare Witticisms, about which novel anecdotes (nawādir) are spicy and which bland, and on which, being bland, 111

112 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s become spicy because they are so exceedingly bland that they produce a more intense pleasure than the spicy [1.3.14–4.1]. [3.2] You inveighed against me for The Treatise on the Arguments of Misers, their attack on the magnanimous, and the discussion of the difference between the truth, when it is baneful in the here and now, and lying, when it is beneficial in the life to come, and why the truth has been rendered ever praiseworthy and lying ever blameworthy; on the difference between possessiveness (ghayra) and squandering one’s honour (ªurma), between a surfeit of burning zeal (ªamīya) and haughtiness, and between falling short in preserving what is due to one’s honour and insufficient concern for a bad reputation. This work considers whether possessiveness (ghayra) is an acquired action (iktisāb) and habit (ʿāda), or one of those circumstances which are occasioned by religious observance (diyāna), by somehow accentuating it and the desire to improve oneself;6 or whether it is something in the nature (†ibāʿ) of being free-born (ªurrīya) and in the reality of its substantiality (ªaqīqat al-jawharīya), as long as reasoning intellects are sound, vices are kept at bay and the humours are balanced [1.4.2–9]. [4.1] You inveighed against me for The Treatise on the Pure-born and the Halfbreed, the vaunting of the blacks and the fair-skinned, and the weighing up of what is due severally to maternal and paternal uncles [1.4.10–11]. [4.2] You inveighed against me for The Book of Husbandry and Date-farming, the olive and the grape, the divisions of the excellences of the crafts and the categories of trade; for The Treatise on the Difference7 between Men and Women, the distinction between males and females, in which contexts the latter gain the upper-hand and are superior and in which contexts they have the lower-hand and are inferior; on which of the two has a more ample share in their offspring and in which contexts the dues of women are more pressing and obligatory, which work is best suited to them, and in which crafts they are more proficient [1.4.11–16]. [5.1] You inveighed against me for The Treatise on the Qaª†ānīs and the ʿAdnānīs8 concerning the rebuttal of the Qaª†ānīs. You alleged that I transgressed the limits of presenting a cause passionately (ªamīya) to the point of factionalism (ʿa‚abīya) and that I was not able to establish the superiority of the ʿAdnānīs without speaking ill of the Qaª†ānīs [1.4.17–5.2]. [5.2] You inveighed against me for The Treatise on the Arabs and their Clients

transla ti on | 113 (mawālī) and you alleged that I had cheated the clients of their rights just as I had given to the Arabs that which was not theirs [1.5.2–4]. [5.3] You inveighed against me for The Treatise on the Arabs and Non-Arabs (ʿajam) and you alleged that to speak of the difference between the Arabs and non-Arabs was to speak of the difference between the clients and the Arabs. You associated me with reduplication and reiteration, with proliferation and crass ignorance of the prattling inanity (kha†al) which occurs when something is repeated as well as the inconvenient labour it burdens people with [1.5.4–7]. [6] You inveighed against me for The Treatise on the Idols, the discussion of the pretexts which the Indians provide for worshipping them and the reason why the pre-Islamic Arabs worshipped them; how they both varied in terms of pretext but agreed in the general forms of religious observance (diyāna); how those who worship buddhas (budad ) and who cling to the worship of graven figurines and carved idols are the most intense religious devotees when it comes to attachment to the object of their worship and love for what they are in thrall to; how they make the greatest public displays of earnestness and are the most extreme devotees in their hatred of their opponents and in clinging to the object of their worship; the differences between a buddha and a figurine, a figurine and an idol, a statuette (dumya) and a recumbent effigy (juththa); on why they depict in their prayer-niches and their houses of worship images of their heroes and the men of their creed (daʿwa); why they take enormous pride in the depiction and great care in setting up the assemblage, and go to extremes in beautifying and venerating them; on what the originary state (awwalīya) of these religious rites was and how those creeds (niªal) divided into various sects;9 on the form of the deceptions (khudaʿ) employed by the temple-keepers (sadana); how they have continued to be the most numerous of all kinds of religious observance and how that way of life (madhhab) came to incorporate different classes of people (ajnās) [1.5.8–6.6]. [7] You inveighed against me for The Treatise on Minerals and for speaking about the jewels of the earth, on the difference between the classes of metals (filizz) and information about which liquify and which are solid, which are created as they are and which are manufactured; on how transmutation (inqilāb) happens quickly in some but is tardy in others; how some colours

114 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s can be used as dye but cannot be dyed whilst others can be dyed but cannot be used as dye and yet others can both be used as dye and can be dyed; as well as what is said about the elixir (al-iksīr) and sublimation (tal†īf ) [1.6.7–11]. [8] You inveighed against me for The Treatise on the Difference between Hāshim and ʿAbd Shams, for The Treatise on the Difference between Jinn and Man and the Difference between Angels and Jinn; on what is said about the understanding (maʿrifa) of the hoopoe (hudhud ) and the autonomy (isti†āʿa) of the ʿIfrīt; about the one who has a knowledge (ʿilm) of the Book and what that knowledge is, and what the interpretation (tafsīr) is of their statement, ‘He had in his possession the greatest name of God’ [1.6.12–15]. [9] You inveighed against me for The Treatise on Number Squares10 and Calculations, and what is said about sustenance and expenditure, what are the occasions for fructifying capital and good management, how merchants attract customers, what legal devices (iªtiyāl) they use for deposited goods and what means they have for using testaments; what obliges them to be proficient in assessing people’s probity and directs them to think well (ªusn al-Õann) of those they do business with; and how we discussed swindling in crafts and trades, what means we have for discerning what they have concealed and for disclosing what they have counterfeited and how one can guard against this and remain safe from those who practise it [1.7.1–6]. [10] You inveighed against me for my epistles (rasāʾil ) and everything I had written to my brethren (ikhwān) and companions (khula†āʾ), be it jocose (mazª) or grave, elegantly clear (if‚āª) or allusively and indirectly phrased (taʿrī∂), deficient or accurate (taghāful wa-tawqīf ),11 be it a lampoon that leaves an indelible brand or an encomium that leaves its mark forever, be it pleasantries to make you laugh or admonishments to make you weep [1.7.6–9]. [11] You inveighed against me for my Epistles on the Hāshimīs, and the arguments which I adduced as proof therein, my thorough scrutiny of their ideas (maʿānī), my depicting them in the most attractive form (‚ūra) and my displaying them in the most perfect condition (ªilya).12 You alleged that I had thereby left the ranks of the Muʿtazila and had joined the Zaydīya, had left behind balance and moderation for extravagance and immoderation concerning partisanship of the Shīʿa (tashayyuʿ). You also alleged that the doctrine (maqāla) of the Zaydīya is the prefatory address (khu†ba) to the doctrine of

transla ti on | 115 the Rāfi∂a and that the doctrine of the Rāfi∂a is the prefatory address to the doctrine of the Ghāliya. You also alleged that, at the root of the issue, and in the normal run of things, every big thing starts with something small, and that every multiple is simply a little thing collected with other little things.13 You recited the words of the Rajaz poet: The paltry is part of the mighty: The stallion was once a young camel weaned And lofty palm-trees grow from saplings! Then you recited the words of the poet:14 Many a little thing has led to a great thing: seas are engulfed in seas. You said: ‘Yazīd b. al-Óakam declaimed:15 Learn, my son, for the learned man derives benefit from learning: Trivial matters are some of the things the mighty hero is stirred up by’. You said: ‘another poet declaimed:16 Your joke became something serious – many’s the serious thing, impelled by drollery’. You recited the words of another poet:17 Did you not consider what is due to Warda to apply to you, when these matters were concluded in the absence of Warda’s family? The paltry affair often sets the major affair in motion – until blood flows constantly as a result. Kabsha bint Maʿdīkarib declaimed:18 In killing ʿAbd Allāh you cut off the noses of his people, the Banū Māzin, because he had insulted the herder of al-Muªazzam. Another poet declaimed:19 What a blaze the fire-starter ignited! What gravity the jocund has attained! The desert Arabs say, ‘The staff comes from the twiglet. Only a snake can give birth to a snake’ [1.7.10–9.4]. [12] You inveighed against my Treatise on the Creating of the Qurʾān, just as you inveighed against my Treatise in Rebuttal of the Assimilationists, you inveighed against my Treatise on what is said concerning the Principles of Legal Rulings and Judgements, and you inveighed against my Treatise on the Arguments Adduced as Proofs concerning the Ordering of the Qurʾān, its Unusual Composition and Original Arrangement [1.9.5–7].

116 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s [13.1] And you inveighed against my Contestation of the Zaydīya and my Deeming Muʿtazilism Superior to all other Creeds, just as you inveighed against my Treatise on the Promise and the Threat, my Treatise against the Christians and the Jews [1.9.7–9]. [13.2] Then you inveighed against all of my treatises On Knowledge and you availed yourself of every stratagem in demeaning them. You belittled their worth and deprived them of the estimation they deserve. You objected to those who copied them (nāsikhī-hā) and sought to benefit from them. So you inveighed against The Treatise on the Appropriate Responses, The Treatise on the Relevant Questions, The Treatise on The Proponents of Inspiration (a‚ªāb al-ilhām), The Treatise of the Proof concerning the Establishing of the Prophethood of Muªammad and The Treatise on the Reports (al-akhbār). Then you inveighed against my Rejection of the Clairvoyance of Ghannām the Apostate, and of the clairvoyance of every repudiator (jāªid ) and deviant (mulªid ), my differentiation between the objections raised by the inexperienced dolt and the clear examination of the man of truth. You inveighed against The Treatise of the Rebuttal of the Jahmīya concerning perception (idrāk) and what they say about not knowing (al-jahālāt), The Treatise on the Difference between the Prophet and the Would-be Prophet, and the difference between the stratagems and deceptions used by the latter and the manifest truths and conspicuous signs of the former [1.9.9–10.3]. [14] Then you set your sights on this current book of mine by belittling its value and demeaning its ordering (naÕm), objecting to (iʿtirā∂) its diction (lafÕ), and declaring its ideas (maʿānī) to be contemptible. You scoffed at how it had been sculpted (naªt) and moulded (sabk), just as you scoffed at its theme (maʿnā) and diction, and then you censured the aim (ghara∂) we have striven keenly for, and the end we have set our sights on, even though it is a book whose theme is nobler than its title (ism), whose true reality (ªaqīqa) is more scintillating than its diction [1.10.3–7]. It is a book which is required by the ordinary (ʿāmmī) student mid-way through his studies (mutawassi†) as it is required by the learned specialist (khā‚‚ī). It is required by the novice (rayyi∂) as it is required by the expert (ªādhiq). The novice requires it for study and training (durba), for setting his ideas in order and practising, for exercising and mastering his habits, since in it the important (jalīl) precedes the recondite (daqīq) and since its

transla ti on | 117 preliminary positions (muqaddamāt) are set in order and the levels of its ideas are set down where they ought to be (munazzala). The expert requires it because it saves him enough labour, for anyone who chances upon a compendious (jāmiʿ) book or a chapter (bāb) in which the principles of learning (ummahāt al-ʿilm) are collected will reap the profits (ghunm), whereas its composer (muʾallif ) will have to bear the costs (ghurm):20 his will be the benefit, while the toil and distress will be its author’s (‚āªib), what with how he exposes himself to the censorious attacks of the unjust, to the objections (iʿtirā∂) of his competitors, to say nothing of how he thereby exposes his jaded intellect to intellects which are fresh and free from toil and his ideas to the mighty critics (jahābidha), and allows the ambitious (al-mutaʾawwilīn) and the envious to pronounce the verdict on it [1.10.7–15]. When something like it falls into the hands of an expert in one discipline (‚āªib ʿilm), or it is chanced upon by a student of religious learning (†ālib fiqh), enjoying a peaceful, quiet life, and in fine fettle, full of mental energy (nashī† wa-jāmm), while its composer is jaded and exhausted, then, this being so, it is right and fitting that he make his chance discovery of it a sign of divine guidance (tawfīq) and his possession of it an aspect (bāb) of heavenly favour (tasdīd ). This is because he has been relieved of the labour of collecting and storing it, of seeking it out and investigating it, and it has made long cogitation, devoting his life to the subject and blunting his critical edge (ªadd ) unnecessary. So he has attained his utmost requirement while simultaneously conserving his strength [1.10.15–11.4]. This is a book in which the desire of all communities (umam) is equal, in which Arabs and non-Arabs resemble each other, because, even if it is in the chaste Arabic of the desert Arabs (ʿarabī aʿrābī) and is Islamic and communitarian (islāmī jamāʿī), it has taken maxims from the rarities (†uraf ) of philosophy (falsafa), has combined learning gained from study (samāʿ) with knowledge acquired from experience (tajriba), and has made partners out of the knowledge of the Book and the Sunna and the findings of the senses (wijdān al-ªāssa) and the sensation of the natural instinct (iªsās al-gharīza). Young men desire it just as venerable sheikhs do.21 The dissolute desires it just as the ascetic does. The wanton playboy desires it just as the grave man of resolve does. The ingénue desires it just as the man of affairs does. And the blockhead desires it just as the perspicacious thinker does [1.11.5–11].

118 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s [15.1] You inveighed against me for representing (ªikāya) The Words of the ʿUthmānīya and the ¤irārīya, even though you heard me say at the beginning of my book: ‘The ʿUthmānīya and the ¤irārīya said’, just as you heard me say: ‘The Rāfi∂a and the Zaydīya said’. So you judged me to have been guilty of animosity to ʿAlī (na‚b) because I represented the words of the ʿUthmānīya. But did you not judge me to have been guilty of pro-Shīʿī sentiments because I represented the words of the Rāfi∂a? And was I not, in your opinion, one of the Ghāliya because I represented the arguments of the Ghāliya, just as I was, in your opinion, one of the Nā‚iba because I represented the words of the Nā‚iba? Yet in our book we have represented the words of the Ibā∂īya and the Íufrīya, just as we have represented the words of the Azāriqa and the Najdīya.22 And on the basis of these four pillars (arkān) the Khārijīya is erected. Every other name for them is merely a corollary, an inference or a derivation of this word and is predicated upon it. Do we not, then, in your opinion, belong to the Khārijīya, just as in your opinion we belong to the ¤irārīya and the Nā‚iba? How can you be satisfied with being hastier than both the Shīʿa and the Khārijīya in attacking people’s reputations? Unless, of course, Heavens above!,23 you found my representation of the ʿUthmānīya and the ¤irārīya more extensive and more comprehensive, more complete and better constructed, better crafted and loftier in aim than those other works and so you thought that I had weakened the claims of those Shīʿīs insofar as I had strengthened the falsehood of your opponents! And if this really was the case, then the book could have been your witness and your proof (burhān) against what I had claimed was clear [1.11.12–12.8]. [15.2] You inveighed against me for The Treatise of the ʿAbbāsīya. But did you not inveigh against me for representing the doctrine of those who deny the obligatoriness of the Imamate, those who countenance the impossibility of obeying the Imams, who allege that to leave people to pasture freely (sudan)24 and to roam day and night without a guardian or a herder is more productive and profitable for them and is more likely to bring them a combination of security (salāma) in this world and booty (ghanīma) in the next, given that leaving them alone scattered here, there and everywhere without any order is at a greater remove from the sources of corruption and is more effective in guiding them on the right road [1.12.9–13]?

transla ti on | 119 [16] But that was not how you reacted. Instead, you were dazzled by what you heard and your chest was filled with what you read – it took control of you and turned your head. That’s why you did not aim for the decisive argument (ªujja) though it presented itself to you and you did not know where to strike the deadly blow though it was evident to you. You did not know the point of egress because you were ignorant of the point of ingress and you did not know how to get out of the watering-hole because you were ignorant of how to get in. You thought that to abuse your trusted companions (awliyāʾ) was a better way of curing your disease and a more effective way of treating your illness. You thought that letting your tongue loose would bring a more immediate pleasure and would be at a greater remove from worrisome toil, from long cogitation and from disagreeing with the experts (arbāb) of this craft [1.12.13–19]. [17] If you had but perceived your inability and had joined your deficiency with the completeness of someone else, if you had asked for the help of someone who was devoted (mawqūf ) to help people like you and dedicated (ªabīs)25 to set those like you straight, then that would have been so much more seemly in this world and so much more likely to earn you recompense in the next. If you had missed out on the spoils, you would not have missed out on security, for you are secure from your opponent to the extent that your supporter assumes his vexation on your behalf, although he can only do this if and insofar as you charge him with the labour (maʾūna) of improving you and of preoccupying himself with setting you straight. Were you in this any different to what the Arab says, ‘Can the barking of dogs harm the clouds?’ or to what the poet declaimed:26 Is the sea at high tide harmed by a boy tossing a stone into it? Is our situation in this any different to what the other poet declaimed:27 Taghlib Wāʾil is not harmed by whether you lampoon it or piss where the two seas clash and to what Óassān b. Thābit declaimed:28 It is of no concern to me whether a rutting he-goat rattles in al-Óazn or a caitiff upbraids me behind my back29 [1.13.1–13]. [18] I have no doubt that you made out of my protracted avoidance of you a camel that you could ride and that you construed as fear of you my forbearance and restraint (ªilm) towards you. Zufar b. al-Óārith declaimed to

120 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s someone who did not countenance the duty of forgiveness (‚afª) and made pardon an occasion for ill speech:30 If you come back, by God upon His throne, I will bestow upon you a bright blue sword with a sharpened blade, For beheading is the only way to treat crass and uncivil behaviour – the presumptuous meddler should be thrown in water and left to drown. An early poet declaimed:31 I have often medicated rancour and malice with rancour and malice. Thus I cured malevolent spite with malevolent spite! Another poet declaimed:32 Nothing protects you against a people you fear quite like your humiliation of ignoramuses by means of ignoramuses — So puff out your chest when they arch their backs and arch your back when they puff out their chests – weigh wickedness with wickedness, ounce for ounce. Now, we may not possess the blade of Zufar b. al-Óārith, and we are unable to match wickedness for wickedness, crass incivility for incivility, or malevolent spite for spite as these men could do, but I do have in my power that which al-Masʿūdī said:33 So touch the earth from which you were created and to which we are fated to return until the Summoning on Judgement Day! Do not disdain to come back and give greetings. Pride is the worst garment for me to dress their mouths in!34 Should I wish, many people would speak badly of you both, in the open, or secretly in my company, For though I neither issue commands nor prohibitions concerning you, I smile at them that they may persist and apply themselves. Al-Namir al-Tawlab declaimed:35 May God repay Jamra bint Nawfal36 for me as befits a liar who has betrayed our trust — She informed the calumniators about me, that they might lie about me, even though I had supported her against the uncertainties of fate. He is saying: she divulged her information and it came into the possession of those whom I wished would be the object of her invective [1.13.14–15.6]. [19] But were you to wish for us to compete with you, we would compete

transla ti on | 121 with you in words, in a way that will have a more repulsive impact and leave a longer lasting mark that will be more truthful as a saying and more righteous as a witness than anything I have said thus far. The person who avoids competition does not always do so because he has forgiven the offence, just as the person who does compete has not immediately prevailed. The poet uttered a saying, if you understand which, then you will have spared us the labour of competing with you and you will have saved yourself from the stigma of shame. Here is his saying:37 If you are not afraid to censure me because you know that I forgive the ignoramus Then fear my silence for I hear the foul words that people say about you for all to hear: Just as to provide food is to eat, to listen to censure is to participate in it; A bad utterance will reach those to whom it pertains faster than a torrent rushing down a hill; He who invites criticism will be criticised, rightly and wrongly. So, if you are a man of acumen (irba), do not stir up a war with the man of intellect (ʿāqil) and experience (tajriba), For when you stir up the man of intellect, you stir up someone who is able to inflict a paralysing palsy — You will witness in his attacks upon you now the subsequent harm that will ensue later. It is said: Pardon corrupts the caitiff to the extent that it improves the magnanimous. The poet declaimed:38 Pardon is a lesson for the clever man but even a little accustoms the dullard to expect it. Now if we have acted wrongly in this upbraiding exhortation (al-taqrīʿ wa-al-tawqīf ), surely it is the person who did not treat us in accordance with the rule (ªukm) of the Qurʾān or the exemplary lesson (adab) of the Messenger (eternal peace and blessings be his!), the person who did not circumspectly seek refuge in what sound insight (al-fi†an al-‚aªīªa) establishes as appropriate behaviour or in what is obligatory conduct according to the analogies conformable with general usage (al-maqāyīs al-mu††arida), the exemplary maxims struck for all to follow and the poetic verses in current

122 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s usage – surely he is the one who deserves to be thought of as acting badly and who merits reproach? God (Great and Glorious!) said: ‘No burdened soul bears the burden of another’.39 The Prophet (eternal peace and blessings be his!) said: ‘Let not your right hand shift its responsibility onto your left hand’.40 This, then, is the rule (ªukm) of God the Exalted, the exemplary lessons (ādāb) of His Messenger, and the message the Book was sent down with, which the probative arguments (ªujaj) of reasoning intellects indicate (dalla) [1.15.6–16.16]. [20] . . . You said: ‘Why is it that the people of learning and speculation (ahl al-ʿilm wa-al-naÕar), the masters of thinking and drawing lessons from signs (al-ʿibar), the experts in religious creeds, the scholars (ʿulamāʾ) and the people of insight into how belief-based communities (milal ) emerge and turn out, the heirs of the prophets (warathat al-anbiyāʾ) and the aids (aʿwān) of the caliphs, write books on humorous wits, books on layabouts and immoral folk, books on musical instruments and jests, books on the proponents (a‚ªāb) of litigations (khu‚ūmāt), books on the proponents of contentious disputation (mirāʾ) and books on the proponents of factionalism (ʿa‚abīya) and the burning zeal (ªamīya) of the pre-Islamic age (jāhilīya)? Is it because they do not scrutinise their souls, do not weigh up the difference between what is incumbent upon them and what is in their interest, and do not fear the careful examination of the scholars (ʿulamāʾ) or the reproach of men of acumen (urabāʾ), the scorn of their peers and the contempt of their table-companions (julasāʾ)?’ [1.25.2–8] But why did you not refrain from your invective (ʿayb) (God pity you! [yarªamu-ka Allāh]) and attack, from providing counsel (mashwara) and admonishment and from creating fear of what bad consequences entail, until you had attained the status of the scholars (ʿulamāʾ) and the level of their peers [1.25.1–11]? In this book of ours, we will mention the ways of thought in a comprehensive manner (jumlat al-madhāhib), and we will next proceed to explanation (tafsīr), and perhaps at that point, if God wills, your opinion (raʾy) will alter and your words will change so that you will either endorse our position or will have acquired a modicum of circumspection (tawaqquf ) [1.25.12–14].

transla ti on | 123 [21] . . . This is a book of admonishment and instruction, of religious inquiry (tafaqquh) and reminder (tanbīh), yet I see that you inveighed against it before you had a good grasp of all its headings (ªudūd ) and had reflected upon its fascicules (fu‚ūl ), before drawing lessons about its conclusion from its beginning and its points of egress from its points of ingress. You have been misled by some of the levity (mazª) which you saw it contained (fī athnāʾi-hi), but the meaning of which you did not understand, and by its waggish wit (ba†āla) the point of which you had not fathomed and could not work out why it had been included. You did not understand the reason why such a burden had been assumed or what was desired thereby, what serious purpose (jidd ) was served by shouldering the burden of such triviality (hazl), or for which improving exercise (riyā∂a) the fatigue caused by this waggish wit (ba†āla) was endured. You did not know that levity (muzāª) is gravity (jidd ) when it is included as grounds (ʿilla) for gravity and that waggish wit is pious seriousness (waqār) and sedateness (razāna) when its burden is imposed for that very result [1.37.9–16]. [22] When al-Khalīl b. Aªmad said, ‘No-one gets to what he needs of the knowledge of grammar without learning what he does not need’, Abū Shamir said, ‘If the only way of getting to what is needed is through what is not needed, then what is not needed has become what is needed’. Now this is just like this book of ours. Were we to have constrained everyone who assumes the burden of reading this book to the astringency of the truth and the difficult business of gravity, the onus of labour and the demeanour of pious seriousness, the only person who would be able to finish it, in view of its length, would be the person who had devoted himself to the pursuit of knowledge and naught else, who had understood how it is realised (maʿnā), who had tasted of its fruits, whose heart had felt its greatness and who had acquired its joys. After all, length bequeaths weariness and abundance aversion – how many people are led to their lot of knowledge by being dragged roughly by the collar like dogs and by severe intimidation! [1.37.17–38.8]. [23] But then I noticed that you were not satisfied with simply attacking every book I have written. You went farther and inveighed against the production (wa∂ʿ) of books, irrespective of the situation which may have given occasion to them or the various reasons which may have governed them. I was amazed at your invective against the part, without any knowledge, so that you

124 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s inveighed against the whole, without any knowledge! Then you went even farther, to condemnation and then further still, to declaring outright war. For you inveighed against the book in general, but what a storehouse and estate (ʿuqda) it is; what a companion and device (ʿudda); what a diversion (nuzha) and charm (nushra); what a distraction and occupation; what a comrade in times of solitude (waªda); what an informant when in distant lands; what an associate (qarīn) and guest (dakhīl); what a vizier and visitor (nazīl)! The book is a receptacle full of knowledge, a vase replete with wit, a vessel laden with levity and gravity. At your whim, it will be more eloquent than Saªbān of the Wāʾil; at your whim, it will be more inarticulate than Bāqil; at your whim, you will laugh at its novel tales; at your whim, you will be amazed at its unique bizarreries; at your whim, its rare witticisms will divert you; at your whim, its admonishments will move you [1.38.10–39.3]. Where else will you find a diverting admonisher, an alluring chastiser, a rakish ascetic, a dumb speaker, a wit who is both lukewarm and hot? On the subject of that which both freezes and burns, al-Óasan b. Hāniʾ41 said: Say to Zuhayr, as he goes on his way, urging his camels with a chant: ‘Do it little or do it much – you are a haverer: You are so frozen that you burn – you seem to me to be fire’. My audience should not be amazed at my description: snow is like this – it both freezes and burns!42 Where else will you find a doctor who is a Bedouin?43 Where else will you find a Byzantine Indian, a Persian Greek, an aged new born child, a corpse which is given long life? Where else will you find something that combines the beginning and the end, the deficient and the abundant, the hidden and the evident, the visible and the invisible, the high and the low, the lean and the plump, one thing (shikl) and its contrary, one class (jins) and its opposite [1.39.3–12]? [24] . . . People have differed vehemently in arbitrating between what is better: using fingers to count or gesturing, and were it not that the aim of our campaign (maghzā) in this book was another subject (bāb) entirely, then this would be one of the subjects which I would dearly love our brethren and companions (ikhwānu-nā wa-khula†āʾu-nā) to know. But we can only treat

transla ti on | 125 of this topic of discussion (hādhā al-bāb min al-kalām) upon the conclusion of that which has greater claim on us, since you did not contend with me and inveigh against my books on the subject of determining the difference44 between counting and gesture or in distinguishing between them and diction. The sole intention of our discussion (kalām) is to provide information about the virtue (fa∂īla) of the book [1.49.14–50.4]. [25] . . . Next let me turn to your words (qawl ): ‘What was so significant about the dog, given the baseness of its origin, the wickedness of its nature (†abʿ), the ignobility of its value, the contemptibleness of its soul,45 given what little good and how much harm it does, the fact that all the communities (umam) are united in deeming it ignoble and base, given that they have made it a proverbial expression to cover all of this, and given its condition (ªāl ) for which it is well known – namely, that it is incapable of attacking in the way carnivorous predators do, of matching their power, of defending itself as they do, of attaining their nobility, their savageness and the difficulty of taming them; that it is also incapable of the placidity and submissiveness of herbivores (bahāʾim) and of how they make it possible for man to establish their utility (ma‚laªa) and benefit from them, since it is not in the nature (†abʿ) of herbivores to defend themselves as carnivores do or to devise stratagems (iªtiyāl ) for their subsistence, and they do not know how to tell safe areas from areas which are to be feared? And the dog is neither a complete carnivore nor a complete herbivore, with the result that it seems to be constituted of a compound creation (khalq), its natural elements (†abāʾiʿ) patched together and its humours imported, like the mule which is so varied in its behaviour (akhlāq), which has so many blemishes (ʿuyūb) generated (mutawallida) out of its mixture [102.7–17]. [26] ‘The worst of natures (†abāʾiʿ) is that which is torn between contrary hereditary qualities (aʿrāq), between competing behavioural patterns (akhlāq) and between distant (mutabāʿida)46 elements (ʿanā‚ir), such as the Rāʿibī pigeon, which has lost the homing instinct and the speed of flight of other pigeons and does not coo like them. It does not live as long as the wood pigeon (warashān), its wings are not as strong, its ligaments are not as powerful, its voice is not as beautiful, its throat is not as wide and its melodies (luªūn) are not the same, the emotional response (i†rāb) it elicits is not as

126 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s intense and it is not as robust when struck with pellets or wounded by talons. The Rāʿibī is feathered on the legs and is heavy, and it happens (ªadatha) to have a magnitude of body and a heaviness of weight which neither its father nor its mother have [1.102.18–103.4]. [27] ‘So too the mule emerges from two animals which produce an animal like them that lives and stays alive for as long as they do, but the male offspring does not produce viable offspring though he is not sterile and the mare mule produces no children though she is not barren. If the male mule were incapable of siring offspring and the mare mule were without the means for reproduction, then that would augment their power and complete their strength even more. The male mule has a vehement lust and an erection which its father does not have, while the mare mule has a lasciviousness (sawas)47 and a desire to be covered which her mother does not have. All of this is detrimental to strength and a deficiency in structure. Its penis when unsheathed is larger than the penises of its paternal and maternal uncles. Therefore it ceases to resemble them and it begins to resemble something which has no origin on earth. It turns out to be longer lived than its parents and capable of bearing heavier burdens than they are [1.102.18–103.12]. [28] ‘Or take the son of a mannish woman and an effeminate man. He is a more nauseous offspring than the mule, his hereditary qualities (aʿrāq) are more corrupt than the Simʿ and more shameful (akthar ʿuyūban) than the ʿIsbār and than any creature composed of a contrary that ever was created, and any tree grafted with an opposite. Yet something similar to this does not obtain for the Khilāsī among the domestic fowl or the Wardānī among pigeons [103.13–17]. [29] ‘Every weakness which enters the natural constitution of a creature (khilqa) and every accident of feebleness (ʿara∂at) in a living thing (ªayawān) is determined by its class (jins). Incapacity (ʿajz) and blemishes (ʿayb) appear in accordance with its value (miqdār) and its power (tamakkun) [1.104.1–2]. ‘Al-A‚maʿī alleged that a lean horse has never beaten the other horses in a race [1.104.3]. ‘Muªammad b. Sallām said: “Neither a piebald stallion nor a piebald mare ever beat the other horses in a race” [1.104.4]. ‘The sense of direction in pigeons and stamina in flying great distances is the sole property of the dark female whose feathers are of one hue [1.104.5–6].

transla ti on | 127 ‘They alleged that all maculations (shiyāt) are a weakness and a defect. “Maculation” means: any colour which intrudes on top of another base colour. God (Great and Mighty!) said, “He said, ‘She must be a cow, not submissive, kicking up the earth or watering the tillage, sound, with no maculation on her’48” [1.104.7–10]. ‘ʿUthmān b. al-Óakam alleged that the son of a mannish woman by an effeminate father assumes the worst features (khi‚āl) of his father and the vilest features of his mother. Mighty misfortunes and the very essences of wickedness (aʿyān al-masāwī) unite in him. Given that he is born like this, no education (adab) will have an effect on him, no physician will desire to treat him. He said that he saw in the dwellings of the Thaqīf a young man in whom these features were united. No day passed without them reporting something about him, in comparison with which the greatest error (dhanb) that could be attributed to him would pale into insignificance’ [1.104.11–17]. You alleged that in this the dog is like the cross-dresser, neither male nor female, or the eunuch who, when that by means of which the male becomes a stallion (faªl) is cut off from him, no longer belongs within the definition (ªadd ) of complete male by virtue of the loss of his male member but yet is not completely equipped to become a female, on account of his original nature (al-gharīza al-a‚līya) and his remaining substantiality (jawharīya). You alleged that he becomes like date wine ruined by excessive heat since this removes it from the definition (ªadd ) of vinegar but does not keep it in the definition (ªadd ) of date wine [1.105.1–6]. Mirdās b. Khidhām said:49 We gave ʿIqāl a drink at al-Thawīya, and it caused the mind of ʿIqāl, of the tribe of Kāhil, to incline:50 So I said, ‘Drink it as a morning draught, ʿIqāl, for it is a wine that has made us imagine a phantom’. I smote the inner depths of his heart with the mother of vinegar and he did not wake up again for three nights! He made wine the ‘mother of vinegar’ from which wine can be generated. Wine can be generated from vinegar, since it was once wine [1.105.7–12]. Saʿīd b. Wahb said:51 Alas, tender youth, you were once desired for the freshness of your face, few hairs growing on your cheeks,

128 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s But now the beard that has started to appear on your cheek has removed your charm, as a hand snatches something away, Like a fine vintage, the wine of whose juice, once so delicious, has reverted to sharp wine vinegar [1.105.13–16]. The dog is also like middling verse and middling singing, and a flaccid anecdote which neither goes from spicy to bland to make you to show your teeth in a smile nor goes from bland to spicy to show your teeth in a smile [1.105.17–106.2].

3.3 Commentary

[1] At Óayawān 1.44.8–12, many of these key concepts recur in al-JāªiÕ’s description of the moral agency and intellectual capacities God has endowed man with. Compare this with the opening address of his treatises On the Creating of the Qurʾān (Fī Khalq al-Qurʾān) Rasāʾil 3.285.2–3, where we encounter the terms shuhba, thabbata, shākirīn; and of On Agents (al-Wukalāʾ) Rasāʾil 4.95.3–96.18, where similar moral and spiritual failings on the part of an Addressee are denounced for misunderstanding the divine articulation of human society and thus denying the thanks due to God for His benefaction (niʿma), explicitly stated at Rasāʾil 4.100.1–101.2 of the work. Shubha and ªayra: see (respectively) Óayawān 7.8.10–14 and 3.379.7– 380.3; also Óayawān 6.35.2–37.12, translated by Rosenthal, Knowledge, pp. 303–5, especially p. 303, note 3. His discussion of ‘the attitude toward doubt’, pp. 299–308 is crucial. [2] Parts of the attack are reproduced throughout the treatise when the dog and the rooster are discussed: Óayawān 1.190.12–200.4; 1.203.12–17 = Part 6, §§1.1–1.8.7 and §4.1. See Geries, ‘Quelques aspects’, p. 77, note 7, for a list of other instances where al-JāªiÕ praises the marvellous nature of despicable animals. For the contours of the offence as perceived by the Addressee: Óayawān 1.201.1–6; 1.216.9–10 = Part 6, §3.1 and §10. On the use of serious processes for trivial things: Óayawān 1.201.1–2 = Part 6, §3.1. [3.1] I have indicated what I take to be titles of works by al-JāªiÕ by italics but as many of the treatises are no longer extant, the matter is entirely inconclusive. I have followed Pellat’s convention of denoting with a double asterisk works which are substantially extant and with a single asterisk those which are fragmentary. An absence of an asterisk signifies the loss of the work. I also reproduce in bold letters what Pellat identifies as the key words in the 129

130 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s title of each work. These works are: Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, *§127 (Kitāb Óiyal al-Lu‚ū‚), §201 (Kitāb Ghishsh al-Íināʿāt) and *§150 (Kitāb al-Mulaª wa-al-˝uraf ) respectively. [3.2] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, **§54 (Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ), §200 (al-Qawl fī al-Farq bayn al-Íidq wa-al-Kadhib) and §72 (al-Qawl fī al-Farq bayn alGhayra wa-I∂āʿat al-Óurma) respectively. Given that it was early ʿAbbasid custom to be relaxed about the exactitude of the titles which one gives to one’s works, a case can be made for arguing that there are at least three and possibly five titles given here, if the work on the miserly arguments is not the same as the analysis of truth and falsehood or the emotions and values of the elite in scrupulously attending to their honour. As it is writings (kitāb) with which the Addressee takes issue and not pronouncements (qawl: 1.4.2) I have preferred to err on the side of caution and to count the occurrences of kitāb in conjunction with the verb ʿāba as significant, though generally any real distinction between qawl and kitāb is negligible. For the formula ʿibta-nī bi-kitābī see: Óayawān 1.3.14, [1.3.15], 1.3.15, 1.4.1, 1.4.10, 1.4.11, [1.4.13], 1.4.17, 1.5.2-3, 1.5.4, 1.5.8, 1.6.7, 1.6.12, [1.6.12], 1.7.1; the variant wa-ʿibta-nī bi-rasāʾilī at 1.7.6 and 1.7.10; the variant wa-ʿibta-nī bi-ªikāya at 1.11.12; the important variation ʿibta kitābī occurs at 1.9.5 (bis), 1.9.6 (bis), 1.9.7 (wa-ʿibta muʿāra∂atī), 1.9.8, [1.9.9], 1.9.9 (wa-ʿibta jumlat kutubī), 1.9.11, [1.9.11–12], [1.9.12] (bis), [1.9.13], 1.9.13 (thumma ʿibta inkārī), 1.9.14–10.1, [1.10.1], 1.37.10 (ʿibta-hu), 1.41.10, 1.50.2 (wa-la taʿib kutubī). The references in square brackets indicate occasions when the verb does not occur but continues to govern an object which is specified: for example, at 1.9.8–9, the text runs, ka-mā ʿibta kitābī fī al-waʿd wa-al-waʿīd wa-kitābī ʿalā al-na‚ārā wa-al-yahūd. The work on mores which al-JāªiÕ describes here does not tally fully with the extant Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ (Treatise on Niggards): see Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §54 (p. 134), §200 (p. 156), where Pellat is disinclined to discern a separate treatise, and §72 (137), where he is inclined to think that the phrase al-farq bayna al-ghayra wa-i∂āʿat al-ªurma denotes a subject which might have merited an opuscule. This particular topic promises an address of similar concerns to those discussed in al-JāªiÕ’s Book of the Singing-Girls (Kitāb al-Qiyān). I suspect that the Kitāb Iªtijājāt al-Bukhalāʾ may be a rehearsal of the material used again in Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ, which is a treatise much

commentary | 131 exercised over truthfulness and lying, and an excessive scrupulosity in possessiveness. Though I am equally prepared to countenance the possibility that the extant Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ is intended here. Ghayra is the maintenance of one’s honour through being jealously protective of one’s possessions and especially one’s womenfolk, whence the relevance also of ªurma. I am unsure of the exact significance of the noun ªurrīya, though I presume that it has simply a legal and not an ethical or philosophical sense. The term recurs in al-JāªiÕ’s reiteration of the ‘Introduction’ in his preface to Óayawān Volume Seven (7.8.13). Bibliography: Rosenthal, The Muslim Concept of Freedom; Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 350–4; Montgomery, ‘Speech and nature, Part 4’, pp. 215–19 (for the centrality of the concept of ‘nature’ in early ʿAbbasid scientific debates); Montgomery, ‘Convention as cognition’, pp. 147–78 (on the passions in the ʿAbbasid tradition generally); Adamson, Al-Kindī, pp. 150–6 (for a cognate treatise on sadness in the early ʿAbbasid philosophical tradition); Adamson and Pormann, Philosophical Works, pp. 249–66 (for its translation). [4.1] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §210 (Kitāb al-Íuraªāʾ wa-al-Hujanāʾ) and the ghost entry (Kitāb Mufākharat al-Sūdān wa-al-Óumrān) between **§205 (Kitāb Fakhr al-Sūdān ʿalā al-Bī∂ān) and §206 (Risāla fī Ithm al-Sukr). We might be tempted to emend the text to read: wa-ʿibta-nī bi-kitāb al-‚uraªāʾ wa-al-hujanāʾ wa-muwāzanat mā bayna ªaqq al-khaʾūla wa-al-ʿumūma wa-bi-kitāb mufākharat al-sūdān wa-al-ªumrān: ‘you inveighed against me for The Treatise on the Pure-born and the Half-breed, and the weighing up of what is due severally to maternal and paternal uncles, and for The Treatise of the Vaunting of the Blacks and the Fair-skinned’. Two works would thus be reproved: one on breeding and ancestry, human and zoological; the other cognate, if not identical, with the Kitāb Fakhr al-Sūdān ʿalā al-Bī∂ān, The Treatise of the Vaunting of the Blacks over the Whites, translated by Khalidi, ‘The boasts of the Blacks’. The authorial remark in Óayawān 3.510.1–2, that the mufākhara was gathered as a separate collection (majmūʿ),52 and the claim in the Fakhr al-Sūdān (Hārūn Rasāʾil 1.177.3–5) that it was kept distinct and separate from the Kitāb al-Íuraªāʾ (to the surprise and remonstration of one of its readers who writes to al-JāªiÕ asking for an explanation) merely remind

132 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s us how difficult and approximate such speculation on the dishevelled character of the JāªiÕian library can be. He was a habitual recycler of his works and I have the impression that they did not achieve a fixed form, if at all, until perhaps quite late in his life. We might be encouraged to see such editorial redacting as the task of his warrāqs, stationers. [4.2] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §242 (Kitāb al-Zarʿ wa-al-Nakhl wa-al-Zaytūn wa-al-Aʿnāb) and §202 (Aqsām Fu∂ūl/Fu‚ūl al-Íināʿāt wa-Marātib al-Tijārāt), although he does not seem certain that these are two separate works, since at §202 he refers the reader to §242 without comment, and *§168 (Kitāb al-Nisāʾ, the Book of Women), with the first of the ghost entries (Kitāb Fa‚l mā bayn al-Rijāl wa-al-Nisāʾ wa-Farq mā bayn al-Dhukūr wa-al-Ināth) on p. 156, between §195 (Kitāb al-Rāfi∂a) and §196 (Sharāʾiʿ al-Murūwa). According to Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, Sayyid 582.16–583.2 = Tajaddud 210.1–4 (translated in Chapter 2.2, p. 63), The Treatise on Husbandry and Date-Farming was dedicated to and remunerated by Ibrāhim b. al-ʿAbbās al-Íūlī. The Treatise on the Difference between Men and Women seems to be the work which according to Ibn al-Nadīm was appended to The Book of Living (Fihrist, Sayyid 582.8–9 = Tajaddud 209.28–31): see Chapter 2.2, p. 61. Bibliography: van Gelder, Close Relationships, p. 28–34, especially the discussion of the verse by Kaʿb b. Zuhayr on pp. 29–30, for the relevance of maternal and paternal uncles in determining the pedigree of camels; Bray, ‘Lists and memory’, especially her discussion of Muªammad b. Óabīb’s lists of pedigrees of the Prophet, the caliphs and the early Muslim leaders: as she notes, tracing female genealogy for ʿAbbasid caliphs born of an umm walad (concubine) became a problem for the dynasty and their antiquarian genealogists (pp. 222–3). Lassner, Islamic Revolution is especially insightful on the propaganda issued by the ʿAbbasid family and the activities of the paternal uncles. Some legal authorities contemplated the possibility that women could become judges and while the evidence dates from some fifty years after al-JāªiÕ’s death his reference to crafts and occupations is suggestive: Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 348–50 (on the status of women in the Islamic social order; see p. 350 for the eligibility of women to become judges).

commentary | 133 [5.1] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §15 (Taf∂īl ʿAdnān) and §173 (Kitāb [Fakhr] al-Qaª†ānīya wa-al-ʿAdnānīya) respectively. The work presumably had something to do not only with tribal claims to military, social and political ascendancy, but with debates about primacy of descent from Ismāʿīl, the son of Abraham and Hagar, as claimed by the Arabs of ʿAdnānī genealogy, and thus with relative Arabian and Muslim pedigrees. It was presumably also a work on arguments adduced by both groups in promotion of these claims. Bibliography: Agha, ‘Language as a component of Arab identity’. [5.2 and 5.3] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §41 (Kitāb [al-Taswiya] bayn al-ʿArab wa-al-ʿAjam) and *§42 (Kitāb al-ʿArab wa-al-Mawālī) respectively. These two titles, presumably similar in tenor to the first [5.1], are possibly exercises in assessing the merits, social status, cultural and artistic achievements of Arabs and non-Arabs generally, especially burning issues for third century ʿAbbasid society. The introduction to The Treatise on the Arabs and their Clients is extant. It is better known today as The Epistle on the Upstarts, Risāla fī al-Nābita, Hārūn Rasāʾil 2.7–23. Bibliography: Cooperson, ‘JāªeÕ’, EIr, XIV, pp. 386–389 (for an excellent overview of al-JāªiÕ’s views of the Persians); generally, the articles collected in Bernards and Nawas, Patronate and Patronage; for the role of non-Arabs (the mawālī) and recent Iranian converts to Islam in the ʿAbbasid revolution: Agha, The Revolution which Toppled the Umayyads; on how ªamīya and ʿa‚abīya were thought to imperil the balance of society and on the role of the king as coercer of parity among the contending factions in fourth- and fifth-century society, see Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership, pp. 173–90, especially pp. 173–4 and 178–9. [6 and 7] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §46 (Kitāb al-A‚nām) and §129 (Kitāb al-Maʿādin [wa-al-Qawl fī Jawāhir al-Ar∂]) respectively. [8] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, *§82 (Kitāb Fa∂l Hāshim ʿalā ʿAbd Shams) and §74 (Kitāb Farq mā bayn al-Jinn wa-al-Ins) respectively. The first work is devoted to the distinction between the Hashimite clan (the Banū Hāshim to which the ʿAbbasids belonged) and the Umayyads (the Banū ʿAbd Shams) by presenting their respective boasts for pre-eminence. The extant version of The Difference between Hāshim and ʿAbd Shams, written after 228/842 during the reign of al-Wāthiq (r. 227–32/842–7), presents a eulogy of the

134 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Hashimites (in the sense which Crone refers to as ‘Hāshimite Shīʿism’, loyalty to the Hashimite clan) as well as the Umayyad boasts. It concentrates equally on two branches of the Hashimite family tree, the ˝alibid and the ʿAbbasid, and argues for the legitimacy of the latter by enfolding the former in the latter and by rewriting the history of the family as the history of the caliphate, interrupted by the Umayyads. Thus it raises issues of a similar tenor as those listed above, §5.1 and §5.2 (1.4.17–5.7), though of much greater import for the legitimacy of the ruling dynasty. Bibliography: Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 71–3 (‘Hāshimite Shīʿism’) and pp. 89–94 (the ʿAbbasid claims to legitimacy vis-à-vis the Shīʿa); Sánchez, ‘Al-JāªiÕ’s treatises’. Angelology and the human-angel and angel-jinn divide is mentioned as a topic for Kalām debate at Óayawān 1.210.3–6 (= Part 6, §4.11). Cf. Óayawān 6.15.2–5 and 6.496.4–9 (translated in Chapters 2.3 and 2.4, pp. 68 and 89–90), for the title K. Fa∂īlat al-Malak ʿalā al-Jinn and Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §132 (Kitāb Farq mā bayn al-Malāʾika wa-al-Jinn) and §133 (Kitāb alQawl fi Fa∂īlat al-Malāk ʿalā al-Insān wa-al-Insān ʿalā al-Jinn). As Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, p. 147 (§132), notes, it is impossible to determine whether these topics designate parts of one composition or several. Presumably, in view of the case put forward in Chapter 2.4, p. 94, that al-JāªiÕ may have relied on lecture-notes to compile The Book of Living, these may have formed topics or items in a series of connected lectures on the sort of subjects mentioned in this paragraph, and may have resulted in a pamphlet. The work on angelology is also an exercise in Qurʾanic exegesis: one of its topics (‘the understanding of the hoopoe’) is based on Q. Naml 27: 20–26 where Solomon sends the hoopoe to bring him back information about the Queen of Sabaʾ. Some jinn are said in the Qurʾān to be in thrall of Solomon (Q. Sabaʾ 34: 12) and in Q. Naml 27: 39 it is a ʿIfrīt, a kind of demon, who promises to bring Solomon the throne of Sabaʾ (whence his isti†āʿa, his capacity for autonomous action). Isti†āʿa and maʿrifa, cognition, knowledge, were topics of great interest to the Kalām Masters, because they raised issues of volition, choice, pre-determination and the nature of action. See further, Óayawān 4.85.16–93.6 (discussed in Chapter 5.2, pp. 327–31). Bibliography: Lassner, Demonizing the Queen of Sheba (contains translations on pp. 185–214 of texts from the Islamic tradition relating to

commentary | 135 the matters alluded to here). The debates surrounding the capacity of the jinn and the hoopoe for knowledge are discussed by Geries, ‘Quelques aspects’, pp. 79–81 (on the debate concerning the jinn and those demons who try to listen to God in the heavens at Óayawān 6.264.9–281.2), and pp. 83–4 (on the hudhud ); Schöck, ‘Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit’. [9] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §49 (Kitāb al-Awfāq wa-al-Riyā∂āt). This seems to be a work on all aspects of trade; cf. the title listed above, 1.3.15 = §3.1, The Treatise on Swindling in Crafts, and 1.4.12 = §4.2; it is unclear whether the same work is intended. There is an extant work (probably erroneously) attributed to al-JāªiÕ known as Kitāb al-Taba‚‚ur bi-al-Tijāra (The Treatise on Scrutinising Trade): Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, **§222; edited by ʿAbd al-Wahhāb; trans. Pellat, ‘G ˇ āªiÕiana, I’. Works on this subject were variably indebted to the translation of the Oikonomikos of the neo-Pythagorean Bryson (second century AD?). So in the late fourth/early fifth century AH, a certain Jaʿfar b.ʿAlī al-Dimashqī wrote an Ishāra ilā Maªāsin al-Tijāra (An Indication of the Benefits of Trade), drawing on it.53 A common component of this tradition was the discussion of the domestic economy and the place of women in it, an ostensible subject of The Treatise on the Difference between Men and Women (1.4.13–16 = §4.2). In view of the argument proposed by some of al-JāªiÕ’s contemporaries that governance of society should be devolved to patriarchs, heads of households and local leaders, the subject matter of these treatises by al-JāªiÕ could have some bearing on the claims of some of his Basran colleagues that society could do without an Imam, a position with which he disagreed strongly. Bibliography: Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 66–9; Sánchez, ‘Al-JāªiÕ’s treatises’, pp. 111–47. The work may also have been concerned with some of the issues raised later in the ‘Introduction’ at 1.12.9–13 = §15.2. According to those Muslims (including some of the immediate Muʿtazilite predecessors of al-JāªiÕ) who did not recognise the legitimacy of the ruler, all forms of ownership, including trading and buying and selling, was rendered illegitimate (taªrīm al-makāsib, ‘declaring acquisitions illicit’). It is also condemned by the conceited individual who affects Íufism whom al-JāªiÕ describes at Óayawān 1.219.17–200.2; Part 6, §13.2. The Zaydī contemporary of al-JāªiÕ, al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm

136 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s identifies as the fifth of his five principles of Islam that ‘during a time in which the rulings (aªkām) are untended and when what God has decreed for the widows and orphans, the blind and lame and other vulnerable people is usurped (yuntahab), it is not licit or allowed (i†lāq) to trade property or possessions (makāsib), as it is in the time of just and good rulers (wulāh) who uphold the punishments (ªudūd ) decreed by the Merciful’. Bibliography: I use the text of al-Qāsim given by Griffini, ‘Lista dei manoscritti’, pp. 605–6; see Madelung, Der Imam al-Qāsim ibn Ibrāhīm, pp. 103–52, especially pp. 137–52; Abrahamov (trans.), ‘Introduction’, in Al-K.āsim b. Ibrāhīm on the Proof of God’s Existence, p. 38; Crone, ‘Ninth-century Muslim anarchists’, pp. 21–2; Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 346–8 (‘private property’). [10] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, *§96 ([Ikhwānīyāt]). Compare these items with Ibn Qutayba’s list of what constitutes majāz provided in his Explanation of the Complexities of the Qurʾān, Taʾwīl Mushkil al-Qurʾān, 15.17– 16.4.54 Bibliography: for a translation and discussion of one such letter attributed to al-JāªiÕ, see Gordon, ‘Yearning and disquiet’; for a poetic correspondence a century later, see Montgomery, ‘Convention and invention’. [11] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, ghost entry (al-Rasāʾil al-Hāshimīyāt) between *§82 (Kitāb Fa∂l Hāshim ʿalā ʿAbd Shams) and §83 (al-Risāla al-Kha††ābīya), with reference to *§117, Kitāb Íināʿat/Íiyāghat al-Kalām, The Treatise on the Craft of the Kalām, basing himself on a comment by the human geographer al-Masʿūdī that the Íināʿat al-Kalām is also known under the title of al-Risāla al-Hāshimīya. We should note that al-JāªiÕ refers to rasāʾil in the plural. Bibliography: van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, VI, ‘G ˇ āªiÕ Werkeliste’, pp. 313–16, §10; Zakeri, Persian Wisdom in Arabic Garb, pp. 284–5, §53; my forthcoming edition and translation of the Íināʿat al-Kalām for the Library of Arabic Literature; Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 71–3 (‘Hāshimite Shīʿism’) and pp. 89–94 (the ʿAbbasid claims to legitimacy vis-à-vis the Shīʿa). [12] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, *§183 (Kitāb Khalq al-Qurʾān = van Ess,

commentary | 137 ‘Werkeliste’, §21 and §21a), *§218 (Risāla fī Nafy al-Tashbīh/ Kitāb al-Radd ʿalā al-Mushabbiha = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §16), *§64 (Kitāb al-Futyā) and *§191 (Kitāb fī [al-Iªtijāj li-]NaÕm al-Qurʾān = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §22), respectively. All four works were written for the Chief Qā∂ī Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād: see Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, ad loc. and §192 (Risāla ilā Ibn Abī Duʾād fī K. NaÕm al-Qurʾān), (p. 155). Bibliography: van Ess, Flowering, pp. 45–77; El-Bizri, ‘God: essence and attributes’; Frank, ‘The divine attributes’; Pellat, ‘À propos du Kitāb al-Futyā de JāªiÕ’; Stewart, ‘Muªammad b. Jarīr al-˝abarī’s al-Bayån’, pp. 341–8, especially, p. 344. [13.1] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, ghost entry after §243 (Kitāb Óikāyat Qawl A‚nāf al-Zaydīya); (Pellat thinks it highly unlikely that muʿāra∂atī li-alzaydīya could be the title of a work); §156 (Kitāb Fa∂īlat al-Muʿtazila = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §12) (see also §115 Kitāb al-Iʿtizāl wa-Fa∂li-hi = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §11); §234 (Kitāb al-Waʿd wa-al-Waʿīd = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §27); **§165 (Kitāb al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā) and first ghost entry after **§165 (Kitāb al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā wa-al-Yahūd ) and §239 (Kitāb al-Radd ʿalā al-Yahūd ) (Pellat considers the phrase ʿalā al-na‚ārā wa-al-yahūd to indicate two separate works) (= van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §4 and §6). [13.2] Eight works are listed. They are: – Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, *§134 (Kitāb al-Maʿrifa = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §36); §69 (Kitāb al-Jawābāt): Pellat suggests that the jawābāt are either on the subject of the Imāma (= §103 Kitāb al-Jawābāt fī al-Imāma = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §49) or Maʿrifa *§135 (= Kitāb al-Jawābāt fī al-Maʿrifa = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §37); – Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §137 (Kitāb al-Masāʾil ): Pellat entertains its possible identity with §136 (Kitāb Masāʾil Kitāb al-Maʿrifa = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §38) or §190 (Kitāb al-Masāʾil fī al-Qurʾān = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §23) or an independent work (= van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §8, who follows Pellat in possibly connecting it with van Ess §23 [= Pellat, §190] or van Ess §38 [= Pellat, §136]); – Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §97 (A‚ªāb al-Ilhām = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §40); – Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, *§170 (Kitāb al-Óujja fī Tathbīt al-Nubūwa = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §43);

138 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s – Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, **§19 (Kitāb al-Akhbār wa-kayf Ta‚iªª = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §41); – Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §68 (Kitāb [ba‚īrat] Ghannām al-Murtadd = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §25) (cf. Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §30: Kitāb al-Radd ʿalā man Alªada fī Kitāb Allāh ʿAzza wa-Jalla); – Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §67 (Kitāb al-Radd ʿalā al-Jahmīya [fī al-Idrāk wa-alJahālāt] = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §39), who defends his reading of al-jihāt for the MSS’s al-jahālāt, accepted by Pellat. At Óayawān 5.11.3, al-jahālāt occurs in an analogous context. – Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §159 (Kitāb Farq/Fa‚l mā bayn al-Nabī wa-alMutanabbī = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §45), respectively. Note that the inexperienced dolt (ghumr) and the Addressee are charged with the same activity: that of iʿtirā∂, setting obstacles in the form of objections in the way of the truth: see also its use at 1.10.4 (§14), in the next paragraph, and 1.218.12–14, Part 6, §13.1. There is no break in the catalogue between the work on the prophet and would-be prophet and the defence of The Book of Living given in the next paragraph (14). [15.1] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, **§231 (Kitāb Maqālāt al-ʿUthmānīya = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §53); Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, §94 (Kitāb Óikāyat Qawl al-Ibā∂īya wa-al-Íufrīya wa-al-Azāriqa wa-al-Najdīya = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §55) identifies the reference to the varieties of Kharijism as a work in its own right. Note that the work listed by Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, as §243 (Óikāyat Qawl A‚nāf al-Zaydīya = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §60) is not one of the titles attacked by the Addressee in The Book of Living (and so is not to be found on page 1.9 of the text of The Book of Living, as Pellat mistakenly avers). The work on the ʿUthmānīya and ¤irārīya is another of the many doxographical texts in the JāªiÕian library which the Addressee upbraids. Each of the sects mentioned take radically different stances on the rightfulness and legitimacy of the first four Muslim caliphs. By the time of the composition of The Book of Living the Azāriqa branch of Kharijism had been suppressed, as had most of the Najdīya (also known as the Najadāt), though remnants still persisted in Arabia; the Íufrīya continued to attract supporters in Iraq and North Africa, and there was an Ibā∂ī presence in Basra. The Najdīya adopted the position that the Imamate was unnecessary: that is, that society did not need a leader. The Shīʿī

commentary | 139 groups (Rāfi∂a, Zaydīya and Ghāliya) are here opposed, in the Addressee’s critique, to the so-called proto-Sunnī groups, the ʿUthmānīya and ¤irārīya. The version of the treatise devoted to the ʿUthmānīya described here appears to contain some of the arguments and pronouncements made by the various sub-sects of the Khārijīya. Bibliography: Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 54–64; van Ess, Flowering, pp. 117–51; Afsaruddin, Excellence and Precedence; Sánchez, ‘Al-JāªiÕ’s treatises’, pp. 23–109. [15.2] Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, *§1 (Kitāb fī [Masāʾil] al-ʿAbbāsīya = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §51). Pellat entertains its identity with either §99 (Kitāb Imāmat Banī/Wuld al-ʿAbbās = van Ess, ‘Werkeliste’, §50) or §141 (Risāla fī al-Mīrāth). He notes that it was written immediately after the ʿUthmānīya, the order in which they are listed here in the attack. From al-JāªiÕ’s remarks we can surmise that the work was a discussion of arguments in favour of the Imamate, as it is contrasted with some of the more controversial theories against the Imamate addressed in the ʿUthmānīya. Crone, ‘Ninth-Century Muslim Anarchists’, has argued that this group is to be identified as the Muʿtazilīs who followed the line taken by ¤irār b. al-A‚amm (d. 201/816 or 202/817) on how society could be organised without an imam. Under the caliphate of al-Mahdī, the legitimacy of the ʿAbbasid claim to the Imamate was justified in terms of wirātha, inheritance, from al-ʿAbbās. It is connected in the sources with Abū Hurayra al-Rāwandī (whence the name al-Rāwandīya). According to this aetiology, the caliphate passed from the Prophet to al-ʿAbbās. It continued in his descendants until the ʿAbbasid revolution. Of course this meant the illegitimacy of every caliph prior to al-Íaffāª. The extant fragment of The Treatise of the ʿAbbāsīya concerns the legal authority of the caliphs and the practice of naskh, ‘abrogation’, in the form of a debate between the supporters of Abū Bakr and ʿUmar and the supporters of ʿAlī and his family. It focuses on Abū Bakr’s disagreement with Fā†ima concerning inheritance. Bibliography: Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 92–3; Sánchez, ‘Al-JāªiÕ’s treatises’, pp. 180–90, who connects it with ʿAbbasid debates concerning al-Maʾmūn’s pro-Shīʿī policies. [16] Cf. Khalq al-Qurʾān Rasāʾil 3.288.4–6: ‘Books should only be written against opponents and one’s equals, for friends against enemies – for those

140 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s who see that speculation is a duty and that knowledge has a value, who have a method when it comes to equity (in‚āf ) and have the wherewithal to acquire understanding (maʿrifa)’. The role of the walī (plural awliyāʾ) in ʿAbbasid courtly and elite society is extremely obscure. It is not clear to me, for example, what relation, if any, the role has to the notion of the walī Allāh, which was sufficiently developed in the course of the third century for Ibn Abī al-Dunyā (d. 281/894) to compile a Kitāb al-Awliyāʾ: Berndt Radtke, ‘Walī’, EI2, XI, pp. 109–12. The notion of the ‘special friend’ of the caliph, for example, is still attested at the court of al-Muqtadir; the Samanid Emir asks Ibn Fa∂lān after the well-being of the Caliph, his brave companions, fityān, and his special friends, awliyāʾ: Risāla, 77.4. In the Risāla ilā ʿAbd Allāh b. Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād, translated in Chapter 4.2, pp. 201–7, al-JāªiÕ beseeches the Chief Judge to make him one of his aʿwān, his assistants. I also do not know if the awliyāʾ, the ‚aªāba and the aʿwān, be they at court or part of a patron’s retinue, are synonymous functions: al-JāªiÕ, Manāqib al-Turk Hārūn Rasāʾil 1.8.2, where awliyāʾ is virtually synonymous with an‚ār khalīfati-kā, that is al-Mutawakkil, the caliph of al-JāªiÕ’s patron al-Fatª b. Khāqān; Fī Dhamm Akhlāq al-Kuttāb Rasāʾil 2.189.5, where al-JāªiÕ refers to the awliyāʾ of Abū Bakr. Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 276–7, notes that according to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ in the entourage of the early ʿAbbasid caliphs one of the functions of the Caliph’s companions was to act as alsinat al-raʿīya, the tongues, that is voices, of the subjects, where they are also described as al-aʿwān ʿalā raʾyi-hi, the helpers in his decisions: Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, al-Íaªāba, 51.5, §44. Zaman, Religion and Politics, p. 83, note 47, shows that the practice of caliphal ‚aªāba was still in place during the reign of al-Muʿta‚im (r. 218–27/833–42). [17] At 1.7.10–9.4 (§11), the Addressee, in his critique of the Hāshimīyāt Epistles, cites seven verses of poetry and one Bedouin proverb in support of his position. Al-JāªiÕ now returns the favour with three verses (one by the Umayyad controversialist and poet al-Farazdaq and one by the Prophet’s poet laureate, Óassān b. Thābit) and one proverb. In them the Addressee’s invective is zoomorphised: it becomes a dog’s bark and a rutting he-goat’s rattle; and is trivialised (it is a piss in the ocean, as it were). [20] I construe the sentence not as a list of separate scholarly groups within

commentary | 141 Islamic society, though that is an entirely feasible reading of the Arabic, but as a list of separate scholarly activities of one group, the ahl al-ʿilm wa-al-naÕar: in other words, the wāw is epexegetical. The scholarly activities I understand to be the manifold scholarly and social facets of the third century Muʿtazilī Kalām Masters as championed by al-JāªiÕ in his works. Bibliography: on debate and the unease over it generally: McAuliffe: ‘“Debate with them in the better way”’; McAuliffe, ‘The genre boundaries of Qurʾānic commentary’; Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam (with abundant incidental information on debating, laudable and reprehensible); Reinink and Vanstiphout, Dispute Poems and Dialogues; McKinney, The Case of Rhyme, pp. 66–81. In Flowering, pp. 28-34, van Ess provides a concise historical overview of debate and contention in the early period. The programmatic description of the contents of the treatise, however brief here (1.25.12–13), is also a signal for a transition. The next stage of the ‘Introduction’, 1.26.2, begins with aqūlu, ‘I say’, a stark contrast to the predominance in the text thus far of the second person singular verbs, ʿibta and qulta. In al-JāªiÕ’s works, transitions are often achieved by means of a change in the person of the verb or the person of the locutor. [25] See Óayawān 3.393.1–397.15; al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 254.1–255.11; Montgomery, ‘Speech and nature, Part 3’, pp. 231–2 (on moral elitism); Geries, ‘Quelques aspects’, p. 85 and Geries, Un genre littéraire, p. 46, note 2, on the debate over what befalls animals (and children) in the afterlife; Óayawān 4.287.14–289.9; Charles Pellat, ‘Aªmad ibn Óābi†’, EI2, I, p. 272; Pellat, ‘Deux curieux Muʿtazilites’, pp. 482–94; Heemskerk, Suffering, pp. 187–9; van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, III, p. 431; Reynolds, A Muslim Theologian, pp. 34–5. [26] The lexicographers are unsure about the exact identity of the Rāʿibī pigeon, singled out for the loudness of its cry. From the context it is clearly a hybrid, though we cannot tell whether its mother or its father is a pigeon or dove or whether the Rāʿibī is a cross between two other species. Pigeon fancying and racing was a popular pastime and the ʿAbbasids used a pigeon post. Thematically, the passage alludes to the topic of the hudhud and its use by Solomon, discussed in al-JāªiÕ’s work, The Treatise on the Difference between Jinn and Man and the Difference between the Angels and the Jinn (Óayawān

142 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 1.6.12–15, §8, and 1.97.3–13) and to the marvellous melodies produced by the birds praised at 1.35.11–13. [27] The mule (male and female) is the offspring of a he-ass and a mare, while the hinny is the offspring of a stallion and a she-ass. The term for mule, baghl, can presumably denote either hybrid. Al-JāªiÕ appears to use baghl for the male and baghla for the mare mule (though a very rare occurrence, the mare can become pregnant and produce viable offspring, whereas the hinny is sterile). The Addressee singles out the mule as an entity (shayʾ) which does not belong in this world, insofar as it is an offspring which does not resemble its lineage. This emphasis on lineage resumes the reference to maternal and paternal uncles at 1.4.11 (§4.1), the Kitāb al-Íuraªāʾ wa-al-Hujanāʾ. According to Q. Naªl 16: 8, God created horses, mules and asses for men to use. Many well-to-do individuals, men and women, rode mules in the ʿAbbasid era. Bibliography: Montgomery, ‘Speech and nature, Part 1’, for some anecdotes; Silverstein, Postal Systems, pp. 111–13 for the use of mules in the postal service. [28] The Khilāsī is apparently the offspring of an Indian and a Persian fowl; the Wardānī is clearly a kind of pigeon produced from cross-breeding. The Addressee seems to allege that there are good and bad hybrids, though his exact reasons for preferring the one over the other are not completely clear but seem to centre on appearance. The Simʿ was generally thought to be the offspring of a male wolf and a female hyena and the ʿIsbār was generally thought to be the offspring of a male hyena and a female wolf. Al-JāªiÕ later reviews the evidence that they are hybrids but is unable to give testimony as to its veracity (1.181.9–185.11). Bibliography: Macdonald, ‘Two mysterious animals’, with a translation of 1.181.9–185.11. [29] Al-JāªiÕ concludes his verbatim quotation (qawl: 1.102.8–104.17) and representation (paraphrase) (105.1–106.2; cf. zaʿamta: 1.105.1 and 5) of the Addressee’s speech. This is yet another instance of how important it is to follow al-JāªiÕ’s indications of who is speaking and when the speech is concluded. The possibility of reconstituting vinegar as wine is obscure. Bibliography: Kueny, The Rhetoric of Sobriety, pp. 34–41 (on vinegar and nabīdh); A. J. Wensinck, ‘Khamr’, EI2, IV, pp. 994–7 (p. 995).

commentary | 143 The dog is like middling discourse, be it poetry, song or anecdote: its mixture of ‘hot’ (which I have rendered as ‘spicy’) and ‘cold’ (‘bland’) as tepid or lukewarm entertainment condemns it. The reference to entertaining anecdotes (nādira) at 1.105.17–106.2 reiterates the point made about anecdotes at 1.3.16–4.1, §3.1, The Treatise on Pleasantries and Rare Witticisms.

3.4 The Argument

[1] Al-JāªiÕ begins his work with a pious address to an unnamed recipient. It is an address which contains ten wishes. These wishes are not for continued well-being, or prosperity or felicity in continued favour from God, as we often find in such opening addresses. Rather, they are wishes for the (re-) establishment of intellectual well-being. In other words, al-JāªiÕ prays for the institution or the restitution (as opposed to the continuation) of these virtues. Therefore the Addressee needs God to unite him with knowledge and truth (such a connection being presently non-existent). The extent of the Addressee’s intellectual corruption is indicated by the doublet of nasab and sabab, the former being kinship through birth, the latter through marriage. Al-JāªiÕ wishes that the Addressee effectively be reborn and so reintegrated into society. That this corruption is not only intellectual or a matter of birth and social standing but is also moral is expressed in the wishes for the sweetness of piety, the might of the truth, and avoidance of the abjectness of falsehood. Al-JāªiÕ is frank about the inappropriateness of such a prayer. His Addressee is already a man of moment, one who had previously cared for his soul, his spiritual well-being, and had made it the mark of his honour. The station in which he had placed his soul is one commensurate with his religious standing and with his personal virtues. Something is seriously wrong for a supplication such as this to have been warranted. It is not one which al-JāªiÕ makes lightly or unadvisedly. The Addressee is presently devoid of such virtues: for example, to wish that someone be helped to avoid uncertainty and made inviolable to perplexity is to imply that such a person is presently in a state of uncertainty and perplexity. Shubha and ªayra are errors which result from the faulty 144

the arg ument | 145 application of the intellect (ʿaql) in judgements and especially in managing aporias (shukūk, doubts) in dialectical reasoning (Kalām) and which engender corresponding states of mind. An introductory series of wishes such as this can only mean that al-JāªiÕ’s work is intended to correct these faults and set them aright, or in terms of the third century: to enjoin what is known to be right and to turn others from what is disapproved of as wrong, al-amr bi-al-maʿrūf wa-al-nahy ʿan al-munkar.55 [2] The Addressee has taken offence at a debate on the respective merits of the dog and the rooster between two (Muʿtazilite) theologians: Abū Isªāq al-NaÕÕām and a certain Maʿbad, famous largely for his involvement in this event.56 It appears that the debate between al-NaÕÕām and Maʿbad was conducted after the manner of a trial for it led to a balancing of the evidence and a final judgement concerning them. It is unclear from the current passage whether it is the subject matter of the debate (dogs and roosters), the disproportionate attention lavished on the debate or the ‘bad’ example set by the spectacle of two eminent theologians debating on two animals of low cultural esteem rather than the prime matters of theology (e.g. subjects such as divine unicity and reward and punishment in the afterlife) that the Addressee takes umbrage with. The contours of the offence become clear as the ‘Introduction’ progresses. We must presume for the moment that it is all three, since hazl, triviality, was often detected when a serious activity, such as legal proceedings, was used for something considered to be trivial, such as a debate on the merits and demerits of two otherwise contemptible animals, or when someone grave and serious stooped so low as to discuss inappropriate matters: ‘men of gravity are not men of levity’, as the Addressee points out later (Óayawān 1.201.2–3 = Part 6, §3.1). Al-JāªiÕ’s exploration of the animal kingdom in The Book of Living thus becomes motivated by the need to correct the Addressee’s ­erroneous assessment of this debate. Al-JāªiÕ himself composed many such debates. It is one of his most enduring compositional techniques. Perhaps under the influence of Ibn Qutayba’s dismissal of al-JāªiÕ as someone able to argue for both one thing and its opposite (see Part 1, pp. 36–7), Geries wonders whether al-JāªiÕ has enhanced his depiction of the debate or perhaps even invented it, and argues

146 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s that al-JāªiÕ entertains an epistemological relativism, in a theory of value which considers that each and every thing, by virtue of being both good and bad at the same time, is effectively neutral. Consequently he suggests that al-JāªiÕ could have pictured each of his two adversaries as defending and attacking such despicable creatures as the dog and the rooster, by demonstrating the boons and the banes of each.57 Thus, according to this view of the debate, al-NaÕÕām and Maʿbad would, each and severally, have taken turns to enlarge upon the boons (maªāsin) and the banes (masāwī) of both the dog and the rooster. But we might imagine a scenario in which al-NaÕÕām first promoted the maªāsin of the dog and the rooster, and Maʿbad their masāwī, with this exercise followed by al-NaÕÕām’s promotion of the masāwī of the dog and the rooster and Maʿbad’s essay in promoting their maªāsin. Such a scenario would represent a display of rhetorical prowess and sophistry, rather than Geries’s epistemological exploration of the relativist nature of value, which I find difficult to reconcile with the Muʿtazila’s general approach to good and bad as ontological categories.58 Anyway, all this is unnecessarily complicated: al-NaÕÕām promoted the boons of the dog and enumerated the banes of the rooster, Maʿbad promoted the boons of the rooster and enumerated the banes of the dog. Each animal has a ‘proponent’, a ‚āªib: see Óayawān 1.222.2 and 222.13–14. The purport of the debate lies elsewhere: in human responsibility and disobedience to divine command: Óayawān 1.207.15–16 = Part 6, §4.7, p. 406. The value of things is relative, rather than relativist. It can only be fully comprehended, assessed and determined through comparison (see terms such as muwāzana, weighing things up) and the explication of the relations that obtain between things. In seventeenth-century Britain the question of animal reason constituted a major philosophical problem. A public debate on whether dogs could reason was held in Cambridge in 1615 between John Preston and Matthew Wren in front of James I. It was also socially unacceptable even to pretend ‘to be an animal for purposes of ritual or entertainment’, an attitude reminiscent of the unease aroused by the notion of hazl.59 [3] Al-JāªiÕ introduces the theme of the invective directed by the Addressee at his treatises. In each instance al-JāªiÕ establishes a close connection between the attack on him and on his books. Four treatises, which are no longer

the arg ument | 147 extant, are listed and appear to involve lowly or discreditable subjects. They are also, by implication, liable, in the eyes of the Addressee, to the accusations which are levelled at al-NaÕÕām and Maʿbad for their debate and are, I presume, also characterised by the application of similar dialectical methods to the discussion of their topics. The fourth work mentioned seems to include an ethical analysis of the passions, of the type common in Classical and late Antique philosophy, in which questions relating to human behaviour and emotions are discussed. Specifically in this treatise whether these particular passions are natural to all humans (be they habitual or acquired), are specific to one religious community as opposed to another or are essential to freeborn elites, provided that they are not engendered by viciousness, ill-health or an inability to reason. [4] The tenor has been raised, for the subject matter of these three works is no longer completely disreputable: breeding, skin colour and ethnicity and parental pedigree (probably of horses and camels, but equally possibly of humans and slaves); agriculture, trade and economics; the position of women in society. The respective values of purity and miscegenation, and their ­assessment, are an important aspect of the ‘Introduction’. [5] The tenor of these works continues to be elevated: their subject matter is not in the least disreputable. Al-JāªiÕ’s perceived fault in these works is apparently threefold: a lack of temperance which verged on factionalism; injudicious assessment of the contending parties in the case of Arabs and clients; and prolixity through devoting two treatises to a subject which should properly have merited only one. Interestingly, the Addressee imputes to al-JāªiÕ in his treatment of the Qaª†ānīs the fault of tanaqqu‚, ‘speaking ill’, which al-JāªiÕ imputes to him in his treatment of the theologian Maʿbad (Óayawān 1.3.11). Prolixity and repetition were grave errors in public discourse. Al-JāªiÕ will return to them again in the course of the ‘Introduction’ and the treatise itself. As the Addressee alleges, they cause readers and listeners unnecessary hassle (muʾan). The Addressee, in accusing al-JāªiÕ of these faults, uses (at 1.5.6) the terminology of nasab, kinship through birth, which al-JāªiÕ applies to him in the opening supplication (1.3.4). It is by limiting the deleterious effects of ʿa‚abīya that al-JāªiÕ thinks The Book of Living will save his society. It was thought vital for the preservation of social equilibrium that

148 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s the interest groups in society remain disparate, if somewhat overlapping and loosely articulated. [6 and 7] It is unclear why the Addressee has found fault with either of these books, the first clearly a work of religious anthropology, the second a work on metallurgy and alchemy. One of al-JāªiÕ’s primary interests in The Book of Living is in the notion of ‘class’ (ajnās: 1.6.6), particularly in interstitial things which appear to resist being subsumed easily into any one class: transmutation demands that one thing changes into another, different thing. [8] These paragraphs establish two central points of contention to which al-JāªiÕ returns at various points in the ‘Introduction’ and The Book of Living. The difference between men and the jinn is a signal that the Qurʾanic treatment of Solomon and the hoopoe is at stake, an attack on Qurʾanic meaning which was launched by the group known as the Eternalists, the Dahrīya: see further Chapters 4.5, pp. 262–5, and 5.2, pp. 327–31. The reference to Hāshim and ʿAbd Shams picks up on the attack on the political works in §5 and anticipates al-JāªiÕ’s major defence of the stratagem of representation, ªikāya, in §11. [9] As The Book of Living is a book driven by a desire to regulate society, it is hardly surprising to encounter al-JāªiÕ’s defence of a work apparently devoted to the regulation of trading practices. [10] The Addressee now attacks al-JāªiÕ’s ‘informal’ compositions, the letters and epistles which he wrote to close friends and which were not his ‘commissioned’ works or works written with a view to dedication, that is those which he wrote on behalf of, or at the behest of, a patron. Again no reason is given for the Addressee’s umbrage. Such letters were composed in both poetry and prose. It is, I think, one of the tragedies of JāªiÕian studies that these epistles have not survived. Al-Kindī’s Epistle on the Quantity of Aristotle’s Books, Risāla fī Kammīyat Kutub Aris†ū†ālīs, suggests that Aristotle wrote the Nicomachean Ethics for ‘one of his brethren’ (baʿ∂ ikhwāni-hi).60 [11] This is the most extensive attack by the Addressee so far. It is the first time in The Book of Living that he is given a voice. The subject of the epistles seems to be the Hāshimīya (unless the epithet is bestowed on the works by virtue of being patronised by a Hashimite), which might simply mean no more than the Hashimite family, and a discussion of the entitlement to the caliphate of the ʿAbbasids: see §7, pp. 133–4. The works, to judge from the

the arg ument | 149 Addressee’s criticisms, appear to be heresiographical. If so, they would probably have described the claims and arguments of the Hāshimīya (literally the followers of Abū Hāshim [d. 98/716], i.e. the grandson of ʿAlī b. Abī ˝ālib and the son of Ibn al-Óanafīya). They would thus have dealt with (and given voice to) the ‘bequest’ (wa‚īya) rather than ‘inheritance’ (wirātha) narrative of ʿAbbasid legitimacy and succession to the leadership of the community. As was previously the case with The Treatise on the Qaª†ānīya and the ʿAdnānīya, al-JāªiÕ is said to be guilty of a lack of temperance, of dressing and showcasing the claims of the Hāshimīya in too good a light. As a consequence, the Addressee imputes, he ceases to present their arguments as a Muʿtazilī (i.e. as he ought to, in view of his doctrinal affiliations), but rather as a Zaydī. The Addressee considers that these writings render him effectively if unwittingly a propagandist on behalf of the Rāfi∂a. He sees this as one step short of the hyperbolic claims of the extremist Shīʿī groups (referred to as the Ghāliya). It will become evident in the course of the first part of the ‘Introduction’ that al-JāªiÕ’s practice of quotation and representation (ªikāya) is considered by the Addressee to be a feature of hazl, triviality, and mazª, levity, and so is all too prone to endanger and damage social cohesion. In these terms al-JāªiÕ’s error is compound: it is one of political judgement, of cultural education (the inappropriate assessment and use of his cultural heritage), and of misunderstanding human psychology. As in the case of the debate on the dog and the rooster, drollery and levity are held by the Addressee to lead to serious consequences – they are deleterious to the stability of the community. In his reference to multiplicity, the Addressee may allude to the Soritic paradox, the classic formulation of which is extant only in Óunayn b. Isªāq’s translation of Galen’s treatise, On Medical Experience, Fī al-Tajriba al-˝ibbīya.61 The eristical context for this allusion seems to be the Muʿtazilī dispute over theodicy, specifically about whether God’s blessings are finite or not: see Óayawān 1.206.6–13 = Part 6, §4.5 (p. 405). The notion of ‘oaks from acorns’ then becomes the subject of seven poetic illustrations (among them verses by the pre-Islamic poet ˝arafa and the ʿAbbasid Abū Nuwās) and one proverbial utterance taken from the Bedouin. These are apparently adduced by the Addressee in criticism of al-JāªiÕ’s approach in the work. The illustrations also make it amply clear that the Addressee considers levity and triviality to be dangerous to society. It

150 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s is worth noting that to my ears, at least, the Addressee can sound remarkably like al-JāªiÕ, by which I mean simply that they share and speak in the same cultural idiom (and not that the Addressee is some JāªiÕian doppelganger). [12] The first two and the last of these titles are examples of Muʿtazilī theology. The issue of whether the Qurʾān was created or eternal was viewed by the Kalām Masters as having severe implications for how one conceived of divine unicity. It involved the question of God’s attributes and whether the ability to speak, for example, was co-eternal with God, leading to the possible charge that there were other eternal existents alongside the divine. The practice of anthropomorphism, literally assimilating, comparing God with man, raised issues not only about the divine attributes but also the absolute transcendence of the deity whom many (al-JāªiÕ among them) considered to be above and beyond any similarity to human beings. The third title is an (early) work on Islamic jurisprudence which may have enlarged upon the legal teachings of al-JāªiÕ’s teacher al-NaÕÕām. See the translation of the epistle by al-JāªiÕ to the Chief Judge Ibn Abī Duʾād offering the work to him: Chapter 4.2, pp. 201–7. The final work listed represents the early stages of the arguments and debates about the nature of Arabic and the rhetorical aspects of the Qurʾān which would lead to the emergence of the dogma of the ‘Inimitability of the Qurʾān’ (iʿjāz al-qurʾān): see the discussion (and references cited there) of ‘the grateful response’ in Chapter 5.2 (pp. 319–32). Note that the precise object of the invective has changed: it is no longer al-JāªiÕ but his books which are abused. In other words, at this point, the invective establishes complete identity between al-JāªiÕ and the books which he has composed. There is no break in al-JāªiÕ’s catalogue between itemising the work on the Qurʾān and the first title given in §13. [13] The tempo has changed, as al-JāªiÕ moves from a descriptive account of the works which the Addressee has attacked to a list of titles. He enumerates more than sixteen works of Muʿtazilī theology, including: the establishment of Muʿtazilī doctrines as superior; a work on meriting the promise of Paradise and the threat of Hell (a topic which involved issues of desert and considerations of legal and moral majority); and a work of polemic against Christians and Jews [13.1]. It is his works on epistemology however which are lumped together and rejected tout court, be they of the responsa format (as well as being the

the arg ument | 151 cornerstone of the Islamic educational system, question and answer was used for training dialecticians in not only posing and responding to the right sort of questions in a debate but also identifying and analysing the contours of a topic); rejections of those who believe that the Imam is able to receive divine inspiration (the Imāmī doctrine of ilhām); or who claim some form of prophecy; or in defence of the Prophethood of Muªammad (knowing how to assess the signs of Muªammad’s prophethood was an important sub-discipline of epistemology and a way of rejecting Muslim and Jewish attacks on Islam); and the attack on the doctrine of the Jahmīya who argued that perception was effected by God.62 Al-JāªiÕ accuses the Addressee of seeking to hinder the dissemination of these books by interfering with his readers who sought to copy them and to gain benefit from studying them. The preface to The Rebuttal of the Christians connects its composition to a request made of al-JāªiÕ by an important personage, possibly al-Fatª b. Khāqān on behalf of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 232–47/847–61): see Chapter 4.3, pp. 234–7. This has been construed as evidence that The Book of Living (or more accurately, at least the ‘Introduction’) should be dated to al-Mutawakkil’s reign. The extant text of The Rebuttal of the Christians may not be the same work referred to in this passage, in view of al-JāªiÕ’s habit of recycling his works and possibly even of redacting them for dissemination some time after their original composition, however desirable it may be to date the extant version of The Book of Living to the first decade of this Caliph’s reign. [14] The catalogue comes to an abrupt halt as al-JāªiÕ launches into a sustained defence of The Book of Living. The defence is mounted on two fronts: the didactic and educational value of the book; and its significance for the religious well-being of the Islamic and non-Islamic peoples. As an educational treatise, it is intended to function as a training manual for students. The subtleties of the topic cede to the major issues and the student is given information on the terms that dialectical investigations should proceed on the basis of and to what level or rank each of its major ideas belong. Yet its comprehensive nature means that it is also a labour-saving device for the expert who can benefit from the information it presents, without having to go to the trouble of collecting it for himself. (This picks up on an earlier criticism by the Addressee, 1.5.7 = §5, that al-JāªiÕ had imposed

152 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s too great a burden on his audience by devoting two treatises to a subject which ought to have merited only one.)63 Al-JāªiÕ then proceeds to bemoan the travails of authorship and the hazards of hostile reception. The composition of a book is onerous and fatiguing. It renders an author doubly vulnerable because those who read it have not been through the same intense labour as he has. He proposes that the community of scholars ought to be predicated upon mutual respect and gratitude, rather than on competitiveness and animosity. Thus inconsiderate and intemperate criticism of books becomes a communal fault, as the writing of a book is deemed to be an act of generosity which ought to establish its own code of appropriate exchange. By implication, the Addressee, like so many other scholars of the day, is guilty of breaking the social code, because he does not abide by the terms of this exchange. The Book of Living is a work central to the religious weal of the nations, Arab and non-Arab alike. (Thus some of the issues raised earlier in the ‘Introduction’, at 1.4.17–5.7 = §5 are resumed.) Despite being written in formal Arabic, its concerns are with the maintenance of the integrity of the Islamic community (which is why al-JāªiÕ uses the term jamāʿī), and its approach is catholic, combinatory and inclusive. The insights of GraecoArabic philosophy are combined with what can be learned in the Islamic lecture system (samāʿ) and with knowledge which is empirically acquired. The Qurʾān and the Sunna of Prophet Muªammad, that is the code of religious and social conduct based upon his sayings and deeds, also participate in its message along with the lessons which can be obtained from sensory perception and from how natural reason (gharīza) learns from the senses. Therefore its appeal extends across all the moral categories of society, pious and impious, earnest and frivolous, young and old. By implication, the Addressee, having failed to take this aspect of the work into account, is imputed with anti-communitarian sentiments, with an opposition to the message of Islam. The description by al-JāªiÕ given of his approach in The Book of Living Beings is thus, like the vision of Islam it promotes, inclusive. This book is intended to unite Arabs and non-Arabs in Islam and to maintain the cohesiveness of society. Why he thinks this, is the subject of Part 5, pp. 315–17. This is also the first rehearsal of an important aspect of al-JāªiÕ’s encomium of books: the curious ability discernible in the book to be both one

the arg ument | 153 thing and its opposite. We note that, if the Addressee has already criticised The Book of Living, then the rebuttal of the Addressee contained in the ‘Introduction’ must have been composed later than the (first version of ) the treatise. The Addressee has attacked its wording, ideas and composition (naÕm). He has taken exception to how al-JāªiÕ has sculpted and moulded it but worst of all he has criticised al-JāªiÕ’s purpose in writing it, even though such a subject ought to be above and beyond such mundane criticisms. [15] The last item of the JāªiÕian library in the Addressee’s attack is listed. Note that the invective has been redirected at al-JāªiÕ and not directly at his books. Al-JāªīÕ’s spirited defence grows apace. At the heart of his argument here lies the notion of ªikāya, which I have rendered as ‘representation’. It combines the idea of mimesis and mimicry with that of verbatim and accurate quotation, almost to the point of impersonation or ventriloquism. The Addressee has misconstrued the mechanics of ªikāya and so blames the messenger for the message. Presumably, his accusation is that the arguments should not have been aired in the first place, just as he seems to hold that trivial matters ought not to be discussed because of the unforeseen consequences for society. But al-JāªiÕ does not entertain this possibility. He proceeds to demonstrate how he cannot be accused of both pro- and anti-Shīʿī sentiments, how he cannot be a member of the ʿUthmānīya and the Nā‚iba (i.e. anti-ʿAlid proto-Sunnīs) and simultaneously of their antonyms, the Rāfi∂a and the Ghāliya. By the logic of the Addressee, al-JāªiÕ should be that most contradictory of creatures: someone whose affiliations lie with both opposing factions! But, he claims, surely this cannot be the case. The reason must lie elsewhere. It must be because al-JāªiÕ had represented the arguments of the ʿUthmānīya in too strong a light which displeased the Addressee, whose sympathies, if I have understood the passage correctly, lie with the pro-ʿAlid Shīʿa (in view of the reference to the proto-Sunnīs as ‘your enemies’).64 The final point of al-JāªiÕ’s riposte is that if the Addressee had wished to attack him on the grounds of representing the arguments of the ʿUthmānīya too well, he should have brought this charge against him and not the charge of creedal allegiance which al-JāªiÕ has just refuted. [16] Al-JāªiÕ now moves from defence of his books to speaking in his capacity as one of the Addressee’s awliyāʾ, chosen, special companions, participating in the tradition of providing moral and ethical counsel to those in

154 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s power (known in Arabic as na‚īªa). I read this as a reference to the role which al-JāªiÕ fulfilled in the Addressee’s circle and that thus the Addressee here must be al-JāªiÕ’s superior, if not his patron.65 The Addressee’s frailty in argumentation, his lack of expertise in dialectic, has meant that he has squandered a golden opportunity to mount a respectable attack on al-JāªiÕ. This lack of expertise is paralleled by a lack of self-control and an excess of rash emotion (here presented as an illness). For a similar set of incriminations about al-Zayyāt’s inability to control his emotions, see the digest of the points which al-JāªiÕ makes in his Epistle on Earnestness and Jest, Risāla fī al-Jidd wa-al-Hazl; Montgomery, ‘JāªiÕ on jest and earnest’, pp. 214–21. He is also guilty of a breach of trust and loyalty for publicly vilifying (sabb) one of his trusted companions (al-JāªiÕ), thereby endangering the social fabric further. [17] Al-JāªiÕ explains what the Addressee should have done. He should have enlisted the support of a comrade, an expert in dialectic, who could have been empowered to attack the Addressee’s (imagined) opponent (al-JāªiÕ) and at the same time could have provided him with the cultural and moral guidance which his wayward emotional state requires. What is at stake is the Addressee’s prosperity in this world and the next. [18] Al-JāªiÕ now combines sincere advice (na‚īªa) with threats. The first three poetic examples he quotes describe the sort of response which the Addressee’s behaviour ought to merit: like for like. Al-JāªiÕ, however, continues to abide by the bond of loyalty which obtains between him and the Addressee as one of his chosen friends, awliyāʾ. Thus he cannot emulate his poetic exemplars in this regard. What he can do is to display his self-control (it is Zufar’s forbearance, his ªilm, in issuing a warning, rather than chopping off the man’s head, which is stressed) and neither urge others to speak well of the Addressee (the commands to which al-Masʿūdī refers in his poem) nor forbid them from speaking ill of him (the prohibitions referred to). There is a further parallel: in the instance of al-Masʿūdī’s poem, we have a pious and respected Muslim resolutely opposing powerful members of the aristocracy. Al-JāªiÕ can also imitate al-Namir al-Tawlab in praying to God to recompense the Addressee for his breach of trust. His verses describe his consternation and desire for revenge at the behaviour of his beloved who betrayed his trust (i.e. the love he has confided in her) despite his honourable treatment of her: a fitting description of the breakdown of the relationship between

the arg ument | 155 al-JāªiÕ and the Addressee (the occurrence in the verse of the key verb ʿāba, to inveigh against, is not, I suspect, coincidental). Thus, the Addressee has underestimated the resources at al-JāªiÕ’s command. That he has not yet used those resources is an indication of his ªilm, his self-restraint and control of his emotions. [19] The threats of retaliation are now specified: the contest would be a muʿāra∂a, a competition in the form of a verbal imitation of the Addressee’s invective. I presume it to be informed by the rules of dialectic: al-JāªiÕ has already implied what a poor dialectician the Addressee is. In Arabic poetic practice, where the exercise of muʿāra∂a was common, the imitating poem would be cast in the same rhyme and metre of the work it set out to imitate. There can occasionally be some degree of imitation in term of content (themes and diction). But this will not be a laudatory emulation: it will be vicious in the stain which it leaves on the Addressee’s name, whilst also being more truthful and more just than his invective of al-JāªiÕ has been. There is one opportunity left for the Addressee to save himself and his reputation. It is epitomised by an eight-line poem by al-ʿAttābī (d. 208/823 or 220/835). With this poem and the proverb and line of verse which follow, al-JāªiÕ resumes his role of counsellor offering sincere advice (na‚īªa). See further his appeal to the Addressee at Óayawān 1.218.15–220.10 (= Part 6, §13.2). This stage of al-JāªiÕ’s rebuttal of the Addressee is concluded with his appeal to the authority of the Qurʾān and the Sunna of the Prophet, to what has been established as proper comportment by the Revelation and man’s natural intelligence (fi†ra) (when it is sound and not ill: remember al-JāªiÕ has suggested at 1.12.17 [§16] that the Addressee is ill) and by the arguments, maxims and poetic statements established and accepted by ʿAbbasid society as ethical norms. The final sentence of this appeal expresses in a nutshell a basic interpretative impulse of the whole Book of Living: the authority of the Revelation and the value of reasoning. That this is not an opposition but a concord is expressed by the syntax. The conceptual field of the root dalla (to point to) is central to this process and will come to dominate large sections of the ‘Introduction’: see Chapter 5.4, pp. 384–7. At this point, al-JāªiÕ is no longer simply speaking directly to the Addressee. He now begins actively and openly to involve his audience. It is

156 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s they whose values he appeals to directly, as he has implicitly throughout. It is they who are the real arbiters of the success of his plaint. (The Addressee, by virtue of his superior status is the immediate arbiter; God of course is the ultimate arbiter.) In this paragraph and in the topic which he discusses at some length (of animals and humans being wrongly harmed, punished or killed for something which they did not do or for which they are not responsible),66 al-JāªiÕ is at pains to exculpate himself of any imputation of moral transgression in being compelled to respond to the Addressee’s invective. We should also remember that to address a superior as al-JāªiÕ does was an activity fraught with danger. It was not unknown for individuals to be flogged for what they had said.67 For the next seven pages or so, al-JāªiÕ explores, though poetry, anecdote and oratorical statements, the theme introduced in the course of the last point of his address, namely the proper apportioning of blame and censure, specifically that an injured or guiltless party should not be punished for the actions perpetrated by another. He mixes examples taken from poetry and prose, and relating to both animals and humans, in order to build up a composite picture of how execrable it is to punish the guiltless or to accuse them of wrongdoing.68 He concludes with the words, ‘It is in this manner (sīra) that you are behaving towards me’ [1.24.15]. [20] The invective has passed beyond al-JāªiÕ’s books. It is now global – why do the Kalām Masters, the experts in scientific speculation and in the study of nature (this is what I take to be the force of ʿibar), in religious sects and creeds, who have inherited the mantle of the prophets and are the advisers and champions of the caliphs, write books on unworthy subjects, among them not only frivolous subjects but also works expounding the theories of the proponents of litigious argumentation and technique and of factionalist support of the times before Islam? I discern in the reference to the pre-Islamic Age of Barbaric Ignorance, Jāhilīya, both a characterisation of the enthusiasm for the Greek falsafa tradition (however tempered and critically appropriated) so evident in The Book of Living, as well as an allusion to the thematic contours of the controversy alluded to earlier (1.4.17–5.7, §5) concerning the merits and standing of the various groups in ʿAbbasid society. So what is now at stake is the value and credibility of the (Muʿtazilī) Kalām method. Al-JāªiÕ does not engage immediately with this critique: the

the arg ument | 157 themes and topics of the remainder of the ‘Introduction’, and of the work as a whole, constitute his eloquent and sustained rejoinder, including, as we will see, his passionate paean to books. He points instead to the inappropriateness and rashness of the Addressee’s invective. The Addressee is not the intellectual equal of those whom he attacks. It would have been more fitting for him to have refrained until his scholarly training was complete. Al-JāªiÕ’s treatise, by providing ‘a comprehensive statement of the ways of thought’ (jumlat al-madhāhib), and explaining them, will seek to do just this. (Whether the treatise actually does provide such a statement is another matter: see the observations on similar promises to the reader in Chapter 5.4 on ‘Obliquity’.) Al-JāªiÕ brings this stage of his rebuttal of the Addressee and the preliminary defence of his books, and thus of himself, to a close by reverting to one of the key elements of the Addressee’s disapproval of al-NaÕÕām and Maʿbad for their debate on the rooster and the dog: the low esteem in which the Addressee holds the devotion of scholarly attention to unworthy topics.69 The engagement concludes with notions from the conceptual field with which it began. (Such use of ring-composition is a common feature of third-century works, poetry and prose.) Just as shubha and ªayra (uncertainty and aporia) are errors which result from the faulty application of the intellect (ʿaql ) in dialectical discussion (Kalām) and which engender corresponding states of mind, so ithbāt, ‘endorsement through agreement’, is the successful outcome of a dialectical encounter, and tawaqquf, literally ‘suspension of judgement’ in recognition of the presence of an aporia or in acknowledgment that the preliminary positions (muqaddamāt) from which one began the debate are untenable, is an intellectually more productive outcome than shubha or ªayra: after all, it acknowledges that there has been a debate and that it is still in progress. There is an unease often expressed in Islamic societies over (dialectical) debate, an unease which is central to how I read The Book of Living. This is surely a remarkable, if not in fact a perverse, way to introduce one’s magnum opus. On a conservative reckoning, some thirty-five books, published pamphlets and treatises are enumerated (though more may be intended). The whole gamut of the JāªiÕian library is under siege. By any stretch of the imagination, the works which al-JāªiÕ lists (even judging by his brief descriptions of them when they are not extant) represent an amazing breadth of scholarship and expertise. The full panorama of early ʿAbbasid

158 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s intellectualism is encapsulated in these writings. Thus the intellectual and scholarly orientation of third-century society is also under siege. The next stage of this part of the ‘Introduction’ is divided primarily into two, equally significant, arguments: the two divisions of creation (1.26.1– 33.3); and the two kinds of wisdom (1.33.3–37.8). The latter is effectively a way of responding to the former. Al-JāªiÕ’s underlying method of presentation in both arguments is definition (ªadd ) through division (qisma), a technique common among ʿAbbasid thinkers. He offers sometimes a twofold, sometimes a fourfold division of the first item of a previous division. Thus, the universe is divided into two: capable of growth and incapable of growth; ‘capable of growth’ is then divided into two, ‘living things’ and ‘plants’; ‘living things’ are further divided, and so on. He is rigorous in following this method but uses it only to point out the slippages between divisions and sub-divisions, to indicate what they exclude rather than what they include, because his guiding principle is adherence to the normal linguistic practice of the Arabs, as was common among early Kalām thinkers, who were fond of allowing linguistic usage a probative and at times determining capacity in the assessment of arguments.70 Paraphrase of Óayawān 1.26.1–37.8 Al-JāªiÕ now broaches the theme of creation and the problem of how to produce a coherent taxonomy out of it. He identifies two categories; that which is capable of growth (the animate) and that which is not (inanimate matter). This is a false start however, for he rejects the unqualified application of this category by ‘the sages’ (ªukamāʾ), by which I presume he intends those operating within the Greek-Arabic philosophical tradition, to the spheres and the four elements on the grounds that it is basically inconsistent with Arabic language usage [1.26.4–27.6]. The first primary category, that which is capable of growth, is retained, for the time being, and is subdivided into its various constituents. Once again, al-JāªiÕ abides by the dictates of acceptable Arabic language use throughout. He is insistent on pointing out when creatures do not fit comfortably or easily into any one category but extend across several, as with vermin and creepycrawlies (ªasharāt) [1.27.11–12], snakes [1.28.10–29.1], to which, for example, the proper noun ‘carnivore’ can rightly be applied but not in the sense in

the arg ument | 159 which it is applied to a dog or a wolf, and birds which share aspects pertaining to the definitions of herbivorous and carnivorous birds [1.29.12–16]. When this primary pseudo-taxonomy has been explored and its limitations highlighted, al-JāªiÕ next turns to an alternative (and competing) primary taxonomy applied by Arabic language users to living things: those creatures capable of clear and proper expression and those not so capable. By the flexibility inherent in language use, this taxonomy is applied to animals which are not endowed with the ability of speech but which can nonetheless communicate and which we as humans can understand [1.31.5–33.3].71 Al-JāªiÕ next embarks upon what I consider to be a passage of singular importance for the guidance he wishes his audience to derive from his book: the observation that the universe contains two kinds of wisdom, that which is capable of reasoning both about itself and the wisdom contained in the rest of God’s creation and that which is not. By consensus, man alone belongs to this first class [1.33.4–12]. The methods and means at man’s disposal for engaging in this interpretative process and communicating its results are what al-JāªiÕ subsumes under the general heading of bayān, clear expression [1.33.13–35.8]. Al-JāªiÕ entertains both a four- and a fivefold scheme of bayān, while at 1.45.10–18, he clearly prioritises the first four over the fifth type. (In The Book of Clarity he unequivocally promotes a fivefold division.)72 God has given to the second class of wisdom, that is the animals who constitute the non-inferential signs, many abilities which far surpass those of man (e.g. the spider’s web, or the homing instinct of the pigeon), with this one important distinction: the spider may be able to spin its web but is not able to achieve any of the constituent steps which would lead to such a web being constructed; man might not be able to spin a web, but is able to achieve the steps which lead him to the performance of any action of which he is capable [1.35.10–37.8].73 [21] The witty and buffoonish use of jesting is ambivalent, just like the snakes [1.28.10–29.1] and the other birds which belong to the classes of both carnivores and herbivores [1.28.10–29.16]: it is both itself and not itself because it can also be seriousness, its antonym. One has to discern jesting in its context, on the basis of the consequences it is intended to serve. It is a troublesome burden, which scholars do not assume lightly, and so it requires of its ­audience that they inquire after its purpose.

160 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s I take the implication of the first sentence [1.37.10–12] to be that the work of which this ‘Introduction’ is part had already been presented to the Addressee and criticised by him: see 1.10.3 (§14). In other words, the present version of the ‘Introduction’ is later than the rest of the work. In this, it performs a similar function to the other epistles by al-JāªiÕ which are intended to communicate to the Addressee the conclusion and imminent arrival of the commissioned treatise, such as the extant Epistle to Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād concerning the Treatise of Legal Rulings translated in Chapter 4.2, pp. 201–7. Except, of course, that in this case, the ‘Introduction’ is a justification for a work already received and so is tantamount to a sort of querulous rededication: see further ‘The Enigma of the Addressee’, Chapter 4.3, pp. 224–38. [22] A complete mastery of a discipline demands of you that you study what you think you do not need as much as what you think you do. Thus, if al-JāªiÕ had written this book, in view of its length, without reliance upon triviality, it would only have been accessible to expert scholars, who alone have the stamina and the passion for learning which reading it would require. The majority would not be led to wisdom by it in such a situation.74 In these two quotations al-JāªiÕ abbreviates a famous dispute between the grammarian al-Khalīl and the theologian Abū Shamir, in which the theologian uses the grammarian’s paradox against him in a renowned turn of phrase that became part of the tradition of ‘dumbfounding retorts’ (al-ajwiba al-muskita), to point out that a speaker must mean the opposite of what he intends. (See Baalbaki, ‘The place of al-JāªiÕ’, pp. 102–3.) [23] The Addressee has extended his invective from al-JāªiÕ to his books and now to all books – to the book as a cultural and social product, no matter why they are composed or what purpose they are meant to serve (see also Óayawān 1.41.10–42.16, translated in Part 1, pp. 42–3). Such a statement is outrageous because a global condemnation of books like this is perforce a condemnation of the Qurʾān, the Holy Book. In the ensuing paean of books, al-JāªiÕ stresses the abundant character of books, able to fulfil so many useful social functions, and then proceeds to highlight the ambivalence of books: one single book is able to produce so many contradictory effects. Thus the book is a phenomenon like many of the creatures discussed earlier, it inhabits more than one class and it cannot be categorised, and so dismissed, simply. The taxonomic elusiveness of the book is a true paradox, able to have more

the arg ument | 161 than one ethnic identity, able to contain all of creation in its manifold complexities. In this respect it is even more interstitial and ambivalent than levity and seriousness. Paraphrase of 1.39.13–49.1375 Al-JāªiÕ next addresses three major themes of the ‘Introduction’: (1) the paean of books [1.39.13–42.16]; (2) God’s disposition of human society [1.42.17–46.4]; and (3) the social and intellectual benefits of writing [1.46.5–50.1 and 1.62.9–84.6]. The other major theme of the ‘Introduction’ is the importance of books for social cohesion (4) addressed at 1.50.5–62.8 and 1.84.7–102.6. (1) The Paean of Books The encomium of books is launched as an unequivocal riposte to the Addressee’s invective [see 1.41.10]. Books are gardens which can be carried in one’s sleeve, they are floral meadows which can be transported in one’s waist-band. They are ever attentive companions who only utter what you wish them to and their capacity for storing information easily surpasses any human memory. They do not quarrel with you or try to deceive you. They amply repay the investment in them by producing an excellent return and despite their youthfulness they provide you with the wisdom of ages. In the Qurʾān God makes the prime importance of the book evident when, in His first revelation, He declares that ‘He teaches by the pen’ [1.39.13–42.16].76 (2) God’s Disposition of Human Society God has ordained that human society be predicated upon man’s essential nature as a creature of deficiency and need. Man needs other men to help him survive, just as he needs ancestral narratives to guide him and as those who come after us will need our narratives to guide them in turn. All members of society, high and low, require each other’s help in some way or another. No one is exempt from this condition. Need itself is of two kinds: the basic need for livelihood and subsistence; the need for pleasure and increased comfort, through technological progress. God has organised society in such a way that there is perfect equivalence between what man is capable of and what he needs in order to live. Were it otherwise, man would no longer be man, for

162 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s he would lack an essential component of his being: his imperfection. God has created man as the master of creation, though his mastery is not always easy. Furthermore God has created a close connection between how man fulfils his needs and how he communicates his recognition of God’s wisdom implanted in His creation.77 Clear communication (bayān) has been designed by God as a fundamental form of social cohesion. As it is easier for one man to understand another man than to scrutinise the secrets of the structure of the universe, the bayān is perfectly instituted to help him meet his social, intellectual and religious requirements. This is because all creatures are created in such a way that they incline more to members of their own group who resemble them than they do to members of other groups who do not resemble them. There are five types of the bayān. The correlation between these types and the five senses is explored, and priority among them is given to writing (kha††, literally ‘script’) [1.42.17–46.4]. (3) The Social and Intellectual Benefits of Writing The benefits to society of Indian writings on astronomy are used to exemplify this. The calculations which they have preserved for us have enabled us to devote time and energy to speculating upon more vital matters relating to our religion and how we live. Astronomy is, like the bayān, an activity sanctioned in the Qurʾān. As repositories of knowledge, books, by making good the deficiencies of the human memory, enable us to fulfil our moral obligations to God. In conveying a message across large distances, writing is superior to speaking and gesticulating, other forms of communication. This is why God has placed the pen in such an elevated rank. Men have followed His example and have praised the benefits of penmanship as well as what men have been able to achieve through manual dexterity in general – music and horsemanship for example [1.46.5–49.13].78 [24] A discussion of communication is presumably the direction which the audience might have expected al-JāªiÕ’s argument to take: his aside is also designed to help them follow the thread of his discourse and to ward off any accusation of prolixity, in belabouring his point. His use of the word maghzā, equally applicable to warfare and to speech, is clever. I have translated it with an emphasis on the former because of his claim that composition is

the arg ument | 163 tantamount to entering the lists at Óayawān 1.88.2–3 (see Chapter 5.4, p. 365). Al-JāªiÕ interrupts the flow of his disquisition with a very characteristic authorial comment. In terms of the architecture of the discussion this aside provides a transition (takhallu‚) from the theme of writing systems to the paean of books. In terms of the disagreement between counsellor and patron, it acts as a reminder to the patron that his invective has resulted in a missed opportunity to offer improving guidance to their companions. The patron’s rejection of the work has effectively silenced it. In view of the individualistic and competitive nature of third-century society, given the Qurʾanic precept that no soul can carry the burden of another soul, that is one cannot be responsible for the acts of another, al-JāªiÕ cannot at present speak on behalf of the patron and so offer his improving counsel to the brethren. In other words, a spokesman needed the permission of the person on whose behalf he was intending to speak. These brethren represent the wider audience of the work – his elite comrades to whose cultural values al-JāªiÕ appeals in pleading his case with the Addressee. As communication is such a vital element of social cohesion, it would be a useful topic for the company of brethren and companions to listen to. Al-JāªiÕ is constrained to an exclusive defence of the merits of the book by virtue of the invective to the detriment of other improving topics. Paraphrase of 1.50.5–102.6 In the remainder of the ‘Introduction’ al-JāªiÕ brings to the forefront a notion which connects his praise of books in his analysis of (2) God’s disposition of human society and (3) the social and intellectual benefits of writing: I mean (4) the importance of books for social cohesion [1.50.5–62.8]. This is complemented by a rehearsal of (3a) the social and intellectual benefits of writing [1.62.9–84.6] and rounded off with (4a) the importance of books for social cohesion [1.84.7–102.6]. (4) The Importance of the Book for Social Cohesion This topic is exemplified through a series of ideas which we have already encountered: the book as consummate companion; its effectiveness as a teacher and counsellor; writing as the most consummate form of bayān.

164 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Eighteen scholarly utterances are listed to extol the excellence of books. This list includes the famous discussion at Óayawān 1.55.9–58.10 between al-JāªiÕ and Ibrāhīm al-Sindī on the Manichaean veneration for their scriptures, a discussion in which these scriptures are belittled for, among other things, not encouraging social well-being [1.50.5–62.8].79 (3a) The Social and Intellectual Benefits of Writing Various aspects of writing systems are explored as attestations of its great utility to society, from the Qurʾān as divine inventory to writing as fortune telling and doodling (and other reflex actions) as an indication of extreme psychological trauma. Verses from the Qurʾān and poetry serve as appropriate archives. Four long sequences of poetry praise the benefits of writing and establish a close connection between writing and power, a subject which will come to dominate the remainder of this section. This is taken up in the discussion of how powerful empires have used monumental epigraphy to record and celebrate their achievements and events and to immortalise the memory of important persons. A sixth type of writing is the practice among the pre-Islamic Arabs of recording contracts and treaties. Scripts and numerical and computational systems are effectively identical and al-JāªiÕ explores their various social applications and other marks which indicate ownership of property, including their centrality to the functioning of trades such as the manufacture of clothing, weaving and the teak trade. When viewed in terms of the theory of entitative accidents as understood in Kalām physics, consonants vocalised and given form in the air are identical to those given form and vocalised in ink on a sheet of paper [1.62.9–71.12].80 After a brief digression in which an equivalence between spoken and written consonants is posited, the important subject of the close connection between writing and human civilisation, be it in the form of empire or religion, is broached. This leads al-JāªiÕ to record the contributions to what appears to have been a debate in a Majlis between an Apologist of Books and an Apologist of Poetry on the relative achievements of the Arabs and the Indians, Greeks and Persians which took the form of the merits of books versus the merits of poetry as a way of preserving the past. The tenor of the debate is prefaced by the comments of Hishām b. al-Kalbī and al-Haytham b. ʿAdī on the methods adopted by the desert Arabs and the Persians during

the arg ument | 165 the pre-Islamic era for preserving their achievements. The Arabs did this through poetry, the Persians through monuments. The Arabs sought to rival the Persians by erecting imposing buildings while continuing to surpass them through their pre-eminence in poetry [1.71.13–72.14]. The case of the Apologist of Books hinges upon the fact that more books than buildings have survived from previous eras, from which he concludes that books are a more effective means of preserving one’s heritage than monuments. Poetry is a recent phenomenon, the origins of which can be dated at most to two centuries before the advent of Islam and which originated with the great pre-Islamic poets, Imruʾ al-Qays and Muhalhil, unlike books, which are of venerable antiquity: the writings of Plato, Aristotle and Democrates predate them by aeons. Poetry is confined to the desert Arabs and those who speak their language; it cannot be translated or paraphrased, for then it loses its aesthetic appeal. Prose written as prose is more pleasing than poetry converted to prose. All societies require guidance in religion, in crafts and their means of subsistence and attaining comforts. They get this from books. The archives of the Indians, Greeks and Persians have all been more or less successfully translated into Arabic over the generations and from community to community. The wisdom of the Arabs, because it is in verse, is not transferable, and its ideas and thoughts have been anticipated by the non-Arabs [1.72.14–75.16]. The Apologist of Poetry begins his defence with a critique of translation which is always defective because the translator can never understand the ideas and arguments of the work which he is translating as well as its author does. Recent translators into Arabic, such as Ibn al-Bi†rīq and Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, cannot compare with Aristotle, Khālid cannot compete with Plato. The translator must have attained the same degree of exceptional competence in both target and source language. This is not how language acquisition takes place, however, for the acquisition of one language always works to the detriment of the other. This problem is at its most acute in the case of abstruse, scholarly subjects such as geometry or music. As a result no translator is the equal of any expert. The problem is exacerbated when we move from scientific subjects to religious works and texts which deal with the nature of the godhead, for to err on one of these subjects is much worse than to make a mistake about natural philosophy or alchemy, for example. Then

166 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s there are the errors which creep in because of the vagaries of textual transmission: it can be easier for an author to compose ten pages of purple prose than for him to correct an error which has been introduced into his text, so how much worse must this be, when the translator is not as knowledgeable as the author of the text to be translated and does not boast the same degree of mastery over such technical matters and when the text to be translated is of a venerable antiquity [1.78.6–79.14]? The Apologist of Books is invited by the assembled company to respond [1.79.16]. He does so by extolling the preservation of books in view of their manifest importance. Their benefits are universal; whereas those conveyed by Arabic poetry are limited and severely curtailed. Even if we admit that books such as Euclid’s Elements, the medical writings of Galen or the Almagest, which was produced by al-Óajjāj b. Ma†ar,81 are defective, what they contain is still enough to meet our needs, and this is so much more than what poetry has to offer. The Apologist of Books catalogues in a long list the innumerable advances in technology and crafts which are owed to these books and proceeds to inquire after similar advances introduced by the Arabs. After a brief survey of advances in ship-building, money-changing, pottery and the efficient use of camels in the imperial post, the Apologist concludes that all the advances achieved by the Arabs are either the result of sheer coincidence or are derived from some previous practice [1.79.17–84.6]. (4a) The Importance of the Book for Social Cohesion Al-JāªiÕ resumes his theme. Books promote social well-being because they encourage solitary study. This means that we can avoid the causes of the factionalism by which society is damaged – the competitiveness encouraged by debate. Books far exceed the capacities of their authors, by disseminating their message to a greater audience than their authors could ever reach and by perpetuating their memory and their learning long after they have gone. It is precisely thus that we are able to gain access to the wisdom of our ancestors. We should therefore codify our learning in books as a bequest to future generations. This is nowhere more evident than in the divine scriptures, Muslim, Jewish and Christian. The Qurʾān contains knowledge of every kind of wisdom and establishes what is right and what is wrong. Moreover, books are wondrous instructors, as we can see from the treatises of Abū Óanīfa (d.

the arg ument | 167 150/767): a man can spend a lifetime in the study of legal scholars and not be appointed as a judge, but a couple of years studying these textbooks and he will become the governor of an imperial province [1.84.7–87.17].82 The paean of books is almost concluded. Al-JāªiÕ continues his exposition of (4a), ‘the importance of books for social cohesion’. The use of epistolary correspondence as an indication of social prestige, the ease of communication by letter in Iraq and the fact that God chose to commit His Revelation to writing are adduced as evidence of the superiority of writing [1.96.9–98.16]. The subject of legacies and how best to provide for one’s inheritors is explored through five pronouncements by Greek sages, which cumulatively present the case for books and not property as the best kind of inheritance: the knowledge which they pass down is both beneficial to the recipient and useful for society, in addition to being a means of evading the taxes which are due to the government on account of bequests [1.98.17–102.6]. [25–29] As the conclusion of the first section of the ‘Introduction’ the Addressee’s invective is resumed with a representation (ªikāya) of his words. The conclusion takes the form of a lengthy quotation of a further element of the Addressee’s invective, that with which al-JāªiÕ began the work, the debate on the merits of the dog. The Addressee cannot see what is so important about the dog, an animal which is universally condemned and despised, and which is neither a predator nor a domestic animal. One of the principal facets of his criticism of the dog is this compound nature. In other words, the dog is interstitial and trans-categorical, like the mule, which is the object of regular invective because it is a hybrid. The dog and the mule, then, in the outlook of the Addressee, resemble the book and al-JāªiÕ’s use of levity: they belong to too many categories and in the process are to be rejected for their compositeness. It is this which leads to them being reprehensible and to the faults of which they are guilty – their shamefulness is the consequence of this compositeness. Once again we note that the Addressee is a stout opponent of mixtures, of phenomena which straddle more than one category or type. According to the Addressee, such phenomena are to be criticised for their social blameworthiness. Al-JāªiÕ regularly promotes the cause of animals normally considered despicable: for example, Óayawān 1.206.14–15 = Part 6, §4.6 (‘the peacock, so greatly admired, is no greater an indication of God

168 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s the Exalted than the pig, so greatly loathed’).83 This aspect of the Addressee’s invective is resumed at 1.200.5–19 (Part 6, §2). The passage is notable for the Addressee’s use of a technical vocabulary typical of Kalām science and of natural philosophy, words such as †abʿ, ªāl, nafs, ʿajz, maʿrifa, murakkab, †abāʾiʿ, akhlā†, akhlāq and mutawallida, terms that we also encounter regularly in the JāªiÕian lexicon applied to human beings. I am unsure of how much weight to attach to the phrase mahānat al-nafs (1.102.9). The Addressee sounds in this passage as if he is describing the dog in human terms. Some contemporaries of al-JāªiÕ argued that animals had souls and that they would be punished or rewarded by God in the afterlife. If I have understood al-JāªiÕ’s theory of moral desert properly, then he holds that only the mature individual of reasoning intellect, someone who can understand what angers God (as at Óayawān 3.397.4–14), can properly be rewarded or punished for his actions. It is for this reason that animals and children cannot be subsumed in this category and so cannot be punished in the afterlife. In §29, three further allegations are made about the dog. It resembles a cross-dresser or a eunuch, because the first belongs to neither the class of male nor that of female, while the latter is no longer classed as a complete male but cannot be classed as a female either. The dog is like date or raisin wine (nabīdh) from which the alcohol has been burned off (which rendered it licit according to some authorities): that is, it is not vinegar yet it also is no longer wine because it has lost its alcohol. The Addressee’s criticism of hybrids is a scientific position predicated upon an exclusivist notion of classification and ideas of species purity and controlled cross-breeding, permeated with social and cultural ideals of nobility. The criticism begins from the compositeness of the nature of hybrids. Accordingly, he rejects the dog, the Rāʿibī pigeon, the mule, and the son of a masculine mother and an effeminate father. These are all execrable crossbreeds, and their cross-breeding leads to their blameworthy faultiness. In this they are no different from al-JāªiÕ’s books. In other words, the classes (jins) are not to be mixed: pure breeding is to be prized at all costs. Class (jins) is the determining element in the natural constitution of any living creature: 1.104.1–2. This position resumes the invective of 1.4.10–11 (§4.1), the Addressee’s rejection of ‘The Treatise on the Pure-born and the Half-breed,

the arg ument | 169 the vaunting of the blacks and the fair-skinned, and the weighing up of what is due severally to maternal and paternal uncles’. Dappled, mottled or piebald appearances are visual evidence of weakness and feebleness, be it in racehorses, homing pigeons, or cows (and God’s words in the Qurʾān are a testimony to this). The conclusion to this section of the ‘Introduction’, the Addressee’s invective of the hybrid, functions as the transition to the next major section (bāb) of the ‘Introduction’, the disquisition on eunuchs: 1.106.3–190.12. This next section, the examination of the eunuch, is an elaboration of and inquiry into the Addressee’s point of view expressed at 1.102.7–106.2. Some salient points emerge from this survey of the first section of the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living. Al-JāªiÕ formed part of the Addressee’s entourage. The Addressee seems to have written or pronounced a highly unfavourable and negative ‘review’ of The Book of Living. (In Part 6, it will emerge that this ‘review’ was quite detailed.) Such a ‘review’ is tantamount to a rejection of the work. Al-JāªiÕ’s ‘Introduction’ responds to this review and so it was the written rather than any earlier version of The Book of Living which was rejected in this manner. It is unclear to what extent the current version of The Book of Living corresponds with any earlier version. The disagreement between al-JāªiÕ and the Addressee is not some little spat between two intellectuals who happen to disagree on a number of points. The attack on the JāªiÕian library raises a number of concerns of fundamental relevance for ʿAbbasid society at the middle of the third century. The Addressee voices various views which touch on the question of classification. These views are informed by a scientifically articulated cultural purism, one which discerns in pure, thorough breeds an inherent superiority over cross-breeds. Classification, the identification of the group (jins) to which an object belonged, was a vital aspect of the juridical application of qiyās, analogy, to determining the legal status (the ªukm) of things, from how animals were to be categorised and so which ones could be eaten, to which types of drink could be considered licit and so consumed without impunity, to how numerous other activities such as trade and commerce were conducted and regulated, to say nothing of deontological and axiological questions of legal right and wrong. An anxiety over classification was at the very heart of

170 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s the scrupulosity which the Óadīth folk applied to the world around them in their effort accurately to categorise existence and thereby protect themselves from unwittingly being contaminated through coming into contact with any object the provenance of which was unknown and which may have been unclean or illicit. Al-JāªiÕ for his part is keen to stress the significance for classificatory schemes of the interstitial. His abiding interest is in things which seem to belong in more than one category, be they living creatures, or values such as seriousness and levity, or artefacts such as the book. He explores with great intelligence the degrees to which taxonomies and schemes of classification are non-representative. He erects taxonomies in order to take delight in ­collapsing them. In the ‘Introduction’, the book (and The Book of Living in particular) is a key interstitial object. The eunuch is another. Man is the key inter-category because he belongs to both kinds of signs designed by God, those which indicate God’s creative powers, and those which are in addition able to draw inferences from the signs of the first kind to God’s creative powers. The method which he applies to the correct drawing of these inferences (istidlāl ) is informed by speculation, naÕar, a key feature of the Kalām, itself a culturally ambivalent phenomenon. The Addressee is no admirer of this book or of books in general. But in rejecting them on the basis of his valorisation of all that is pure, he is guilty of an improper method of classification and rejects the manifold benefits which books bring.84 God has so organised society that man needs help and assistance in meeting His requirements and realising His benefits. Man can find this help in books. Books promote social cohesion and social advancement. Al-JāªiÕ thinks that one of the main ways they bring this about has been largely overlooked by his society – books can help his fellow-citizens avoid the destructive factionalism by which their society is being torn apart at the seams. Yet in making this argument, al-JāªiÕ ran up against another source of cultural and intellectual anxiety – the ambivalence expressed in the Qurʾān over debate, dispute and argument (jadal). No matter how intellectually accomplished the Kalām might be, no matter how compelling its reasoned account of existence might become, no matter how successful it might be in

the arg ument | 171 correcting the beliefs of society and so readying it for the afterlife, the Kalām Masters could never rid themselves of this ambivalence. The Addressee does not reject Kalām as such but he does expect the Kalām Masters to show a cautious reserve in their choice of topics to debate in public. In his opinion, a debate on the dog and the rooster rather than on a topic such as divine unity or the promise and the threat could do nothing but set a bad example. Once again we note a mistrust of mixing categories and of celebrating culturally aniconic and ignoble things. The Addressee leaves al-JāªiÕ with no choice but to engage with his ‘review’ of The Book of Living in an eristical contest. This will be a muʿāra∂a the extent, ambition and sweep of which ʿAbbasid society had not previously witnessed. But it will be a contest enclosed in a book and so it will not exacerbate the fissiparism of the ʿAbbasid elite.

4.1 Biobibliographies

A. Preamble

A

number of questions arise from the foregoing examination of the ­contours of this disagreement. Why were al-JāªiÕ’s books rejected in this manner? What was the point of the critique? What exactly was attacked – the form, the content, the ambition, or the fact of the book – that is, the fact that it was even written? Was it the style of thinking (Kalām) or did the work unsettle the attacker, resolutely determined not to be fashioned as an ideal reader? Who was the attacker? Why is he unnamed? And what did al-JāªiÕ hope to achieve by rehearsing his arguments and refuting them by his praise of books? In this part of my book I consider these questions by putting The Book of Living in the textual environment of the third century, by reviewing attitudes to bibliographies and biographies, book-writing, and patronage, and by contrasting the apparent formal indeterminacy of the ‘Introduction’ with contemporary works. I conclude that al-JāªiÕ wanted his book to save society from the competitive strife which argument and debate had engulfed it in. Debate could now be internalised in the soul of the reader because books encouraged solitary reading and interior debate. This part of my book asks a lot of my readers.1 It makes too many demands on their patience. And it is long. The paths I follow meander, sometimes they are tortuous and make for tough going and some of them may very well be dead ends and so force us back to the beginning again. Some of them are circular and bring us rather than force us back to the beginning. This is what reading al-JāªiÕ means for me. I tear off down some path of inquiry or other only to find I am lost. Or I saunter along, thinking I am following his lead and am on the right track, only to realise that I am not. Very rarely 175

176 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s do I find the right path the first time I look for it. So this part of my book is perhaps the most personal in that it charts the steps I took in order to be able to write the next part, Part 5, on the importance for The Book of Living of the concept of God’s design and reading His signs. The final section of Part 5 also allows me to reflect, in what I hope are al-JāªiÕ’s rather than my own terms, on this fascinating aspect of his writing – how he can direct and misdirect, beguile and mislead, his readers. When reflecting upon the inquiries I have pursued in this part of my book, I see that there is another set of assumptions which underlie them. The more I read and re-read The Book of Living and the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that al-JāªiÕ undertakes to speak for and on behalf of his society, that he takes it for granted that his various patrons expect him to discharge this function, in fact he remonstrates with the Addressee for preventing him from discharging this function, that he perceives the cohesiveness of his society to be endangered, and that he presents The Book of Living as the way to preserve that cohesiveness. Such a set of aspirations is typical of the interpretation of Islam which we today recognise as Sunnism. In the late third and fourth centuries Sunnism emerged as the Islam devised, articulated and championed by ‘the people of Prophetic practice and community’, ahl al-sunna wa-al-jamāʿa. But there is a problem here. Sunnī Islam did not exist as such in al-JāªiÕ’s day (most scholars speak of the ‘proto-Sunna’) and al-JāªiÕ was an inveterate opponent of the kinds of groups which scholars normally identify as the promoters of the ‘proto-Sunna’. And yet The Book of Living forces us to take al-JāªiÕ’s claims seriously that he has devised a plan to preserve the cohesion of his community. Chapters 4.5 (‘The Cohesiveness of Society’) and 4.6 (‘An Encyclopaedia to Save Society’) represent my attempts to respond to this desire on al-JāªiÕ’s part to save his community. This also casts into some relief the importance of the occurrence of the disagreement between al-JāªiÕ and his Addressee. The Book of Living can hardly achieve such a grand ambition if it falls at the first hurdle and provokes the kind of spirited and engaged critique as that which the Addressee presents. I argue in Chapter 4.4 that the type of discourse which al-JāªiÕ adopts in order to engage with the Addressee, the reproach, is perfectly suited for the restoration of amicable ties between him and the Addressee.

bi obi bli og raphi es | 177 But why do I also need to investigate the identity of the Addressee in Chapter 4.3? Al-JāªiÕ does not tell us who he is so why should I devote so much energy to circumventing his wishes? Quite simply, in the third century, public speech (and writing was thought of as a form of public speech) was always tied to an occasion. There was always a reason to speak, an occasion to fit one’s words to, a person or a group to address. This is why the identity of the Addressee is so significant – it would allow us to anchor al-JāªiÕ’s Book of Living in terms of patronly circles or patronly obsessions and interests. The acute realisation that al-JāªiÕ does not make it possible for us to make this identification also affords the opportunity to reflect on how committed he is to acting as his society’s spokesman and speaking on their behalf – in other words to transcending occasion – and highlights the uniqueness of The Book of Living as a creative act. Not only was public speech tied to an occasion. Speech was owned by its utterer who gave his speech his intention. This was a maximal intentionalism. The utterance reflected the speaker’s intention and his intention reflected his character (what I elsewhere refer to as the ‘speech–nature insight’). Thus Chapter 4.1 explores this phenomenon of the collapse of distinctions between biography and bibliography, between speech and character, between book and life. As a public act, speech was considered to be subject to all the strictures and regulations other acts were. A person’s acts were central components of one’s public persona and identity. (I am not sure that a third-century intellectual would have understood the concept of a private as opposed to a public persona. One had a soul, nafs, and a place where one tried to store one’s secret thoughts, often referred to as the ∂amīr, but the soul and the ∂amīr were never hidden from God and al-JāªiÕ argued that one’s speech was, as it were, quite literally the window on the soul.) It is one of the reasons why in The Book of Living al-JāªiÕ urges solitary reading and one of the reasons why it was so odd for him to do so. In a self-chronicling society such as that of al-JāªiÕ’s day, appearances and the reputation attached to them were of the highest and most signal importance. Al-JāªiÕ and his contemporaries were principally obsessed with appearances. Most of them based their investigations of the godhead on the appearance of reality. They informed their ethical assessments through their

178 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s understanding of appearances. Thus one of al-JāªiÕ’s ambitions (which I consider in Chapter 5.4) was to educate the Addressee and his contemporaries in how to read appearances properly in accordance with God’s design for them. Therefore the form which one gave to one’s utterance was no idle matter. It was not just a shape that one gave to one’s speech. It was the phenomenal appearance which would be its attribute. It was determined by conceptualisations of how speech exists in the public domain and it reflected and determined how the speaker intended his audience to respond. The endeavour to control the response of one’s audience was one of the great intellectual, moral and writerly battlegrounds of third-century culture. This is why it is so important to try to determine the form of the ‘Introduction’ as I do in Chapter 4.2 and why I return to it at the end of Part 6, pp. 418–22. It is also why the Addressee’s invective was such a parlous matter for the author of The Book of Living. B. Libraries The Book of Living begins, then, with a list of the JāªiÕian library. The libraries of the Islamic world were renowned for the mind-boggling quantities of volumes which they were said to have housed. There were the great caliphal libraries such as those amassed by the ʿAbbasids in Baghdad and destroyed by the Mongols, or by the Fa†imids in Cairo or the Cordoban library of alÓakam II (d. 366/976); or the impressive mosque libraries; or the extensive holdings of private scholars. For example, Yaªyā b. Maʿīn, a contemporary of al-JāªiÕ who specialised in collecting the traditions of the Prophet Muªammad and who died in 233/847, is said to have owned about 114 book chests and four large containers of papers.2 Libraries were not just physical institutions. Numerous virtual libraries and catalogues have survived. The Shīʿī scholar Ibn ˝āwūs (589–664/1193– 1266) compiled, at the age of fifty-seven, a list of his own works, which he declares to be incomplete because he could not remember all of the abridgements of longer works which he had composed, including his many unpublished sermons and hortatory addresses. He was acting in accordance with a well-established tradition at the heart of which stands the Index (Fihrist) of books compiled by Ibn al-Nadīm, a work which includes much information

bi obi bli og raphi es | 179 on book-making and its techniques, on foreign scripts, as well as a catalogue of titles systematically arranged. In the centuries after al-JāªiÕ’s death, when paper books and writerly culture had become hegemonic, scholars regularly composed catalogues of other people’s works. Ibn ˝āwūs, for example, also compiled a list of the books which he had in his own library.3 The Egyptian physician Ibn Ri∂wān, in a work written in 436/1044–5, copied out an Arabic translation of a Greek list of the works of Hippocrates.4 These two works are lists, plain and simple. More complex catalogues of books are conspicuous for how they equate biography and bibliography, and thus raise interesting points of comparison with the close connection established between life and books in the account of the JāªiÕian library in The Book of Living. Among the many works which he wrote to position himself as the heir of a direct philosophical genealogy extending from Alexandria to Baghdad, Abū Na‚r al-Fārābī (d. 339/950) produced a survey of the writings of Plato, in which some thirty titles are named, accompanied by little gobbets of information: The Philosophy of Plato, its Parts and the Ranks of its Parts from their Beginning to their End, Falsafat Aflā†un wa-Ajzāʾi-hā wa-Marātib Ajzāʾi-hā min Awwali-hā ilā Ākhiri-hā.5 What is especially remarkable about this work is that it is unlikely that al-Fārābī had access to much of the Platonic corpus beyond translated excerpts from a (Galenic?) compendium of some Platonic dialogues, among them the Phaedo, Symposium, Timaeus, Laws and Republic. The catalogue is presumably an Arabic transcription of a translation of a lost original, probably in Syriac – though it is unclear how much of the corpus was available to Plato’s Syriac bibliographer. This basic equivalence of biography and bibliography is an inflection of a fundamental assumption about knowledge central to the Islamic biographical project, namely that knowledge lives in people, and does not reside in institutions. The biography is thus the most effective way to express this assumption.6 C. Al-Bīrūnī’s Index of the Books of Muªammad b. Zakarīyā al-Rāzī In 427/1035–6, Abū Rayªān al-Bīrūnī (d. after 442/1050) compiled An Index of the Books of Muªammad b. Zakarīyā al-Rāzī, Fihrist Kutub Muªammad b.

180 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Zakarīyā al-Rāzī, in response to an inquiry from a potential patron for a possible commission (Kraus 1.4–2.11).7 The unnamed Addressee had also expressed an interest in the history of medicine, so al-Bīrūnī appends two things to his list of the physician al-Rāzī’s 184 titles arranged by eleven categories: a jadwal, a table, of physicians from Asclepius the First to Jālīnūs (Galen) (Kraus, p. 22); and a history of medicine cast in the form of a review of theories concerning the origin and development of crafts (Kraus 25.13–29.12). The book comes to a close with a catalogue of al-Bīrūnī’s own compositions (Kraus 30.3–46.3). It begins with an exact date, al-Bīrūnī’s age at the time of writing (63 years of age according to the solar calendar), and a discussion of a dream he had (Kraus 29.13–30.2). It includes the titles of five works which al-Bīrūnī no longer has copies of in his possession (Kraus 40.13–41.4), ten titles which he has not finished (Kraus 42.11–43.8) in addition to a miscellaneous category of twelve works (Kraus 37.1–38.6) and twenty-five further works written by three other scholars in al-Bīrūnī’s name and with his blessing (Kraus 44.1–45.2, 45.3–46.1 and 46.2–3).8 The treatise begins with a conventional statement of the request which al-Bīrūnī has received. The patron wants a comprehensive treatment of the time, that is the life, and the books of al-Rāzī, with a chronology of physicians and medicine. His interest in medicine has been stimulated by an appreciation of al-Rāzī’s acumen, intelligence and skill as a physician (Kraus 1.4–9). A work on this subject composed by Isªāq b. Óunayn the Translator (d. 209/910–11) would suffice had it not been corrupted and vitiated by the ignorance of copyists and epitomators (Kraus 1.9–2.8).9 As demanded by the conventions of patronage, al-Bīrūnī explains how he has responded to the patron’s request (Kraus 2.9–13) and also, in another conventional expectation, refers to the difficulties which the request has put him under – in this case al-Rāzī’s notoriety as a heretic will lead readers of the work to suspect that al-Bīrūnī shares his views, confounding the benefits of his scholarship with his contempt for religion (Kraus 2.13–3.2). This is a ‘warts and all’ portrait of al-Rāzī (d. 313/925 or 323/935), the physician and philosopher who denied the necessity of prophethood. Al-Bīrūnī explains that al-Rāzī had spent so long copying out the books of Mānī and his disciples as a way of casting doubt on religion that he was led

bi obi bli og raphi es | 181 unawares, through repeated exposure, to say things that no-one in his right mind would countenance. In attributing his excesses to habituation and overenthusiastic self-exposure to something pleasurable, al-Bīrūnī defends al-Rāzī in terms of al-Rāzī’s own defence of Socrates as mounted in his pamphlet, The Philosophical Lifestyle, al-Sīra al-Falsafīya. Socrates had been criticised by some of al-Rāzī’s contemporaries for the immoderation and excess of his lifestyle.10 Al-Bīrūnī uses a personal anecdote to illustrate how spending too long thinking about a certain book can lead one astray: We are accustomed to hearing those who are not equal to the dust under al-Rāzī’s feet say, ‘Al-Rāzī corrupted people in terms of their money, their bodies and their religion’. This is true in terms of the first and in most of the last item (ªāshiya) on the list and for that reason the second item is irrefutable. You know that I am innocent of following him when it comes to squandering money, despite my love of riches and everything else which makes self-sufficiency possible – I do not declare myself innocent of that! – but I did not avoid the misfortunes he brought when it comes to the last item on the list. Let me explain. I read his treatise On the Divine Science very closely. This is the work in which he openly argues against the books of Mānī and especially his book entitled (mawsūm) The Book of Mysteries (Sifr al-Asrār). The title (sima) deceived me, just as in alchemy (kīmiyā) others are deceived by white and yellow. Youthfulness, or rather, the concealment of true reality (ªaqīqa), aroused in me a cupidity for seeking out these Mysteries from my acquaintances in various countries and places [Kraus 3.7–15]. I remained in the doleful grip (tabārīª) of yearning for a little more than forty years until a courier (barīd ) from Hamadhān sought me out in Khwārazm, seeking my acquaintance by means of some books which he knew I was desirous of and which he had found thanks to the good graces of Fa∂l b. Sahlān. Among them was a codex (mu‚ªaf ) containing the following books of the Manichaeans (mānawīya): Pragmateia (faraqmā†iyā), The Book of Giants, The Treasure of the Living, The Dawn Light of Certitude and Foundation, the Gospel, al-Shābūrqān, and a number of epistles by Mānī, in which number was the work I was looking for – The Book of Mysteries.11

182 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s I was overcome with joy – like a parched traveller who sees a mirage and is downcast with dejection when he approaches it and is disappointed. I realised that God (the Exalted) is truthful when he says, ‘Him to whom God does not give light has no light’.12 Then I made an epitome of the arrant nonsense and the utter obscenity contained in that book so that anyone afflicted with my disease could read it and be swiftly cured of it, as I was [Kraus 4.1–10].

Al-Bīrūnī involves his biography even more closely in his bibliography when he discusses a dream which he had when he was seriously ill: I mentioned earlier the interpretation of my dream. You should know that in times of tribulation and misfortune, even the most rational and sagacious of people never ceases to anticipate release. He takes comfort in good tidings, shuns and draws bad omens from what he dislikes, finds joy in dreams and relies on astrological omens and favourable readings (aªkām). For all my criticism of this practice, at times such as these I used to ask astrologers to consider the consequences of my date of birth. They began by estimating the length of my life in greatly contradictory ways. One of them predicted sixteen more years, while another, lying to himself, took it to mean more than forty more years, though I had passed fifty at the time. Others predicted that I would live a little beyond sixty [Kraus 41.5–12]. Now when I had reached that age, I was almost put in my grave by a number of life-threatening diseases, some of which came all at once, while others followed one after the other, time after time. They crushed my bones, ravaged my body, deprived me of movement and corrupted my senses. Then I began to recover after my energies had overcome my senectitude. On the night when my sixty-first year was about to elapse, I had a dream. I dreamt I was trying to observe the new moon, seeking it in its stations and looking closely at its settings but I could not see it. Then someone said to me, ‘Leave it be, for you will be its son one hundred and seventy times’. At that point, I woke up. I converted the fourteen lunar years by adding two months (?) into solar years and then I subtracted five and a half months. The total came close to the great year of Mercury which they mentioned had been in the ascendant at the time of my birth. Despite this, I was not best pleased about what had been said, for it was as if there were almost

bi obi bli og raphi es | 183 nothing left of my life13 except for one thing: the completion of the unfinished works I had to hand and the fair copy (tabyī∂ al-musawadd ) of the addenda (taʿāliq) I had jotted down to numerous works such as al-Qānūn al-Masʿūdī . . . [Kraus 41.12–42.11].

Among the 113 titles which al-Bīrūnī lists, arranged in twelve categories, are books written in his name (and with his approval) by others. He describes his feelings for his books: It is vital for you to know that I neither reject nor despise those books I have listed as having been composed in my youth and to the topics (fann) of which knowledge has subsequently added. They are all my sons – the majority of men are uncritical in their love for two things: their sons and their poetry. The works which others have produced in my name are like foster-daughters nursed in one’s lap or like necklaces worn on the breast – I make no distinction between them and my sons [Kraus 43.12–15].

In this declaration of his paternity of both the books he had written and those he had permitted others to write in his name, biography and bibliography become synonymous. The declaration seems to echo al-JāªiÕ’s sentiments about a writer’s feelings for his books in his Epistle to Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād Informing Him of the Treatise on Legal Verdicts and also in the ‘Manual of Composition’ (translated in Chapters 4.2 and 5.4 respectively). Al-Bīrūnī brings his letter to an end with the remark that he is ready to provide the addressee with any of the works which he has listed and which are in his possession (Kraus 46.4–5).14 In making such a close connection between biography and bibliography, as well as his interest in medicine, al-Bīrūnī positions himself in the tradition of Galen and Óunayn b. Isªāq. D. Óunayn b. Isªāq’s Epistle Catalogues like this were a characteristic of the Graeco-Arabic tradition in the third century. Two of them stand out: one is by the philosopher and scientist al-Kindī (d. after 252/865), the other by the scientist and translator, Óunayn b. Isªāq (d. 260/873). In order to write both these works, their authors obviously relied extensively on access to libraries. It emerges from both their stories that these were personal collections and both scholars were reported to

184 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s have suffered at late stages in their careers the crippling blow of having their libraries confiscated. Al-Kindī attempts a definition of philosophy in the spirit of Alexandrian Aristotelianism through an inventory of the books of Aristotle: On the Quantity of the Books of Aristotle and what is needed for the Obtention of Philosophy, Fī Kammīyat Kutub Aris†ā†ālīs wa-mā yuªtāju ilay-hi fī Taª‚īl alFalsafa. This epistle, a response to a request (AR 1.363.6–10 and 1.364.5–9), combines an overview of Kindian philosophy (AR 1.378.9–14) with an intonation of its importance and difficulty (AR 1.363.11–364.4) and a list of the titles of Aristotle’s books divided into six categories (AR 1.364.10–369.13): logic (AR 1.365.3–368.4), natural science (AR 1.368.5–11), psychology (AR 1.368.12–15), metaphysics (AR 1.368.16–17), ethics (AR 1.369.1–11) and miscellaneous (AR 1.369.12–13). It discusses the centrality of mathematics to philosophy (AR 1.369.14–370.8 and 1.376.12–378.8) and gives an account of Prophetic knowledge (AR 1.372.16–376.11) as exemplified by Prophet Muªammad’s inspired answers to a question concerning the resurrection (AR 1.373.15–376.11), before listing the titles of the books once more, this time along with an explicatory inventory of their aims (aghrā∂) (AR 1.378.15–384.18).15 The second text is no less fascinating than al-Kindī’s epistle: the commission received by Óunayn b. Isªāq from a member of the Banū al-Munajjim family, a dynasty of powerful courtiers and vigorous sponsors of Arabic translations of scientific texts, for a survey of all the ancient works on medicine still important in the third century.16 The commissioner was ʿAlī b. Yaªyā, who had assisted the Caliph al-Mutawakkil’s favourite courtier al-Fatª b. Khāqān to amass his library, and who commissioned works on geometry and music as well as medicine. Instead of the sought-after catalogue, what ʿAlī receives is a list of 129 titles of the books of Galen, both those translated and those not as yet translated into Arabic largely under the aegis and supervision of Óunayn himself: An Epistle to ʿAlī b. Yaªyā listing the Books he knew had been translated and some which had not been translated, Risāla ilā ʿAlī b. Yaªyā fī Dhikr mā turjima min Kutub Jālīnūs bi-ʿIlmi-hi wa-baʿ∂ mā lam yutarjam.17 Óunayn begins with a motif commonly used in third-century epistles: a reference to the composition of the work in response to a patron’s request. This is no tired commonplace, however. Óunayn has not fulfilled ʿAlī b.

bi obi bli og raphi es | 185 Yaªyā’s original request for a comprehensive guidebook to all the ancient works on medicine which are of continued relevance. Óunayn asserts his independence of his patron by noting his procrastination in fulfilling even a modified version of an earlier request which came from another patron! His accession to the request is actuated by his realisation of the universal benefit a Galenic catalogue would represent, a benefit which he expresses (as a lightening of a burden) in a manner not dissimilar to al-JāªiÕ’s description of the benefits of his Book of Living (1.10.7–15).18 This current (Arabic) composition is a version of a slightly earlier work commissioned in Syriac by an unnamed patron. So the text has two patrons: an original patron who requested the work be written in Syriac; and ʿAlī b. Yaªyā requesting it be written in Arabic. Both works are defective as a result of Óunayn’s dependence on his memory19 and the commission is incomplete because the work restricts itself to a Galenic catalogue based on Galen’s own catalogue of his books, his Pinax. Óunayn notes that the epistle owes its present format to the intervention of the first (Syriac-speaking) patron who asked for a list of translations of the works enumerated in Galen’s catalogue. The work begins with the double commission. You mentioned (may God ennoble you!) the need for a book which compiled the register of the ancient books on medicine that were still relevant. It was to explain the aim (ghara∂) of each title, the enumeration (taʿdīd ) of the discourses (maqālāt) of every book, and the topics (abwāb) of the discipline (ʿilm) contained in every discourse, one by one. Its purpose is to lighten the burden (maʾūna) for someone who seeks any of the topics, one by one, when the need arises to look into it – thus he will understand in which book, in which of its discourses, and in which section (maw∂iʿ) of which discourse it is to be found. You asked me to undertake this onerous task (atakallaf ) on your behalf [Bergsträsser 1.4–10]. May God assist you! I informed you that my memory (ªifÕ) was not good enough to remember all those books in their entirety since I had lost all the books I had collected. I also said that, after I had lost my books, one of the Syriac-speakers had made a similar request of me specifically for the books of Galen, requesting that I clarify for him which books had been translated into Syriac and other languages by me and by others. So I wrote

186 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s a book in Syriac for him in which I followed the path he had set out for me when he asked me to produce (wa∂ʿ) it [Bergsträsser 1.10–16]. May God ennoble you! Then you asked that I translate this book for you immediately, in order that God, with all the gratitude He deserves, might generously restore these books by your hand, that I append to the books of Galen recorded in this work a list of any not available to me and that I mention the remaining books by the ancients on medicine which we have come across.20 I will proceed to do what you have asked for, if God wills [Bergsträsser 1.16–2.4]. May God honour you! The first thing I did in the book was to name the man and outline his request. I said, ‘You have asked me to write for you on the subject of the books of Galen: how many they are, by what titles they are known, what is the aim of each one, how many discourses each contains, and what subjects he describes in each and every discourse, one by one (’?) [Bergsträsser 2.5–8].21 Then I informed you that Galen had produced (wa∂aʿa) a book in which he followed this approach and described (rasama) his books. He named it Fīnaks (Pinax) which I translated as ‘the Catalogue’ (fihrist). I also told you that he had produced another discourse in which he described the order in which his books were to be read and I remarked that it was better to look to learn about the books of Galen from Galen himself rather than from me [Bergsträsser 2.9–12]. You responded that if the matter was as I say, then we and everyone else who shares this aim (ghara∂) and who reads his books in Syriac and Arabic needs to know which of these books has been translated into the Syriac and the Arabic tongues and which has not; which books I am responsible for translating; and which ones others are responsible for translating; which ones were translated by others before me, that I then revisited and translated or corrected (a‚laªtu); who exactly is responsible for the translation of each and every one of the books translated by others; and the ability and vigour (mablagh al-qūwa) in translation of every one of those translators. You also said that we need to know for whom they were translated; who are the people for whom I translated each of the books I was responsible for; and at what age I translated it – both of these need to be known since a translation is commensurate with the vigour of the translator for the

bi obi bli og raphi es | 187 book and with the identity of the individual it was translated for. You said that we also need to know which of the books as yet untranslated are still available in a copy (nuskha) in ancient Greek (yūnānīya) and which are not available, or which are only partially available, for this is something which is needed in order to ensure the translation of extant works and to search for those which are not [Bergsträsser 2.12–3.2]. When you detailed this to me as you did, I knew that your words had hit the mark and that you had called on me to undertake something generally useful to me, to you and to many others. But for a long time I kept on putting off and delaying your request because I had lost all my books – I had collected them, one by one throughout my whole life, from the time when I developed my understanding (?),22 in every land I had travelled to. Then I lost every single one of them completely so that I do not even possess that very book which I mentioned to you a little while ago, the one in which Galen established the list of his books. But when you pressed me with the request I was compelled to accede to it, despite the loss of the equipment which I needed to do the job, when I saw that you were satisfied with restricting your request to what I could remember on the subject (bāb) [Bergsträsser 3.3–11]. Therefore, placing my trust (mutawakkil ) in the heavenly assistance which I hope for through your prayers for me, I now begin, with all the concision I am capable of, to provide in detail all I can remember about these books as you have asked me to do. I will begin my speech with the description of what we need to know about the two books which I ­mentioned a short while ago [Bergsträsser 3.11–15]. 1. The book which Galen named Fīnaks (i.e. Pinax) and in which he provided a register of his books is composed of two discourses. In the first discourse he mentions his books on medicine and in the second discourse he mentions his books on logic, philosophy, rhetoric (balāgha) and grammar. In some of the Greek manuscripts we have come across these two discourses joined together as if they were one discourse. His aim in this book is to describe the books which he produced (wa∂aʿa), the aim of every one of them, that which prompted him to produce it, the patron for whom and at what stage (ªadd ) of his life he produced it. Ayyūb al-Ruhāwī, known as ‘Freckles’ (al-abrash),23 translated it into Syriac before me, then I

188 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s translated it into Syriac for Dāwud the Physician and into Arabic for Jaʿfar Muªammad b. Mūsā. Now because Galen did not actually go so far as to list all his books in this work, I appended a third brief discourse in Syriac to the two discourses, in which I explained that Galen had omitted some of his books and I enumerated many of those which I had examined (raʾaytu) and read. I also described what caused him not to mention them [Bergsträsser 3.16–4.4]. 2. The book whose title (ʿunwān) is ‘On the Order of Reading his Books’ is one discourse. His aim is to tell what order his books must be read in, book after book, from the first to the last. I did not translate this discourse into Syriac. Ibn Isªaq translated it for Bukhtīshūʿ. I translated it into Arabic for Abū al-Óasan Aªmad b. Mūsa. I do not know of anyone who had ­translated it before me [Bergsträsser 34.5–10].

Óunayn’s catalogue is a complex work, a revised version (by an unknown redactor who updates several entries after Óunayn’s death) of a revision made by Óunayn himself of his translation into Arabic of his earlier rendering into Syriac of Galen’s catalogue of his own books!24 It is remarkable for its scrupulous inventory of Galen’s books (it lists 179 Syriac versions and 123 Arabic versions, 100 of which are the work of Óunayn, of 129 works by Galen).25 The work notes problems such as illegible manuscripts, defective translations, retranslations, and points out when works were available in manuscript form but had not been rendered into Syriac or Arabic.26 It outlines a comprehensive research programme for making Galen available in Syriac and Arabic, a programme which, while it is a compromise between Óunayn’s own vision and the receipt of patronal commissions, seeks to restore the original order of Galen’s books after the distortion of it by the Alexandrian curriculum.27 It is also a personal plea for protection and sponsorship. I presume that when Óunayn refers to the as yet untranslated works a Greek version of which he has in his possession he means to direct his patron to a commission. On a number of occasions, Óunayn refers to the loss of his books.28 In a probably apocryphal text contained in a history of medicine and physicians by Ibn Abī U‚aybiʿa (d. 668/1270), a text which has come to be known as Óunayn’s autobiography, Óunayn tells how his success at court

bi obi bli og raphi es | 189 as head physician of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil led to an intrigue against him masterminded by his fellow Christians. The result of this complot is a flogging, the confiscation of his library as well as his entire estate and a six-month imprisonment. While the autobiography in its extant form may be pseudepigraphical, perhaps a narrative confected by Óunayn’s family to protest and defend his innocence, the Epistle does describe the calamitous deprivation of Óunayn’s library. It suggests that the Epistle itself is somehow soteric, enabling the text’s patron to effect the return of the library.29 The philosopher al-Kindī is also said to have had his library confiscated during alMutawakkil’s reign by the Banū Mūsā, the powerful dynasty of scientists and patrons of scientific works, for whom many of Óunayn’s translations listed in the catalogue were commissioned.30 What intrigues me about the text, in the present context, is how it establishes a fascinating series of correspondences between bibliography and biography, between biography and translation and between textuality and corporality. Bibliography and biography are connected not only in terms of Óunayn’s life and career, but also because Óunayn’s memory is his only way to save his books (in the double sense of ensuring their return and keeping them alive in his mind), and perhaps even secure his release from imprisonment and return to caliphal favour. Galen had set himself up as an exemplary physician-philosopher whose biography was paradigmatic and authoritative and whose bibliography represented a sort of pedagogical imperative. This memory had been perverted by the way in which the Alexandrian school had erected a new curriculum through distorting the order of his books. Óunayn seeks to reinstate the original Galen through restoring the proper, authoritative order of his books, and by situating himself as his true representative, the renewer (mujaddid ) of the master’s vision. On occasion, in a fashion which exemplifies al-JāªiÕ’s inquiry into the ancient Greek practice of using books as familial inheritance, Óunayn mentions that he has prepared a particular Galenic text for his son, Isªāq, himself a renowned translator: Ayyūb had produced an incomprehensible translation. I‚†fan translated it also into Arabic for Muªammad b. Mūsā: Muªammad had asked me for

190 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s it before he requested the previous book from me so he ordered I‚†fan to collate it with me. I corrected the Syriac with a correct and comprehensible phrasing to which no exception could be made because I was very desirous of preparing a copy for my son [Bergsträsser 24.7–11].31

In Arabic the word tarjama, Óunayn’s term of preference for taking a text out of one language and converting it into another, means both biography and translation.32 Thus the age of a translator and the identity and intellectual capacity of the commissioner are significant elements of the translation process. The provision of these details by Óunayn mirrors Galen’s own practice (Bergsträsser 3.21).33 Biography is thus a central part of the evaluation of the merits of a translation. As part of his entry on Galen’s book ‘On Proof (burhān)’ (Bergsträsser 47.10–48.8, §115) Óunayn informs ʿAlī b. Yaªyā that In my case, my soul (nafs) was not happy (ta†ib) with translating only a portion of it rather than reading it in its entirety, on account of the defectiveness and lacunose state of the manuscript which was available to me and on account of the covetousness (†amaʿ) and yearning (tashawwuq)34 of my soul for discovering the full version of this book. But then I translated into Syriac what I had discovered – that was a small portion of the second discourse, most of the third, about half of the fourth from the beginning, and the ninth apart from a portion of its beginning which had been lost. I eventually discovered the rest of the other discourses as far as the end of the book apart from the fifteenth discourse because the end of it was lacunose [Bergsträsser 47.19–48.6].

In other words, a lacunose text occasions psychological disturbance (covetousness and yearning are passions which need to be restrained and controlled). Once the translator has quelled the disturbance he is able to translate the text. Translation is a matter of ‘vigour’ or ‘strength’ (qūwa)35 and ‘maturity’ (bulūgh): Sarjis had developed a certain vigour (qawā baʿ∂ al-qūwa) in translating but he had not fully matured (yablagh ghāyata-hu) [Bergsträsser 7.13–14].

This is also because translation, as a facet of understanding, is something with which we are endowed by our nature. Not everyone can translate:

bi obi bli og raphi es | 191 I had translated all of this book into Syriac a few years ago for Yūªannā b. Māsawayh. I was extremely solicitous to express it succinctly (talkhī‚) and eloquently (ªusn al-ʿibāra). I also translated the first discourse of this book into Arabic for Muªammad b. Mūsā. The rest of the book was the responsibility of Óubaysh, using the Syriac copy (nuskha) which I had translated. Now, Óubaysh is a man naturally marked with intelligence (ma†būʿ ʿalā alfahm) and he desires to follow in my footsteps when it comes to translation but I do not consider his solicitude to match his natural aptitude (†abīʿa) [Bergsträsser 15.4–10].

Textuality and corporality are associated through puns on textual explication (sharª) and anatomy (tashrīª), both derived from the same lexeme in Arabic. Anatomy is the exegetical dissection of the text of the body.36 Perhaps this equivalence between text and body is most evident in the following comment: At the time I translated it I was a young man of about thirty and a decent amount (ʿidda ‚āliªa) of knowledge had accumulated in my soul and in such books as I possessed [Bergsträsser 6.3–6].

None of these three catalogues, however, are quite identical to al-JāªiÕ’s account of his library in The Book of Living. For example, they deal with works written by others, however closely their authors engage with them and seek to associate themselves with them, and they are promotions, not really defences, of the works catalogued. And with the exception of Óunayn’s imitation of Galen’s custom of compiling catalogues of his books, and perhaps of al-Fārābī’s On Plato’s Philosophy, these lists do not establish such an intimate connection between biography and bibliography as the synonymy between a man and his library that al-JāªiÕ presents us with in the ‘Introduction’. E. Aristotle Aristotle and Galen are the only other figures for whom there is such an extensive and close association between biography and bibliography in the third century.37 Gutas has surveyed the intimate relationship in the Alexandrian tradition and its Arabic epigones between Aristotle’s life, books and the imperative to define philosophy. He has noticed how the Arabic versions of the schoolbook biographies of Aristotle from Alexandria in the fifth and

192 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s sixth centuries AD heighten the equivalence of biography and philosophical discovery – Aristotle’s life becomes the history of philosophy. This process of philosophical and biographical becoming is a necessary preliminary before philosophy can grow, develop and progress in Aristotle.38 Thus a Greek text from the fourth century AD, which may have been translated into Arabic in the third century AH, contains an epistle from a certain Ptolemy to Gallus, in which he narrates the life of Aristotle, describes the contents of his will and provides a catalogue (pinax) of his works. A version of this document appears to have been incorporated by Ibn al-Nadīm in his entry in the Fihrist on Aristotle and his books.39 We will encounter al-JāªiÕ’s argument that books are closer to their writer than his children in the ‘Manual of Composition’ (at Óayawān 1.89.7–14) (translated in Chapter 5.4, p. 366). Al-JāªiÕ may, then, figure an association between himself and his books in a manner which might encourage some of his contemporaries to identify him with Aristotle. Sadly, we are not told in The Book of Living whether the catalogue of the JāªiÕian library is complete. Is this a list of all of his works composed prior to The Book of Living? Or is the list selective? If it is selective, who has made the selection? Are we to think that al-JāªiÕ has chosen to defend these particular works, and so do they have, in terms of his argument or his presentation, something in common? Or is this a random list? These books are not all extant. We do not even know whether those which are extant have survived in the forms which al-JāªiÕ may have given them at any one time. Many are anthologised, abbreviated and preserved in later collections. So we have no way of answering this question. Or are we to understand that the list is one compiled and determined by the Addressee – is it an integral component of the muʿāra∂a, al-JāªiÕ’s rebuttal of his charges? If it is the Addressee who has selected these treatises and singled them out for his vituperation, do they share common features which render them reprehensible and blameworthy in the Addressee’s estimation? These are the sorts of questions which I would dearly love to answer but cannot answer fully. In order to think about them further, however, it might be useful to ponder a number of related issues: the form of the ‘Introduction’; the enigma of the Addressee; invective; the cohesiveness of society; and encyclopaedism.

4.2 The Form of the ‘Introduction’

B

y the middle of the third century, in terms of the textual tradition as it has been preserved, the form that a speaker gave to his speech and that a composer bestowed on his composition was an integral part of what one said and was subjected to the most intense scrutiny by his audience of listeners and readers. (This audience was also largely formed of one’s competitors, looking not only to learn but also to attack.) The beginning of a work, be it poem or prose composition, was the moment when the form of the work was advertised and where the composer sought to control the moral, aesthetic and estimative response of his audience. This was a persistent, centuries-old, feature of the poetic tradition. But when we ask how early ʿAbbasid prose works begin, we see that commonly, and at best, they begin with short notices but without the type of composition which would by the second half of the third century become identified as a formal introduction (muqaddima).40 For example, in the case of lecture notes made public in book form by lecturers or their students (i.e. works which were not prepared by their authors for dissemination formally as books), a chain of authorities (an isnād or a riwāya) may be the extent of the prefatory material. Generally, however, prefatory material is rehearsed and presented in three formats: risāla (or kitāb), letter or epistle (I tend to reserve the term ‘epistle’ for what I describe as the ‘erudite’ letter); muqaddima, introduction; khu†ba, homily and prefatory address. A. Risāla and Kitāb The letters and epistles (risāla or kitāb) to have survived from the third century which I have consulted are mostly arranged in a simple ternary format. The basmala is usually accompanied by a doxology (a ªamdala) and possibly 193

194 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s also a prefatory supplication in the form of a prayer for the addressee’s wellbeing or a brief address of the recipient. The substance of the epistle is generally introduced by the paratextual marker, ammā baʿd (i.e. to begin or let us turn to the matter at hand). A string of pious supplications predominantly makes up the letter’s envoi.41 Within this simple scheme, at its most evident, rudimentary and commonplace in everyday letters and state communications, an astonishing plethora of variations is employed in what for want of a better term I would describe loosely as the ‘erudite’ letter. The prefatory material may perhaps take the form of a notification of the sender and the recipient: see for example the list of senders and declaration of recipients with which al-JāªiÕ’s Treatise of the Singing-Girls, Kitāb al-Qiyān, begins. By the second quarter of the third century, however, this type of preface, overwhelmingly common in everyday letters, was rendered obsolete by the practice of providing these details on the exterior of the writing material.42 Typically, the sender may note that he has written his epistle in response to the request of the recipient, as in al-JāªīÕ’s Book of the Vaunt of the Blacks over the Whites, Kitāb Fakhr al-Sūdān ʿalā al-Bī∂ān, or in the following p ­ assage from The Treatise on the Craft of the Kalām, Kitāb fī Íināʿat al-Kalām: God keep you! You mentioned your preference for the craft of dialectic and for that which you deem special to the method (madhhab) of al-NaÕÕām, your passion to advance to the limit in speculation (naÕar) and your assiduity in keeping the creeds (niªal ) chaste, together with your disposition towards communality (jamāʿa) and your aversion to sectarian bigotry (furqa). You mentioned that you were completely determined to perpetuate inquiry and probing, to constrain your soul, for all its aversion, to cogitating, and to take the name of the Kalām Masters and profess their allegiance.43

This description of the epistle as fulfilment of a request is very evident in the letters written by the Monophysite theologian and apologist Óabīb b. Khidma Abū Rāʾi†a al-Takrītī (d. c. 220/835).44 Thus the petition and response topoi are deployed in his Defence of Christianity and the Holy Trinity, Fī Ithbāt Dīn al-Na‚rānīya wa-Ithbāt al-Thālūth al-Muqaddas (Keating 83.4–9, §1). So too, in his first epistolary argument for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity,

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 195 Fī al-Thālūth al-Muqaddas, Abū Rāʾi†a incorporates an intriguing iteration of the convention of the author’s difficulty in fulfilling the petition (Keating 165.9–168.2, §§2–3).45 The epistle On the Incarnation, Fī al-Tajassud, apparently written in conjunction with On the Holy Trinity, concludes with the conventional statement that the author is confident that he has fulfilled the petition and attributes to the addressee the responsibility for any failure to understand it (Keating 294.13–17, §86). He ends with a prayer to God for guidance (Keating 296.1–3, §86). Prefatory material may simply consist of a brief prayer for the guidance of the recipient and/or the sender, as in some of al-JāªiÕ’s theological or eristic epistles, such as An Epistle on Deeming Reasoned Speech Superior to Silence, Risāla fī Taf∂īl al-Nu†q ʿalā al-Íamt: May God long rejoice in you for your piety and perpetuate His blessings with you! May He place you among those who are led to the truth when they learn it and who reject and withdraw from falsehood (bā†il ) when they see it! [Rasāʾil 4.229.3–4].

This particular prayer is followed by a declaration that the epistle which it prefaces is a muʿāra∂a, a critical engagement with a pamphlet which al-JāªiÕ has received: I have read your pamphlet (kitāb) concerning the virtue (fa∂īla) of silence such as you have described it and the accomplishments of quietness (sukūt) such as you have explained them . . . [Rasāʾil 4.229.5–6].46

This pattern is also evident, for example, in his Treatise in Criticism of the Mores of the Bureaucrats, Kitāb Dhamm Akhlāq al-Kuttāb, which begins with a basmala, a short prayer and an avowal that al-JāªiÕ has read and comprehended the addressee’s treatise (Rasāʾil 2.187.3–4), before he launches into his rebuttal. Receipt and comprehension of the addressee’s treatise appear to be closely connected with the eristic and refutatory character of other treatises by al-JāªiÕ, such as The Rebuttal of the Christians, al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚arā (Rasāʾil 3.303–51). In this work al-JāªiÕ mentions the reading and comprehension of the letter (kitāb) (3.303.7–10) and provides several quotes from its contents (3.303.11–307.15) before beginning his rebuttal of the Christians with the

196 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s paratext wa-baʿd (3.307.16). A similar technique is discernible in his treatise On the Creating of the Qurʾān, Fī Khalq al-Qurʾān (Rasāʾil 3.285–300), which boasts a preamble, in which al-JāªiÕ mentions receipt and comprehension of the addressee’s first letter (kitāba-ka al-awwal: 3.285.9–11) from which he proceeds to quote (3.285.12–287.3) before progressing to detail how in the current tractate he has satisfied the request made of him (3.287.4–289.3). In those treatises which belong to the paraenetic, ‘mirror for princes’ tradition, in which al-JāªiÕ provides moral guidance and ethical instruction for a charge entrusted to his care, the pattern is to begin with praise of the recipient’s character tempered with suggestions for how that character may be improved. This is the case with his Treatise on the Here and the Hereafter: On Education, Managing People and Ways of Dealing with them, Risālat al-Maʿāsh wa-al-Maʿād fī al-Adab wa-Tadbīr al-Nās wa-Muʿāmalatihim (Rasāʾil 1.91–134; Kraus-Óājirī, pp. 1–36), written for the son of the Chief Judge Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād, Abū al-Walīd Muªammad (d. 239/854), and The Treatise on Keeping a Secret and Holding One’s Tongue, Kitāb Kitmān al-Sirr wa-ÓifÕ al-Lisān (Rasāʾil 1.139-172; Kraus-Óājirī, pp. 37–60), a work which is truncated in its present form, no longer having a doxology or prefatory supplication.47 The Treatise on Quadrature and Circumference, Kitāb al-Tarbīʿ wa-alTadwīr, begins in the same fashion. After a narrative setting, in which al-JāªiÕ describes the object of his vituperation (the bureaucrat Aªmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb), and the reasons for their contre-temps (Pellat 5–6, §§5–9, §§1–8), he commences the direct address (Pellat 10, §9). As this is a parody of the ‘mirror for princes’ genre, traits which seem virtues in the addressee’s eyes are paraded by the addresser as vices, the consequence of egregious selfdelusion (Pellat §§1–3 and 10–12, §§9–12).48 The exculpatory address evident in the explanatory matter which prefaces The Book of Mules, Kitāb al-Bighāl (translated in Chapter 2.2, p. 62), in which the author refers to extenuating circumstances in an apology for the work, is a more confessional mode of engagement and, to the best of my knowledge, is less commonly encountered in letters and epistles from the third century. We have just encountered an example in Óunayn’s Epistle on his translations of Galen. If we take a look at some other (longer) third-century works we find

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 197 considerable variation in practice, as we would expect when writerly practice is in the process of determining its contours and emerging as tradition. The treatise identified as probably the first work to have been written as a book in Arabic, The Book, al-Kitāb, of Sībawayhi, begins with seven short chapters which apparently constituted what was at one stage a separate risāla, and which were added to The Book, either by him or (more probably) by al-Akhfash (al-Awsa†) (d. 215/820), the scholar who preserved the copy of the work and was responsible for its promulgation. These chapters are usually read in terms of a programmatic relationship to the rest of the work – though whether this relationship is one created by Sībawayhi himself or by al-Akhfash is impossible to say.49 The Kitāb itself is bare of many of the usual trappings of the early Arabic book. Apart from this Risāla it has no avowed preface or conclusion. It seems also to have been bereft of a title. The lack of a title has attracted to it the most laconic, but also the most grandiloquent, of descriptions – al-Kitāb, ‘the book’, inviting comparisons with the Holy Qurʾān, universally referred to as al-Kitāb, ‘the Book’. The seven chapters which are identified as constituents of the Risāla bear the following titles (in a provisional translation): 1. ‘This is the chapter (bāb) of the knowledge of what words (al-kalim) in Arabic are’ (i.e. the three parts of speech) [Hārūn 1.12.1–13]; 2. ‘This is the chapter of how the endings of words run in Arabic’ (i.e. the inflected nouns and verbs and uninflected words) [Hārūn 1.13.1–23.8]; 3. ‘This is the chapter of that which is supported and that which is supported on it’ (i.e. how statements are made) [Hārūn 1.23.9–24.6]; 4. ‘This is the chapter of the use of words because of their meanings’ (i.e. lexical usage and signification) [Hārūn 1.24.7–14]; 5. ‘This is the chapter of the accidents (aʿrā∂) which can occur in words’ (i.e. linguistic occurrences which cannot otherwise systematically be accounted for) [Hārūn 1.24.15–25.9]; 6. ‘This is the chapter of using speech correctly and absurdly’ [Hārūn 1.25.10–26.5]; 7. ‘This is the chapter of that which poetry can allow’ (i.e. poetic licence) [Hārūn 1.26.6–32.8].50

198 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s What I find a bit unusual as I read these chapters is that they remind me most of a work from the first half of the fourth century, al-Fārābī’s Enumeration of the Sciences, Iª‚āʾ al-ʿUlūm. This is a work in which the philosopher systematically reviews and classifies the kinds of knowledge and disciplines practised in his society. So at one point towards the end of the Risāla, Sībawayhi (or the author of the epistle) justifies his brevity by noting that ‘poetry permits many more licences than I can mention to you here because this is an occasion for summary points (maw∂iʿ jumal )’ (Hārūn 32.6–7). Al-Fārābī constructs his classificatory edifice precisely on the strength of a list of ‘summary points’ (jumal). The Risāla employs regular cross-references (I have counted eight occurrences) and scatters the didactic address ‘know!’ twelve times throughout the work.51 Apart from this instance of identification (maw∂iʿ jumal), I cannot find any other indications in the text itself that it may have been at one point an independent composition separate from the main treatise. There is, for example, no indication in the Risāla that the Kitāb begins with ‘the Chapter of the Agent’ (bāb al-fāʿil) (Hārūn 33.1).52 If these chapters did form the substance of a more substantial Risāla by Sībawayhi, al-Akhfash or someone else for that matter, then it is not unreasonable to assume, in the absence of further evidence, that it is a truncated or modified version of an annunciative epistle, one which announced the completion of the treatise on grammar (today known as al-Kitāb). As an annunciative epistle, it would be similar in manner to al-JāªiÕ’s Epistle to Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād announcing the Treatise on Legal Verdicts, which I translate presently, or the annunciative dedication of the epistle which is incorporated into al-Kindī’s On First Philosophy (see pp. 199–201). ʿAlī b. ʿUbayda al-Rayªānī (d. 219/834) was an acquaintance of al-JāªiÕ who composed a compendious collection of adages and aphorisms with the title Bejewelled Statements and Pearls of Wisdom, Jawāhir al-Kilam wa-Farāʾid al-Óikam. He prefaces his work with a formal introduction (Zakeri 5–12) which he calls a risāla, an epistle (Zakeri 12.18). This epistle is a moralising survey of human ethical behaviour, and its sententiousness is corroborated by observations drawn from the author’s own personal experience, informed by a deep sense of the spiritual, emotional and social benefits to be gained from studying the paraenetic literature which he presents (ādāb, adages, mawāʿiÕ, exhortations, and wa‚āyā, testaments).53

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 199 After a basmala (Zakeri 4.1), and a doxology (Zakeri 4.2–6), ʿAlī b. ʿUbayda declares that people are of two types: those gifted with comprehension and those who are not (Zakeri 4.7). This last category is briefly characterised: they are beyond instruction (Zakeri 4.7–9). The first group contains two sub-groups: the preternaturally intelligent, who are very rare (Zakeri 4.9–12), and the intelligent (Zakeri 4.12–14). All are liable to forgetfulness, however. Its causes are delineated (Zakeri 4.14–17). Its remedy is the paraenetic literature (Zakeri 4.17–6.4) to which the author can testify from his own personal experience (tajriba) of acquiring ethical hygiene through poems and testaments (Zakeri 6.4–10.3). Al-Rayªānī explains how, thanks to a saying of one of the scholars (ʿulamāʾ), he learned the importance of thanking the Benefactor and he notes that grateful enjoyment of life’s blessings is consistent with the practice of the rightly guided Imams, the Companions, Successors and Virtuous Sages (ªukamāʾ) and that asceticism is legally supererogatory (fa∂īla) but not obligatory (farī∂a) (Zakeri 10.4–12). He expounds his four behavioural principles (khilal) for seeking knowledge (Zakeri 10.15–22), praises his composition as a means for achieving ethical hygiene (Zakeri 12.1–5), provides guidance on the purpose and uses of his book (Zakeri 12.5–17), outlines its contents (Zakeri 12.17–20) and prays for his own guidance (Zakeri 12.21–22). Thus in this risāla, an epistle integrated into the treatise as a programmatic introduction, ʿAlī b. ʿUbayda advises his readers on why and how to use his book (Zakeri 12.5–17), and provides them with a table of contents and an overview of its division into thirty chapters of fu‚ūl, aphorisms (Zakeri 12.17–22). Like the Bejewelled Statements, On First Philosophy, Fī al-Falsafa al-Ūlā, by al-Kindī contains an epistle in the form of an address of the patrondedicatee (the Caliph al-Muʿta‚im).54 The extant version of this text begins as follows: In the Name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful. My success comes from God alone. The letter (kitāb) of al-Kindī to al-Muʿta‚im bi-Allāh on the first philosophy. May God give you long life, son of the descendants of chieftains and the mainstays of felicity. He who seeks to be guided by them is felicitous in this

200 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s life and in eternity. May He adorn you in the raiment of virtue and cleanse you of all stains of vice. The highest of the human crafts in station and the noblest in rank is the craft of philosophy . . . [RJ 9.1–8; AR 1.97.1–7].

Al-Kindī sets out to establish that first philosophy is the study of God. The ensuing rehearsal of topics functions as the programmatic introduction to the treatise, although it does not quite assume the form of a table of contents. Al-Kindī presents a definition of first philosophy as the highest component of philosophy (RJ 9.8–11.2; AR 1.97.8–101.1); that it is acquiring know­ ledge of the knowable (RJ 11.3–12; AR 101.1–14); first philosophy is the name given to the first cause (RJ 11.13–15; AR 101.15–17); it promotes a theory of progress which entails praise for the philosophers of the past (RJ 11.16–13.14; AR 102.1–103.3) and reliance on their endeavours (RJ 13.15–22; AR 1.103.4–11); and embarks on a rebuttal of his enemies who have criticised the value of philosophical speculation (RJ 13.22–15.14; AR 1.103.11–105.9). At the end of this section, al-Kindī concludes his address with a pietistic envoi: Now we bring this section (fann) to a close through the assistance of the Bestower of blessings, the Accepter of good deeds [RJ 17.8; AR 1.105.18].

The next section begins: The second section (fann), which is the first part (juzʾ) on first philosophy. Since we have placed the obligatory introductory matters (qaddamnā mā yajib taqdīmu-hu) at the beginning (‚adr) of this letter (kitāb) of ours, let us follow it with what follows on naturally from it . . . [RJ 19.1–4; AR 1.106.1–4].

In other words, the dedicatory epistle has been fully integrated into the treatise: it is a formal introduction, a muqaddima, in all but name, and has been arranged as one of the formal sections (fann) of the work.55 So, al-Kindī’s treatise and al-Rayªānī’s compilation indicate that the delivery of commissioned works or works dedicated and donated to a potential patron were sometimes announced in a short petitionary epistle. Such petitionary epistles either preceded or accompanied the larger work, though

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 201 occasionally they were incorporated formally into the body of the work which they announced. Sometimes, we find cases in which the dedicatory epistle has survived but the treatise itself has not. And in the case of The Book of Sībawayhi, an epistle has survived alongside a treatise as if it were either an annunciative epistle or a formal programmatic introduction, though in its present form it does not seem to fit either function. We might also assume that the dedicatory epistle was not always integrated into a work disseminated to a wider audience, after it had been donated to a patron. Once donated and accepted, the work seems to have become the property of the dedicatee who thereby becomes the patron and owner of the work. A number of al-JāªiÕ’s works appear to have been preserved only in the personal library of the patron and not disseminated to a wider audience. This is one of the probable reasons for the disappearance of many of his writings. The Treatise on Husbandry and Date-Farming written for Ibrāhim b. al-ʿAbbās al-Íūlī (mentioned by Ibn al-Nadīm: Chapter 2.2, p. 63) is probably an instance of such a work. Presumably the author of the work (i.e. the individual who writes it rather than the individual who owns the work) would have to secure the permission of the patron of the work in order to be able to disseminate it outwith the confines of the patron’s library or circle. B. The Treatise on Legal Verdicts There are a few annunciative epistles extant in the JāªiÕian corpus: one of them is the Epistle to Abū ʿAbd Allāh Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād in which he Informs him about the Treatise on Legal Verdicts, Risāla ilā Abī ʿAbd Allāh Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād Yukhbiru-hu fī-hā bi-Kitāb al-Futyā. Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād was the Chief Judge whom we have already encountered as the patron who, according to Ibn al-Nadīm, rewarded al-JāªiÕ so handsomely for the Book of Clarity and Clarification, Kitāb al-Bayān wa-al-Tabyīn. Its singularity makes it worth translating in full: Translation56 [Mīr Dāmād 95a; Leiden 159] An epistle to Abū ʿAbd Allāh Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād al-Iyādī by Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baªr al-JāªiÕ which he wrote to inform him of The Treatise on Legal Verdicts [Pellat 542.6–8; Rasāʾil 1.309]. [1] [Mīr Dāmād 95b] In the Name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful.

202 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s May God prolong your life, may He make you mighty and bring about righteousness through your hands.57 It is said, ‘Power (sul†ān) is a market’. Markets only attract the goods that will sell there. Scholar (ʿālim), teacher and student of the good, you who summon and bring people to it! You are in the most elevated station of power. When God has entrusted to someone the misdeeds (maÕālim) of His bondsmen and the welfare (ma‚āliª) of the territories, has made him scrutineer (muta‚affiª) of judges and a mainstay of the provincial governors (wulāh), and when He has made him the destination of scholars (ʿulamāʾ), the refuge of the weak and the repose of the wise (ªukamāʾ), then God has put that person in the most elevated place and conspicuous rank. The people of learning (ahl al-ʿilm) and the people of experience and understanding (ahl al-tajriba wa-al-fahm) say, ‘God exerts control through those in power (sul†ān) more than He does through the Qurʾān’.58 It is often said, ‘There are two separate things – if one of them is righteous, then the other will be too: those in power (sul†ān) and their subjects’. Well then, those in power (sul†ān) are righteous, and it remains for God to bring about the fullness of His blessing in the form of the righteousness of His subjects, so that Prophetic tradition (athar) may be verified and testimony (shahāda) in reports (khabar) be true.59 Therefore we beseech Him who bestowed upon you goodly stewardship to bestow upon us goodly obedience [Pellat 542.9– 18; Rasāʾil 1.313.1–314.1]. [2] I have considered the trade (tijāra) which you have chosen and the market which you have set up, and the only goods which I see selling there are knowledge (ʿilm) and its clear expression (bayān), righteous actions (al-ʿamal al-‚āliª) and summoning thereto, co-operation in maintaining the welfare (ma‚laªa) of God’s bondsmen and banishing (nafy) corruption from the ­territories [Pellat 542.19–543.1; Rasāʾil 1.314.2–4].60 [3] God extend your life! I am a member of the people of speculation (naÕar) and [Leiden 160] the bearers of tradition (ªummāl al-athar),61 and I can only accomplish and perform this fully by following the path of its people and according to the example set by its members. A man remains with those he loves. To him belong the actions he performs (iktasaba) [Pellat 543.1–3; Rasāʾil 1.314.5–7]. [4] May God give you long life! I have a comprehensive treatise (kitāb jāmiʿ) on the diverse disagreements (ikhtilāf ) of people concerning the foundational

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 203 principles (u‚ūl) of legal verdicts (futyā), on the basis of which their secondary principles (furūʿ) disagree and their rulings (aªkām) contradict each other. I have collected therein all the claims62 with all of the reasons given in support (ʿilal). The treatise will be complete and so comprehensively fulfil the need people have for it, only if, as proofs63 for every position, we adduce the arguments which are not achieved by its proponent, and which are not expressed by those who support it, and only if we are satisfied not just with removing the veil of falsehood rather than ripping it off or with weakening it rather than invalidating it [Pellat 543.4–7; Rasāʾil 1.314.8–12]. [5] The Apostle of the Lord of the Worlds, the Seal of the Prophets, Muªammad (May God bless and cherish him and his family!)64 said, ‘Give gifts to each other and earn each other’s affection’. [Mīr Dāmād 96a] So he urged the giving of gifts, even a trifle, say a shinbone (kurāʿ).65 When he invited us to give a worthless gift, he was inviting us even more to give important and valuable gifts. He would have been more satisfied with them than with paltry gifts. I know nothing which summons us more to mutual affection (taªābb), which has a greater obligation in terms of reciprocal gift giving, which is higher in station and more noble in rank, than that knowledge (ʿilm) to which God made action secondary and Paradise its reward [Pellat 543.7–11; Rasāʾil 1.314.12–17]. [6] When someone writes a book, in the absence of his opponent (kha‚m), and when he has assumed surety (takaffala) for providing information about his opponent’s position, it is inexcusable for him not to be exhaustive and not to establish everything which his opponent’s statement entails. So too it is inexcusable for him not to invalidate any statement that conflicts with his own system (madhhab) in the estimation of the readers of his book who have already comprehended the defects of the statement. For what makes excuse impossible and removes all argument in the writer’s defence (ʿilla) is the following simple fact: his opponent’s words are an easy and vulnerable target for his tongue.66 His opponent has given him control of his person and power over exposing his shame (ʿawra). And since the producer of the book (wā∂iʿ al-kitāb) enjoys repose from the mischief of his opponent and the blandishments of his companion (jalīs), all that remains is that he is either capable or incapable of smashing falsehood [Pellat 543.13–17; Rasāʾil 1.314.18–315.4]. [7] One of the thankful features of understanding (maʿrifa) how people go

204 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s astray and how they follow the right course, and what harms and helps them, is that you can shoulder67 the heavy burden of providing them with instruction (taʿrīf ) on this, [Leiden 161] and you can undertake to guide them aright, even if they do not understand the excellence of the benefit they are being given. Nothing preserves knowledge (ʿilm) like being generous with it. Nothing hastens it like scattering it. However, the reading of a book is a more effective means of providing good guidance than when they meet one other. When people meet one another there is an increase in doing wrong to one another, the will to help one’s comrade is excessive and burning zealotry (ªamīya) grows intense. In face-to-face encounters, the love of victory (ªubb al-ghalaba) is excessive as is the desire (shahwa) for vainglory and leadership, along with being ashamed to retreat and pride (anafa) at humiliation. Out of all of this, hatreds are occasioned and division (tabāyun) becomes apparent. When men’s hearts assume this attribute (‚ifa) and constitution (ªilya), they are resistant to understanding (maʿrifa) and are blind to indications (dalāla). Books offer no reason (ʿilla) which would prevent people from attaining the desired aim and hitting upon the probative argument (ªujja), because when someone reads in solitude and is alone when he comprehends (fahm) their ideas, he does not seek to vanquish himself or to score a victory over his ­reasoning intellect [Pellat 543.17–544.4; Rasāʾil 1.315.5–316.2]. [8] The book is often superior to its author (‚āªib) and outdoes its producer (wā∂iʿ) in a number of ways. For instance, it can be picked up68 at any time, despite the disparity of the eras and the great distance between towns. That is something [Mīr Dāmād 96b] impossible for the book’s producer (wā∂iʿ) and anyone who contends (al-munāziʿ) in question and answer. The scholar (ʿālim) passes away while his books remain. His offspring69 disappear while the traditions (athar) he has passed on remain. Were it not for what the ancestors (awāʾil) have recorded (rasamat) for us in their books, the marvellous wisdom which they have perpetuated, and the various kinds of biographies (siyar) which they have inventoried (dawwanat), with the result that in them we can witness (shāhadnā) what has passed and through them can open what is locked, thus combining their abundance with our paucity and obtaining what we would otherwise have been unable to – were it not for this, our share of wisdom (ªikma) would decrease, our connection (sabab) with knowledge (maʿrifa) would be cut off, our ambition (himma) would be curtailed and

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 205 our intention (nīya) would weaken.70 Then, personal opinion (raʾy) would fall sterile, our ideas (khawā†ir) would die, and the reasoning intellect would move away [Pellat 544.4–11; Rasāʾil 1.316.4–11].71 [9] The books which bring more benefit than their books, the best ever to have been uttered, are God’s scriptures (kutub Allāh). They contain guidance, mercy, information about every lesson (ʿibra) and the specification (ta‚rīf )72 of everything ill and good. Therefore it is vitally necessary that we trail a path [Leiden 162] for those who come after us, just as those who came before us did for us. We may have discovered more of the lessons (ʿibra) than they did, but those who come after us will discover more than we have [Pellat 544.12–15; Rasāʾil 1.316.12–16]. [10] So why is the scholar (ʿālim) waiting to reveal his beliefs? Why is he who disseminates the truth (al-nāshir li-al-ªaqq)73 waiting to undertake what he must do? For speech has become possible, the times are righteous, the star of precautionary dissimulation (taqīya) has fallen, the scholars (ʿulamāʾ) are in good odour,74 ignorance (jahl ) and blindness (ʿamā)75 no longer find buyers, and a market for knowledge (ʿilm) and clarity (bayān) has been established [Pellat 544.16–18; Rasāʾil 1.316.17–317.2].76 [11] May God guide you aright! This book may seem good in my eyes and sweet in my breast. But I am prone to the same error about it as the father is about his son and the poet about his verse.77 For all my anxiousness over it and my apprehension (hayba) at your scrutinising (ta‚affuª) it, I was incited to produce (wa∂ʿ) it when I learned that your intention (irāda) and conduct (madhhab) are governed and determined by affability to the scholar (taqrīb al-ʿālim) and the expulsion of the ignoramus (jāhil ); that, when you read a book or listen to a speech, your comprehension (fahm) is so extensive and your knowledge (ʿilm) so sound that they exceed both the faults and the virtues contained in the work; that, when you see a slip, you pardon it and correct it but do not upbraid or brand the man who committed it,78 whereas, when you see something correct, you draw attention to it, shepherd it, summon others to it and reward it.79 So when I was safe from being punished for doing wrong and sure of being rewarded for doing good, the production (wa∂ʿ) of the book became an obligation and I did not discourage myself. This then made putting it in sequence (naÕm) and [Mīr Dāmād 97a] seeking close support (taqarrub) thereby an obligation.80 The cause (sabab) is to be preferred over

206 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s the effect (musabbab), because an act is predicated upon its cause, is annexed to it, dependent upon it and included in it81 [Pellat 544.19–545.6; Rasāʾil 1.317.3–15]. [12] May God prolong your life! Any good I do through this book of mine, if I have been successful, is paltry beside the good you do, since you are the one who stirred it from its covert and who brought it forth from its slumber. Therefore the greater portion belongs to you – the more effective cause is attributed to you. If I have fallen short of my aim, then I am the one who has been led astray, not you. If I have attained it, [Leiden 163] then your superiority is more evident and your share more abundant, because I would not have found the energy (ansha†) to do it but through you and I could only have relied on you in doing it. And were it not for the market you have set up, in which only the establishment (iqāma) of the Prophetic Sunna and the destruction of heretical innovation (bidʿa), the repulsion of injustice, and speculation (naÕar) concerning the weal of the community are for sale, then these wares would be worthless, the goods brought here would be rejected and this precious commodity would be cheap [Pellat 545.7–13; Rasāʾil 1.317.16–318.7]. [13] So praise be to God who civilised the world through you, who entrusted to your care those who have been wronged, who strengthened this rule through your blessing, and who made the Imam’s prognostication (firāsa) concerning you come true! What station is more elevated, what estate is more laudable than that of the man whom every scholar (ʿālim) on earth yearns for or has journeyed to, is under his protection or has been taken under his wing; than that of the man whom every wrong-doer on earth seeks protection against and whose intercession every wronged individual seeks? Who can grasp the value of the recompense of one whose worth and whose estate are thus? [Pellat 545.14–17; Rasāʾil 1.318.8–13]. [14] May God extend your life! I have other books besides this one. I am only prevented from donating (uhdiya) them to you all at once by what I know of how busy you are and the many burdens of governance (tadbīr) which press upon you night and day. Though knowledge be the life of the reasoning intellect, as the reasoning intellect is the life of the spirit (rūª) and the spirit is the life of the body, the determining characteristic (ªukm) of knowledge is the determining characteristic (ªukm) of water and the other nutrients:

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 207 when they exceed the extent to which they are required, they become harmful.82 Drinks are only palatable and food is only wholesome one bit at a time (al-awwal fa-al-awwal). Knowledge (ʿilm) works like this and proceeds as they do. It is part of [Mīr Dāmād 97b] men’s souls to feel ennui over what they find too lengthy and too copious. We should not be among those who assist this or be among those who fail to understand the nature of the human constitution (†abāʾiʿ al-bashar), for even the strongest is weak and even the most energetic (ansha†) grows weary. Though their states be disparate, they are all susceptible to and overcome by weakness [Pellat 545.18–546.2; Rasāʾil 1.318.14–319.2]. [15] May God assist you! When this letter (kitāb) is read to you, we request it be at times when you are at leisure (jamām) and hours of inactivity insofar as such a thing is possible and available. God will give success in this and make it happen. Then we will send every book (kitāb) in its proper sequence, if God wills. They do not, praise be to God, form part of the study (bāb) of the leap (†afra) and interpenetration (mudākhala) or substance (jawhar) and accident (ʿara∂). No, they are all devoted to the Book and the Sunna, and the whole community has the most pressing need of them [Pellat 546.3–6; Rasāʾil 1.319.2–7]. [16] Next we petition Him who taught us of your excellence to unite us with a firm bond,83 to make us among your righteous assistants (‚āliªī aʿwāni-ka) who learn from you (al-mustamiʿīn) and speculate (nāÕirīn) in your company and to render seemly in your eyes and pleasing in your ears that through which we have sought to come close (taqarrabnā) to you and have looked to approach you, for He is near and answers and does what He wills [Pellat 546.7–9; Rasāʾil 1.319.8–11]. [17] May God prolong your life and complete His blessings and His grace upon you in this world and the next [Pellat 546.10; Rasāʾil 1.319.12]. Commentary [1–2] Al-JāªiÕ begins his dedication by stressing how important authority and the holders of authority are for the good governance of society. Under the Chief Judge’s pious and rightful tutelage, society is prospering. This is vital for the honest and scrupulous transmission of the reports concerning the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muªammad. The Chief Judge has also

208 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s created the correct environment for scholars and scholarship to flourish, in particular knowledge of the Prophetic tradition, a meaning which ʿilm often has in the third century.84 [3] Al-JāªiÕ now introduces the purpose of his epistle: the dedication to the Chief Judge of a systematic compendium on legal verdicts, one which will explain why these verdicts differ so much by establishing the basic assumptions and the underlying principles upon which each approach is based. This is something which is not provided by the proponents of these various views. Compare this with the following statement made in The Rebuttal of the Christians, al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā: We have discussed how to answer them and have corrected their questions to an extent and in a manner beyond their abilities. We have several reasons for doing so, including the comprehensiveness of our proof (dalīl ) and the inclusiveness of our response, our intention to inform anyone who reads this pamphlet and scrutinises this response that we have not taken advantage of their inability or capitalised upon their inadvertence (ghirra). We also want people to know that the bold presumption which comes from the conclusiveness of our argument (idlāl ), and our confidence in victory and divine assistance were our incentives for providing the sort of information about them which they themselves do not provide, for only using ideas, when discussing their questions, which others have already pointed to and indicated, and for making it impossible for them in the future to approach our weak-minded fellows and those feeble in speculation with a point which has not previously been answered and to which their tongues have not already assented85 [Rasāʾil 3.349.15–350.2].

In other words, al-JāªiÕ has sought in his rebuttal of the Christians to articulate all the relevant points of their arguments, doctrines and polemics.86 In the Epistle to Ibn Abī Duʾād, his approach will be informed by his membership of ‘the folk of speculation and the bearers of tradition’, by which I understand him to say that he is a Kalām Master with a special interest in Óadīth, not a faqīh or a muªaddith (since neither of these professions has been able to explain its positions systematically). So in this work I think al-JāªiÕ promotes himself as a semi-rationalist of the kind the Caliph al-Mutawakkil promoted (see Part 1, p. 31).

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 209 [4] Al-JāªiÕ promotes and justifies his gift of a treatise on knowledge (i.e. Prophetic tradition) by adducing Prophetic precedent (i.e. Sunna) in the form of the quotation of a ªadīth without its chain of authorities (isnād ). [5] Al-JāªiÕ explains that writing a polemical treatise in which one attacks another person’s doctrines or statements is not like arguing with them in person. One’s mental state is less liable to the confusion which results from the hurly-burly of face-to-face argument. Therefore, in the absence of any excuses based on extenuating circumstances, a written polemical work is more revealing of the argumentative and reasoning capacities of its author than a debate is. This is the notion we encountered in the first section of the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living: books promote social cohesion through acting as a substitute for live debate. The following repetition of a passage found also in this section of the ‘Introduction’ would tend to corroborate this contiguity. [7] Here in a nutshell is al-JāªiÕ’s psychological analysis for promoting books over debates. The passage Pellat 543.17–544.18; Rasāʾil 1.315.5–1.317.2, is repeated almost verbatim at The Book of Living 1.84.9–87.1 and a slightly longer form of the passage, Pellat 543.12–544.18; Rasāʾil 1.314.18–317.2 is repeated almost verbatim at The Responses and Meriting of the Imamate, al-Jawābāt wa-’stiªqāq al-Imāma: Rasāʾil 4.295.7–298.6 (see Hefter, ‘You have asked’, p. 20). I am minded to discern in these recyclings repetitions intended to persuade and convince one and the same addressee, Ibn Abī Duʾād, to see these texts as part of a cycle of works. The Óujaj al-Nubūwa is in many ways similar to this cycle. Whilst it does not in its present form contain any verbatim recyclings, it does rehearse a key idea as it is expressed in these other works: the usefulness of the treatise in helping to convert the apostate and deviant when he reads it in quiet solitude (Rasāʾil 3.235.8– 236.2). Al-JāªiÕ also remarks on the usefulness of his book as a compilation of proof texts (Rasāʾil 3.234.11–236.2). [11] The paean of the book is complete. Al-JāªiÕ reverts to the topic of the favourable rule and his eulogy of the Chief Judge. This is a classic captatio benevolentiae, an attempt to secure the patron’s goodwill, by stating that it is the dedicatee’s virtue which is the impetus and occasion of the donation. [13] The reference to the Caliph, responsible for appointing the Chief Cadi,

210 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s as the Imam I take to be an allusion to the debate provoked by the despair expressed by some scholars over achieving a legitimate Imamate. Some Kalām Masters even proposed governing society without a leader, a position which al-JāªiÕ found abhorrent: Part 3, §9 and §15.2, pp. 135–6 and 139; Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 65–9; Sánchez, ‘Al-JāªiÕ’s treatises’, pp. 119–27 (on the dispensability of the Imamate). The reference to the importance of firāsa, presumably in making or confirming the appointment to the chief judgeship, is fascinating. Hoyland, ‘Physiognomy in Islam’, pp. 372–6, and ‘The Islamic background’, pp. 247–50, notes the use of physiognomy by the judiciary but not its use in the appointment of the judiciary. [14] Al-JāªiÕ explains that although he has other writings in addition to the current one which he offers the Chief Judge, he will refrain from sending them all at once, presumably waiting to see how this current donation will be received. A similar declaration is made at the end of the Epistle on the Upstarts (Nābita Rasāʾil 2.22.11–16). This caution and uncharacteristic coyness is explained away in an argument which compares knowledge to nutrition: because of human psychological composition, the over-provision of knowledge can be as harmful to the soul as over-eating can be to the body. [15] The topics of these promised works are not the topics of Kalām physics, as expounded by al-JāªiÕ’s teacher, al-NaÕÕām. The topics of these books he intends to donate are those which exercised the community in the middle of the third century: how to expound and codify revealed law on the basis of the interaction of the Qurʾān and the Sunna. Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, p. 272, stresses how essential revelation was for determining that the Imamate was entailed by and included in divine law. [16] On this type of epistolary conclusion, see Hefter, ‘You have asked’, p. 12; parallels to the final formula: Manāqib al-Turk Rasāʾil 1.86.13–14 = Manāqib al-Turk Rasāʾil 3.220.17–18 (inna-hu samīʿ qarīb faʿʿāl li-mā yurīd ) (addressed to al-Fatª b. Khāqān); ʿAdāwa Rasāʾil 1.373.10 (inna-hu qarīb mujīb) (addressed to ʿUbayd Allāh b. Yaªyā b. Khāqān); al-Mawadda wa-al-Khul†a Rasāʾil 4.204.15–16 (inna-hu samīʿ qarīb faʿʿāl li-mā yurīd ) (addressed to Abū al-Faraj b. Najāª al-Kātib). The formality of this concluding supplication would seem to cast doubt on the applicability of Hefter’s assertion, ‘You have asked’, p. 15, n. 35, that certain of al-JāªiÕ’s letters such as those to Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik and Abū al-Faraj b. Najāª are

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 211 distinguished by an air of flippancy or peevishness determined in proportion to the presumed degree of intimacy in al-JāªiÕ’s relationship with the addressees. [17] Compare this concluding supplication with the pietistic envoi of the epistle to Ibn Abī Duʾād’s son, Abū al-Walīd Muªammad, On the Rejection of Assimilationism, Fī Nafy al-Tashbīh, Rasāʾil 1.308.12: a†āla Allāh baqāʾa-ka wa-ªafiÕa-ka wa-atamma niʿmata-hu ʿalay-ka wa-karāmata-hu la-ka, May God prolong your life and keep you, and may He complete His blessings and His grace upon you. C. Al-JāªiÕ and the Chief Judge This epistle, a eulogy in prose, concludes with al-JāªiÕ’s voicing of his petition: membership of the Chief Judge’s entourage. It simultaneously tells a prospective patron of the existence of a composition which is to be dedicated to him and petitions entry to his entourage. Al-JāªiÕ asks Ibn Abī Duʾād to make him one of his ‘righteous assistants’ (‚ālihī aʿwāni-ka: Pellat 546.7–9; Rasāʾil 1.319.9), so that he can give him counsel on why there is such fundamental disagreement over the basic principles informing judicial decisions. In making this plea for patronage, al-JāªiÕ both avows and disavows his speculative past by declaring his membership of the craft of the Kalām (Pellat 543.1–3; Rasāʾil 1.314.5–7) and by renouncing its subject matter (Pellat 546.5–6; Rasāʾil 1.319.6–7). He notes that he is a semi-Rationalist, a tradent of Prophetic traditions (athar) who recognises how scrupulous, accurate and honest transmission of historical reports and legal testimony is the fundament upon which society rests (Pellat 542.16–17; Rasāʾil 1.313.13–14). His reassurance that his books do not deal with the leap, interpenetration, essence and accident (Pellat 546.5–6; Rasāʾil 1.319.6–7) is not only a public recusal of the main tenets of the physics of al-NaÕÕām, but probably also a veiled reference to a move away from al-NaÕÕām’s political theories relating to the conventionality, rather than indispensability, of the Imamate.87 Such a work on legal verdicts is, of course, a very fitting gift for a Chief Judge. Its theme is a matter of supreme importance for the welfare of the community and is entirely consistent with Ibn Abī Duʾād’s official interests in promoting its unity through the institution of the Sunna. The codification of judicial procedure was not only vital for the governance of the provinces

212 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s of the empire, but, insofar as it involved scrutiny of the Sharīʿa, went to the heart of contemporary debates, including that about whether the institution of the Imamate, the leadership of the Islamic community, was decreed by divine revelation or was simply a matter of human convention. And, insofar as it depended upon scrutiny of the respective authorities of Sharīʿa and Sunna, it raised questions relating to the centrality of the Qurʾān and the Sunna in organising society, in terms of how far the Óadīth and the Prophet’s life should not only mould but actually determine human relations. This epistle is predicated upon a vision of society common to many Islamic thinkers. At its heart stands the association between God and the community as represented in the figure of the ruler. Human beings, as creatures of need and deficiency, require a ruler to hold society together. Al-JāªiÕ’s vision of a society is thus thoroughly traditional – one in which the morals of the ruled are predicated upon the morals of the rulers. In the terms established by Crone, al-JāªiÕ reveals himself to be a jamāʿī Muslim, one whose vision of the Sunna comprises both Prophetic traditions and theological speculation.88 Ibn Abī Duʾād has inaugurated a new golden age of scholarship, one in which scholars are no longer required to hide their beliefs (taqīya: Pellat 544.17; Rasāʾil 1.317.1) and in which the only marketable commodities are knowledge (and by ʿilm here I suspect that al-JāªiÕ intends knowledge of the Prophetic Sunna) and its proper articulation (bayān). Perhaps one of the most striking features of the epistle is the wholesale recurrence of a passage which is also included as part of the paean of books in the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living. Of course, al-JāªiÕ was an egregious recycler of his writings and there is no way of telling which of the two passages is the earliest. There is further evidence, however, of the close connection which obtains between the argument of both works in their notion that writers can be deceived about the merits and demerits of their books, and in their argument that books maintain social integrity more effectively than debates and discussions in person (an argument which we encountered in Part 3, pp. 166–7, in another notably recycled passage which also features in the Responses and Meriting of the Imamate, al-Jawābāt wa-’stiªqāq al-Imāma, Rasāʾil 4.295.7–298.6). We may, then, glean little about The Treatise on Legal Verdicts from its annunciative work but we get a reasonable sense of its contours. We learn that

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 213 it is an exhaustive and comprehensive work on the subject of the principles underlying legal decision-making which seeks not only to give an account of the positions which various groups and individuals have taken up but also to interrogate the ideas upon which these positions are predicated. In so doing, it seeks to place the Qurʾān and the Sunna at the very heart of the community and to position al-JāªiÕ as the spokesman of the People of Prophetic Practice and Communitarianism, the Ahl al-Sunna wa-al-Jamāʿa.89 In terms of the eventual establishment of the formal introduction (muqaddima) to books in the third century, this dedicatory epistle demonstrates that in cases where a treatise was accompanied by such a letter, the letter was presumably expected to articulate the eulogy to the dedicatee in a direct mode of address, even though the dedicatee might not be named. We might infer, therefore, that it was not thought necessary for the main body of the treatise itself to contain these formal expressions of loyalty. On the other hand, we have seen in al-Kindī’s On First Philosophy and al-Rayªānī’s Bejewelled Pronouncements, that prefatory and dedicatory epistles were eventually incorporated formally into the disseminated version of the work. D. Muqaddima By the time of the floruit of Ibn Qutayba in the second half of the century, substantial monographs, commissioned by a patron but also designed for dissemination as books, were prefaced with often long, programmatic introductions. These introductions are known as muqaddimas. They too display a simple ternary format identical to the ternary format of the ‘erudite’ risāla, which suggests that muqaddimas may have developed as prefatory and dedicatory epistles, formally incorporated into the body of the book or treatise, perhaps in emulation of the programmatic introductions found in many of the Greek works translated into Arabic.90 It is instructive briefly to contrast two of Ibn Qutayba’s works: the prefatory format which he employed in his first major composition, The Education of the Bureaucrat, Adab al-Kātib, written for Abū al-Óasan ʿUbayd Allāh b. Yaªyā b. Khāqān, who became vizier in 236/851 (and for whom al-JāªiÕ wrote his Epistle on Distinguishing Enmity from Envy, Risāla fī Fa‚l mā bayn al-ʿAdāwa wa-al-Óasad );91 and the technique employed in his Book on Poetry

214 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s and Poets, Kitāb al-Shiʿr wa-al-Shuʿarāʾ, with its renowned muqaddima. Let us first consider the opening salvo of this book on poetry: Abū Muªammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Muslim b. Qutayba said: ‘This is a book which I have composed on poets and in which I have given information on the poets and their times, on their rank and standing (aªwāl ) as regards their poetry, on their tribes and the names of their fathers, on those who are known by cognomen (laqab) or teknonym (kunya), on what is admired of the accounts of any given poet and what is deemed excellent of his poetry, on such errors and mistakes in their wording and meaning as the scholars (ʿulamāʾ) have criticised them for, on what the early poets have done first and the recent poets have derived from them. In it I have also given information on the Categories of Poetry and its echelons, on the purposes for which poetry is anthologised and because of which it is admired and such like, including that which I have included in this first part’ [de Goeje 2.1–8; Shākir 59.3–10].92

In other words, Ibn Qutayba has effectively provided his audience with a table of contents and has directed them to the principal contents of the introduction, as well as guiding his readers on how to use the work. Of the two extant manuscript traditions of the imperial geography of Ibn Khurradādhbih (d. either c. 272/885 or 300/911), The Treatise of the Highways and the Kingdoms, Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik, one begins with a doxology, while the second version begins with a muqaddima: a prayer for the continued well-being of the addressee, a declaration that the author has fulfilled his patron’s commission and a table of contents, and closes with a hymn to the Creator.93 One Óadīth collection, the Sound Compilation, Íaªīª, of Muslim b. al-Óajjāj (d. 261/875) begins with a programmatic introduction.94 A ªamdala and a doxology (Muslim 1.24.1 and 24.1–2) are followed by the conventions of the petition (1.24.2–26.2) and response (1.26.2–27.1). Next comes advice of what the reader/petitioner can expect from the book, coupled with a general description of its aims, a justification of its method and identification of the audience to whom it is addressed (1.27.2–31.2). A detailed overview of the contents of the work is provided (1.31.3–37.14). Muslim first outlines his threefold division of tradents (1.31.3–32.1) and then justifies

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 215 his repetition of ªadīths when such repetition is unavoidable (1.32.1–6). The three categories of Óadīth practitioners, muªaddithūn, are described more fully (1.33.1–3; 33.4–35.10 and 35.11–37.11), Muslim’s technique of providing commentary is explained (37.12–14) and he returns to the conventions of the petition and response by noting that the social and personal benefits which the work will bring has made compiling it a lighter task than its author might have expected (1.37.15–38.6). The bulk of the introduction is devoted to an exploration of the principle that scrutiny of the Óadīth and its tradents is a moral and religious duty for those blessed with the capacity for discerning and making distinctions (tamyīz) (1.38.7–86.4). Óadīths are related in order to establish the following code of conduct: lying in transmitting ªadīths is to be avoided (1.38.7–41.2); those who fabricate ªadīths and attribute them to the Prophet will suffer damnation (1.42.3–43.9); discrimination and discernment must be used in transmitting ªadīths (1.44.1–46.12); suspect transmitters must be shunned (1.46.13–51.6); in order to respond best to the religious significance of the chain of authorities, the isnād, transmission must occur in accordance with the authority of trusted informants (1.51.7–74.3). Having established this code and the scientific credibility of this method of scrutinising and transmitting traditions (1.74.4–75.6), Muslim embarks upon a rebuttal of an unnamed opponent who advocates that judgement be suspended on chains of authorities, in which it is not specifically stated, and so is not known for certain, whether any of the reporting authorities formally studied with the authority on whom he bases his transmission (1.75.7– 86.4).95 The introduction concludes with a short prayer (1.86.4). Al-JāªiÕ’s Treatise on the Proofs of Prophethood, Kitāb Óujaj al-Nubūwa, also has such a programmatic preface. In its extant form, this work is not formally an epistle. After a doxology (Rasāʾil 3.223.3–6), al-JāªiÕ informs his reader that he will discuss akhbār, reports, and āthār, traditions, giving guidance on how to detect which are dubious, which can constitute proof (ªujja), and on the various kinds of proof itself (Rasāʾil 3.223.7–11). He announces that he will discuss why traditions need to be transmitted and reports need to be heard and the role which human nature and societies play in this (Rasāʾil 3.223.12–224.5). In this way he means to remedy a deficiency of the jurists (fuqahāʾ) and Kalām Masters (mutakallimūn) who have neglected to discuss

216 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s ‘how to distinguish traditions’ (tamyīz al-āthār) and ‘how to determine which reports are sound’ (ta‚ªīª al-akhbār), because this is absolutely central to distinguishing the true prophet from the false and for identifying what constitutes the Sharīʿa (i.e. revealed law) and what constitutes the Sunna (i.e. the exemplary practice of Prophet Muªammad, which according to al-JāªiÕ is not law, however desirable it may be for the goodly Muslim to emulate him) (Rasāʾil 3.224.6–11). Then al-JāªiÕ declares: When I set down the reports in their proper places and divide them, I will mention the proofs, signs, revealed legal codes (sharāʾiʿ) and exemplary conduct (sunan) of the Messenger (God bless and cherish him!). I will classify (jannastu) the traditions according to their value and arrange them in their stations. By means of weighty methods (wujūh) and necessary signs, I will summarise it and make it easy to understand, explaining it and making it clear, so that it will be just the same for someone who has not studied with many scholars (qalla samāʿu-hu) and who has a poor memory to learn as it is for someone who has studied with many scholars (kathura samāʿu-hu) and who has an excellent memory [Rasāʾil 3.224.12–16]. I did not intend in this book to collect, specify (taf‚īl ) and discuss (qawl ) the proofs of the Messenger (Eternal peace be his!), because they have been contaminated by a defect, or because their source (a‚l ) has been weakened by those who transmit them (nāqilī-hā) and provide information about them, or because the attacks of the deviants (mulªid ) have fractured (farraqa) their cohesiveness (jamāʿa) and destroyed their vitality, but rather for several reasons (umūr) which I will mention, argue for and prove [Rasāʾil 3.224.17–225.2].

In other words, in this treatise we are provided with a table of contents, an authorial programme, and advice to the reader about how to use the book. These introductions are designed to contain, in abbreviated form, the major themes of the work: an opportunity for the author to showcase the principal topics of the work and to guide the listener to what to look out for. E. Khu†ba The khu†ba, loosely rendered as the pulpit oration whence my rendering ‘homily’, continues to be the pre-eminent form of public oration in Islam and

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 217 is a prominent part of the Friday-congregation in the mosque. Early khu†bas tended to have a ternary structure (ªamdala, oration, pious supplication) and be of a moralising character. A few texts from the first half of the third century begin with khu†bas.96 It is as a khu†ba, a homily, that I read the prefatory material of the jurisprudential Epistle (Risāla) of al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820). This early work does not contain any indication that its initial material is to be identified as a muqaddima, a formal introduction. After a doxology (Shākir 7.3–8.11, §§1–8), al-Shāfiʿī composes a brief salvation history, explaining the consequences for mankind of the mission of Prophet Muªammad (Shākir 8.12–20.14, §§9–52), peppering his account with many quotations of Qurʾanic verses. This homily certainly rehearses ideas, concepts, themes and positions which underpin al-Shāfiʿī’s legal epistemology as presented in the Risāla, and so it is basically programmatic, but he does not make this explicit to his audience, the study circle for whom it would presumably have been self-evident.97 Like The Book of Living, The Book of Clarity and Clarification does not have a formal, programmatic introduction (muqaddima) extant. After a doxology (Bayān 1.3.3–6), a khu†ba (Bayān 1.3.6–22.13), which in the JāªiÕian lexicon means both a homily and a preface to a book (see Óayawān 1.7.10– 9.4), is followed by an account of how the theologian Wā‚il b. ʿA†āʾ (d. 131/748) received the cognomen of the Weaver (Bayān 1.23.1–34.3) and by a disquisition on mispronunciation (luthgha) (Bayān 1.34.4–74.8). And when al-JāªiÕ begins his presentation of the theory of bayān, the ostensible subject of the work, he draws attention to the unusualness of his organisation, with the following words: Abū ʿUthmān said: ‘This chapter should really have come at the beginning of this treatise, but we have held it back for the sake of an aspect of organisation (baʿ∂ al-tadbīr) [Bayān 1.76.17–18].

These passages do however rehearse a considerable number of important and significant ideas for the presentation of al-JāªiÕ’s arguments in the treatise, such as the parallels which are drawn between the Prophet Moses and Wā‚il and the lionisation of Wā‚il as the founding father of Muʿtazilism, the centrality of chaste and proper linguistic usage to the cohesiveness of the Islamic community, and the divine nature of the bayān, clear communication.98

218 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s F. The Education of the Bureaucrat In his Education of the Bureaucrat, Ibn Qutayba follows this practice of beginning his composition with a khu†ba, a prefatory homily, in which he rails against the corruption of the times in a tone evocative of al-Rayªānī’s denunciation of the corruption of his era. Ibn Qutayba’s later readers thought that it was so distinct from the book which it prefaced that one of them described it as a khu†bā bi-lā kitāb, a homily without a book.99 This homily has the simplest of binary structures: the author denounces the ills of his era; the author proposes how to remedy the ills of his era. The work begins with a ªamdala (Grünert 1.0–3; al-Dālī 5.1–5) which heralds Ibn Qutayba’s sustained jeremiad (Grünert 1.3–9.5; al-Dālī 5.5–11.12) against the frivolous degeneracy of his society which has brought about an abandonment of learning (Grünert 1.3–2.5; al-Dālī 5.5–6.7). Nowadays the bureaucrat only seeks to be a calligrapher, the literary expert (adīb) only wishes to praise singing-girls or describe a goblet, the subtle scientist (la†īf ) concentrates on the stars, on predetermination and logic, while attacking the Qurʾān and the Óadīth, although he understands neither properly, and is content with a reputation for subtlety (Grünert 2.5–3.1; al-Dālī 6.7–13). The self-delusion of this subtle thinker leads Ibn Qutayba to condemn other people as riff-raff and rabble, and although both are guilty of crass ignorance (jahāla), at least the latter know that they do not know, whereas the man of subtlety cannot be bothered to spend the time studying the Qurʾān, the Óadīth of the Prophet and his companions, and the knowledge, language and precepts of the Arabs. Were he to do so he would be filled with God’s light of guidance (Grünert 3.1–8; al-Dālī 6.13–7.4). Instead of these worthwhile subjects to which he is implacably opposed, he devotes himself to a type of ‘learning which the Muslims have left to him and his peers, one in which those who would contend with him are few, which has a translation (tarjama) which shines without any meaning, and a name which impresses without any substance’100 – that is, Aristotelian philosophy, much to the detriment of the inexperienced who are overawed by its flashy language (Grünert 3.8–4.9; al-Dālī 7.4–7). When the Kalām Master uses this terminology, his language degenerates, his tongue is shackled and he becomes

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 219 gauchely incompetent (ʿīy) at public gatherings (maªāfil) (Grünert 4.9–5.9; al-Dālī 7.15–9.1). Ibn Qutayba illustrates this point with an anecdote and concludes that Were the composer (muʾallif ) of The Definition of Logic (Óadd al-Man†iq) (i.e. Aristotle) to have reached this time in which we live so that he could hear the precise discussions of religion, jurisprudence (fiqh), legal obligations (farāʾi∂) and grammar, then he would count himself among the dumb. Or were he to hear the words (kalām) of the Apostle of God (God bless and cherish him!) and his companions, then he would be certain that ‘wisdom (ªikma) and decisive oratory (fa‚l al-khi†āb)’101 belong to the Arabs (Grünert 5.9–6.2; al-Dālī 9.1–4).

A eulogy of the work’s patron, who is immune to the vices of his time (Grünert 6.2–7.1; al-Dālī 9.5–13), provides a respite before Ibn Qutayba launches his prolonged attack on the imbecilities of the bureaucrats. He bases this attack on his own personal observation of their petty foolishnesses (Grünert 7.1–9.5; al-Dālī 9.14–11.13). Ibn Qutayba proposes to remedy this parlous situation. He has composed numerous, short introductory treatises (though they are not for the complete novice or those who have no grasp of the rudiments of formal Arabic) (Grünert 9.5–10.5; al-Dālī 11.13–12.12). But the well-rounded bureaucrat also needs to master some basic mathematics (Grünert 10.5–11.1; al-Dālī 12.13–13.5), the principles of jurisprudence (jumal al-fiqh wa-maʿrifat u‚ūli-hi) contained in the Óadīth (Grünert 11.1–12.5; al-Dālī 13.6–14.4), and narratives (akhbār) and the sources of the Hadīth (Grünert 12.5–7; al-Dālī 14.5–7). Even these accomplishments are not enough, however, if the novice does not have ‘reason (ʿaql) and a generous innate disposition (jawdat al-qarīªa)’ (Grünert 12.7–9; al-Dālī 14.8–9), for Ibn Qutyaba’s books will only work if the aspirant educates (yuʾaddib) his soul before he educates his tongue, improves (yuhadhdhib) his character (akhlāq) before he improves his words, preserves his virtue (murūʾa) from the ignominy of slander and his craft from the turpitude of lying, and if he avoids foul discourse and unseemly levity

220 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s (rafath al-mazª), before avoiding solecisms and prattling speech [Grünert 12.10–13.1; al-Dālī 14.10–14.13].

Ibn Qutayba pauses to enumerate several instances of seemly levity among the pious forebears of the past, including Prophet Muªammad (Grünert 13.1–6; al-Dālī 14.13–15.5). In this context he draws on the notion that speech is an ethical action, subject to the same laws of right and wrong as other actions, and as such is determined by the moral probity or otherwise of its user. In other words, in order to speak properly, one cannot simply use fine language and obey punctiliously the rules of Arabic grammar but must also be a good person. (This is the position which led al-JāªiÕ to articulate his notorious theories concerning the relationship between a man’s God-given nature and the speech which he is able to produce.)102 Ibn Qutayba offers his readers further advice: on euphony (or rather: on the avoidance of dysphony) (Grünert 14.6–15.6; al-Dālī 16.5–13); and on spoken as opposed to written syntax, for in written works it is not involved syntax as much as an inappropriate and outlandish lexicon which is disapproved of (Grünert 15.6–16.14; al-Dālī 17.1–18.2). The longest piece of advice for the aspirant amanuensis is the need to maintain an appropriate harmony between writer and recipient and to match the level of one’s discourse with the status of one’s addressee (Grünert 16.13–18.2; al-Dālī 18.3–19.1), and the desirability of achieving consistency in one piece of discourse by avoiding mixing praise with blame of one and the same individual (Grünert 18.2–10; al-Dālī 19.1–8). Ibn Qutayba provides some examples of this from his own personal experience, and corroborates his point with three examples taken from the Qurʾān, and two anecdotes concerning the Persian ruler Khusraw Abarwīz, that is Chosroes II Parviz. The dictum, ‘Every occasion has its discourse’ (li-kull maqām maqāl ), so central to al-JāªiÕ’s thinking on communication, is the focal point of a discussion of concision (ījāz) and repetitive amplitude, familiar to us from al-JāªiÕ’s thoughts on brevity and prolixity expressed in The Book of Living (see Chapter 5.4, pp. 366–8) (Grünert 18.10–20.4; al-Dālī 19.8–20.7), in which Ibn Qutayba cites the Qurʾān as his exemplar and refers to his discussion of these points in his treatise Explanation of Complexities of the Qurʾān, Taʾwīl Mushkil al-Qurʾān. Ibn Qutayba brings his homily to a close by advising that the pious

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 221 bureaucrat who is in full possession of the means (literally, tools: adawāt) which he has described, will, God willing, be virtuous, noble, victorious and successful in this life and the next (Grünert 20.4–8; al-Dālī 20.8–12). There can be no doubt that Ibn Qutayba prepared his Adab al-Kātib as a book for use by bureaucrats and those who wished to seek employment and preferment as bureaucrats. Indeed, he not only refers to another treatise he has written, he even specifies his intended audience (Grünert 9.13–10.5; al-Dālī 12.8–12). The homily with which he opens the work is a stylistic and formal response to the degeneracy of his society, a society in dire need of an exhortation and not a programmatic introduction.103 At the same time his eulogy of the patron amplifies the homily as a dedication and donation. And of course the remedies which he advocates for the improvement of his contemporaries is tantamount to a programmatic overview of what the reader can expect to gain from a perusal of the treatise. When we compare these three formats, the risāla (an annunciative and/ or dedicatory epistle), the muqaddima (a programmatic introduction) and the khu†ba (a prefatory homily), we can conclude that the provision of a programmatic muqaddima, was, therefore, by the middle of the third century, tantamount to a declaration by its composer that the work was designed for general use as a book. Ibn Qutayba’s khu†ba in his Education of the Bureaucrat, a work which the author describes unequivocally as having been designed for general use as a book (albeit by a certain class of people, the kuttāb, both the bureaucrats and those who would be bureaucrats, and not so much the public at large), signals the accomplishment of the programmatic khu†ba – and its swan song. G. Back to the ‘Introduction’ The ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living is unusual (though not unique). It is, to my knowledge, the longest introduction of any work from the third century to have survived, be it one declared as such by its author or not identified explicitly as a muqaddima. In fact, it is, in formal terms, a gigantic, bravura amplification of the address of the recipient with which so many short third-century ‘erudite’ epistles begin. It is quite possible that both The Book of Living and The Book of Clarity and Clarification were at one point accompanied by epistles addressed to their patron(s) and that these epistles have not

222 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s survived, because they did not form part of the eventual format which the books assumed when they were made accessible beyond the author-patron relationship. The impression these treatises convey, that they did not prove popular with their (initial?) dedicatee(s), may explain why their annunciative epistles were kept separate from the public versions. The ‘Introduction’ is also homiletic. It resembles the khu†ba techniques of the Epistle of al-Shāfiʿī, al-JāªiÕ’s own Book of Clarity and Clarification and Ibn Qutayba’s Education of the Bureaucrat. Yet it also functions as a programmatic introduction, in the same way that these introductory materials do, and so it also resembles the muqaddima. The introductory materials of The Book of Living and The Book of Clarity and Clarification resemble the Epistle of al-Shāfiʿī more than al-Kindī’s On the First Philosophy or al-Rayªānī’s Bejewelled Pronouncements: that is, they are khu†bas more than they are risālas-cum-muqaddimas. There is, however, another feature which characterises the ‘Introduction’ which these other works do not share: its extensive quotation and paraphrase of the Addressee’s words. I will return to this point in Part 6, pp. 418–22. The ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living, then, presents the author’s outline of the importance of reading creation as a system of signs, scrutinises the sufficiencies and insufficiencies of formal schemes for the categorisation of creation, explores the categorical capacities of a Kalām theory of ‘class’ (jins), especially in view of its potential to accommodate interstitial, trans-categorical and hybrid entities, and promotes the vital role which books must play in securing the continued solidarity of the Muslim commonwealth. It also infuses the treatise with the spirit of dialectical eristics, be it in its support for al-JāªiÕ’s written representation of the debate of al-NaÕÕām and Maʿbad on the dog and the rooster, or in its engagement with the critical invective of the Addressee, which is maintained throughout the first two volumes. However its khu†ba style and programmatic nature still do not account for the passion of al-JāªiÕ’s appeal. In this, The Book of Living is unique. Among his works, I think that only The Treatise on Quadrature and Circumference and On Earnestness and Jest come close in the force and intensity of their engagement. The first is an attack on a member of the entourage of the Vizier Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik b. al-Zayyāt, while the second is a plaintive

t h e f orm of the ‘i ntroduc tio n’  | 223 plea addressed to this same Vizier, asking him to alter his decision about the flogging which he has ordered al-JāªiÕ to receive. In sum, then, the ‘Introduction’ is a magnificently enlarged instance of the epistolary habit of addressing the recipient. It functions as a khu†ba, a homiletic preface to the work and it serves as a programmatic introduction to the treatise, in the style of the muqaddima which was soon to become expected of the published prose compositions. Like the rest of the work of which it forms so significant a part, and like the book as social artefact which it praises so lavishly, the ‘Introduction’ appears to be miscegenated and interstitial.

4.3 The Enigma of the Addressee

T

he whole work, as we are beginning to see, invites us to try to answer its mysteries, to respond to its idiosyncrasies. A question persists in my mind. Why does al-JāªiÕ begin his longest and most ambitious, if unfinished, extant work in this manner? I have pondered this question long and hard. There is no easy answer, it seems to me, beyond of course effectively seeking recourse in its very imponderability – it begins thus because it is unfathomable. Perhaps the simplest story we might tell about it is the following. The ‘Introduction’ was written after an original dedication and donation of the work and subsequent to the Addressee’s attack on al-JāªiÕ’s work and/or the Addressee’s rejection of this dedication. Why do I say ‘and/or’? Because an Addressee might conceivably accept the dedication subject to the improvement of those aspects of the work of which he disapproves. This story is required by the notice of donation at Óayawān 5.156.8 (see Chapter 2.5, p. 100) and by the reference at 1.10.3 (see Part 3, §14, pp. 116–17). In fact, it is actually demanded by al-JāªiÕ’s attempted refutation of the invective to which the ‘Introduction’ refers repeatedly. Such a refutation implies the prior existence of a text or a declamation for it to refute, and for such a refutation to have any point, this invective can only have been a criticism of The Book of Living (be it of specific volumes or the whole treatise).104 I hope it is clear from my preceding discussion of prefaces, dedicatory epistles and formal introductions that al-JāªiÕ moved and operated in a society in which the predominant model of social interaction among the elite, both educated and noble, was a system of patronage or clientage. Before you had an occasion to speak you needed to have access to the occasion at which to speak. Notables maintained large entourages to which scholars 224

t h e eni g ma of the addres s e e  | 225 could petition entry through the dedication of a composition or treatise, often described as a ‘gift’, hadīya. If a dedicatee accepted the donation, a ‘bond’ (literally a rope, ªabl, as in al-JāªiÕ’s Epistle to Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād ) or a ‘connection’, ‚ila, was tied between patron and client. The client became one of the patron’s aʿwān, helpers, or awliyāʾ, friends.105 This bond could be severed, of course, but once tied, it was expected that the client would work to preserve its integrity by fulfilling the responsibilities expected of him: the provision of advice, perhaps of a specialised or technical nature, the dedication of further compositions, representation and defence of the patron among his opponents.106 The dedication of compositions was informed by a system of gift exchange. The patron enjoyed the benefit of the scholar’s expertise, his mastery of Arabic, and his celebration through the renown that such works would earn for him among his peers. The client could expect to receive financial reward and a measure of personal security as well as the reflected glow of power which would surround his work and the accreditation conferred by the patron’s acceptance, himself often a very learned and educated individual and thus an arbiter of cultural prestige. The existence of such circles and entourages was not restricted to the notables, however. Eminent scholars were in turn the focal point of their own networks, and members of these networks could expect their patron to exert his influence with his superiors on their behalf: Abū Óanīfa (d. 150/767) is a fine case in point. The extended members of his network dominated the judiciary for almost a century.107 There was intense competition for entry to such entourages, and scholars were often victims of conspiracies, invective, slander and defamation. On occasion a direct challenge to a scholar’s expertise and authority might be mounted by a determined rival. Caution and circumspection upon detecting such plots could also easily become paranoia. The writers of Arabic compositions, both prose and verse, who moved in such circles were masters of ambiguity and evasion. Their attentive audiences were no less adept at decoding their compositions. The works produced in and for such a milieu (i.e. works which did not operate in the lecture circuit or were not written solely for the school and the study circle) were designed to resist straightforward or univocal readings, a phenomenon I have elsewhere described as ‘multivalency’. The emergence of the cultivation of the stylistic devices and rhetorical techniques

226 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s known as the ‘new’ style, Badīʿ, was at least partly actuated by participation in such milieux.108 For all the centrality of this ritual of gift exchange to the maintenance of these social networks, the ostentation of social and cultural prestige which they celebrate and the works which were composed and donated as part of it, there is an enigma at the heart of many third-century Arabic prose works. It is at its most acute in the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living. This enigma centres on the roles of a trio of actors in any given work. The actors are: the patron (by which I mean the person who recompenses the author for the work and so accepts, confirms or reaffirms him as his dependent); the dedicatee (the person or persons from whom the author hopes to receive recompense and to whom he dedicates the work); and the addressee (the person addressed in the work). In some works, these various, complementary, roles are performed by one actor, though it is rare for the patron also to be the addressee. In other texts, the patron and the dedicatee may be the same actor but distinct from the addressee, and in others the dedicatee and addressee may be the same actor but distinct from the patron. Sometimes the patron/dedicatee may be the commissioner of the work; on other occasions, he may also be the composer’s sponsor (his mawlā, in the sense that the author belongs to his entourage or faction), though he may not actually have commissioned a given work – it may be a donation, a gift of exchange, a declaration of fealty between dependent and patron, a reassertion of allegiance. There is a fourth textual agency which complicates matters: the listener and/or reader. In some texts, the listener is the addressee and the patron/­ dedicatee is praised and referred to in the third person. In this case, the dedication functions as praise of the author’s sponsor through celebrating his qualities to the community of readers and listeners who are summoned to bear witness to the truth of what the author says. In other texts, however, especially when the patron/dedicatee and the addressee are identical, the reader/listener is a privileged fourth party to the public intimate, to what is a very public private conversation, as happens in love poetry. The enigma consists in what seems to be a deliberate strategy: the avoidance of naming the patron.109 Even in an epistle as overt in its supplication as that sent by al-JāªiÕ to Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād petitioning him for patronage,

t h e eni g ma of the addres s e e  | 227 the Chief Judge is not actually named in the epistle. Indeed were it not the case that the anthologiser of the collection in which the epistle was included had preserved the identity of the destination, I think we would be a bit hard pressed to determine it, the profusion of its references to the legal tradition notwithstanding.110 Of course, the Addressee does not constitute the entirety of al-JāªiÕ’s audience for the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living. The audience is the notables and the educated elite, the khā‚‚a, and those to whom he refers as ‘our brethren and companions’, ikhwānu-nā wa-khula†āʾu-nā at Óayawān 1.49.15–50.1. The audience is also the community to whom he appeals in his preface to Volume Seven (see Chapter 2.4, pp. 90–1 and Chapter 4.5, pp. 256–61), if they are in fact distinct from the educated elite. Al-JāªiÕ’s writings (and other early ʿAbbasid prose works) are no different in this regard from coterminous panegyrics (or lampoons or love poems for that matter). They were composed in a direct and often close relationship with the interests, achievements, or defects and defeats, of the maecenas, and should be read first and foremost in terms of this relationship, without, of course, losing sight of the relevance of the wider audience. These prose texts and their prefaces, introductions and modes of address were composed in such a way as to resist the kind of interrogation we, and their later readers within the tradition, want to subject them to. In the first instance, the act of donation itself renders any need for this kind of specificity (through naming) otiose. In the second instance, many works were presumably rejected by their original destinations and were thus readied by this avoidance of specificity for rededication. In the third instance, composers of prose works may have emulated their poetic counterparts who at times displayed great scrupulosity in not naming the victims of their poetic attacks or in eliminating or emending in later redactions of the poem the names of those attacked. The compilers of poetic compilations (dīwāns) also exercised the same caution, often basing their decision on whether to include or exclude a vituperative poem on the presence or absence of naming in the work.111 In the fourth instance, the works were often multifunctional. Not only did they cover many purposes and meet many uses, they were also designed to be read in a variety of ways, say through the use of key notions and terminology intended for a clique or a particular audience, the precise

228 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s connotations of which might be lost on those outside this charmed circle, or through ambiguity, of tone, perhaps, or of the posture and register adopted by the author in declaiming the text. Such styles of discourse are not conducive to an open and explicit specification of identities. And anyway, we should always bear in mind that an over-precise specification like this would tie the composition to a particular individual in a way that would render it practically impossible to rededicate it, should the work not meet with the approval of its intended patron-dedicatee. This is not to deny however that the works were composed in such a way as to appeal to, and be informed by, perhaps even predicated upon, the interests, affiliations, predilections and aversions of the patron-dedicatee. The composition of this kind of work was an extremely delicate, if ambivalent, activity, a cultivation of a rhetoric of evasion and suspicion and at the same time of the prerogative of commanding right and forbidding wrong, as well as a fulfilment of the ties of patronage. This kind of activity is also typical of the poetical culture of the third century. The patron-dedicatee-addressee is not named in the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living. This prompts a series of questions. Is al-JāªiÕ’s Addressee the same actor as the dedicatee? And is the dedicatee the same actor as the patron? Why does al-JāªiÕ not mention by name any of these actors in the work? Was there more than one patron-dedicatee-addressee? It is not unusual for al-JāªiÕ’s works to have survived without the specification of the identity of their dedicatee. We have surmised that many of his works were presumably accompanied by letters (no longer extant) to their dedicatees announcing the arrival and completion of the work in question. In the case of the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living, and based on some permutations of the patron/dedicatee/addressee triangle, I have devised several conceivable responses to this enigma of the addressee (the list is not exhaustive): (1) The Addressee is the dedicatee/patron. He is either (1a) Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt or (1b) Ibn Abī Duʾād or (1c) both. (2) The Addressee is distinct from the dedicatee.

t h e eni g ma of the addres s e e  | 229

This latter scenario gives rise to further permutations, listed in no particular order of appeal, on the basis of which we might explore this enigma. The first is specific: (3) Al-JāªiÕ may address Ibn Abī Duʾād in defence of his patron/dedicatee Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik (there was no love lost between Vizier and Chief Judge). The remainder are less specific: (4) Al-JāªiÕ may address some other opponent of his patron/dedicatee; (5) Al-JāªiÕ may address a personal adversary in a munāÕara or a muʿāra∂a, an eristic contestation;112 (6) The address may be a rhetorical device, a fictive conceit; (7) The Addressee may be the reader; (8) Or the Addressee may be dead. The following speculation works on the assumption that the ‘original’ dedication and/or donation included all seven volumes of The Book of Living and that the work dedicated with its new ‘Introduction’ is effectively the form in which it survives today: see Part 2 for a review of other possible scenarios relating to the preparation of the treatise for public dissemination by al-JāªiÕ and his warrāq, his stationer. (5, 6 and 7) Al-JāªiÕ was a dialectical thinker who revelled in question and response. Did he need a straw man to pit his work against? Is the Addressee cast in the mould of the figure of the ʿādhil, the carper, familiar from the Arabic poetic tradition, the reprimander against whom the poet justifies his lifestyle, defends a decision or boasts of the extravagance of his actions? In most engagements with the figure of ʿādhil with which I am familiar, be it pre-Islamic or ʿAbbasid, the ʿādhil is effectively the voice of reason, of responsibility, or sober self-control and restraint – in other words, the ­spokesperson (the ʿādhil can be male or female) for society. Is the Addressee the recalcitrant reader who is unable to read al-JāªiÕ’s books because he is too lazy as a thinker and reader? Is the Addressee simply someone who dislikes al-JāªiÕ’s writings? Or does the Addressee function as the reader does in Freud’s Interpreting Dreams, in which Freud engages in an on-going tussle with his critical reader?113 Did al-JāªiÕ require a non-reader whom The Book of Living seeks to fashion as an ideal reader114 of nature, a

230 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s reader whose inabilities to understand his project would cast that project into sharper focus? In Volume Seven of the work, he does introduce one such non-reader, in the figure of the Eternalist, the Dahrī: someone who believed in the eternity of time rather than the eternity of God. Al-JāªiÕ tries to argue into silence his opposition to The Book of Living (see the translation in Chapter 4.5, pp. 256–65).115 Considered in these terms, I would be inclined to identify this Eternalist as the Addressee. The Book of Living itself would then be a protracted case for the defence mounted by al-JāªiÕ in rebuttal of the Eternalist’s vituperative rejection of the JāªiÕian world-view insofar as it is represented by his library.116 (1a and 8) Let us consider the patronage of Muªamamd b. ʿAbd al-Malik with the Vizier himself in the role of the Addressee. Ibn al-Nadīm is the earliest witness, external to the text, to identify the patron of The Book of Living with the dedicatee of The Treatise on Quadrature and Circumference and the addressee of On Earnestness and Jest, the Vizier Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik b. al-Zayyāt (d. 232/847–8). This relationship was close. Al-JāªiÕ is said to have given Muªammad a precious ‘first edition’ of Sībawayhi’s grammar, in a splendid format.117 But their relationship does not seem to have been always smooth or troublefree to judge from al-JāªiÕ’s appeal to him in On Earnestness and Jest that the Vizier spare him the flogging he has ordered that he undergo. I have noted that the stridency of the address in the ‘Introduction’ is also similar to that which obtains in On Earnestness and Jest, while the torrential abundance of dialectical engagement is similar to the barrage of questions with which al-JāªiÕ bombards the Addressee of The Treatise on Quadrature and Circumference, and indeed in The Book of Living he provides a basic answer to some of the questions posed in this work.118 The ‘Introduction’ rehearses several key themes which would appeal to Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik. It seems that the Vizier delighted in mixtures of jest and earnest, with the ambivalences and slippages the juxtaposition of the two produced.119 He took a keen interest in falsafa and in the GraecoArabic translations, reputedly spending two thousand dirhams per month on sponsorship of translations, especially in the study of medicine. The Book of Living inhabits the same universe of philosophical and scientific speculation

t h e eni g ma of the addres s e e  | 231 as does The Treatise on Quadrature and Circumference. The Vizier was a keen proponent of the use of paper and books in the imperial bureaucracy.120 As a renowned epistolist and poet himself, he would surely have enjoyed al-JāªiÕ’s bravura performances, not only with the Arabic language, but also with the formal conventions and stylistics of contemporary practices of composition. There are some discordances with this supposition, however. At Óayawān 1.67.6–68.3 al-JāªiÕ quotes a panegyric in honour of the Vizier by Abū Tammām, which he introduces with the following words: ‘al-˝āʾī said, praising Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik’ (1.67.6). In other words, the recourse to the third person is out of keeping with the predominance of the secondperson mode of address in the ‘Introduction’ and could be taken to imply that the Addressee is not Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik. And then there is the unusual occurrence at Óayawān 1.42.18, ‘May God the Exalted have mercy on you!’, raªima-ka Allāh taʿālā, a variation on the standard phrase used to commend the dead to God.121 Is this a hint that the Addressee has recently died? In other words, are we hereby warranted to think that the person whom al-JāªiÕ addresses is recently dead (whence the use of the pious optative and the second person rather than third person pronoun)? Did al-JāªiÕ dedicate a first version of the Book of Living to the Vizier which the Vizier rejected and criticised but then died before he could receive the version with the ‘Introduction’ which rebuts the critique? I do not know the answer but a post-mortem address of a previous patron, cast in the form of an invective, is an attractive solution to the very real personal dangers which such a composition addressed to one of the most powerful figures in the Islamic empire would surely have exposed al-JāªiÕ to. (3) If Muªammad is the patron/dedicatee of The Book of Living, but not the Addressee, could it be that the Addressee is his arch-enemy Ibn Abī Duʾād, the Chief Judge? Could al-JāªiÕ be attacking, under the aegis of the Vizier, one of the Vizier’s most inveterate opponents? This is the second of the two scenarios I can think of (the first being a post-mortem address) which goes some way to accounting for how an inferior could adopt such a tone of withering contempt to so eminent and powerful a figure as either the Chief Judge or the Vizier. I have ruled out the possibility that al-JāªiÕ’s patron, whoever he may be, would have been kept in the dark about a possible version of the treatise

232 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s which contains the ‘Introduction’: this is not a private or secret or occluded address. In The Book of Clarity and Clarification, al-JāªiÕ speaks to the addressee of that work in a cross-reference to The Book of Living: It was my custom in the books of The Living for me to include in every one of its parts ten leaves of excerpts from the poetry of the Arabs and other notable poems, because you mentioned to me that they met with your favour. Accordingly, I very much intended this book to be even more voluminous in this regard, if God wills [Bayān 3.302.1-4].122

Some sixty printed pages of poetic excerpts follow. Let us recall that Ibn al-Nadīm tells us that the Clarity was dedicated to, and remunerated by, Ibn Abī Duʾād. (1b) Let us consider Ibn Abī Duʾād’s patronage of The Book of Living with the Chief Judge himself in the role of the Addressee. The ‘Introduction’ rehearses several key notions which would have been of interest to him. It mentions at Óayawān 1.9.5–7 the works written for him by al-JāªiÕ but criticised by the Addressee. Al-JāªiÕ praises the books of Abū Óanīfa, the eponym of Ibn Abī Duʾād’s legal order. It outlines an organisation of society similar to that implied in al-JāªiÕ’s epistle to him announcing the Book of Legal Verdicts. It incorporates a theory of clear communication which was to be explored at greater length in The Book of Clarity and Clarification, and there is the matter of the repetition of the passages in the ‘Introduction’, the Epistle to Ibn Abī Duʾād (see Chapter 4.2, §7, pp. 203–4 and 207) and others. We might also be inclined to imagine that a Chief Judge who was not an egregious enthusiast for theological speculation would be more scandalised by the spectacle of two eminent Muʿtazilī doctors engaged in a debate on the merits of the dog and the rooster and would be more inclined to disapprove of the slippages from seriousness to jest and vice-versa than the Vizier who was renowned for just these interests.123 Are we then to imagine that The Book of Living is one of the many books which the Epistle to Ibn Abī Duʾād announces? Was it donated to but then rejected by the Judge? Is the critique which the ‘Introduction’ engages with part and parcel of the incident in which the Chief Judge publicly rejected and then gloriously and magnanimously pardoned al-JāªiÕ? We learn in

t h e eni g ma of the addres s e e  | 233 the Deliverance from Evil, al-Faraj baʿd al-Shidda, of al-Tanūkhī (329– 384/940–94) that this incident took place upon the death of al-JāªiÕ’s patron Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik. Al-Tanūkhī’s narrative of this confrontation is magnificent for the contrast it points between the all-powerful Chief Judge and his moral outrage and the unrepentant moralist al-JāªiÕ, chained but unbowed: I read in a book that after the calamity which befell Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt al-JāªiÕ was despatched in chains, wearing only a woollen garment, to Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād. Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād said to him, ‘By God, ʿAmr, I have only ever known you to forget a benefaction, recuse a blessing, enumerate your own virtues and conceal your vices. The passing of the days will never mend one such as you, so corrupt is your intent, so vile your faculty of choice’. ‘Go easy’, al-JāªiÕ replied. ‘It is better, by God, that the boon be yours to give to me than that it be mine to give to you. It is better for your reputation that I be wicked and you virtuous than that we both be wicked, you and I. And it is more becoming of you in your position of power to pardon rather than punish’. Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād said, ‘I have only ever known you to have a tongue of pure silver. Your tongue has veiled your heart and then you concealed it in duplicity (nifāq). Be gone, may God revile you!’ He shuffled off in his chains. Then Aªmad said, ‘Slave, catch up with him, remove his chains, take him to the bath-house, bring a ceremonial robe for him to wear, take him to where he can recuperate and be rid of his ailments, a residence with bedding, utensils and furnishings, and give him ten thousand dirhams as his stipend until he recovers from his illness’. This was done. On the next day al-JāªiÕ was to be seen in the seat of honour in the majlis of Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād, wearing a ceremonial robe taken from his wardrobe and sporting one of his tall peaked-caps (qalansūwa), with Aªmad welcoming him in person with the words, ‘Come, Abū ʿUthmān’.124

(1c and 8) This scenario however still does not account for the singularity of the vehemence of such a perilous address of a superior. Let us posit two Addressees: the Vizier and the Judge. Perhaps the work was written to appease both dedicatees, the Vizier and the Judge, during their lifetime, an essay in misdirection encouraging them both to see the other as the Addressee, part

234 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s of a complex process of networking and dual clientage, in an effort to ensure al-JāªiÕ’s survival in times of political uncertainty. Or perhaps Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik, al-JāªiÕ’s patron, is now dead. Al-JāªiÕ is in need of a new patron. He attacks his old patron, in the manner of the poets who terminated a relationship of dependency upon a patron with the composition of a lampoon (hijāʾ), because he has criticised al-JāªiÕ’s books. Al-JāªiÕ’s new patron, Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād, to whom he presents this treatise as a donation, is given the benefit of witnessing al-JāªiÕ recuse his former patron completely. (8 and 1a, 1b, 1c) Finally let us consider that The Book of Living is a work without a patron or a dedicatee but which has a (post-mortem) Addressee, a composition made available to a reading public. Patron-dedicatees, it seems, could keep donated compositions in their libraries and not permit their release and so block their dissemination.125 Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik and Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād are now dead. It is now possible for al-JāªiÕ to prepare The Book of Living for public dissemination, as Ibn al-Nadīm tells us he did with the help of his warrāq. The ‘Introduction’ is his public revenge on his (dead) patron(s), and a declaration that he was available for adoption by a new patron in a new entourage. A. At the Court of al-Mutawakkil In his biography of al-JāªiÕ in the Dictionary of Literati, Muʿjam al-Udabāʾ, Yāqūt (d. 626/1229) quotes from a letter sent by al-Fatª b. Khāqān (d. 247/861), the childhood friend of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil, his personal amanuensis and a high-ranking member of the elite, to al-JāªiÕ: Al-Fatª b. Khāqān wrote a letter to al-JāªiÕ in a section (fa‚l ) of which he said: ‘The Commander of the Faithful is growing very serious about you and he perks up when you are mentioned. Were it not for the great respect which he has in his soul (nafs) for your learning and your knowledge, then he would erect an obstacle between you and your ever being absent from his majlis and he would deprive you of your plans (raʾy) concerning, and your management (tadbīr) of, that with which you are occupying yourself so continuously. He gave me a taste of this, but I made such a fuss about you that I dissuaded him from compelling you to attend against your will.

t h e eni g ma of the addres s e e  | 235 Understand that you owe this situation to me and bind this benefaction which I have done you to The Treatise of the Rebuttal of the Christians: be finished with it, send it to me quickly and become someone who will thereby be generous to himself. If you do this you will obtain your renown, I will ask him to set you free of what has taken place in the past and will request on your behalf a stipend to cover the coming year in its entirety. Now this is something which you could not arrange for yourself, but I have read your Epistle on Ghannām the Apostate. Were it not that I would increase your high opinion of yourself, then I would tell you of my reactions when I read it. Farewell’.126

Both the Vizier Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik and the Chief Judge Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād were, along with other prominent members of the imperial court, the targets of the new Caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 232–47/847–61), in his attempt to sever all ties with previous regimes and thereby liberate his caliphate from powerful opponents who, having set him on the throne, might conspire against him. Al-Mutawakkil was designated Caliph by a cabal of kingmakers. He would surely have been only too aware not only of his dependence on their existing power structures but also of the precariousness of his hold on power. Al-Mutawakkil was a brutal and ruthless caliph who was both patient and determined to build up his own power base at the expense of those who put him on the throne. His tragedy is that his death, at the hands of a group of assassins employed by his son al-Munta‚ir, is entirely consonant with the deaths which he inflicted on the major powerbrokers who gave him the caliphate.127 Let us imagine that the fragment of the letter quoted by Yāqūt is genuine – we have no way of telling that it is not genuine. And let us also imagine that it dates from the period of the Caliph’s annihilation of his opponents, in fact from the aftermath of the dismissal of Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād in 237/851–2 and his death in Muªarram 240/June 854. The death of the Chief Judge would have meant that al-JāªiÕ was once again without a patron. This letter would suggest that no less a personage than al-Fatª b. Khāqān was acting on his behalf with the Caliph and we learn that he is doing so because of his admiration for one of al-JāªiÕ’s epistles (an epistle mentioned in the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living, Part 3,

236 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s §13.2, p. 116). We might imagine that the Epistle on Ghannām the Apostate was donated to al-Fatª to secure his patronage. Al-Fatª’s letter tells us that the Caliph entertains a very high opinion of al-JāªiÕ but that he is growing tetchy. It implies that the Caliph is growing impatient for al-JāªiÕ’s treatise, The Rebuttal of the Christians,128 which we can imagine he has already commissioned but not received. He is not prepared to put up with al-JāªiÕ’s absence from his majlis for much longer or to tolerate the delay with the composition. Al-Fatª suggests that he is on the verge of forcing al-JāªiÕ to be present at court and perhaps also to be punished. Al-Fatª mollifies the Caliph and advises that al-JāªiÕ finish his refutation of the Christians quickly so that it can be presented to al-Mutawakkil. This will secure for al-JāªiÕ a stipend for the coming year and free him of any previous obligations – and let us imagine that this is a veiled allusion to his previous allegiances to the now dead Vizier and Chief Judge. If we allow ourselves to entertain these imaginings, we have in this fragmentary letter a reference to the initial stages of al-JāªiÕ’s association with al-Mutawakkil’s court. Saʿid Man‚ūr in his thoughtful investigation of al-JāªiÕ’s world-view expressed in The Book of Living reviews the evidence for dating the work to the caliphate of al-Mutawakkil. He notes the references in the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Niggards, Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ (at Óayawān 1.4.2: Part 3, §3.2, p. 112), a work widely held to date from the caliphate of al-Mutawakkil and the final decades of al-JāªiÕ’s life, and The Rebuttal of the Christians (at Óayawān 1.9.9). Man‚ūr points out that the extant version of this treatise refers to the receipt of a letter which he presumes to be from al-Fatª b. Khāqān, whom we have now met as a member of the Caliph’s inner circle, requesting the composition of this work on behalf of the Caliph.129 Man‚ūr next produces some stronger evidence derived from the text of The Book of Living, for the previous bibliographical testimonies he adduces are entirely dependent on the assumption that the extant treatises are in fact identical with those referred to in the ‘Introduction’. He notes al-JāªiÕ’s remark at Óayawān 7.253.3–4, where in the context of a discussion of a prodigious animal-trainer who had domesticated a wolf and even a lion until it attacked and killed a child, he says that ‘he told me this story in the days during which the Commander of the Faithful al-Mutawakkil ʿalā Allāh came to power’. He also points out that in the section on fleas al-JāªiÕ provides a

t h e eni g ma of the addres s e e  | 237 notice at Óayawān 5.373.2–374.3 concerning a particularly noxious attack of fleas in Damascus and Antioch. Although the Caliph is not mentioned by al-JāªiÕ (he simply refers to a‚ªābu-nā, ‘our companions’, and uses the first person plural, dakhalnā, ‘we entered’), Man‚ūr takes this very plausibly to refer to the caliphal visit to Damascus in 244/858. Al-JāªiÕ was a member of the retinue which accompanied al-Mutawakkil who was preparing to launch a sustained attack on Byzantium.130 Al-JāªiÕ mentions his visit to the Great Mosque of Damascus at Óayawān 1.56.17–57.5. There is therefore two pieces of internal textual evidence attesting to a visit by al-JāªiÕ to Damascus. Man‚ūr concludes that The Book of Living ‘was written during the time of al-Mutawakkil’ (though much, as I have sought to show, depends on what we mean by the term ‘written’). Elsewhere in his book, he wisely refers to the other compositions which al-JāªiÕ wrote for members of this court and to the notorious tale that al-Mutawakkil wanted to appoint al-JāªiÕ as tutor to his sons but was deterred from confirming the appointment on account of his hideous appearance.131 It seems then that the current version of The Book of Living (or at the very least the current version of the ‘Introduction’, of Volume Five and of Volume Seven) was composed after al-Mutawakkil’s journey to Damascus. This of course makes it likely that the work in its present form belongs to al-JāªiÕ’s Indian Summer which he enjoyed during al-Mutawakkil’s caliphate, with the caliphal commission of The Rebuttal of the Christians, the dedication of The Noble Qualities of the Turks to one of the Caliph’s closest intimates al-Fatª b. Khāqān and the application for patronage to al-Mutawakkil’s Vizier ʿUbayd Allāh b. Khāqān in the form of the donation of The Epistle on Distinguishing Enmity from Envy. B. An Unfinished Book Addressed to Two Dead Patrons? The idea that the vehemence of al-JāªiÕ’s address of a superior (if the Addressee is a superior and is not some other figure such as the Dahrī of Volume Seven of The Book of Living) was a post-mortem luxury appeals to me. If the act of dedication is, as one scholar has described it, a process of disequilibrium which extends the sovereignty of the patron over the author and his composition, to the extent that the patron can be considered the true author of the work,132 then the public release of a treatise like The Book of Living with its

238 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s post-mortem excoriation of (two) patron(s) would become al-JāªiÕ’s strongest assertion of his role as author in the sense of producer (wā∂iʿ) and owner (‚āªib) of the work. It would represent a seismic shift from a patronal conception of authorship to one more suited to the marketplaces of books, one entirely consistent with the treatise’s paean of books and their fundamental importance for social cohesion and human welfare. However intriguing these speculations may be, the enigma of the identity of the Addressee remains. Simply put, the text does not allow us a resolution. It resists this kind of interrogation and invites the sort of gossipy reconstructions which I have just indulged in. Most third-century texts provide their readers with an abundance of directions on how to read them. The Book of Living is no exception (see further Chapter 5.4, pp. 365–76). If this kind of information is not forthcoming it is because the ‘Introduction’ was designed and executed in such a way that it would not be forthcoming, and could not be extracted, unless we as readers were in possession of the key which would enable us to decode its wiles. In the case of The Book of Living, therefore, and until some new evidence comes to light, I submit that we have good reason to read the work on the assumption that the dedicatee and the Addressee are identical (even though there may have been two or more dedicatees and two or more Addressees and even though the dedicatee and Addressee may never have existed). As I have noted, my own personal favourite is that this is an unfinished book addressed to two dead patrons. The version of The Book of Living which contains the ‘Introduction’ that engages so critically with the Vizier and Chief Judge will then be one which appeared after the demise and probably after the death of the latter in the summer of 240/854 and sometime after the return of the court from Damascus to Sāmarrā in 244/858.

4.4 Invective

T

he Addressee of the ‘Introduction’ has attacked al-JāªiÕ with a series of accusations which he seeks to rebut. What exactly does the Addressee accuse al-JāªiÕ of? The key term in the invective is ʿayb, ʿuyūb, a blemish, fault, failing, or defect which besmirches a man’s honour and occasions disapproval and condemnation among his peer group and/or society, and which the committer, or possessor (if it is an object), should respond to as a significant diminishment of his social standing. (The nearest response in modern, Western, societies which I can think of is ‘shame’ but this distorts as much as it reveals.) This fault can be physical, a defect in workmanship, a deformity or a physical abnormality, for example, or moral, or both. The act of pointing out the fault or defect is expressed in terms of rendering the object faulty or defective through the use of the verb ʿāba, with its verbal noun ʿayb. The verb, however, can equally be intransitive (i.e. the object is already in a defective state) or transitive (i.e. the act of making an object defective). When applied to humans as the target of this act of making an object defective, the sense seems to be that the agent makes the object (here a human) defective by pointing out or indicating the fault or defect. And informing this perspective is the assumption that a person’s actions are effectively his possessions. A. Blemish and Defect It is this ambiguity between being defective, rendering something defective and indicating that something is defective which imbues much of the disagreement between al-JāªiÕ and the Addressee with its emotive appeal. A slave was both a possession and an indication of the owner’s status. Ibn Qutayba, in his lambast of the woeful education and self-centred morals of 239

240 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s the bureaucrats of his day, describes what appears to be a maÕālim tribunal, one set up to investigate grievances, in this case to monitor trading standards and practices:133 I have been present at a gathering of illustrious bureaucrats, fiscal agents (ʿummāl ), scholars learned in how to manage domanial land (fayʾ), how to annihilate people and lay towns waste to get it, and how to make a personal killing out of it and thereby make a clear loss for the Sultan. A slave-trader was shown in, along with a slave-girl who had been returned to him because she had too many teeth and they were crooked. He said, ‘I told her purchasers her crooked teeth had nothing to do with me, but they returned her to me because she has too many teeth. So how many teeth are there in a man’s mouth?’ No one present knew the answer. Then one of them stuck his forefinger in his mouth and began using it to count his teeth. But his saliva started to drool so someone else kept his mouth shut and counted them with his tongue. Is it good for someone not to know this about himself, someone on whom the Sultan relies to look after his people and his property, someone of whose judgement and investigation of their complaints (naÕar) he approves? Is he not, in this respect, in the same position as someone who does not know how many fingers he has? There was much discussion in this session about the defects of the slave (ʿuyūb al-raqīq), yet none of them knew the difference between a twisted big-toe (wakaʿ) and a deformed wrist (kawaʿ), between an inverted foot (ªanaf ) and a malformed ankle (fadaʿ) or between having fleshy, red lips (lamā) and shrivelled, dry lips (la†aʿ) [Grünert 8.4–9.5; al-Dālī 11.2–12].

The number of the concubine’s teeth clearly violated the aesthetic standards of her prospective purchasers. The crooked irregularity of her teeth was clearly something over which the slave-trader had no control and which he presumably advertised as reflected in her price. In order for the slave-trader to know whether this could be recognised as a disfiguring blemish (ʿayb) and so tantamount to invalidating the sale, he had to know how many teeth people normally have. There is no indication that the denticular malformation might possibly be remediable. And before we imagine that Ibn Qutayba might possibly be hyper-critical of the dental ignorance of the bureaucrats, we should remind ourselves that one of the items of knowledge possessed by Tawaddud,

i nvecti ve | 241 the slave girl who is a walking encyclopaedia in The Thousand and One Nights, is how many bones and veins are contained in the human body.134 Actions, like possessions, can be blemishes and defective. In a boast, the pre-Islamic poet Bishr b. Abī Khāzim celebrates his peerless accomplishments: raiding other tribes; keeping the company of rulers; risking all in gambling: With every blameless possession (bi-kulli kasībatin lā ʿayba fī-hā) have I been minded to increase my wealth or my well-being By means of making my beast amble among the other beasts, of honouring kings, and of the gaming arrows.135

According to this perspective, actions are tantamount to possessions and vice-versa. The following anecdote told by al-JāªiÕ in the Treatise on Asceticism (Kitāb al-Zuhd ), part of The Book of Clarity and Clarification, expresses this equivalence nicely: Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Malik rode forth one day in sumptuous attire. One of his slave-girls saw him and said, ‘You obviously have in mind the two verses by the poet’. ‘What are they?’ he asked. So she recited to him:136 What a fine thing you are! If only you were permanent – but there is   no permanence for man: There is no human blemish in what you show us of yourself – except   that you will pass away. ‘Curse you’, he said, ‘You have announced my death to me’137 [Bayān 3.144.4–8].

The Caliph’s pomp and finery may be immaculate and beyond reproach but will not prevent him from passing away. He is reminded that he should pay as much attention to his spiritual well-being as he obviously does to his appearance and material well-being. Human blemishes can be both evident and latent. They can be attributable to one’s appearance and/or one’s actions. Thus in one of his Arabic maxims Aristotle declares that ‘no-one is free of blemish or devoid of good so we should not be deterred by any blemish a man may have from seeking his assistance, provided that we do not suffer any diminishment thereby’. In another, he maintains that ‘he who follows the inner blemishes of his

242 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s brethren will never lead’.138 Óunayn b. Ishāq mentions that Galen composed a book ‘on how a man can recognise his faults (dhunūb) and blemishes’ (Bergsträsser 48.17). Because speech, and the writing down of speech in books, was thought of as an action which belonged to its enunciator, the agent who gave it a purpose, it too was included in the category of things which could be designated as either pleasant or ugly, good or bad (ªasan and qabīª). They were effectively possessions of which the owner could be proud or at which he ought to feel discomfort amounting to shame. Their social (and moral) status was determined by how they were described by the members of one’s peer group and/or society. As al-JāªiÕ puts it in the ‘Introduction’, one ought ‘to be afraid of blame’ (Óayawān 1.88.7).139 It is for this reason that Ibn Qutayba devotes a section of the introduction to The Book of Poetry and Poets, Kitāb al-Shiʿr wa-al-Shuʿarāʾ, to ʿuyūb al-shiʿr, the faults, the blemishes of poetry, and to al-ʿayb fī al-iʿrāb, the defective use of case-endings in Arabic. These are not simply aesthetic transgressions. As acts, they bring shame and opprobrium to those who have committed them.140 Al-Bīrūnī, in describing the polysemy of Sanskrit he says the Hindus were inordinately proud of, castigates it as ‘a defect in language’ (ʿayb fī al-lugha) (Hind 13.11–12). Muslim b. al-Óajjāj, in his introduction to the Íaªīª, 1.32.7–33.1, explains that ‘we intend to put first reports (akhbār) which are more secure and more likely to be free from blemishes than the others (aslam min al-ʿuyūb min ghayri-hā wa-anqā)’. These blemishes need to be explained and identified, for people untrained in Óadīth criticism are not aware of them (Íaªīª 1.37.15): God have mercy on you! Moreover (wa-baʿd ), achieving the discrimination (tamyīz) and specification (taª‚īl ) you have requested would not have been easy for us, had we not observed how many of those who set themselves up as tradents act badly when it comes to their obligation to cast away weak ªadīths and objectionable (mustankara) transmissions (riwāyāt), and fail to restrict themselves to sound ªadīths which are widely known, such as those which the trustworthy tradents renowned for truthfulness and reliability (amāna) hand down. And still they persist in this, even after they

i nvecti ve | 243 are aware and openly admit that much of what they pelt the unknowing (aghbiyāʾ) with is objectionable (mustankar) and is handed down on the authority of folk who are not approved of, who belong to that group whose transmission has been criticised (dhamma) by the Imams of the Óadīth folk such as Mālik b. Anas, Shuʿba b. al-Óajjāj, Sufyān b. ʿUyayna, Yaªyā b. al-Qa††ān, ʿAbd al-Raªmān b. al-Mahdī and other Imams. However, responding to your request has not weighed heavily on our mind because we have informed you of how this group spreads condemned ªadīths with weak and unknown chains of authority and pelts the common people who do not know their defects with them [Íaªīª 1.37.15–38.6].141

Muslim explains that the act of criticising and rejecting these suspect transmitters has not occasioned him any anguish: their actions merit this response. The faults and blemishes of these traditions, however, must be pointed out. It is his task to make this clear, distinct and appropriately set out. Like poetry, language and the Óadīth, so too doctrines can be ‘free from defects’ (bariʾ min al-ʿuyūb). In On the Creating of the Qurʾān, Fī Khalq al-Qurʾān, al-JāªiÕ explains how, even when a doctrinal statement is sound and immaculate, it can still be disfigured by its proponents: Know that people are forced to accept the arguments they force upon themselves. This is simply because of their incompetence in disentangling what is due to them (takhallu‚ bi-ªaqqi-him) and because they deviate from the fundamentals of their doctrine (qawl ) and the ramifications of their basic principles. You must not attribute to the basic principle of their doctrine the incompetence that originates with them and so transfer that error to others. There is many a doctrine, of noble ancestry, well-constructed, completely honourable, free from blemishes (ʿuyūb), healthy and sound, which its proponents have squandered, and which its opponents have denigrated with calumny. For they have made it liable to arguments it was not liable to and they have attributed to it things which it could not possibly entail [Rasāʾil 3.289.5–11].

A cack-handed wording, explanation and defence of a doctrine renders that doctrine easy to attack but ought not to lessen our appreciation of the ­doctrine itself.

244 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Books, letters and treatises, as textualised forms of speech acts, can also be said to be defective. The Addressee has found fault with al-JāªiÕ’s treatise, The Book of Living and with many of his other writings. Finding fault with writings is not an action unique to the Addressee. In his On Magnanimity, Genuine and Feigned, and in Condemnation of Haughtiness, Kitāb fī al-Nubl wa-al-Tanabbul wa-Dhamm al-Kibr, al-JāªiÕ informs an opponent who has sent him a treatise that he has already found fault with the arguments which his opponent makes at great length in this work: We have already voiced the faults (ʿayb) we find in it. The report of our criticism (dhamm) of it, our vehement opposition (na‚b) to its supporters, our distinguishing ourselves from its proponents, our astonishment at them and our public rejection of them has spread far and wide [Pellat 283.3–5; Rasāʾil 4.169.5–6]. The upshot (jumla) is that when excessive pride is combined with abundant ignorance (jahl ) and exposure to criticism (ʿayb) is consistent with a lack of concern (iktirāth), reproofs are futile and ideas (khawā†ir) are dead. When the disease is critical and is beyond treatment, the threat of punishment becomes prattle, fit only to be discarded, but the punishment has become a verdict (ªukm) put into practice [Pellat 283.5–8; Rasāʾil 4.169.7–10].142

It is precisely such exposure to criticism, with its implication that the man vulnerable to it is almost beyond redemption unless he pay heed to the criticism which others direct at him, which so unsettles al-JāªiÕ in the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living. Of course, it is not that al-JāªiÕ disapproves entirely of the practice of finding fault with a book or a treatise, however much he protests in the ‘Introduction’ that books should be read with a benevolence of spirit. There are some books which are so vulnerable to criticism that anyone who is incapable of finding fault with them will not be respected in his society: Now, who is incapable of finding fault with a treatise (ʿayb kitāb) which has not been protected by means of prudence (tathabbut), which has not been fortified by means of diligent scrutiny (ta‚affuª), which has not been carefully reviewed and revised by its writer and over which its author’s eyes have not passed in caution and wariness? [al-Wukalāʾ Rasāʾil 4.98.7–9].

i nvecti ve | 245 Books which have not been subjected to such intense testing and proofing are defective and will be shown to be defective in the highly competitive hurlyburly of ʿAbbasid society and the Iraqi book trade and in the highly charged cut and thrust of religious polemic of the third century. That al-JāªiÕ’s Book of Living is not such a book is one of the reasons for his rejection of the Addressee’s criticism and for his repeated statements in defence of his practice as an author scattered throughout the ‘Introduction’. The lexeme ʿayb runs through the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living.143 It is combined with other words for reproach and attack, terms such as †aʿn, ‘spearing’ (1.25.9 and 1.38.10), laʿn, ‘cursing’ (1.24.4), both used as synonyms of ʿayb in its sense of ‘rendering something defective’, dhamm, ‘criticising’ (1.24.13 and 14), and lāʾima, ‘reproach’ (1.25.8). At Óayawān 1.50.2, the precise context of the Addressee’s invective is encapsulated in the doublet of munāzaʿa (in the verb tunāziʿ-nī) and ʿayb, of engaging in strife and faultfinding. It is usually but not exclusively books which the Addressee identifies as defects, though he also designates the mule as ‘liable to many blemishes’ (al-kathīr al-ʿuyūb, 1.102.16–17) and the son of an effeminate man and a mannish woman is declared to be ‘more defective than the ʿisbār’ (1.103.14). Let us remind ourselves of the Addressee’s words (translated in Part 3, §27, p. 126): Every weakness which enters the natural constitution of a creature (khilqa) and every accident of feebleness (ʿara∂at) in a living thing (ªayawān) is determined by its class (jins). Incapacity (ʿajz) and blemishes (ʿayb) appear in accordance with its value (miqdār) and its power (tamakkun) [1.104.1–2].

Therefore, according to the Addressee, the discerning of faults, blemishes and defects is a feature of determining the ‘class’ of a creature or thing. That which is indeterminate or mixed in terms of its class will for him be prone to blemishes and defects. The extent of its defectiveness will be determined by an assessment of its value, capabilities and class. We can conclude two things from this: that the Addressee is a purist and an elitist; and that the process of categorisation and the epistemology of classifying become crucial in the debate between him and al-JāªiÕ over the assessment of what one sees and perceives. There appears to be several aspects to the Addressee’s critique. That the

246 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s book in general is defective because it can be said to belong to more than one class of things; that al-JāªiÕ’s books in particular are especially vulnerable to this charge; and that The Book of Living is especially blameworthy because it devotes so much attention to creatures like the dog and the rooster which are both held in low esteem and do not deserve to be the subject of a scientific debate between two learned doctors of theology, al-NaÕÕām and Maʿbad. When it comes to this last point, the Addressee seems to hold the position expressed by the Óādīth expert Muslim b. al-Óajjāj: that it is better to keep quiet about reprehensible doctrines than to glorify them with public discussion: For to turn away from the doctrine which is to be rejected is more likely to annihilate it and to consign to oblivion the repute of its holder. It is also less likely to make of it a guidance (tanbīh) for the ignorant [Íaªīª 1.75.9–10].

Moreover, in Part 1, pp. 36–7, we saw that this was the very thing that Ibn Qutayba found so reprehensible about al-JāªiÕ’s writings. It is one of the practices about which so many cultural actors from the third century seem to voice the profoundest unease. In a work in many ways similar to The Book of Living, The Treatise on Quadrature and Circumference, Kitāb al-Tarbīʿ wa-al-Tadwīr, we learn that the second Caliph ʿUmar b. al-Kha††āb ‘found fault (ʿāba) with a certain important personage, and said, “This man has a tendency to frivolity (duʿāba)”’ (Pellat 47.2, §85). Elsewhere in the work, al-JāªiÕ offers to give a concise summary of the doctrines entertained by those who hold that ‘all levity is better than all gravity’ and those who argue that ‘good and bad are divided equally between them’ (Pellat 65.8–10, §115). An apologist for ­triviality (al-muªāmī ʿan al-hazl: Pellat 65.12, §116) explains that Levity (muzāª) becomes a blemish (maʿīb) and triviality (hazl ) becomes blamed simply because the person who employs them (‚āªib) cannot avoid exposing himself to going beyond the right measure and thereby risking the fond indulgence of his friend [Pellat 66.5–7, §117].144

Al-JāªiÕ proposes the view which recognises that gravity is generally preferable to levity and triviality, a case for which can sometimes be made, whereas gravity always finds proofs in its favour (Pellat 68.1–3, §120). He would

i nvecti ve | 247 seem to agree therefore that levity if untrammelled does tend to ifrā†, exceeding the appropriate measure but is unwilling to outlaw it completely.145 So another aspect of al-JāªiÕ’s treatises especially blameworthy in the eyes of a rigorous purist is that they mix two categories which ought to be kept separate, the dignified and the undignified: jidd wa-hazl, gravity and triviality. We could even be tempted by some of his many remarks on this subject into imagining that al-JāªiÕ might admit some of the justness of the critique of the Addressee in The Book of Living, were it not for the resoluteness and vehemence with which he counters his opponent’s arguments. But this would be to overlook the vitally important presence of the third party to the dispute: the audience of listeners and readers. It is the appeal, if not the possible consonance, of the Addressee’s critique with the value system of the audience which gives al-JāªiÕ’s response its urgency. That they may also be elitists and purists and so reject and condemn his book and the wisdom which it offers for the proper reading of nature is what really worries him. Paradigmatic therefore is the passage in the Qurʾān, in The Cave, where the mysterious companion explains to Moses why (in verse 71) he scuttles the ship they have boarded: The ship belonged to some paupers who laboured on the sea. I wanted to render it defective (aʿība-hā) as there was a king behind them who commandeered every ship by force [Q. Kahf 18: 79].146

And so, like the mysterious unnamed companion of the Qurʾān, the Addressee has rendered al-JāªiÕ and his library defective. B. Reproach In the previous section, I suggested that such a committed, extensive and passionate rebuttal of the Addressee’s critique could easily have provoked the wrath of a superior and that I have a predilection for imagining the Addressee(s) to be dead. There is a further unique characteristic of the ‘Introduction’: al-JāªiÕ has modelled it on the ʿitāb, the reproach, one of the recognised ‘intentions’ (aghrā∂, also regularly translated as ‘genres’) of poetry. The reproach offers four clear advantages. Firstly it was frequently composed among social equals. Secondly, it was not as dismissive or as irrevocable

248 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s as the hijāʾ, the poetic invective, an act of aggression designed to damage the reputation and social standing of its victim, be they the poet’s peer or his superior. Some invectives signal the end of a relationship. Others seek to keep the relationship alive. This is because, thirdly, the ʿitāb is a mixed mode of address, hovering between praise and lampoon. As the philologist, chronographer and poetry expert Óamza al-I‚fahānī (d. 350/961 or 360/971) explains in his redaction of the collected poems, the dīwān, of Abū Nuwās: I have arranged for the threnodies to follow the panegyrics because they are praise of the dead, and then the reproaches to follow them because they are half praise and half invective. Then I have arranged for the renunciant poems to follow the invective because they criticise the world just as invective criticises men’s honour. Then I have kept the remaining chapters separate from the preceding and have gathered them together because they belong to the class of pleasure and frivolity (hazl ), and I have made some of them cross into others. I will consider these chapters exhaustively in accordance with the condition which I have set for them, should God the Exalted wish.147

In other words, the reproach is suasory but not necessarily punitive: it allows al-JāªiÕ to propose the moral improvement of the Addressee, whereas the invective seeks to punish its victim by successfully convincing an audience of its powers of persuasion as invective and so damning its victim as execrable.148 If we consider the poems gathered together by Óamza al-I‚fahānī in the fifth chapter of his redaction of the dīwān of Abū Nuwās under the rubric of ʿitāb, reproach, the appeal of this mode of address for al-JāªiÕ soon becomes apparent. Thus poem §25 (1.398.2–6) is a reproach of al-ʿAbbās b. al-Fa∂l b. al-Rabīʿ because, as a result of al-ʿAbbās’s leisurely approach to compensating the poet, Abū Nuwās has been compelled to sell his horse, cannot afford a mule or a donkey and so must walk everywhere. In poem §33 (1.402.1–403.9) Abū Nuwās reproaches the inhabitants of Egypt for their want of hospitality. There is also a series of six poems, §§27–32 (1.399.11–340.4) directed at a certain ʿAmr al-Warrāq, one of which seeks to keep the ties between the two intact, while the rest bewail his inconstancy as a companion. There is even one poem, §26 (1.398.7–399.10) in which the poet reproaches himself for his invective of Hāshim b. Óudayj whom he had previously lampooned for

i nvecti ve | 249 his pretensions in natural philosophy.149 In other words, the reproach, ʿitāb, was also a means whereby a poet might seek to undo the damage which an earlier poem had wrought. It could be used for what we would think of as serious matters such as imprisonment: thus we learn from one reproach that the poet has been wrongly imprisoned because unfairly traduced (Poem §4, 1.386.6–1). But mostly, these poems are occasional pieces, expressions of everyday disappointment, be it because a patron has been slow in paying the poet (Poem §1, 1.382.3–383.12) or because none of his friends would give him a scroll of papyrus (qir†ā‚) (Poem §23, 1.397.5–8). The following are typical: 1. A comrade has disappointed the opinion I had of him: one usually expects good of comrades. 2. He treated me nicely with words until he got some money and a position, 3. When he turned away, twisting his mouth in a sneer, as if he were as rich as Qārūn. 4. I disapproved of this behaviour and I reproached him – after all, sincere advice (nu‚ª) is guaranteed among brothers — 5. But for all my reproaches, he sauntered along with his nose in the air, though he is of lowly origins among his people. 6. I came to you in conciliation. Be off with you, it is a disgrace to know you! [Poem §9, 1.389.2–9]. 1. Praise be to God – Has my experience (tajriba) of people not warned me away from them, 2. That I prevent my soul from its desire? My insolvency has humiliated me in front of them: 3. I remained silent in the face of time and its calamities until time shat on my head [Poem §15, 1.392.1–8]. 1. I praise God who has made me dwell in the Abode of Contempt! 2. All those in whom I had placed hope have treated me harshly – even my tongue. 3. Those who see me will not point to my brothers after I have gone (?): 4. Those who think well of people are smitten with the calamity which smote me.

250 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 5. I had a close friend of whom I expected much against uncertain events: 6. His spirit (rūª) was my spirit though we were enfolded in two bodies; 7. His ambition (hamm) was my ambition and my ambition was his ambition in everything; 8. He did not disobey me and I did not disobey him. What he said was enough for me. 9. But then he treated me harshly when I outdid him in the disturbances brought by time. 10. He abandoned plain speech (ta‚rīª) when forsaking me but I could write out his meanings in a fine hand, 11. For the man of intelligence (ʿāqil ) discerns in allusiveness (taʿrī∂) the exegesis (tafsīr) of clear speech (bayān) [Poem §16, 1.392.9–393.6].

This last poem, §16, is a wonderful meditation on the severing of friendship. The actions of the poet’s companion have left him speechless: his companion’s truculent treatment consists in his abandoning unequivocal language in favour of allusiveness. This recourse to the language of ambiguity has forced the poet to seek to parse and explicate his ideas. This he takes to be a sign that their close companionship has been terminated by the other. No longer are they two hearts beating as one. Abū Nuwās’s poems of reproach, then, rehearse the entire gamut of social interactions expressed in a full range of emotional registers. One feature which all poems have in common is that they unanimously avoid naming the person to whom the reproach is addressed or about whom it is intended. This, I expect, is the fourth advantage which the mode of ʿitāb, reproach, offered al-JāªiÕ when directing at the Addressee his ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living. The reproach then was a mixed poetic mode, between eulogy and invective. This makes it a perfect match for an ‘Introduction’ that is itself a mixed form, one which blends khu†ba (homily) and muqaddima (formal introduction) in the manner of a risāla, an annunciatory epistle. C. Disputation Those like al-JāªiÕ who would dispute and contest the arguments of another thinker or system or sect or religion had a choice between engaging in a munāÕara, a speculative contest, or a muʿāra∂a, a contestatory emulation.

i nvecti ve | 251 Both have analogues in poetry, both were public affairs (i.e. they needed the presence of an audience in order to be genuinely valid and valuable) and both are predicated upon the interrogation and defence of the component parts and argumentative steps in any doctrine, tenet, statement or system. Both were intended to be tests, the equivalent of verbalised chess games. At stake in these tests were not only the ideas but also those who stood for them: their proponents. Therefore they depended not only on reasoning and analytical skills but also on how well a participant could express those skills in words. And given that speech was thought of as an action the disputation was a moral activity – it was thought to reflect well or badly on the character of those who participated in it. D. MunāÕara The munāÕara is properly speaking a debated disputation in which both parties agree to consider, investigate and scrutinise (naÕar) the merits of an idea or object or set of objects or an argument or belief supported by one of the two parties to the debate. In other words a munāÕara can be either an interrogation or a debate. In the third century it was a sort of loosely ritualised activity, in the sense that it had an often tacitly acknowledged code of procedure and set of rules. In the munāÕara, two opposing camps or objects voice their respective virtues and merits. It is very similar, and sometimes indistinguishable, from the mufākhara. In al-JāªiÕ’s extant corpus, The Vaunting Contest of Slavegirls and Slave-boys, Mufākharat al-Jawārī wa-al-Ghilmān, The Vaunting of Blacks over Whites, Fakhr al-Sūdān ʿalā al-Bī∂ān, and the debate between the Proponent of the Dog and the Proponent of the Rooster in The Book of Living are examples of this style of arguing. A cognate form is the vaunt, as when for example al-JāªiÕ in his Noble Qualities of the Turks, Manāqib al-Turk, mounts a defence of an otherwise undervalued, misunderstood or maligned object. His evident skill in the art of munāÕara as debate, manifest in so many of his writings and implied by so many of the titles of his lost works, led to al-JāªiÕ being dismissed as a sophist and as dishonest or insincere (a quibbler capable of arguing for one thing and its opposite).150 The munāÕara enacted and performed through question and answer finds its textual realisation in the dialogic structure of many third-century

252 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s treatises, especially in the formula in qīla . . . qulnā: ‘if it is said . . ., then we respond’.151 There are also treatises in which the question and answer format is expressed directly and not mediated, manifestly as an instruction from teacher to pupil on how to defend the school’s position. Óunayn b. Isªāq in his Epistle on his translations mentions that he even converted some of Galen’s books into epitomes patterned on the question and answer style (see e.g. §95, Bergsträsser 42.18–19). In al-JāªiÕ’s extant corpus the work which belongs most firmly to the practice of the munāÕara as interrogation is The Treatise on Quadrature and Circumference with its relentless sequence of hundreds of questions. Although in the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living al-JāªiÕ addresses his critic directly in his reproach, he does not rely on the munāÕara but has recourse to its counterpart, the muʿāra∂a. The practice of the muʿāra∂a is predicated upon the notion of comparison (ʿar∂). One can compare one claim (daʿwā) or proof (dalīl ) or justification (ʿilla) with another and in so doing the disputant who proposes a muʿāra∂a proposes that both parties step outside the aggression of interrogation to seek argumentative analogues. The process of effecting such a comparison often entailed the representation (ªikāya) of other positions and pronouncements, usually in the form of verbatim or paraphrastic quotation. Accordingly it was rejected by some theorists of dialectic as a dilution of the munāÕara and so was at best frowned upon and disapproved of. A consideration of its poetic analogue is instructive. E. Muʿāra∂a The poetic muʿāra∂a may be a poem which was composed as part of a series of compositions by various poets on the same theme and so offered up to an arbiter for adjudication as to selecting the best of the bunch. But also it will often be a poem based by one poet upon a prior composition by another poet. It is thus both an act of homage and an act of contestation: imitation as emulation. And in this case the poet will often use a significant proportion of the words, ideas and images of the poem of which it is an emulatory imitation. It was the prevalence of this stripe of intertextuality which contributed to the obsession with literary theft (sariqa) voiced by so many critics of poetry. These features are prominent in the muʿāra∂āt al-Qurʾān, those cases

i nvecti ve | 253 which the tradition records for us where writers accepted the challenge posed in the Qurʾān to emulate and imitate it.152 The dialectical muʿāra∂a, a contestation informed by the incorporation and imitation of the words, tenets or arguments of someone else (i.e. by the appropriation of the opponent’s own argumentative tools), is not uncommon in al-JāªiÕ’s epistles. It is well suited to written contestations, as it allows the writer of the contestation to stage the debate and in so doing affords him the privilege of narrating the defeat of an opponent. There are therefore two ­possible types of textualised muʿāra∂a: 1. a comparison and representation; 2. a comparison and representation with a narrativised victory. Thus in his On Deeming Reasoned Speech Superior to Silence, Taf∂īl al-Nu†q ʿalā al-Íamt, al-JāªiÕ mentions the receipt of a treatise from the addressee and proceeds, as far as we can tell (in view of the loss of the addressee’s treatise), to quote and/or paraphrase the words of his opponent’s treatise and incorporate them within his rebuttal of the other’s defence of silence. Thus the muʿāra∂a depends upon the practice of ªikāya, representation, the practice at which the Addressee takes such umbrage in the ‘Introduction’ (see Part 3, §11 and §13). In the debate between the Apologist of Poetry and the Apologist of Books recreated in the first section of the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living (1.71.13–84.6), a victory is recorded (see Part 3, p. 166 and the Appendix, pp. 458–9). In other texts, however, such as The Book of the Partisans of ʿUthmān, Kitāb al-ʿUthmānīya, the imperatives of comparison (ʿar∂) and representation (ªikāya) predominate, and while the debate is still staged, an explicit victory narrative is excluded. Thus the reader occupies a middle ground between these positions tantamount to the ethical tenet so beloved of the Muʿtazila, the intermediate position between the two positions, al-manzila bayn al-manzilatayn. The ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living, as an instance of muʿāra∂a, occupies a middle ground. It represents the words and arguments of the Addressee and sets out to show why and how they are refragable and indefensible because erroneous. Al-JāªiÕ’s triumph is implied, though not taken for granted. This procedure is adopted because he wants to convince not only

254 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s the Addressee of the justness of his case but also the audience of listeners and readers, whose approbation is not assured but which must be earned. His contest with the Addressee is an attempt to persuade this audience to side with him and not with his opponent. The treatise is an attempt to manufacture the ideal reader out of its contestation with the Addressee and the indication of his errors. F. A Shared Value Repugnance at, and disapproval of, blemishes, faults and defects is a key part of the elite community of values and feeling to which al-JāªiÕ belongs. The discourse of ʿayb is a socialising response, one which defines and bonds an in-group who subscribe to it and know how to recognise it and, by dividing them off from the rest of society, relegates all others to the out-group. While al-JāªiÕ may not agree in this particular case with how and what they identify as part of the discourse of ʿayb, he obviously values the esteem of this group, which is manifestly not something which he can either take for granted or presume to receive – for otherwise, he would not go to the trouble of ­appealing to them as he does. The behaviour of this in-group is dominated by their attempts to avoid the discourse of ʿayb, by their fear of being castigated as blameworthy through association with, or commission of, something defective. This fear of being singled out as defective, the fear at the loss of power and standing which this would entail, the fear of ostracism, is a phenomenon which is interactive and so external (i.e. it is governed by how others respond to us) but is equally internal and personal (i.e. it determines how we as individuals manage our person, cultivate our behaviour, censor our thoughts and feelings). By challenging this value system from within al-JāªiÕ runs the risk of being completely ostracised from the in-group. The process of exposure, of ostracism, has already begun, however, in the form of the Addressee’s censure of his books as blemishes. Al-JāªiÕ’s continued membership of this elite group will depend upon the success of his rebuttal of the criticism and his persuading the in-group of the rightness of his vision and the error of the Addressee’s. Where he differs from them is in what is to be identified and rejected as shameworthy and in the process whereby it is rejected.153

i nvecti ve | 255 G. A Cohesive Society At the heart of the disagreement between al-JāªiÕ and the Addressee in the ‘Introduction’ lies a fundamental disparity over how to classify things. Therefore he exhorts the Addressee to become more adept at deriving inferences from signs, and not simply or exclusively, as some scholars maintain, become a better (i.e. less lazy) reader or drop his antipathy to Muʿtazilism. The Addressee must learn to read existence properly in terms of mushāhada, the apparent testimony of what we see (Óayawān 1.206.17–207.6: see Part 6, pp. 405–6) and not to dismiss what we see based on inadequately formulated schemes of classification. The altercation between author and Addressee over how to read The Book of Living and how to determine what is blameworthy and what is commendable is a dispute about epistemology (how do we make these decisions and what are the categories and schemes of classification upon which we base them?) and ontology (how do we perceive the nature of the existence of things through classification?). It is also a contest over social values. It is the cohesiveness, the jamāʿa, of society which is threatened by the erroneous categorisation of existence, by the rejection of books as objects of shame and by the inability properly to understand the complex interactions between the trivial and gravely serious.

4.5 The Cohesiveness of Society

H

owever we resolve ‘the enigma of the addressee’ or specify the nature of the Addressee’s invective, the force of some of al-JāªiÕ’s arguments in the first section of the ‘Introduction’, notably the proposition that books are highly effective agents of social cohesion, remains. Let us recap briefly. In the process of rebuttal of the Addressee’s charges he enumerates more than thirty of his own works which have been attacked, explains how God has ordered His creation and discusses His disposition of human society, arguing incessantly that the book as artefact is a central, indeed a necessary, part of holding that society together. In an important sense, the overarching argument of this section of the ‘Introduction’ is al-JāªiÕ’s pleading his case in favour of preserving the community from corruption through schism, heresy or deviant belief by means of his writings. But what does this have to do with living things? Surely, pigeons, flies, snakes, lizards and creepy-crawlies as topics for a book are at the farthest remove from the cohesion of the Muslim community which is supposed somehow to ensue from reading the work? A. The Opening of Volume Seven of The Book of Living Al-JāªiÕ was not unaware of the force of this query. Volume Seven of The Book of Living opens with a densely argued reiteration of the ‘Introduction’ in which some answers to these questions are provided. Al-JāªiÕ begins with a prayer to God that, in his eagerness (maªabba) to finish the work, he might avoid intercalating the false between the lines of the true, and that he might not

256

t he cohesi veness of socie ty  | 257 strengthen the weakness of falsehood by means of pleasing words and conceal the reprehensible by means of delightful composition (taʾlīf ) [7.5.6–7].

Instead the true should only be clarified through the true, and probative arguments should only be explicated through other probative arguments. An author should not entice others to study and pursue the truth and urge them to declare its pre-eminence with invented poems (al-ashʿār al-muwallada), fabricated ªadīths (al-aªādīth al-ma‚nūʿa) and weak isnāds (al-asānīd al-madkhūla), with anything which has no witness beyond the claims of the person who utters it and no-one to declare it true apart from someone whose knowledge (maʿrifa) cannot be trusted [7.5.9–11].

Speech may seduce the soul (fitna) and become prattling, and prolixity is to be avoided, because those who talk too long, do so without reflecting ­properly on what they are saying (7.5.11–12). Al-JāªiÕ declares that he is out of step with his time, because he approaches other thinkers and writers with the intention to think well of them and their achievements and to excuse any lapses they may be guilty of.154 Many of those who take it upon themselves to read books and study knowledge, however, ignore the rest of the work and single out the weak word, the foolish expression (laf Õa) or some other aspect of the composition (taʾlīf ) which has become liable to a certain amount of disapproval or has fallen foul of a degree of perturbation in its author, or is even one of those lapses in concentration (wahm) which occur in books, fumbles caused by vexation (∂ajar), mistakes of the copyist (nāsikh) and the poor memory of the collator (muʿāri∂) . . . [7.6.3–6].

It would be best if readers were to attend to the ideas of a book with a sound intellect, on their guard against the effects of envy, or the habitual consequences of excessive haste, or seeking to avoid the ethical dispositions (akhlāq) of those who hold forth with too much volubility because they are too mean-spirited or who let their tongues run away with them because they do not understand what they are saying (7.6.6–9).

258 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s The praiseworthy qualities of what they read should preoccupy them more than its blameworthy qualities, for this is more seemly with regard to approved conduct (al-adab al-mar∂ī) and righteous disposition (khīm), it bears a greater resemblance to sagacity (ªikma) and is at a greater remove from the sway of flippancy (†aysh), it is closer to the habits of our ancestors (salaf ) and the lifestyle of our predecessors (al-awwalīn). God is more likely to reward such readers with a secure reception for their own books and the successful defence of their arguments (ªujja) on the day when they contend (munā∂ala) with their opponents and seek to knock (muqāraʿa) out their enemies [7.6.9–14].

Thus al-JāªiÕ provides his audience with moral and ethical advice on how to comport themselves as authors, debaters and readers, as well as giving them guidance on how to read and receive his own treatise. We should note that readers are also themselves writers: Al-JāªiÕ is speaking to a cohort of makers, and not simply consumers, of books. Next al-JāªiÕ turns to a description of his own treatise: God pity you! (yarªamu-ka Allāh). This book is not on the obligatoriness of the promise of Paradise and the threat of Hell-fire, so that the Murjiʾī will object to it, or on the preferment of ʿAlī, so that the ʿUthmānī will react vehemently (yan‚ib) to it. It is not on justifying the appointment of the two arbiters of ʿAlī and Muʿāwiya (ta‚wīb al-ªakamayn),155 so that the Khārijī will become enraged with it, or on proving human capacity to be anterior (taqdīm al-isti†āʿa), so that those who disagree with its anteriority will object to it, or on affirming the concrete existence (tathbīt) of accidents (aʿrā∂) so that the proponent of material bodies (‚āªib al-ajsām) will disagree with it. It is not on the subject of declaring Basra to be superior (taf∂īl ) to Kufa, Mecca to Medina, Syria to Mesopotamia (jazīra), on declaring non-Arabs to be superior to Arabs, ʿAdnān to Qaª†ān, ʿAmr (b. ʿUbayd) to Wā‚il (b. ʿA†āʾ), so that thereby the partisans of Abū al-Hudhayl might rebut the partisans of al-NaÕÕām, or on declaring Mālik (b. Anas) to be superior to Abū Óanīfa, or on declaring Imruʾ al-Qays to be superior to al-Nābigha and ʿĀmir b. al-˝ufayl to ʿAmr b. Maʿdī Karib or ʿAbbād b.

t he cohesi veness of socie ty  | 259 al-Óu‚ayn to be superior to ʿUbayd Allāh b. al-Óurr. It is not on declaring Ibn Surayj superior to al-Gharī∂, Sībawayh superior to al-Kisāʾī, the supporter of Jaʿfar superior to ʿAqīl,156 the forbearance (ªilm) of al-Aªnaf superior to the forbearance of Muʿāwiya, or on declaring Qatāda superior to al-Zuhrī. Every one of these types (‚inf ) has a group of partisans (shīʿa), and every one of these individuals has a numerous army who will litigate on his behalf: the impetuous imbeciles among them are many, the scholars among them (ʿulamāʾ) are few and fair-minded scholars (an‚āf ʿulamāʾihim) are even fewer still [7.7.1–8.3].157

In sum, third-century ʿAbbasid society is riven with partisanship and is fragmented into competing groups, each of them revelling in mukhā‚ama, forensic litigation, jadal, dialectical debate, mufākhara, vaunting matches, and munāÕarāt, speculative controversies. Of course, al-JāªiÕ is hoist with his own petard, as the ebullient composer of numerous such works, to say nothing of the many debates which jostle one another in The Book of Living.158 In his Kitāb al-Jawāhir (The Treatise of Precious Stones), the scientist and scholar al-Bīrūnī describes human beings as vigorously competitive (and he was followed by the German scholar Franz Rosenthal who describes Islamic society in similar terms).159 Its competitiveness is at its most brutally evident here in al-JāªiÕ’s portrayal of a community riven by the competing claims of cultural and intellectual superiority among its members. Al-JāªiÕ forestalls any criticism that he may be exaggerating by describing an incident which he witness at Bāb Muways b. ʿImrān (in Ba‚ra) in which a Basran and a Kufan debate the respective merits of two types of grapes and come to blows. The Kufan cuts off the Basran’s finger and the Basran puts out the Kufan’s eye.160 A short while later, al-JāªiÕ says, he saw them enjoying a drink in each other’s company as the best of friends, with no understanding of what occasions anger or happiness (7.8.4–9). He explains that this is because his society (jumhūr) has forgotten how to pause (tawaqquf ) when confronted by a doubt-inducing problem (shubha), and how to persevere (tathabbut) when forming a decision (ªukūma) (7.8.10– 11). Rather society knows only ‘yes’ and ‘no’: the latter for ire, the former for pleasure:

260 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s the qualities of the freeborn (ªurrīya) have been set aside (ʿuzilat), discussion of what is licit and illicit has died, and mention of the reprehensible and the seemly has been rejected (rufi∂a) [7.8.13–14].

Society is so morally corrupt that al-JāªiÕ quotes a wise utterance to the effect that the old vices of hypocrisy (riyāʾ) and hauteur (nafkh) are missed, presumably because they entail the prevalence of their opposites, sincerity and modesty (7.8.15–16). After a brief reminder that the seventh volume of The Book of Living is devoted to the elephant (in the form of some authorial guidance accompanied by the provision of a table of contents) (7.9.1–3), al-JāªiÕ explains his purpose in the work: In these books we have sought to provide information about the evident and complementary arguments (ªujaj) and overlapping indications (adilla mutarādifa)161 which concern the classes (ajnās) of animals, to point to the decisive proofs (burhānāt) that God the Exalted has clothed them in, the true realities (ªaqāʾiq) of which can only be known through cogitation (fikra), and the signs (ʿalāmāt) that God has wrapped them in, the benefits of which can only be obtained through pondering His lessons (ʿibra). We have sought to show how He has divided wondrous instances of wisdom among them – subtle senses, ingenious abilities, and such understanding as He has inspired (alhama) them with; the cowardice and bravery He has filled them with, the ability He has given them to perceive what will nourish and sustain them, and the ability to sense what their enemies will attempt which He has made part of their natural intelligence (fi†na): so that this may become an occasion (sabab) for caution, and caution may become an occasion for watchfulness, and watchfulness an occasion for safety. They even surpass the watchfulness of the man of worldly experience (al-mujarrab) and of the fearful man among the folk of capacity (isti†āʿa) and reflection (rawīya) who is sought after (ma†lūb) (?). Take for example what is related of the watchfulness of storks (gharānīq) and cranes (karākī). There are numerous similar instances (ashkāl ) of this, so much so that when people coin proverbs, they use these creatures as examples, and they express criticism and praise in terms of what they observe among wild birds and other creatures . . . [7.9.4–10.1].

t he cohesi veness of socie ty  | 261 There next follows a list of thirty proverbs in which living creatures provide the point of comparison for a variety of human characteristics and behavioural patterns, reiterating al-JāªiÕ’s profound commitment to operating within the norms of the Arabic-speaking community (7.10.2–9). B. A Diminished Anthropocentrism But why should we base our evaluations of human behaviour on our assessments of the animal kingdom? Are human beings not at the top of the hierarchy of being? He, Exalted and Great, has shown us this correlation (munāsaba) and this shared connection (mushāraka). He put our abilities to the test by putting them above us in some matters and by putting us above them in most matters. He intended thereby not to deprive us of any probative argument (ªujja), or of the occasion to speculate on a paradigmatic sign (ʿibra), or of that which, upon cogitation (fikra), is an admonishment (mawʿiÕa). Just so He disapproves of our inadvertence (sahw) and negligence, our folly (ba†āla) and insouciance (ihmāl ). Therefore, He has brought it about that in all of our estates (aªwāl )162 we do not open our eyes without alighting upon some type of indication (dalāla) or one of the forms (ashkāl ) of decisive proofs (burhānāt). He has made the evident signs (āyāt) they contain an incentive to contemplation (tafkīr) and He has made all the types (a‚nāf ) of wonders that He has hidden in them knowable through uncovering them [7.10.10–11.4]. They include the obvious which calls you to Him and indicates what powers He has, and the hidden which augments your confidence in interpreting matters when you reach its true reality (ªaqīqa), in order that, for all the excellence of your reasoning intellect and the capabilities (ta‚arruf ) of your capacity to act (isti†āʿa), you might know that when your inability to match in deed the ability of something less capable than you becomes evident, He who gave you pre-eminence over it in terms of capacity and reasoned speech (or logic: man†iq) is the very One who gave it pre-eminence over you in various other things; that you have both been given the ability to do what you were created for and you each achieve what you have been charged to do; and that he who is unable to build the way the surfa bug163

262 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s can or to arrange (tadbīr) things the way the spider does, despite the paltriness, abjectness, weakness and minuteness of their bodies, ought not to wax proud on the earth or to strut and swagger arrogantly, or to resort to verbal threats, take oaths or act without consultation. This is so that man might understand that his intellect is a gift from his Lord, that his capacity to act simply a loan borrowed (ʿārīya) from Him, and that he can only pray for His blessing to continue through ever giving thanks, and runs the risk of cancelling it by failing to give thanks [7.11.4–13].

After a passage like this, it is difficult to maintain that al-JāªiÕ unquestioningly and without qualification put man at the apex of the hierarchy of creation. Such a position is given to us by God but even then it is subject to qualifications and limitations. We take it for granted at our peril. Al-JāªiÕ next proceeds to describe how God has arranged the organisation of animal behaviour as a way of testing man to respond in proper terms: gratitude, knowledge and the dispelling of ignorance (7.11.14–12.8). He then reiterates the universal appeal of the argument from design, which extends even beyond Muslims to appeal to all adherents of organised religions: This book will find no opposition among all those who declare the shahāda, pray in the direction of the qibla, and eat ritually slaughtered meat. It will find no opposition among all the deviants (mulªid ) who profess the resurrection and give credence to revealed laws, even if they reject a few or many of them, except for the Eternalist (dahrī) [7.12.8–11].

C. The Eternalist The Eternalist, or as some would render it the ‘Materialist’, the Dahrī, is a bogeyman of third-century religious discourse. Those so labelled can hold a variety of positions, of which al-JāªiÕ’s opponent is broadly representative. They apparently believed in the pre-eternal force of primordial matter, but are rarely named and identified in the sources: we know of few adherents of the Dahrīya by name. Third-century texts can be very reluctant to name the object of their contumely, preferring to refer to them via epithets such as almulªid, the deviant, al-jāªid, the repudiator, or as here al-dahrī.164 They take their identity from the following verses of the Qurʾān (Q Jāthiya 45: 21–26), to which al-JāªiÕ’s characterisation is largely indebted:

t he cohesi veness of socie ty  | 263 Or do those who perpetrate evil deeds think that We will render them like those who believe and work righteous actions, their coming back to life and dying being equal? Their judgement is bad! (21). God created the heavens and the earth with the truth and so that every soul will be recompensed for what it has acquired. They will not be mistreated (22). Have you not seen the man who takes his desire (hawā) as his god, the one whom God has led astray, despite knowledge, on whose hearing and heart He has set a seal, and over whose sight He has placed a covering? Who can guide aright after God? Are you not mindful? (23). They say, ‘There is nothing but our life here and now. We live. We die. We are destroyed only by Time (dahr)’. In this they possess no knowledge – they are just guessing (24). When our signs (āyāt) are recited to them clearly, their only argument (ªujja) is to say, ‘Bring us back our fathers if you are truthful’ (25). Say, ‘God brings you to life, then brings you to death, then brings you together for the Day of Standing in Judgement on which there will be no doubt, but most people do not know this’ (26).

The key verse is verse 24: the denial of God’s existence, the refusal to acknowledge that life and death come from Him and that He will resurrect us to be judged, combined with the veneration of the potency of Time. Whilst strictly speaking the individual in verse 23 who makes a god of his caprices and his whims is different from those who deny god in order to give primacy to Time (verse 24), but is rather an example of wilful belief which is punished by God who leads him astray, in al-JāªiÕ’s description of the Eternalist’s system, wilful desire, the pre-eternity of Time and the rejection of the moral universe upon which the Day of Judgement is predicated are conflated: For he it is who denies divine lordship (rubūbīya); who holds commanding right and forbidding wrong to be inconceivable; who rejects the possibility of apostleship; who makes clay (†īna) primordial matter; who repudiates reward and punishment; who knows not licitness or illicitness; who avers that the world contains no proof which indicates a craftsman and his handiwork, a creator and his creation. It is he who makes the celestial sphere (which does not know the difference between itself and someone else, which does not distinguish between new and old and between good and bad, which is not capable of increasing its motion or decreasing its

264 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s revolution, of alternating rest with motion, of coming to a halt for the blink of an eye or of turning from its course) the origin and the destruction of all this good craftsmanship, of subtle and momentous matters, of these wondrous instances of wisdom and perfect arrangement (tadābīr), of novel composition (al-taʾlīf al-badīʿ) and wise disposition (tarkīb), all according to an identified pattern and a known order, at the extremes of subtly fine wisdom and perfect fabrication! [7.12.11–13.5].165

Not only is the Eternalist incapable of giving a rational account of the order of creation (i.e. his system cannot accommodate the argument from design), he has no reason (religious or moral) to object to a treatise which celebrates this design: What’s more, this Eternalist ought not to object to this book even if it proves the contradiction of his system and invites us to what is contradictory to his beliefs, for the Eternalist does not countenance any religion, creed, revealed law (sharīʿa) or community of belief (milla) on earth, he does not countenance any inviolability in what is licit – in fact he does not recognise the concept; nor does he know of any terminus to what is illicit – he does not recognise this concept either. He does not expect punishment for wrongdoing nor does he hope for reward for doing good.166 What is right in his opinion and what is true in his judgement are simply that he and the herbivore are equal and that he and the carnivore are equal. According to him, the objectionable is simply that which goes against his desire (hawā) and the good is simply that which agrees with his desire (hawā): the whole of existence (amr) revolves around disappointment and success, pleasure and pain [7.13.6–13].

The Eternalist does not share in the moral and evaluative universe of the audience (the adherents of revealed religions, i.e. monotheists) for whom al-JāªiÕ has written the work.167 Whether he heaps opprobrium on all books or not is all the same to this individual – there is no reward or punishment for him in this life or the life to come: What is correct for him is simply such benefit as he acquires, even if he were to kill one thousand upright men for the acquisition of one bad dirham. Therefore this Eternalist fears no punishment, no opprobrium, and no

t he cohesi veness of socie ty  | 265 chastisement, eternal or terminable, if he were to leave off attacking all books, and he expects no reward in this world or the next, if he were to criticise them and oppose them vehemently. This book therefore must be secure for all of humanity, since it has this attribute and is directed to this end. God, the Exalted, is He who suffices, who brings success through His subtle design (lu†f ) and His assistance, for He hears, is close, and does what He wills [7.13.13–14.5].

D. A Palliative Work for a Riven Society Al-JāªiÕ, then, has chosen to describe God’s creation as an appeal to unite the community of believers, including an appeal to those who adhere to any organised religion, even if it is not Islam. The only human it could possibly exclude is the Eternalist and it would make no sense, in terms of his creedal system, for him to object to its promotion of the design argument. He simply does not have the language or the conceptual apparatus with which to mount such an objection. The Book of Living is a palliative work written for a riven society, one which seeks to build a new consensus on the basis of one incontrovertible piece of evidence on which all will agree: that life as a product of creation necessitates a creator whom we should celebrate out of gratitude for the blessings He has showered upon us. The book, as an artefact, and this book, The Book of Living, in particular, is the most appropriate vehicle for such a celebration. It is a powerful attempt to act as a channel for God’s clemency (raªma), as a response to His declaration in the Qurʾān that through clemency He has brought harmony to His people, the community of believers: Had your Lord willed, He would have made men one community yet they would not cease to differ (118) apart from those on whom your Lord has mercy. He created them for this. The word of your Lord has come to pass: ‘Surely I will fill Jahannam of jinn and men together’ [Qurʾān Hūd 11: 118–19].

4.6 An Encyclopaedia to Save Society

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hat society needed, then, as an antidote to the strife which had riven it, was a book which sought to describe the wonders of God’s creation. The Book of Living is a miscellany, a florilegium and an ordered inventory of creation. The totalising ambition of the treatise tempts us to make of it an encyclopaedia, the mission of which was to save society by celebrating the majesty of God’s creation, easily and readily discerned and capable of generating consensus. A. The Encyclopaedia To describe The Book of Living as an encyclopaedia, however, is to describe it as something which it is obviously not, at least at first sight. It is not in any formal sense what we might today identify as an encyclopaedia – say, the magnificent Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert or The Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Many in the field of Islamic studies might nominate The Encyclopaedia of Islam or the Encyclopaedia Iranica, but I am not at all sure that we can, properly speaking, have an encyclopaedia of one subject.) Most of us would reasonably expect of an encyclopaedia that it be comprehensive, representative, systematic and ordered with a view to easy retrievability of the knowledge it contains: according to the letters of the alphabet, perhaps, the predominant arrangement for modern encyclopaedias, though in the past this was often held to be a random and contingent imposition on its materials – in other words, an arrangement which the materials do not themselves display. Most of us would also expect an encyclopaedia to be a compilation, to be multi-authored, to come in many volumes, to provide illustrations where necessary and above all to provide us with the final word on any subject about which we consult it (‘final’ at least at the time of the 266

an e ncyclopa edi a to sa ve socie ty  | 267 writing of the article), though this is more an index of our lust for data than of any inherent feature of the encyclopaedia. In the publishing history of encyclopaedias, as the case of the eighteenth-century publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke’s revision of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie demonstrates, ‘finality’ is a commodity offered by the publisher to his book-buying public. I expect that most writers of encyclopaedic entries are at heart only too conscious of the ephemerality of their contributions.168 Such works had not yet, by the middle of the third century, been composed in Arabic and it is moot whether they were ever composed in Arabic. When we realise that the Islamic tradition held knowledge to be incommensurable and inexhaustible, this absence is hardly surprising, for the ideal encyclopaedia, one which educates its readers through the encircling and encompassing of knowledge, is antonymical and antipathetic to such a conception. Just as the length of a man’s life is known only to God, so too is the sum of all knowledge. It is much more common for us to encounter ­specimens of living, human encyclopaedias. Most of the works usually designated as classical Arabic encyclopaedias are probably better described with other names: the miscellany, the florilegium, the catalogue, the cosmography, the bureaucratic reference work, the universal history. Of course, the texts thus designated display one or more of the features of the model (modern) encyclopaedia which I have sketched, being compilations, for example, or multi-authored, grandiose in their ambition, or universalising – in other words they are inflections of Arabic ­encyclopaedism, but still I hesitate to call them encyclopaedias.169 But am I right in proposing the modern version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a model encyclopaedia? When I compare it with the Encyclopédie, a work which is both heuristic and descriptive (its entries are designed to serve as opportunities for more discoveries), I am inclined to argue that it represents a formal impoverishment of the encyclopaedia as a textual performance, for the encyclopaedia is not so much an identifiable genre as a totalising aspiration, a contact zone of discursive practices, and something of a shape-shifter, being characterised by a multitude of formal realisations. It is for precisely this reason that the term, itself a humanist neologism, is so labile and has been applied to so many different texts.

268 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s In the Arabic-Islamic context, it is encyclopaedism, the totalitarian urge to communicate as much knowledge as is humanly possible and in so doing both to provide a complete account of existence and to imitate the divine insofar as is humanly possible, and not any formal characteristic, which distinguishes a work as an encyclopaedia. This is precisely why, as Borges’s ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ (1941–2) reminds us, a work of fiction can be more encyclopaedic and thus inspire more conviction in its contents than many other books which go by this name.170 In the Arabic tradition, I would identify three books as encyclopaedic in this totalitarian sense: the Qurʾān, al-JāªiÕ’s Book of Living and al-Fārābī’s First Principles of the Views of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City (Mabādiʾ Ārāʾ Ahl al-Madīna al-Fā∂ila; hereafter, The First Principles). B. The Qurʾān The Qurʾān is the ultimate book. A terrestrial and incomplete realisation of a celestial master text, it is both perfect and imperfect at the same time. It is complete and all-sufficing, an inventory of the divine revelation gifted by God to His Prophet Muªammad, and so is the only book which the believer will ever require, and yet it is a work which demands interpretation. In other words, it asks its readers to have recourse to other sources in order to comprehend it. Therefore over the centuries Muslims have constructed one of humanity’s greatest and most compendious book cultures in response to it. It is absolutely central to how a Muslim ought to live and think and feel. It is the alpha and omega of the manifold world views, religious, cultural and intellectual, which have constituted Muslim existence. It is thus the quintessential Muslim encyclopaedia: comprehensive, in that it covers all of existence; moral, in that the knowledge it imparts is essential to spiritual and personal well-being; this knowledge is retrievable through memorisation, audition and contemplative reading; it corrects and rectifies all previous revelations by removing human perversions of the original message; it also emerged as an organisational structure around which the world of Islamic knowledge could be organised. Some argue that each individual verse of the Qurʾān is a cosmos in itself. As the truest glimpse man can ever achieve, on earth, of divine omniscience, it is a work in which God, in the first person, speaks to us via His Prophet

an e ncyclopa edi a to sa ve socie ty  | 269 about God. It thus is supremely self-referential, to the point that the interpretation of the Qurʾān in terms solely of the Qurʾān became one of the cherished modes of exegesis. And yet, its meaning is inexhaustible. According to the jurist and exegete Muªammad b. Jarīr al-˝abarī (d. 310/923) some of it is only known to God, some is only known through privileged explanation given by God to Prophet Muªammad (and thus we need to have recourse to the Sunna, the record of Muªammad’s life and sayings), and some of it can be known by man through the interpretations of the exegetes. In the Shīʿī tradition, of course, the divinely inspired Imam is the bridge between the terrestrial and celestial encyclopaedia of revelation.171 C. Al-Fārābī’s First Principles of the Views of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City The Book of Living and al-Fārābī’s work The First Principles are responses to the encyclopaedism of the Qurʾān. The First Principles is a text written in the tradition of Islamic Neoplatonism and in keeping with the trend in late Greek Aristotelianism to emphasise the centrality of the intellect to ontology (an approach known as ‘noetics’). It is a totalising inventory of the cosmos in the form of a meticulous, rigorous, emanationist account of existence. A work in nineteen chapters, it begins with God, the First Cause (1), proceeds to the Angels (2 and 6), the celestial bodies (3 and 7) and the sub-lunar bodies (4–5), the natural bodies made out of prime matter (8–9), and man and the forms of society he creates (10–12 and 15–19). Chapters 13 and 14 deal with psychology and noetics. The emphasis is on how these different levels of existence ‘ought to be described’.172 And yet this globalising structure is also encountered in Arabic theological monographs from the fourth century, such as al-Ashʿarī’s Kitāb al-Lumaʿ, Book of Blinding Insights.173 Al-Fārābī is among the most encyclopaedic writers in the Arabic tradition. He responds to the works of Aristotle as an encyclopaedia. On the basis of Aristotle’s works al-Fārābī, the incarnation of philosophy (which thereby attains its consummation in him), the last and most complete representative of the School of Alexandria, produces his globalising and oracular visions of being. Informed with the lessons of The First Principles, the reader will be empowered to discipline his soul and intellect, in order not only to discern and describe the true nature of existence, but to ascend the ladder of

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being and realise man’s ultimate felicity: divinisation. In this sense, The First Principles is a muʿāra∂a (an emulation) of the Qurʾān – an encyclopaedia of all that the philosopher must know so as to achieve true bliss.174 D. The Book of Living as Encyclopaedia In what sense is The Book of Living an encyclopaedia? If there is one essential feature shared by all the discursive performances we are tempted to identify as encyclopaedias it is comprehensiveness. I have repeatedly noted the ‘totalising ambition’ of The Book of Living. The encyclopaedia is also a moral endeavour. The knowledge which it gathers and imparts is in the process declared to be useful knowledge, of the sort which will improve those who consult it. Thus, the encyclopaedia is parasitic.175 It can only come into existence thanks to its dependence on pre-existing knowledge which it can gather and collect and so designate as useful. It is preparatory – or rather prefatory: a gargantuan self-annulling paradox, often of vast scope and scale, which, by means of all that it is, prepares its reader for all that it is not, by demanding that the reader leave it behind, often for the contemplation of God or the interpretation of existence or the application of the knowledge it has imparted. At the same time, the encyclopaedia is a work of deception; it professes comprehensiveness whilst silently suppressing what it excludes. It can only seem to contain totality through being surreptitiously selective. It is also a work of aspiration. It yearns to mimic God in His omniscience, despite being only too conscious that as a human, and so imperfect, activity, it is doomed to failure. Thus the encyclopaedia is a mentality and a state of being. It is receptive to everything (at least potentially). It is universalising and intends thereby to make up for the limitations of human reason. It is insatiable and omnivorous, using as support almost any source or authority which will offer it sustenance. In the words of Luciano Berio, it is a ‘tendency to embrace a totality’, a way to think and to be.176 Therefore, as I read it and despite my contention that the classical Arabic Islamic tradition produced no encyclopaedias in any generally accepted sense in modern usage, The Book of Living is al-JāªiÕ’s most encyclopaedic work extant: it aims to give an account of all of the signs of God’s creation. It tries to achieve this through its presentation of creation as a semiotic system, a system of signs established by God as indications of His majesty, divided into

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an e ncyclopa edi a to sa ve socie ty  | 271 signs which merely point to God and other signs (i.e. human beings) who are endowed with the capacity to draw reasoned conclusions both from these other signs and from their own existence as signs. The inventory of materials which The Book of Living chooses to collect (creation) is a pre-existing inventory, one waiting for its collector to bring it together. These materials are not static, of course. And so correspondingly, the ways used to ensnare them in written words are not static although the form imposed upon the materials is itself pre-existing. The alternation of topics and of the serious and the trivial, jidd and hazl, is in the first instance dictated to the collector by the psychological capacities of his readers whom he seeks to woo through this blandishment. But this hurly-burly of topics mirrors the hurly-burly of creation: the book is as tumultuous as the creation it recreates. Its underlying disposition of ta‚nīf (arrangement by chapters) is like ‘life’ (ªayawān: Q. ʿAnkabūt 29: 64): simple (in the obviousness of its indications) and complex (in the diversity of its indications).177 The totalising vision of the encyclopaedia, as multiform as the multiple discursive fields it collects, is one of the reasons why The Book of Living appears to be such an interstitial text. It is a chimera, a will-o’-the-wisp which refuses to be contained in any one format. It is a series of textual manoeuvres rather than a particular thing; an attitude, an adjective, rather than an object, a substantive. The Book of Living is a textual intermediacy caught between yearning for the absolute and the frustration of the incomplete; between the perfect taxonomy and the cornucopia of exceptions to that taxonomy; between the universal and the particular, the eternal and the contingent. E. Comprehensiveness There is a story of an encounter in Helsinki in 1907 between Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius. Sibelius sought to explain to Mahler the ‘profound logic’ which was to bind together the theme of the symphony. His rigorous vision elicited from Mahler the response that ‘the symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing’. In this exchange, we can discern the crisis of the totalising work: the epistemological aporia posed to the encyclopaedist in the form of the ‘professional disease’ of selection.178 Encyclopaedias are always incomplete collections. This is one of the

272 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s reasons why the Islamic tradition preferred to locate encyclopaedism in the person and not the book, thereby ensuring that the collection of know­ ledge could only be terminated in death and perhaps continued throughout ­eternity in Paradise. Among the many problems which beset the encyclopaedist, from the mustering of data and the devising and articulation of its schemes of organisation, no problem is more pressing than the realisation that the encyclopaedia remains incomplete, no matter how comprehensive, no matter how compendious and exclusive, no matter how vaunting the ambition, grand the vision and dedicated the encyclopaedist. It may highlight and celebrate the information which it frames by means of inclusion, but it equally and simultaneously points to the information which it neglects by means of exclusion. Exclusion is the most expressive strategy available to those encyclopaedists whose work is not determined by a totalising imperative but is selective or polemical or normative, a declaration not only of correct method but also a categorisation of the kinds of knowledge worth cultivating or acquiring, however comprehensive such encyclopaedists may intend to be in terms of what they include. Such works are, in principle if not always in practice, capable of being finished: their end, even when it is not accomplished, is plotted as rigorously and as carefully as their commencement. For those encyclopaedists who want to encompass the sum and total of all available knowledge, whose collections are effectively descriptive, exclusion is the ghost in the machine – it is what subverts and undermines the totalisation of their work. It is as pernicious as nihilism or scepticism. Such works, by their very nature, are not capable of being finished. They come to an end, often with the death or the despair of the encyclopaedist, but they are never finished, for the sum of all available knowledge is like Borges’s ‘Library of Babel’ – the place where complete synonymy obtains between library and universe. Yet even in their optimism, such descriptive encyclopaedists must somehow confront the spectre of exclusion. Al-JāªiÕ’s solution is ingenious: he composed a book which is both descriptive and normative – in other words, The Book of Living is both inclusive and exclusive. By considering creation as a system of signs in a book which is itself a reordering of those signs, al-JāªiÕ is able to guide his audience to seek the correct interpretations of the signs which his treatise contains and

an e ncyclopa edi a to sa ve socie ty  | 273 so to establish for them the mechanisms whereby all the signs not contained in his treatise can in turn be successfully interpreted. The treatise is an interpretative key to the signs which it includes and thus becomes an interpretative key to the signs which it excludes. The semiotic system is universal: its interpretation, which is effectively the expression of grateful praise of its Maker, knows no limits save in the death or the imbecility of the interpreter. But as we learn from the terrifying psychological and epistemological despair which the ‘Library of Babel’ inspires in its inhabitants, a universal system is effectively a useless system. It is one which, like omniscience, quite simply is beyond the capacity of any one human being. This is why al-JāªiÕ’s totalising inventory is predicated upon interpretation. There are bad as well as good forms of interpretation. So, in addition to any acts of selections which the compiler of the totalising work may make (as when in Volume Seven of The Book of Living, al-JāªiÕ justifies his exclusion of the marine world), it is interpretation which becomes the primary mechanism for the moral activity of exclusion as well as inclusion. Good and bad interpretations are estimative processes, that is they provide value judgements about what they include and exclude. It is thus that al-JāªiÕ’s encyclopaedia becomes practicable, ­scriptable and capable of performance. In order to succeed in its proselytising mission to heal society through its intonation of God’s creation, The Book of Living must create its readers, those capable of recognising it for what it is and of learning the lessons of good and bad interpretation. It bases this mission on the homiletic, universalising appeal of the Argument from Design, but it is only by creating such readers that it can save society. For as Conte remarks of Pliny’s Natural History, if the encyclopaedist were to attempt to circumscribe the multiplicity of uses to which the encyclopaedia could be put, he would limit its utility and thereby nullify his own utility. In so doing the encyclopaedist would invite identification as an author who had predetermined and foreordained the uses to which readers could put his book. For al-JāªiÕ, a Book of Living thus articulated would despoil his reader of the capacity of ikhtiyār, choice, and thus deny him the possibility of Paradise by invalidating his status as mukallaf, as an agent charged by God with moral responsibility. In other words, were the Book of Living to be anything other than what it is, it would be a book ­destined to destroy rather than salvage society.179

5.1 Governance of the Cosmos

T

he Book of Living is a book on a mission – a mission to save society from fragmentation through squabbles, quarrels, arguments, disagreements and disputes. It proposes to achieve this by enfolding its readers in its all-embracing universe of debate, encouraging them in solitude to engage with its written arguments and so to avoid the psychological consequences of public debate. Its message: a celebration of God’s majesty as manifest in His creation. Its proselytising appeal: to all theists, dualists, monotheists and henotheists (among whom could conceivably be included those who tended to promote the virtues of one principle, say light, against the evils of another, e.g. darkness). The only member of al-JāªiÕ’s society who would be excluded by such a message is the execrable Eternalist, the Dahrī, in so many respects considered by contemporaries to be the century’s atheists, though their denial of providence and design did not necessarily amount to a denial of a divinity. How could a book save society? The answer lay in an appreciation of God’s design in the universe. The third century abounded in books on the subject and The Book of Living is in conversation with them. The theological premise of the work is that God has put in man a primary appreciation of His design. Al-JāªiÕ’s book explores this primary appreciation and so directs its appeal to the monotheists in his audience who, by participating in the process of becoming its ideal readers, will recognise that creation can only fully and properly, however imperfectly, be appreciated through al-JāªiÕ’s (Islamic) account of design. Appreciation took two forms: the proper use of the ʿArabīya; a conception of composition which permitted an author to aspire to mimic God without thereby becoming God. And so the second tension in the totalising work 277

278 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s raised in Part 2 is addressed. 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? Why does he seem often to want to send his readers off on so many wild goose chases? A. The Design Complex The message of The Book of Living, then, is God’s creation. The principal means at al-JāªiÕ’s disposal for the expression of that message is an exploration of the notion of tadbīr, governance, an enormously popular notion in third-century Arabic texts. Governance is hierarchical: there is governance of the cosmos; governance of society, be it the empire (the dawla), the religious community (the umma) or the city (the madīna); and governance of the household (the dār). When governed optimally, each of these venues will mirror the governance of the institution(s) above it in the hierarchy. At its heart stands a series of assumptions. Ultimately these assumptions amount to, and are derived from and informed by, an understanding of the nature of the godhead. There must be a supreme figure, a governing sovereign who controls and guides; in the case of the cosmos, that sovereign is also God. It was simply inconceivable that there should be an infinite regress: everything had to start somewhere, and supreme power had to be vested in a supreme leader. This gubernatorial God had to be the Creator, because if He were a created product, then His governance would not be absolute. And this Creator God had to be One, for otherwise His perfection would be diminished by the existence of any partner deities and His power would thus not be absolute. As this Creator God was supremely powerful, so His actions, especially that of creation, had to be perfect, for imperfect action would once again diminish the absoluteness of His power. A perfect action is a good action, and a good action is a beneficent action. Therefore His act of creation was providential. If His creation was perfect and His creating it providential, then it would embody a cornucopia of signs attesting to and indicating His supreme majesty. It had to be possible for these signs to be read by His creatures for otherwise they could form no part of a providential system. Such a God would

governance of the cosmo s  | 279 not have acted in vain and to no purpose, for uselessness was equated with meaninglessness (and vice versa) – and that which had no meaning, had no purpose. Therefore creation was purposive and the Creator God intended its purpose to be comprehensible. In this way the Creator God had charged His creatures with the task of reading His signs. The evidence of these signs was so abundant, so conspicuous and so convincing, their appeal so overwhelming and universal, that it could only be rejected by someone who was wilfully perverse, or someone who had overestimated the capacity of man, or someone who was mentally defective. (Of course, those who denied God’s signs were effectively all three.) There were few Kalām Masters among the Muʿtazila who demurred. Only Thumāma b. Ashras dissented, according to al-Ashʿarī (and even he was not sure).1 To deny God’s signs, to fail to try to read them, then, was tantamount to a rejection of man’s moral obligatedness, his taklīf. It is at this point in the series that The Book of Living is positioned.2 In a theological context, this series of assumptions can be taken to be the key components of the proof of the existence of God known as the ‘Argument from Design’. This label is slightly misleading for the third century and so I will refer to it as the ‘Design Complex’ – few third-century thinkers argue for God’s existence. My unpacking of the notion of governance in the preceding paragraph is entirely artificial. It would not have seemed necessary to anyone in the third century who believed in, and worshipped on the basis of, the notion of divine governance. All of the items in the foregoing series which I constructed are found severally in third-century texts, but they overlap with one another, their boundaries are fuzzy and they each prop and subtend the other. They also exert gravitational pull, in that they attract into their orbit arguments which the later tradition would have identified as distinct. The line between ‘cosmological’ and ‘teleological’ arguments, between those which start from an observation of some law of the universe (the combination of opposites, for example) and those which begin with the intricacy of a design and its wondrous functionality (the eye as the organ for sight is a favourite), is very, very fine.3 Consider the following defence by al-Khayyā† (c. 220–300/835–912–13)

280 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s of an older contemporary of al-JāªiÕ, the Muʿtazilite Hishām al-Fuwa†ī (d. before 218/833) who is being attacked by Ibn al-Rāwandī (d. between 245/860 and 298/912): Then he (Ibn al-Rāwandī) said: ‘He (Hishām) used to maintain that, “there is no colour, taste, or smell, there is no heat, coldness, dryness or moisture, there is no composition (taʾlīf ) and separation (iftirāq), which points to God. That is because none of the dispositions (hayʾāt) of corporeal beings (al-ajsām) point to their creator”’. May God be gracious to you! Understand that Hishām used to allege that, ‘the existence of the signs pointing (adilla) to God could only be known through necessity (i∂†irār), while the existence of accidents could only be known through reading the signs (istidlāl ) and speculation (naÕar)’. According to him, ‘only the bodies whose existence was known through the senses and eye-witness could constitute these signs, because when God directed His creatures to Himself, He cut off their excuses and deprived them of their justifications. His wisdom is such that He could not but have given them knowledge of the signs pointing to Himself which He has set up (na‚aba)’. Alongside this doctrine, he used to hold that the corporeal beings, with their colours, their tastes and smells, their composition and separation, their heat, and coldness, dryness and moisture, are signs ­indicating that God created them and governed them.4

This series of moves is typical of how thinkers used the ‘Design Complex’. Neither Hishām nor Ibn al-Rāwandī (nor al-Khayyā†, for that matter) are especially interested in proving or disproving the existence of God. It is the nature of the signs which point to Him as Creator and Governor which is at stake, alongside the possibility of the moral obligatedness of man, His creature, to know Him. This leads Hishām (as al-Khayyā† represents him) to insist upon the necessary character of our knowledge of God as His creatures (i.e. it is known intuitively, we do not have to learn it) and this allows him to establish the providential beneficence and sagacity of the Creator. He mixes elements of the argument from the composition of contrary elements (hot, cold, dry and moist), with the semiotic attributes of accidents, with our being equipped with functioning sensory apparatus, our primary means of responding to God’s signs. If this is an argument from design it is an argument not

governance of the cosmo s  | 281 for the existence of God but for His nature as Creator and Governor and for our moral stature as His creatures. We come much closer to an ‘Argument from Design’ in the following critique by al-Khayyā† of Ibn al-Rāwandī’s critique of al-NaÕÕām’s ­cosmological argument from the composition of contraries: Then he (Ibn al-Rāwandī) said: ‘His disciples assault folk with one of his proofs (dalīl ) for the temporal origination of creation (ªudūth), namely his statement: “I experience that heat and cold, despite their contradictoriness (ta∂ādd ) and mutual incompatibility (tanāfur), are joined together in one body, so I know that they have not joined together through themselves, since their basic state (shaʾn) is contradictoriness, and that that which has joined them is the One who fashioned (ikhtaraʿa) them as joined together and who compelled (qahhara) them to differ from what is in their essence (jawhar). Therefore He made of their joining together, despite their contradictoriness, an indication that He who joined them is their fashioner”’. Ibn al-Rāwāndi continued: ‘Yet he alleges that man who cannot fashion bodies puts fire in cold water so that he makes it warm and brings them together despite their contradictoriness, and that he brings together the dryness of soil and the moistness of water so that they reach a balance and cling to one another, but he (i.e. al-NaÕÕām) does not make of man’s actions in this a sign indicating that man is a fashioner of their essences (aʿyān)’. May God teach you what is good! Understand that one of two things applies to the author of the book (‚āªib al-kitāb): either he is the most crassly ignorant of all of God’s creatures or he is purposefully using words (kalām) which he knows are false. With God’s assistance, I will describe the point which Ibrāhīm (al-NaÕÕām) was inferring (istadalla) so that anyone who reads my book may know that what the author of that book (Ibn al-Rāwandī) identifies as a necessary consequence (alzama) of Ibrāhīm’s statement is not necessary and that Ibrāhīm’s proof (dalīl ) is sound and is not demolished or corrupt. Ibrāhīm said: ‘I experience that heat is contradictory to cold and I know from experience that the two opposites do not join together in one place as a result of the essence of their natures (dhāt anfusi-hā), so I know from what I experience of them when they are joined that they have a joiner

282 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s who has joined them and a compeller who has compelled them against their basic state. That which is subject to compulsion and prevention is weak. Its weakness and the efficacy (nufūdh) of the governance (tadbīr) of its compeller is a sign both of its temporal origination (ªadath) and of there being someone who originated it temporally, a fashioner who fashioned it but is not like it. This is because the defining characteristic (ªukm) of everything that resembles Him is the characteristic that defines it as an indication of its temporal origination – He is God the Lord of the Worlds. Now, the fact that someone who is not God can join fire and water or earth and air is also a sign of their temporal origination, although the one who originates them temporally is not the human being who joins them, because the human is subject to the same compulsion as they are. The fashioner of these beings and the fashioner of man, who resembles them, is God whom nothing resembles: “Nothing is like Him”’.5 Then he Ibn al-Rāwandī said: ‘One of the things he (al-NaÕÕām) says is that God separates things which are contradictory in this world and then brings them back to their state of being joined together but not by fashioning their essences (aʿyān), and that their being joined together a second time does not indicate that the one who joined them fashioned them as joined together’. The explanation (sharª) of Ibrāhīm’s proof has been given. This means that we do not need to repeat it a second time. What Ibrāhīm intended was simply that the control (ta‚rīf ) of these things, the efficacy of governance in them, and their deflection (‚arf ) from their natural condition (†abʿ), point to their weakness; their weakness points to their temporal origination; and their temporal origination necessitates that there be one who originated them temporally, since it is an impossibility that there be an occurrence of temporal origination without one who originates it temporally [Kitāb al-Inti‚ār, 40.9–41.10, §26].

The original context for al-NaÕÕām’s argument about the contingent createdness of the world is obviously directed against a materialist who argued for the pre-eternity (i.e. non-createdness) of the world, by posing the dilemma of how the four natural elements, which are inherently contradictory and mutually antipathetic, can be combined and found together into one substance or

governance of the cosmo s  | 283 location: it was a fundamental of Aristotelian physics that opposites could not occupy the same space. Al-NaÕÕām deduces the existence of a creator from the nature of created being and so employs an ‘argument from design’. Al-Khayyā†’s restitution of his argument from the perversion and misquotation of it by Ibn al-Rāwāndī is, in its present context, deprived of any epistemological concerns over our knowledge of God and of any moral concerns over how we should respond to that knowledge. Such is the fundamental fuzziness of the ‘Design Complex’ in our texts that it is possible to identify two contrary movements. One moves downwards from the wise and just Creator to His wondrously ordered creation and is identified as ‘providence’: ʿināya in Arabic. We might be tempted to see this as a forerunner of modern versions of the ‘Argument for Design’. The other moves upwards from the signs of this wondrous order in creation to the wisdom and justness of the Creator. Yet these two movements form a hermeneutical circle, they each presume the operation of the other. The circle was widely held to be the most perfect form and so the circular argument is itself an indication of both its success and of the perfection of the One who made it possible.6 The complementarity of these movements was also buttressed by the observation that the morphology of Arabic (in which the active voice precedes the passive voice which is dependent upon and secondary to it) mirrored the chain of causality which was found to be so evident in the universe. Al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm, a contemporary of al-JāªiÕ, puts it thus: One of the indications He has also given is His words: «Do they not look at how the camels were created, at how the heavens are raised aloft, at how the mountains have been erected, and at how the earth has been spread out?»7 The creation of the camels which He crafted is to be found on the earth and the raising of the heavens above it is observable and can be seen with your own eyes. The erections of the mountains as tent-pegs and the spreading out of the earth as flat are matters of certain knowledge, observable and comprehensible. It has been established that all these are crafted and that everything crafted has a beginning by means of the indications of crafting and His governance and the waymarks of origination and His imprint

284 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s which are evident in them and which testify to their creation. Where would the creator and crafter of the camels, he who holds the heavens aloft, who erects the mountains and uses them as tent-pegs and spreads out and flattens the earth, be, if it were not necessary and incontrovertible that everything made must have a maker, everything raised must have someone who raised it, everything set up and pegged in place must have someone who set it up and pegged it in place, everything spread out and flattened must have someone who spread it out and flattened it. That is God the Lord of the Worlds, the maker of all makers, who made the earth, camels and mountains to be crafted in an act of His crafting, and made the heavens as a roof which is fixed, preserved and raised aloft through His preservation of it (Kitāb al-Dalīl, 110.5–17).

The force of al-Qāsim’s rhetoric lies in his morphological, syntactic and theological engagement with the basic structures of Arabic. The speculative theologians put great faith in the predictive and normative capacities of Arabic language usage and in al-Qāsim’s exposition language and universe blend seamlessly. Of course, few would have doubted the existence of God. There were certain materialists (whom we meet identified in the sources as ‘Eternalists’, Dahrīya) who believed in the primacy and pre-eternity of matter (though not necessarily in the non-existence of God), but generally speaking the majority of intellectuals viewed the existence of God as an a priori, that is they took the existence of God as a given. It is for this reason that genuine debates about and proofs for the existence (as opposed to the activities) of God in third-century Arabic texts are so scarce, all due allowances being made for the lacunose character of the textual tradition. Rather, as we have seen with Hishām al-Fuwa†ī, thinkers were driven by a desire to respond to and account for the aprioricity of their knowledge of God and the moral consequences it entails, and they saw evidence of its innateness in the universal appeal of the ‘Design Complex’. Conversely, this universalism dictated the uses to which the ‘Design Complex’ could be put. Thus several centuries later, Ibn Rushd begins his legal ruling (fatwā) on the compatibility of philosophy and the revealed law (in fact of how the

governance of the cosmo s  | 285 revealed law can only fully and adequately be fulfilled and upheld by virtue of philosophical speculation) with an expression of the ‘Design Complex’: We say: If the activity of philosophy is nothing more than speculation on existents and deriving lessons from them insofar as they are indications of the Manufacturer – I mean insofar as they are manufactured, for existents indicate the manufacturer only by virtue of understanding their manufacture, and the more complete the understanding of their manufacture is, the more complete the understanding of the manufacturer is – and if the revelation (sharʿ) has urged and exhorted us to derive lessons from existents, then it is evident that what this word ‘philosophy’ indicates is either obligatory or urged through revelation.8

So he begins his fatwā with the ‘Design Complex’ precisely because of its attractiveness: no one in his right mind would be prepared to contradict its appeal. But the consequence of this appeal is that for Ibn Rushd the ‘Design Complex’ remained essentially non-philosophical – the God whom it established was of popular appeal, one who did not enjoy the philosophical and spiritual aura of Aristotle’s unmoved mover. B. The ‘Design Complex’ in Action We encountered a passage just previously from a work typical in many ways of how the ‘Design Complex’ was used in the third century: The Major Book of the Proof (Kitāb al-Dalīl al-Kabīr) by al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm (169–246/785– 860). Al-Qāsim was a preacher and a prominent Zaydī who died in the environs of Medina. His Major Book of the Proof is a verbatim quotation presented by al-Qāsim’s son al-Óusayn of his dead father’s teaching on the subject of the sign (dalīl ) which points to God (62.3–5). Its basic form is a pattern familiar from ancient wisdom literature: a son asks his father to give him guidance. Al-Qāsim’s address of his son is maintained throughout the written record of this oration composed in sajʿ, writing which is rhythmical and rhymed but is neither properly prose nor verse. The oration is directed at a student at the intermediate level of learning. I presume that this student is al-Qāsim’s son. It is not a disquisition of Kalām as such. It does on occasion introduce Kalām topics discussed in a style typical of other third-century Kalām discussions, such as the brief definition of

286 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s existence and non-existence, 74.21–76.5, and the argument from particularisation, 114.5–16. On other occasions it assumes the character of a doxography, as at 62.5–11, where al-Qāsim establishes his oration as a correction of previous misunderstandings, or at 64.18–66.9 and 70.9–72.19, the review of the modes of knowing God put forward by other groups, or at 102.18– 106.13, a survey of cosmological theories. In these discussions, it presupposes a basic familiarity with the range of possible and actual approaches to certain Kalām topics. There may even be an allusion to the Aristotelian doctrine of God as the unmoved mover (116.17). Overall, however, excessive technicality and abstruse vocabulary are avoided. The work in its present form has also preserved some traces of a debate text. There is the trace of an attack on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in the denial of polytheism (98.5–7) and they are probably intended by the designation al-mulªidīn, the deviants, at 62.4. There is the occasional use of the debate text formula in qīla . . . qulnā (e.g. 74.20–21; 102.15 and 18). The oration also records al-Qāsim’s attack on those whom he descries as ‘the cloth-heads of this commonalty’ (ªashw al-ʿāmma: 142.7 and 148.12) in the last third of the text when the oration becomes a rebuttal of the Sunnī doctrine of faith and good deeds. In terms of its organisation, the oration has a doxology and a concluding prayer which book-end three main sections: 62.1–2: Doxology; 62.3–76.13: the imperative to know God and the means of acquiring knowledge of Him (i.e. through reading His signs correctly: istidlāl ); 76.14–136.6: review of Qurʾanic testimony that God is to be ‘known through the indicative, prominent way-marks and the decisive and just testimonies which do constantly give testimony and are testified to in men’s souls and on the horizons’ (76.16–17); 136.7–176.18: the components of true belief: God’s attributes, His names and the rejection of anthropomorphism (136.7–142.19); the promise of reward and the threat of punishment (al-waʿd wa-al-waʿīd ) (144.1–150.11); the salvific properties of goodly actions and the rewards attendant upon knowing God appropriately

governance of the cosmo s  | 287 (150.12–172.5); the despair of those who do not seek to know God (172.6–176.18); 178.1–8: concluding hymn and prayer. The basic theme of the oration is not so much the ‘argument from design’ but the role of the design of creation in providing us with signs so that we might acquire an appropriate understanding and knowledge of God.9 As al-Qāsim asserts: My son, the sign for knowledge of God and the enormity (reading ʿaÕm) of His causes (asbāb) and the nearest entrance to knowledge of Him that He has established is the traces (āthār) of His perfect wisdom which He (Praised be He!) has made evident in things, traces that can only come to be as a result of a perfect maker of traces (muʾaththir) [Kitāb al-Dalīl, 62.16–64.2].10

And again: Certainty in God is the key to every act of obedience and good deed; so gain certainty about God – you will do good; do good through God – you will have faith [Kitāb al-Dalīl, 160.3–4].

The evidence which God’s signs provide about Him is absolutely incontrovertible: Men’s minds (albāb) will not reject His existence and lies cannot falsify His witness [Kitāb al-Dalīl, 90.17–18].

If this evidence is rejected it is out of perversity and caprice: What He (Praised be He!) mentions about the impregnation and the parturition of every female11 is something which no one on whom He has bestowed some of His wisdom would reject and is something which not even a dolt would deny after it had been confirmed, unless he does so through overweening pride in his own reason, even though he has conceded to us a similar point, willingly and in his abasement. So if he concedes a point similar to this one, then his rejection of it is out of overweening pride. Or rather he yields and only denies it out of licentiousness (majāna) and flippancy (ilʿāb) in debate [Kitāb al-Dalīl, 90.19–92.4].

288 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s At 82.12 al-Qāsim declares that these signs are such ‘that no one of sound intellect (salīm al-ʿuqūl ) would deny’. The incontrovertibility of this evidence is a leitmotif which al-Qāsim delights in intoning throughout his oration.12 This seems to be knowledge which God creates in men’s minds: Our Lord, He is known, not unknown, in men’s minds, is fixed and cannot be rejected in men’s reasoning intellects [Kitāb al-Dalīl, 124.13–14].

Just how exactly this knowledge exists in men’s minds is not a topic which al-Qāsim’s oration elaborates upon too closely. He does though assert that it is part of man’s fi†ra, his originary created state: Among the means (asbāb) of gaining knowledge of Him and His signs, after the traces of governance which He has made clear in His actions, the most secure is the decisive knowledge and firm certitude upon which He has created (fa†ara) the structure of men’s minds (albāb), certitude which is unaffected by any doubt or dispute (murya) . . . These are two basic, fixed foundations for knowing (maʿrifa) God, and two just, decisive testimonies for knowledge of God [Kitāb al-Dalīl, 64.10–14 and 16–17].

It is sadly not clear whether at 68.14–70.8 al-Qāsim attacks those who maintain that this knowledge is innate to man because it implies that man may take it for granted or because al-Qāsim does not think that they can give an adequate account of it as knowledge or because he espouses a different epistemology which involves some form of direct inspiration from God to man. At all events, al-Qāsim shares the belief in the incontrovertibility of the evidence of God’s signs with all those who voice the ‘Design Complex’. Its appeal is universal. As with all engagements with the ‘Design Complex’ I am familiar with, so al-Qāsim promotes a subtending concept of God. God is absolute otherness: He is intellected and known in a manner different to how things are intellected and known. They differ from Him and He differs from them in a way which is not how they differ among themselves [Kitāb al-Dalīl, 64.14–16].13

Perhaps one of the most striking features of the oration is al-Qāsim’s use of the Qurʾān. Most of the signs attesting to God’s role as Governor and Creator are derived from verses of the Qurʾān. On one occasion

governance of the cosmo s  | 289 (114.17–116.19), the Kalām argument from change is expounded through the narrative of the Prophet Abraham’s opposition to his people at Q. Anʿām 6: 76–9. The Prophet Abraham takes centre stage, though Noah (122.2–17), Joseph (122.18–126.3), Moses and Aaron (126.4–128.15) also play prominent roles in al-Qāsim’s lesson. This is because in his promotion of the right way to know God and his jeremiad against his opponents, al-Qāsim models his behaviour on imitation of the Prophets: Then he (Abraham) began to engage them in argument on the subject of knowing God by means of His attribute (‚ifa) which there is no way of rebutting and of the particular descriptions (anʿāt) which can only be found among His attributes [118.7–9].

And like Noah and Abraham, al-Qāsim is astonished at those who doubt the arguments and signs which God’s Prophets lavish upon them (130.1–7). There could be no more perfect summary of al-Qāsim’s oration, though I am not sure if we should infer from these parallels whether al-Qāsim establishes hereby any prophetic credentials for himself. Central to this intriguing text is the process of istidlāl, deriving proofs from God’s signs. For those of discerning minds and reasoning intellects, this is a process of progressing with certitude from effect to cause and from that which is ‘present, evident and clear’ to ‘that which is invisible, hidden and concealed’ (126.14–15). Al-Qāsim’s Major Book of the Proof is thus an ʿaqīda, a credo, a text which exhorts us to know God, shows us how to know Him and informs us of the manifold blessings which we will acquire if we achieve this properly. C. Qurʾanic Signs The series of positions, assumptions and statements which I have identified as the ‘Design Complex’ is ubiquitous in the Qurʾān. Time and time again in the Qurʾān, God intones the themes of God as Creator, of God as Sovereign, of creation as blessing, as test, and as sign, of the divine injunction to man to heed these signs and to learn how to read them, of the dire punishment awaiting those who do not heed them. The Qurʾān itself, as word of God, is a sign and the same word, āya, does service as both ‘sign’ and as ‘verse’ of the Qurʾān.14

290 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Creation in the Qurʾān is a brute fact of unimaginable power, all the more awesome for the brevity of the imperative God utters: kun, Be!: He is the one who created the heavens and the earth truthfully. On the day when he says, ‘Be!’ and it is, His word is truth. To Him is sovereignty on the day when the Trumpet is sounded. Knower of the unseen and the witnessed, He is the Wise and the Knowing [Q. Anʿām 6: 73].

Just as He began life, so will He end it on the Day of Judgement when His decision will be as curt and as summary as the order He gave to existence. Or again, in The Bees: Our words to a thing when we intend it is to say to it, ‘Be!’ and it is [Q. Naªl 16: 40].

Creation is, like the imperative uttered by God, not subject to time but is an on-going process, preserved (ªifÕ) by God throughout eternity, for He never tires nor sleeps (Q. Baqara 2: 255). It is not for God’s amusement (Q. Āl ʿImrān 3: 190–1) or out of frivolity (Q. Anbiyāʾ 21: 16) but to provide for man (e.g. Q. Baqara 2: 22) and to put him to the test (Q. Hūd 11: 7; Kahf 18: 7; Dukhān 44: 33). How can creation put man to the test? God’s actions constitute a lesson for the perspicacious to decipher (Q. Baqara 2: 164; Nūr 24: 43–4). Man as creature cannot be free of this test, this injunction to read which God has imposed upon him. Like the Prophet Abraham, they may falter and stumble to read the signs (Q. Anʿām 6: 75–79), but the descent and irruption into terrestrial existence of the Qurʾān has deprived them of all excuse. The conviction which they command as evidence is incontrovertible (Q. Dhāriyāt 51: 20–1): We will show them our signs on the horizons and in their souls so that it will be clear to them that it is the truth. Is it not enough of your Lord that He witnesses everything? [Q. Fu‚‚ilat 41: 53].

Misreading the signs, which is also miscomprehension of the verses, introduces corruption into God’s beautifully ordered creation (Q. Aʿrāf 7: 54–8). This is a grievous offence against God (Q. Kahf 18: 57). Even worse as an

governance of the cosmo s  | 291 offence is capriciously ignoring them or querulously debating about them (Q. Ghāfir 40: 35, 44, 56; Fu‚‚ilat 41: 40). The centrality of signs to the Qurʾanic cosmos and their synonymy with verses of the Holy Book are well brought out in the following verses of Sūrat al-Jāthiya (Q. 45: 1–10): (1) Óāʾ Mīm (2) The sending down of the Book from God, the Almighty, the Wise: (3) In the heavens and the earth are signs for those who believe; (4) And in the creation of you and the mounts that He urges are signs for a people of certainty; (5) And in the difference of night and day, in the sustenance which God sends down from the sky so that He can thereby revivify the earth after its death, and in the disposing of the wind are signs for a people of reason. (6) Those are the verse-signs of God which We recite to you truthfully – so, after God and His verse-signs, in which story will they place their faith fully? (7) Shame on every lying miscreant (8) Who hears the verse-signs of God recited to him but then haughtily scampers off as if he had not heard them – give him the glad tidings of a smarting punishment! — (9) And who, when he learns any of our verse-signs, takes them as jest – they are those for whom there is a humiliating torment (10) Behind them stretches Jahannam: what they have acquired will not avail them nor will the patrons they have taken instead of God: theirs is a grave chastisement.

The descent of God’s Revelation in verses has inaugurated the signs of creation and has divided mankind into two groups: those who believe in them and those who reject them. Rejection of the verses-cum-signs incurs damnation. Signs and Qurʾanic verses must be recited (tilāwa) (Q. Āl ʿImrān 3: 113; Maryam 19: 73; Yūnus 10: 31), must be voiced (dhikrā) (Q. Aªzāb 33: 34). They are recited by God’s messengers (Q. Baqara 2: 129 and 151). Salvation comes from hearkening unto God’s messengers and observing the signs properly (cf. Q. Qāf 50: 2–8) for creation is an act of revelation and revelation is itself an act of creation (Q. Raªmān 55: 1–7):

292 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s (1) The Raªmān (2) Taught the Qurʾān (3) Created man (4) Taught him the Bayān15 (5) The sun and the moon move in a pattern (6) The stars and the trees are in prostration (7) He raised the sky on high and set up the balance.

Yet man should never be seduced into thinking that God’s creative energies can be exhausted: Say: if the ocean was ink for the words of God, the ocean would be spent before the words of God are spent, even if We were to produce its like in ink (Q. Kahf 18: 109).

The complete book of nature can never encompass the words of God. The only complete inventory of creation is that kept by God. D. Graeco-Arabic Teleologies16 Thinkers profoundly immersed in Qurʾanic providence and design, committed to unravelling its complexities and discerning its indices, may perhaps have been surprised by the rich accounts of creation and intelligent design which the Greek scientific and philosophical tradition offered. Aristotle, of course, was not a creationist, his god was not a god of creation, but his writings offered an unrivalled account of causality which no teleological ambition could properly afford to be without. The vision of God which he offered in Metaphysics Lambda, a self-intellecting unmoved mover, was ideal for those for whom absolute tawªīd was paramount, though it was so difficult to reconcile with the beneficent creator God of the Qurʾān. Aristotle’s god simply was not providential. Plato, whose presence in the textual tradition was shadowy in comparison with Aristotle, Euclid and Ptolemy, offered a dazzling myth of a beneficent creator God in his Timaeus, available to third century readers in a translation (of an epitome?) of Galen’s commentary from the workshop of Óunayn b. Isªāq.17 In this work, Plato proposes that the cosmos can only be explained in terms of divine causation. The hand of the supremely good

governance of the cosmo s  | 293 and generous Demiurge, the artisan-creator, is evident everywhere, from the selection of the appropriate geometric shapes with which to fashion matter to the best possible order he imposed on his materials. Timaeus’s bold account fuses both cosmological and teleological arguments in his attempt, through the best possible cosmogonic hymn, to imitate the Demiurge’s best possible ordering of the universe. And this ordering is both psychocentric – it is designed to allow the human soul to return to the good; and anthropocentric – not only is man at the bottom (by being enfouled in matter) and the top of the celestial hierarchy (since creation was designed for him to break free of matter), the design of the human body, a spectacular instance of almost unbelievable engineering subtlety, seems implicitly to be used as a partial model for the Form of the Living upon which the Demiurge models his craft. There were problems for Muslim readers of the work of course. Timaeus described creation of the world in time, which was good, but out of pre-­ existing matter, which was not. In other words, the Qurʾanic doctrine of creation ex nihilo was explicitly rejected by Timaeus. Thus the Demiurge, though supremely good and beneficent and providential, was not omnipotent but was limited by the stuff he had to work with. And then there was the way in which the Demiurge used a model to design his craft. So the Demiurge was not One, he was not solely eternal and he was not omnipotent!18 What would the appeal of this work have been? Surely not only its demonstration of design, its inspiring portrait of beneficent and providential creation, and its insistence on the geometrical structure and analysis of existence, but also its completeness. Timaeus’s account is as complete an account as is humanly possible. The Demiurge sought completeness in his creation of human beings, whose incarnation remains, notwithstanding God’s generosity, the source of moral disorder and unhappiness in His design. Timaeus’s account is also complete in that it fuses both design and providence. But it is typical of the evanescent and elusive Plato Arabicus that his showpiece of cosmogony should have left so few obvious, textual traces in Arabic.19 We have better evidence for how al-Kindī was inspired by his reading of the Arabic version of Alexander of Aphrodisias’s treatise On Providence.20 Alexander was a peripatetic commentator of Aristotle who lived in the third century AD. A number of his philosophical writings were translated into Arabic. This work on providence was an attempt to find a middle way between

294 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s a denial of divine providence in the world and an unqualified, ubiquitous obsession with evidence for providence. Alexander’s solution was to deny divine providence a role at the level of particulars. Thus God is exculpated from responsibility for evil, which occurs at the level of particulars. So in the Arabic translation generated in the Kindī workshop, Alexander’s treatise is able to explain in detail how the heavens are providential and how the sublunary world is influenced by the celestial spheres. And in other works, notably in his On First Philosophy, al-Kindī is prepared to extol not only the workings of providence but also to argue that God’s rule of this world is perfectly wise, by which I presume he means the best possible world.21 It was not Aristotle or Plato or Alexander of Aphrodisias whose writings proved influential among Muslim readers, however. It was Galen and the pseudepigraphical tradition associated with his name that proved decisive. For Galen the medical art was the means whereby the intelligent design manifested in nature could be made apparent. It was both a template for, and a paradigm of, design in that it showed how intelligent design operated and why design must operate as it does for it to be intelligent. And on matters of design Galen’s world view was resolutely Platonic. We have come across Galen’s commentary on the Timaeus translated in the workshop of Óunayn b. Isªāq. Another work by Galen proved so popular that it was translated into Arabic three times. This was On My Own Opinions.22 Galen attests to his knowledge, on the basis of his own experience and that of others, that there is a Demiurge, that this god has observable powers, that he sends us signs, that the structure of animals is evidence of his purpose, and that the bodily functions, which are harmonious, are vital for the creature’s well-being. In fact there are elements of creation which Galen thinks could only have been the product of intelligent providence. And in order to lead the good life, we must inquire into how these things are ordered for the best. This treatise was overshadowed, however, by another work – Galen’s hymn to providential design: On the Usefulness of Bodily Parts.23 This work, the Arabic version of which was also generated in the Óunayn workshop, is an impressive, protracted, and detailed survey of purposive teleology. Indeed it verges on interpretative paranoia in its attention to detail, especially when Galen considers what appear to be purposeless parts of the body and strives

governance of the cosmo s  | 295 to explain them as purposive. In this work Plato’s Demiurge is an artificer of incomparable ingenuity, intelligence and providential concern for his creation. And it is an act of impiety for humans not to inquire into his wondrous workings. Thus Galen models the principal components of what I have described as the ‘Design Complex’ in third-century Islamic thought: evidence of and for the best possible design, providential concern for man manifest in the best possible design, and man’s pious obligation to investigate God’s signs based on his experience. A further work, falsely attributed to Galen, a commentary on the Kitāb al-Asābiʿ, Hippocrates’s On Sevens, contains abundant evidence of how to understand the operations of nature, governed by the cosmic principle of the hebdomads, the sevens.24 Pseudo-Galen explains that Hippocrates ‘likened man to the world and called him “the small world” because his governance (tadbīr) is dependent upon the governance of the world’ (Bergsträsser 4.3–4): The sage wanted to establish the existence of the hebdomad so he divided the whole into seven parts, in order to show and to instruct us that the world is governed by the hebdomads and that the sign of the hebdomad is the fourth which is the median, for it is the middle of the hebdomad and joins the two divisions of the hebdomad [Bergsträsser 32.3–6].

Considerable exegetical effort is devoted to the explanation of Hippocrates’s intention in the work: Galen said that Hippocrates promised to clarify for us that the whole world is governed by the composition (taʾlīf ) of the hebdomads and that man’s governance functions according to this idea (maʿnā) also. He intended here to clarify also how man resembles the whole. So he said that the nature of the living thing (ªayawān) above the earth and on its surface resembles the nature of the whole, both small and large, for these parts also have many parts and so necessarily they resemble in their nature the whole. We say that what Hippocrates intended in his reference to living things small and large was to instruct us that the nature of all living things resembles the nature of the whole, lest anyone suppose that the nature of small living things did not

296 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s resemble the nature of the whole. So he said that these parts have other parts and therefore they resemble the whole necessarily. Now let no one suppose that Hippocrates used vain and idle words here by mentioning necessity. He was guided by wondrous intelligence and superb wisdom, for the parts of the particulars follow the universals necessarily. We say that if living things are parts of the universe (ʿālam) then they necessarily accept the limits of the universe. All the philosophers are agreed on the statement that the parts accept the limits of the whole necessarily. No one is able to rebut this statement. And we also say that all things are compounded from the four elements (ustuqussāt). I mean: hot, cold, moist and dry. The whole and the parts are compounded from these four elemental natures. Hippocrates added to this statement the idea that the parts of the particulars follow the universals and are governed just as the universals are governed [Bergsträsser 62.5–21].

The Greek version of this work had exerted considerable influence on this kind of approach to understanding nature over many centuries.25 What it fails to offer Muslim readers in terms of God and providence, it more than amply makes up for in terms of governance and the subordination of all things to a cosmic principle. Works such as this, with their distinct affinity with works in the hermetic and alchemical tradition, provided the basic grist for the mill of those thinkers on a quest to divine cosmic design. The Book of Sevens is impressive for the extent of its monomaniacal imperative of the governance of the cosmos and the numerological patterning of existence. In this, however, it is matched by the translation of a hermetic work: Kitāb Sirr al-Khalīqa wa-Íanʿat al-˝abīʿa, The Book of the Secret of Creation and the Artisanship of Nature, attributed falsely to Balīnūs, the Neopythagorean witch-doctor Apollonius of Tyana (d. c. 100 AD?). What this work, also known as the Kitāb al-ʿIlal, The Book of Causes, added to the mix was the central presence of a Creator.26 The Secret of Creation inhabits a textual world shared by some Christian texts from the third century. It shares a common source in the pseudoAristotelian and pseudo-Proclean traditions of the problēmata physica with a Syriac treatise we will shortly encounter, The Book of Treasures by Job of Edessa (d. c. 220/835), and with the Arabic alchemical corpus attributed to

governance of the cosmo s  | 297 Jābir b. Óayyān. One version of The Secret of Creation includes extracts from Kitāb ˝abīʿat al-Insān, On the Nature of Man, the Arabic translation of De natura hominis written c. 400 AD by Nemesius of Emesa.27 It will surely come as no surprise to hear that Christian (Greek, Arabic and Syriac) texts from the third century exhibit much the same obsessive interest in the ‘Design Complex’. Christians living in Iraq were as infatuated as the Muslims were with the explicative appeal of divine governance and providence. Al-JāªiÕ tells us as much in The Book of Living. Let us begin our survey of this Christian infatuation with an enigma. E. Al-JāªiÕ the Christian Creationist? One of the more baffling and peculiar works in the JāªiÕian corpus is a work given in its only printed version to date the title of Kitāb al-Dalāʾil wa-al-Iʿtibār, The Book of Signs and their Study. It shares much of the spirit of hermetic interpretation so manifest in the pseudepigraphical works just considered and exists in at least two versions.28 This promiscuous and compendious text inhabits very comfortably the world of ancient falsafa. It aims to account for the semiotics of the whole of creation by drawing the reader’s attention to the excellence of God’s design which creation exhibits, in terms of both functionality and aesthetic. In fact, for the author of this work creation is the supreme expression of divine purpose: it is beautiful because it works well and works well because it is beautiful. As such it is the best possible world. And as with so many of the third-century works which explore aspects of the ‘Design Complex’, it elides any difference between cosmological reasoning (determining the cause of the world from the world or an aspect of the world) and teleological reasoning (determining purpose through the functionality and design of the world or a thing in the world). The Book of Signs constructs its argument on the cosmic scale by taking the whole of creation into its purview. The work is cast as a homily. It regularly exhorts the reader to ponder, reflect or consider this or that facet of design. And it is hymnodic, singing the Creator’s praises at every turn. A leitmotif is that human craft is an act of imitation of nature’s craft. And in this text ‘nature’ is synonymous with God’s design. The following is typical:

298 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Scrutinise the creation of leaves, for you will find that a leaf has what appear to be veins running all over it. Some are thick and stretch across its length and breadth and some are fine, cutting across the thick veins, woven into a delicate and delightful pattern. If this were something fabricated by the hand of man, the leaves of one tree would take more than a whole year to complete! But it has no need of tools, of moving to and fro, of assiduous care or stitching, and yet in a few days of spring enough leaves are produced to cover the mountains, plains and valleys of the earth – with no moving to and fro and no words spoken, only God’s will (irāda) which controls everything. Further, learn the reason for these veins. They are created to cut across the whole of the leaf in order to bring it moisture and nutrition. They have the same function as the veins which are spread throughout the body so that they can bring nutrition to every part. And there is another purpose (maʿnā) behind the thick veins. They are hard and robust so that they hold the leaf together and prevent it from being torn and ripped. Think of the leaf as being similar to a sheet of paper manufactured from rags. Pieces of wood are stretched across its length and breadth so that it can be held together and not be disturbed. Even if nature is compared to craftsmanship, it is craftsmanship which resembles nature.29

The author of The Book of Signs begins his survey with an account of the heavens and the celestial sphere, and then moves to the terrestrial level and considers in turn the earth, its plants and animals, before proceeding to man. This version of the work concludes with a survey and refutation of the various philosophical arguments rallied against design. So this hymnodic homily is also polemical. It is a rebuttal of those who have either failed to be convinced of the presence of providential design in creation or who reject it outright. I have emphasised the term ‘providential’ because this seems to be what the author’s application of the term ihmāl (‘negligence’) to describe his opponents’ position(s) is designed to capture. After all, we can encounter evidence of design but deny that it is providential or beneficial or purposive or functional. I tried to make a table once and it certainly failed to satisfy all these criteria. Or we can see evidence of design but decide that it is badly or negligently designed. Modern manufacture is full of such cases of bad design. Or we

governance of the cosmo s  | 299 can see evidence of design and decide that it is the best that could have been achieved but still decide that it is imperfectly done, as happens to an extent with Plato’s Demiurge in the Timaeus who has to work within the constraints of imperfect matter (though the Demiurge still manages to produce superb and perfect design out of this imperfect matter). Or we can reject design outright and attribute the whole process to happenstance and accident. Here are the key passages: When people do not understand causes and purposes (maʿānī) and fail to scrutinise the correctness and wisdom in the shapes things have been created with (khilqa), they progress to repudiation (juªūd ) and accusations of falsehood to the extent that they deny the creation of things and allege that they have come to be through negligence (ihmāl ), with no craftsmanship (‚anʿa) and no calculation (taqdīr) [al-˝abbākh, 2.3–5]. The Creator of it is One. He it is who composed (allafa) it and arranged (naÕama) it part by part. This is one of the things which the earlier generations maintained and they spoke well. But we will turn our attention to another category (fann) of the subtleties of created form (khilqa) and will clarify the correctness and wisdom they contain along with patterning (niÕām) and appropriateness (mulāʾama). This will also constitute a reprimand of those who profess ‘negligence’ and those who profess two contradictory principles (a‚layn muta∂āddayn), because ‘negligence’ does not produce correctness and contrariness does not produce correspondences [al-˝abbākh, 3.11–15].30 A group of the ancients such as Diagoras (Diyāghūrūs), Epicurus (Afīqūrūs) and a faction of the Naturalists (†abīʿīn) denied purpose (ʿamd ) and governance (tadbīr) in things and alleged that things came to be through accident (ʿara∂) and coincidence (ittifāq). They based their arguments on those signs (āyāt) which are produced in the course of nature, such as the man who is born without a hand, or with an extra finger, or the man who is born deformed, with an altered shape. They said: ‘This is an indication that man does not come to be through purpose (taʿammud ) or calculation (taqdīr) but rather through accident and just as he happened to turn out’ [al-˝abbākh, 66.11–15].

300 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s The work then is aimed at dualists because they reject the existence of a single cause of the universe and at those who deny the presence of providence and governance in creation. It is also intended to fortify the believer: We stand as surety for all the paradigms (ʿibar) and testimonies (shawāhid ) of the creation, composition, and correct governance of this world that we have discovered. We also stand as surety for the explanations (sharª) in this book of the causes and notions (maʿānī) the world contains, to the extent of our knowledge, and have aimed at speaking clearly, at shining a light on the subject and at being concise in our explanations so that it will be easy to understand and anyone who looks into it will have no problem in taking what he wants from it. We hope that it will thus become a remedy for the denier (nākir) overcome with perplexity (murtāb) and increase the certainty of him whom God guides. Success comes from God alone [al-˝abbākh, 3.2–5].

Who is the author of this intriguing homiletic hymn? I referred to this text as ‘promiscuous’. It is so in two senses: it offered its abundance to many later scholars; and it took much from a number of earlier texts, some which it mentions, others it does not. It has been attributed to al-JāªiÕ. It has been thought to be by the pious renunciant al-Muªāsibī (d. 243/857). It was recast in a Shiʿite work as a dialogue between the Imam Jaʿfar al-Íādiq (d. 148/765) and a pupil, was freely and extensively excerpted in al-Óikma fī Makhlūqāt Allāh, a work attributed to al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), and was also excerpted in a work by the Arabicwriting Jewish author Baªya ibn Paqūdā who lived in al-Andalus during the fifth/eleventh century.31 The introduction to another version of this work which carries the title Kitab al-ʿIbar wa-al-Iʿtibār, The Book of Paradigms and their Study, extant today in a manuscript in the British Library, casts the work’s promiscuity with respect to earlier texts in an interesting light. (For the sake of convenience, I will refer to the recension edited by al-˝abbākh as The Book of Signs and the recension represented in the British Library manuscript as the Book of Paradigms). In The Book of Paradigms, the author expressly criticises four earlier works on the subject of the divine plan in creation, works which he finds wanting in terms of presentation, expression and accessibility, but from which he has cherry-picked all the best bits.

governance of the cosmo s  | 301 The first scholar to be lambasted is Jibrīl b. Nūª al-Anbārī, which is also the name of the scholar whom the Aya Sofia manuscript apparently identifies as its author. The author notes that Jibrīl’s work was written in an obscure style without introduction (muqaddima) or prefatory address (khu†ba) and arranged after the fashion of the philosophers (tartīb al-falāsifa). This Jibrīl is an awkward and problematic presence.32 The next to receive a dressing down is Diodorus of Tarsus (d. c. 392 AD), for his Kitāb al-Tadabbur (Book of Governance), which is presumably a reference to the Arabic translation of the fifth-century Syriac translation of his Peri Oikonomias, On Governance.33 The poor quality Arabic translation from the Syriac is criticised for its lack of clarity. The third scholar to be on the receiving end of the author’s withering tongue is Theodoret of Cyrus (d. c. 457 AD) for an unnamed Greek composition, presumably his Peri Pronoias, more often referred to by its Latin name, De divina providentia, On Divine Providence.34 The author notes that there was a Syriac and then an Arabic translation of the work, which he finds as deficient as the attempts at rendering Diodorus’s book. Gibb and Davidson have both charted the points of contact between our text and Theodoret’s Greek original, a work divided into ten homilies. Gibb has established that the last five homilies of the extant Greek did not appeal to our author, that he used the first homily most extensively, but rearranged the material, and that he dips in and out of the remaining four homilies. In other words, based on a comparison of the only text in Arabic of which we have an extant version from his list, the author of this critical preface seems true to his word when he refers to his cherry-picking. The last precursor to be denounced for the obscurity of his composition is Īshōʿbōkht, Metropolitan of Fārs (i.e. Rev Ardashir?) under the Umayyads, the author of the famous canonical law book written in Pahlavi and translated into Syriac at the end of the eighth century.35 Griffith has noted how impeccable this genealogy is, in terms of the doctrinal history of Nestorianism. He notes that only Nestorius himself and Theodore of Mopsuestia are missing!36 From time to time, the author of The Book of Paradigms refers to Aristotle as either Aris†ā†ālīs or as ‚āhib al-ªayawān, the ‘author of the Animals’. Davidson has also noted that many of the topoi in the venerable tradition of

302 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s ancient thinking on providence and design, from Xenophon’s Socrates to the Stoics (as represented by Cicero) and Aristotle, find analogues in The Book of Signs, partly thanks to Theodoret, but presumably also thanks to the author’s background and the other texts he refers to. And as noted by El Shamsy, The Book of Paradigms in the British Library manuscript also bears the imprint of an Arabic version of Galen’s On the Usefulness of Parts that seems to predate Óunayn’s version. In 1948 Gibb was happy to entertain, however circumspectly, the possibility of al-JāªiÕ’s authorship of The Book of Signs. The possibility was also entertained, albeit fairly lukewarmly, by van Ess in 1980. I find it very hard to contemplate that the author of The Book of Paradigms in the British Library manuscript, an author who so avowedly and explicitly creates a Christian textual genealogy for himself, was not in fact a Christian and in view of his doctrinal genealogy a Nestorian. And at this point we may care to ponder the complete absence in the work of any reference to the Qurʾān. A critical edition of the work, which is very much a desideratum, will reveal the points of contact between and the reciprocal indebtedness of the Aleppo, Istanbul, Berlin, Escorial and the British Library (BL) manuscripts. Until such an edition appears, let me hazard a guess at the intellectual milieu of the author of The Book of Paradigms. I am struck as I read al-˝abbākh’s edition of the Aleppo MS by the plethora of ancient philosophers who pop up from time to time. We have already met Diagoras and Epicurus, by no means names of common occurrence in Arabic texts from the third century. This facility with obscure names and thinkers makes me think of two doxographical works from the period. The earlier of the two is presumably the Neoplatonising doxography attributed to Ammonius, probably produced in the middle of the century by the Christians associated with the Kindī workshop. The second is the Placita Philosophorum translated by the Melkite Qus†ā b. Lūqā (c. 203–300/820–912).37 If the Nestorian bishop Jibrīl b. Nūª al-Anbārī is disqualified as author of The Book of Signs (and I do not by any means think he is), my preferred candidate for author of The Book of Signs would be the prominent Nestorian bishop, author and controversialist who is famously said to have bested al-Kindī’s pupil al-Sarakh‚ī in a debate and who locked horns with Qus†ā b. Lūqā: I mean Israel of Kashkar (d. 260/872). He wrote a work on the unity

governance of the cosmo s  | 303 of God and the Trinity which has survived and has been edited and translated into English: Risāla fī Waªdānīyat al-Bāriʾ wa-Tathlīth Khawā‚‚i-hi, an Epistle on the Oneness of the Maker and the Trinity of His Properties. This work does contain a significant doxography which reminds me of the refutation with which The Book of Signs concludes, though Israel’s work is very much indebted to the Arabic Plotinus and Proclus tradition, and is not dissimilar to the Pseudo-Ammonius text generated in the Kindī workshop.38 However, The Book of Signs does not contain any whiff of Neoplatonism which my nose can detect and unlike many cognate works in the Syriac Christian tradition does not proceed from the level of reading the signs of nature to arguing for the validity of the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation. In other words, despite my present efforts to excavate a Nestorian milieu for the work, there is nothing, apart from the carnaptious Christian preface to The Book of Paradigms, to identify the work as explicitly Christian. And in the absence of any echoes of the Qurʾān there is also nothing to identify the work as explicitly Muslim. (Muslims and Christians alike took an active interest in doxographies of ancient philosophers.) It is a singularly monotheistic, virtually non-partisan, hymn to the providential Creator. F. Al-JāªiÕ the Muslim Creationist If I am right in suspecting a Christian authorship of both The Book of Signs and The Book of Paradigms, then the misattribution of the work to both al-JāªiÕ and al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm suggests just how similar Christian and Muslim explorations of the ‘Design Complex’ could be. But before we take a look at the contours of the ‘Design Complex’ in some Christians’ works, it might be as well to consider what al-JāªiÕ says in The Book of Living about creation and the Creator. The classic evidence of al-JāªiÕ’s creationism is usually taken to be the declaration in The Book of Living (2.109.1–116.10), where his readers are exhorted to abandon their dismissal or under-valuing of seemingly insignificant or ugly creatures, in order the better thereby to determine the wondrous gifts God has endowed them with. Those who refer to this passage as typical of al-JāªiÕ’s thought tend to overlook the fact that it is actually put in the mouth of the Proponent of the Dog in his argument with the Proponent of the Rooster. For all the similarities it may bear to al-JāªiÕ’s views presented

304 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s elsewhere, it is not uttered in his own voice. There is however a fine, succinct passage at the beginning of Part 4 which is worth quoting. It is tantamount to a credo: We know that the small ant does not possess the utility of the horse in battle or as a means for defending one’s property (ªarīm), but since our intention is to locate the places of wonder (maw∂iʿ al-ʿajab) and wonderment (taʿjīb) and to draw attention to design (tadbīr), we will discuss the insignificant and contemptible, the ridiculous (sakhīf ) and worthless. Thus we will show you what subtle senses and unusual skills of calculation (taqdīr) it has, as well as how it considers the consequences of its actions and its similarity (mushākala) and competition with man, though it is man for whom the celestial sphere (falak) and all its contains have been provided [Óayawān 4.5.7–12].39

G. Christian Designs During the third century and beyond, Christian scientists, theologians and intellectuals were as besotted with the potential that the ‘Design Complex’ provided them in their attempts at uncovering and explaining their existence and religious and moral role in a providentially ordered creation. Several works stand out: al-Maymar fī Wujūd al-Khāliq wa-al-Dīn al-Qawīm, The Homily Concerning the Existence of the Creator and the Correct Religion, by the Melkite Theodore Abū Qurra (d. c. 209–10/825); The Book of Treasures written in Syriac by the Nestorian Job of Edessa (Ayyūb al-Ruhawī; d. c. 220/835); and the two treatises on the divine governance (or, more correctly in Christian terms, divine ‘economy’) by ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī (d. c. 231–2/845). H. The Homily of Theodore Abū Qurra The composition which goes by this name is a remarkable work in three parts. It is one of the earliest extant works of Kalām in Arabic, a fact which is rarely commented upon, and has been dated by its editor Ignace Dick to c. 164–70/780–5. It proved to be hugely influential in both the Christian and the Muslim tradition, inspiring a rebuttal by ʿĪsā b. Íābiª al-Murdār (d. 226/840–1), Against Abū Qurra the Christian, and leaving a deep and discernible imprint on the structure of the theology of God developed in

governance of the cosmo s  | 305 Zaydism by al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm, whose oration on the ‘Design Complex’ we have already encountered earlier (pp. 283–9). I think it is also important for a reading of al-JāªiÕ’s Book of Living.40 It is in Part 1 of the pamphlet that the ‘Design Complex’ features prominently. Theodore begins from the phenomenal world around him, from nature and from sense perception, and proceeds, through the consistent and determined application of reason, to draw a number of inferences about the unseen and invisible world. He gallops through assessments of the elements, of man (life and death), of animals (such as eagles, bulls, dogs, crows, horses, humans), and of minerals (iron), at each occurrence inferring the universal from the particular. When he has reached the limit of inferential thinking about the natural world based exclusively on sensory perception, he then proceeds to inner things which are not accessible by the senses. An analogy based on shipbuilding on the banks of the Nile, the results of the various stages of construction which he observes without actually seeing a shipwright in action, leads him to conclude the existence of a manufacturer who can be known from his actions and effects. This is, of course, an inflection of the familiar comparison of the construction of the universe with the building of a house. This topical comparison features in The Book of Signs, for example, and also in Theodore’s Homily itself (Dick, 183, §13). The second stage of Theodore’s argument is an exploration of the knowledge of God which the inferential method can furnish. The position of the earth, unsupported in the middle of the universe (an item of cosmology which is treated as axiomatic and is not subject to verification or argument by Theodore), leads him to propose that this is contrary to its nature and so must be subject to some compulsion from a more powerful thing. This is an inflection of the cosmological proof based on the coercion of contraries. The next stage of the argument is an inflection of another cosmological proof, this time predicated upon the concordant composition of the elements, which is itself further combined with the first proof (the coercion of contraries), in order to reveal the presence of a supremely powerful force at work. Theodore’s exposition now brings him to identify the attributes of this supremely powerful force (Dick, 187–9, §§1–11), and he turns to his denial of pre-existing matter (Dick, 190–1, §§1–12), assertion of creation ex nihilo, and establishment, through the familiar rejection of an infinite regression, of

306 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s a single originary Creator (Dick, 193–6, §§1–21). He concludes this step in his exposition by noting that the existence of God has been established from His creation through a scrutiny of the natures of things. But there is a limit to what the mind can know of God via this method of reasoning based on the phenomenal, perceptible world – namely, whether God is one person or more. There are several features about this rich engagement with the ‘Design Complex’ worth noting. Theodore’s proofs predicated upon composition and coercion are taken from the Neoplatonic Christian (Jacobite) commentator and critic of Aristotle, John Philoponus, known in Arabic as Yaªyā al-Naªwī, John the Grammarian (c. 490–c. 570), and Theodore’s predecessor John of Damascus (d. c. 131–2/749), respectively.41 The teaching of John of Damascus may also lie at the heart of the relish with which Theodore explores the tenet that the order of the Universe attests to a controlling being.42 Theodore puts nature and human nature in particular at the very heart of his outlook. Not only is nature the way to gain knowledge of God, the key to identifying the correct religion lies in human nature. In other words, he suggests that as humans we are religious by nature, and that this nature will allow us to choose which of the many pretenders to the title of the correct religion is from God. His anthropology is also central to his notion of the godhead, for as humans our small perfections mirror, however approximately and dimly, the perfect attributes of God. They also show forth the eternity and unrestrictedness of God’s attributes. Thus, in our quest for the correct religion, we do not need to rely on scripture but solely on reason. Not all of Theodore’s readers approved of this emphasis on reason. It seemed to them to be a hostage to fortune in their debates with their Muslim opponents. Their polemical preference was for an apologetics predicated upon the evidentiary miracle.43 It is because Theodore prioritises reason and sets such a high store by it that it is easy to overlook the force of the claim, tantamount to an axiom, that all the religions which he surveys in Part 2 of his treatise concur in their belief on the existence of a God or gods. This is the indubitable conviction which allows him to appeal to his Christian and Muslim readers and listeners. In so many respects, then, this pamphlet by Theodore Abū Qurra seems to anticipate al-JāªiÕ’s gargantuan Book of Living.

governance of the cosmo s  | 307 I. Job’s Treasure Trove Job of Edessa (d. c. 220/835) was the chief physician of the Baghdad hospital. He was one of the foremost medical authorities of the age, an expert on Galen and Aristotle, and a regular participant in Óunayn’s translation bureau. Óunayn mentions his involvement in thirty-six projects. He was also a prolific composer of scientific and medical treatises, of which only one remains: On Canine Hydrophobia. Sometime in the first quarter of the third century he wrote a book in Syriac to which he gave the title The Book of Treasures. Its translator, Mingana, aptly entitles it the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical and Natural Sciences as Taught in Baghdad about ad 817. Born out of the same pseudo-Aristotelian tradition of the problēmata physica as The Secret of Creation by Pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana, with which it shares some textual portions, and the Pseudo-Proclean Questions on Natural Things, it is modelled on Galen’s On the Usefulness of Parts and makes frequent reference to Aristotle, whom Job reveres but whom he is prepared to criticise and correct. The work is informed with wonderful, small insights such as discussions of tickling and why people can make themselves sick when they insert their fingers far enough into their mouth.44 The four discourses of The Book of Treasures describe the life cycle of the universe, from the creation ex nihilo of the elements to the resurrection of the dead and the creation of heaven and hell. As Job sees it, God created the four elements and then let them do the work for which they were designed under the impulsion of necessity (which God also designs; the presence of the Timaeus is strong here), and that work includes degeneration at the end-time. Job distinguishes between two causal principles, one concerned with ‘function’, the other with ‘existence’ (Mingana, p. 15). God is master of existence, necessity is in control of function. Thus understanding the ways in which the four elements interact is sufficient to explain any and all phenomena. And in Chapter 4 of the First Discourse Job offers, as proof of the composition of the antipathetic elements, the proof of God predicated upon the coercion of contraries familiar from John of Damascus and the tradition he represents. So a key move in the ‘Design Complex’ is inverted – we do not go from the combination of the elements to the Creator but from the Creator to the combination of the elements.

308 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s This detailed and meticulous inventory of life is guided throughout by a teleological awareness of God as the first cause. Knowledge of His creation leads to knowledge of Him as Creator and this knowledge allows us to draw near to Him. In this respect, Job’s treasure trove offers us a path to salvation. But what would this have to do with al-JāªiÕ’s Book of Living, beyond perhaps suggesting that the idea of a meticulous inventory of creation was something in the air in the third century? After all, al-JāªiÕ knew no Syriac, Job’s Arabic was not thought to have been especially good and there is little evidence that he engaged in disputations or public discussions. The Book of Treasures is remarkable for one other feature, however. It contains (in Discourse III, Chapters 16–20) a refutation, in the Kalām eristic style, of a philosopher thought to be al-JāªiÕ’s teacher al-NaÕÕām. I enjoy imagining how al-NaÕÕām might have described Job’s ideas to al-JāªiÕ, and how intrigued al-JāªiÕ may have been, especially by the notion of two causal principles (God’s fashioning of the elements and His control of necessity) which Job argued could be construed sufficiently and adequately to account for God’s agency in His creation. J. ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī: Governance and the Gospel The theories of the Nestorian Kalām Master ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī (d. c. 231– 2/845) were prominent enough and provocative enough to elicit a rebuttal from no less a Kalām Master than Abū al-Hudhayl: the Kitāb ʿalā ʿAmmār al-Na‚rānī fī al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā, the Pamphlet against ʿAmmār the Christian, Concerning the Rebuttal of the Christians.45 For this Nestorian apologist few concepts were as powerful in his polemical arsenal as that of tadbīr, which hitherto I have been translating somewhat loosely as God’s ‘governance’ of creation. In two works, The Pamphlet of Queries and Responses, Kitāb al-Masāʾil wa-al-Ajwiba, and The Book of the Proof of the Guiding of the Divine Economy, Kitāb al-Burhān ʿalā Siyāqat al-Tadbīr al-Ilāhī, thought to have been written around the time of al-Muʿta‚im’s reconquest of Ammorium in 223/838, ʿAmmār presents in Arabic a vision of tadbīr which is resolutely not Islamic but singularly and triumphantly Christian.46 This vision is that of the divine ‘economy’, a calque of the Greek term oikonomia, by which was meant not only God’s generosity in creation and

governance of the cosmo s  | 309 His providence in creating the best possible world, but also His providential disposal of its order, exposed firstly in the Old Testament and culminating in His redemption of man through the Incarnation and the subsequent life of the church. Thus, it combines an appreciation of God’s unsurpassed engineering skills in creation with His design for the future of mankind. God is both an unsurpassed draughtsman and builder! In other words, ʿAmmār ousts Theodore’s celebration of reason with the scriptural unfolding of the divine economy. The Pamphlet of Queries has a fascinating preface in which the author explains that he has composed the work at the behest of the Emir of the Believers, and though he does not name the caliph in question, it is presumably addressed to al-Muʿta‚im. Griffith has drawn attention to how it is written almost as a prayer for the Caliph (it commends him for his duty to care for God’s religion), that its style and lexicon are those of the Qurʾān and Muslim Kalām texts, through its use of terms such as ªujja, conclusive ­argument. In the preface ʿAmmār states that May God strengthen and assist the Prince of the Believers! The path I have taken in this book is to present arguments concerning the Creator (Blessed and Exalted!); to discuss the proof of the oneness of his lordship (waªdānīyat rubūbīyati-hi) (Mighty is His Praise! Hallowed be His names!); to establish the proof (ªujja) of it against those who repudiate (ahl al-juªūd ) it; to put forward in support of His economy (tadbīr) an irrefutably truthful argument (burhān) and a case (qiyās) of compelling veracity. The first question I address concerns their repudiation of the Almighty Creator, so that they will be compelled to accept His existence as determined by their reasoning intellects. From Him alone come success and guidance [Hayek 94.19–95.4].47

In many ways, this preface is very reminiscent of the preface to On First Philosophy written by al-Kindī and addressed to the same caliph, al-Muʿta‚im (see Chapter 4.2, pp. 199–200). Unlike Hayek, I personally see no reason to smell a rat and conclude that this is a disingenuous ploy enacted by the author. Whether it was politically wise or personally safe to dedicate a work on the Christian vision of divine economy to the Caliph is another matter, of course. But if you were going to try, then surely it was best to laud the Caliph

310 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s in the process. And it is not unthinkable that the Caliph may have requested such an account, for his dialecticians to refute. The ‘Design Complex’ forms the topic of the first of the twenty-eight questions which constitute the first pronouncement (maqāla): the createdness of the world attests to the pre-existence of the Creator. What I find intriguing is that the first question is posed by a partisan of the people of repudiation (ahl al-juªūd ). In other words, this tract is directed against those who deny the existence of God, as its Preface also intimates. The similarity of language with al-JāªiÕ’s opposition to a group of Eternalists over their denial of the existence of God is striking. And like al-JāªiÕ, ʿAmmār seems to expect that none but the denier will counter-say his establishment of either the existence of God or the presence of a divine master-plan. And yet it is hard to imagine a vision of tadbīr at a further remove from that of al-JāªiÕ’s in The Book of Living than ʿAmmār’s disquisition on the Biblical vision of providential salvation. This most definitely is not the Qurʾanic governance of the cosmos. The Book of the Proof is, as Griffith has characterised it, a practical work with a popular purpose. It is effectively a guidebook of polemical gambits and positions for Christians involved in controversies.48 ʿAmmār begins his twelve topics by perfunctorily establishing the existence of the one God. There are two aspects to the point which he makes. Design is manifest through man’s antipathies to the harmful things in the world and his fear of death leads him to seek a world in which life is not characterised by unpleasantness. It is God’s beneficial design to have provided such a world for man. God’s oneness is manifest through the consensus of all religions that there is ultimately only one God (Hayek 22.16–23). According to ʿAmmār, in an echo of a cardinal doctrine of Islamic law, consensus is irrefragable and irrefutable: it cannot deceive (Hayek 23.14–18). So just as al-JāªiÕ and Abū Qurra do, ʿAmmār bases a large part of his argumentation on the most basic common denominator he can establish (the religious consensus that there is only one God), so much so that when he comes to voice his defence of the Incarnation, he reminds his audience of God’s previous blessings, proposing to them that their concurrence on God’s blessings should function as a testimony in support of ʿAmmār’s position that the Incarnation represents ‘the fulfilment of God’s plan to benefit His creatures’.49

governance of the cosmo s  | 311 K. The ‘Design Complex’ as Contact Zone The ideas, arguments, positions, anxieties and aspirations which contribute to what I have termed the ‘Design Complex’ constituted a contact zone in the third century, where thinkers, intellectuals and philosophers from different traditions and creeds converged, shared, borrowed, stole, argued with, rejected, contested and appropriated each other’s positions. The presence in the Arabic tradition of John Philoponus’s rejection of Aristotle’s arguments for eternity has been conclusively established by Davidson, no more obviously so than in the cosmological proof from composition. Equally pervasive was the tradition of argumentation based upon the coercion of opposites represented by John of Damascus.50 It is important that we remember that much, if not most, of this speculative and dialectical activity took place in the form of argumentative engagements, be they in person, in majālis, debate sessions, as performances of munāÕara, eristical emulation, or in texts as written rebuttals, queries and responses, in the dissemination of pamphlets, or as imagined debates rehearsed in a school setting in front of students. Griffith has argued that the Christian thinkers adapted their Christian beliefs and submitted their theological systems to the newly emergent and soon to be prevalent style of reasoning that we refer to as Kalām, forging for themselves a new Arabic technical terminology as they did so, and constantly looking for points of contact, common ground they might share with their Muslim debate partners. The traffic was not one way only, however, as Job of Edessa’s Syriac Kalām refutation of al-Nazzām suggests.51 Madelung has shown in astonishing detail how far the Zaydī al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm engaged with Christian thinkers in his articulation of his theology. Al-Qāsim was one of the numerous Muslim polemicists who in the course of the third century composed a textual rebuttal against the Christians (al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā).52 The Christian thinkers whom he rebuts, however, left a deep imprint on the structure of his theology. Key among them is Theodore Abū Qurra. Madelung has noted that both al-Qāsim and Abū Qurra share the discernment of proof of God in the evidence of His actions in creation, and entertain a similar construal of free will and choice. They also ignore any distinction between essential and temporal attributes of God, preferring instead to emphasise God’s radical otherness

312 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s (His khilāf ). Abū Qurra’s desire to establish a connection, however faint, between man and God finds no room in al-Qāsim’s system, however. And Abū Qurra’s epistemology, his quadripartite scheme of how we know things, is picked apart by al-Qāsim, who reduces it to two. Madelung concludes that al-Qāsim was intimately acquainted with Theodore’s Arabic writings and that his response to them was both positive and negative. I would simply add that al-Qāsim appropriates Theodore’s ideas and arguments, retaining those which work best for him and discarding or rephrasing the rest. This is by no means a neutral encounter. Theodore’s Arabic writings and his Christian theories voiced in Arabic are fully assimilated into al-Qāsim’s thought world and in the process are neutered.53 But how does my reading of the Muslim-Christian encounter sit with the repeated invocations to shared points of belief in both Christian and Muslim texts or the fidelity with which Christian Kalām Masters writing in Arabic structured the topics of their disquisitions according to paradigmatic Kalām treatises written by Muslims or indeed the sense we often have of both sets of thinkers striving after a shared technical vocabulary to capture the mysterious nature of the divine attributes? Is it not better to imagine that what we have here is some anticipation of the kind of convivencia so many have discovered in the dealings of the three principal religious communities in al-Andalus? After all, both sets of apologists seem only too ready to look for and find basic points on which all monotheists might agree, be they providence, reason, nature, epistemology, or the recognition of the significance of the Christ, or, with due allowance being made for the presence of taªrīf, distortion, the veracity of the scriptures of other scriptural communities. And in his Rebuttal of the Christians, al-Qāsim quotes with obvious approval a number of passages from the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, Ibn Qutayba in his Kitāb al-Maʿārif, The Book of Items, depends at some points on the Old Testament, and even al-JāªiÕ in his Rebuttal of the Christians is prepared to admit that the Torah is true – and in this epistle al-JāªiÕ is no admirer of the Jews.54 I think we can unearth some of the dynamic of this polemical appeal to common and agreed ideas by considering two Syriac texts, one from a century or so later than al-JāªiÕ’s floruit, the other an almost exact contemporary. As has so often proved to be the case in this study, the later text will

governance of the cosmo s  | 313 cast in sharp relief certain elements of the notion which the coterminous texts in Arabic seem not to trumpet too loudly. L. Christian Universalism The anonymous work known as The Cause of All Causes, composed sometime (possibly) in the fourth century in Syriac by a Jacobite Bishop of Edessa, is incomplete in its current state: only the first seven of its original nine discourses (as advertised in its preface) are extant.55 The unknown author sought to inform his readers about all knowledge, and his encyclopaedic ambitions incorporated geography, theology, philosophy and anthropology, among many other subjects. The nine discourses are arranged according to an epistemological priamel which is itself an inflection of the divine economy: the book of nature (the natural Law) comes first; it is succeeded by the written Law of the Old Testament; which is in turn supplemented by the spiritual Law of the New Testament.56 So what marks this work out as especially relevant for my present endeavour to scratch beneath the surface of the appeal to common notions? In the first place, it offers a recipe for attaining the truth based upon a withdrawal from society, a search for solitude in which the soul can be set free from its mundane concerns and purified of its extraneous passions, and by means of a series of reflections based upon its three stages of insight, can discern the one universal principle of truth. This discernment will reveal the purpose of the order of the world in all its myriad and confusing aspects. This soteric recipe is addressed not only to Christians but also to all humans and all peoples. Its universal principle of truth and how to acquire it is globalising. By means of it Christianity becomes the religion of universalism. And only Christianity can give a scientific explanation of God’s design which is all-encompassing and so corresponds fittingly to His omnipotence in the creation of all that is visible and invisible. The reader who comprehends this need not be Christian, even though the work, by virtue of being written in Syriac was unlikely to move beyond and outwith Christian circles. But anyone who does understand this properly and thus recognise the perfect fit between Christianity and God’s design will not demur: Christian scientific knowledge is destined for all of mankind, wherever they may be, and whatever creed they may profess.

314 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s So The Cause of All Causes takes a common denominator in the monotheistic outlook (the existence of a Creator God who expresses His providential generosity for man through the design of His creation) and converts it into an argument of considerable proselytising appeal. Out of this mix, it produces a powerful apology for Christianity – the only religion for all men. What I think The Cause of All Causes allows us to perceive is the universalism latent in the third-century Christian Arabic texts which look to find the common ground and to establish the consequences predicated upon an argument of common appeal. Its force is merely intensified by the fact that this was a standard Kalām manoeuvre: the need for both parties to identify and agree or to submit the first principles upon which any debate will be conducted. A work by a contemporary of al-JāªiÕ, the so-called ‘Apologetic Treatise’ of Nonnus of Nisibis, written in Syriac probably during a period of imprisonment by al-Mutawakkil in Samarra from 242–8/856–61, is without a doubt the most explicit statement of the universalism of Christianity in the third century which I know. I suspect that its rampant and explicit universalism is a consequence of the language in which it was composed.57 Nonnus time and again justifies his argumentative tactics by appealing to their uncontroversial character and their totalitarian appeal, be it in the case of the existence of the one God, the testimony among the religions of his day to the coming of Jesus as the Messiah, the strength of reason, effectively a masked presentation of the claim that Christianity is not confined to any one people or any one language community, or the realisation that the Gospel is testified to by the very constitution and articulation of nature. In sum, what reason was to Theodore and what the divine economy was to ʿAmmār, the universalism of Christianity is to Nonnus. Such universalism did not emerge from a vacuum of course. It had an ancient pedigree in a Stoic argument, as did the argument for design based on the aesthetic arrangement of the cosmos and on the teleology of creation. The argument in question was a proof for the existence of God from the consensus of mankind: e consensu gentium. This was deployed by Christian theologians in the pre-Islamic period to prove the existence of one God on the basis that it was the conviction of all men.58 In sum the universal appeal of the ‘Design Complex’ was itself a contact

governance of the cosmo s  | 315 zone and a site of polemical contestation, intensified by the degree to which both Christian and Muslim interlocutors were committed to upholding it while actually claiming it as their own. The battleground on which this campaign was waged was nature itself. It was the most hotly contested site, for without control of nature, Christian apologetics would be reduced to the Law of Moses and the Gospel only. That is scripture would be ranged against scripture, the debate would be a sectarian squabble, and would be divested of its universalising pretensions informed by the ‘Design Complex’: both Muslim and Christian parties recognised the insufficiency of such a move. Job of Edessa expressed it succinctly: Our aim has generally been in all our works to demonstrate our statements from the nature of things, so that no one might be able to reject them. The testimonies taken from the Books are accepted without question by believers only, while non-believers do not accept them [Mingana, pp. 278–9].

M. The ‘Design Complex’ as Proselytism This fecund contact zone of theories, positions, ideas, concerns and imaginings exerted a powerful emotional appeal on the authors of the texts I have surveyed. They cared deeply about God’s design. And they cared deeply about who had the greatest claim to read and discuss God’s design. Apologetics and polemics were formalised activities but they were not empty gestures. The third century is alive with argument and disagreement. As I read the textual contours of the century, the ‘Design Complex’ represents one of the primary reasons behind the interest which scientists and thinkers took in the works of Galen, Hippocrates and Aristotle. It explains to me why translations of works such as Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology, Physics and the series of zoological works known as the Historia Animalium were commissioned, whatever other motives may of course have been at work in these commissions. So when al-JāªiÕ claims that his Book of Living is designed to appeal to all monotheistic believers, and not the Eternalist, his claim has a history in Christian deployments of a Stoic argument, it has a resonance in terms of Christian-Muslim polemics, and is intended to reclaim the scientific study of nature for Islam. And his totalising treatise The Book of Living is in contact

316 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s with texts which correspond in terms of ambition if not perhaps in magnitude. It breathes the same intellectual ambition as Theodore Abū Qurra’s survey of creation at breakneck speed and his paean to the imperative of inference based on signs that open his On the Existence of the Creator. It surpasses Job of Edessa’s Book of Treasures, the most meticulous, original scientific dissection of existence prior to The Book of Living to have survived from an Islamic milieu. In my opinion, the nearest analogue to The Book of Living is not one of these works or even Aristotle’s Historia Animalium with which it is so often compared but is paradoxically one of the shortest: the Arabic translation of Galen’s Compendium of Plato’s Timaeus. Al-JāªiÕ seeks to rewrite the Christian mission. The Book of Living is a salvific book and also a proselytising work, designed not only to save Muslim society but also to convert non-Muslims to Islam or at least to reduce them to silence by depriving them of any pretensions to the reading of nature. As such it is entirely consistent with the early history of the Muʿtazila as a missionary movement. N. The Psychology of Universalism The ‘Design Complex’, as I have christened this congeries of claims and positions, is a zone of contact and negotiation rather than a set of formal arguments as such, be they cosmological or teleological, from design or for design. The basic positions subtending the claims and positions were not, to my knowledge, subjected to any philosophical or logical scrutiny, at least in terms of the extant textual tradition. No one in the third century seems to have stopped and asked what precisely constitutes evidence when identifying evidence of design, how do we recognise it, what qualifies as evidence and what does not. No one seems to have inquired into the validity of moving from discerning design to inferring the work of a designer, to have pondered whether such a move was warranted by the evidence or was simply a leap of faith. And no one seems to have thought to explain why a group of demiurges or creators could not have dreamt up and implemented a single design, although perhaps Theodore Abū Qurra in the first part of his homily may have skirted around one or two of these issues. Why was this? It was not for want of theological subtlety or philosophical acumen or logical panache. The tradition teems with displays of astonishing

governance of the cosmo s  | 317 intelligence and breath-taking imagination. Was it because the Complex appealed so directly to the emotions or because it simply acted as an elevator – it allowed them to get from point A to point B with the maximum of speed and minimum of effort? Possibly. Was it because of the phenomenon which Sheldon-Williams once simply called ‘Christianism’ and which we might replicate with ‘Islamism’?59 I mean the distinctive philosophies constructed upon and out of Christian or Muslim doctrine, rather than the actual philosophical investigation of doctrine prior to constructing Christian or Muslim doctrine. Presumably the answer lies in a combination of all the preceding, in varying measures and to varying degrees, depending on context. But there is one thing which strikes me consistently and repeatedly as I read through these texts, Christian and Muslim: the ‘Design Complex’ is treated as if it were an axiom, as an item of knowledge which is self-evidently true. In some positions, such as Hishām al-Fuwa†ī’s views as represented by al-Khayyā† (see p. 280), the ‘Design Complex’ is to be considered as necessary knowledge. Abū al-Hudhayl holds that perception (idrāk) was necessary knowledge (ʿilm al-i∂†irār). Al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm considers knowledge of the ‘Design Complex’ to be part of God’s primary fashioning of man, the fi†ra He has given him. I suspect that this is what Theodore Abū Qurra and Nonnus of Nisibis mean when they appeal to ‘common ideas’, a notion also expressed by John of Damascus, according to whom God planted within each and every one of us knowledge of his existence.60 So I think that a large part of the explanation for the appeal of the Complex may lie in how these thinkers thought they got the idea and came to know it in the first place. It was planted in them by God.61 O. The Trouble with Design But there were problems. Cosmological imaginings predicated upon theodicy and divine providence struggle to give satisfactory explanations of the presence of evil in the world. Responsibility for evil usually ends up being laid fairly and squarely at God’s door. By the end of the century the Muʿtazila had gotten themselves into a right old mess over the questions of evil and suffering. And then there is the fundamental assumption of the ‘Design Complex’ itself. I mean its anthropocentrism. It is driven by the assumption that the

318 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s celestial realm exists for the sake of man, not God. And though some argued that God ranged His arguments before man, convincing arguments to be sure, ones which would command immediate assent and the denial of which would constitute unbelief, among which arguments was the perfection of creation, all the same God was effectively working in the service of man and not the other way around.62 It was as if God had to convince man of His truth. In fact, when thinkers had recourse to the macrocosm/microcosm analogy so popular with both Muslims and Christians, the stance which they adopted became positively anthropomorphic. How could a thinker such as al-JāªiÕ, who championed the transcendent uniqueness of God so enthusiastically, reconcile his celebration of design with the anthropocentric pull of the ‘Design Complex’, bringing the transcendent God to the level of man and not the other way round? And so there also arose the problem of the rightful response to design.

5.2 The Grateful Response, 1

A. Responding to Design

T

he ‘Design Complex’ exerted the force of a moral imperative for those believers who explored its complexities. This contributed to a highly developed notion of moral obligatedness (taklīƒ), which included among other things the obligation to express gratitude to the Creator. This chapter will explore two ways of fulfilling this obligation: the use of formal Arabic (the ʿArabīya) in order to thank God (Part 1); the confluence of composition (taʾlīf ) and godlikeness (tashabbuh) (Part 2). B. The Expression of Thanks

Gratitude to the benefactor is a prominent theme in early ʿAbbasid writings. We find it in the introduction to al-Shāfiʿī’s Risāla at the start of the third century. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā (d. 281/894) devotes a tractate to the subject at the end of the century. It is a leitmotif which runs through al-JāªiÕ’s writings. In The Responses and the Meriting of the Imamate, al-JāªiÕ equates this benefaction with God’s gift to man of the (vocal) apparatus (al-adāh) (i.e. the ability to speak) and the clear expression of proof (tabyīn al-ªujja) (i.e. use of this ability to speak), terms which imply appropriate expression of the benefaction.63 I have argued elsewhere that for him, failure to use the ʿArabīya properly was a moral failing. I take that moral failing to be kufr al-niʿma, ingratitude to God for His bounty, by failing to live up to the exemplary practice of the Prophet.64 In Before Revelation: The Boundaries of Muslim Moral Thought, Reinhart shows that the notion of thanking the benefactor is part of the matrix of questions related to the status of moral actions. Do we need Revelation to tell 319

320 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s us what is right and wrong or can we identify right and wrong independently of Revelation? He notes that the idea that man should owe thanks to God as his Benefactor is a virtuous action which we might reasonably expect to be able to appreciate as virtuous without requiring Revelation to point it out to us. After all, its origins presumably lie in the social custom of patronage and clientship of some sort, be it tribal, or urbanised. According to Reinhart, during the pre- and early Islamic era and into the Umayyad period, the conferral of a benefaction established a transactional relationship between benefactor and beneficiary, key to which was the creation of an obligation of acknowledgment. The expression of thanks, the shukr, for this benefaction, is ‘performative’ as ‘it is an acknowledgment and statement of intention’, the goal of which ‘was the satisfaction (ri∂ā) of the benefactor’.65 As al-JāªiÕ puts it in one of his treatises on the Imamate, There is a difference between the benefactor and the beneficiary because it is an obligation for the beneficiary to be thankful, to maintain what is due as a result of the benefaction (li-ªaqq al-niʿma rāʿiyan).66

Therefore, if the divine Revelation is itself an obligating benefaction, the intellectual and moral apparatus needed to discern it as an obligating benefaction must predate the benefaction itself. If this is the case, then this apparatus must be located in human nature. It is the reasoning intellect, the ʿaql, to be precise.67 The later tradition reacted negatively to the delimitation of God’s transcendence which the transactional or covenantal character of this relationship implied. As al-Ashʿarī puts it somewhat obscurely and tersely in a discussion with al-Íayrafī, either you agree with the Muʿtazila and think that God only wants the good, or you abjure human certainty and consider that God might not want you to thank Him and might punish you if you do so.68 I take him to mean either that God may (in some inscrutable fashion) want ingratitude or that certainty lies only with God or that if you are not absolutely certain of the obligatedness of gratitude, if you have not determined the obligation for yourself, then thanking God might be punishable precisely because you are not being properly grateful to Him through the very lack of certainty which is your response to His injunctions. Yet surely, in this urge to be grateful to God, the Muʿtazilites, enthusiastic

the g ra tef ul response, 1  | 321 proponents of shukr al-niʿma, were in the grip of a further conundrum, for their devotion to divine unity and transcendence was predicated, as rebuttals of their position so clearly demonstrate, upon the paradoxical delimitation of divine transcendence to the capacities of the human reasoning intellect. In other words, if God is amenable to rational scrutiny by humans, is this not an avowal of His limitation, for He then is manifestly not transcendent in an unqualified way, beyond the ambit of human reason.69 C. The Speech–Nature Insight Al-JāªiÕ countered this conundrum with two notions. One is what I describe as the numinous ʿArabīya. The other notion is what I have referred to in an article as the ‘speech–nature insight’ (‘that every man speaks in accordance with his innate disposition and nature’, in al-JāªiÕ’s formulation), whereby human command, for example, of the ʿArabīya or the very ambit of the reasoning intellect is necessarily delimited by the nature which God has created in each and every one of us – in this way God remains in complete control of His creation, including its use of language. It is man’s task to respond properly and fully to the nature with which he has been created. The speech–nature insight allowed al-JāªiÕ to acknowledge the covenantal demands of thanking the benefactor and the primacy of the reasoning intellect without delimiting God in the process. As he says, continuing his train of thought in his treatise on the Imamate, The benefactor is the one who makes gratitude dear to him who performs it (fāʿil ) by means of his act of kindness (iªsān) with which he has advanced him and the ease which he has given over to his charge.70

The occupation of this middle ground (between the human reasoning intellect and divine transcendence) was also in effect an expression of a moral elitism, according to which the appreciation of unity and transcendence was limited to the fully developed ‘man of reasoning intellect’ (a rare being, nearly as rare as, say, the sage was according to the Stoic philosophers). It was not available to the masses who did not meet al-JāªiÕ’s stringent criteria, though according to his thinking, they would not be punished for their failure to live up to any developed contractual obligations with God: one can only be rewarded and punished for that which one has been created as capable of.

322 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s In The Book of Clarity and Clarification, the paradigmatic ‘man of reasoning intellect’ is Wā‚il b. ʿA†āʾ (d. 131/748–9), whom al-JāªiÕ compares with the prophet Moses. This vision of Muʿtazilism is charismatic. God, through the medium of clear communication (bayān), continues to communicate with man, and the man of reasoning intellect disseminates, in grateful acknowledgment of this obligation, appropriate exegesis of the Qurʾān and of His creation.71 Al-JāªiÕ had a Qurʾanic parallel for this combination of ideas in Q. Aʿrāf 7: 144: 144. He said, ‘Moses, I have singled you out among the people with My message (risāla) and My speech (kalām), so take what I have given you and be one of the thankers’;

Clear communication (bayān) is for al-JāªiÕ the chief mechanism whereby the engagement with the Revelation so characteristic of the early Islamic Community was developed into a theological (and moral) system of wideranging consequence. D. The Numinous ʿArabīya The other notion with which al-JāªiÕ countered this conundrum of restricting divine transcendence to the limits of human reason is not a position which he articulates explicitly in any of his works, as far as I can determine. In an article on his Book of Clarity and Clarification, I suggested that during the first part of the third century, formal Arabic (the ʿArabīya) was somehow ‘numinous’. I was alluding there to the ideas of Rudolf Otto, in his book Das Heilige (1917), translated in 1923 as The Idea of the Holy. The sub-title of the work is ‘An inquiry into the non-rational in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational’.72 To get a sense of what is involved, let us leap forward in time and consider a quotation taken from one of the epistles of the Ikhwān al-Íafāʾ, the Brethren of Purity, datable probably to the middle of the fourth century, but certainly no later than the middle of the eleventh century. In ‘the third epistle of the mathematical section dedicated to As†runūmiyā, concerning knowledge of the stars and the arrangement of the spheres’, an epistle on what we would today describe as astrology, in ‘the section concerning the reason for the difference of the effects which the constellations

the g ra tef ul response, 1  | 323 have on that which comes to be and passes away in the sublunar sphere’, we read: Another example: A number of births, under the one ascendant sign and in the one time can occur in various territories. Now, the configuration (shakl ) of the sphere indicates that those born then should be poets and orators, although some of them are born in the territory of the Arabs, some in the territory of the Nabataeans (Naba†), yet others in the territory of Armenia. Their receptiveness varies, because the ʿArabī (i.e. Arabic-speaker) is quicker to receive the specific characteristic (kha‚‚īya) of his territory, the Nabataean (i.e. the Aramaic-speaking agriculturalists of southern Iraq) less so, and the Armenian even less still. According to this example and by analogy, the effects which the constellations have on things which come to be vary. In the treatises on judicial astrology, I have mentioned the reasons for this with a long commentary, so study them there.73

What intrigues me about this passage is the notion that the eloquence of poets and orators is the ‘specific characteristic’ of the territory of the Arabs. A natural or even spontaneous superabundance of eloquence or linguistic aptitude seems to be intended. This characteristic (kha‚‚īya) is found in all three ethnicities listed but is present to the greatest extent among the speakers of Arabic. By the end of the first millennium, there is nothing particularly striking about this claim for those familiar with Arabic writings. In fact it is quite a commonplace. This commonplace should not hide from us, however, the possibility that for the third century it was in the process of becoming a commonplace. In other words, that it was a live and not a dead question for al-JāªiÕ and his contemporaries. Al-JāªiÕ is widely associated with the study and codification of the ʿArabīya. What do I mean by ʿArabīya? The ʿArabīya is the Arabic of the Qurʾān, the language in which Muªammad received the Divine Revelation. As such it is not anyone’s native tongue. For all except God it is an acquired language, yet we must also reflect that it is the language in which God has chosen to utter His final revelation and is thus, to coin a bizarre paradox, God’s favourite mother tongue. The Arabic of the Qurʾān is intimately connected with the ʿArabīya

324 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s though by the third century the two were not completely identical. The Qurʾān does insist dramatically and emphatically on the Arabic-ness of its language, but during the early ʿAbbasid centuries, it too was a paradox, for its Arabic was somehow both to be imitated and yet had to remain inimitable. By ʿArabīya in the third century, then, I mean the Arabic of the Qurʾān, a pale but vibrant imitation of which is human artistic composition, predominantly but not exclusively poetry. Considered in this light, the ʿArabīya is in constant flux, though forever fixed as God’s language of the Revelation – a sacral, though not a sacred, language. E. The Paradox of a Speaking God This sacrality, the fact that the ʿArabīya was divine and uniquely special but available for human use, was not without its problems, however, and gave rise to a series of tensions in response to a set of challenges of profound dimensions posed by this very divine character of the Arabic Revelation. Central to al-JāªiÕ’s ideas on, and use of, the ʿArabīya are the tensions which sustained Muslim thinking on God and language. For all but the most enthusiastic anthropomorphist, a speaking God is a paradox. This paradox is intensified when God decides to have a chosen language, in this case Arabic, a special language which was particularly suited to His Revelation. If we do not agree that God has a special language particularly suited to His Revelation, we will end up jettisoning the sacrality of the ʿArabīya, though not necessarily of the Qurʾān, and the embryonic realisation of its potential as a miracle. If we do agree that God has a special language particularly suited to His Revelation, then we will have a further conundrum to address.74 Central to the theologians’ discussion of God’s essence is the observation that the language of the Qurʾān is subject to a special religious experience to which other languages and idioms are not subject. This language of Revelation somehow does not seem, properly and meaningfully, to belong unequivocally and unambiguously to created existence. It might lead us to wonder whether this language is in some sense coeternal with God or created.75 This posed a challenge for the principles of divine unity (tawªīd ) and transcendence (tanzīh) so cherished by the Muʿtazila. There were those thinkers, like the poet Bashshār b. Burd (d. 167/783–4), the caliphal counsellor

the g ra tef ul response, 1  | 325 Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. c. 139/756) and the theologian Jahm b. Íafwān (d. 128/746), who seem to have argued that the Arabic of the Qurʾān was not really all that special, that it was not in and of itself evidence of divine origin. This was also a position adopted by many Muʿtazilīs who opted to deflect attention away from the language of the Qurʾān and to celebrate its arrangement instead, for the core Muʿtazilite position was to preserve the createdness of God’s speech in order thereby to protect divine unity and transcendence. The challenge to divine unity and transcendence was rendered more acute by the emergence in the third century of the debate surrounding the proofs required to confirm the prophethood of Muªammad. This led to a search for evidentiary miracles. One set of proofs was to argue that the Qurʾān itself was the most convincing evidentiary and apologetic miracle. And if the Qurʾān was to be promoted as miraculous, the miracle must consist in how the Qurʾān is put together and not in the language out of which it is composed – if that language is created, then it must be available to humans. This is how al-Ashʿarī describes the range of their views: They differed on whether the arrangement (naÕm) of the Qurʾān was a miracle or not. There are three positions: The Muʿtazila, apart from al-NaÕÕām, Hishām al-Fuwa†ī and ʿAbbād b. Sulaymān, maintained that the composition (taʾlīf ) and arrangement (naÕm) of the Qurʾān was a miracle, one as impossible for humans to bring about as the revivification of the dead, and that it was a sign of the Messenger of God (May God bless and cherish him). Al-NaÕÕām said: ‘The sign and the wonder of the Qurʾān was the information about hidden matters that it contained. Human beings could conceivably be capable of its composition and arrangement were it not the case that God prevented them through a disabling and disempowering that He occasioned in them’. Hishām and ʿAbbād said: ‘We do not hold that any accident points to God the Exalted!, nor do we say that any accident points to the prophethood of the Prophet (May God bless and cherish him!) either’. They did not make the Qurʾān a sign of the Prophet (May God bless and cherish him!) but claimed that the Qurʾān was a series of accidents.76

326 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s It seems then that these Muʿtazila were keen not to have to articulate a position on the ʿArabīya of the Qurʾān, preferring instead to emphasise how the Qurʾān is put together, though for al-NaÕÕām even this compositional miracle was not beyond the wit of man. Hishām and ʿAbbād clearly chose to sidestep the issue entirely, leaving them vulnerable to the attack of Ibn al-Rāwandī, as we have seen above (in Chapter 5.1, p. 280). This insistence on the createdness of God’s speech and the language He uses was obviously not unproblematic, then. Man the creature should be ever humble before, and fearful of, his Maker. But there is a further tension at the heart of a system in which a worshipper uses the language of his maker: does man become divine, can man play God, through his use of God’s language, be it created or coeternal with Him? Might this not render redundant the spiritual and exegetical obligations of the community, for example to expound God’s word? Might this not effectively invalidate the Qur’ān and dispense with the Sunna? Could texts written in the ʿArabīya ever replace the Holy Book? And how could the Muʿtazilite believer remain true to both his reasoned dedication to divine unity and transcendence and to the need of the worshipper to be grateful to his Maker and to declare that gratitude regularly and appropriately? After all, to imply that such a sacral language teeters on the brink of coeternity with God, however remotely, and to insist on the primacy of the essence of God over His attributes, fall just short of denying God the reality of his attributes. In this way the Muʿtazilite doctors seemed to refuse worshippers the object of their worship.77 Clearly, the divine ʿArabīya was too precious, too much a part of the Qurʾān and the early ʿAbbasid cosmos, to be jettisoned. Ever resourceful, al-JāªiÕ refashioned an identity for the ʿArabīya, one tantamount to the privileged and reverential status it had enjoyed thus far among believers, but one even truer to the divine revelation of the Qurʾān as an Arabic Qurʾān and to the Muʿtazilite obsession with the transcendental God. Al-JāªiÕ’s system tried to come to grips with what it means for a language to be divine and yet available for human intercourse. As such, it anticipated the aspirations of the developed tradition of the doctrine, the challenge of retaining the Qurʾān as greater than human ingenuity yet still liable to human aesthetic criteria and response, perhaps even emulation in some respects.78

the g ra tef ul response, 1  | 327 F. The JāªiÕian Solution So how did al-JāªiÕ do this? His solution began from the idea of the ʿArabīya as God’s special gift to man. He noted that eloquence was the special characteristic of the pre-Islamic desert Arabs and that Prophet Muªammad was pre-eminently eloquent in a society which was already conspicuous for its egregious eloquence. In other words, he located the ʿArabīya in a golden age in which Prophet Muªammad in his eloquence became the paradigm of how best to repay God’s blessing, of how best to thank the benefactor. Thus it became part of the Sunna, the exemplary practice of the Prophet. And thus it became an obligation for the man of reasoning intellect to avoid using the ʿArabīya improperly for improper use was a moral failing. It was ingratitude to God. To fail to live up to the Sunna of the Prophet in this regard was therefore an instance of ingratitude for God’s blessing (kufr al-niʿma).79 In respect of the ʿArabīya as God’s special gift to the Arabs, al-JāªiÕ refined considerably one of the doctrines of his teacher al-NaÕÕām: that of ‚arfa (‘deflection’). Al-NaÕÕām also started from the acknowledgment that eloquence was the special characteristic of the desert Arabs and from a recognition that the Arabs had the capability of putting together a work such as the Qurʾān. For him eloquence was so much the special characteristic of the desert Arabs that God was now required to prevent them, to deflect them, from imitating the Qurʾān. To account for this al-NaÕÕām formulated the theory of ‚arfa (‘deflection’) – the proposition that God had averted the Arabs from imitating the Qurʾān, because the eloquence of the ʿArabīya was so irrefragably their special characteristic that ‘had He left them alone, they would have been able to produce a sūra from a composition like it in eloquence (balāgha), euphony (fa‚āªa) and arrangement (naÕm)’.80 While discoursing on the pig in Volume Four of The Book of Living Ó ayawān 4.85.16–93.6) al-JāªiÕ addresses the main points of the debate. ( This is a dense passage in which al-JāªiÕ’s argumentation is, even by his standards, compact and elliptical. I am not sure that I fully understand it. Al-JāªiÕ summarises an attack launched by a spokesman for a group of the Dahrīya (the ‘Eternalists’) on the coherence and plausibility of the

328 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Qurʾanic narratives of the past, in particular King Solomon’s ignorance of the existence of the Kingdom of Sabaʾ (Sheba) in Q. Naml 27: 22–5, despite his other awesome powers: over the winds and the satans (Q. Íād 38: 35–8), and his fluency in the language of the birds (Q. 27: 16) (Óayawān 4.85.16– 86.10). The disquisition begins at 4.77.12 and concludes at 4.93.6. His defence begins with an acknowledgment. If God took no part in the ordering of this world, the position of the Dahrīya would in fact be tenable (4.86.11–12). But al-JāªiÕ implies, He does and so it is not. Solomon’s ignorance of Sabaʾ is not the only instance of a Qurʾanic narrative in which we encounter a surprising and apparently paradoxical lack of knowledge. He refers to Isaac and Joseph (4.86.12–16); to Moses and the Israelites wandering in a desert (4.86.17–87.5) which they ought surely to have crossed in the course of a forty-year voyage, had God not ‘deflected their minds (‚arafa awhāma-hum) and lifted the decisive discernment (fa‚l ) from their breasts’ (4.87.4–5). He notes the rebellious satans who endeavour to eavesdrop on God in the heavens: ‘it is impossible for any of them to want to eavesdrop on God given his memory of the previous failures he had witnessed’ (4.87.6–9); and then the disobedience of Iblīs: It is inconceivable for Iblīs to combine the availability of autonomy (wujūd al-isti†āʿa), the lack of incentives (dawāʿī) and the permissibility of acting (jawāz al-faʿl ) – if a man knew for definite that he would not leave his house that day, it would be impossible for his soul to incite him to leave, given his knowledge that he would not do it [Óayawān 4.88.5–9].

Iblīs’s mind must, therefore, be deflected (ma‚rūf ) from remembering what God said to him about his perpetual disobedience and so he reverts to being classed as an autonomous agent (and therefore punishable for his ­disobedience – have I understood this? Al-JāªiÕ’s argument is extremely flimsy: surely God is still responsible for Iblīs’s forgetting?). He refers to the Prophet Muªammad and the Muslims at the Battle of Uªud, which they lost to the Meccans in 3/625: God had assured them that they would ultimately triumph but this knowledge would have deterred them from fighting: God the Exalted out of His consideration for them removed that knowledge from their minds on many occasions, in order that they might undergo the

the g ra tef ul response, 1  | 329 travails of battle, uncertain whether they would be the victor or the vanquished, the slaughterers or the slaughtered [Óayawān 4.88.13–89.2].

Al-JāªiÕ then proceeds to an extra-Qurʾanic example – the case of the desert Arabs who were its original audience: Similar too is what He lifted from the minds of the desert Arabs and how He deflected (‚arafa) their souls from trying to match (muʿāra∂a) the Qurʾān after the Prophet had challenged them to put it together (naÕm). This is why we do not encounter anyone who formed a desire to do so. For if he had formed such a desire, he would have gone to the trouble of doing it, and if one of them had gone to the trouble of doing it, and had produced something about which there was the merest uncertainty (shubha), the Arabs, and those like the Arabs, and women, and those like women, would have prized the story (qi‚‚a).81 He would thus have set this as a task for the Muslims who would have sought arbitration and reconciliation from one of the Arabs. There would have been much chitter-chatter (al-qīl wa-al-qāl ) about this [Óayawān 4.89.3–8].

In the two documented cases of attempts to match the Qurʾān that al-JāªiÕ proceeds to cite, the counter-prophet Musaylima and the obscure ‘disciples of the Banū al-Nawwāªa’, it is obvious that Musaylima’s compositions were plundered from the Qurʾān. In other words, these were not bona fide attempts to match the Qurʾān but rather subterfuges designed to pass off some of the Qurʾān as their own prophecies: ‘that organisation (tadbīr) which human beings cannot attain even if they were to unite to do so is the work of God’ (Óayawān 4.89.9–12). Al-JāªiÕ moves from defence to attack. It is wrong to expect adherents of the revealed religions to confine themselves to recognising only empirically verifiable evidence as the hard-line Eternalist does (4.89.13–90.2) for he knows (and disapproves) that we believe in a creator God who lives, knows and is indivisible and incorporeal, and in Prophets who can resurrect the dead (4.90.3–6). His position would only be valid if our arguments for establishing the nature of God and verification of the message are logically impermissible (qiyās). Otherwise al-JāªiÕ’s position is neither reprehensible nor contradictory, neither wrong nor shameful (ʿayb):

330 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s The only way for the Eternalist to proceed is to ask us about the foundational principle (a‚l ) which motivates us to declare divine unity (tawªīd ) and the affirmation of the Prophets: in our revealed Book that which points us to its truthfulness is its novel and unique arrangement (naÕmu-hu al-badīʿ) the like of which human beings are incapable of, along with the other indications (dalāʾil ) which have been brought by those who brought them [Óayawān 4.90.9–13].

As an example of this latter group of signs al-JāªiÕ recounts the Qurʾanic narrative of the death of Solomon (Q. Sabaʾ 34: 14) where we learn that Solomon died leaning on his staff but without falling over, thus going unnoticed by the satans who were labouring on his behalf: ‘this description (‚ifa) is not the description of what happens to our dead’ (4.91.6).82 What he means is that Solomon’s death is a custom-breaking event. A quotation of Q. Sabāʾ 34: 14 prompts the following exegesis: Our senses are less truthful, our vision less penetrating, than those of the satans and the jinn. So if we found ourselves confronted by a corpse like this, it would not go unnoticed and the least we could do is to speculate and entertain suspicions. When people entertain suspicions, they begin to talk with one another and consult with one another, they gain understanding and so are confirmed in their speculations, especially when it comes to eternal punishment and when they have seen the prognostications of salvation [Óayawān 4.91.9–15].

Were it not for God’s act of deflection (‚arfa) and His ability to make us remember and forget, then Solomon’s entire retinue would not have agreed unanimously that he was alive (4.92.1–6). With this al-JāªiÕ resumes his earlier pattern of arguing on the basis of Qurʾānic narratives of ‚arfa, though he cannot resist pointing out a secondary message to the narrative: God wanted to point out that the jinn and the satans do not possess any knowledge of the invisible world, contrary to the erroneous assumptions of the ignorant and the unlearned (4.92.6–8). He concludes his engagement with the Dahrī as follows: So with this event and those like it we are compelled, by necessary arguments, to acknowledge (iqrār) Him. Therefore our opponents have no

the g ra tef ul response, 1  | 331 stratagem other than to take a stand against us and investigate the reasoning (ʿilla) which compelled us to hold this position. If the reasoning is sound, then that which is sound can only entail what is sound, and if it is unsound and sick, then still we know that we have not been overcome in our interpretation (taʾwīl ) of the Qurʾanic accounts discussed above [Óayawān 4.92.8–12].

So even if the Dahrī is able to invalidate the basis upon which al-JāªiÕ’s argument is founded, his explanations of the Qurʾanic narratives would remain untouched. As if to ram home this conclusion, al-JāªiÕ rounds off his rebuttal with an example of classic Qurʾanic exegesis (of the phrase, ‘I shall surely punish’ in Q. Naml 27: 21). Al-JāªiÕ studiously avoids introducing the ʿArabīya into the debate with the Eternalist. The Qurʾān incapacitates its human emulators by means of its arrangement and composition. What al-JāªiÕ intends by naÕm, arrangement, of course is not clear from the passage. I am sure that I am not alone in not finding al-JāªiÕ’s arguments very convincing (if, that is, I have understood them properly). On this occasion, my sympathies lie with the Dahrīya.83 Al-JāªiÕ’s solution to the paradox of a transcendently eloquent Qurʾān which must remain available to human capacity lay in advocating proper use of the ʿArabīya as the most appropriate method of thanking the benefactor. The ʿArabīya remained available for use by man but in strictly delimited terms (that of beneficiary addressing the benefactor). Thus his act of pious homage would never be in danger of becoming an act of wayward competition with God, an attempt to challenge the Qurʾān through emulation. At the same time, Qurʾanic composition became an indication of its truthfulness, because the Qurʾān ‘is a body and a sound, a work of composition (taʾlif ) and arrangement’.84 G. The ʿArabīya as ‘Wholly Other’ The numinous is a mental and emotional response to the consciousness of something completely and unequivocally unlike humanity. Otto introduced the adjective ‘numinous’ into the study of religion, to express that element of the deity which is beyond human rationality and which cannot be encompassed in ethical terms. An encounter with a something which is ‘wholly

332 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s other’ is at the core of the doctrine of tanzīh, divine transcendence. Thus, al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm, in his Major Book of the Proof, highlights the otherness of God as the burden of his theory of God’s attributes, noting that God is to be apprehended through His difference (khilāf ) to all things, sensible and intelligible, in everything that can be apprehended of things, in both their fundamental and the derivative principles [Kitāb al-Dalīl, 66.8–9].

In other words, God is utterly unlike any other thing, be it something we can understand through intellect or apprehend through sensory perception. It is a rigorously purified version of tanzīh.85 Tanzīh expresses what Otto terms the ‘consciousness of creaturehood’. His term is Geschöpflichkeit. This is a consciousness of ‘impotence’ and ‘nothingness’ when ranked alongside God’s awesome power. It represents an apophatic Muʿtazilite response to the non-rational in their religious experience. Otto contrasts creaturehood with ‘the consciousness of createdness’ (Geschaffenheit), the realisation that to be created, to be a creature is entirely dependent upon the divine creative activity – part of what al-JāªiÕ would mean by gratitude to God as the Benefactor (shukr al-niʿma), the rational in his religious experience. I think Otto helps us to recover the miraculous or the extraordinary puzzle of the ʿArabīya as something that ruptures the skein of nature. In terms of the present discussion, I take the ʿArabīya to be an object which belonged to what Otto identifies as the ‘“natural” plane’ but one elevated and removed from that plane by its sanctification through the Revelation. The ʿArabīya in the third century was an astounding object. It overwhelmed and attracted the mind. It mediated the encounter with that truly other object (God), that which indicates the insuperable limits to our knowledge – God is simply ‘incommensurable’ with us.86 Al-JāªiÕ may have prioritised the reasoning intellect in many of his responses to the created world, but in the case of the ʿArabīya, reasoning intellect yielded ultimately to the numen. It was in the ʿArabīya as divine benefaction that he sought to keep alive all that is ineffable in our encounters with the holy.87

5.3 The Grateful Response, 2

T

he ‘Design Complex’ revealed the breath-taking extent of God’s power and kindness to His creatures as made manifest in His creation. As Benefactor He could only be thanked appropriately in the proper use of His language, at one and the same time both a divine and a human language. This is one of the reasons why interest in the numinous ʿArabīya distinguishes the speculative activities of the third-century practitioners of the Kalām, with their especial devotion to the principles of language usage, and as such it is for them an identity marker, an emblem of their speculative and exegetical practice. I want now to consider a corollary of this grateful response. My main focus will be on aspects of the notion of ‘composition’, and especially on the act of putting together a work written in the numinous ʿArabīya. A. Taʾlīf

An important term regularly used by al-JāªiÕ and his contemporaries for ‘composition’, be it in prose or music or song (much poetry was in fact also song), is taʾlīf, the root notion of which includes ‘putting together’ as well as ‘domesticating’, ‘habituation’ and ‘familiarisation’. By the middle of the century, the word was hotly contested. One use, prominent among the early philosophical tradition, identified the soul as a ‘harmonious composition’, a notion which was explained in terms of a precise analogy with music as ‘harmonious composition’. This analogy was facilitated by the designation of music as ‘the science of composition’ (ʿilm al-taʾlīf ). ‘Composition’ was also identified as a branch of mathematics. A further use, prominent among the speculative scientific and theological tradition, explained material existence as an ‘aggregation’, a ‘compilation’ of discrete atoms.88 333

334 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s My rummaging around in ʿAbbasid texts has convinced me that this set of uses of the word taʾlīf is not a coincidence, so I wish now to explore some of the resonances for the notion of writing understood as composition, compilation and aggregation, of the writer as muʾallif al-kitāb, the composer who aggregates the book. I will begin with the apparently wanton disregard for order on account of which al-JāªiÕ’s writings are often berated and condemned. I will then offer a brief account of the main outlines of atomism as it was constructed and analysed by the speculative theologians of the third century. Then I will consider a notion commonly encountered in contemporary philosophical texts: that the soul is a ‘harmonious composition’. This will lead to a consideration of another popular notion, that of ‘godlikeness’. A rehearsal of the notion of ‘governance’ (tadbīr), a cognate of taʾlīf, which al-JāªiÕ himself promotes as a compositional principle in The Book of Living, will allow me to tease out and speculate on some of the implications of referring to the act of writing and composing by means of the term taʾlīf. B. A Wanton Disregard for Order? Al-JāªiÕ is often charged with a wanton disregard for systematic order. Take, for example, a long chapter in the second volume of his Book of Clarity and Clarification, in which al-JāªiÕ explores the observation that ‘every man speaks in accordance with his innate character and natural disposition’, which I refer to elsewhere as ‘the speech–nature insight’.89 In this sequence of utterances, we are presented with the often pithy and concise sayings of a huge range of figures from the Islamic past and from contemporary ʿAbbasid society, from holy men, princes and caliphs to boatmen and gaolers, poets and popular preachers. In fact the one voice which is almost silent in this tumult is al-JāªiÕ’s own. The chapter raises an interesting formal consideration. How does al-JāªiÕ organise his 184 separate units of information? Are they simply juxtaposed one after the other with no concern for how they cohere? Is this chapter typical, then, of this oft imputed disregard for order? Is each and every item of information germane to a particular topic merely lumped together under an appropriate if obscure rubric with no solicitude for the cogency of its presentation? Or are there schemes and patterns which, upon close scrutiny, emerge?

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 335 Such an ‘anarchic’ or ‘haphazard’ style may appear to be a characteristic of some of al-JāªiÕ’s Epistles, the majority of which exist in anthologised or excerpted form, but it is worth pausing to consider what the procession of utterances in this section of The Book of Clarity and Clarification tells us about how on this occasion he approaches the coherence of his material. I would ask the reader once again to bear in mind that it is not simply what a person says that is important but the medium (poetry, prose, or sajʿ, rhymed and rhythmical utterance) they couch the utterance in and how that choice reflects social standing. The following discussion of some of al-JāªiÕ’s organisational strategies should thus be easier to follow. C. Alternation One simple method of organising the contents of this chapter of The Clarity and Clarification which al-JāªiÕ employs is alternation: of speaker, topic and the medium in which the speakers express themselves (be it poetry, prose or prose with rhymed and rhythmical utterance). The chapter begins with five definitions of happiness, four expressed in sajʿ, one partially in verse, given by four members of the Muslim elite from the late Umayyad period (Bayān 2.175.3–11; Montgomery §§2–6). This is an example: ¤irār b. al-Óusayn was asked, ‘What is joy?’ He replied, ‘A banner unfurled,

reclining on the divan, and greeting you, my Emir’ [Bayān 2.175.5–6; Montgomery §3].90

This is followed by eight comments (in standard unadorned prose) taken from common people: boatmen, sailors and cattle-traders (Bayān 2.175.12– 176.11; Montgomery §§7–14). They are witty, some of them are slips of the tongue and others display to humorous effect the application of a vocabulary derived from sailing, for example, to another walk of life in which it is inappropriate: I once wanted to cross a bridge where there was an old salt sitting. It was a rainy day and the ground was slippery. My donkey slipped and almost threw me on my side, but managed to stay on its feet. Then it sat on its rump. ‘Truly there is no god but God!’ the old salt said, ‘How wondrously it sits on its stern!’ [Bayān 2.176.6–8; Montgomery §12].

336 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s The elite then reappear with five definitions of virtue (couched in sajʿ) (Bayān 2.176.12–177.2; Montgomery §§15–19) only to be alternated with two more typical statements of commoners (Bayān 2.177.3–5; Montgomery §§20–1). The following is how al-JāªiÕ juxtaposes religious ideal and mundane reality: Abū Hurayra was asked, ‘What is manly virtue?’ He replied, ‘Godliness, upright behaviour, eating lunch and supper in open spaces’. Bakr b. al-Ashʿar, who was a gaoler, looked once at the walls of the house of Bajala b. ʿAbda and said, ‘Truly there is no god but God! Think of the gaol that could be made from that!’ [Bayān 2.177.1–2; Montgomery §19 and §20].

We next encounter some pious renunciants (including Jesus) who pronounce observations on worldly asceticism (Bayān 2.177.3–17; Montgomery §§22– 6), followed by three definitions, uttered by pre-Islamic poets, of worldly pleasure (all couched in sajʿ) (Bayān 2.177.18–178.4; Montgomery §§27–9). The contrast here is achieved via subject matter and the disparity between Muslim ascetic and pre-Islamic sybarite. Worldly pleasures form the topic of the next two quotations, though the speakers are drawn from the common folk (Bayān 2.178.5–9; Montgomery §§30–1). A slip of the tongue (Bayān 2.178.10–12; Montgomery §32) bridges this section of contrasts and alternation which is concluded with four specimens of aphoristic poetry extolling contentment with one’s lot (Bayān 2.178.13–179.8; Montgomery §§33–6), three uttered by the same individual (Montgomery §§33–5). For example, Ibn al-Aʿrabī recited: I see that mankind erects castles – but men have no castles save what remains of their fated span! There are two kinds of actions, proper and improper: proper actions last; improper actions come to naught [Bayān 2.179.1–3; Montgomery §34].

D. Contrast Another type of schematic organisation very similar to alternation (of the social status of speakers and the medium they use to express themselves) is encountered later in the chapter (Bayān 2.194.3–197.9; Montgomery

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 337 §§113–18). This series begins with some pronouncements which involve a thematic contrast (between two things): the individual most able to hold forth on good and evil – a grave as a ‘pile of stones from Hell-fire’; a bad companion is ‘Hell on Earth’ – travelling is an anticipation of the divine punishment; there are two divine punishments here on Earth: a long journey and construction work – friends and foes. The juxtaposition is open and associative (what might be termed ‘free-wheeling’) and the third item in the series (a grave ‘piled high with stones of the Fire’) (Bayān 2.194.8–9; Montgomery §115) has no connection (obvious to me at least) with the preceding anecdotes. E. Chiasmus, Repetition and Other Schemes Al-JāªiÕ next introduces a statement involving the number three; three character types are enumerated: an angry man, a man protective of his womenfolk and a drunk: Sahl b. Hārūn said, ‘Three types of men transform themselves into the maddest of the mad, even if they are the most intelligent of the intelligent: the irate, the protective and the inebriate’. The insane poet Abū ʿAbdān asked him, ‘What about the man in a state of sexual arousal?’ He fell about ­laughing . . . [Bayān 2.195.3–6; Montgomery §119].

Anger is the subject of the next utterance (Bayān 2.195.7; Montgomery §120), followed by one dealing with a triplet of vices, avarice, anger and drunkenness, one on avarice and impropriety and finally the impropriety of a judgement (Bayān 2.195.8–13; Montgomery §§121–3). The topic of three reasons for living (composed in poetry and prose) marks a return to the number three (Bayān 2.195.14–196.14; Montgomery §§124–8), a segment in which the second Caliph ʿUmar’s pious and stern response to the indulgence of a verse by the pre-Islamic poet ˝arafa features: A man recited to ʿUmar b. al-Kha††āb (May God have mercy on him!), the line of ˝arafa Were it not for three things that make up the life of the warrior, by  your good fortune, I would not care when my death-bed attendants stand up.

338 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s ʿUmar replied, ‘Were it not that I travelled in the path of God, lowered my forehead to God and kept the company of a people who select the choicest sayings of the Prophet as they select the choicest dates, I would not care if I were dead’ [Bayān 2.195.14–17; Montgomery §124].

This is followed by two observations enumerating three things missed about home (Bayān 2.196.1–4; Montgomery §§125–6), one piece of poetry on homesickness (Bayān 2.196.5–11; Montgomery §127), and a poetic rounding off of the number three with the topic of three reasons for living: Someone else said: Were it not for three things which make life worth living for eternity – Water, sleep and Umm ʿAmr, then I should have no fear of the narrow tomb [Bayān 2.196.12–14; Montgomery §128].

This arrangement by means of the number three provides a loose chiasmus, with the pattern a bb (c) a. Al-JāªiÕ next proceeds to relate four utterances which outline four features of the complete Muslim (repetition) (Bayān 2.196.15–197.9; Montgomery §§129–33). Thus, within the compass of three sequences of anecdotes, themselves, as it were, numerically arranged, we encounter four schemes of composition: the associative, the parallel, the (loosely) chiastic and the repetitious. F. Ring-composition Another structuring device is ring-composition. The chapter begins with prominent individuals from the end of the reign of the Umayyad Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 65–86/685–705) and the caliphate of al-Walīd b. ʿAbd alMalik (r. 86–96/705–15) and concludes with a linguistic portrait of Caliph al-Walīd himself. At least fourteen other statements derive from individuals from the same era. G. The Chapter within the Book Al-JāªiÕ’s scrupulous ingenuity in arranging his material in this chapter of the Clarity is further emphasised if we consider another accomplishment, the

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 339 disposition of the work as a treatise and the position of the chapter within that arrangement. The chapter on the speech–nature insight stands at the head of a series of five chapters concerned with linguistic faults: Chapter of Solecisms (Bayān 2.210–19); Chapter on Eloquent Speakers who Committed Solecisms (Bayān 2.220–4); Chapter on Dolts (Bayān 2.225–33); Chapter on Linguistic Inability (Bayān 2.234–46); And One on the Mistakes Made by the Ulema (Bayān 2.247–77); Chapter Containing Elliptical Discourse (Bayān 2.278–319). In accordance with his principle of mixing the grave with the trivial, al-JāªiÕ separates the chapter on solecistic orators from that on linguistic inability with the chapter entitled the ‘Chapter on Dolts’ (Bayān 2.225–33). The chapter on the speech–nature insight should therefore be viewed as the introduction to these chapters. Furthermore, these chapters form a continuation, in the second volume, of the material discussed in the third, fourth and fifth chapters of the first volume of The Book of Clarity and Clarification: on mispronunciation (the mangling of euphony); clarity; and effective ­communication (Bayān 1.34.3–74, 75–87 and 88–97 respectively). In the eyes of this reader at least, and on the basis of the modest evidence presented here, al-JāªiÕ is clever and inventive when it comes to the aggregation of this chapter and the large-scale work in which it is found. The chapter on the speech–nature insight is characterised by a series of micro-schemes of organisation, which interweave and are imbricated, which shade off into one another and which jostle for attention in a kaleidoscope of seemingly evanescent patterns. This chapter is most certainly not dominated or defined by any one scheme – it appears simply to happen to be joined together. H. Kalām Atomism The atomism of the third-century theologians was a speculative inquiry. It was completely underdetermined: they were not in a position to observe the parts which they considered to have been the smallest divisible units of

340 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s existence (which is why they are referred to as ‘atoms’). We do not know where this atomism came from. According to some, we are to look to the city of Edessa, while others point to the emergence of these ideas in Iraq and propose an Iranian origin. Still others have wondered whether their provenance should be located in India. At all events, the Kalām atomists were the inheritors of a venerable antiquity. The atomism of Democritus had been rejected by Aristotle in his Physics, and echoes of the system of Epicurus have been heard by some scholars in the Arabic source texts.91 Whatever its provenance, the appeal of atomism as a coherent account of the role in creation of a divine and transcendent God lay precisely in those qualities which seem to us at the farthest remove from such an image of a deity far removed from the material and sensual world: I mean the ­mechanical-ness and sensualism of an atomistic outlook. The scholars found manifest support for their ideas in the visible world as they perceived it. As a mechanical system, atomism had been used by the Epicureans to do away with any need to have recourse to God (or the gods), while its foundational appeal to the senses seems hardly consistent with the idea of an uncompromisingly monotheistic and transcendent God who is above sensible perception and is utterly dissimilar to anything terrestrial (tawªīd and tanzīh). The early Kalām atomists shared an interest in this appeal to the senses with the Dahrīya, the group with whom al-JāªiÕ engages so persistently in the course of The Book of Living. It led them to place an uncompromising emphasis on phenomenology, the appearance of reality. And this resonated powerfully with their thoroughgoing epistemological realism, their insistence that the basic components of the universe are concrete, that it is possible for man to gain true knowledge of these components and their qualities, and that sense perception is a valid way of acquiring this true knowledge. So attractive was the pull of these tendencies that one early thinker, ¤irār b. ʿAmr (d. 180/796), asserted the priority of qualities and accidents (such as colours and smells) to the point that he denied the existence of any substance or atoms or material substrates in which these qualities would inhere. In other words, ¤irār’s is an ontography of phenomena.92 Thus this atomism is not so much an explanation of the nature of existence as it is a description – it is an ontography rather than an ontology, or in Sabra’s term, ‘an ontology of events’. It is designed to reveal and celebrate

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 341 the workings of God’s omnipotence. One of its most striking features is its uncompromising austerity. All inessentials are pared away and the atomist is left with three basic constituents: God, atoms and accidents. A fourth constituent, bodies, could only exist through the coming together of at least two atoms, though there were many variations on this theme and much disagreement. The early vocabulary was also uncompromisingly austere: the atom is designated a juzʾ, a ‘part’; sometimes it is ‘the part which cannot be partitioned’ (al-juzʾ alladhī lā yatajazzaʾ); and when its function is to constitute the material substrate in which accidents inhere it is called the jawhar, the word the philosophers used to describe Aristotelian ‘substance’. Most early atomists seem to have resisted the temptation to assert that the atom could endure, contrary to what the philosophical use of jawhar would entail, and with time the system identified the occupation of space as the essential feature of the atom. And yet the atom, although the basic building block with which God creates existence, was not really intended to explain the nature of existence. Viewed from this angle, it is both vitally necessary (because no account could proceed without it) and effectively surplus to requirements (because once the basic issues were resolved in the aftermath of al-NaÕÕām’s assault on the notion of the atom and its definition became conventional and axiomatic, there was little point in lingering too long over it). Rather, it was a component that was needed to allow for a coherent description of God’s creation. The atom was, after all, devoid of qualities, it was inert and unobservable and could not, in and of itself, even when occupying space, constitute a body. For that two or more atoms were required. But it was the basic element without which there could be no accidents and Richard Frank has argued that it had a ‘permanence in existence’ denied to most accidents and thus is somehow stable unlike their evanescence.93 The atomists referred to the qualities which inhere in atoms as ‘accidents’ (ʿara∂, pl. aʿrā∂), a term which they also shared with the Greek-Arabic philosophical lexicon. ‘Accident’ is an unsatisfactory translation for the ways in which the atomists used this word. It is really the transient and temporary ‘presentation’ of an aspect by means of which a phenomenon is present to us and perceived.

342 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s A major section of the doxographical survey of Islamic dogmas and doctrines, The Doctrinal Utterances of those who Profess Islam and the Divergences of those who Practise Prayer by al-Ashʿarī (d. 324/935), a thinker who renounced the Muʿtazilite system in which he had been trained in order to establish his own synthesis, is devoted to ‘abstruse’ (daqīq) doctrines: those not essential to the coherence (jamāʿa) of the community (which doctrines he calls jalīl ). It begins with a foundational divergence of doctrines: (1) ‘the Kalām Masters differed on the question of what body (jism) is, in twelve propositions’ (Maqālāt 301.2–306.13). It is the body and not the atom which is the problem central to al-Ashʿarī’s vision of the principal doctrinal developments of his predecessors. The section on body contains seven further points of divergence: (2) The community differed concerning the atom-as-substance (jawhar) and on its meaning, in four statements (Maq. 306.14–307.7); (3) They differed concerning whether the atoms-as-substances were all bodies or whether it was permissible for atoms-as-substances to exist which are not bodies, in three statements (Maq. 307.8–308.2); (4) The community differed as to whether atoms-as-substances were one class and whether the atomic substance (jawhar) of the world is one substance, in seven statements (Maq. 308.3–309.8); (5) They differed as to whether what was permissible for some atoms-assubstances was permissible for all atoms-as-substances; whether it was permissible that that which inhered in all atoms-as-substances could inhere in the single atom-as-substance; and whether it was permissible for them to exist with no accidents inhering in them or whether that was impossible (Maq. 309.9–313.13); (6) They differed as to whether it was permissible for an act of knowledge, perception and capacity (qudra) for knowledge to inhere in the hand or not (Maq. 313.14–314.8); (7) The community differed as to whether or not it is permissible for the body to separate or for such conjunction (ijtimāʿ) as it contains to be invalidated so that it becomes an atom which cannot be partitioned and as to what inheres in body, in fourteen doctrines (Maq. 314.9–318.14); (8) They differed as to whether or not it is permissible for two movements

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 343 to inhere in the single atom and whether or not it is permissible for two colours and two faculties to inhere in it (Maq. 319.1–321.4).94 A body (jism) can only come about through the occurrence of an accident. This accident is variously referred to as taʾlīf, the active composition or aggregation of two or more atoms; tarkīb, compounding, synonymous with taʾlīf; mumāssa, the coming into contact and contiguity of two or more atoms; mujāmaʿa, their union; ijtimāʿ, their coming into a state of union and being joined together; or iʾtilāf, the coming into a state of aggregation. The definition offered by al-Iskāfī (d. 240/854) provides a convenient example of this approach: Some said: ‘The meaning of body is that it is composite (muʾtalif ). The smallest body is two particles.’ They claimed that when the two particles are composite, neither one of them is itself a body; rather the body is the two particles combined. It is inconceivable for there to be composition (tarkīb) in a single one, though the single particle bears colour, taste, scent, and all the other accidents except composition. I reckon this doctrine belongs to al-Iskāfī [Maqālāt 302.5–9].95

It is for this reason that aggregation was such a vital notion for the early thinkers, though in later versions of the system it was superseded by motion (ªaraka), a synonym of ‘change’, and so of time. The body received its reality though being an aggregation of evanescent accidents. It is for this reason that some doctors offered the following statement: Some maintained: ‘Atoms-as-substances are of two kinds: compound atoms and simple atoms which are not compound. Such atoms-as-substances which are not compound are not bodies; those which are compound are bodies [Maq. 307.15–308.3].

The Ashʿarite version identified the simple substances as indivisible atoms not bodies. The explanatory burden which this austere and uncompromising vision was expected to bear was enormous. The atomists did not rely on the explanatory power of the soul, as the philosophers did: even man remained a basic composite like any other, though the early Muʿtazila accorded him some

344 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s small measure of transcending his compositeness by virtue of his ability to make choices and capacity for autonomous action. The appeal of the system, the Ashʿarite refinement of which lasted for many centuries and satisfied most thinkers apart from the philosophers operating in the Aristotelian, peripatetic tradition such as Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) and Maimonides (d. 602/1204), lies partly in its austere simplicity but also in its consonance with the Qurʾanic account of creation. But it is important to note that its true power was precisely that it was not in and of itself a sufficient account of existence. Its efficacy hinged upon the one central and key constituent without whom it would not have been developed: God. This is why many early atomist theologians of third–century Iraq asserted that the operation of these mechanics required the immediate and unmediated presence of a mechanic (God) not only to create the atoms but also to hold them together (and why ‘aggregation’ or ‘composition’ became such an important idea for them). Its sensuality confirmed them in the justness of their resolutely empirical approach to accounting for c­ reation – in other words, in order to establish God’s absolute transcendence, they had recourse to the material world and in so doing were responding to injunctions in the Qurʾān to read the signs of God’s power and majesty in His creation. Atomism exerted on them the further appeal of being amenable to a thorough going rationalism. They could, on the basis of atomism, construct a physical account of God’s creation that was reasoned and reasonable, the constituent doctrines of which could be subjected to their dialectical ­question-and-answer method of speculation without having to jettison the basic hypotheses. The resultant formulations of the system, some of which I have translated above, were expressed in axiomatic propositions reminiscent of the style of the ‘elements’ of Euclid.96 I. Psychic Harmony The most sustained alternative to this meaning of taʾlīf as developed by the atomistic theologians came from the philosophers and the physicians working in the medical tradition, some of whom argued that the human soul, and not material existence, was a composition and discerned an ontological analogy between it and musical composition.

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 345 J. Music as Psychic Hygiene Accordingly, it was firmly held among many third-century philosophers and physicians that music and song were an important form of psychotherapy (sometimes referred to as the hygienic concept of music). This is well expressed in the following analogy by one of al-JāªiÕ’s major opponents, the philosopher al-Kindī (d. c. 252/866), in his Treatise on Stringed Instruments: The adept musician-philosopher knows which types of rhythm, notes and poetry resemble (yushākil ) all those whom he seeks to move with music, just as the physician-philosopher (al-†abīb al-faylasūf ) needs to know the states of those whose health he seeks to treat or preserve.97

This resemblance (mushākala) is substantial, that is, it is physical and psychological, and not just a passing similarity.98 K. Al-JāªiÕ on Music As someone who presumably advocated at least a modified or hybrid form of atomism, al-JāªiÕ would not have been sympathetic to this philosophical alternative. His Treatise on Quadrature and Circumference contains an inexorable sequence of devastating inquiries concerning this approach to music, which I take to be an attack aimed at the philosopher al-Kindī. Al-JāªiÕ reviews some of the major issues in the history of Arabo-Islamic music: the origin of the lute and the other musical instruments; the types of song found among the pre-Islamic Arabs; the relative merits of various singers and songstresses; Greek theories of music, be they the systems of Euclid, the obscure Mauristus, Aristoxenus (whose influence is most apparent in the musicology of al-Fārābī, d. 339/950) or Pythagoras (whose presence is most apparent in the musicology of al-Kindī); and the Persian musical tradition.99 Al-JāªiÕ raises two points relating to the widespread philosophical notion of music as cosmic: the anthropomorphism of the lute; music as therapeutic. The anthropomorphism of the lute was basically an aetiological myth which maintained that the lute was invented and designed on the pattern of the human body, be it by, among others, the Biblical figure of Lamak b. Qābil (Lamech the son of Cain) or Ptolemy or Euclid. In the following passage, al-JāªiÕ addresses the notion of music as

346 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s therapy. According to this view, the four strings of the lute correspond to the four humours (blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm: the basic substances of which the human body was thought to be composed). As a consequence of this correspondence music has the capability to effect physical change: My music is quite rudimentary, for I have not yet learned as much about it as I would like . . . why did the Teacher make the tones sixteen, in accordance with the computing of the Greeks? Was it because he could discover no more or was it because his circle could only accommodate what he discovered? Why did he attribute fear to black bile, sadness to phlegm, audacity to yellow bile and joy to blood? And why did he divide the strings of the lute accordingly, making the zīr correspond to yellow bile, the mathnā to the blood, the mathlath to phlegm, and the bamm to black bile? And why did he say that, ‘The zīr is subtle and light, like fire, the mathnā is like air, between the nature of fire and water but less than fire in lightness, whereas the mathlath is like water, and the bamm is like earth, with the mathnā being twice the weight of the zīr, the mathlath being four times and the bamm being six times the weight of the zīr’? Why did he allege that there are melodies which cause shaking and fear, which if increased cause collapse and if intensified can kill; that there are those which cause change, which if increased bring about a loss of consciousness, if intensified can freeze the blood and if intensified yet further can kill? Why did he postulate the existence of an open melody which can kill through melting and one which can kill through freezing? Why did he describe melodies with the attributes of freezing and melting, the very attributes of deadly poisons?100

The ‘teacher’ referred to is presumably al-Kindī. This patterning of quartets is very common in his musicological works. In fact the arithmetical patterning of the value accorded to each of the strings of the lute is not dissimilar in ambition to the sequences explored elsewhere in al-Kindī’s treatises, such as his study of compound drugs.101 A century later, al-Masʿūdī (d. 345/956) refers to the equivalence of these two quartets (humours and lute strings) as one of the fundamental features of the heritage which the Muslims received from Greek antiquity:

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 347 The sages arranged the four strings in accordance with the four natures (i.e. the humours), for they made the zīr string correspond to yellow bile, the mathnā string correspond to blood, the mathlath string to phlegm and the bamm string to black bile.102

L. Music as Cosmogony In the musicology of al-Kindī these equivalences are elevated to the position of a universal causal principle. Here the extent of the correspondences becomes simply stunning. Before we consider the centrality of music to al-Kindī’s cosmogony, we must explore a further, seminal refinement of this musical psychotherapy. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates effortlessly demolishes the Pythagorean theory of the soul as a harmony of the body championed by Simmias. Yet thanks to the persistence and revival of Pythagoreanism in Hellenistic Antiquity and Plotinus’s attack on it in his Enneads (IV.7 [2], 84), this theory of the soul was available to Muslim intellectuals in the Third Homily of The Theology of Aristotle, an influential though curious translation-cum-commentary of major sections of Plotinus’s Enneads IV to VI. This work, of enormous significance for the development of Arabic philosophy and for the future persona of the Arabic Aristotle, has convincingly been connected with the philosophical agenda of al-Kindī and his disciples. In it, the problem is posed thus: We say: if the soul is a nature other than the nature of bodies (i.e. the Stoic corporealism which has just been refuted) then we are obliged to investigate this nature and learn what it is. Are you to think that it exists in the composition (iʾtilāf ) of bodies, for the disciples of Pythagoras describe the soul thus and say that it is a composition of bodies like the composition which arises from the strings of the lute, for when the strings of the lute are stretched, they receive a certain effect which is composition? What they mean by that is simply that a composition arises from the strings when they are stretched and then strummed by a player, one which did not exist in them previously when the strings were not stretched. Man is like this. When his humours are mixed and become one, a special mixture arises from this mix. It is this special mixture which animates the body, whereas the soul is merely an impress produced by this mixture. Now, this argument is disgusting.103

348 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s This is essentially what we may call a ‘classical’ Pythagorean position, in which the body-soul relationship is conceived as an analogy to the relationship of the strings to the lute. It is refuted by another argument taken from music, in which soul is declared to be causally anterior to the lute and the music it makes, rather than being their effect as the product of the fine-tuning of the strings of the lute. According to ‘Aristotle’ (i.e. the explicator of the Arabic Plotinus) in the Theology: The composer (muʾallif ) is none other than the musician who stretches the strings, composes them one to the other, and so composes an impression which creates emotion, being moved and affected by listening to music. Just as the strings are not the cause of the composition, so too bodies are not the cause of the composition and do not have the power to create an impress on the composition. Rather, it is for them to receive sensory impresses. So therefore the composition of bodies is not the soul [Badawī 53.14–17].

Due account was taken of the express disapproval of ‘Aristotle’ (and his Arabic commentator). This ‘classical’ Pythagorean analogy was accommodated to encompass the idea that a special (causal and ontological) affinity existed between soul and music, with music becoming an important medium for the soul to contemplate the cosmos. As such, it proved very fecund for many thinkers who, inspired by al-Kindī and his followers, looked on Arabic philosophy in the Neoplatonic tradition as a quasi-religious world view for elite intellectuals, one fully compatible with the Qurʾān. Consider the following statement made by al-Kindī, again in his Treatise on Stringed Instruments: When they (i.e. the Philosophers) had shown that there was no sensible being whose element did not consist of the four principles and the fifth nature – I mean fire, air, water, earth and the celestial sphere – they were impelled by their innate perspicacity, guided by acuity and directed by thought to establish sonorous, stringed instruments which would mediate between the soul and the way in which the elements and the fifth nature create compositions (taʾlīf ) through the use of instruments. So they manufactured many stringed instruments which were related to (tunāsib) the composition (taʾlīf ) of living bodies, from which there came sounds

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 349 resembling (mushākila) the human assemblage (tarkīb), in order thereby to demonstrate to acute intelligences the extent of the nobility and preeminence of philosophical sagacity [Mu‚awwi†āt 71.14–20].

The philosophers of Antiquity, then, invented stringed instruments in accordance with the causal principles which they discerned in the cosmos, as a medium for the soul to be attracted to philosophy and thus contemplate creation through being brought into harmony with the cosmos. So it is that, by virtue of the affinity between the lute and the cosmos, music can alter and determine the assemblage of humours (which are part of the human makeup) and thus our very being. Al-Kindī pursues this cosmography to extremes. In his account of the correspondences between the strings of the lute and the constitution of existence, he establishes the following affinities. For the string of the lute known as the zīr: of the faculties of the soul which are extended in the head: the faculty of thought . . . the visible actions which it produces in living things (ªayawān) are bravery, courage, valour, presumption, pride, audacity, forwardness and haughtiness.

For the string known as the mathnā: of the faculties of the soul which are extended from the brain: that which is called the production of mental images (takhayyul ) . . . the actions which it produces in living things are fine character, laughter, musical affect, joy, mirth, modesty, pleasure, justness and equanimity, love of the bonds of piety and affection.

For the string known as the mathlath: of the faculties of the soul which are extended in the brain are the faculties of recollection . . . the visible actions which it produces in living things include chasteness, mildness, cowardice, compliance and being affectionate.

For the string known as the bamm: of the faculties which are extended in the head is the faculty of memory . . . the visible actions which it produces in the ethical characteristics of living

350 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s things (khuluq al-ªayawān) are forbearance, gravity, being affectionate, and affability.104

Al-Kindī proceeds in his treatise to explain further ‘how the strings can bring out the soul’s ethical characteristics’. Music, therefore, also assumes an ethical dimension. It is the soul and man’s ethical behaviour which are of central importance for al-Kindī. Physical well-being is vital – without it one cannot enjoy psychic well-being – but it remains a necessary if not a sufficient ­condition for psychic health. M. Godlikeness Music is spiritually hygienic, an activity which can promote and improve the well-being of our soul. It is also a means whereby the soul can achieve spiritual salvation as music brings out and releases its original characteristics, mired in and contaminated by material existence. In other words, it is a complete psychotherapy, the cultivation of the (invisible) faculties and (visible) emotions of the Neoplatonic soul. Music thus leads to the ideal of philosophy that ‘man should strive to be as like God as is possible’: divinisation or godlikeness. This ideal was something of a philosophical slogan. Formulated by Plato in a number of his works such as the Timaeus and the Symposium, the ideal was phrased succinctly and attractively in the Theaetetus (176b) in the form in which it became immortalised: ‘assimilation to god insofar as is possible’ (homoiōsis theōi kata to dunaton). As a definition of philosophy it appealed to Aristotle, to Epicurus and the Stoics, to the Patristic theologians (and to PseudoDionysius) and to Plotinus and the Neoplatonists. It was also adopted widely by the ʿAbbasid philosophers as al-tashabbuh bi-Allāh, ‘making oneself like, assimilating ­oneself unto, God’. Much of its appeal lies in the malleability of its formulation. It is not clear what exactly Plato may have meant by ‘assimilation’, to say nothing of the indeterminacy of the notion of the godhead. Did ‘assimilation’ involve a conversion of human virtues into divine virtues? If so, how was such a thing possible? Or was it the realisation of some divine trace or presence in the human body? The passage in the Theaetetus also speaks of a move, or an escape. Was this a physical or an immaterial process? Was it metaphorical or

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 351 a literal ascent from earth to heaven? In sum, the slogan allowed for exegesis in terms of virtuous living and in terms of a release of the divine within the body in an act of separation (i.e. of the soul) and an attendant ascent through the hierarchies of the cosmos.105 In his Necessary Preliminaries to the Learning of Philosophy, al-Fārābī ­identifies as preliminaries four and five the following axioms: Four: The aim which is intended by the learning of philosophy is understanding of the Creator (Exalted!): that He is One, Unmoving; that He is the agent cause of all things; that He is the One who disposes this world in its appropriate hierarchies (al-murattib) through His generosity, wisdom and justness. The actions which the philosopher performs are assimilation (tashabbuh) to the Creator insofar as man is capable (bi-miqdār †āqat al-insān). Five: The path which he who wishes to learn philosophy must follow is intention for action and attainment of the aim. Intention for action comes about through knowledge (ʿilm): that is because the perfection (tamām) of knowledge is action. Attainment of the aim in knowledge can only come about through understanding the natural elements (†abāʾiʿ) because they are closest to his comprehension and then after that geometry (handasa). Attainment of the aim in action comes about firstly through man’s rectification of his soul, then through the rectification of others, in his household or his city.106

There is no hint of assimilation through separation from the body in al-Fārābī’s formulation. God is generous, wise and just and man strives to become like Him through pious imitation of these virtues in his soul, his household and his community. Assimilation is thus not simply a mental or intellectual exercise. It is also the practice of virtuous living. Divine assimilation as virtuous living rather than as physical separation is also stressed in an ethical exhortation, extant only in an epitome based on Óunayn b. Isªāq’s translation of Galen’s On Ethics (Peri Ēthōn), where we learn that only the individual human being: can act freely (yata‚arraf ) in his essence (dhāt) because he is free and is ruler of his will. So what can be more fitting for someone who is like this than

352 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s that he set his soul on the loftiest rank of nobility – and there is no nobility greater than the rank of following (iqtidāʾ) God in accordance with human possibility (ªasb al-imkān al-basharī). This comes about through making light of present pleasures and preferring the beautiful.107

The term used here, iqtidāʾ (‘following the footsteps’ rather than tashabbuh, ‘assimilation’), suggests that it may be an approximation of the Pythagorean precept ‘follow God’, which for some classical philosophers was an anticipation of Plato’s notion of divinisation. And yet the possibility of assimilation through physical separation is perhaps hinted at in a passage immediately preceding this: Whilst you remain alive, the least you can do is that your lifestyle be similar (shabīha) to the lifestyle of the angels [Kraus 40.9–10].

Assimilation to the angels suggests, to me at any rate, a physical separation of the soul from the body. In the First Homily of The Theology, the Arabic Aristotle (Plotinus) provided his readers with an extremely powerful version of assimilation through the release of the divine from the body. This is an evocative Arabic version of a famous passage in Ennead IV.8 [6]. 1, in which Plotinus had described an out-of-body experience whereby he came ‘into identity with the godhead’. It is further on in this same Ennead (IV.8 [6]. 8) rendered into Arabic as part of the Seventh Homily of The Theology that Plotinus made the bold claim which many ancient Neoplatonist philosophers found shocking and unpalatable, namely that even ‘when it descends to the low world of the senses some of the soul remains in the world of the intellect’. For all the charismatic appeal of the cosmology of The Theology, for all its imagistic panorama and the skilled deployment of the terminology of late Hellenistic Gnostic religion, for all that it chimed with pre-Islamic Iranian notions of the heavenly journey of the soul and of the epic ascent (miʿrāj) of Prophet Muªammad through the seven heavens, the boldness of this version of ‘assimilation’ was largely eschewed by the early Arabic philosophical tradition.108 This becomes evident when we consider al-Kindī’s very careful and precise reformulation of the assimilation slogan. In his Pronouncement on

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 353 the Soul Epitomised from the Treatise of Aristotle and the Other Philosophers, al-Kindī attributes the following statements to Plato: For him whose aim in this world is delighting in foodstuffs and beverages . . . and whose aim is also for the pleasure of intercourse, then there is no way for his intellective soul to reach understanding of these noble things and attainment of assimilation (tashabbuh) to the Maker (al-bāriʾ) (Be Praised!) is not possible for him . . . He who is dominated by the force of the intellective soul, whose behaviour is predominantly cogitation, discernment, understanding of the true natures of things and inquiring into the obscurities of knowledge, is a virtuous man, close in resemblance (qarīb al-shibh) to the Maker (Be Praised!). This is because the things which we find the Maker (Great and Glorious!) to possess are wisdom, power, justness, the good, beauty and truth. It is often possible for man to govern (dabbara) his soul with this device (ªīla) in accordance with what is in the power of man (ªasb mā fī †āqat al-insān), that so he may become wise, just, generous, good, preferring truth and beauty, but in all of this his will be a type of acting inferior to the type which belongs to the Maker (Be Praised!) in terms of His force and His power, for it is only through their closeness to God that they derive a power which resembles His power.109

The best even the wise philosopher can achieve during his life is to come ‘close in resemblance to the Maker’ and he does this through virtuous living, by ensuring that the parts of his soul are governed in conformity with God’s governance of the universe, insofar as divine assimilation (which is a ‘stratagem’, a ‘device’ for making this activity possible to the intellective soul) is achievable for human beings. For al-Kindī, it seems, the soul is released from the body only after the death of the body. In other words, it is a post-­mortem assimilation which the intellective soul achieves. The virtuous lifestyle is ­preparatory for a successful release. That al-Kindī should be keen to emphasise in this manner the distance between God and man is hardly surprising. It is in keeping with his avoidance of tashbīh, assimilating God to other beings, especially man, and his promotion of tawªīd, divine oneness. Thus his evocation of an analogous notion,

354 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s that of ‘drawing one’s self close to God’ (al-taqarrub ilā Allāh), attributed to Abū al-Hudhayl is hardly fortuitous. It is entirely consistent with the tendency of post-Plotinian Platonism to stress the chasm between man and the upper levels of the cosmos. It is also consonant with the general tendency among the educated elite of his time to de-emphasise the anthropomorphism to which the Qurʾān was liable to give rise. For the Óadīth folk of the late third century and beyond, it was not a question of man’s assimilation to the divine but rather of a God in the likeness of man, for theirs was a literalist reading of the anthropomorphic passages of the Qurʾān.110 Al-Kindī’s allusion to man’s governance of his soul raises the question of whether this psychological governance is actually modelled along the lines of the ‘Design Complex’, the divine governance of the complexities of existence. The interweaving of divine assimilation, governance and creation is given a dramatic twist in the corpus of alchemical writings from the third and fourth centuries attributed to Jābir b. Óayyān (fl. second/seventh century). In one of these works, we read: This is the aim of the craft of alchemy concerning the wisdom by means of which man becomes the one to receive (al-mutaqabbil ) the actions of God (Exalted! Great and Glorious!) and to assimilate himself in accordance with his power.111

In other words, the human craftsman imitates the wisdom of the divine Craftsman in the exercise of a creative power gained through receipt of His actions. The famous physician Muªammad b. Zakarīya al-Rāzī (Rhazes) was also an alchemist. It is to him that we owe one of the most scintillating treatments of the philosophical ideal of divine assimilation. Al-Rāzī was born in al-Rayy in about 250/864–5 and according to his biographers studied music until the age of thirty, acquiring, so one source tells us, an excellent reputation as a lutenist. A move to Baghdad led to his study of medicine and he achieved much fame and prosperity as a medical practitioner, becoming personal physician to the Caliph al-Muktafī (r. 289–95/902–8). He died in 313/925 at the age of sixty (or in 320/932 at the age of 67). Al-Rāzī was as notorious as a philosopher as he was famous as a physician. His uncompromising stance towards the importance of prophecy as

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 355 the source of revelation was taken to be tantamount to a denial of prophecy. Interestingly he was as unpopular with the philosophers as he was with the non-philosophers and the theologians – al-Rāzī’s supposed rejection of Aristotle upset the former as much as his supposed rejection of prophecy upset the latter. Al-Rāzī’s short rebuttal of his opponents known as The Philosophical Lifestyle (al-Sīra al-Falsafīya) has much in common with the first part of al-JāªiÕ’s ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living. Al-Rāzī’s opponents accuse him of shameful conduct (ʿayb), as al-JāªiÕ is accused, and an important part of al-Rāzī’s defence of his vision of philosophical living and his meriting of the title of philosopher hinges upon a list of his writings. I find myself wondering if al-Rāzī has modelled his work on The Book of Living. The pamphlet is also an exercise in following a precept of one of al-Rāzī’s role models, Galen, who argued that ‘we may discover our own vices by heeding the criticisms of our enemies’. The order of topics is: (1) The Attack on and Defence of Suqrā†’s Lifestyle; (2) The Philosophical Lifestyle; (3) The Attack on and Defence of al-Rāzī’s Lifestyle.112 The text begins with an exposition of the biography of al-Rāzī’s spiritual leader, his imam Suqrā† (Socrates). Al-Rāzī has been criticised by a group of theologians, the people of speculation, discernment and analysis (ahl al-naÕar wa-al-tamyīz wa-al-taª‚īl ). They have identified as a social stigma his failure to live in accordance with Socrates’s lifestyle, for Socrates was a recluse who lived an ascetic life in a barrel in the desert, admonishing poor and rich alike, whereas al-Rāzī lives a comfortable life, is a full member of his society, and is employed in various ways of making a living. This criticism is double-edged, however, for it does not imply that al-Rāzī’s critics approve of Socrates’s life as a hermit but points to how deleterious its antisocial character is for ‘tillage and procreation’, that is for the material needs of human society and its continuation: Then they spoke of the vices of this lifestyle which our Imam Suqrā† followed, saying that it is contrary to the course of nature, the maintenance of the economy (literally, ‘tillage’) and procreation and is an incentive to the destruction of the world and the ruination and death of people [Kraus 99.10–12].

356 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Al-Rāzī’s response is basically to reject the criticism because it is founded on an ignorance of the whole story of Socrates’s life. It is an erroneous analysis of his physiology and its attendant psychology. He accepts the general accuracy of what they say but also points to the intentional omissions in their account, omissions driven by their polemical enthusiasms. He argues that Socrates abandoned this asceticism in the course of his life and notes that when he died, he had had children, had gone to war and had taken part in festive occasions. According to al-Rāzī, it turns out that in his early life Socrates was addicted to philosophy. The physiological and psychological consequences of his devotion to and love of philosophy (or rather his infatuation with it) drove him to a total immersion in it until, with the passing of time and in accordance with the physiological process of pleasure, the imbalance in his constitution was dispelled: when he had plunged into its depths and his behaviour settled down, his philosophical excess fell away and he reverted to equilibrium [Kraus 100.5–6].

As philosophy is a ladhdha, a pleasure, so al-Rāzī the physician diagnoses the supreme philosopher Socrates as he would any other person addicted to a pleasure. The bulk of the pamphlet is devoted to an exposition of the six basic principles on which one’s ethical behaviour ought to be predicated, accompanied by an insightful analysis of pleasure and pain. The concluding part to al-Rāzī’s exposition is the rebuttal of his critics and their attack on his philosophical credentials, both theoretical and practical: In sum, I say: since the Maker (al-bāriʾ) (Great and Glorious!) is the Knowing who is not ignorant, the Just who does no wrong, and who is knowledge, justness and mercy absolutely (bi-al-i†lāq); since He is our Maker and Ruler and we are His slaves and His property; and since the most beloved of slaves to their masters are those who assume their lifestyles and follow their conduct (sunna) most closely, then the closest (aqrab) of God’s slaves to Him (Glorious and Great!) is the most knowledgeable, the most just, the most merciful and the most compassionate among them.

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 357 This whole sentence is what is intended by the words of all the philosophers: ‘Philosophy is the assimilation to God (Great and Glorious!) in accordance with what lies in the power of man (bi-qadr mā fī †āqat al-insān)’. This is the summation (jumla) of the philosophical lifestyle. It is explained in detail in The Book of the Medicine for the Spirit, for there we have mentioned how bad dispositions are dragged away from the soul and how far the would-be philosopher (mutafalsif ) should devote himself to earning a living, acquiring possessions, spending it and seeking the offices of state. Well, given that we have clarified at this juncture that which we wanted to explain, we will revert to the subject in hand, clarify what is on our mind and mention those who lambast us. We state that we have not to this very day (thanks to the support and assistance of God) lived a lifestyle which disqualifies us deservedly from the appellation of ‘philosopher’. The one who deserves to have the name of ‘philosopher’ removed is he who has fallen short in both parts of philosophy together – I am referring to knowledge and deeds – by not knowing what the philosopher needs to know or living in a manner which is completely unbefitting the philosopher. Praise be to God, thanks to His kindness and support and guidance, we are not guilty of this. In terms (bāb) of knowledge, if we had proved to be capable of composing (taʾlīf ) a pamphlet like this and no more, then that would be enough to prevent the removal of the name of philosophy. But that is to say nothing of our books such as On Proof, On the Divine Knowledge, On the Medicine for the Spirit, our book On the Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature given the title of The Lecture on the Heavens (samʿ al-kiyān, i.e. on physics), our disquisitions On Time, Place, Extent, Eternity and the Void, On the Shape of the World, The Reason why the Earth Stands in the Middle of the Celestial Sphere, and The Reason why the Celestial Sphere Moves in a Circle; our disquisition On Composition (tarkīb), That the Body Moves of its Own Accord and that the Motion can be Known; our books on the soul, our books on matter, our books on medicine such as The Man‚ūrī Treatise, and our book For Those who Do not Have Access to a Physician, our book On Existing Medicaments and the one with the title The Regal Medicine, our book entitled The Compendium which I was the first in the whole realm to write – and no one has as yet imitated my actions or copied what I have done; our books

358 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s on the craft of wisdom known as alchemy among the uneducated. In sum, nigh on two hundred books and disquisitions and epistles which I have produced on the aspects of philosophy involving knowledge of the natural and the divine, right up until the time when I prepared this disquisition [Kraus 108.4–109.11].

Al-Rāzī caps his promotion of his devotion to the scientific aspect of philosophy with a defence of his neglect of geometry before finally launching into his summation of the life of virtue which he has led. What fascinates me about this passage is not the most obvious aspect of al-Rāzī’s defence, that someone who has composed so many works on philosophical subjects must surely deserve the title philosopher. In fact this is not a very convincing defence. It is rather the insight that in devoting himself to mapping out accurately in his works the organisation and governance of God’s creation in all of its philosophical splendour, divine assimilation for al-Rāzī becomes this very activity of composing works in which the divine governance is mirrored, recreated and explained. Books, pamphlets and epistles become the realisation and imitation of the divine virtues of justness, mercy, knowledge and compassion. Whether al-Rāzī owes this insight to his interest in alchemy or not is impossible to determine. N. Governance Let us return to atomism, and composition as aggregation. To recap: the speculative theologians were not content simply to describe material existence as atomistic. They were driven as much by their awe of the omnipotence of God and their reality as creatures as they were by any rationalising imperatives. They meant to give a reasoned and reasonable account of it as pious Muslims for whom monotheism and the unqualified transcendence of God were absolute: they wanted to show not only how the atoms were held together but also to prove that they could only be held together by God. This is how the most eminent historian of early Islamic theology, Professor Josef van Ess, describes Abū al-Hudhayl’s (d. 227/841–2) conversion of the sensualist materialism of atomism into an account of divine creation (remember: Abū al-Hudhayl was the uncle of al-JāªiÕ’s theological mentor, al-NaÕÕām):

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 359 The ‘bundles’ [i.e. of atoms, JEM] need someone to assemble them, and human beings can play that role only from the epistemological angle, as subjects of knowledge . . . if one asks not only by whom the bundles are perceived but also by whom they are created – the answer can only be God . . . God wills atom-substances to form bodies: that is called creation. To achieve the result he has in view – that is, to join together or assemble a quantity of atoms – God adds the accident of juncture, assemblage (taʾlīf ).113

If we substitute ‘writer’ for ‘God’, ‘book’ or ‘treatise’ for ‘bundle’ (of atoms) and ‘reader’ for ‘subject of knowledge’, we have in this conspectus a fairly comprehensive account of early ʿAbbasid writing which I think describes important features of al-JāªiÕ’s approach. O. Compositional Governance According to al-JāªiÕ, successful composition (taʾlīf ) for the composer of prose works required arrangement, and organisation (tadb⁄r): The method of organising (tadb⁄r) a treatise when it is long is for its composer to nurse the vital energy of its reader and to drive him to his lot by ensnaring him [Bayān 3.366.1–367.6].

And here we notice a further correspondence, not only between the uses of ‘composition’ (taʾlīf ) but also between the uses of ‘organisation’ (tadbīr). In other words, composition (in the sense of atomic aggregation) for al-JāªiÕ was an element of the divine governance and organisation as revealed by means of the ‘Design Complex’. Governance, divine providence and the optimal world hinge on the reading of God’s signs. Accurate and conscientious reading of God’s signs is a vital component of what thinkers identified, through their reading of the Qurʾān, as a covenant imposed upon man by God. The covenant is made actual through the signs of God’s existence and God’s prophets. Thus the revealed law indicates how the covenant should be kept.114 In these early ʿAbbasid scientific and theological explorations of the ‘Design Complex’ the divine covenant and the revealed law establish, as it were, the research agenda of the theologians and philosophers.

360 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s P. Muʾallafāt (‘Compositional Aggregations’) The model for writings referred to as ‘compositional aggregations’ is the Qurʾan which, according to al-JāªiÕ, is ‘a body and a sound, a work of composition (taʾlīf ) and arrangement (naÕm)’, a work gifted with ‘its novel and unique arrangement (naÕmu-hu al-badīʿ) the like of which human beings are incapable of’.115 It is this arrangement which, as we saw in the first part of the discussion of the grateful response (Chapter 5.2, pp. 325–6) indicates to us that it is true. And because the Qurʾān is a sound and a compositional aggregate, it must be created and cannot be co-eternal with God.116 According to atomism, the aggregate body which is produced by the bringing together of atoms is a temporary accident. Just as God can deconstruct an aggregation and render it back into its constituent atoms, so too, according to this equivalence, the composition of a text is a temporary accident, for aggregation-composition depends entirely upon the act of the composer. It may be objected that in thus teasing out this analogy between the work of God as creator and composer of existence and the author as creator and composer of an aggregated book I am guilty of violating the Muʿtazilite aversion to anthropomorphism, as expressed in the concept of assimilationism, making God like unto His creatures (tashbīh). But it is for man to seek to draw near to God yet not to make himself like God. When an author composes a large-scale work, the accident of composition which is created and inheres in the work is a quality which also inheres in him as an accident. The only real composer is God. Man’s agency expressed in the act of composition, while autonomous, is also vicarious and so is still evanescent and temporary. In other words it is an accident. I think that this too has far-reaching implications for how al-JāªiÕ considered his large-scale compositions in particular. The units of information, the discussions, arguments and reported speech (i.e. the akhbār) are aggregated temporally and contingently in a manner which depends wholly and is in exclusive dependence on the composer as aggregator, which act of aggregation is not his in any way, just as the atoms of material existence depend wholly and exclusively upon God. So the resultant book, for all its continued permanence when consigned to paper and reproduced in writing, is itself a temporal and contingent phenomenon, an aggregation of

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 361 transient accidents, one which somehow, and quite paradoxically, requires an aggregator-­composer to confer upon it any permanence. I say paradoxically because the act of putting the work onto paper in written form would seem to render the need for an aggregator redundant and to deprive him of his role in ensuring continuity in the aggregation. In the words of Richard Frank, the book like man exhibits ‘a disunity of interiority and a unity of exteriority’.117 Yet for all its appearance of autonomous or self-subsistent endurance and continuity, the composition is entirely dependent upon Him who creates the accident of composition. The composed thing is not anything without the accident of composition and the alighting of the accidents in its atomistic substances. Its completeness does not transcend the moment(s) of the accident(s) of composition, however long God allows them to be repeated. It becomes in these terms almost impossible to speak of the history of a book, for such a history is merely the sum total of a discrete series of momentary accidents. The book can just as readily be decomposed as it can be composed. It is held together by God and in a figurative sense by the author who composed it, whom God allows and empowers to bring about this accident in the text. This existential dependence of text as thing (shayʾ) upon composer means that in the case of an aggregated, composed book, the reader must continue to have recourse to the composer as the agent whom God enables to continue the accident of the composition. The reader must not ascribe this agency (and any authority which may seem to accrue from the agency) to that which is composed (the book) rather than the composer (God and then figuratively the author), for the composition (the book) remains simply a temporary accident. In like measure, a believer would not deflect the responsibility and authority for the signs of creation such as atoms and their aggregates away from God their Creator and ascribe them to the signs themselves. Q. Aristotle’s Physics The Physics of Aristotle is an account of the cosmos decidedly hostile to atomism. It was translated into Arabic in response to the early atomic controversies of the ʿAbbasid speculative theologians. The earliest attested rendering into Arabic of the Physics is that of Sallām al-Abrash during the reign of Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 170–93/786–809) and it was rendered once more by Ibn

362 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Nāʿima al-Óimsī, the translator involved in The Theology of Aristotle, active circa 226–36/840–50. Now, if there is an equivalence between the composition of books and the aggregation of atoms, then the Arabic version of the Physics of Aristotle becomes, after the Qurʾān, an admittedly unlikely yet oddly important manual of composition, one which may paradoxically have nourished, precisely because of its antagonism to the atomistic theory of aggregation, the development of large-scale Arabic prose compilations. It is small wonder perhaps that Ibn Qutayba bemoans the hold which Aristotle’s Organon, Physics and On Generation and Corruption had over his contemporaries, especially the Kalām Masters.118 R. Conclusion Classical Arabic compositions, both poetry and prose, can frequently incline to the minimalist and be devoid of the sorts of narrativisation or devices of presentation we are familiar with, but they seem to me rarely, if ever, to be intentionally anarchic or haphazard: their schemes of discourse are often quite simply different. The creativity of these compositions has often been descried and rejected by scholars as atomistic. Yet would it be too far-fetched to imagine that for a composer such as al-JāªiÕ, taʾlīf, the bringing together, the composition, the aggregation of discrete (atomistic) verses or segues of information, was a form of what Abū al-Hudhayl is said to have referred to as ‘seeking to draw near unto God’ (al-taqarrub ilā Allāh), a devout mimesis of the divine arrangement of the bringing together and maintenance of the composition of bodies through their atoms? And as such, is not this act of mimesis an alternative to the Platonic ideal of godlikeness so popular with the Arabic philosophers, even in its modified form in the writings of al-Kindī, and still so repugnant to the speculative theologians because of its reliance upon the assimilation of God to man?119 As a final example of this way of thinking I wish to take a most remarkable passage from a treatise by al-Bīrūnī in which he celebrates knowledge: It is obligatory for him who serves knowledge not to distinguish between its types, even if he is not created with a ready facility for the containment

the g ra tef ul response, 2  | 363 of all of its types. Rather, it is obligatory for him to know that knowledge is absolutely good in its essence and in relation to its objects, that his pleasure is forever, without cessation, that, as far as its objects are concerned, it arises upon seeking, and ceases upon acquisition; to praise those who devote their energies in provoking the contents of those types of knowledge, when their devotion is to derive pleasure therefrom and to derive pleasure without conquest as occurs in dialectical disputation (jadal ); not to view their actions with a disdainful eye but rather in looking into them to make his goal training of the self (tadarrub) and securing the strength to follow their lead so that he will take what is best and most correct and turn away from what is separate from knowledge which is perfectly accomplished.120

In a seminal study of this passage, Franz Rosenthal noted that it was virtually impossible to overlook how similarly phrased this paean of knowledge is to a standard account of God encountered in many theologies. Rosenthal concluded that this similarity would not have occurred to al-Bīrūnī. I am not so sure. The godhead is knowledge and knowledge is the godhead, and to seek knowledge is to seek to draw close to it. So too God’s divine governance is a series of signs to be read and books, the repositories and the showing forth of these signs through knowledge, figure in writing the divine governance. I hope it is clear now why we should foster in ourselves an aesthetic appreciation of atomism as part of our aspiration to become model readers of some third-century writings. It is a potent example of the bond between the form of a literary work and ‘the need for a cosmological model’ of which Italo Calvino speaks in the third of his memos for the next millennium.121

5.4 Obliquity

C

ognition of the ‘Design Complex’ was widely held to have been implanted in us as human beings. A rightful response to this benefaction, a realisation of man’s moral obligatedness, was found in the use of God’s favoured language, the numinous ʿArabīya, to capture the wondrous signs of creation in compositions which were aggregates in the way that created existence was an aggregate and which were held together vicariously and accidentally by an author who derived his agency from God. In this way an author both aspired to draw near unto God and at the same time remained firmly within the limits of his humanity. But what of the appreciation of the wondrous signs of God’s creation? Was this also implanted by man in God? Were humans also created with a knowledge of how to read the signs? Could humans make mistakes in reading the signs? And, moving from reading signs to reading the compositions which sought to describe these signs, could an audience err in their reading of such books? Clearly the answer to this latter question is ‘yes’ – otherwise al-JāªiÕ’s work would not have been misconstrued, attacked and reprimanded. One of the themes which runs through The Book of Living is that it is also difficult to read the wondrous signs of creation properly. As al-JāªiÕ urges us: ‘Do not go by what your eyes show you. Go by what your reasoning intellect shows you’ (Óayawān 1.207.6).122 If I am right in thinking that The Book of Living was the longest and most ambitious book to have been written in Arabic by the middle of the century, then we might also wonder whether it was easy for its audience to read, to follow its trains of thought, to comprehend its architectonics, and to ­appreciate its totalising ambition. As the first part of the ‘Introduction’ nears its conclusion, al-JāªiÕ 364

obli qui ty | 365 presents his audience with some guidance on how to write books. Advice of this sort, ostensibly aimed at those who mean to compose books, is of course as much concerned with how to read as how to write books. This sequence thus presents us with a kaleidoscopic insight into what kind of ideal reader and writer the ‘Introduction’ sets out to create. Through them, al-JāªiÕ seeks to countermand the addressee’s acerbic invective by positioning himself as a critical reader of his own writings.123 I have labelled this section of The Book of Living ‘the manual of composition’. I will now present a translation of and short commentary on these intriguing pages. A. The Manual of Composition Translation [1] It is imperative for him who writes a book that he should only write it on the understanding that all of his audience are his enemies, that all of them are knowledgeable about his topics (umūr) and that all of them will devote themselves fully to him. In view of this, he should not be happy to leave his book uncultivated124 and he should not be happy with any hastily formed opinion (raʾy), for there is a temptation (fitna) and a presumptuousness (ʿujb) in beginning a book. So when his nature (†abīʿa) has become peaceful, his commotion (ªaraka) has stilled, his humours (akhlā†) have regained their equilibrium and his soul has returned to generous abundance once again, he must scrutinise (naÕar) it carefully once more so as to stop and consider (tawaqquf ) its sections (fu‚ūl ) as does someone whose desire for safety is outweighed by his fear of incurring shame (ʿayb). He must understand the words of the poet:125 Speaking in a secluded spot seduces people and so linguistic ineptitude (ʿīy) and verbosity (ikthār) cling to them obstinately. He must also pause at the maxim people pronounce: ‘Every man who races his courser in an empty field is happy’.126 Therefore he should fear becoming subject to the feelings which come over the man who races his steed on his own or who retires into solitude with his learning when his opponents (khu‚ūm) and the colleagues in his craft who are of the same rank (manzila) as he are absent [1.88.1–12].

366 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s [2] Let him know that the user of the pen is subject to the feelings which come over the preceptor (muʾaddib) when he metes out a thrashing as punishment: how often does he resolve upon five strokes but dishes out a hundred! This is because when he begins the thrashing, his nature (†ibāʿ) is peaceful and this peacefulness enables him to see that moderation is correct. But when he doles out the thrashing, his blood is commoted (taªarraka). This causes heat to spread throughout him and augments his ire (gha∂ab). The ire forces him to think that excess is the correct opinion. The user (‚āªib) of the pen is just like this: how often does someone begin a piece of writing (kitāb), intending a couple of lines, but writes ten. And with moderation, memorisation is more achievable whereas with verbosity, it is less likely [1.88.13–89.6]. [3] Know that the man of reasoning intellect, if he does not follow this advice relentlessly, is often subject to the feelings which come over him about his children – in other words, something abominable in the eyes of another person is deemed pleasing in his eyes. So let him understand that his words are more closely related (nasab) to him than his son is and that his motion (ªaraka) enjoys a greater kinship with him than his children do. This is because his motion is something (shayʾ) he brings about (aªdatha) out of his own soul (nafs) and through his own essence (dhāt): it is separated from the core of his essence (ʿayn jawhari-hi fa‚alat) and comes into existence from his soul (nafs). Children, however, are like the mucus which he blows from his nose and the phlegm which he spits out. Removing from a part of you something which did not come into being out of you and manifesting a movement which did not exist until it came into being out of you are not the same thing. This is the reason why you will find that a man is more deceived about his verse, or more deceived about his words and his books than he is about the rest of his blessings [1.89.7–15]. [4] More than anything else a book needs to make its ideas (maʿānī) comprehensible, so that he who listens to what it contains does not need to ponder it (rawīya). It needs to employ a diction (lafÕ) whereby it will be raised from the diction of the riff-raff (sifla) and the Cloth-Heads (ªashw) but which will not be as elevated as the uncustomary usage and the savage (waªshī) speech of the Bedouin. He (i.e. its author) should not prune and trim it overmuch or purify and distil it too much so that he only utters the very quintessence of

obli qui ty | 367 the quintessential idea (lubb al-lubb), in diction which he has pared (ªadhafa) of all excess and from which he has tossed away all redundancies to the point that it has become pure and unadulterated [1.89.16–90.5]. [5] For if he does this, he will only be understood if he repeats again and again what he wants them to understand because people are accustomed to speech which is generously spread out (mabsū†) and their faculties of comprehension (afhām) will not exceed their habitual abilities (ʿādāt) unless they be taken hold of, reined in and turned around. Do you not see that if you were to read the work which has been given the name The Book of Logic to the preachers of the garrison towns and the eloquent Bedouins, they would not understand most of it? The Book of Euclid contains words in common circulation (kalām yadūr). It is in Arabic and has been purified (‚uffiya), but if one of the preachers were to hear it taught, he would not comprehend it – even someone who intends to teach it would not be able to make him comprehend it because he needs to have a knowledge of the purpose of the subject (jihat al-amr) and to have become accustomed to the logical vocabulary (al-lafÕ al-man†iqī) which has been developed and divorced (ustukhrija) from all other speech [1.89.17–90.13]. [6] Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān asked Íuªār al-ʿAbdī (May God be pleased with both of them!), ‘What is concision?’ ‘That you answer but do not delay and speak but do not stray’, he replied. ‘Is that how you are speaking?’ retorted Muʿāwiya, at which Íuªār said, ‘Forgive my lapse, Prince of the Faithful: Do not stray and do not delay’. Now, if someone were to ask you about concision, and you said, ‘Do not stray and do not delay’, and you happened to be in the company of Khālid b. Íafwān, not even he would understand spontaneously (badīha) and on the spot that your words ‘do not stray’ implied (muta∂ammin) ‘in speech’ and that your words ‘do not delay’ implied ‘in answering’. Yet this is a report (ªadīth) which people have handed down and are satisfied with. If it had been someone asking one of us (baʿ∂i-nā), ‘What is concision?’, I think that he would have replied, ‘Abbreviation’ (ikhti‚ār), for by ‘concision’ (ījāz) the paucity of the number of consonants (ªurūf ) in the word is not what is meant. This kind (bāb) of speech might apply to someone who fills up a whole scroll of papyrus (†ūmār) yet who has still been concise. It is the same with prolixity (i†āla). It is necessary that he (i.e. the speaker) use ellipsis only to the point that it does not close the door of intelligibility, and

368 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s that he avoid repetition, when half is sufficient for comprehension. Anything in excess of this is prattling (kha†al ) [1.90.14–91.12]. [7] I asked al-Óasan al-Akhfash the following questions: ‘You are the most knowledgeable of people about grammar, so why don’t you make your books completely comprehensible, why is it that we comprehend parts of them but do not comprehend the greater part of them, and why is it that you put a degree of complexity (ʿawī‚)127 first and delay some readily comprehensible topics ?’ He replied, ‘I am not someone who has produced (wa∂aʿa) these books on the subject of God. They are not books of religion (kutub al-dīn). If I had produced them in the manner which you invite me to, people would have little further need of me to explicate them. My sole aim is financial gain (manāla), so I produce parts of them in the comprehensible style, in order that the sweetness of what my readers have comprehended might incite them to seek the comprehension of what they have not comprehended. It is only with this arrangement (tadbīr)128 that I have made money, since I set out to make money. But why is it that Ibrāhīm al-NaÕÕām, and so-and-so and such-and-such, write books on the subject of God, so they allege, and they are picked up by someone as competent as I am on the battlefield of debate (muwāqafa), who has an excellent command of speculation (naÕar) and an intense solicitude for learning (ʿināya), and he cannot comprehend the majority of them?’ [1.91.13–92.9] [8] I say: ‘If Yūsuf al-Samtī had written these Stipulations (shurū†)129 during the days when Salmān b. Rabīʿa sat in court for two months, and no two men presented themselves before him, when men’s hearts were uncorrupt and what was due was accorded in full to those to whom it was due, then that would be prattling (kha†al ) and idle chatter (laghw). And if he were to write The Stipulations (shurū†) of Salmān, in his own period, then that would be an act of foolishness – it would be defective, an instance of uncivil misunderstanding of governance (siyāsa) and of what is proper (ya‚luª) in every period. And we find that people become prolix when they declaim on a truce between tribes. When they recite poetry in praise of kings on formal occasions they also become prolix. Prolixity has a place when it does not become prattling (kha†al ) and laconicism (iqlāl ) has a place when it is not the result of inability [1.92.10–93.2]. [9] ‘Were I not absolutely sure that you will no sooner grow bored with the

obli qui ty | 369 chapter on herd camels than you will move on to the elephant, with the small ant than you will move on to the mosquito, with the scorpion than you will move on to the snake, with the man than you will move on to the woman, with flies and bees than you will move on to crows and eagles, with the dog than you will move on to the rooster, with the wolf than you will move on to the lion (sabuʿ), with the cloven-hoof than you will move on to the solidhoof, with the solid-hoof than you will move on to the pad, with the pad than you will move on to the claw, and with the claw than you will move on to the talon (and that you would react in exactly the same way to the discourse on birds and all their types), then I would consider that it was not the book taken as a whole (jumlat al-kitāb) – even if the number of its pages is considerable – which caused weariness and led to me being accused of prolixity. Even though it is one book, it is many books, and every one of its codices (mu‚ªaf ) is an independent work (umm) in its own right [1.93.3–12]. ‘If anyone wants to read the whole work, the first chapter will no sooner seem long to him than he will launch into the second and the second will no sooner seem long than he will launch into the third, for he will constantly learn something useful and be delighted: one part of him will reinvigorate another and his energy (nashā†) will always increase [1.93.12–15]. ‘When he moves from the verses of the Qurʾān, he will come to the tradition (athar), and when he moves from a tradition he will come to a report (khabar); then he will move from the report to some poetry, from poetry to choice anecdotes (nawādir), from the choice anecdotes to the wisdom of reasoned philosophy (ªikam ʿaqlīya) and well tested syllogisms (maqāyīs sidād ). At this point he will not quit this topic – and perhaps it is very heavy going and quickly generates boredom – before being led to levity and jesting, to frivolity (sukhf ) and make-belief (khurāfa), though I do not consider it frivolity (sukhf ) since I have simply applied the method (sīra) of the sages (ªukamāʾ) and the lessons (ādāb) of the scholars (ʿulamāʾ) [1.93.15–94.3]. ‘We notice that when God, Blessed and Exalted!, addresses the Arabs (al-ʿarab) and the Bedouin (al-aʿrāb), He produces speech with indication (ishāra), inspiration (waªy) and ellipsis (ªadhf ). But when He addresses the Sons of Isrāʾīl or quotes (ªakā) their words, He extends His speech ­generously (mabsū†) and increases His words [1.94.4–7]. ‘So the best course of action is to follow the traditions of the scholars

370 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s (ʿulamāʾ), to emulate the example set by the ancients and to adhere to what the general community (jamāʿa) practices’ [1.94.7–8]. Commentary [1] The writing of books should not be undertaken unless the aspirant author acknowledges the hostile reception which awaits his book. This is a resumption of the comments which al-JāªiÕ has made at Óayawān 1.10.11–11.4. But it is also a social activity, no matter how hostile the audience will be. Sharing one’s knowledge and putting it to the test against fellow experts is important for the author and his ideas. At first blush, the emphasis on contestation may seem to contradict his rejection of debate as deleterious to social welfare at 1.84.13–85.4, until we remember one of the other notions which recur throughout the ‘Introduction’: that the solitary study of books is beneficial to social welfare because it permits the avoidance of confrontation in debate. So al-JāªiÕ’s position appears to be that the form of debate and contestation which bring the greatest benefit to society is that which is codified in writing and disseminated in the form of books because in this way people do not need to gather in groups in order to acquire knowledge but can read them in isolation, safe from the perils of rivalry and competitiveness. The commencement of a book is a time of psychological vulnerability. It is an occasion when its author is prone to self-deception and overweening arrogance about the value of his thoughts. Therefore what one has written should always be rigorously proofed and checked when one has returned to a state of psychological and physical equanimity. Al-JāªiÕ’s psychology of writing can usefully be compared with his psychology of communication derived from Bishr b. al-Muʿtamir’s theory of nashā† as expounded in The Book of Clarity and Clarification and his psychology of the varying intellective capacities of human beings (wusʿ).130 [2] Al-JāªiÕ expands upon the points he made at the beginning of his guide and offers, in the process, a proleptic analysis and defence of his own treatise (which is extremely long and so less likely to be committed to memory). He resumes maxims concerning memory made by al-Khalīl b. Aªmad and al-NaÕÕām at Óayawān 1.59.1–2. Unlike many of his contemporaries, especially in Basra, where the cultivation of prodigious memories was especially valued, al-JāªiÕ was not in favour of excessive memorisation, arguing that

obli qui ty | 371 this could lead to over-reliance on and uncritical acceptance of the views of others.131 This is, of course, one of the reasons why The Book of Living and The Book of Clarity and Clarification are so long: in order to render them impractical to memorise, as al-JāªiÕ implies here (though more prodigious feats of memory are attested for the scholars of the Óadīth in the third century and after). His psychology of the passions is informed by a basic application of Galenic physiology and the commotion of the four humours as well as the Aristotelian-inspired speculations of the Kalām Masters on the physics of movement.132 [3] Not even the ʿāqil, the man of reason, is immune to this physiology. One should view one’s books as one does one’s children: by realising that one is all too prone to being deceived about them. In fact, children, being the consequence of ejaculate, are like any other ejaculate which one ejects from one’s body: they are therefore not properly part of one’s inner being, unlike speech which is an action that man creates of his own accord, one that is not the product of any other substance being generated in him. The language which al-JāªiÕ uses at 1.89.10–12 is very typical of the early Kalām Masters: ªaraka, shayʾ, aªdatha, dhāt, ʿayn (itself an early precursor of jawhar), kawn. It is consistent with the analysis of ire in the previous paragraph. The use of juzʾ at 1.89.13 is obscure. [4] The primary requirement of the book is that it operate in accordance with the bayān: see the definition in The Book of Clarity and Clarification, al-bayān huwa al-fahm wa-al-ifhām, clear communication is understanding and making others understand (Bayān 1.76.4). Its ideas should be readily comprehensible; its choice of lexicon should not be too common or lowly, such as one finds among the riff-raff and the adherents of the Óadīth (i.e. the proto-ahl al-ªadīth, soon to become the Sunnī Óadīth folk) who were routinely upbraided by al-JāªiÕ for stuffing (ªashw) their discourse (and their memories) with unnecessary padding and verbiage. It should not be too lofty and recondite so as to be wild (waªshī) or strange (gharīb) like the language of the desert Arabs. It should not be over-refined (the use of alchemical language at Óayawān 1.90.3–5 should be noticed) and it should not be too pared down or elliptical so as to be impenetrable. [5] Two prominent books derived from the antique scientific and philosophical tradition and available in Arabic are chosen as case studies of an

372 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s over-technical vocabulary and an overspecialised discipline: the Logic, by which al-JāªiÕ probably means the paraphrase by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 139/756), which he relied extensively upon in composing the chapter on bayān in The Book of Clarity and Clarification, and The Elements of Euclid (praised by the Apologist of Books at Óayawān 1.80.7–8).133 If they were to be taught by either of the methods most commonly used by Muslim scholars (qirāʾa, according to which a student would read a text under the supervision of his teacher; and samāʿ, according to which a student would ‘audit’, i.e. listen to a text being read or recited by a teacher) to the recognised experts in Arabic, namely the preachers (khu†abaʾ) and the eloquent Bedouins, these works would not be understood, even though the Elements is available in a much-worked-upon Arabic translation. This is because the principles of the discipline need to be comprehended and one needs familiarity with the technical vocabulary of logic above all, which is so specialised that it seems to have been taken completely out of the orbit of normal language.134 [6] Al-JāªiÕ composed an epistle On Eloquence and Concision, Fī al-Balāgha wa-al-Ījāz.135 The exchange between Muʿāwiya and Íuªār is also to be found at Bayān 1.96.12–15. The didactic nature of the manual is at its most evident here in al-JāªiÕ’s advice to the addressee and his own companions (see the phrase baʿ∂i-nā at 1.91.6). Note that he also uses some basic terms also used by the grammarians (although his usage is different from theirs): ªadhf and muta∂ammin. His proposed definition of ījāz as ikhti‚ār is intended to remove any notion of brevity or curtness from its ambit: see also Bayān 1.91.2–93.14. Concision is a question of fitting what you want to say to the subject, situation or location in which you are going to say it. Ibn Qutayba, in his Adab al-Kātib, Education of the Bureaucrat (Grünert 19.1–20.4; al-Dālī 19.9–20.7), agrees about matching concision to occasion but thinks of ījāz exclusively in terms of brevity and curtness. [7] Al-JāªiÕ was not an enthusiast of the methods of the grammarians, who he thought restricted themselves to one aspect of Arabic, its declension (iʿrāb), at the expense of other, more important features of language and communication. The grammarian al-Akhfash al-Awsa†’s defence of his books is witty. He is not a theologian, writing books of religion on the subject of and in honour of God. He writes books of grammar to earn a living. In order to earn as good a living as possible, he puts his books together in such a way that the

obli qui ty | 373 easy bits act as an incentive for his readers to come to him for the explanation of the more abstruse and recondite sections. We note that al-JāªiÕ himself argues in favour of organising a book so as to encourage a reader to continue with it. Like al-Akhfash, al-JāªiÕ is also, I think, reluctant for the book (as social and cultural artefact) to eclipse or eradicate the author: they both share the aim of encouraging readers to have recourse to the authors of the books they are reading. However, he disagrees with al-Akhfash on his choice of presentation, since according to him a book should be entirely comprehensible if it is to fulfil its purpose of communication. Presumably recondite topics ought to be reserved for texts intended for the scholarly circle or epistles exchanged between experts. Al-Akhfash has therefore failed in his duty as an author and a teacher, according to al-JāªiÕ’s ideal of matching articulation to subject, occasion and audience. That is also why the criticism of al-NaÕÕām voiced by al-Akhfash seems to meet with al-JāªiÕ’s acquiescence, for his theological writings are in no whit different from al-Akhfash’s works of grammar. Al-JāªiÕ implies that his own books are ‘books of religion’ (i.e. are theological works) for theological books dedicated to God and released to a general audience (rather than being restricted, say, to the school setting) ought to be easy to comprehend. In al-JāªiÕ’s lexicon, such books, his own included, should be driven by the communicative ideal of fahm, understanding, and ifhām, giving to understand. Formally, in terms of the presentation of the argument, 1.91.13–92.9 is, if not quite a digression, an example of a technique whereby al-JāªiÕ interlaces topics by breaking up the presentation of one topic (here, prolixity) with a reiteration of an earlier topic (here, comprehension). This provides the sequence of: (i/a) comprehension (1.89.16–90.13); (ii) concision (1.90.14– 91.10); (iii/a) prolixity (1.91.10–12); (i/b) comprehension (1.91.13–92.9); (iii/b) prolixity (1.92.10–93.2).136 [8] Speech, including written speech (and written words were still thought of as spoken), must be appropriate to its time and occasion, otherwise it is either verbiage or defective. In the anecdote, Salmān’s time represents a forensic ‘golden age’ when justice was dispensed carefully and scrupulously, one marked by an absence of litigation. The legal knowledge required in the time of Salmān is not that required in the time of Yūsuf; if Yūsuf were to have written his Stipulations during the golden age of Salmān, such an act would

374 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s be excessive (i.e. useless verbiage); if he were to write up Salmān’s stipulations for his own epoch, then that would be a naive and deficient action, one uncivil to the judiciary and a wrong way to govern society, for Salmān’s rulings would not be appropriate for the kinds of cases pursued during Yūsuf’s time. [9] There are occasions when brevity is appropriate and occasions when discoursing at length is justified. Formal declamations, and especially panegyrics, tend to be long as do orations when a truce is negotiated. Al-JāªiÕ could therefore mount a justification of his treatise on the grounds that its length is both merited and determined by it being a panegyric of God in celebration of His creation. One can, however, organise a long book in such a way that it is in effect a sequence of short books (the ambivalent nature of books, being both one thing and its opposite, is intoned once again). Each of these short, and self-contained, works is, moreover, a polygeneric assemblage: it contains a well-ordered, hierarchically disposed, selection of the types of discourse available to ʿAbbasid writers, from the most sublime to the most disreputable. This polygeneric style is demanded by the psychological disposition of the audience, for it is such variety which sustains the mental energy of the audience and stimulates them intellectually and physically. The recourse to the concept of nashā† pioneered by Bishr b. al-Muʿtamir is a reminder that the whole treatise is oriented towards ifhām, making to understand, and that al-JāªiÕ’s thinking is again informed by his application of the concept of wusʿ, psychic capacity for reasoning, which varies from one individual to another. This mixing of registers has a Qurʾanic prototype. In applying it, al-JāªiÕ is conforming with accepted practice established by the ancients (qudamāʾ), and the scholars (ʿulamāʾ). Of course, al-JāªiÕ is being slightly disingenuous here. He does not, as far as I can determine, apply this method or this sequence rigorously in every tractate of the work, but it is hard to deny in general terms the adequacy of his description as a characterisation of The Book of Living. This is also a waspishly clever rebuttal of the addressee’s invective against the book for being too long. It works on several levels. As I see it, the argument is as follows. You have rejected the book as being too long and have accused me of long-windedness, but I know how you read and react – you are easily bored and will flit from one subject to another. I have organised

obli qui ty | 375 the book to take account of the fact that you do not read as a serious scholar would, devoting his full attention and time to the task. Therefore the book is a series of self-contained tractates and each tractate is written so as to incorporate a plethora of genres, each one leading to the next, in an order of decreasing importance, from the Holy Qurʾān to tall tales and fables (khurāfa). What’s more, the light subjects are deployed as relief for the reader after the rigours of philosophy and syllogistic reasoning; in this I have merely followed scholarly and philosophical antecedents and have acted in accordance with the custom of our society (jamāʿa). Indeed the Qurʾān contains both terse and condensed passages addressed to the kind of audience who will understand this style of discourse and more ample, loosely expressed passages, addressed to or as quotations of the Israelites. My book may be long, though its constituent parts are short, but its length is appropriate to its occasion. Your criticism of it as being too long is, therefore, unfounded and inaccurate. What’s more, the fact that you cannot read a book written and presented even like this, is an indication of how much in need you are of improvement, of how uninformed your invective of my work is – in fact you have erred so far from the Truth that you are as misguided as the Israelites in the Qurʾān. Is this kind of writing and thinking about writing, what some modern critics would refer to as metatextuality, typical of al-JāªiÕ and his society? What kind of book (and society) are we presented with, in view of this kind of theorising about books and their composition, to say nothing of books and creation? These are just some of the questions which I am not yet in a position to answer but would dearly love to find answers to, answers towards which I seek to move in this book. So al-JāªiÕ is not averse to giving us guidance on how to copy his compositional style and on how read his writings. This guidance is often, however, characterised by obliquity. It can be extremely difficult to assess. It can sometimes be misleading or disingenuous. In The Book of Living, he provides many such pieces of advice. Let us take a look at two passages, both taken from the first part of the ‘Introduction’. The first, which we have just met as part of pericope [9] (Óayawān 1.93.3– 12) of the ‘Manual of Composition’, is professedly an account of the structure of the treatise and al-JāªiÕ’s rebarbative justification of the prolixity which the

376 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s addressee has discerned therein. We can state at the outset that this list does not describe the order of animals as they are discussed in the treatise. In fact, the list is a set of similar pairs (e.g. man and woman, scorpion and snake). So then, if al-JāªiÕ is not describing the structure of The Book of Living, which book or what kind of a book is he describing, one that both is and is not one book, one that both is and is not many books? After all, according to this description, it is a most curious creation, one that is both itself (singular) and its opposite (plural). And what kind of a reader does he describe, one who needs to be led swiftly from one subject to another, almost breathlessly and with no pause for rest? The answers to these questions are not immediately apparent either from the passage itself or the context in which it is encountered.137 B. Octuplets Somewhat further on in this section of the ‘Introduction’ to his book, al-JāªiÕ quotes a statement on the eight aspects of composition by the Greek philosopher Democrates: Democrates (Dīmuqrā†) said: ‘It is vital to know that there are eight aspects (awjuh) to every book of learning (ʿilm) which any of the sages has produced (wa∂aʿa): they are ambition (himma), usefulness (manfaʿa), affinity (nisba), genuineness (‚iªªa), type (‚inf ), assemblage (taʾlīf ), support (isnād ) and arrangement (tadbīr)’ [Óayawān 1.101.15–18]. The first means that its author must have ambition; that there should be some usefulness in what he has produced; that it should have an affinity to which it is connected; that it should be genuine; that it should be recognisable (maʿrūf ) according to one of the types of books; that it should be assembled (muʾtalif ) out of five parts (ajzāʾ); that it should be supported on one of the aspects (wujūh) of wisdom (ªikma); and that it should have an arrangement (tadbīr) which can be described [Óayawān 1.101.18–102.4]. It is recorded that Hippocrates (Abuqrā†) has brought together these eight aspects in this book, namely his book which is called Afūrīsmū138 (aphorismoi), the translation (tafsīr) of which is The Book of Aphorisms (fu‚ūl ) [Óayawān 1.102.5–6].139

Are these two statements, one purporting to describe the book itself and the other the act of putting a book together and what to include in that book,

obli qui ty | 377 compatible? Has al-JāªiÕ adapted this Democratean notion of authorship and the accompanying comment on Hippocrates’s method in the Aphorisms as both a template for the composition of The Book of Living, and as guidance for his readers on how to read the work? As I have had noted previously, it is frequently the case in al-JāªiÕ’s writings that the identity of the speaker is as important for an evaluation of a statement as what is actually said. Democrates’s pronouncement on books is a quotation within a quotation. It is the conclusion to a long paean of books as the best legacy which one can bequeath to one’s children, presented by al-JāªiÕ as an account of the traditional practice of ‘the philosophers of the Yunānīya’ (literally the Ionians, the ʿAbbasid term for the ancient, pre-Byzantine Greeks; they referred to the Byzantines as al-Rūm, Romans) (1.98.17–102.6). Unfortunately, in this instance, the identity of the enunciators is not specified: qālū, they said. In other words, this is presented as an item of common, cultural consensus. The pronouncement by Democrates and the comment on Hippocrates are obviously drawn by their enunciators with approval from the Greek-Arabic cultural archive. Whether al-JāªiÕ quotes and refers to them with approval is not clear from the text. Their provenance is unknown. I am inclined to think that he does. The explanation of Democrates’s pronouncement (‘it is said’) and the reference to Hippocrates’s Aphorisms can, with some confidence, be ascribed to al-JāªiÕ. In Democrates’s octuplet an ideal book is defined, just as an ideal morality is defined in the so-called ‘Octagon of Justice’, the eight maxims thought to have been inscribed on Aristotle’s tomb and which proved enduringly popular with authors writing in Arabic, or as knowledge is encapsulated and defined in the eight treatises of the Aristotelian Organon.140 The set of eight items is significant. It points us to late Alexandria. In fact these pronouncements of Democrates and Hippocrates belong to an enduringly popular tradition of pedagogical advice for students which the Muslims adapted from sixth-century Alexandrian methods of teaching medicine and philosophy (and reading their course books), as formulated by Palladius and Stephanus in their commentaries on Hippocrates and by Elias and David in their commentaries on Aristotle. In addition to philosophical writings, it is also found in much later Arabic scientific works as diverse as a treatise on

378 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s optical health and works of history and topography, while in a theological treatise it is used not to describe an actual piece of writing but to define theology as a scientific discipline.141 C. Al-Fārābī’s Version In order to appreciate just how, in al-JāªiÕ’s text, a (descriptive) pedagogical device designed to prepare students for instruction and reading and studying their course books, be they philosophical or medical, has been transmogrified into an apparently normative declaration of how a book is to be composed and arranged and read, let us compare a version of the octuplet given by al-Fārābī (d. 339/950) in his handbook to logical terminology The Treatise on the Terms Employed in Logic, Kitāb al-AlfāÕ al-Mustaʿmala fī al-Man†iq: After this it is necessary that we enumerate the matters which the student must know in opening every book. It is not difficult for you to learn them from their enumeration by the recent commentators. They are: the aim (ghara∂) of the book; its usefulness (manfaʿa); its division (qisma); its affinity (nisba); its rank (martaba); its title (ʿunwān); the name of its composer (wā∂iʿ); and the manner of instruction which is employed therein. By ‘the aim’ is meant those matters the identification (taʿrīf ) of which is intended in the book. Its ‘usefulness’ is the usefulness of what is learned from the book in some other thing external to that book. By ‘its division’ is meant the number of the parts (ajzāʾ) of the book, be they discourses (maqālāt) or fascicules (fu‚ūl ) or some other designation such as is appropriate to be taken as agnomens (alqāb) for the parts of a book – miscellanea (funūn), chapters (literally, ‘doors’: abwāb) and the like – and the identification (taʿrīf ) of what each part contains. By the ‘affinity’ of the book is meant the explanation (taʿrīf ) of which art (‚ināʿa) the book belongs to. By the ‘rank’ is meant the rank of the book within that art – which rank is it? Is it a part which is first, middle or last or some other rank in that art? Its ‘title’ is the meaning of the name of the book. The meaning of the ‘name of the composer of the book’ is obvious, whereas we have clarified the meaning of ‘the manner of instruction’ (naªw al-taʿlīm) previously. When known, each is an enrichment in teaching the contents of the book.142

obli qui ty | 379 Al-Fārābī’s interest lies overwhelmingly in instruction. This octuplet represents preliminaries which the student must seek to establish when he intends to begin studying any book and which the teacher must ensure the student knows. It is to be anticipated by the student that the book may contain the octuplet, although al-Fārābī admits that not all of this data is recoverable. He does note that when it is, it is of genuine benefit to comprehending the work. He then explains that the reason that this data is not always recoverable is precisely because Aristotle and his followers do not always provide it: In most of his books Aristotle can scarcely omit the major items among these which are required: aim and usefulness. Frequently he mentions affinity and rank and often alongside them the method of instruction which is used in the book.143

In other words, these eight preliminaries are a pedagogical and exegetical but not a compositional strategy. Al-Fārābī’s terminology reflects the Arabic version of this octuplet which became standard despite some minor modifications. Scholars have demonstrated its fidelity as a translation of its Greek prototypes. Yet, it is obviously not identical to that of Democrates quoted by al-JāªiÕ. (The Arabic terminology devised for Aristotle’s ten categories underwent a similar process of refinement.) We need to go back in time, to the early stages of the ʿAbbasid translations of Greek texts, to find parallels to the terminological lexicon of al-JāªiÕ’s quotation of Democrates. There are some other versions of the Democratean octuplet which I am aware of in third-century writings: in The Definitions of Logic, Óudūd al-Man†iq, by Ibn Bihrīz (early third century?); The Great Introduction to the Science of the Rulings of the Stars, al-Mudkhal al-Kabīr ilā ʿIlm Aªkām al-Nujūm, by Abū Maʿshar (d. 272/886); and in an as yet unpublished partial commentary on Hippocrates’s Aphorisms attributed to a certain ʾFlʾdhnwsh, a transcription which presumably masks the name Palladius, the sixth-century AD iatrosophist and commentator on the works of Hippocrates. The lexicon of Ibn Bihrīz’s book of logic reveals greater affinities with the ‘mainstream’ tradition (as represented in al-Fārābī’s text).144

380 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s D. Hippocrates’s Aphorisms The Aphorisms of Hippocrates, a school compilation of pithy pronouncements on manifold aspects of the medical art, arranged traditionally in seven books, was the corner-stone of medical education and practice from its first collection by the Hippocratean school of Cos in the fifth or fourth century BC until the eighteenth century. The appeal of the Aphorisms, however, transcended the craft of the physician and the work came to be viewed as the masterpiece of the divine Hippocrates as his name entered the Hellenistic canon alongside Homer and Thucydides. The Hippocratic treatises were studied in the late antique Academy of Alexandria. They were systematically arranged with a view to their pedagogical effectiveness. The Aphorisms was studied first as the summation of the medical art, then the student read those works which described the healthy human condition followed by the nosological works, which were in turn variously divided according to types of disease. It was commented upon by Palladius, and then by his pupil, Stephanus, who praises the form, wisdom and style of the treatise. There arose a tradition of interpreting the Aphorisms allegorically, seeing in it universal laws foretelling and regulating events.145 The Aphorisms proved no less popular in the Arabic tradition. There were at least two translations and the work was regularly quoted and discussed. At the time of the composition of The Book of Living, we know from Óunayn b. Isªāq’s account of his translations of Galen that Ibn al-Mudabbir (Aªmad b. Muªammad) commissioned from Óunayn a translation of Galen’s commentary on the Aphorisms, a commission which was terminated and ultimately honoured by Muªammad b. Mūsā. The statement quoted by al-JāªiÕ certainly implies that in some circles the Aphorisms were being celebrated as an exemplary composition. The work, then, presumably enjoyed considerable topicality in some contemporary elite circles and, perhaps not surprisingly, later in the century Ibn al-Muʿtazz (247–96/861–908) fully embedded the Hippocratean example in an Arabic cultural setting when he composed a work of Fu‚ūl in the format of an Arabic compendium of aphoristic sayings.146

obli qui ty | 381 E. Palladius’s Commentary on Hippocrates’s Aphorisms Much uncertainty surrounds how al-JāªiÕ positions himself in his many writings with regard to the Graeco-Arabic heritage which dominated so many aspects of the elite culture of ʿAbbasid society in the middle of the third century. There is no reason for us to expect consistency of this position across the many works of his which feature items from this archive or even that these writings represent a coherent response to the Graeco-Arabica considered as a single archive. Elements of this complex and multifarious archive may be presented favourably in one work, but not others. And of course the position which we adopt on the question of al-JāªiÕ and the Graeco-Arabica will determine how ultimately we evaluate these two statements and respond to them as directions or misdirections for the reader of The Book of Living, or even as obliquitous, that is as directions which, if taken entirely at face value or if improperly considered, will misdirect. On folio 1b of the singleton manuscript of Palladius’s commentary in Arabic, we encounter an almost perfect match of al-JāªiÕ’s octuplet, only the placement of ‚iªªa, genuineness, is at variance, coming between the items of taʾlīf, assemblage, and isnād, support, rather than between nisba, affinity, and ‚inf, type. As al-JāªiÕ does in The Book of Living, so the Commentator offers an explanation of the series. According to the paraphrase provided by Hinrich Biesterfeldt, who discovered the manuscript in a private collection in 1972, the ‘ambition’ of the Aphorisms lies in its encyclopaedism; its ‘usefulness’ is that it is indispensable to both the seasoned physician and the neophyte; its ‘genuineness’ is obvious from a comparison with other works by Hippocrates; the work’s ‘affinity’ is Kitāb al-Taf‚īl (by ‘affinity’ here the work’s title, al-Fārābī’s ʿunwān, seems to be intended); its ‘type’ is that it is ‘the key to the science of medicine’ and so should be studied first (al-Fārābī’s martaba); its ‘assemblage’ is its division into seven parts; its ‘support’ consists in that it is founded on both practical and theoretical medicine; its arrangement is ‘combinatory’, with lengthy accounts (ªadīth), division into pithy statements (taf‚īl: i.e. into aphorisms, fusūl ), and a ‘mixed’ style which combines these two methods of instructions.147 This translation of Palladius’s Commentary on the Aphorisms was carried

382 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s out by an older contemporary of al-JāªiÕ, al-Bi†rīq, a Melkite Christian, probably active during the caliphate of al-Man‚ūr (r. 136–58/754–75), the first ʿAbbasid caliph officially to commission and patronise translations of Greek learning. Al-Bi†rīq’s translating activities comprised both medicine and astrology. We know that ʿUmar b. Farrukhān (d. 200/816), a translator of astrological works written in Pahlavi, commissioned him to translate from Greek into Arabic Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, the bible of classical astrology. His son, Yaªyā (or Yūªannā) b. al-Bi†rīq was also active as a translator.148 When he refers to the Aphorisms, I am fairly certain that al-JāªiÕ has al-Bi†rīq’s translation in mind. The explanation of Democrates’s pronouncement given in The Book of Living is not that of al-Bi†rīq’s translation of Palladius as it has come down to us. It is for this reason that I think that the explanatory gloss in The Book of Living is not a quotation but is provided by al-JāªiÕ (though he does not draw attention to his own voice). So the pronouncement of al-JāªiÕ’s Democrates and the octuplet provided in the Arabic translation of Palladius’s commentary are identical, though how Democrates has entered the tradition as the enunciator of the series remains unclear. (I expect that it has been a scribal mistake for Buqrā†, though this would be to reverse the law of the lectio difficilior.) The glosses provided in both texts are not identical: the account in Palladius remains descriptive and exegetical, while I read al-JāªiÕ’s gloss as tending to the normative. Al-JāªiÕ’s reference to the Aphorisms is an acknowledgment of the close association between the octuplet and the Hippocratic text, and is presumably a reference to al-Bi†rīq’s translation of Palladius’s commentary. If I am correct in reading al-JāªiÕ’s gloss as normative, can the octuplet be applied to The Book of Living? The author’s ‘ambition’ is to provide an account of how to read God’s signs as enunciated in His creation. Its ‘usefulness’ is that the believer is thereby able to thank his benefactor, God. It is obviously ‘genuine’, it is ‘assembled’ of seven parts, as opposed to the ‘five’ of the gloss and is ‘supported’ on the philosophical inquiry into nature associated with the early ʿAbbasid interest in Greek learning (as well as drawing on lexicography, Qurʾanic exegesis, Islamic law and legal thinking, Arabic poetry and speculative theology). Its method of ‘instruction’ is combinatory in that it mixes concision with prolixity and passes swiftly under review a plethora of subjects in order to replenish the psychic energy of its audience.

obli qui ty | 383 Yet although the book represented a technological breakthrough, it does not unambiguously belong to a recognisable ‘type’ of writing, nor can we be specific about its possible ‘place’ in the JāªiÕian curriculum, even were we to suppose that such a thing ever existed. So al-JāªiÕ may have composed The Book of Living with Democrates’s octuplet in mind. Thus we learn as much about his book in a remark which he does not explicitly draw our attention to, as we do from the specific advice he gives on how to respond to his work. In other words, taken individually, these passages are obliquitous, but when taken together, the directions which they provide are both complementary and enlightening. But does this mean that al-JāªiÕ composed The Book of Living with the Aphorisms of Hippocrates in mind also? For Carlo Ginzburg, aphorisms and aphoristic writings are ‘an attempt to formulate evaluations of man and society on the basis of symptoms and clues’.149 Whilst I would not want to argue that The Book of Living is modelled on the Aphorisms, in the manner of a contestatory emulation (muʿāra∂a), I would argue that The Book of Living draws some of its inspiration and method from Hippocratic medicine. F. Reading Disease Al-JāªiÕ presents creation as a system of signs which we, with his guidance, must learn to read. This process of deciphering is analogous to medical semiology, the reading of the signs of a disease. As the Hippocratic physicians recommend, in the cataloguing of signs attention is paid to even the most seemingly insignificant of details, details which might, to the untutored eye, appear to be completely irrelevant. The catalogues of signs which the physicians compiled are rarely hierarchically arranged, being instead recorded with little initial concern for prioritisation, because it is only when taken in its totality, in comparison with the other recorded signs, that the sign can properly be interpreted, can be made to signify. The interpreter’s judgement is global – it is an assessment of the whole set of signs. Just as both the disease and the inner workings of the human body remain beyond the grasp of the physician, and as the Hippocratic method is designed to enable him to move from the seen to the unseen, so too the JāªiÕian semiology of creation is designed to allow the reader to pass from the phenomenal world to the invisible world of divine majesty. Central to the reading of signs

384 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s in both systems are tajriba, experience, and ʿiyān, autopsy, seeing with one’s own eyes. They in turn are enhanced and directed by reasoned analogy, that is qiyās (analogy) informed by ʿaql (reasoning intellect).150 And in The Book of Living the reasoning intellect also acts as a vital tool in the process whereby the observer goes beyond drawing analogies to attempting to interpret and decipher the invisible. For al-JāªiÕ this process of rendering analogies into interpretations is also informed by the practices of Qurʾanic exegesis, Islamic legal method, and dialectical reasoning. Thus, al-JāªiÕ’s treatise, we might say, is a theological exploration and expansion of the Hippocratic medical tradition in Arabic. The paradigm common to both is evidential, what Ginzburg has identified as ‘presumptive’ (i.e. able to move from effects to causes) and ‘divinatory’ (scrutiny of the infinitesimal as the means to discover that which is not directly observable by the investigator). The conjecture fundamental to Hippocratic medicine is transformed into certainty by al-JāªiÕ’s belief in the verity of the Qurʾān. Of course, al-JāªiÕ did not need to turn to the Arabic Hippocrates for encouragement to read creation for signs of the Creator’s majesty and beneficence. We have seen in the discussion of the ‘Design Complex’ that it is a much-intoned injunction in the Qurʾān that man should thus heed God’s signs (itself an avatar of Mesopotamian hieroscopy, the endeavour to read the divine messages written everywhere around us). The Qurʾān equally enjoins man to develop methods for interpreting these signs. In other words, it exhorts us to read the signs but does not tell us how to read them. One of the principal strands of al-JāªiÕ’s interpretative response to this exhortation is Hippocratic observation and its evidential paradigm.151 G. The Semiotics of Design The uncertainty which we as readers experience in our attempts to unravel al-JāªiÕ’s statements about his own work contrasts starkly with the lack of equivocation in his promotion of nature, that is God’s creation, as a system of signs. What does it mean for al-JāªiÕ to claim in his treatment of the Divisions of Creation that ‘we discover that the universe exists in such a way as to provide wisdom’ (1.33.4) and that this wisdom takes the form of signs (dalīl )? Many human societies have responded to animals by viewing them as

obli qui ty | 385 signs of some other thing, be it deities or as mirror images of themselves. A sign, be it an animal or some other thing, is never quite fully itself but always indicates some other thing (its referent).152 This other thing is invariably absent, for although it may well exist, the fact of its not being present is what requires the presence of the sign. The sign’s mode of existence therefore is through a perpetual sequence of deferrals or postponements, as it waits for its meanings to be read. The value of the sign is also deferred because its value consists in something other than itself: namely, that which it indicates. Signs form part of semiotic systems – it is the system which enables the signs to indicate, which endows the whole process with meaning. Signs within such systems are interdependent: they need other signs to be able to indicate and they often share with other signs that which they signify. Sometimes signs signify other signs and so one absence indicates another absence. In such cases, we encounter a circle of substitution, as the semiotic system itself is a phenomenon of postponement, because the very substances which the signs indicate are absent. This is most readily recognisable in the case of self-referential artistic creations which locate their meaning in other artistic creations, as when a love poem is both a sign of other love poems and of the absent beloved to which it refers; or in the case of a writing, in which the imagined world enjoys at best a parasitical relationship to the world which it recreates. There is however an important distinction to be made: in the system presented to us in The Book of Living, one of al-JāªiÕ’s signs (man) is endowed with the ability to draw inferences from himself qua sign. Man can never be separately or independently himself: on the one hand, his existence as a sign is postponed until he is given value through being read, while on the other he is the one who bestows value on other signs through discerning what they signify. And within this second circle of substitution, al-JāªiÕ enjoys a privileged place because it is he who points out to other men their privileged existence as inferential signs. This privilege consists of the God-given cognition of design and the ensuing desire to decode His creation. Al-JāªiÕ affirms that creation is a system of signs. In this he is entirely in keeping with what the Qurʾān says about the signs of creation and about itself as one of those signs.153 He is at pains to remind the addressee that we must not be seduced by the sign to mistake its referent as substance

386 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s but see it for what it is. In effect, we must not forget that we as humans exist in a state of deferral. Because everything in creation is a sign, the semiotic system to which it belongs, creation, is a circle of substitution and a phenomenon of postponement. Interpretation, the hermeneutic at man’s disposal for connecting signs with their referents, must be carefully controlled. Language (the means at man’s disposal to communicate his interpretative decoding of the system) is in its turn a loose conglomeration of conventions (i.e. it is itself another semiotic system) and is ultimately not able to confer any reality on the signs whose significations man seeks to capture in and through it. Nothing within this system has an independent reality. Everything is mimetic – it exists as a sign of something which is absent. That absent something which everything indicates mimetically is God. It is He who confers existence upon these semiotic systems and who alone exists. The existence of all the signs of creation depends exclusively and entirely upon Him. And in keeping with semiotic systems as phenomena of postponement, the circle of substitution will continue indefinitely or will only be terminated in the removal (in the collapse and annihilation) of the system. For al-JāªiÕ, it is on the Day of Judgement when creation, the system of signs, is brought to an end, when the true interpretation of creation is revealed, and when, upon God’s passing of the final judgement as to the real value and worth of human beings as signs, existence will move from the terrestrial to the celestial or the infernal. In his location of God as the sole reality and creation as a series of signs without independent existence we might be tempted to discern the stirrings and makings of an occasionalism which would later characterise how Ashʿarite theology decoded the universe. In this respect creation and books mirror one another. Both are semiotic systems, both are mimetic and their significations are completely contingent upon God, while man is their decoder. The end of both is postponed or deferred until a final judgement. The Book of Living, as a relentlessly mimetic act of interpretation of the signs of creation, is thus fictitious. Like fiction, it exists in a condition of parasitical dependence on another semiotic system. As the clear expression of a sign (man) endowed by God with the power to draw inferences (i.e. as a book by al-JāªiÕ) it indicates that its system of representation is a self-referential

obli qui ty | 387 reading of the signs of creation but not one which confuses the true significance of the signs. The Book of Living, which assimilates other semiotic systems within its own, and indicates the cross-references between them is ‘a temporal system of cross-references among signs’.154 It is the allegorical book of creation. And so its mode of existence as a reading and figuring forth of signs is as circular as the semiotic system it sets out to read. And like that system the book can only be completed, its reading only be finished, the circle can only be i­nterrupted, in death. It is of the nature of totalising works and books of fiction that they remain incomplete, even when finished.155 That The Book of Living was left unfinished is an expression of the incompleteness of the globalising vision. If I am correct in reading The Book of Living as an exercise in writing the book of the book of creation, it is impossible to see how it could have been finished during its author’s lifetime, for the act of reading (and then writing) God’s creation can only be brought to an end in death.

6.1 An Eristical Contest

O

ne question still haunts me despite all my preceding attempts to come to terms with The Book of Living. What exactly were al-JāªiÕ and the unnamed Addressee quarrelling over? Al-JāªiÕ finishes his ‘Introduction’ by returning to their disagreement. In this part I translate the whole passage. In the process I try to reveal the nature of their disagreement and also identify the kind of writing to which the ‘Introduction’ belongs, something which eluded me earlier in Chapter 4.2. The ‘Design Complex’ teaches us that we are equipped by God with the innate ability to recognise the signs of His governance as manifest in His creation.1 Along with this ability to recognise His signs, God is additionally beneficent to us in that He exhorts us to ponder creation and puts it entirely at our service.2 We must, then, set this ability in motion. But even when set in motion, the ability to recognise is not the same as the ability to read, understand and appreciate these signs. Al-JāªiÕ may have intended his book to save his society from the deleterious effects of unbridled debate by engulfing it in a torrent of textualised argument and celebration, but the reaction of the Addressee, not only to al-JāªiÕ’s own books and the book as an artefact, but to the very debate between al-NaÕÕām and Maʿbad on the dog and the rooster was a sobering reminder to him that his readers still had to be educated in how to read and appreciate God’s signs. So this innate ability permitted man to read the signs but not to determine their proper use, their reason for inclusion in creation. And as al-JāªiÕ was convinced that we live in a world which was optimally designed for God’s bondsmen to fulfil His religious, ethical and moral injunctions, this proper use of things is how he accounted for the existence of what was evil, harmful and noxious, as well as all the good, pleasant and beautiful things in 391

392 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s life. And for al-JāªiÕ worldly pleasure was precisely the just and right enactment of God’s order for society.3 It is crucial to keep in mind that in this branch of third-century Kalām epistemology equates to ontology. How and what we know is closely tied to how and what things are. It is thus that morality is produced. Therefore his argument has a twofold aspect: epistemologically, all of God’s signs work together as a totality and all are needed to be read properly for the semiotic system of creation to function; ontologically, everything is needed for men to be able to develop, refine and hone their reasoning intellects and acquire the experiences (good and bad) required to actualise their capacities for autonomous action to the fullest of their abilities. Through a combination of both epistemology and ontology emerges man’s moral nature.4 Al-JāªiÕ and his contemporaries in Kalām prized their notion of God’s omnipotence and His omniscience, including of course His eternal know­ ledge of moral principles. They also strove to discharge their duty to Him by developing a rigorous system which could mirror God in its simplicity and consistency. But the problem of evil and suffering simply would not go away. They could determine actions which were causally attributable to man in terms of choice (ikhtiyār) and his capacity for autonomous action (isti†āʿa). But this did not cover everything that they found in the world God had created for them. God must then in some mysterious and inscrutable fashion be causally responsible for all suffering and evil not causally attributable to man. They were intellectually incapable of imagining a providence which might be messy. In his guidance to the Addressee on how to appreciate God’s design, read His signs properly, and craft a theology which reflected the manifold grandeur of His creation, we see al-JāªiÕ wrestle with these problems. It is a desperate and impassioned attempt to save the system.5 The Addressee’s purism and his denigration of cross-breeds and the inter-category with which the first part of the ‘Introduction’ ends (Óayawān 1.102.7–106.2: see Part 3, §§23–28) lead al-JāªiÕ to write a long chapter on the ‘merits and demerits of the eunuch’ and the interstitial (Óayawān 1.106.3–190.11).6 This is a sustained polyphonic exercise, and al-JāªiÕ rarely speaks in the first-person.7 A chorus of voices and opinions are heard, as al-JāªiÕ explores his society’s views on eunuchs and their uses. And while he is partly concerned to present a rebuttal of an attack on the Prophet

a n eri sti cal contest | 393 Muªammad for accepting the gift (and thereby becoming the owner of ) a eunuch (1.163.10–166.11), the driving motive behind the investigation seems to be the fact that the gelded animal and the eunuch, in that he is a man-made creature, represent a transgression of the Qurʾanic condemnation of Satan’s promise to seduce humans to change or alter God’s creation (Q. Nisāʾ 4: 117–20).8 This then is effectively the second part of the ‘Introduction’. Its conclusion, the third part, is a reiteration of the Addressee’s attack and al-JāªiÕ’s response (1.190.12–220.10). The ‘Introduction’ overall finishes with a short chapter (1.220.11–221.16) exploring figurative language, a key issue that was raised in the quarrel with the Addressee. I propose now to offer a translation of the third part of the ‘Introduction’, which I will follow with a brief discussion of the structure of how the argument between the Addressee and al-JāªiÕ is presented. I will end this part, and the book as a whole, by identifying the form of the ‘Introduction’, a question which had puzzled me and escaped resolution earlier in Chapter 4.2, pp. 193–223.

6.2 Translation

[1.1] You said: ‘Were the dog’s nature and behaviour (maʿnā) fully that of the carnivore, it would not keep the company of humans and avoid that of predators; it would not dislike thickets and hang around houses; it would not avoid open ground and keep away from empty deserts, cleaving to places where men gather and live instead. Were its behaviour, disposition (khuluq) and nourishment fully those of the herbivore, it would not eat human flesh and rabidly attack people. Yes, in fact, sometimes it even becomes rabid and turns on its master, frenziedly attacking his family. This is what ˝arafa mentioned: Time was kind, yet still you destroyed our life of ease with the catastrophes you brought Like ˝asm’s dog, which he had reared and fed with milk before sunrise: One day it savaged him again and again, lapping up his blood and tearing at his flesh.9 Óājib b. Dīnār al-Māzinī said something similar: Many enemies have you helped against yourselves with wealth and power, when the bond remained secure, Like the owner of a dog he has fattened and trained well that inflicts a terrifying calamity upon him.10 ʿAwf b. al-Aªwa‚ said: When it comes to Qays, I am like the man who is torn to shreds by the fangs and the nails of the dog he has fattened.11 Ibn al-Aʿrābī recited this verse by one of them: They have fattened a dog for it to eat one of their number. Had they been prudent, the dog would not have been fattened.12 There is a proverb: “Fatten your dog and it will eat you.” 394

transla ti on | 395 There was a Syrian in the retinue of al-Óajjāj b. Yūsuf who used to share his table. He wrote to his family to tell them how well he was doing and to say he had grown fat. His wife wrote back: Do you send me a sheet of papyrus when it is bread that I want, and you grow pot-bellied at the emir’s door? When you are away, you do not remember a friend. When you are here, your hands cling to what you own. You are like a wicked dog among a starving family: the family wastes away while the dog grows fat.13 There is a proverb: “The dog grows fat among a starving family.” This is because, when the herd is blighted with disease and the she-camels abort their babies, the dog still prospers by eating the carcasses and getting fat [1.190.12–192.8]. [1.2] ‘Another reason for despising the dog is that it is a guardian which must be guarded against, sociable but extremely savage at heart, a companion who often betrays his companion. The only reason people get a dog is to warn them of burglars. They don’t chase it away so that it can raise the alarm when a thief comes in the night. But it is more thieving than any burglar and is more likely to do harm than any burglar ever would. The words of the poet indicate that they considered it to be a habitual thief: Was Laylā divorced because a dog came in the night and raided the ­panniers and milk-skins?14 So it is an inveterate thief, a night-raider, a grave-robber, and a man-eater. It combines thieving by night with thieving during the day [1.192.9–193.2]. [1.3] ‘Next point. Whenever you come across a dog walking in a store, or a kitchen, a courtyard, road, open ground, on a mountain top or through the middle of a valley, even though the ground be full of pebbles and stones, or across a flat desert plain or over a smooth rock, it will always have its nose to the ground, smelling and sniffing, out of greed, voracity, gluttony and desire. Yes, in fact, every time you come across one and it sees another dog it sniffs its behind, but it does not sniff any other part. And if you see one of them being pelted with a stone, it comes back and picks it up with its mouth, because it is almost always fed by having things thrown to it, and so, as it is such an exceeding glutton and as voracity has overcome its nature, it forgets that the man who threw the stone wanted to slaughter and kill it and supposes that he

396 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s actually wanted to feed it and be kind to it. This is what it is made to imagine and think by excessive appetite and domination by gluttony. However, it hurls itself at people, is afraid of predators and avoids the open plains out of incapacity (ʿajz) and baseness (luʾm), vileness (fusūla) and defectiveness (naq‚) [1.193.2–12]. [1.4] ‘When people heard one of the exegetes explain that in the words of the Exalted, “Those who give a recognised share of their property to the beggar and the deprived”,15 “the deprived” means the dog and when they heard the proverb, “Do good deeds even unto the dog”, they developed a fondness for it and let it into their homes, although we are only talking about how the riffraff and the ignoramuses behave, those who are unconcerned about impurity, who are very, very unknowledgeable and reject traditions (āthār), be it out of a lack of knowledge or obduracy (muʿānada) [1.193.13–17]. [1.5] ‘Let’s turn to the rooster. It is a large herbivorous bird, weak and dependent for nourishment upon its owners. It does not belong to the noble or aristocratic birds or those that kill their prey, nor is it one of those that excite with their musical voice or move with their song, as the Egyptian and Iraqi turtle dove,16 the palm dove, the wood-pigeon, the bulbul and the collared dove do. It is not one of those that please with their appearance or delight the eye with their beauty, as do the peacock and the pheasant. It is not one of those that amaze with their sense of direction or ensure their protection through sociability and tenderness, intensity of companionship and longing, such that you want them as they want you and you develop a fondness for them because they love you, as the dove does. Moreover, it is not one of the birds with the power of flight. So it is a bird that does not fly, a herbivore, and does not hunt – it is not even good game so that it could provide enjoyment in this manner and be kept for this pleasure. The bat is hairless and smooth but is very skilled in flight whereas the rooster is covered in feathers but does not fly! What could be more amazing than a feathered creature that never gets off the ground and a creature with skin that is airborne? [1.193.18–194.10]. [1.6.1] ‘Of all creation man combines good traits the most. Marriage is only found among humans and among birds. If the rooster were not a bird then it would be an animal that does not marry, for it would have been hindered from this boon, would not have had this unusual similarity, and would have been deprived of this noble bond and laudable resemblance. So how could it

transla ti on | 397 possibly not marry, since it is a bird and only birds and humans get married, share their lives and keep their troth, seek offspring and love their descendants, return to their domiciles and suffer from home-sickness? Everything that does not marry is subject to defectiveness and suffers the loss of this boon in one respect. The rooster is subject to defectiveness in two respects [1.194.11–195.1]. [1.6.2] ‘Abū al-Akhzar al-Óimmānī describes the donkey and the alpha-male onager in particular: for our purposes the latter provides a better object of scrutiny than the domestic ass.17 He notes how it covers the females and describes how it is completely unaware of begetting offspring, how it has no understanding of the role of procreation, and that its offspring are produced without it ever seeking them. When sperm free of disease encounters a womb free of disease, pregnancy occurs naturally (ʿalā khilqa). This is how their bodies were shaped and formed. He remarks that its leaping on the female is of the same order as its leaping on the males – it is simply determined by the lust that overcomes it, for it pays no attention whatsoever to the pudenda and posteriors, or to females that are estrous as opposed to those which are not. He says: It neither seeks offspring nor withdraws before ejaculation.18 In other words, it does not seek children and does not withdraw before emission. Creatures which keep the company of people, seeking nothing else and yearning for nothing apart from them, are, for example, the sparrow, the swallow, the dog and the domestic cat. But the rooster does not become attached to its dwelling or domicile, shows no fondness for its hen or the female it covers, and exhibits no yearning for its offspring. Actually it does not even know that it has offspring. If it did know, there would be an indication that it did, but since we have observed that it treats its eggs and the chickens generated by it as it does those which it has not sired, those which are not of its making (shakl ) and which do not stem from its lineage, how are things to be known if not by this behaviour and such like? [1.195.1–16]. [1.7.1] ‘In addition to this, it is stupid, for it does not know the family it lives with, and confused, as it does not recognise the face of its owner, though from the moment it was created it has lived with him, been sheltered, watered and fed by him, and lived under his wing. For all the defects of the dog, at least it knows its master. The dog and the domestic cat recognise their names.

398 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s They keep to where they live, come back if chased away, are patient if kept hungry and put up with neglect and poor treatment. But the rooster will live in a house from the time it was a little chicken until it grows into a mature rooster, and if it leaves the house or falls into a neighbour’s yard, or ends up anywhere else, it has no idea of how to get back, even if its domicile is visible and close by and the way there is easy.19 It does not remember and has no memory. It has no sense of direction and the very notion of how it would find its direction does not occur (yata‚awwar) to it. If it were homesick, it would look for a way, and if it experienced need, it would look for a solution. If this experience (khubr) were part of its nature, it would be evident, but it has a stupid and vague nature, disobedient and forgetful [1.195.16–196.12]. [1.7.2] ‘Next, it covers the hen but does not recognise her, despite the fact that it has such a great need of her and is very greedy for covering. Necessity is the mother of invention. It leads to knowledge. The only exception to this rule is the rooster, because, for all its greediness for covering, it does not recognise the female it covers and does not intend to produce offspring; it does not nurse the eggs and is not swayed by any family ties. In this regard, it is dumber than the bustard and less nurturing than the lizard [1.196.12–16].20 [1.8.1] ‘ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān (May God the Exalted be pleased with him!) said: “Everything loves its offspring, even the bustard.” He applied this proverb, as you can see, to foolishness and inadvertence, ignorance and stupidity [1.196.17–19]. [1.8.2] ‘The Arabs say, “Less nurturing than the lizard,” because it eats its young newly hatched from their eggs. The mare is honoured among the Arabs, because they say, “More devoted to one’s family than a mare, and less nurturing than a lizard.” They attribute a molly’s eating of her young to her excessive love and attribute the lizard’s eating of its young to its hatred. Not a single hatchling will escape unless the lizard is too busy devouring one of its brothers, and it only guards them against predators in order to prey upon them and devour them himself. This is the reason why al-ʿAmallas b. ʿAqīl said to his father ʿAqīl b. ʿUllafa: You have devoured your sons as the lizard does; now you experience the bitterness of the noxious pasture: Had they been present, you would have been able to defend your enclosure against Bajīl.21

transla ti on | 399 He also said: You have devoured you sons as the lizard does. Now you have left your sons with no one to count on. Ibn Muªammad, who would go by the name of the Óimyarite Chief (alsayyid al-ªimyarī), compared ʿĀʾisha (May God the Exalted be pleased with her!) with a molly who devours her young because on the Day of the Camel she waged war and fought against her sons: She arrived in a howdah, along with her wretches, driving her soldiers to Basra Behaving like a molly who means to devour her children [1.196.19–197.14].22 [1.8.3] ‘The Arabs also say: “Dumber than an agile she,”23 i.e. a she-wolf because she abandons her cubs and suckles the cubs of the hyena. (He said).24 This is the meaning of the statement by Ibn Jidhl al-˝iʿān: Like one who suckles the children of another and abandons her own sons – what is the point of that?25 They say: “When the female hyena is hunted or killed, the wolf brings her cubs food”. Al-Kumayt said: As Umm ʿĀmir keeps to her burrow with those of her own line until Aws feeds her brood.26 Aws is the wolf.27 Another said on the subject: Every day the limping wolf brings about yet another calamity. I will fire on you, Uways, a broad arrow as a gift (aws) for your ambush.28 The word aws means ‘a gift’ and Uways is the wolf. The Hudhalī poet29 said on the subject: I wish I could learn from you, though the matter is clear, what Uways has done among the flock today.30 Umayya b. Abī al-Íalt said: The father of the orphans used to give generously to them and would provide for them in every barren year [1.197.15–198.11].31 [1.8.4] ‘They say: “Dumber than an ostrich hen” and they say: “Flightier than an ostrich hen.” They say this because she ceases to nurse her eggs the moment she needs food, and if, while out looking for food, she sees the eggs of another hen which has gone out to look for food, she nurses these eggs and

400 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s forgets all about her own. And it can happen that she is hunted and does not return to her eggs in the plain and they perish [1.198.12–199.2]. [1.8.5] ‘They said: “This is why Ibn Harma said: By leaving the beneficence of the most generous lords behind and striking an unyielding flint with my hands I am like a hen that leaves her eggs behind in the plain and folds her wing over the eggs of another” [1.199.3–5].32 [1.8.6] ‘The dove will nurse the eggs of the hen and the hen will nurse the eggs of the peacock. But it does not leave its eggs and nurse the eggs of the hen, and the hen does not leave its eggs and nurse the eggs of the peacock. The domestic chicken hatched by a dove has more feathers, but the peacock hatched by the hen is less beautiful and has a more odious voice [1.199.6–10]. [1.8.7] ‘The name for every creature inside an egg and hatched from one is a chick, except the eggs of the hen which are called chickens, not chicks, although the poets do sometimes apply the word ‘chick’ to the ‘chicken’ by poetic licence (ʿalā tawassuʿ al-kalām) and they permit in verse things which they do not permit in speech which is not verse. The poet said: I swear by my life: the voices of the finches in the morning and black crows that caw to each other in the evening33 Are dearer to me than the chicks of a hen and a rooster with flapping gills in the land of the Nabateans.34 Al-Shammākh b. ¤irār said: Ho! Who will carry a message to Khāqān from me: When the winter strikes you, look closely And draw close both the young and the old damaged by age Chicks of a hen following a rooster, to which they look for support when war’s clamour blazes’ [1.199.11–200.4].35 [2] You said:36 ‘What is so important about the status of the dog and the excellence of the rooster that two of the loftiest, most eminent and revered Kalām Masters should devote their time to discussing their merits and demerits, to weighing up their pros and cons and celebrating them? Was it because this course of conduct would bring them fortune, wisdom, virtue and religious observance,37 and those less adept than they would follow them blindly, once they had reached their verdict and delivered their eloquent judgement? Was it because this would become a pretext for them should you see them pitting

transla ti on | 401 flies and woodlice against one another, or scarabs against dung beetles, or all classes of flying insects against all kinds of vermin, creepy-crawlies and small birds38 – including even the mosquito and the moth, worms and camel ticks? But if we opine that this is permissible and the job is done, this style of speculation will take the place of speculating on divine oneness, and this mode of discernment (tamyīz) will replace determining whether God is just (taʿdīl ) or is responsible for injustice (tajwīr).39 Discussion of the promise and the threat will cease, analogical reasoning (qiyās) and determining (ªukm) predication (ism) will be forgotten.40 Rebuttals of the other faith communities and weighing the pros and cons of creedal systems and even speculation on how people can best be guided and helped, on what is beneficial and gainful employment for them, will cease. This is because their minds are not expansive enough to grasp the totality and their tongues cannot express the whole. The best decision is for you to begin by broaching the most important and imposing subject and then the next imposing topic’ [1.200.5–19].41 [3.1] And you said: ‘This is a topic for a time of leisure: it belongs to the category of novelties and is one of the paths of levity – it is a way of having a laugh. Men of gravity are not men of levity. A thing might be seemly in a young man and its like unseemly in an old man. Were it not for analysis (taª‚īl ) and comparisons, of perpetuating learning (adab) and worshipping by means of intense reckoning, then people would not have said, “Every situation has its utterance, every time its men. Whatever has fallen is picked up; every food has its eaters” [1.201.1–6].42 [3.2] ‘Some people allege that everyone is equipped for one means of gainful employment or another and has the tools for one beneficial activity or another. This natural disposition (†abīʿa) must stir and move, even if it is tardy, and this hidden feature must appear. If it is within his power, he will set it into action. Otherwise it will creep towards him like poison in the body, and grow as a root grows. So it is with grains in the ground and uncultivated seeds hidden in the womb of the earth. They must move when it is time to move and split and open up when it is time to open up. When the rains act like sperm on this womb and part of the earth becomes like a nourishing mother, then each and every potently moist soil must reveal its potency. It is as the ancient poet said: The man suffering from a chest infection must spit one day.

402 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s And he also said: When a man has exhausted his patience, he simply must complain [1.201.7–202.2].43 [3.3] ‘This is why some men find it easier to study arithmetic, while others are more attracted to the study of medicine. It is the same with being attracted to geometry, and with the passion astronomers feel for the stars. Moreover, this natural inclination is often stirred after maturity and attracts a man’s desire for it after adulthood, depending on the power of the hereditary trait (ʿirq) in his body, and on the distractions and obstacles he encounters. Thus you will find one person mad about trying to sing songs and tunes, another mad with a desire for fighting to the point of enlisting in the army, another choosing to become a copyist, and another choosing to seek princely power. You will discover that their desire is commensurate with the hidden causes which rouse them into motion. But you will not know how such a person was exposed to this particular determinant (sabab) rather than any other unless you speak in generalisations (jumla). And you will discover that no one who chooses any of these crafts knows why he chose it, be it in terms of generalisation (jumla) or explanation (tafsīr), since it did not result from, and he did not choose it on the basis of, any hereditary trait (ʿirq) or inherited characteristic (irth) [1.202.3–12].44 [3.4] ‘The wonder is not that someone has in his nature a determinant (sabab) which connects him with a particular activity and which moves him in a certain direction. The wonder is that someone can die as a singer without naturally understanding metre and without having a lovely voice – who, if unable to become an instructor and singer of the elite, will become an entertainer and singer for the commonalty. Yet another may die and be remembered for his generosity and lavishness with food, when in fact he is by nature the most niggardly of creatures, and you can plainly see that he goes to great lengths to acquire nice things and is obsessed with amassing a great quantity of them. His viciousness and the deficiency of his nature are always on display, his faults obvious, and he is full of bad grace when dining with those whom he himself has invited and sent for, even though he knows exactly how much they can chew and when they will stop eating [1.202.13–203.6]. [3.5] ‘Now if you allege that every one of these people is simply a hostage to his motives (asbāb) and a prisoner in the hands of these determinants (ʿilal ),

transla ti on | 403 you will have made an excuse for every poltroon and every failure, every miscreant and everyone who errs. If the situation is down to one’s own power (tamkīn) rather than what one is destined for (taskhīr), then is the staging of an exemplary debate (tamthīl ) on cocks and dogs not the greatest source of amazement and the worst possible decision to take?’ [1.203.7–10]. [4.1] We have understood your words and comprehended your way of proceeding (madhhab). Let’s begin with your statement, ‘what is so important about the value of the rooster and the status of the dog?’ Now this, and statements like it, is how a slave talks when he has understood his lord and master no better than the commonalty does, or that level of society which is next to the commonalty does.45 May God the Exalted give you comprehension! It is as if you suppose that the governance (tadbīr) in the creation of the snake and the scorpion, the governance (tadbīr) in the creation of the moth and the fly, and the wisdom in the creation of wolves, lions and everything you find hateful or despicable, be it subservient to you or able to attack you, is varied or deficient, that the wisdom contained therein is paltry or mixed [1.203.11–17].46 [4.2] Know that from the beginning of the world to the end of its term, well-being (ma‚laªa) is an admixture of the good with the bad, the harmful with the beneficial, the unpleasant with the pleasing, the low with the high, the abundant with the meagre.47 If badness were unadulterated, creation would perish. If goodness were pure, the trial (miªna) would become invalid and the reasons and stimuli (asbāb) of thought would be cut off. With the absence of thought comes the absence of wisdom. When choice goes, discernment (tamyīz) goes too. The scholar is left without prudence, suspension of judgement (tawaqquf ) and learning. There is no knowledge. The category of clear expression (bāb al-tabayyun) is unknown. There is no knowledge of how to ward off harmful things or bring about a benefit, of how to put up with unpleasantness and express gratitude for the things we love, of how to vie for superiority in clarity or compete for rank. The joy of victory and the majesty of conquest become invalid. Nowhere on earth will there be a man of truth who experiences its majesty; nowhere will there be a man of falsehood who experiences its humiliation; nowhere will there be a man of certainty who experiences its cool delight; nowhere will there be a doubter who experiences the defectiveness of aporia (ªayra) and the chagrin of sitting with eyes

404 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s downcast in silence. Souls are without hope and are not driven in different directions by their desires. He who does not know how desire works, does not know despondency. He who is ignorant of despondency, is ignorant of feeling secure. The condition of the world will revert from that of the angels, the purest of creation, and of men, among whom are the Prophets and the friends of God, to the condition of the animal kingdom, to the condition of folly and stupidity, and to the condition of the stars in their subservience. The condition of the stars is lower than that of the herbivores in the fields. Who is there who would be happy to be the sun and the moon, fire and snow, or one of the Signs of the Zodiac, or a wisp of cloud, or all the Milky Way, or a measure of water, or a quantity of air? Everything in the world exists for man alone, for those with choice who have acquired knowledge, for the people of reason and autonomy (isti†āʿa), and for the people of clear communication (tabayyun) and mature consideration [1.204.1–205.4]. [4.3] How can the pleasure of a beast in the fields, or of an animal fed in the stables, or of a carnivorous animal lapping blood and eating meat, compare with the joy of defeating enemies and unlocking the door of knowledge after banging on it loud and long? How can this compare with the joys of lordship and the majesty of leadership? And how can this compare with the estate, the majesty and effulgent light of prophethood and the caliphate? How can sensual pleasure – the experience of food and drink, the experience of a moving voice, a gorgeous colour and a soft caress – compare with the joys of enacting the command and the prohibition, with the permission granted by the official signature, with the obedience mandated by the seal and how it silences all opposition? [1.205.5–11]. [4.4] If all things were equal, discernment (tamyīz) would be pointless, given that without hardship there can be no recompense. Should that happen, there would be no reward to reap from reliance on God the Exalted and from the certainty that He is the refuge and the one who keeps and protects, provides and defends, that He who calls you to account is the most generous of the most generous, the most merciful of the merciful, that He accepts a little but grants a lot, and that only the lost (hālik) is lost to Him.48 If the situation were as this cretinous fool who does not understand the consequences of things would have it, speculation, its sharpening effects and its motives, would be pointless; spirits (arwāª) would be divested of their accidents (maʿānī)49 and

transla ti on | 405 reasoning intellects of rewards, and things would lose their apportioned lots and dues [1.205.12–206.2]. [4.5] Glory be to Him who made the benefits in things a benefaction, and arranged it that their noxiousness should derive from the greatest of benefits; who divided them between pleasurable and painful, sociable and savage, small and contemptible and large and important, between an enemy lying in ambush and a reasoning intellect which guards you, between a confederate who protects you and an ally who supports you;50 who placed complete well-being (ma‚laªa) in the whole. For the benefaction is made complete by its being in a state of total combination.51 The whole is invalidated by the invalidation of any piece of it, according to a correct line of reasoning and a clear proof. You see, the whole is simply one thing added to another, and another thing added to them, because the entirety is made up of segments (abʿā∂): every body is composed of parts (ajzāʾ),52 and if you permit the removal of one, and the other is of equal weight with an equal effect, share and portion, then you have permitted the removal of the whole. When you want to remove it the first is no better a place to start than the second. And the same is true for the second, the third and the fourth, on and on until you come to the whole and you have exhausted the totality [1.206.3–13]. [4.6] Thus it is for all things added together (al-umūr al-mu∂ammana) and the restricted causes (al-asbāb al-muqayyada).53 Don’t you see that the mountain is no greater an indication of God the Exalted than the pebble, that the peacock, so greatly admired, is no greater an indication of God the Exalted than the pig, so greatly loathed, and that fire and snow, for all that they differ in terms of coldness and heat, are no different when it comes to proof and indication? I suspect that you are one of those who think that the peacock is more honoured by God the Exalted than the crow, that the pheasant is nobler with the Exalted than the kite, and that the gazelle is more loved by God the Exalted than the wolf. But these are differences which God the Exalted has placed only in the eyes of men, distinctions He has introduced into the natures of His bondsmen.54 Some He has made closer to them in likeness, others keep the company of man, and yet others are savage. He has made some nourishing, others deadly. Similar examples are: pearls and glass beads, dates and burning coals.55 So do not go by what your eyes show you. Go by what your reasoning intellect shows you.56 There are two characteristics by

406 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s which things are judged: one characteristic is apparent to the senses; another is hidden away for the reasoning intellect. The reasoning intellect is the conclusive proof. Therefore we know that the angels who tend the fire of Hell are not inferior to those who tend the Garden, that the Angel of Death is not inferior to the Angel of the Clouds, even if he brings us rain and fertility, and that Gabriel who brings down the punishment is not inferior to Michael who brings down mercy [1.206.13–207.12].57 [4.7] The only difference of opinion concerns those who obey and those who disobey, in their degrees and categories.58 What our colleagues disagree on is the following: if people are equal in acts of disobedience they will receive equal punishment, if they are equal in terms of obedience they will receive equal reward, and if they are equal in not obeying and disobeying they will be equal in their beneficent treatment.59 This is the fundamental principle at the heart of the disquisition (maqāla) and the axis around which the mill turns [1.207.12–16].60 [4.8] God (Great and Glorious!) said: “By the fig and the olive!”61 Now Zayd b. Aslam claimed that the fig is Damascus and the olive is Palestine. The Extremist Shiʿis have an interpretation (taʾwīl ) of this verse concerning the Family of the Prophet which I will avoid and will not mention.62 God (Blessed and Exalted!) expressed these words as an oath. Damascus is only known as Damascus and Palestine is only known as Palestine. Now if at the mention of the fig you go no further than thinking of a foodstuff that can be both dried and fresh, that you can conceal yourself with its leaves and branches and make a fire out of its twigs, that it is beneficial for someone suffering from consumption, that it is mightily nutritious, and is good in various medicinal compounds, and in poultices, that it is the only sweet thing which does not ruin your teeth, and that according to the People of the Book it is the tree from which Adam (Eternal peace be his!) ate and with the leaves of which he covered his pudendum when the punishment befell, that the patient suffering from piles eats it to aid the passage of the faeces and to facilitate defecation; and if at the mention of the olive you go no further than its oil and its use in lamps, that both are used as condiments and as fuel, with a plethora of similar matters – then you mistreat the Qurʾān with such thoughts and have no knowledge of the excellence of interpretation (taʾwīl ). This is not why God (Great and Glorious!) has exalted them

transla ti on | 407 and sworn by them, or why He celebrated them through mentioning them [1.208.1–15].63 [4.9] If you had practised speculation (naÕar), had developed a healthy mind (salīm al-āla) and were to study the wing of a mosquito carefully, as one who knows how to draw lessons from signs, and were to examine it closely, as one who knows how to ponder things, as a pearl-diver diving for ideas, exposed only to those fleeting notions which accord with the soundness of your reasoning intellect, and those preoccupations which enhance your energy (nashā†), you would be filled with as many lessons as you would be able to draw from the bizarreries with which lengthy scrolls and big, thick tomes are filled.64 Then you would see that it contains a cornucopia of skilful wonders and employs every level of wisdom, and that it is filled with all kinds and types of abundance. Then you would be drenched and soaked by the flood of ideas hidden and buried away in it, by its concealed wisdom and the wellsprings of its knowledge. Then your excessive astonishment at those who study the wondrous features of the rooster, and the bizarre behaviour, diverse benefits and various uses of the dog, and the mighty trials (miªan)65 they both present, would pale into insignificance in comparison. To say nothing of the knowledge deposited in them, such that when it becomes apparent to you, what you now revere as great will become small, and what you now see as much will become little [1.208.16–209.11]. [4.10] It is as if you suppose that the wisdom in creating something that may seem fine in your eyes, in terms of its value and appearance, will be proportionate to its value and appearance. Now God the Exalted has said: ‘If all the trees in the world were reed pens and the ocean ink, with seven seas more replenishing it, still God’s expressions would not be exhausted.’66 By the word ‘expressions’ on this occasion He does not mean speech and words composed of letters. He means blessings and wonders, and how they are described and such like. If a man with a fine tongue, a pure intelligence, sound thoughts and perfect equipment, were to study an entirety of these various classes of things, he would be incessantly worn out by thoughts, drowned in wisdom [1.209.11–210.2]. [4.11] The Kalām Masters, their leaders and their most eminent practitioners have staged exemplary comparisons (tamthīl )67 between angels and believers, and on the difference between jinn and men. The nature of the jinn is at

408 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s a considerable remove from the nature of men and from the nature of the rooster and the nature of the dog. What they were really talking about was the topic of obedience and disobedience. I imagine that your astonishment would not have been so extreme if you had heard them staging an exemplary debate between the pheasant and the peacock. Actually, we deem it more astonishing to stage exemplary debates between the features of the ant and the dove, the elephant and the camel, the fox and the wolf. We don’t mean that the ant has the beautifully coloured, variegated and striated plumage of the peacock, or that it is as useful in waging war or defending one’s property as the horse. Rather, since our intention is to determine where wondrous governance (tadbīr) is located in insignificant creatures, and to uncover the subtle senses in ridiculous things, and the ability to reflect on the consequences of actions among creatures outwith the defined limits (ªudūd ) of man, jinn and angels, we do not go by thickness of body or size and bulk, nor by fine appearance or high value. There are many wonders in both the ape and the bear, though neither is regularly put to work by humans, except for the living which owners of apes make. We chose two things which are frequently discussed and from which many lessons have been learned, extracted by scholars from the secrets hidden in them. If we had combined the rooster with one of the animals I have mentioned, or the dog with one of the animals I referred to, the discussion would have been over before it had reached the stage of comparing and weighing them up [1.210.3–211.2]. [5] You noted that one of the motives you had for disapproving of them and expressing amazement at their behaviour was the contemptible worthlessness of the dog and the stupidity and folly of the rooster, that the dog was neither fully herbivorous nor fully carnivorous, that the extent of its sociability with humans was such as to remove it in a certain sense from inclusion in the definition of dog and to put it under the definition of human [1.211.3–7].68 [6.1] Yet one thing can often bear a certain similarity to another thing but that does not remove them from the characteristics by which they are judged or the definitions to which they belong. Poets, scholars, and orators often compare a man to the sun and the moon, to generous rainfall and the sea, to the lion and the sword, to the snake69 and the Pleiades, but through these poetic themes (maʿānī) they do not remove them from70 the definition of man. When they apportion blame, they say: ‘He is a dog and a pig; he is an

transla ti on | 409 ape and an ass; he is a bull; he is a billy-goat; he is a wolf; he is a scorpion; he is a dung-beetle; he is a qaranbā beetle’.71 But they do not include these things in the definition of people and their proper nouns, nor do they thereby remove man from his definition and include him in these definitions and proper nouns. In the same vein, people call slave-girls ‘Gazelle’ as well as ‘Bambi’, ‘Filly’, ‘Tweety’, ‘Birdy’, ‘Venus’, ‘Twiggy’ and ‘Slinky’. People do the same thing with the Signs of the Zodiac and the constellations. They mention the Lion, the Bull, the Carrier, the Kid, the Scorpion, and the Fish, and call them the Bow, the Ear of Corn and the Scales, among others. On this Ibn ʿAsala al-Shaybānī said: Then you would have recovered while al-Namarī thought the singing-girl was the uncle of the Fish and the aunt of the Pleiades.72 It is told that the Prophet (May God bless and cherish him!) said: ‘What a good relation you have in the palm-tree, created from the remains of the clay of Adam’. The idea expressed in this utterance is sound. Only those who do not understand figurative language find fault with it. But this is not an argument we have constructed for present purposes.73 We are simply going where others have gone, refraining from what they have refrained from and ending up where they have ended up. We see people applying to a man one word for a camel (jamal ) but not another (baʿīr) and they do not call a woman a she-camel (nāqa). They call a man a bull, but they do not call a woman a heifer. They call a man an ass but they do not call a woman a jennet, and they call a woman a ewe but not a sheep, though they do not use the word ‘ewe’ as a proper noun and make it a designation like Zayd and ʿAmr. They call a woman a nanny goat [1.211.6–212.10]. [6.2] Surely you know that they called man the microcosm, the offspring of the macrocosm – man on account of whom the heavens and the earth and everything in between were created, as God (Great and Glorious!) says: ‘He made all in the heavens and on the earth subservient to you’74 – for the simple reason that they discovered combined in him the forms (ashkāl ) of all that exists in the macrocosm? We discovered that he has the five senses and they discovered in it the five sensibles.75 They discovered that he ate meat and seeds and so combined the foodstuffs of both herbivores and carnivores. They observed that he has the aggression of the camel and the attack of the lion, the treachery of the wolf and the slyness of the fox, the timidity of the

410 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s corncrake,76 and the hoarding of the ant, the artifice of the surfa bug and the liberality of the rooster, the sociability of the dog and the sense of direction of the pigeon. Sometimes they discovered in him two or three of the innate dispositions found in herbivores and carnivores. But it is not enough for him actually to become a bull camel by combining its sense of direction and its territoriality (ghayra), its aggression and envy and endurance when carrying heavy burdens. Nor does the comparison with the wolf necessarily entail that he is equipped with counterparts of its treachery and deviousness, its sense of smell, savageness and acute sharpness of mind.77 So too a man may alight correctly upon an abstruse view once, twice and thrice, but that is not enough for him to be said to have an acute mind or to be a man of intelligence or possessed of sound judgement. Or he may make a mistake and his mistake may be serious and repugnant once, twice and thrice, but that is not enough for him to be called dim-witted, stupid and defective [1.212.11–213.10]. [6.3] They called him the microcosm because they observed that he creates the shapes (yu‚awwir) of every thing with his hand and with his mouth imitates every sound. And they said: ‘And it is because his limbs are apportioned among the twelve Signs of the Zodiac and the seven planets. Moreover, he contains yellow bile, the product of fire, black bile, the product of earth, blood, the product of air, and phlegm, the product of water. So the four pivotal points (awtād ) are based upon his four natural elements’.78 Therefore they made him a microcosm because he contained all of its parts, humours and natural elements [1.213.11–214.1]. [6.4] Don’t you see that he combines the natural passions (†abāʾiʿ) of anger and satisfaction, as well as the means (āla) for certainty and doubt, belief and hesitation? And that he contains the natural qualities (†abāʾiʿ) of intelligence and foolishness, loyalty and craftiness, good counsel and deception, fidelity and treachery, duplicity and sincerity, love and hate, gravity and levity, niggardliness and generosity, moderation and excess, humility and pride, sociability and savagery, cogitation and procrastination,79 discernment and randomness, cowardice and bravery, resolve and neglect, profligacy and parsimony, lavishness and haughtiness, careful hoarding and complete reliance on God, contentment and avidity, eagerness and self-denial, ire and satisfaction, patience and fretfulness, memory and forgetfulness, fear and hope, desire and despair, innocence and turpitude, doubt and certainty, reserve and insolence,

transla ti on | 411 keeping and divulging a secret, assertion and denial, knowledge and ignorance, wrongfulness and fairness, seeking and fleeing, envy and toleration, irascibility and serenity, joy and anxiety, pleasure and pain, expectation and wishfulness, perseverance and regret, refractoriness and whimsicality, linguistic ineptitude and eloquence, speech and dumbness, determination and hesitancy, heedlessness and intelligence, forgiveness and requital, autonomy (isti†āʿa) and nature (†abīʿa), along with innumerable others too many to be specified [1.214.2–16].80 [6.5] The dog is a carnivorous animal even though it is sociable to man, but one or two features as are close to some of man’s natural qualities (†abāʾiʿ) do not go so far as to remove it from the definition of dog-ness (kalbīya). (He said.) The same holds for the whole lot. You know how the insides of the dog resemble the insides of a man and how the exterior appearance of the ape resembles the exterior appearance of a man. You can see that in how he looks and closes his eyes, in his laugh and his mimicry, and in the palm of his hand and fingers – how he raises and lowers them, how he picks things up with them, how he places a morsel of food in his mouth, how he cracks open the shell of the walnut and extracts the nut inside, how he understands whatever he is taught and is repeated to him, and that among all the animals he drowns when he falls in water, just as a man does, and that, for all the ways (asbāb) to acquire knowledge combined in him, he will drown unless he has learned how to swim. So even though his nature is more complete and extensive than the other animals he is, in this respect, weaker and more defective, for every animal can swim, whether it has the attributes of knowledge and intelligence or foolishness and stupidity. But not even the ape, despite this extensive closeness, reaches the point at which it will be removed from one of the definitions of ape and included in the definitions of man [1.215.1–12]. [7] You alleged that one of the obstacles to staging an exemplary debate between the rooster and the dog is that the dog is a guardian to be guarded against, and a human guardian cannot be trusted because he may change sides [1.215.13–15].81 [8] One night Ziyād asked, ‘Who is in charge of your police?’ and they replied, ‘Balj b. Nushba al-Jushamī’. At which he said: There are many energetic supporters of the authorities who work against them; there are many guards who are to be guarded against.82

412 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s And it is also said: The poet declaimed this verse about al-Fulāfis al-Nahshalī, when he was in control of the police force of al-Óārith b. ʿAbd Allāh: Spare me the criticism, Daughter of Mālik, and blame an era when al-Fulāfis is leader — There are many energetic supporters of the authorities who work against them; there are many guards who are to be guarded against [1.215.16–216.4].83 [9] One does not judge in favour of small over large woes. After all, the decisive factor (ªukm) is determined by the dominant rather than by the dominated, by the conqueror, not the conquered. If we had quoted verbatim what this sheikh said about the features of the dog and what his colleague mentioned of the features of the rooster, you would be convinced that ‘haste is one of the works of Satan’,84 and that pride is a poor companion [1.216.5–8]. [10] You said: ‘What is so important about the value of the dog and the worth of the rooster that two of the most venerable Muʿtazilite sheikhs, veritable lords among the people of sagacity, should devote their time to them?’ [1.216.9–10].85 [11.1] May God the Exalted give you forgiveness! What, I ask, is so important about an indivisible particle (al-juzʾ alladhī lā yatajazzaʾ) compared to the sands of ʿĀlij, about the smallest atom (al-juzʾ al-aqall ) compared to an ant’s journey to a distant location, and about a surface without depth? Why do people concern themselves with this? What is so valuable and significant about it that venerable sheikhs and men of mature dignity and eminence should devote their time to controversies (jidāl ) on it, that they should choose to speculate on it rather than shouting out God’s praises, reading the Qurʾān and standing long in prayer, and that its people should even allege that it is above the pilgrimage and the jihad – in fact, above every act of worship and exercise of reason (ijtihād )? [1.216.10–217.1]. [11.2] If you allege that it is all the same, then our dispute with you will go on for a long time and will distract us from taking a more appropriate course of action towards you,86 because if you blame all of this activity in general and include every aspect of it in your criticism, then you are even more of a disaster than I had thought, one for which it will be much harder to find consolation [1.217.1–4].

transla ti on | 413 [11.3] But if you allege that it is only permissible precisely because they did not go by the value of goods in the markets, by their size and bulk, and by what pleases the eye and accords with the soul, and because they went by its consequences and results, by what is produced thereby, and by the knowledge that is generated out of it: the knowledge of finitude (nihāyāt); the topic of the whole and the part and of what has been and what will come to be; the topic of what knowledge can contain and what is too abundant for it; and knowledge of the distinction between the approach of the Eternalists and the approach of those who profess divine oneness – if this explanation and excuse is accepted, if this verdict is sound, then that’s exactly what we say on the subject of the dog. After all, the dog is not a valuable item. It does not hold a significant place in men’s affections. The compensation for a hunting dog is forty dirhams, for a sheep dog (kalb ∂arʿ) it is one sheep, and for a house dog it is a basket of earth. This is the price anyone who kills it is due to pay and the owner of the house to receive [1.217.4–13].87 [11.4] Such is the worth of the dog if we look only at its apparent situation, after a superficial inquiry. Its hidden features, the wisdom buried therein and the proofs of the wondrous governance (tadbīr) of God (Blessed be His name!), are quite another matter. This is why they thought it permissible to speculate on its condition and to stage an exemplary debate between it and its equal. Furthermore, you do know that, if, for all its abject baseness, the dog contains as much wondrous governance (tadbīr), abundant blessing and extensive wisdom as does man for whom God created the heavens and the earth and all in between. It is most deserving of being pondered, and God the Exalted of being praised for the wondrous wisdom and abundant blessing He has entrusted it with [1.217.14–218.2]. [12] And you said: ‘It would have been more appropriate if, instead of speculating on this, they had speculated on divine oneness, on the banishment of assimilationism (tashbīh), on the promise and the threat, on determining whether God is just or is responsible for injustice, on how to verify reports and decide whether it is superior to study nature (†abāʾiʿ) or choice’ [1.218.3–5].88 [13.1] What I find amazing is the fact that you singled out men who have no other craft or trade than calling people to the very subjects you have mentioned, developing conclusive arguments for what you have described,

414 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s producing books (wa∂ʿ al-kutub) on the subject and protecting and defending these topics with antagonism. It is their only source of pleasure and ambition, the only thing they aim and look for. And while they wanted to divide the whole proportionately and equally and to treat the entirety fairly by giving every thing its share, so that fairness could be inclusive and justice comprehensive, and that concealed aspects of wisdom and hidden governance (tadbīr) could become apparent, you objected by pointing out flaws and expressing amazement, you wrote your words down (sa††arta al-kalām) and delivered lengthy orations (khu†ab), even though no erudite (adīb) and wise man approved of or agreed with your opinion [1.218.6–14]. [13.2] I will provide you with a parable, though you have merited a much rougher response and exposed yourself to a much severer treatment, but we still have hopes for you and eagerly anticipate your return [1.218.15–17]. We have noticed that all defective people without exception, no matter what type or group they belong to, have a particular kind of piety (nusk) which they intend as seemly behaviour, with which they are satisfied as proper obedience and as their way of seeking the Reward, and in which they seek refuge. It is determined by the corruptness of their nature and the weakness of their primary state and the disorder of their secondary state,89 in addition to the vileness of their upbringing, and by the fact that they so rarely deliberate and pause before reaching a decision but instead are always changing their minds and proceeding on the basis of the first thought that occurs to them [1.218.17–219.2].90 The piety of the Kalām Master of dubious and suspect beliefs (murtāb) is to make himself look fine by accusing other people of dubious beliefs (rība) and to preen himself by imputing to his opponent that which he finds in himself, afraid lest it be perceived in him. So he conceals this disease by accusing others of having it [1.219.2–4].91 The piety of the Kharijite, that with which he makes himself look fine and bedecks himself in splendour, is his public profession of how heinous he deems acts of disobedience to be. Therefore he pays no attention to whether proportionality has been exceeded or to the unjustness of God’s bondsmen, and he does not stop to think that God the Exalted derives no enjoyment from requiting even the most injurious wrongdoer with injury, and that the truth is extensive enough for everyone [1.219.5–7].

transla ti on | 415 The piety of the Khurasanian is to perform the pilgrimage and sleep on the ground, to bind himself to the leadership, and be ready to die a martyr, his tongue ever voluble on the subject of public order (ªisba).92 People say: ‘When the nobleman worships, he behaves humbly. And when the base commoner worships, he waxes proud’. The explanation of this is easy and clear [1.219.8–10]. The piety of the Arab Khurasanian (banawī) and soldier is to reject the military payroll (dīwān) and to reprove the authorities (sul†ān) [1.219.11].93 The piety of the Iranian landed gentry (dahāqīn) in the fertile plains of Iraq (sawād ) is to avoid drinking alcohol that has been cooked [1.219.12].94 The piety of the eunuch is never to leave Tarsus and to make a public display of waging jihad against the Byzantines [1.219.12–13].95 The piety of the Rāfi∂ī is to avoid drinking date wine [1.219.13]. The piety of the gardener is not to steal fruit from the orchard [1.219.13–14]. The piety of the singer is to perform his prayers on Friday gatherings, to chant God’s praises frequently, and to pray for the Prophet (God bless and cherish him!) [1.219.14–15]. The piety of the Jew is to exert himself by observing the Sabbath [1.219.16]. When the Sufi among the Muslims who makes a public show of his piety is a shiftless lowlife, he will become a beggar, wear woollen clothes96 and publicly forbid anyone else to make a living, saying that it is illegal (taªrīm al-makāsib). Thus he makes his beggary an expedient for people to respect him [1.219.17–220.2]. If the Christian is a shiftless, despicable lowlife, he will become a monk and wear wool, certain that when he wears this finery and bedecks himself in such frippery, he will, with this emblem on prominent display, oblige the rich and the well-to-do to support him and give him enough to live on. But he is not satisfied just with profiting from the sufficiency he has earned idly. He will even act with insolent superciliousness in his position [1.220.3–6]. When the dubious dialectician attacks those who are innocent (barāʾa), he thinks that he has passed his dubiousness (rība) onto his opponent and has attracted his opponent’s innocence onto himself [1.220.7–8].

416 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Now, when every single one of these groups behaves as we have described, he has satisfied his desire and realised his objective. But beware lest you become one of them and know that you resemble them in this respect and are similar to them in this approach (madhhab) [1.220.8–10]. [14] Chapter containing things we have already discussed, though there is a certain difference between it and our previous discussion [1.220.11–12]. [14.1] It is said: ‘Bolder than the lion, more timorous than the corncrake, more bountiful than a pigeon feeding her chicks, more patient in enduring degradation than a dog, more cautious than a magpie, more conceited than a crow, more skilled than a surfa bug, more noxious than a snake, more treacherous than the wolf, nastier than a wolf lurking in a thicket, more hostile than a scorpion, more cunning than a fox, dumber than a bustard, a surer guide than a sand-grouse, a bigger liar than a collared dove, more degraded than a dog beside a corpse, a greater hoarder than an ant, more errant than a donkey, less nurturing than a lizard, more dutiful than a molly caring for her kittens, more flighty than the male ostrich, more errant than a monitor lizard, more errant than a lizard, and more errant than the snake’ [1.220.13–221.3]. [14.2] People apply to these creatures the sort of expressions they use of humans on occasions of good or bad conduct, so that it is as if the humans belong either to those who are criticised or those who are thanked [1.221.4–5]. [14.3] In the following, second, type of discourse, people avoid using this style of expression but instead restrict what they want to say (khabar) to some natural feature or faculty of the created form. So they say: ‘With keener sight than an eagle, with sharper hearing than a horse, clinging to life longer than a lizard, healthier than the male ostrich’ [1.221.5–8]. [14.4] This second type resembles expressions of praise and blame, whereas the first resembles expressions of criticism and gratitude. The reason we say this is that, while everyone who is thanked is praiseworthy, not everyone who is praiseworthy is to be thanked, and, while everyone who is criticised is blameworthy, not everyone who is blameworthy merits criticism.97 People may praise one location and blame another. The same is true of food and drink. But this is not a way of expressing criticism or gratitude, because we are only recompensed for the choices we make, for the difficulties we undertake, and for what we can only attain through our autonomy. The earlier

transla ti on | 417 category98 is performed by means of created form and with a modicum of understanding and is not enough to merit the name of reason (ʿaql ). Thus we do not call every faculty a capacity to act (isti†āʿa). God, Glorified and Exalted!, knows best [1.221.9–16].

6.3 The Argument

T

he preceding altercation can be unpicked as follows. [1.1]–[3.5] The Addressee’s Attack on the Rooster and the Dog (1.190.12–203.10) The Addressee’s attack is given in three distinct statements. He raises the following topics: [1.1] The faults of the dog: it combines traits of both carnivore and herbivore (and so is not pure); it attacks its owners; [1.2] Though kept as a guard dog it is just as likely to need guarding against, on account of its thievery and taste for carrion, including human flesh; [1.3] Its excessive greed; [1.4] An erroneous exegesis of a Qurʾanic verse has endeared the dog to the common people; [1.5] The faults of the rooster: it is not aesthetically pleasing; it does not fly. It is thus a contradiction: a flightless feathered fowl; [1.6.1–2] Unlike other birds it does not mate for life. It is more like the alpha-male onager; [1.7.1–2] It is extremely stupid and has no powers of recollection, not even of the hens it mates with or its offspring; [1.8.1–7] How various creatures treat their young. [2] The dog and the rooster are improper subjects for a dialectical debate conducted by two such eminent Kalām Masters. Such topics distract from the proper subjects of Kalām: divine oneness, God’s attributes, His justness, the defence of the faith, and attention to the enhancement of man’s wellbeing (ma‚laªa). [3.1–5] The inappropriateness of such a topic is further compounded in terms of its public propriety. All humans are predisposed by their natures 418

the arg ument | 419 for one calling or another. Often this will include roles for which they are not properly equipped or suited. Society may even give people credit for a certain laudable virtue, such as generosity, though their behaviour hardly merits this reputation. In fact it is its exact opposite. The Addressee implies that in staging this and similar debates al-NaÕÕām and Maʿbad show they are not properly equipped for Kalām. In fact, he seems to suggest that their reputation for adeptness may not be justified. Such actions cannot be excused because they are determined by some hidden natural impulse. If such actions depend on what human beings have the power to control, then these Kalām Masters must also be rebuked and censured. [4] Al-JāªiÕ’s Response (1.203.11–211.2) Al-JāªiÕ responds to the second point first – the determination of value. In order to appreciate the significance of this topic, we need to appreciate how man’s well-being (ma‚laªa) has been designed so as to comprise both good and bad things mixed together (§4.2). This mixture is at the centre of creation and God’s plan for man, namely that man exert his God-given reason and also live as a social creature (§4.3). The promise of Paradise and the threat of Hell-fire depend on our ability to determine the differences in things (§4.4). God’s gift of creation is an integral whole, no part of which can be removed without vitiating the entire complex (§4.5). In terms of their function as signs, there is no difference between a large, imposing or beautiful object and its opposite. Al-JāªiÕ draws the Addressee’s attention to a key point: there is effectively only one subject about which there is any disagreement and that is human wrong-doing and responsibility for it. He notes that the debate on the dog and the rooster is really about the classification of human culpability and responsibility (§4.7). The same is true of debates about angels, jinn and men (§4.11). The subject of design in creation is resumed by considering a verse of the Qurʾān (§4.8) and a mosquito’s wing (§4.9). Al-JāªiÕ criticises the Addressee for placing too much store by the pleasing, the seemly and the beautiful. Small and negligible things contain just as many hidden signs of wisdom (§§4.10 and 4.11). Therefore, the Addressee’s error is, according to al-JāªiÕ, twofold: he is mistaken about the true nature of how signs function; and also about how man, that sign endowed with the ability to infer meaning from signs, interprets and discusses those signs. [5] The Addressee’s Attack on the Rooster and the Dog (1.211.3–7)

420 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s The categorical indeterminacy of the dog means that if sociability is its determining feature it thus falls under one of the principal defining features of humans. [6] Al-JāªiÕ’s Response (1.211.8–215.12) Al-JāªiÕ launches a characteristic excursus into the exact nature of language usage and figurative speech in particular. His thinking on these subjects is informed by considerations of legal hermeneutics. Figurative speech does not alter the categorisation of the object to which it is applied (§6.1). Even man, that most versatile of creatures, for whom God made the heavens and the earth, who is the creature most capable of imitation and replication, and of behaving like any animal whatsoever, even man does not cease thereby to belong to the category of the human. The same holds true of the animal which most resembles the human – the monkey. [7] The Addressee’s Attack on the Rooster and the Dog Reiterated (1.215.13–15) Part of the criticism of the dog voiced in §2 is reiterated. [8]–[9] Al-JāªiÕ’s Response (1.215.16–216.8) This criticism has also been made of some humans (§8). An object must be categorised according to its dominant, preponderant trait. Your judgement against the Kalām Masters has been over-hasty. [10] The Addressee’s Attack on the Rooster and the Dog Reiterated (1.216.9–10) Part of the criticism of the dog voiced in §2 is reiterated. [11] Al-JāªiÕ’s Response (1.216.10–218.2) You have misunderstood the nature of the Kalām and of God’s design. [12] The Addressee’s Attack on the Rooster and the Dog Reiterated (1.218.3–5) Part of the criticism of the dog voiced in §2 is reiterated. [13] Al-JāªiÕ’s Response (1. 218.6–220.10) Your misunderstanding of the nature of the Kalām is in fact an ethical and moral shortcoming. You have attacked al-NaÕÕām and Maʿbad in order to mask and conceal your own dubious beliefs. [14] Language Usage and Figurative Speech (1.220.11–221.16) This is an extension of the topic discussed at §6. Al-JāªiÕ points out that ʿaql, the reasoning intellect, and isti†āʿa, capacity to act, autonomy, are terms reserved for special, particular activities. These activities are what determine whether man has fulfilled his duty of taklīf. They are refined and practised through God’s having designed man’s well-being (ma‚laªa) in such a way as

the arg ument | 421 to comprise both the pleasant and the unpleasant, the beautiful and the ugly, the important and the unimportant. The third, and final, part of the ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living, then, is structured as a conversation which covers a series of points and counterpoints. Sometimes the opponent’s words are quoted, evidently verbatim, and at other times they are paraphrased. And on a number of occasions, a key objection raised by the opponent is repeated, rephrased, and rejected. This style of writing is familiar from some of al-JāªiÕ’s other works. His Rebuttal of the Assimilationists, for example, and On the Creating of the Qurʾān, On the Craft of the Kalām and The Rebuttal of the Christians all display this structure. It is an elaboration of the other common dialectical format, ‘If the following is said . . . then we say in reply’ and presumably reflects the written nature of these dialectical encounters. Al-JāªiÕ himself points to the combined oral and written nature of the Addressee’s attack (1.218.13).99 Having followed the tumultuous meanderings of al-JāªiÕ’s argument with his unnamed and enigmatic Addressee, the formal structure of the ‘Introduction’ finally reveals itself. It is in fact an extended eristical conversation conducted over some 220 pages of published text. The Addressee launches his attack (on the debate of the dog and the rooster and on the JāªiÕian library) (1.3–25). Al-JāªiÕ responds by expounding the order of creation (1.26–38.8). The Addressee launches the second prong of his attack, on the very nature of the book as an artefact (1.38.9–42.16). Al-JāªiÕ responds with his paean to the book (1.42.17–102.6). The Addressee launches the third prong of his attack, on the defects of cross-breeds, the interspecies and the inter-category and compares the dog to the eunuch (1.102.7–106.2). Al-JāªiÕ responds with his inquiry into the nature of the eunuch (1.106.3– 190.11). The Addressee concludes his attack by enumerating the defects of the dog and the rooster and lambasting their proponents. And al-JāªiÕ responds comprehensively and conclusively (1.190.12–220.10). The stage is set for the representation of the debate between the Proponent of the Dog and the Proponent of the Rooster. We also note that the Addressee appears now as a fellow Kalām Master, an interlocutor who has signalled his disagreement through his criticism and whom al-JāªiÕ hopes to rehabilitate and bring back to the group. From

422 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s the list of Kalām topics the Addressee prioritises, it transpires that he is a Muʿtazilī. Al-JāªiÕ does not begin his longest and most important work to have survived with a formal introduction (muqaddima) or an oration (khu†ba) but with an enormous and extensive version of an eristical ploy familiar from his debate texts. Its distinctiveness consists in the fact that the Addressee’s words are not quoted or paraphrased sequentially but that his attack is interrupted, rebutted and then resumed. In this way The Book of Living begins by exemplifying its injunction to conduct debate through texts to be read in solitude rather than through public display.

6.4 Conclusion

L

et me briefly draw attention to a couple of comments which al-JāªiÕ makes in the preceding passage I translated: This is the fundamental principle at the heart of the disquisition (maqāla) and the axis around which the mill turns [1.207.15–16]. What they were really talking about was the topic of obedience and disobedience [1.210.5–6].

The debate between the dog and the rooster was really, according to al-JāªiÕ, an exploration of the subject of human responsibility and wrong-doing. That this was its true topic has obviously escaped the notice of the Addressee. But what I find more illuminating is al-JāªiÕ’s statement that these debates staged by Kalām Masters between creatures like the dog and the rooster (and which he refers to in the text by the term tamthīl ) were actually obliquitous. They were not immediately transparent or obvious. Kalām debate of this sort thus becomes an art of obliquity. And if the primary obsession of The Book of Living is an exploration and celebration of the wonders of God’s design, a secondary preoccupation is with identifying and understanding which of man’s actions are attributable to his ‘nature’ (†abīʿa) and which are the direct results of his autonomous capacity to act (isti†āʿa). The Book of Living is thus an obliquitous ethical inquiry into the analysis of man’s obedience and ­disobedience towards God.

423

POSTFACE

Postface

I

n the cultural milieu of third-century Iraq and the bibliomania which accompanied the appearance of books, attitudes to books were anything but straightforward. An essential ambivalence, from a religious, intellectual and cultural point of view, predominated. In Praise of Books is devoted to al-JāªiÕ’s bibliophilia. It focuses on the most sustained paean of books in the JāªiÕian corpus, that contained in the first part of his magnum opus, the seven-volume celebration of God’s creation: The Book of Living. In this paean, books are presented as the solution to a broken society, designed to heal its rifts and promote cohesion through the elimination of public debate and dialectical contests. Books require to be read in isolation. Reading is a solitary practice. The consequences of disagreeing with the ideas contained in a book are confined to the individual soul, and thus are amenable to ethical and emotional therapies. In order to allow books to achieve this, al-JāªiÕ sets out to identify a ubiquitous item of a priori knowledge shared by all men: the awareness that creation could not possibly have been accidental but rather indicates the presence of a divine artificer. So for us to understand why al-JāªiÕ praises books as he does is for us to seek to understand The Book of Living, a work of many thousands of words, left unfinished but published nonetheless by its author in its unfinished state. It is a book in which I think almost every aspect of man’s existence is somehow catalogued, investigated and explored. The image of al-JāªiÕ which emerges from this reading of The Book of Living, I hope, is of a writer who cares passionately for his society and who offers his book, and the book as artefact, as an antidote to the very real religious, social and political problems besetting his community. The Book of Living is both a vision of and a vision for man’s world. 427

428 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Questions persist, however. Or rather one conundrum and two questions persist. In reverse order they are: 1. How could al-JāªiÕ speak and write on behalf of his society? The answer to this involves three related questions: what did al-JāªiÕ do for a living? What were the public roles for this kind of speech and writing in elite circles? Does al-JāªiÕ have a programme for the fashioning of his imagined community? 2. How is the Dog and Rooster debate ultimately a debate about human autonomy and moral obligatedness as al-JāªiÕ claims it is? 3. What do I think al-JāªiÕ’s ideal reading of The Book of Living is? I hope to address Question 1 in the second volume of my study: Al-JāªiÕ: In Censure of Books. I have touched on some of the key points in the present study: the role of the counsellor; the importance of educating children; the use of reading as a mechanism to fashion character. I am not quite sure of a convincing answer to Question 2. I have thought about it long and hard and I think the answer centres on the position that it is only by understanding the divine design in two animals generally held to be contemptible and of little worth, it is only by investigating and pondering and analysing their natures and behaviour that we can begin to understand what God asks in particular of the man of reasoning intellect and why He has designed us as He has and so why people behave as they do and where their moral obligatedness may be located. Al-JāªiÕ hints at his answer to this in Óayawān 7.11.11–13, where he notes that by studying these creatures and their likes we come to realise that man’s capacity to act is in fact only ‘borrowed’ (ʿārīya) from God, to whom alone true agency belongs: This is so that man might understand that his intellect is a gift from his Lord, that his capacity to act simply a loan borrowed (ʿārīya) from Him, and that he can only pray for His blessing to continue through ever giving thanks, and runs the risk of cancelling it by failing to give thanks.1

I find the conundrum posed in Question 3 even more difficult to determine. I suspect the ideal reading of The Book of Living would involve putting

postf ace | 429 the book to one side and seeking out the company of the sheikh himself. Ultimately al-JāªiÕ, for all his love of books, did not view them as completely sufficient for man’s moral and intellectual needs. They were the beginning, not the end of the Kalām project he championed.

Appendix: The Praise of Books

One of the tasks which I set myself in this book is to try to demonstrate how, beneath the babel of voices and the tumult and cornucopia of ideas, arguments, counter-arguments and expositions, al-JāªiÕ employs fairly simple structures to hold his work together. In the short paraphrase of the main section in which books are praised (Part 3, pp. 163–7) it became clear that there were four basic organising notions around which some sixty pages of text were articulated. Thus, in addition to the macrostructures he uses (such as a 200 or so page long ‘Introduction’ which is not properly an ‘Introduction’ according to accepted third-century usage) to present his arguments, and the microstructures he employs (such as the arrangement and deployment of clusters of akhbār as we saw in Chapter 5.2, pp. 334–8), there is a set of mezzo-structures: topics, ideas, themes, notions, anxieties and insights. An important consequence of unearthing these mezzo-structures across a number of works, though not one which I can explore in the present book, will be the emergence of al-JāªiÕ as a thinker and a writer who, over a large corpus of writings, regularly and persistently explores a repository of insights and notions which were presumably also the concerns, ambitions and anxieties of the intellectual and political elite of his society. Such a compilation would form a central component of what I have referred to as ‘Slonimsky’s Earbox’.1 As a way of demonstrating the operation of these mezzo-structures, I have compiled the following paraphrastic inventory of those sections in the first part of the ‘Introduction’ which I have not translated and the long praise of books which is so significant a part of it. I have adopted the following method for my formal paraphrase (always bearing in mind that this is not an exact science). I first seek to identify the main theme which holds 430

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 431 the argument together. As al-JāªiÕ often explores many, disparate aspects of each of his themes, I seek to bundle them into ‘topics’. Several themes and topics are also explored by means of pronouncements by famous figures from al-JāªiÕ’s cultural and historical archive, often as variations upon or explorations of them.2 I have continued the practice in my translations in this book of providing a limited commentary where appropriate. Paraphrastic Inventory of 1.16.17–24.17 Theme: Condemnation of punishing an individual for the fault of another (relevant proverbs, statements by the eloquent orators and poetic utterances): one poetic example (al-Nābigha: one verse) [1.16.17–17.2]; Seven Variations on the Theme [1.17.3–23.3]: 1. The Bedouin practice of blinding stallion camels when a herd reaches two thousand: two poetic examples (al-Farazdaq: one verse; Anonymous: one verse) with comment [1.17.3–18.1]; 2. The Bedouin practice of sacrificing gazelles in place of sheep: one poetic example (al-Óārith b. Óilliza: two verses) [1.18.2–10]; 3. The Bedouin practice of beating the bull so that the cows will enter the watering hole and drink: three poetic examples (ʿAwf b. al-Khariʿ: two verses; Anas b. Mudrik: two verses; al-Hayyabān al-Fahmī: one verse, with commentary) [1.18.11–19.4]; 3a. According to some, jinn keep the bull from the water: three poetic examples (al-Aʿshā: three verses, with commentary; Yaªyā b. Man‚ūr al-Dhuhlī: one verse; Nahshal b. Óarrī: three verses) [1.19.5–16]; 4. Men who refuse to shoulder the responsibility for the wrongdoing of another: four poetic examples (Abū Nuwayra b. al-Óusayn: two verses; Khidāsh b. Zuhayr: two verses; Anonymous: one verse; Qays b. Zuhayr’s rejection of the responsibility of the blood-wit: one khabar and five verses) [1.20.1–21.8]; 5. Luqmān’s killing of his daughter: two poetic examples (Khufāf b. Nudba: one verse; ʿUrwa b. Udhayna: one verse) [1.21.9–22.10]; 5a. Luqmān’s intercourse with his sister: one poetic example (al-Namir b. Tawlab: three verses) [1.21.13–22.5];

432 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 6. The resolute warrior’s determination to take part in a conflict which he has not started: one poetic example (al-Óārith b. ʿUbād: two verses) [1.22.11–13]; 7. Avoid censure until you are in possession of all the facts: two poetic examples (Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ: one verse; Anonymous: one verse) [1.22.14–23.3]; Oratorical Intonations of the Theme: Condemnation of punishing an individual for the fault of another (statements by the eloquent orators): i. The killing of Sinnimār al-Rūmī, architect of al-Khawarnaq: one khabar and one poetic example (al-Kalbī: 5 verses) [1.23.4–24.1]; ii. The unanimous condemnation (ʿayb) by the Muslim tradition of a statement by Ziyād b. Abī-hi in favour of punishing the innocent for the actions of the guilty [1.24.2–4]; iii. The unanimous condemnation by the Muslim tradition of a verse by a poet in favour of punishing the innocent for the actions of the guilty [1.24.4–5]; iv. ʿAmr b. ʿUbayd’s condemnation of the execution of a madman (i.e. someone who could not be held legally and morally accountable for his actions) on specious grounds [1.24.6–8]; v. Al-Óasan al-Ba‚rī’s condemnation of al-Jaªªāf’s execution of Taghlibite women in the Battle of al-Bishr [1.24.9–12]; vi. Al-Aªnaf b. Qays’s witty rebuke of someone who had criticised truffles cooked in ghee [1.24.13–14]; Conclusion: Apostrophe of the Addressee: ‘It is in this manner (sīra) that you are behaving towards me’ [1.24.15]; Envoi: Al-JāªiÕ’s approval of a verse by Saʿīd b. ʿAbd al-Raªmān, the son of al-Óassān b. Thābit (‘Blessed is he who, night and day, lives secure from the attacks of others, and only has to account for what he himself has committed’) [1.24.16–17]. This style of discourse (in which a sequence of exemplars is detailed as instances or amplifications or extensions of a comment or remark) is often employed by al-JāªiÕ. See Montgomery, ‘Speech and nature, Part 1’, for a translation of one of al-JāªiÕ’s longest extant instances of this

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 433 structure and style of writing. It is loosely articulated and paratactic but is not rambling, incoherent or out of control. The theme is a natural expansion of the points which he has made in 1.16.7–16. It opens and closes the series of seven variations (ring-composition). Indeed one of the variations (§4) recapitulates a point made earlier to the addressee (at Óayawān 1.16.9–16); another (§6) recapitulates the threats of retaliation made earlier (at 1.15.5–16.8), while another (§7) voices the fundamental moral of the disagreement between al-JāªiÕ and the addressee and is repeated again, in a slightly different form, at 1.25.12–14. The listener-reader is expected to be able to make these connections: al-JāªiÕ does not make them explicit. Cornucopia and interconnectedness ensue, as an abundance of ideas and statements are loosely woven together. The final Intonations of the Theme muster an impressive array of founding fathers and models of piety: ʿAmr b. ʿUbayd, al–Óasan al-Ba‚rī and al-Aªnaf b. Qays. What al-JāªiÕ does make explicit in the Conclusion is the direct and unambiguous relevance of the theme to the Addressee’s behaviour. Paraphrastic Inventory of 1.26.1–37.8 Theme: The Divisions of Creation [1.26.1–37.8]: First Topic: identification of the two primary categories of division for bodies in the universe (capable and not capable of growth, nāmin wa-ghayr nāmin [1.26.1–4]), rejection of the categories and constructions of the philosophers (ªukamāʾ) and adherence to Arabic language usage [1.26.4–27.6]; Second Topic: subdivision of that which is capable of growth: living things (ªayawān) and plants (nabāt); fourfold subdivision of living things: that which walks; that which flies; that which swims and that which crawls (yansāª, literally ‘flows on the ground’: i.e. it moves with its stomach to the ground) [1.27.8–10]; fourfold division of ‘that which walks’: people, herbivorous quadrupeds, domestic and wild (bahāʾim), carnivores, domestic and wild (sibāʿ), and wingless vermin and creepy-crawlies (ªasharāt) [1.27.10–12]; adherence to categories established by Arabic language usage [1.27.12–15]; threefold division of that which flies: carnivores, herbivores and winged insects, which belong in the class of that which flies but are not birds [1.28.1–9]; snakes are an exception [1.28.10–29.1]; distinctions within

434 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s carnivorous and within herbivorous birds [1.29.2–8]; definition of a carnivorous bird and of a herbivorous bird [1.29.9–11]; birds which share features common to both definitions [1.29.12–16]; exceptions to what is properly qualified by the phrase ‘that which flies’ [1.30.1–13] and ‘that which swims’ [1.30.14–31.4]; Note the two cross-references to the rest of the book at 1.29.10–11 and 29.15–16. Geries, ‘Quelques aspects’, p. 73, notes that at 1.204.2– 205.4 al-JāªiÕ introduces a further sequence of polarities: khayr and sharr, ∂ārr and nāfiʿ, makrūh and sārr, ∂aʿa and rifʿa and kathra and qilla, though al-JāªiÕ is actually defining the ma‚laªa, the optimal arrangement of things, in terms of the mixture, imtizāj, of these polarities: see Geries, ‘Quelques aspects’, p. 74, and Part 6, §4.2, pp. 403–4. In other words, he is taking a swipe at those whose view of creation is purist, such as the disciples of The Theology of Aristotle (note the expression law . . . kāna al-khayr maª∂an, at 1.204.4), at those like al-Kindī who, in the manner of Antique Paganism, saw the stars as alive because endowed with reason and so divine and at some of the Ghālī Shīʿī groups who, for example, thought that ʿAlī was contained in a cloud (1.204.16–205.2). Third Topic: alternative twofold subdivision (in accordance with Arabic linguistic practice) of living things into communicative capacities: that capable of clear and full expression (fa‚īª) and that incapable of clear and full expression (aʿjam) [1.31.5–8]; a list of verbs describing twenty different animal sounds, subsumed within the general designation of nu†q, basically speech which makes sense [1.31.8–11];3 that which is capable of clear and full expression is man; that which is not is everything endowed with a voice whose intention (irāda) is only fully and properly understood by members of the same class (jins) – we can and do understand the noises which animals make just as we can understand the meaning of the laughter and the crying of an infant, so they can be subsumed under the class of things capable of expressive ability [1.32.2–10]; properly speaking, fa‚īª applies to the (human) members of any speech community but as this is a conventional and not a logical distinction, it is to be interpreted as tropical usage (taʾwīl ) when it is used to describe someone who is not speaking Arabic and is not understood by the Arabs [1.32.9–14]; one poetic example, a single verse by Kuthayyir, is provided

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 435 with a commentary to exemplify how common this figurative usage is in the case of words like fa‚īª, nā†iq, uttering, and ‚āmit, silent [1.31.15–33.3]; In Q. Naml 27: 16, Solomon explains that he has been taught the ‘speech of the birds’ (man†iq al-†ayr). The present passage is tantamount to a commentary on the āya. See also Óayawān 7.48.6–58.17 (where the āya is quoted at 7.49.2); and 7.218.2–219.4. At 7.49.4–5, as exegesis of Q. Anbiyāʾ 21: 63, al-JāªiÕ explains that ‘where you find clear speech (man†iq), you will find spirit (rūª), reasoning intellect (ʿaql ) and autonomy (isti†āʿa)’.4 Fourth Topic: the two kinds of wisdom (ªikma) which the universe contains: Type A is that which has been created as an instance of wisdom but which is incapable of reasoning about wisdom and its implications [1.33.4–5]; Type B is that which has been created as an instance of wisdom but which is capable of reasoning about wisdom and its implications [1.33.5–6]. Comment: As probative signs (dalāla) both types are equal but differ in the ability to reflect upon and derive conclusions from the signs which they observe (istidlāl ): everything which is able to reflect upon and derive conclusions from probative signs is itself a probative sign but not every probative sign is able to reflect upon and derive conclusions from signs [1.33.6–8]. (Wisdom Type B) Man alone, of all the living things and inanimate matter, is a sign able to reflect upon and derive conclusions from signs [1.33.8–10]. ‘Clarity’ (bayān) is the means at his disposal for both indicating the various methods of deriving conclusions and the various conclusions which are thus reached [1.33.11–12]. Fourfold division of clarity [1.33.14] insofar as it applies to the probative sign which is capable of (expressing) istidlāl. The fifth aspect of clarity: the probative sign which is not able to reflect upon and derive conclusions from other signs has also been endowed with clarity: it gives the reflective sign, man, the opportunity to gain mastery over his soul by leading him to an understanding of the wisdom and decisive evidence (burhān) stored by God in His creation through His governance. Thus, on the basis of the tropical language which we encountered earlier (see 1.32.9–33.3), these mute and silent bodies can be said to speak and provide information [1.34.1–35.3] (four verses of poetry and one narrative khabar are used to exemplify this point: 1.34.7–35.3): in this respect the locatedness (i.e. the ni‚ba) of insensate and inanimate matter shares clarity with man, the

436 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s living, speaking creature [1.35.4–6]. Those who argue for a fivefold definition of bayān also have a valid case [1.35.6-8]. Al-JāªiÕ provides such a case for a fivefold division in The Book of Clarity and Clarification: see Montgomery, ‘JāªiÕ’s Kitāb al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn’. See also Behzadi, Sprache und Verstehen. It is important to realise that this fourfold definition of bayān as the means for expressing istidlāl is relevant primarily for the ideas which al-JāªiÕ wishes to pursue in The Book of Living. In other words, as this treatise is an exercise in reflecting upon and deriving conclusions from the probative signs of God’s creation, the wider, more encompassing notion of bayān to be found in The Book of Clarity and Clarification, is not strictly germane to his purpose, though he clearly does not want to jettison it. Ni‚ba would, if given equal status with the other four categories, weaken the distinction between the two types of wisdom he wishes to stress at 1.33.7–12. This is why he draws attention to what is distinct in The Book of Living about this present version of bayān as the project of reflecting upon creation. See further his comments at 1.45.10–18 on the four categories of bayān and their superiority to ni‚ba. (Wisdom Type A) The innate, God-given, spontaneous, non-reflective abilities of the other living things apart from man: the variety of music they produce, their ability to use tools, their tracking skills, the intricate structures which spiders and bees fabricate. Man is incapable of matching any of this [1.35.9–36.10]. Man’s abilities (such as his capacity for reflection and moral action, his reasoning intellect, capacity to learn from experience and identify consequence) are compared with those of the animals in God’s design for creation: man, no matter what the extent of his learning, cannot equal what God has made the animals capable of without any need for learning. On the one hand, the animals are not capable of achieving the tasks which are preparatory to (and thus one would presume less complicated than) their particular skill, whereas men, by virtue of reasoning their way to a specific ability, must exhaust in their capacity the steps leading to that ability. None of this is the result of choice or desire on the part of either man or the animals [1.36.10–37.3].5 Conclusion: These kinds of wisdom are placed by God before our eyes as an exhortation to contemplation; they can be listened to and studied;

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 437 it is God’s purpose for us that we study them and draw lessons from them. He has created them as reminders and pointers, and He has created the natural intelligences of men such that they generate ideas (khawā†ir) which are passed around in the systems which inform the various lifestyles of mankind (madhāhib): quotation of the end of Q. Muʾminūn 23: 14 [1.37.3–8].6 This is a remarkable passage.7 Al-JāªiÕ presents us with the universe divided in manifold, varied and different ways: the first (into things which agree, differ and are opposed) is passed over (1.26.2–3); the primary division is into capable and incapable of growth, itself a modification of the division into inert (jamād ) and organic matter (1.26.3–4); organic matter is divided into living things and plants (1.27.8), which in turn supports four further divisions. Various exceptions, special cases which belong to more than one sub-division, which are properly transgressive because they cross over the boundaries which have been established, are discussed. The ‘Introduction’ will devote much of the eulogy of books to exploring the ways in which the book is intercategorical and the significance of recognising this for society. The interpretative challenges afforded by such intercategorical phenomena occupy much of the treatise’s presentation of the living world and suggest that one of its tacit obsessions is with the mechanisms of reasoning on the basis of category, the legal device known as qiyās, analogy. Concurrent with and parallel to this sequence of divisions, is that encountered among speakers of Arabic, between clear in expression (fa‚īª) and incomprehensible to speakers of Arabic (aʿjam) (1.31.6). This division is predicated upon the availability of the hermeneutic device of taʾwīl, interpretation of tropical language use. Without taʾwīl we cannot properly comprehend the categories operated by Arabic and its speakers. Thus the list of animal sounds at 1.31.8–11 is not intended to reduce multiplicity to singularity but rather to exemplify the semantic abundance of Arabic and to stress the central role which taʾwīl, figurative interpretation, plays in attempting to devise categorical schemes that conform with language usage. If we combine these two parallel sets of division, we come to the conclusion that the universe contains abundant evidence of wisdom (ªikma) (1.33.4). This wisdom can be divided into two: signs which exist as signs

438 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s and are not endowed with the capacity to reason about their existence as signs; and those which exist as signs and are endowed with the capacity to reason about their existence as signs. The principal mechanism available to this second species of wisdom and central to its identity as capable of clear expression is the phenomenon of bayān, which itself is capable of a fourfold or a fivefold division: clarity in communicating the conclusions which the sign draws from its own existence as a sign within a larger system of signs (the process referred to as istidlāl ). Thus these schemes of classification are not sufficient in and of themselves. If they are to work, they must do so in tandem, in a refusal to tie down over rigorously the creation which they are meant to classify. In this section of the ‘Introduction’ al-JāªiÕ presents the reader with a chain of interconnected beings but it is not a hierarchically (or vertically) arranged chain.8 Man and the rest of creation are on an equal footing insofar as they are both indications (dalīl ). Thus animals are created capable of many things which man is incapable of achieving (1.35.8–37.8), however strictly delimited that animal capacity is (i.e. it is not universally capable of reflection or analysis – although we discover in the course of The Book of Living that some creatures can and do take account of the results and consequences of their actions). So we are reminded that however anthropocentric our division of creation may be (and compare the anthropocentric hierarchy presented at 1.204.1–205.11) man is not unequivocally and in every respect at its peak, though his capacity for the istidlāl which is bayān means that he is under a special obligation (taklīf ) to thank the Benefactor. After the initial division of the wisdom of creation into two equivalent kinds of signs, al-JāªiÕ applies, within his exploration of Wisdom Type B, a hierarchical taxonomy to the practice of bayān, the means at man’s disposal for fulfilling his obligation, the consummate form of which is the book.9 I discern four major elements to the praise of books in the ‘Introduction’ (see Part 3, pp. 163–7): (1) the paean of books [1.39.13–42.16]; (2) God’s disposition of human society [1.42.17–46.4]; (3) the social and intellectual benefits of writing [1.46.5–49.13 and 1.62.9–84.6];

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 439 (4) the importance of books for social cohesion [1.50.5–62.8 and 1.84.7–102.6]. Al-JāªiÕ presents his audience with a complex exploration of man, the book and society, seeking to discern and expose the divine order in them. It is important to bear in mind throughout, however, that my divisions and schemes are provisional intrusions into al-JāªiÕ’s wonderfully supple and sophisticated argumentative structures. Paraphrastic Inventory of 1.39.13–42.16 (1) Theme: The paean of books (continued from 1.38.4–39.12, translated in Part 3, pp. 123–4) [1.39.13–42.16]: First Topic: the book as consummate companion: they are objects of beauty easy to transport [1.39.13–40.3]; books are endowed with the most remarkable powers, able to make the dead speak and translate (yutarjim) on behalf of the living [1.39.13–40.1]; they are constant in their devoted service to you [1.40.1–3]; Second Topic: books are more effective at preserving information than the memory is [1.40.4–41.9]: books are able to retain more information than those human beings renowned for their memories such as the desert Arabs and even young children (who have the best memories of all human beings) [1.40.4–41.5]; the Umayyad poet Dhū al-Rumma committed his poetry to writing because in this way it would be preserved unaltered [1.41.6–9];10 First and Second Topic combined: reiteration of the invective of the book [1.41.10] despite its social usefulness, as a faithful companion [1.41.10– 42.3], as something more fructiferous than a tree [1.42.3–5], as a better purchase than any other product [1.42.5–6]: it is like this because of its capacity for storing information [1.42.6–10]; Conclusion: Qurʾān ʿAlaq 96: 1–2 and its significance for the primacy of the book [1.42.11–16]; two proverbs on the pen and the tongue [1.42.13–14].11 Al-JāªiÕ’s presentation of his encomium of books continues in the same formal vein as previously.12 He is at pains now to emphasise the contributions which books make to society – they are more retentive, more faithful and more attentive than even the humans who people society! Books are thus, and at present, better members of society than humans

440 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s are. This is an intimation of a paradox which al-JāªiÕ will introduce in a subsequent section: that the book, while it does away with one’s need for other human beings, and promotes solitude (generally disapproved of in ʿAbbasid society), does in fact render its reader a better member of society by providing him with what he needs to become a better person. Just how the reader will become a better person becomes clear as the treatise progresses. Books (and The Book of Living in particular) equip him with the matter of debate without the perils which beset those who gather in groups for the purpose of debate. Books should also be used in the education of children and thus become central to how they will grow and develop as properly functioning members of society (Óayawān 1.98.17–101.15). The comparison of the pen and the tongue recurs later at 1.48.10–49.2. Al-JāªiÕ regularly manages his transitions like this, by flagging up notions, themes and points which he will come to address in a later discussion. Paraphrastic Inventory of 1.42.17–49.13 (2) Theme: God’s disposition of human society: First Topic: man is a creature of need who requires to live with his fellow creatures [1.42.17–44.12]:13 people have been created by God so as always to need each other; they require knowledge of what is harmful to them as much as they require the basic means of subsistence which they lack [1.42.17– 43.7]; He has created us so as to need the reports of our ancestors, just as they needed the reports of their ancestors and as our descendants will require ours; His revelations are predicated upon the human need for sociability [1.43.8–10]; God created need to be of two types: the need for subsistence in order to survive; and that which makes our lives easier (pleasure; enjoyment; technological development): progress made with regard to both is commensurate with what human nature is capable of [1.43.10–14]; when progress is retarded or arrested by Him it is because human nature is not capable of supporting it; humans are necessarily deficient: He could not have created them to be otherwise without thereby omitting some essential element (ʿadam al-aʿyān) in their constitution [1.43.14–16]; men are not sufficient to meet their needs unaided: the great and the humble depend on one another [1.43.17–44.3]; God has put all of creation at man’s disposal; some

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 441 of it he can acquire easily, some of it through ingenuity, some by force; this is because of need, the mother of invention though need is not itself uniform in how it operates and in the effects it has on people [1.44.3–7]; man has been formed by God to worship Him through reflecting and speculating upon His wisdom and man’s attendant needs, because God has provided him with the means to do so, and He has provided a strong connection between communicating it clearly (bayān), knowledge of how to meet these needs and ability to inform each other of His wisdom [1.44.8–12]; Second Topic: clear communication is vital for society [1.44.13–46.4]: Bayān is the means which God has put at our disposal for informing one another of how to ward off deficiencies, how to dispel uncertainty (shubha) and how to treat bewilderment (ªayra) (see 1.3.3); this is because it is easier for men to understand each other than it is for them to understand the physical structure of the universe: this requires much training and dedication in order to attain knowledge of the wisdom and lessons (ādāb) it contains [1.44.15–45.3]; it is a universal phenomenon that like finds it easiest to comprehend like and is more favourably disposed to what is similar than to what is unlike, as in the case of herbivores, carnivores, children, scholars and ignoramuses: this is why, as explained in Q. Anʿām 6: 9, Prophet Muªammad was created a man and not an angel [1.45.3–9]; the fivefold nature of the bayān is one of His blessings: using words, writing, gesture and counting (with the knuckles or fingers) are human activities; the fifth aspect (i.e. locatedness, ni‚ba) is the means whereby insensate and inanimate matter communicates the soundness of its sign (‚iªªat al-dalāla), the truth of its testimony and the lucidity of its decisive evidence (burhān) [1.45.10–18]; God has made these aspects of the bayān correspond to the human senses: words to hearing; gesture to sight; counting to sight and touch, with God allotting to sight priority over touch; taste and smell have no part in this process; writing is superior to gesture because it can indicate what is absent, invisible or had occurred in the past (ghāba), as well as what is in front of one’s eyes, it keeps one in contact with one’s companions, and retains what the memory forgets [1.45.19–46.4]. Thus writing, kha††, by virtue of belonging to more categories of bayān than the others (because it can also enable us to perceive the imperceptible), is trans-categorical; it is therefore like levity and the animals (such as the hybrids) which belong in more than one class. These two topics are

442 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s tightly structured around a sequence of verbs describing God’s agency in the organisation of society and communication, in which the verb jaʿala figures nine times: 1.43.6, wa-jaʿala; 1.43.10, wa-jaʿala; 1.43.14, thumma lam yaq†aʿ; 1.43.17, lam yakhluq; 1.44.3, thumma jaʿala; 1.44.8, thumma taʿabbada; 1.44.14, jaʿala-hu Allāh taʿālā; 1.45.6–7, wa-qāla Allāh ʿazza-wa-jalla li-nabī-hi; 1.45.10, thumma lam yar∂a . . . bal jamaʿa dhālika wa-lam yuffariq; 1.45.11, wa-kaththara wa-lam yuqallil wa-aÕhara wa-lam yukhfi wa-jaʿala; 1.45.19, thumma qassama . . . wa-rattaba . . . wa-ªa‚‚ala . . . fa-jaʿala; 1.45.20, wa-jaʿala . . . waashraka; 1.46.1, fa∂∂ala Allāh; 1.46.2, wa-jaʿala; 1.46.3, wa-jaʿala-hu; 1.46.4, wa-lam yajʿal. See Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 259–85 and 332–57, on the notion of the divine organisation of society and the social order; Gutas, ‘The meaning of Madanī’ (on how Aristotle’s notion that man is political was interpreted in the Islamic philosophical tradition). For an overview of the radical extent to which al-JāªiÕ’s emphasis on meaning differed from the formalistic principles and analyses of contemporary grammarians, see Baalbaki, ‘The place of al-JāªiÕ’, who points out, pp. 109–110, that al-JāªiÕ intends his theory of bayān to be applicable to other languages and is not restricted to Arabic, though we know from other works by al-JāªiÕ that it is a feature which is more characteristic of Arabic than other languages, since Arabic was chosen to be the language in which God expressed the Qurʾān. For a preliminary consideration of al-JāªiÕ’s views on Arabic, see Montgomery, ‘Of models and amanuenses’; see also Chapter 5.2, pp. 321–32. (3) Theme: The social and intellectual benefits of writing [1.46.5–49.13]: First Topic: writing systems are more effective at preserving information than the memory is [1.46.5–47.14]:14 the writing systems (khu†ū†) of the Indians have preserved mathematical and astronomical data which would otherwise have been lost and which would have required much effort to acquire [1.46.6–10]; this has given people the opportunity to devote more of their attention to temporal and spiritual affairs (manāfiʿ al-dīn wa-al-dunyā) [1.46.10–11]; astronomy is sanctioned by the Qurʾān (Q. Raªmān 55: 1–5; Yūnus 10: 5); it is vital to understanding the stations of the moon, the ebb and flow of the tides, and how to measure the months, just as the bayān is the

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 443 means to understanding the message of the Qurʾān [1.46.12–47.5]; books as repositories of knowledge (al-kutub al-mudawwana) immortalise accounts of the past and preserve God’s wisdom through writing, and not just computational astronomy (ªisāb) [1.47.6–8]; writing is more retentive than human memory; if all of us who seek knowledge and produce books (ʿāmmat man ya†lub al-ʿilm wa-ya‚†aniʿ al-kutub) had to retain in our memories what our writings contained (fihrist kutubi-hi), God would then impose upon us an obligation (taklīf ) beyond our capacity (since humans are created in a state of deficiency) and we would be distracted from more appropriate activities [1.47.6–14]; Second Topic: the superiority of writing (over other types of bayān) [1.47.14–48.8]: writing is superior to using words in communicating a message: if someone is far away, you can hear him shout but you are not able to understand what he is shouting; and is superior to gesture, which is very effective when someone is close by (you can interpret the merest gesture such as the raising of an eyebrow, for example) and is good at covering great distances (as when a man waves a piece of clothing on top of a mountain and you are level with him)15 [1.47.14–48.6]; but both are limited and fleeting forms of communication: for when it is necessary for others to understand you and the voice and the power of the eye are not equal to the task, writing systems (khu†ū†: i.e. in any language, Greek, Sanskrit, Pahlavi or Arabic) and books are required [1.48.6–7]; counting is not equal to gesture in crossing distances [1.48.7–8]; Third Topic: the pen [1.48.9–49.2]: the pen is honoured in the Qurʾān (Q. Qalam 68: 1); God uses it as an oath by which He swears because it is superior to the tongue [1.48.10–13]; the tongue has been prized over the pen because of the ways in which language helps men meet the immediate necessities of civilisation, while the pen was reserved for communicating with those who were absent; the imperial administration (al-dawāwīn) is especially dependent on the pen, because ‘the tongue of the pen is more expansive and the traces it leaves are more encompassing’ [1.48.16–17]; today, however, the pen is considered to be one of the advantages of manual dexterity (i.e. it is an element of technological progress: see 1.43.10–14) [1.48.17– 49.2];16 the advantages of the hand enumerated: gesture, preparing the pen for writing, drawing (ta‚wīr), crafts, counting, self-defence, nourishment,

444 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s ritual ablutions, the testing of coins, putting on clothes, archery, swordsmanship, lancing, musicianship; it is vital for horsemanship, which in itself would render it the greatest of activities [1.49.3–13]. This theme (‘the social and intellectual benefits of writing’) is of course an inflection of the cognate theme of the importance of books as agents of social cohesion. It is necessary for his argument because among the books which he presents as socially cohesive he includes Sanskrit, Pahlavi and Greek as well as Arabic. Al-JāªiÕ interweaves his discussions intricately. His ideas are delicately imbricated.17 [The authorial justification at 1.49.14–50.4 is translated in Part 3, §24, pp. 124–5.] Paraphrastic Inventory of 1.50.5–62.8 (4) Theme: The importance of the book for social cohesion; the paean of books (continued): First Topic: books are more effective at preserving information than the memory is [1.50.6–7]: the book preserves religious works and bureaucratic calculations in a convenient format [1.50.6–7]; Second Topic: the book as consummate companion [1.50.8–11]: it is amenable to your every mood [1.50.8–11: see also 1.38.14–40.5 and 1.41.10–42.6]; Third Topic: the pen [1.50.12–16]: the pen is sufficient unto itself [1.50.12]; the tongue is dependent upon other things, including gesture, for example to communicate the most exclusive and restricted of messages (akha‚‚ al-khā‚‚) which might verbally be couched as the least restricted of unrestricted expressions (ʿāmm al-ʿāmm) and which of all the types of intended meaning alone depends upon gesture in addition to words [1.50.12–16]; The translation of this dense comment at Óayawān 1.50.13–16 is: ‘Were it not for indication, then people would not understand special and restricted expressions from you, since the most restricted of restricted expressions may be included in the heading of unrestricted expressions, although this is its lowest category. Words do not suffice for conveying special and restricted expressions, in the same way as they do suffice for general and unrestricted expressions and the categories of expression between it and the most restricted of restricted expressions’. The structure and method of al-JāªiÕ’s presentation of this theme

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 445 is essentially similar to that followed at 1.16.17–24.17, though the present arrangement is simpler than the structure adopted there. The current passage is an inflection of the topic of the superiority of writing (over other types of bayān) [1.47.14–48.8]: see Bayān 1.78.1, wa-alishāra wa-al-lafÕ sharīkān, ‘gesture and words are partners’; Baalbaki, ‘The place of al-JāªiÕ’, pp. 107–8. On ʿāmm wa-khā‚‚, ‘restricted and unrestricted phrasing’, see also Ibn Qutayba’s list of figures of speech in Taʾwīl Mushkil al-Qurʾān, pp. 16.3–4 (al-qa‚d bi-lafÕ al-khu‚ū‚ li-maʿnā al-ʿumūm wa-bi-lafÕ al-ʿumūm li-maʿnā al-khu‚ū‚); Lowry, ‘The reception of al-Shāfiʿī’s concept’; Sánchez, ‘Al-JāªiÕ’s treatises’, pp. 38–52 (a powerful argument that khā‚‚ and ʿāmm in al-JāªiÕ’s system is not only epistemic but also applies to the social hierarchy, i.e. the distinction between khā‚‚ā and ʿāmma). For the phrase khā‚‚ al-khā‚‚, cf. Rosenthal’s discussion of the gloss attributed to the commentator ʾlynws in the Paris Aristotle MS: ‘A commentator of Aristotle’, p 341. Second Topic resumed: the book as consummate companion [1.50.17– 51.3]: the book never tires, bores you or makes you weary of its company [1.50.17–51.2]; it does not deceive you with hypocrisy or lies [1.51.2–3]; Fourth Topic: the book as teacher [1.51.3–12]: the book is improving and educational [1.51.3–6]; it enables you to avoid seeking knowledge at other people’s doors and studying among people whom you find distasteful [1.51.6–9]; as a teacher it resembles its activity as a companion: ever responsive and patient, day and night, at home and abroad [1.51.10–12]; it is not fickle, but is ever faithful [1.51.12–14]; the fact that it permits you to study at home on your own and so avoid the deleterious effects of bad company and the tiresome duties necessitated by moving abroad in society and social interaction with one’s inferiors would be enough to establish its superiority [1.51.15–52.4]; the book preserves you from foolish desires (sukhf al-munā) and frivolous pastimes (laʿb): this makes it God’s greatest benefaction [1.52.4–6]; Al-JāªiÕ broaches his unusual paradox: by enabling its reader to avoid undesirable and corrupting society, by absolving him of the duties and responsibilities of doling out the charity or favours to the needy incumbent upon the powerful, by so allowing him to preserve his virtue uncontaminated, books promote social cohesion! In other words, books further

446 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s the well-being of society by encouraging antisocial behaviour. They are thus also better members of God’s divinely ordained society at present than human beings are proving to be. The distinction between this and the previous topic is extremely tenuous; the companion was expected to provide improving counsel (na‚īªa); in the case of companions who were Kalām Masters such as al-JāªiÕ, that counsel would presumably have been of a moral and ethical nature, as well as presenting the latest developments in speculative theology or cultural politics. See also 1.41.11 (muʿallim akh∂aʿ). Fifth Topic: the limits to the improving power of books [1.52.7–10]: although layabouts and buffoons spend their time reading books, night and day, they show no signs of being improved thereby [1.52.7–10]. The translation of this passage is: ‘And we have come to understand that the most virtuous activity which layabouts (al-furrāgh) and jokers (a‚ªāb al-fukāhāt) can pass their day and at night doing is to read a book, and yet it is the one thing in which there is discernible, upon acquiring it, no evidence of any increase in their experience (tajriba), reasoning intellect (ʿaql ) or manly virtue (murūʾa), in the preservation of their honour, righteous practise of religion (i‚lāh dīn), multiplying wealth, increasing a benefaction (rabb ‚anīʿa) or initiating an act of charity’. See further the comments of al-NaÕÕām at 1.59.11–15. Eighteen Variations on the Theme: Scholarly Pronouncements on the Virtues of Books [1.52.11–62.8]:   1. The testament of al-Muhallab to his sons concerning coats of mail and books (on the authority of Abū ʿUbayda) [1.52.12–13];   2. Noble attainments have vanished from society and are only to be found in books (a Syrian Sheikh, on the authority of a friend of al-JāªiÕ) [1.52.14–15];   3. The bibliomania of al-Óasan b. al-Luʾluʾī (on the authority of al-JāªiÕ) [1.52.16–53.1];  4. Muªammad b. al-Jahm explains how by turning to a book when he feels drowsy he is able to avoid falling asleep more effectively than being woken up by the sound of a braying ass or a collapsing building [1.53.2–6];

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 447  5. Muªammad b. al-Jahm declares his delight at reading a big book [1.53.7–10];  6. Al-ʿUtbī and Muªammad b. al-Jahm disagree on the appeal of big books [1.53.11–54.3];  7. Al-ʿUtbī and Muªamamd b. al-Jahm discuss the respective reading abilities of a slave-girl belonging to Salmawayh and of one of their acquaintances, when she is able to finish the Book of Euclid quicker than he can one of its sections (maqāla); Muªammad explains that the man is an impostor: it is a miracle that he was even able to understand one of its propositions (shakl ), because when it comes to learning he is a miser [1.54.4–13]; Muªammad opines that in order to acquire learning a man should own more books than the number of lecture-courses (samāʿ) he has attended: he should prize acquiring books more than anything – more even than a Bedouin prizes his stallion [1.55.1–8];18   8. Ibrāhīm b. al-Sindī and al-JāªiÕ converse on the Manichaean devotion to their scriptures [1.55.9–58.10];   9. A scholar’s instruction to a student to write down all he hears in class [1.58.11–14]; 10. Al-Khalīl b. Aªmad’s advice to acquire knowledge through learning much but specifically to acquire little for memorising [1.59.1]; 11. Al-NaÕÕām’s discussion of the merits of a poem by Muªammad b. Yasīr al-Riyāshī on faulty memory and in hyperbolic praise of the power of books; he notes that books cannot achieve the impossible but can only improve a man’s nature (†abīʿa); the formation of the man of intellect is set forth according to al-NaÕÕām [1.59.2–60.6]; 12. Mūsā b. Yaªyā informs al-JāªiÕ that his father owned three copies of every book he had in his library (khizānat kutub) and study (bayt madārisi-hi) [1.60.7–9]; 13. Abū ʿAmr b. al-ʿAlāʾ expresses his approval of reading as a virtuous pastime [1.60.10–12]; 14. Abū ʿAmr b. al-ʿAlāʾ tells of his refusal to condemn the reading of poetry, when as part of a mob raiding a house on the suspicion that a drinking party was being convened, he discovered a young man reading out a collection of poetry to a group of white-haired, venerable sheikhs [1.60.13–61.4];

448 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 15. Yūnus the Grammarian condemns a line of verse in which writing is criticised as a way of preserving knowledge [1.61.5–9];19 16. Ibn Dāªa defends his purchase of a luxury edition of the poems of Abū al-Shamaqmaq [1.61.10–14]; 17. Al-JāªiÕ expresses his admiration for Isªāq b. Sulaymān in his study surrounded by books, a sight he finds more awe-inspiring that when he is sitting in full state as emir [1.61.15–62.2]; 18. The great grandson of the second Caliph ʿUmar b. al-Kha††āb, ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUmar b. al-Kha††āb, defends his avoidance of company, preferring to wander around in cemeteries, reading a book: solitariness, he declares, is corrupting for the uncouth ignoramus (jāhil ), but improving for the man of reasoning intellect (ʿāqil ) (on the authority of Ibn al-Dāªa) [1.62.3–8]. Paraphrastic Inventory of 1.62.9–84.6 (3a) Theme: The social and intellectual benefits of writing (continued): First Topic: the varieties of writing systems [1.62.10]: that so many different scripts have been developed is a sign of the social utility of writing [1.62.10]; Second Topic: writing as divine inventory and judgement [1.62.10–18]: in the Qurʾān God makes several references to the writing down of men’s deeds and the presentation of these written records to each believer on the Day of Judgement (Q. Infitār 82: 11–12, ʿAbasa 80: 13–15; Inshiqāq 84: 7–8; Isrāʾ 17: 14 are quoted) [1.62.10–15]; writing is chosen for this purpose to fill men’s minds with awe and fear, and not because of any possibility of forgetfulness [1.62.16–18]; Writing is thus declared by God as a way to render men more compliant, in accordance with the Muʿtazilite political and eschatological principle of waʿd and waʿīd, ‘the promise of Paradise and the threat of Hell’. This topic is an amplification of the topic of writing systems as more effective at preserving information than the memory addressed at 1.46.5–47.14. Third Topic: the writing systems of the fortune-tellers [1.63.1–3]: one famous fortune-teller is mentioned (1.63.1–2) and one verse by Abū Nuwās is used to illustrate this writing system [1.63.2–3]; Fourth Topic: doodling when in a state of psychological anxiety [1.63.4– 65.4]: scribbling is a way of release for prisoners and captives, for those

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 449 in a state of anxiety and those deep in thought: five (predominantly preand early Islamic) poetic examples are listed: Taʾabba†a Sharran: one verse [1.63.5–6]; Dhū al-Rumma: two verses [1.63.7–9]; al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī: one verse [1.63.10–64.1]; three poetic examples on counting and tossing pebbles as an alternative to scribbling: al-Qāsim b. Umayya b. Abī al-Íalt: two verses [1.64.2–5]; al-Óārith b. al-Kindī: one verse [1.64.6–8]; Imruʾ alQays: one verse [1.64.9–11]; Umayya b. Abī al-Íalt: two verses [1.64.12–14]; Anonymous: two verses [1.64.15–65.4]; Four Poetic Variations: writing [1.65.5–68.6]: 1. A panegyric in honour of the Umayyad Caliph al-Walīd b. Yazīd (r. 125–6/743–4) by al-Muqannaʿ al-Kindī, on the authority of Hishām b. Muªammad b. al-Sāʾib al-Kalbī: eighteen verses are quoted [1.65.5–66.12]; 2. A poem by al-Óasan b. Jamāʿa al-Judhamī on writing as capable of preserving a secret faithfully: four verses [1.66.13–67.5]; 3. A panegyric by Abū Tammām in praise of the Vizier Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt: twelve verses [1.67.6–68.3]; 4. A panegyric by al-Buªturī in praise of al-Óasan b. Wahb: one verse [1.68.4–6]; These four poems, which are amongst the most substantial quoted in the whole ‘Introduction’, intone the connection between writing and power. The seventh verse of the poem by al-Muqannaʿ al-Kindī quoted, at 1.65.14, describes the reed pen as a contradictory object, for it is able to express what the tongue expresses though it is unable to speak. Thus it resembles what al-JāªiÕ alleges of writing and books, to which of course it belongs: they are amphibious objects which function in more than one categorical capacity. It is unusual (and hard to explain unless the addressee is someone else) that al-JāªiÕ should, at 1.67.6, refer to Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik in the third person, when he is supposed to be the addressee to whom The Book of Living is directed. It may be that the phrase yamdaªu Muªammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt is a scribal gloss which has crept into the text. The verses are numbers 29 to 40 in a sixty-line poem, no. 129 in Dīwān Abī Tammām, 3, pp. 129–31.

450 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s See further Chapter 4.3, ‘The Enigma of the Addressee’, pp. 230–8. Al-Óasan b. Wahb was the patron for whom al-JāªiÕ wrote his epistle in praise of nabīdh: see Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, *§161, p. 151. As Hārūn notes in his edition (Óayawān 1, p. 68, note 3) it is unclear why al-JāªiÕ does not refer to him by name in the text but instead employs a paraphrase, ‘one of the senior figures of the military’ (baʿ∂ kuhūl al-ʿaskar). Fifth Topic: monumental epigraphy [1.68.7–69.4]: societies preserve the memory of momentous events and significant achievements (dates, treaties, and so on) through monumental epigraphy in stone or wood [1.68.8–12] (seven monuments are listed: 1.68.12–69.2), for the benefit of onlookers and passers-by [1.69.2–4]; This topic is also an amplification of the topic of writing systems as more effective at preserving information than the memory addressed at 1.46.5–47.14. Sixth Topic: treaties and contracts [1.69.5–70.3]: treaties, contracts and other similar agreements have been recorded in writing from the pre-Islamic period on, to preserve them and demonstrate the gravity of the occasion [1.69.6–9]; two verses by al-Óārith b. Óilliza on the treaty between the tribes of Bakr and Taghlib are quoted [1.69.10–70.1]; an explanation of the meaning of the word mahāriq, only applied to writings when they are books of religion (kutub dīn), or contracts, covenants or passes for safe passage [1.70.2–3]; These observations and those of the next two topics are given on the authority of al-JāªiÕ: wa-aqūlu, and I say [1.69.6]. Seventh Topic: writing and numerical systems [1.70.4–9]: there is no difference between writing and numerical systems [1.70.5]; numbers are essential for the commercial functioning of society [1.70.5–6]; numbers and marks used for branding animals are indistinguishable [1.70.6–7]; there is no ­difference between the use of fingers in counting and numbers [1.70.7–8]; Eighth Topic – Digression: voiced and written consonants are indistinguishable [1.70.9–71.4]: the tongue, when it articulates letters, performs the same activity as the pen when it forms letters on paper: they are both forms (‚uwar) (al-JāªiÕ and some other early Kalām Masters believed that sound was a corporeal entity);20 both voiced and pictorial forms become comprehensible through repeated exposure to the sense of hearing and sight respectively [1.70.15–16]; similar instances of comprehension are mentioned: from

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 451 smiling, people have drawn the inference (istadallū) that it is a sign of happiness, from tears that they are a sign of pain; this also applies to the meanings of sounds, gestures and the forms of all dispositions [1.70.17–18]; it is thus that the madman and the dog recognise (ʿarafa) their names, the child and the lunatic comprehend encouragement and dissuasion; pack animals pick up speed at the raising of the voice and neigh when they spot their drover; pigeons interpret the appearance of their keeper as a sign of food [1.71.1–4]; Al-JāªiÕ repeats an important distinction between the act of istidlāl, drawing inferences from a sign, and the act of maʿrifa, which characterises animals and children and lunatics: these latter cannot draw conclusions from their actions (see 1.35.9–37.3). In terms of the presentation of the argument (i.e. one which has the form of a paratactic sequence of topics enlarging upon and exemplifying the theme), this comparison between sound and writing, embedded within the seventh topic, is formally a digression, one of the few formal digressions in the ‘Introduction’. Seventh Topic resumed: writing and numerical systems [1.71.4–6]: numbers function as a script and a writing system; branding maintains the ownership of livestock and is vital for people to preserve their livelihood [1.71.4–6]; Again we note the regularity with which al-JāªiÕ reverts to the subject of the importance of social cohesion and the need to preserve institutions fundamental to the running of society and the maintenance of the status quo. Ninth Topic: writing and empire: every community which has achieved temporal power has had a writing system [1.71.7–9]; wherever there are rulers, the apparatus of the state and organised religion (al-diyāna wa-al-ʿibāda), there the art of the book is perfected as is the system of numerical calculation [1.71.9–10], whatever form the writing system takes, rudimentary or ­elaborate and ornate [1.71.10–11]; This statement marks a conclusion to al-JāªiÕ’s observations on treaties and contracts [at 1.69.5–70.3] and writing and numerical systems [at 1.70.4–9 and 71.4–6]. It is not quite clear what exactly the phrase qāla dhalika al-haytham b. ʿadī wa-’bn al-kalbī refers to.21 There is some confusion in Hārūn’s edition about the following passage [1.71.11–84.6], which is, I think, structured in the manner of a majlis debate.

452 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s The problem probably does not lie with Hārūn’s editorial choices, though his practice of dividing the text into units with sub-headings has unfortunately muddied the waters. As always with al-JāªiÕ, the first thing to try to establish is who is speaking and when.22 This is vital both for following the contours of the argument and for understanding how the audience might be expected to respond to what is said. The ‘Introduction’, for example, is usually scrupulous in recording who says what and we should follow al-JāªiÕ’s lead. The marker used is generally an instance of the verb qāla. I propose the following reconstituted scheme. 1.69.6 is introduced with the marker aqūlu: I say. The force of this verb I take to extend to 1.71.6, that is these topics are what al-JāªiÕ says, on his own authority. The next occurrence of qāla at 1.71.11 is possibly retrospective: the statement of the subject of empire and writing at 1.71.7–11 is thus governed by this verb and is given on the authority of al-Haytham and Ibn al-Kalbī. If we adopt the reading of the Ambrosian MS (see Hārūn, Óayawān, I, p. 400), we will read at 1.71.4, qāla Abū ʿUbaydah. This is the prelude to the position presented from 1.71.14 to 1.72.14.23 Abū ʿUbaydah’s statement outlines the subject and parameters of the debate. The next pronouncement, that of the Apologist of Books, is introduced by the phrase fa-qāla baʿ∂ man ªa∂ara at 1.72.14 and continues (despite Hārūn’s insertion of quotation marks at 1.73.5) up to the phrase thumma qāla baʿ∂ man yan‚ur al-shiʿr at 1.75.18. The uses of qāla at 1.72.8 and 11 and 1.74.14 and 1.75.15 indicate that the speaker has not finished his speech.24 Therefore, the statement fa-qad ‚aªªa anna al-kitāb ablagh fī taqyīd al-maʾāthir min al-bunyān wa-al-shiʿr at 1.75.16 is naturally construed as the conclusion of a case that has been closely argued for: it resumes the points made at 1.73.1–7, that is at the beginning of the case presented by the Apologist of Books (ring-composition). The Apologist of Poetry begins his case at 1.75.18, then. He rests his case impassionedly at 1.79.14. The phrase hādhā qawlu-nā at 1.77.6 is a rhetorical figure, part of his argument about the limitations of books and not a speech marker. The audience attending the majlis ask the Apologist of Books to respond at 1.79.16 (qālū) and he does so at 1.79.17 (qāla al-ākhar). His response is concluded, with the dismissal of the technological inventiveness of the Arabs, at 1.83.2.

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 453 The phrase wa-qāla al-qawm at 1.83.3 I construe as indicating the speakers referred to at 1.72.14–73.1 and 1.79.16. If this is correct, it stands as the concluding opinion of the majority, who seem to terminate the debate with a reiterated condemnation of the technological ineptitude of the Arabs, thus ruling in favour of the Apologist of Poetry. That the record of the debate is thereby terminated is indicated by the emphatic paratext at 1.84.8: thumma rajaʿa bi-nā al-qawl ilā al-targhīb fī ’‚†ināʿ al-kitāb, a common device employed by al-JāªiÕ to direct his audience to a reversion to an earlier theme. See further examples in Chapter 2.4, pp. 78, 81, 84, 88, 91. Thus we end up with the following sequence: 1. The Position of Abū ʿUbaydah [1.71.11–72.14]; 2. The Apologist of Books [1.72.14–75.16]; 3. The Apologist of Poetry [1.75.17–79.14]; 4. The Majlis Invites the Apologist of Books to Respond [1.79.15–16]; 5. The Response of the Apologist of Books [1.79.17– 83.2]; 6. The Majlis Rules in Favour of the Apologist of Books [1.83.3–84.6]. Ninth Topic continued: the record of a majlis debate between an apologist of books and an apologist of the poetry of the pre-Islamic Arabs [1.71.11-84.6]: The Position of Abū ʿUbaydah [1.71.11–72.14]: Every community has used a variety of methods for the preservation of their achievements [1.71.14–15]; for the pre-Islamic Bedouin it was poetry with metre and rhyme because the poet benefited from the virtue of eloquent clarity (fa∂īlat al-bayān) which poetry offered and the maecenas benefited from the virtue of preferment [1.72.2–5]; the Persians (al-ʿajam) had recourse to various kinds of buildings [1.72.5–8]; the Arabs then developed a construction programme of their own, in order to rival the Persians in buildings while continuing to outdo them through poetry which was uniquely an Arab accomplishment [1.72.8–11]; the Persians (al-furs) only considered the construction of such monuments to be appropriate for ­aristocrats [1.72.11–14]; The position resumes the substance of an earlier topic, the preservation of the past in monumental epigraphy discussed at 1.68.7–69.4, though Abū ʿUbaydah’s neglect of books or epigraphy in his position is a gap which the Apologist of Books is quick to point out.

454 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s ʿAbbasid texts occasionally record for us the debates and disquisitions held at these ‘sittings’, gatherings of the educated elite often in the company of a patron where topical issues were investigated. A famous majlis on the subject of love is recorded by the human geographer al-Masʿūdī (d. after 345/956) studied by Meisami, ‘Al-Masʿūdī on love’. Carter, Sībawayhi, pp. 13–15, briefly describes the devastating and life-changing consequences for the defeated party, in this case the grammarian Sībawayhi (d. 180/796) in a grammatical debate known as ‘The Question of the Hornet’ (al-Masʾala al-Zunbūrīya); Sībawayhi’s defeat bears all the signs of having been masterminded and stage-managed by his opponent al-Kisāʾī (d. 189/805); Melchert, ‘The etiquette of learning’ (how to behave when studying in the mosque); Lazarus-Yafeh et al., The Majlis (especially the article by Sarah Stroumsa, ‘Ibn al-Rāwandī’s sūʾ adab al-mujādala’); Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam, a comprehensive analysis of majlis society during the fourth century. The Apologist of Books [1.72.14–75.16]: In this respect, books are far superior to buildings because the books of the sage philosophers (ªukamāʾ) and the scholars are more effective at keeping this material alive in a socially beneficial manner; they may have been members of a people who did not leave any monuments behind [1.73.1–3]; the social benefits they bring are more noteworthy, being a valuable inheritance for future generations25 and a successful way of ensuring a good reputation for those authors to whom this is a matter of importance [1.73.3–5]; in this respect they are more reliable than books because the monuments of former dynasties are razed to the ground by the dynasties who supplant them or come after them: this was the case during the period of Persian ascendancy, during the pre-Islamic era and during the Islamic era: the Caliph ʿUthmān, Ziyād and the ʿAbbasids have all destroyed existing monuments [1.73.9–13]; Arabic poetry is of recent provenance compared to the writings of Aristotle and the other Greek sages, pre-dating the advent of Islam only by at most two centuries [1.74.11–13]; the virtue of poetry is confined to the Arabs and those who speak their language [1.74.14–75.1]; it is not capable of being translated, for then, unlike prose, it loses its arrangement, metre, beauty and wonder [1.75.1–3]; therefore prose, originally intended as prose, is preferable

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 455 to poetry converted into prose [1.75.3–4]; all communities require guidance in matters of religion, crafts, and in gaining subsistence and comfort [1.75.5–8]; the books of the Indians, wise maxims of the Greeks (yūnānīyah), the paraenetic sayings (ādāb) of the Persians have all been translated; some have gained in beauty, others have not lost anything in the process [1.75.10– 11]; were Arabic poetry to be translated, it would lose that inimitable quality (muʿjiz) which is metre; those who translated it would find that it did not contain any item of information not already available in the books of the Non-Arabs (al-ʿajam) [1.75.11–14]; these books have been passed from community to community, from generation to generation and from one language to another [1.75.14–15]; therefore books are more successful than buildings and poetry in preserving notable deeds [1.75.15–16]; Let us pause just long enough to note that the observation and account of why poetry is untranslatable is part of an argument intended to criticise, and not to praise, poetry. The Apologist of Poetry [1.75.17–79.14]: Translation is itself a defective process; the translator requires as complete and comprehensive a knowledge base and expertise as the author of the work he is translating; and which of our modern (Arabic) translators can compare with Aristotle or Plato? [1.75.18–76.8]; he needs a consummate grasp of both target and source language but this is not how languages function: the acquisition of one leads to the diminution of the other languages which an individual has mastery of [1.76.9–14], because an individual only possesses one faculty, rather than two or more faculties (qūwa), for language [1.76.14–77.2]; with abstruse and recondite subjects, the likelihood of error is greater: you will not find any translator who is the equal of any of these scholars [1.77.2–4]; if this is the case with scientific subjects like geometry, astrology (tanjīm), arithmetic (ªisāb) and music, then the translation of books on religious and theological subjects (kutub dīn wa-ikhbār ʿan Allāh) is more arduous still [1.77.5–8]; the Apologist of Poetry lists the subjects and the complexities which theological works address: the elemental natures (†abāʾiʿ), a subject connected with divine unicity (tawªīd ) [1.77.8–9]; how information is passed in the form of the khabar, a subject tied up with determining predication, that is which attributes are applicable to God and how,

456 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s and which attributes are applicable to humans, and how [1.77.9–11]; the general and the unrestricted (al-ʿāmm wa-al-khā‚‚), a key feature of al-JāªiÕ’s hermeneutics, as it was of al-Shāfiʿī’s [1.77.11–12]; what is particular to the khabar which is an account of a past action (athar: i.e. a ªadīth), the khabar which is part of the Qurʾān, and what is particular to the intellect, to habit (ʿāda) and to the situation which converts it from being unrestricted (ʿumūm) [1.77.12–14]; true and false reports and the meaning of truth and falsehood [1.77.14–17]; being able to distinguish the inconceivable from the valid (‚aªīª) and how to interpret the inconceivable (taʾwīl al-muªāl ); whether the inconceivable is to be called falsehood and the nuances in determining it as such [1.77.17–20]; tropical expressions (mathal ) and metaphors (badīʿ)26 [1.77.18], revelation (waªy) and allusion (kināya)27 [1.77.20–78.1]; the distinction between prattling and havering, and the restricted (maq‚ūr), the generous (mabsū†) and the abbreviated (mukhta‚ar) style [1.77.19–20]; the essence of speech (annīyat al-kalām), the habits of people and how they comprehend one another, to mention but a few of many [1.78.2–3]; if the translator is not the master of these, he will err in the interpretation (taʾwīl ) of the discourse of religion (kalām al-dīn); and an error in one of these topics is much graver than an error about mathematics, crafts, alchemy, natural philosophy (falsafah) or human economy [1.78.3–5]; enumeration of the deficiencies of translators [1.78.6–18]; unless an expert in Greek and an expert in Arabic are at exactly the same level of expertise in their respective languages as one another, then even when the former calls on the assistance of the latter, errors will creep in [1.78.15–18]28; then there are copyists’ errors and the vagaries of textual transmission to take into account: sometimes it is not even possible for an author to correct an error which has crept into his own works, so how extreme must the problem be with ancient works at the mercy of translators and scribes [1.78.18–79.14]? This passage has been the subject of considerable study and is one of the most frequently translated sections of al-JāªiÕ’s corpus. No study I am aware of quite grasps the significance of the fact that al-JāªiÕ is not the interlocutor, however, while most commentators, even when they translate the phrase kutub dīn accurately, confuse it with what al-JāªiÕ refers to elsewhere as kutub Allāh (e.g. see 1.86.5–6 and 7): that is, in the current record of the debate the Apologist of Poetry is discussing

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 457 the problems involved in technical translations – he intends theological works and not revealed scripture. Previous scholars seem to have been enticed into their misreadings by their impression that al-JāªiÕ is actually discussing the untranslatability of the Qurʾān.29 This catalogue of the topics of theology reads like an inventory of the JāªiÕian library, the list of the titles of his books which he rehearses at the beginning of The Book of Living.30 There is nothing explicitly in the passage, however, to identify these words as belonging to al-JāªiÕ, properly. Instead, they belong to the Apologist of Poetry. Of course they may very well be those of al-JāªiÕ, in the sense that they are of his devising and not just his in the sense of his representation of them. There is no indication, however, in the text that would allow us to determine the matter. The Majlis Invites the Apologist of Books to Respond [1.79.15–16]: ‘So how can these books be more beneficial to their people than rhymed poetry?’ [1.79.16]; The Response of the Apologist of Books [1.79.17–83.2]: If books are as perishable as you allege, should we not therefore prize them more than buildings and poetry, which loses so much in being transformed and which is such an inferior sort of social boon because its knowledge is so restricted? [1.79.17–80.7]; it is these books and not poetry which contain information on crafts, technology and the comforts of life; even if the texts of the Book of Euclid or Galen or the Almagest of Ptolemy, among so many others which convey their information to people, are corrupt, what they still contain is enough to satisfy us in our purposes – we do not need what has been left out or omitted [1.80.7–11]; the virtue of poetry is as we have outlined it [1.80.12–13]; think about arithmetic, medicine, logic, geometry, music, agriculture, mercantilism and a whole host of other tradecrafts and techniques we have learned from these works [1.81.1–82.4]; what innovations and technological advances have the Arabs made? Al-Óajjāj b. Yūsuf (d. 95/714) was the first to introduce camel panniers and to sail flat-bottomed barges, with nailed and tarred rather than sown timbers [1.82.5–83.2];

458 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s The Majlis Rules in Favour of the Apologist of Books [1.83.3–84.6]: You Arabs owe to the ancients knowledge of the technique of adulterating coins with alloys without which you would be unable to detect counterfeit coins; without the clay found on the ground (ghu∂ār) you would not be able to make it; that which you do produce anyway is inferior to real china clay: rather this is all the result of happenstance (ittifāq) [1.83.3–8]; the same can be said of all your products: you have either derived them from the books you have inherited or they are the result of happenstance31 [1.83.8–11]; you owe the introduction of swift riding-camels ( jammāzāt) to Umm Jaʿfar, the wife of the Caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 170–93/786–809) [1.83.12–84.6]; the same is true of everything that you do: it is either happenstance or derivative [1.84.5–6]. The arguments recorded in the course of this debate are inflections of that series of encounters, debates, engagements and disputes concerning the religious, cultural and political patrimony of ʿAbbasid society typical of the Shuʿūbīya controversy. This controversy seems to have been tantamount to a denial that the Arabs could expect any special privileges in Islamic society due to them qua Arabs. For example, al-JāªiÕ’s younger contemporary Ibn Qutayba (213–76/828–89) claimed vociferously that Bedouin knowledge of astral phenomena was superior to that of the Greeks, Iranians and Indians. There is a tendency to view this in generalised terms (ethnic, political and cultural wars), though I suspect that what is really at issue in the third/ninth century are arguments concerning social standing and aristocratic hierarchy among the ʿAbbasid nobility, especially the Khurasanian Arab families who supported the ʿAbbasid revolution and the factions which emerged as a result of the internecine war between al-Maʾmūn and al-Amīn, as well as the rise to power of dynasties such as the Barmecids and the Khaqanids. It is important to note the neutral presentation of the arguments of both apologists. We may want to know which side al-JāªiÕ supports but the text as it stands and taken in isolation simply will not allow us to determine this issue. This is an instance of the technique of ªikāya, representation, which al-JāªiÕ defends from repeated attack in the ‘Introduction’ (see 1.5.2–7, 1.7.10–9.4, 1.9.7–10.1, 1.11.12–12.8 and 1.12.9–13). Of course, arguments similar to those used on both sides,

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 459 such as the boons of the book which are resumed in the following passages uttered in al-JāªiÕ’s own voice (see aqūlu, I say, at 1.84.9), can be found in the ‘Introduction’ and in The Book of Clarity and Clarification, especially the high esteem which al-JāªiÕ attributes to the poetry of the Arabs and the importance for his arguments about the divine origin of the Qurʾān of what he considers the special nature of Arabic as a language. In the end it is impossible to tell. Taken in itself, al-JāªiÕ’s text seems to support both positions and it commits him to neither – or rather it commits him to both. Al-JāªiÕ is able to manipulate this technique of representation so as to be able to have his cake and eat it! Paraphrastic Inventory of 1.84.7–102.6 (4a) Theme: The importance of the book for social cohesion; the paean of books (continued): authorial guidance signalling a return to the defence of books proper [1.84.7–9]; First Topic: books are fundamental to the improvement of society [1.84.9– 85.4]; improving and protecting the members of a society from the corruption of their basic natures is one of the ways to show gratitude to the Benefactor and is a burden which needs to be shouldered [1.84.9–10]; knowledge needs to be shared in order to be preserved: this is the most effective way of maintaining the benefaction it contains [1.84.12]; reading books is more effective in guiding people than bringing them together to meet; for when people gather, factionalism (ʿa‚abīya), zealotry (ªamīya) (see 1.5.1 for these terms in the context of the Kitāb al-Qaª†ānīya), competitiveness, obstinacy and a reluctance to admit defeat are engendered and this stirs up hatred and social fissiparity (tabāyun) [1.84.13–17]; when men’s hearts assume this attribute (‚ifa) and disposition (hayʾa), they are unable to acquire learning and ‘they are blind to the locations of indication’ (mawā∂iʿ al-dalāla) (i.e. they are unable to identify signs as signs and draw the appropriate inferences) [1.84.17–85.1]; books promote solitary study, because when someone is on his own, studying and seeking to comprehend the ideas which books contain, his soul does not wax proud and he does not have to overcome his reasoning intellect because he is not in the company of other people, who are the reasons for his pride and his will to win [1.85.1–4]; We have encountered this paradox previously: that books, by promoting

460 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s solitary study, preserve the cohesiveness of society because they remove the causes for dispute and friction: see 1.51.3–12 (and 1.62.3–8). Al-JāªiÕ here puts it on a psychological footing. This attack on the deficiencies of debate (and dialectic, and while the term jadal is not used, see the reference to ‘one contending in question and answer’, al-munāziʿ fi al-masʾala wa-al-jawāb at 1.85.9–10) is notable: after all, al-JāªiÕ is defending (his written account of ) the debate between al-NaÕÕām and Maʿbad on the dog and the rooster. ʿAbbasid society was only too aware of the negative social consequences of debate: see McAuliffe, ‘“Debate with them in the better way”’. This awareness has a Qurʾanic precedent (e.g. Q. ʿAnkabūt 29: 46). The passage from 1.84.9–87.2 recurs in The Epistle to Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād translated in Chapter 4.2, pp. 203–5, as does the passage below at 1.86.15–87.2. See my notes to this passage. Second Topic: books are superior to their authors [1.85.5–11]:32 there are various ways in which books surpass their composers and their pens outweigh their tongues [1.85.6–7]; books can be read anywhere, by anybody and at any period, no matter how distant in time and space they may be from each other [1.85.7–9]; this is not possible for their author or for someone engaged in question and answer (al-munāziʿ fī al-masʾala wa-al-jawāb); the tongue and the voice are restricted to the majlis whereas the sage (ªakīm) may die but his books survive, the intellect may pass away but its traces remain [1.85.9–11]; Third Topic: books preserve the past for us on behalf of our ancestors [1.85.12–86.3]: the fact that our ancestors recorded the sum of their knowledge in books has helped us to attain the level of knowledge which we have: we can now see with our own eyes what is lost in the past [1.85.12–15]; had we been left to our own meagre devices, this would not be the case but knowledge would be limited, our ambition would collapse, our resolution would be removed; personal judgement (raʾy) would become sterile once again, ideas would revert to being corrupt, the reasoning intellect would become idiotic [1.85.15–86.3]; This third topic, anticipated in the last motif of the second topic, is an amplification of the topic of writing systems as more effective at preserving information than the memory addressed at 1.46.5–47.14; see also writing as divine inventory and judgement (1.62.10–18) and monumental epigraphy (1.68.7–69.4); it also anticipates the major development of

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 461 books as inheritance at 1.98.17–101.14 and picks up on the point made in the treatment of the opening theme at 1.43.8–10. The concept of progress in knowledge as incremental and as predicated upon the knowledge of our predecessors is found in Aristotle’s Sophistici Elenchi.33 Fourth Topic: the books of God are nobler, more beneficial and more beautiful than all of these books [1.86.4–10]: they contain guidance and mercy, all the wisdom (ªikma) which is needed, and the identification of every good and bad thing [1.86.6–7]; these books have always been written down: on boards (alwāª), sheets of paper (‚uªuf ), parchment (mahāriq) and in codices (ma‚āªif ); verses from the Qurʾān on its all-inclusiveness (Q. Baqara 2: 1–2; Anʿām 6: 38) are quoted [1.86.8–9]; the people of the Torah and the Gospel are called the people of the book (ahl al-kitāb) for this reason [1.86.9–10]; Al-JāªiÕ includes the Jewish and Christian scriptures in his declaration of the utility, nobility and aesthetic and ethical superiority of the divine revelations (the lexeme ªasan includes both aesthetic and ethical connotations). This is a key moment in al-JāªiÕ’s association of the wisdom in creation and the wisdom in divine scripture. As was the case with creation (1.33.4–12), so ‘the books of God the Exalted contain guidance and mercy, information about every kind of wisdom and identification (taʿrīf ) of every bad and good thing’ (1.86.5–7). Al-JāªiÕ’s views on the ‘books of God’ are echoed by Ibn Qutayba who compiles several lists in the beginning of his Kitāb al-Maʿārif, based on the Bible and Torah.34 Fifth Topic: we should emulate our ancestors [1.86.11–87.1]: we have surpassed our forebears in our understanding of how the world is full of paradigmatic lessons about God (ʿibra, a Qurʾanic notion: e.g. Q. Naªl 16: 66; Nūr 24: 44) so we must, for the benefit of our descendants, add the knowledge we have acquired to what our ancestors have given us, for our descendants will surely surpass us in their knowledge of these paradigmatic lessons [1.86.11–14]; so what prevents the scholar and the helpmeet of the truth (al-nā‚ir li-al-ªaqq) from sharing their knowledge, since the climate and present conditions are so propitious that we do not need to practise creedal dissimulation (taqīya); it is possible to speak openly (qad amkana alqawl ) [1.86.15]; scholars are in favour (literally, ‘the wind of the ʿulāmāʾ has blown’); the value of ineptitude (ʿīy) and uncivil ignorance (jahl ) has fallen; the market for clarity and knowledge is thriving [1.87.1–2];

462 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Al-JāªiÕ’s statement about the demise of the ascendancy of taqīya, the creedal dissimulation under times of duress or hostility later so typical of the Shiʿa, the propitiousness of the age for the possibility of speech, and the reference to the favourable circumstances of the scholars, is obscure. See further the Epistle to Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād, translated in Chapter 4.2, p. 205, §10. The context does not permit us to decode the references. It is analogous in tone and sentiment to the statement which he makes in the ʿUthmānīya: ‘In my other books, I do not profess (antaªil ) my doctrine as my own words. I have the book express (ʿabbara) itself, I take the place (qumtu al-maqām) of all the litigants (khu‚ūm) and I make my soul testify equally (ʿadl ) between them. Were I not confident of the triumph of truth over falsehood, I would not deem it licit to conceal it, given the cessation of the need for creedal dissimulation (taqīya), the propriety (salāª) of the times and the fairness (in‚āf ) of the Custodian (al-qayyim).35 He seems to imply the inauguration of a sort of Edenic moment for scholars. In his epistle On the Creating of the Qurʾān, he refutes the defence of Aªmad b. Óanbal’s conduct when brought before the Miªna as being justified by taqīya: Rasāʾil 3.295.13–14. It is possible to conclude, then, that this is a reference to al-Mutawakkil’s abolition of the Miªna. Sixth Topic: the book as teacher [1.87.2–17]: it is not always possible to find a good teacher [1.87.2]; the didactic relationship is subject to the same psychological difficulties of competitiveness as communal gatherings occasion [1.87.2–3]; a book will answer a student’s needs [1.87.4–5] when most students are distracted from study by their youthful inexperience [1.87.5–6]; books inspire the young to learn and exhort them to avoid the defects of uncivil ignorance [1.87.6–9]; a maxim of the Caliph ʿUmar: ‘Acquire religious learning (tafaqqahū) before you lead’ [1.87.10]. In his quest for traditions of the Prophet (āthār) and interpretation (taʾwīl ) of the Qurʾān a man may pass fifty years in the company of scholars of the religious law (fuqahāʾ)36 and not be counted a legal scholar or made a cadi [1.87.12–13]; if however he were to read the books of Abū Óanīfa (d. 150/767) and those like him, were to memorise the books on stipulations (shurū†) for a year or two years, so that should you pass him by you would think he was an agent in control of the tax-revenue of a province (ʿummāl ), it would only be a few

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 463 days before he was put in control (ªākim) of a garrison town or a region [1.87.13–17]; The treatment of the didactic benefits of the book is a resumption of the topic treated at 1.51.3–12. Al-JāªiÕ extends the paradox encountered earlier: that books, by promoting solitary study, preserve the cohesiveness of society (1.51.3–12; 62.3–8 and 84.9–85.4): in this topic, books obviate the need for the central institution of Islamic scholarship: studying with learned scholars. If a man can become a ªākim simply by reading books, this whole system is as good as surplus to society’s requirements. This is a controversial position for al-JāªiÕ to take. The praise lavished on the treatises of Abū Óanīfa is noteworthy, as is the sketch of how scholars were qualified to manage the tax-revenue system and assume cadiships.37 Many of the legal functionaries in the imperial administration in Iraq were trained as Óanafis. Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād the Chief Cadi (qā∂ī al-qu∂āh) was also a Óanafī. Óanafism was much maligned by its opponents for according too great a role to personal opinion (raʾy: see 1.86.2) in the decision-making process. A comprehensive study of the formation of Óanafism is available: Tsafrir, The History of an Islamic School of Law; see also Melchert, The Formation of the Sunnī Schools of Law, pp. 41–67. The emergence and organisation of the judiciary is described by Wael Hallaq, Origins and Evolution, pp. 57–101. Seventh Topic: advice for authors (a manual of composition) [1.88.1–96.8]: (1) The hostility of the audience [1.88.1–4]; (2) Beginning a book is an act of presumption and self-deception [1.88.4–89.15]; (3) Books must be easy to understand [1.89.16–90.13]; (4) Concision [1.90.14–92.14]; (5) Prolixity [1.92.15–93.2]; (6) Organisation [1.93.3–94.8]; (7) Three poetic utterances on books [1.94.9–96.8]: Ibn Yasīr al-Riyāshī: eighteen verses in praise of books, not too dissimilar in substance from al-JāªiÕ’s praise of books [1.94.9–96.1]; Abū Wajza: two verses describing a note in which he was promised sixty camel-loads of merchandise [1.96.2–4]; an anonymous rajaz poet: two verses in which he declares that what is written will outlast the depredations of fate [1.96.5–8];38 Eighth Topic: the social utility of epistolary correspondence and its lofty prestige [1.96.9–98.16]: letters (kitāb) facilitate rapid communication throughout Iraq [1.96.10–97.2]; homing pigeons are used to carry them

464 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s [1.97.3], as the Qurʾān describes in Sūrat al-Naml (27), verses 20–23 and 28 when Solomon sent the hoopoe (hudhud ) to bring him news of Sabaʾ (i.e. Sheba) and then sent it back with a letter rather than using one of the jinn in his power or those who had knowledge of the Book (i.e. the Qurʾān) as a messenger [1.97.3–12]; the Queen’s response (Q. 27: 29) is one of the indications that it is worthwhile to use letters [1.97.12–13]; letters are used as invitations for social events by the nobility, the learned and men of power, even though they have messengers who could do their job for them [1.97.14–98.1]; the letter is deemed the most appropriate form of sending these invitations [1.98.1–2]; the letters of Prophet Muªammad to neighbouring rulers is another sign of the high esteem letters are held in [1.98.3–8]; God chose to divulge His Revelation in books; He could have entrusted His messengers with a verbal revelation but deemed having it written down in books more effective and appropriate [1.98.9–10]; formal correspondence between men of power or religious office is often affixed with addresses, seals and ties as a way of showing esteem for the recipient [1.98.11–13]; the revealed texts of Mūsā and Abraham [1.98.13–16]: in the Qurʾān (Najm 53: 36–37) God mentions the information brought to man in the revealed pages (suªuf ) of Mūsā, which are still extant, and the no longer extant revealed pages of Abraham [1.98.13–15]; He did this to acquaint man with the extent of the benefit and the social usefulness (ma‚laªa) contained in books [1.98.15–16]; Solomon, the hudhud and the Queen of Sabaʾ would have formed one of the subjects dealt with in The Treatise on the Difference between Jinn and Man and the Difference between the Angels and the Jinn which al-JāªiÕ defended at 1.6.12–15. Note that, again, a quotation from the Qurʾān is used as a capping device, for although the next topic continues the theme of the importance of the book for social cohesion, it is self-contained and is introduced by a paratextual speech marker (qālū, they said, at 1.98.18). Al-JāªiÕ interweaves through alternation the two motifs of this topic, the use of letters as a mark of social prestige and the consignment of the Revelation to writing.39 Ninth Topic: the inheritance customs of the Greeks as practised by their philosophers [1.98.17–101.15]: as an inheritance Greek philosophers would leave their daughters money, and their sons religion, because they used to

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 465 make a connection between sufficiency and inability on the one hand and providing sustenance (maʾūna) and effort (kulfa) on the other40 [1.98.18–19]; Five Variations on the Topic: philosophical pronouncements on inheritance [1.98.19–101.14]: 1. First pronouncement [1.98.19–99.3]: sons should only be bequeathed enough property to help them acquire property for themselves; they should be brought up to esteem learning and wisdom more than property, to understand that learning is the most noble and useful of all p ­ ursuits [1.98.19–99.3]; 2. Second pronouncement [1.99.4–10]: sons should only be bequeathed enough to ward off indigence, for otherwise abundance will corrupt those who are already corrupt even more, whereas for the goodly son the knowledge you have bequeathed him and the sufficiency you have left for him will include that which will bring him status (ªāl ); property always follows status but not vice versa [1.99.6–8]; even the experienced man of abundance is always on the brink of corruption, but inexperienced youths are particularly at risk from its corrupting effects [1.99.9–10]; 3. Third pronouncement [1.99.11–100.9]: the best inheritance is that which brings you good health, the sweetness of amiability and loyalty (maªabba), and a good reputation in this life and the next [1.99.11–13]: only noble and precious books, which comprise the well-springs of knowledge and unite the treasure–troves of learning (kunūz al-adab), knowledge of crafts, the benefits of life’s comforts, and the convincing arguments of religion, will provide you with all of this, for religion guarantees psychological tranquillity and emotional well-being [1.99.14–17]; these books increase and improve the reasoning intellect, drive away its diseases, ward off malevolence and permit the acquisition of self-confidence and material and social success [1.99.18–20]; this patrimony keeps the name of its legator alive and is treasured by the legatee but it is not liable to taxation [1.100.1–3]; unlike material patrimony, which is diminished (in quantity) when a part of it is removed, books are merely increased thereby [1.100.4–5]; the legator enjoys renown among the philosophers (ªukamāʾ) as an Imam who is followed, while the legatee is esteemed on his account [1.100.5–7]; the

466 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s bond of loyal amiability established thereby will persist, the benefits of the books will continue to increase for as long as this continues to be a world of need, and they will be esteemed among people for as long as there is a trace of their benefits [1.100.7–9]; 4. Fourth pronouncement: [1.100.10–17]: as a bequest, books are not subject to the fiscal and agricultural requirements of landed property [1.100.10–13]; it makes no difference whether you bequeath knowledge or the means of acquiring knowledge; everything is dependent upon what it is in one’s power to achieve (ʿalā qadr al-imkān) [1.100.13–16]; ‘the books of the fathers are an act of endearment for the living and revivify the memory of the dead’ [1.100.16–17];41 5. Fifth pronouncement [1.101.1–14]: when the erudite preceptor (adīb) and his precepts (ādāb) are comprehensive and outstanding, it is more likely that the child who inherits this property will prize learning over wealth [1.101.1–8]; therefore inexperienced, impoverished youths should be given enough so that they will attain the completeness required for seeking knowledge [1.101.8–10]; the best bequest is that which unites rather than divides and separates, which gives rather than takes [1.101.8– 12], which bestows a treasure over which the apparatus of the state has no control, which cannot be stolen or dispersed among the needy and which does not arouse the envy of one’s opponents or the obligations one has to one’s protégées [1.101.12–14]; Tenth Topic: Democrates on the eight aspects of books [1.101.15–102.6]. In order to get a sense of the moral universe which al-JāªiÕ and his contemporaries inhabited one needs to study the Greek and Persian popular wisdom (gnomological) tradition to which these pronouncements profess to belong. Next to morals derived from the Qurʾān and ethics from the exemplary behaviour of Prophet Muªammad, this tradition stands as the essence of emotional and social self-cultivation. It was the kernel of adab and remained an enduringly popular facet of Muslim interest in and appropriation of the Greek and Iranian heritages: Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, pp. 118–44 (translation of sequences of adages); Gutas, Greek Wisdom Literature in Arabic; Gutas, Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition (Articles VII and VIII, on Theophrastus and Eudemus, provide translations of many such maxims);

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 467 Zakeri, Persian Wisdom (an edition and translation of a voluminous sequence of adages); Montgomery, ‘Speech and nature, Part 1’ (translation of a sequence of adages by al-JāªiÕ in a style similar to that which obtains in the gnomologia); Bray, ‘Ibn al-Muʿtazz and politics’ (a seminal study which demonstrates how compendia of these maxims could be used by the ʿAbbasid elite to establish political personae through the creation of charismatic personalities). In many ways, the statements of the Greek philosophers bring together several of the key ideas of the ‘Introduction’: books are morally improving and educate the young; they keep the memory of their authors alive; they provide knowledge which grows when it is shared; they are a boon to society because they help to provide for what we lack in this world, which is a world of need, and prepare us for the delights of the next; books need to be comprehensible in order for them to function most effectively. Indeed, many of the points made in the pronouncements echo arguments made by the Apologist of Books. These five statements are presented in such a way as to present the unfolding of an argument which begins from the commonplace observation, familiar in the Arabic reception of Stoic and Cynic materials, that wealth and property are inherently detrimental to one’s moral and spiritual well-being. The dangers of wealth point to the contradictions inherent in the usual civic custom of bequeathing wealth to one’s descendants – one is thereby ensuring their (spiritual) demise, in addition to putting them under a legal burden in the form of taxation. These problems disappear when one substitutes learning contained in books for wealth contained in property. This argument, the sources of which I have as yet been unable to identify, is based upon a number of positions articulated in the gnomologia such as a suspicion of wealth (attributed to Diogenes: Gutas, Greek Philosophers, Article II, p. 485, §33.1, p. 490, §151.1, p. 496, §227.1–2, p. 496, §227.9–12, p. 496, §228.1) accompanied by an exhortation to sufficiency (Gutas, Greek Philosophers, Article II, p. 492, §195.3, p. 497, §262.1), and a prioritisation of spiritual and intellectual health over the acquisition of wealth (Gutas, Greek Philosophers, Article II, p. 487, §49.2, p. 497, §§246.1a and 246.1b, p. 512, §611; Greek Philosophers, Article VII, p. 87, §6, p. 91, §16). See

468 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s also Rosenthal, Knowledge, pp. 324–8. Its suspicion of authority and the avoidance of taxes also seem traditional (but not entirely consistent with al-JāªiÕ’s arguments elsewhere in favour of the cohesion of society and the obligatoriness of the rule of law): Gutas, Greek Philosophers, Article II, p. 495, §223.1. See also Gutas, Greek Philosophers, Article II, p. 497, §241.1, where the definition of true wealth is similar to the exhortation to bequeath it in books and p. 504, §397.1, where a young man is urged to study books rather than simply collecting them. Of course, the close connection between books and inheritance is the central feature of the popular translation of Ptolemy’s epistle to Gallus on the life, will and books of Aristotle (see Chapter 4.1, pp. 192 and 488–9). Some of the points made in the statements belong also to the pool of non-Greek or Iranian adab which was in circulation in al-JāªiÕ’s society and which he did so much to archive. Thus in Ibn Qutayba’s ʿUyūn al-Akhbār, Buzurjmihr categorises adab as inheritance, and ʿAlī b. ʿUbayda in his preface to his Jawāhir al-Kilam (Zakeri, 12.1–17) explains that he has compiled his wisdom collection as something to give his children. See further Zakeri 69, §121 (books are stores) and 74, §128 (on kifāya); Chapter 4.2, pp. 198–9. Some of these points are also reminiscent of the Islamic tradition. Thus at Óayawān 1.100.4–5, a definition of books is given which is identical to the definition of ʿilm attributed to ʿAlī b. Abī ˝ālib by Ibn Qutayba in ʿUyūn al-Akhbār: see Rosenthal, Knowledge, p. 256. One of the questions which my book will leave unanswered is how al-JāªiÕ proposes to create his model society out of a community of solitary readers, each engaged in debate within their own souls. A clue to the answer to how he would proceed to fashion a society out of its members reduced by reading to discrete individuals would be to reflect on the parameters of this Greek advice on the rearing and education of children, paying especial attention to the improving role that books ought to play in the formation of society’s members. The maxim of Democrates, which is translated and discussed in Chapter 5.4, p. 376, constitutes the conclusion to the foregoing paean of books.

app endi x: the prai se of boo k s  | 469 The presentation through mezzo-structures of the material which I have tried to capture in this paraphrase is both simple and complex. The paean of books extends for some sixty-five pages of the ‘Introduction’. This basic notion is explored in tandem with an investigation of how God has fashioned human society and with a sketch of how man should endeavour to rectify the corruption into which God’s carefully engineered society has been allowed to slip. The result is the production of a multifaceted interweaving of the praise of books, both because they provide intellectual benefits and are agents of social cohesion. Out of this simple subject matter and these few basic ideas, al-JāªiÕ has developed a cornucopian series of arguments which dazzle and beguile with their riotous but controlled ingenuity.

Notes

Notes to Preface 1. In the edition of Hārūn which I used this siglum is printed in the ‘Muqaddima’, as the letter shīn, but in the book itself it is referred to by the letter sīn. This is also how Bahmān’s inventory lists the identifier. Notes to Part 1 1. This section has been inspired by David Coward, ‘Introduction’, to Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist, and Geoffrey Wall, ‘Portrait of Sartre’, in JeanPaul Sartre, Modern Times. 2. I have been guided in my portrait of the age by: Cobb, ‘Al-Mutawakkil’s Damascus’; El-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography; El-Hibri, ‘The image of the Caliph al-Wāthiq’; El-Hibri, ‘The empire in Iraq, 763–861’; Melchert, ‘Religious policies’ (a seminal study of the religious tincture of al-Mutawakkil’s caliphate); Turner, ‘The end of the Miªna’; Turner, The Inquisition in Early Islam; Turner, ‘The enigmatic reign of al-Wāthiq’; Yücesoy, Messianic Beliefs; Zadeh, Mapping Frontiers. I am grateful to Professor Turner for letting me read his monograph and forthcoming article on al-Wāthiq. 3. Personal responsibility for the salvation of his subjects is one of the duties of the Caliph outlined by al-Maʾmūn in his Miªna letters as reproduced by al-˝abarī: Yücesoy, Messianic Beliefs, pp. 134–5. 4. My reading is indebted to Brown, ‘The apocalypse of Islam’. 5. The phrase mirāʾan Õāhiran is obscure. I have not sought to remove the obscurity. 6. See Zadeh, Mapping Frontiers, pp. 34–8. 7. See Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, pp. 95–104. 8. See El-Hibri, ‘The image of the Caliph al-Wāthiq’, for this.

notes | 471 9. Beckford, Vathek, p. 156. 10. Sartre, ‘Tintoretto: the prisoner of Venice’, in Sartre, Modern Times, p. 362. 11. See Chapter 4.3, p. 233, for a translation of a key account of the encounter. 12. See Chapter 4.2, pp. 201–7 (for a translation of the dedicatory epistle to the treatise on legal verdicts) and Chapter 2.2, pp. 61–3 (for the stroke). 13. Al-˝abarī, Taʾrīkh, III/3, p. 1412.16–17; Al-˝abarī, The History of al-˝abarī, Volume XXXIV, p. 119; see Melchert, ‘Religious policies’, pp. 321–2 on alMutawakkil’s invitation of the Óadīth transmitters and jurisprudents (generally presumed to have been the principal victims of the Miªna) to Samarra. 14. McAuliffe, ‘“Debate with them in the better way”’. 15. On al-JāªiÕ’s declaration that he was both a promoter of speculative inquiry and a transmitter of prophetic accounts, see Chapter 4.2, pp. 202 and 208; on alMutawakkil’s semi-rationalist policies, see Melchert, ‘Religious policies’, p. 318. 16. This epistle will be discussed in Al-JāªiÕ: In Censure of Books. 17. See generally van Ess, The Flowering; van Ess, ‘Al-JāªiÕ and early Muʿtazilite thought’; Frank, Texts and Studies on the Development of the Kalām Vol. II. 18. The most concise description I know of the Kalām reasoning process is, oddly, an account of Greek Scepticism: Barnes, ‘The beliefs of a Pyrrhonist’, especially pp. 58–60. His sequence of the stages of Sceptical inquiry is that of the Kalām: ‘investigation’ = naÕar; ‘opposition’ = jadal or muwāzana or muʿāra∂a or munāÕara; ‘equipollence’ = takāfuʾ al-adilla; epokhē (i.e. suspension of judgement) = tawaqquf; ataraxia (i.e. equanimity) = sukūn al-nafs. The difference is that in the Kalām tawaqquf led to either ªayra (aporetic perplexity), at which point the process would have to begin afresh, or to yaqīn (certainty). 19. Maqālāt, 316.1–317.6; Schoeler, ‘Writing for a reading public’, p. 62. 20. See van Ess, Der Eine und das Andere. 21. See Gutas, ‘Geometry and the rebirth of philosophy’. 22. See van Ess, ‘Al-JāªiÕ and early Muʿtazilite thought’, p. 9. 23. See van Ess, ‘Al-JāªiÕ and early Muʿtazilite thought’, especially p. 4. 24. See Cooperson, ‘Al-JāªiÕ, the misers and the proto-Sunnī ascetics’. 25. This is a difficult phrase and I am tempted to read miʿyāran. My translation is provisional. Lecomte offers ‘celui qui tourne les Anciens en ridicule’: Ibn Qutayba, Le traité des divergences, p. 65, §72. 26. Ibn Qutayba uses in this and the previous sentence two key terms in al-JāªiÕ’s treatises, aªdāth, youths, and ∂aʿafa, more regularly ∂uʿafāʾ, terms by which al-JāªiÕ at times seems to intend the theological groups of the Nābita and the Óashwīya.

472 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 27. Al-JāªiÕ and many third century scholars argued in favour of the licitness of nabīdh, date wine. To drink it was considered a mark of a refined individual. 28. Ibn Qutayba, Taʾwīl Mukhtalif al-Óadīth, 62.15–63.13. 29. Al-JāªiÕ, al-Rasāʾil, ed. Hārūn: Maʿrifa Rasāʾil 4.50.13–17. (This edition is referred to by the name of the epistle followed by Rasāʾil and then volume, page and line numbers.) 30. See Miller, ‘More than the sum’, Chapter 1, for a re-assessment of how al-JāªiÕ read this translation. 31. See the study of one collection of such leather notes by Khan, Arabic Documents. 32. Blair, Paper Before Print; on the warrāq as stationer: Gruendler, ‘Book culture before print’, p. 32; on the jobs associated with the paper industry and the functions of the warrāq: Shatzmiller, Labour, p. 117; M. A. J. Beg, ‘Warrāk.’, EI2, XI, pp. 150–1. 33. Toorawa, Ibn Abī ˝āhir ˝ayfūr; Bray, ‘Lists and memory’; the materials collected in the special issue of the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 12 (2012), edited by Antonella Ghersetti on the book in fact and fiction in pre-modern Arabic literature. The history of this process is currently being written by Beatrice Gruendler. See her ‘Book culture before print’ for an interim survey. I would like to thank Professor Gruendler for sharing her work with me. 34. Q ʿAlaq 96: 3–4. I have tried to reproduce the rhyme in al-akram and bi-alqalam with my pleonasm ‘most generous and open’ and ‘pen’. 35. See the partial translation in Pellat, Life and Works, p. 131. 36. This topic formed the subject of the Third K. W. and E. K. Rosenthal Memorial Lecture in Ancient and Medieval Near Eastern Civilization I delivered at Yale University in April, 2008. I subsequently delivered it at numerous venues, including SOAS at the University of London. I am grateful to my audiences for the questions I received. See also Webb, ‘“Foreign books”’. 37. Read ʿamūd al-subaª for Hārūn’s al-s-b-kh and al-hammāma for Hārūn’s al-hāma wa-al-ham(m)āma: see the relevant entries in de Blois and SimsWilliams, Dictionary of Manichaean Texts, Vol. II; shqlwn seems to be a transcription of ʾshqlwn the Syriac for Saklas, the leading Archon: see de Blois, p. 59, under ‚indīd; Pellat, ‘Le témoignage d’al-JāªiÕ sur les Manichéens’. 38. See Touati, L’armoire, especially pp. 21–57 on collecting books. 39. In his comments on my translation, Professor van Gelder proposes the following understanding of qalb: ‘I wonder if min qalbihī could mean “from (i.e. as a result of ) turning (its pages)” (qalb standing for taqlīb). Al-JāªiÕ humanises

notes | 473 the book in a previous passage, but here Ibn al-Jahm does not and speaking of “the heart” (or “mind”) of the book I find odd’. 40. See Chapter 5.4, pp. 366 and 371. 41. See Schoeler, The Oral and the Written; Calder, Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence, pp. 161–97 (Chapter 7: ‘Literary Form and Social Context’); Cook, ‘The opponents of the writing of tradition’; Heck, ‘The epistemological problem of writing’. 42. The report has been exhaustively studied by Schoeler, The Biography of Muªammad, pp. 38–79 and 124–9; for al-JāªiÕ’s role in the ‘cult of books’, see Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam, pp. 70–1; on his death, see Pellat, Life and Works, p. 9; Pellat, ‘Al-G ˇ āªiÕ jugé’, p. 48. For a similar unfortunate death under a crush of books, that of Dennis Pilton, a British academic who refused to publish what in the UK is known as ‘original’ research (i.e. research as defined by the UK Government agency the HEFCE) but was an egregious and expert compiler of book lists, see Taylor, ‘The “F”-ing bookcase’. 43. See Schoeler, ‘Writing for a reading public’; Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, pp. 99–110; on Ibn Wahb: Melchert, ‘Exaggerated fear’, p. 288. 44. I owe this phrase to Dimitri Gutas. 45. On competitiveness: Rosenthal, ‘The study of Muslim intellectual and social history’; on self-therapy: Adamson, Al-Kindī, pp. 144–59 (Chapter 6: ‘Ethics’); Griffith, ‘Yaªyā b. ʿAdī’s colloquy’. 46. Literally, ‘comprehending (fahm) and making others comprehend (ifhām)’. 47. The text notes that Ibn ʿAbbād is still speaking with a set use of qāla: qāla Ibn ʿAbbād. Similar occurrences in the passage of qāla to mark the end of Abū al-Mubārak’s comments: 1.126.9, 1.126.13, 1.126.16, 1.127.1, 1.127.9, 1.127.16, 1.128.3. 48. Or reading dhakar for Hārūn’s dhikr: ‘the flaccidness of his member’. 49. I have ignored the allatī which Hārūn has supplied. 50. The kabid, the liver, was thought to be the organ in which the emotions were located. 51. See Sezgin, GAS, III, pp. 352–3, who suggests the work is Kitāb Firāsat al-Óamām, The Book of the Physiognomy of Pigeons; Ullmann, Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, pp. 17–18; the Arabic version has been edited twice: Kitāb Iflīmūn fī al-Firāsa, ed. Georg Hoffmann, in Föster, Scriptores physiognomonici, I, pp. 93–294 (pp. 171.16–199.7 are devoted to animals); the ‘Leiden Polemon’ is edited and translated by Robert Hoyland in Swain, Seeing the Face, pp. 329–463; the Introduction to the ‘Istanbul Polemon’ by Ghersetti in

474 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Swain, Seeing the Face, pp. 465–85. The passages quoted by al-JāªiÕ in The Book of Living do not feature in the extant Arabic translation of Polemon: Hoyland, ‘Polemon’s encounter’. See further: Hoyland, ‘Physiognomy in Islam’; and the articles in Seeing the Face: Hoyland, ‘The Islamic background’; Ghersetti, ‘The semiotic paradigm’; Ghersetti with Simon Swain, ‘Polemon’s Physiognomy’. 52. On him see Sezgin, GAS, III, pp. 224–5, who identifies him as Māsarjawayh the Younger, to be differentiated from his father Māsarjawayh al-Ba‚rī (see Sezgin, GAS, III, pp. 206–7); Ullmann, Medizin, pp. 23–4; Ullmann, Naturund Geheimwissenschaften, p. 21. 53. There is a translation of this last passage in Pellat, Life and Works, pp. 151–2. 54. Italo Calvino, ‘World Memory’, in Numbers in the Dark, pp. 135–41. Notes to Part 2 1. See Melvin-Koushki, ‘The quest for a universal science’. 2. Quote taken from Eco, ‘Between La Mancha and Babel’, in On Literature, p. 110. Pierre Menard, the celebrated creation of Borges (in his 1944 collection Fictions), is a French symbolist poet who devotes his life to recomposing Cervantes’s work, word for word, and succeeds in recomposing Chapters Nine (detailing the battle between Quixote and a Basque squire) and Thirty-eight (the discourse on the respective merits of weapons and letters) as well as a fragment of Chapter Twenty-two (the liberation of the galley slaves). 3. Frank, ‘Several fundamental assumptions’. 4. Barthes, Michelet. 5. ‘Óayawān: Zoology’, EI2, III, pp. 311–13 (p. 312). 6. Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, Sayyid 2/1, 582.6–12; cf. Tajaddud 209.28–31; Dodge, The Fihrist of al-Nadīm, I, pp. 397–409. The studies by Devin Stewart and Shawkat Toorawa are crucial, especially Stewart, ‘The structure of the Fihrist’; Toorawa, ‘Proximity, resemblance, sidebars and clusters’. 7. See also the remarks of al-JāªiÕ at Óayawān 6.14.6–8, 6.14.13–14 and 6.15.2–7 (‘large chapters’ [al-abwāb al-kibār] on the Ibil, Nisāʾ and Jinn). 8. See the discussion of this passage by Man‚ūr, World-View, pp. 38–40. 9. Bighāl Rasāʾil 2.214–378. 10. For this meaning of zamāna, see Na‚ārā Rasāʾil 3.326.7 (zamnā) and 8 (zamāna), passages which refer to how Jesus makes the cripple walk. 11. Two distinct phases in the compositional process are meant. The text is dictated by the dictator (mumlī), in this case al-JāªiÕ, to the amanuensis (mustamlī). Their agreed copy is passed to the copyist (nāsikh) for reproduction.

notes | 475 12. The sentence is dense though I think its meaning is clear. On the use of himma, see Chapter 5.4, p. 376, the discussion of the statement on composing books by Democrates. 13. In 1931 Rescher, Exzerpte und Übersetzungen, pp. 21–2, proposed that al-JāªiÕ was a composer of an early style of Amālī works, a genre of loosely organised dictations and reflections. He did this in order to account for the difficulties he had with al-JāªiÕ’s ‘jumpy style of thinking’. 14. I read anā with Tajaddud 210.1, rather than the ināʾ of Sayyid which would seem to mean: ‘There is only a water jug . . .’. 15. Fihrist, Sayyid 582.13–583.2; Tajaddud 210.1–4. 16. MS Sh (see the Preface for a list of the sigla Hārūn used and which I have reproduced) carries the following envoy: ‘The first codex (mu‚ªaf ) is complete and the second codex of The Treatise of Living follows it’ (Óayawān 1.389, note 6). See further Chapter 2.4. 17. The phrase ‘of the record of those who have been lampooned for eating dog meat and human flesh’ has been supplied by Hārūn. 18. I am grateful to Professor van Gelder for this translation of namma. 19. The standard translation for the term ªasharāt is ‘vermin’, but I have usually preferred a hendiadys with the slightly more colloquial ‘creepy-crawlies’. 20. There now follows a brief animadversion on why the value of a creature should not be determined by its size. 21. I have adapted this term from Genette, Palimpsests and Paratexts, and trialed the method for approaching an epistle by al-JāªiÕ in my study ‘JāªiÕ on jest and earnest’. This aspect of classical Arabic texts has rarely been studied. 22. Some considerations of the organisational schemes of large-scale prose Arabic works have been attempted. Lowry, Early Islamic Legal Theory, pp. 369–86 is a highly accomplished study of the organisation of al-Shāfiʿī’s Risāla similar to the present exercise. Other studies of the organisation of large-scale third-century compositions: McKinney, The Case of Rhyme versus Reason, pp. 363–566; Özkan, ‘Narrengeschichten’; Behzadi, Sprache und Verstehen, pp. 48–56. Malti-Douglas, Structures of Avarice, p. 14, argues that the organisation of Ibn Qutayba’s ʿUyūn al-Akhbār ‘possesses a semiotic value’; and Marzolph, ‘Medieval knowledge in modern reading’, pp. 411–13, explores the meaning of the term ‘necklace’ in the organisation of Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi’s al-ʿIqd al-Farīd. Kilpatrick, Making the Great Book of Songs, Chapters 8 and 9, are exemplary. For a later period, van Berkel, ‘The attitude towards knowledge’, pp. 164–8, shows how al-Qalqashandī articulated his work with a view to its

476 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s use by those who consulted it. Compare investigations of these questions in European works: Blair, ‘Annotating and indexing natural philosophy’; Blair, ‘A Europeanist’s perspective’, pp. 206 and 210. 23. See Endress’s description of how Ibn Sīnā arranged his long works: ‘The cycle of knowledge’, pp. 124–5; al-Bīrūnī, Hind, 5.7. 24. See the excellent analyses of these aspects by al-Qadi, ‘Biographical dictionaries’, pp. 51–6, on the structure of Ibn Saʿd’s work, and pp. 67–9, on alphabetisation and enhanced access. 25. Juzʾ: Óayawān 4.5.3; 4.5.4 (the reading of MSS H and Sh for Hārūn’s preferred mu‚ªaf ); 5.5.3; 5.587.2; 6.6.3; 6.6.7; 6.6.14; 6.443.3; 7.9.1; 7.71.15; Óunayn, Risāla, ed. Bergsträsser, p. 13.9–10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22; 14.4, 8; 43.18, 44.1. For a problematic occurrence of kitāb, see the paratext at Óayawān 3.510.1–5. Basically, the term juzʾ can describe three different quantities of gathered folios: (1) a single collection of leaves, usually of 20 folios (which equals 40 pages); (2) a single booklet bound along with other booklets; (3) a volume made up of a number of booklets bound together. I think this last meaning is what is meant here. On juzʾ, see Kohlberg, A Medieval Muslim Scholar, pp. 79–80. 26. Óayawān, I, p. 28 (‘Taqd⁄m’). 27. Its occurrence in al-JāªiÕ’s introductory statement at Óayawān 4.5.4 is an editorial decision chosen by Hārūn from ˝ (i.e. the edition of al-Sāsī), while MSS Sh and H both give juzʾ. See Hārūn’s note 1 to Óayawān, IV, p. 5. Cf. the use of the term mu‚ªaf in the preamble to the Kitāb al-Bighāl, translated p. 62; Óunayn, Bergsträsser 14.20 (ma‚āªif ), referring to a work by Galen which is composed of many ‘parts’. 28. In this sense it differs from its general usage, given by Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon under ∂iʿf as ‘the interspaces of the lines . . . or of the margin’: see Ibn Qutayba, Adab al-Kātib, Grünert 12.6; al-Dālī 14.6 (ta∂āʿīf su†ūrihi). 29. See generally Schoeler, The Oral and the Written (2006); Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, p. 76 (on the gramma). Note that cross-references alone may not be sufficient evidence of publication. Take the case of al-Kindī’s Epistle on the Quantity of the Books of Aristotle (Risāla fī Kammīyat Kutub Aris†ū†ālīs), which is an epistle written in response to a petition: al-Kindī, Rasāʾil al-Kindī, ed. Abū Rīda, 1.363.6–10; 1.364.5–9 (referred to as AR). It has other standard features of a risāla such as the prayers at AR 1.364.8–9 and the concluding topos of AR 1.384.19–20. It is thus to all intents and purposes a risāla ikhwānīya, an epistle shared by two friends. Yet it also contains several

notes | 477 internal cross-references, as at AR 1.378.15–16, and one cross-reference to another composition at AR 1.378.1–2 (also at AR 1.378.3–4, though no titles are mentioned). It is therefore presumably a gramma, written as a text to be circulated and read in the study circle. Adamson and Pormann, Philosophical Works, arrived too late for me to integrate references to it properly in my book. For this work by al-Kindī, see pp. 279–96. Similar observations can be made of the epistles of the Monophysite theologian and apologist Abū Rāʾi†a al-Takrītī (d. c. 220/835), which are grammata: see Chapter 4.2, pp. 194–5. 30. As I have not consulted the MSS but have relied on the excellent, detailed information provided by Hārūn in his edition and its apparatus criticus, this overview is provisional. It is also not exhaustive. I have also experienced some uncertainty relating to the identification of some of Hārūn’s sigla, which I have adopted, with the MSS and other materials upon which he based his edition. 31. Compare the approach here with that taken by Eco to assess the necessity of the ‘stop-gap’: ‘The Flaws in the Form’, in On Literature, pp. 201–11. Lowry, Early Islamic Legal Theory, pp. 369–86, refers to them as ‘caesurae’. 32. Cf. the note of caution rightly sounded by Wasserstein, ‘The “Majlis of al-Ri∂ā”’, pp. 112–13, note 15. 33. The ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Living ends here and not at 1.106.3–5. 34. The phrase ‘explanation (tafsīr) of some of the poetic statements about dogs’ has been added by Hārūn. 35. MS Sh contains the exact wording reproduced by Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, Sayyid 584.2; Tajaddud 210.10. 36. For a translation of the speech on flies, see van Gelder, Classical Arabic Literature, pp. 176–94. 37. I read al-tawfīq for Hārūn’s suggestion: al-ªamd li-Allāh. 38. Hārūn suspects that this prayer is a scribal interpolation, though a comparison with Óayawān 4.5.2 suggests that perhaps only the final clausula should be athetised. 39. Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, p. 101, discerns in this passage evidence of the contention of Cheikh-Moussa, ‘La negation d’Éros’, p. 84, that the texts rarely if ever mention the dedicatee in the body of the work (although not mentioning the dedicatee by name is not the same as not addressing him in the text). Schoeler/Toorawa note that al-JāªiÕ addresses the reader directly. This address to the reader at Óayawān 3.298.8 confirms my suspicion that the speech on flies bears traces of its pre-existence as an independent work, be it as a gramma or hypomnēma. Al-JāªiÕ directs these sorts of appeals directly to the

478 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Addressee first and foremost, and then to his immediate circle of companions, to whom he refers at Óayawān 1.49.15–50.1 as ikhwānu-nā wa-khula†āʾu-nā, then to the khā‚‚a, then to his other readers. See the translation of this passage in Part 3, pp. 124–5. The question of whether the Addressee of the treatise is identical with the dedicatee is considered in Chapter 4.3, pp. 224–38. 40. The phrase ‘in The Treatise on the Half-Breed and the Pure-Born’ seems to have been added by Hārūn. 41. I ignore Hārūn’s addition of wa-awwalu-hu. 42. See Ullmann, Medizin, p. 217 for tar in treating sick animals. 43. Translation tentative. 44. The phrase ‘the celebration of fire in the Holy Qurʾān’ has been supplied by Hārūn. 45. Hārūn seems to have added the phrase ‘on figurative language (majāz) and similes (tashbīh) based on eating’. 46. On these terms as a classification of creation, see 1.26.2–3: ‘I say: the world, in terms of the bodies it contains, is made out of three kinds (anªāʾ): the harmonious (muttafiq), the contrary (mukhtalif ), and the opposite (muta∂ādd )’. The three kinds are derived from the physical theory developed by al-NaÕÕām. 47. See al-JāªiÕ’s remarks at 5.199.2–9; Man‚ūr, The World-View, pp. 42–3. 48. Fihrist, Sayyid 583.3–584.11; Tajaddud 210.5–19; Dodge, The Fihrist, pp. 403–4. Text given in guillemets (« . . . ») has been added by Sayyid from Hārūn’s edition. 49. Hārūn’s text is slightly different. This marks the end of Volume One according to MS L. 50. This version of the ending misses the punch-line of the story: 2.375.9. 51. Hārūn’s text concludes: ‘God Almighty and Exalted knows best’. 52. Óayawān 4.492.6 reads ‘al-Karadūs al-Murādī’. Ibn al-Nadīm does not say what this individual went on to say. Hārūn’s text gives the line of verse which this individual pronounces and a line explaining a few of its difficult lexemes. 53. Reading ʿallama with Hārūn for Sayyid’s ʿalā. 54. Hārūn’s edition contains four more poetic excerpts: 6.510.6–512.2. 55. Dodge’s notes to this passage are liable to inaccuracies. 56. See also G. J. H. Juynboll, ‘Mu‚annaf’, in EI2, VII, pp. 662–3. 57. Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, pp. 68–84 (especially pp. 68–9). 58. Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, p. 76. 59. See Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, p. 100. 60. On Muslim: see Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, pp. 79–81;

notes | 479 Juynboll, ‘Muslim’s introduction’; on al-Bukhārī: see Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, p. 116. Note the cross-reference in Muslim’s introduction: Íaªīª 1.37.13. 61. See the remark of al-Malatī, Al-Tanbīh wa-al-Radd, p. 44.8: wa-‚annafa kutuban wa-kāna ‚āªib ta‚nīf, al-JāªiÕ wrote books organised by subject. He was a master of this style of composition. I owe this reference to Dr Ignacio Sánchez. Al-JāªiÕ’s construction of his treatise out of a series of discrete booklets finds a parallel in the list-building activities of Muªammad b. Óabīb (d. 245/860) in his Kitāb al-Muªabbar, which Bray, ‘Lists and memory’, p. 223, suggests was informed by a design to produce datasets best presented through ‘booklets where the patterns established could be seen at a glance’. 62. Early Islamic Legal Theory, p. 370. 63. See Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, pp. 101–3. 64. On Abū ʿUbayd: see Part 1, p. 41; Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, pp. 95 and 116; Gruendler, ‘Book culture before print’; Touati, ‘La dédicace’, p. 340; see also Kohlberg, A Medieval Muslim Scholar, p. 85, note 107. 65. See also Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, p. 101. 66. Schoeler, The Oral and the Written, Chapter Six and Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, pp. 90–3 (on al-Khalīl and al-Layth); The Genesis of Literature, pp. 87–90 (on Sībawayhi); Humbert, ‘Le Kitāb de Sībawayhi’; Carter, Sībawayhi, pp. 34–7. Al-Akhfash himself produced books to earn a living: see 1.91.13–92.9, translated in ‘The Manual of Composition’, Chapter 5.4, p. 368. 67. Marinelli and Mayer, Dreaming by the Book; Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment; Forrester, ‘Introduction’, in Freud, Interpreting Dreams, pp. xlix and liii–liv. Marinelli and Mayer note that Freud’s preface identifies the initial readers of the book as ‘the circle of those interested in neuropathology’ (p. 14). See also their quotation from the review of Max Burckhardt in Die Zeit, who noted that Freud was addressing a ‘narrow circle’ of specialists who were also colleagues (p. 21) and the reading of the first edition among ‘clinical cultures’ (p. 23). Notes to Part 3 1. See p. 521, note 6, especially the study of the eunuch passage by CheikhMoussa, and Pökel, ‘Der unmännliche Mann’. 2. This section has been studied in detail by Miller, ‘More than the sum’.

480 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 3. The debate between the Proponent of the Dog and the Rooster, the principal topic of Parts 1 and 2 of The Book of Living, is studied in Miller, ‘More than the sum’. 4. Put simply, I propose to read the ‘Introduction’ as if I were reading a qa‚īda: see Montgomery, ‘Abū Nuwās’, pp. 80–116. For some thoughts on text as context, see Hayden White, ‘The context in the text: method and ideology in intellectual history’, in The Content of the Form, pp. 185–213 and 236. 5. I would like to thank Professor van Gelder for this rendering of shubha. 6. I am grateful to Professor van Gelder for his help with translating these terms. 7. Reading fa‚l for fa∂l. 8. I ignore Hārūn’s addition of kitāb in his reading wa-kitāb al-ʿadnānīya. 9. Reading iftaraqat, ‘became divided into sects’, with the 1906–7 Cairo: Ma†baʿat al-Saʿāda edition by al-Sāsī, 1.3.12, and al-Bustānī, al-Rawāʾiʿ, volume 18, p. 5.4 (= p. 469) for Hārūn’s iftarafat (1938–45) and iqtarafat (1969). 10. See Ullmann, Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, p. 362 for awfāq (‘Zahlenquadrate’) and J. Sesiano, ‘Wafk.’, EI2, XI, pp. 28–31. 11. Perhaps we should read tawfīq, success. 12. For these terms, see al-JāªiÕ, Kitāb al-Bayān, 1.76.12–13, where al-JāªiÕ describes a feature of what he presents as the basic human communicative process which he alludes to here: Montgomery, ‘Why al-JāªiÕ needs Slonimsky’s Earbox’. The elatives suggest that he has displayed the arguments of the Hāshimīya in too good a light. 13. See the comments on integrity: Óayawān 1.206.6–13 = Part 6 §4.5. To complete the sense, I supply maʿa instead of Hārūn’s min. 14. The metre is rajaz. 15. The metre is kāmil. 16. The metre is madīd. Professor van Gelder notes that the poet is Abū Nuwās. 17. The poet is ˝arafa. The metre is kāmil. 18. The metre is †awīl. 19. The poet is Abū Nuwās. The metre is sarīʿ. 20. Kāna la-hu ghunmu-hu wa-ʿalā muʾallifi-hi ghurmu-hu: literally, the reader will be able to avail himself of the increase in value in the pledge (which the book represents), whereas its composer (muʾallif ) will have to make good the amount pledged, even if the pledge has decreased in value. Normally both ghunm and ghurm are applied to the individual who initiates the pledge (rahn). 21. Or perhaps just ‘as old men do’, as suggested by Professor van Gelder.

notes | 481 22. The zaydīya of Hārūn’s text is to be emended to najdīya, one of the four ­principal arkān, pillars, of Kharijism. Mention of the Zaydīya here makes no sense. 23. Professor van Gelder comments on my translation: ‘Does allāhumma illā express such strong emotion? It would fit here, but the expression is so common that I doubt it. Ibn Sīnā uses it sixty-seven times (according to alwaraq.com) in his medical work al-Qānūn, a work not particularly dripping with emotive language, and in my experience it is very often used in factual, non-emotive contexts.’ 24. See Q. Qiyāma 75: 36. 25. Dr Sánchez points out to me that both mawqūf and ªabīs are terms used to refer to pious endowments: see Hennigan, The Birth of a Legal Institution, pp. 70–81. Al-JāªiÕ and Kalām Masters like him are devoted to realising God’s order for society in a manner not dissimilar to money and property given inalienably over to pious purposes. 26. The metre is ramal. 27. The poet is al-Farazdaq and the metre is kāmil. 28. The metre is khafīf. 29. I would like to thank Professor van Gelder for his translation of this phrase. 30. The metre is †awīl. 31. The metre is kāmil. 32. The metre is basī†. 33. The metre is †awīl. This is not of course the famous scholar and human geographer al-Masʿūdī (d. after 345/956). 34. I am grateful to Professor van Gelder. He notes: ‘The metaphor is slightly odd, hence the variants ªushiya l-insānū etc. I would prefer ªushiya l-afwāh of course: “mouths to be stuffed with”, and kāf and ªāʾ are easily confused in early ductus. There are also variants with khashiya al-aqwāmu or maliʾa l-aqwāmu but I don’t believe in them.’ 35. The metre is †awīl. 36. Reading Jamra with the third printing for the first printing’s Hamza: see Harūn’s note 3 on p. 15. 37. The poet is al-ʿAttābī and the metre is sarīʿ. 38. The metre is basī†. Professor van Gelder notes that the poet is Yazīd b. ʿAmr al-Óanafī. 39. Q. Anʿām 6: 164; Isrāʾ 17: 15; Fā†ir 35: 18; Zumar 39: 7. 40. The Óadīth is not found in the canonical collections, though there are a

482 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s number of formulations that are similar and are effectively exegesis of the Qurʾanic verse. 41. Abū Nuwās. 42. The metre is munsariª. Zuhayr was a manager of singing-girls. His own singing is so frigid and bland that he is incandescent. Thus the terms ªārr and bārid, hot and cold, are the subject of a punning lampoon of a frigid singer, one based on their metaphorical application to spicy and bland witticisms, as at 1.3.16–4.1, §3.1 and 1.106.1–2, §29. 43. Arabs were not thought to make good doctors: see Montgomery, ‘Islamic crosspollinations’, p. 149. I presume that the reference to an aʿrābī, a Bedouin, is a reference to the popular medical lore that came to be incorporated in the field of Prophetic medicine, the medicinal knowledge attributed to Prophet Muªammad. 44. I read fa‚l for fa∂l, as suggested by Hārūn. 45. I am grateful to Professor van Gelder for this translation. 46. While mutabāʿida does not imply incompatibility, I hear in this argument an echo of the argument about creation out of contraries propounded by al-NaÕÕām as an argument for design: see Part 5, pp. 281–3. 47. I have followed the reading of the third edition where Hārūn, in his explanation of this term, normally a disease of the rump, refers to al-JāªiÕ, Al-Bighāl, 89, §140 and 91, §144. The first edition reads al-shabaq, repeating the word from the previous line (1.103.8). 48. Q. Baqara 2: 71. 49. The metre is †awīl. 50. Or conceivably this line may mean ‘and his ties to me caused the mind of the man of Kāhil to slide’. 51. The metre is kāmil. 52. Hārūn seems to be responsible for the phrase fī kitāb al-hujanāʾ wa-al-‚uraªāʾ, included in the Kitāb al-Hujanāʾ wa-al-Íuraªāʾ. 53. Ritter, ‘Ein arabisches Handbuch’; W. Heffening/G. Endress, ‘Tadbīr’, EI2, X, pp. 52–3. A study of this tradition by Simon Swain with an edition of the Arabic text is due to appear soon. 54. Discussed by Heinrichs, ‘On the genesis of the ªaqîqa-majâz dichotomy’, pp. 130–2. 55. Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong. For the claim that the Treatise on the Singing-Girls, Risālat al-Qiyān, is informed by this principle, see Montgomery, ‘Al-Jahiz’, p. 239.

notes | 483 56. He is the authority for the tale of the miserly landlord al-Kindī in The Book of Misers: al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 82.1. 57. Geries, Un genre littéraire, p. 18. 58. Frank, ‘Several fundamental assumptions’. 59. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 124–7 and p. 39. 60. AR 1.369.11. 61. Translated by Walzer and Frede in Galen, Three Treatises. 62. See Óayawān 5.10.2–11.7; van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, VI, pp. 31–2, Text XXII, 50; ‘GˇāªiÕ Werkeliste’, §39: Theologie und Gesellschaft, VI, p. 315. 63. Compare al-JāªiÕ’s remarks with Blair’s reading of Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum maius (1255): ‘A Europeanist’s Perspective’, p. 204. 64. I have argued in another publication that Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt had Rāfi∂ī leanings: Montgomery, ‘Al-G ˇ āªiÕ and Hellenizing philosophy’. 65. Such is a maximalist reading of the passage. A minimalist reading would interpret this reference as intending the study circle and posit that the Addressee is an influential and respected member of that circle. Such a reading does not, however, account for how the Addressee would be in a position to prevent the circle from benefitting from The Book of Living. 66. Óayawān 1.16.17–24.17, paraphrased in detail in the Appendix. 67. See Montgomery, ‘Speech and nature, Part 3’, pp. 107–10; Montgomery, ‘JāªiÕ on jest and earnest’, p. 221 (al-JāªiÕ begs not to be flogged). 68. For a detailed paraphrase of this passage, see the Appendix, pp. 431–3. 69. See 1.3.10–14 [§2] and stated openly at 1.201.1–6; 1.216.9–10 = Part 6, §3.1 and §10. 70. See for example 1.26.14–15; 26.16–27.2; 27.12–15; 28.14–29.1; 31.6. This passage is translated and compellingly analysed by Miller, ‘More than the sum’. 71. See Eisenstein, Einführung, pp. 188–90; Enderwitz, ‘Culture, history and religion’. 72. This finds a curious parallel in the Risāla of al-Shāfiʿī, where as Lowry, Early Islamic Legal Theory, p. 386, notes, at §§56–9 four modes of bayān are identified, while five are given at §§73–125. Al-JāªiÕ’s text would seem to corroborate Lowry’s suspicion about the centrality of bayān in the early juridical theories ‘developed by the proto-Shāfiʿī school of legal thought’. This was obviously very much a live question in the early third century. 73. Compare the subtlety of al-JāªiÕ’s hierarchy of creation, reiterated at Óayawān

484 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 7.10.10–12.8 (see above, pp. 440–2), with the more straightforward anthropocentric hierarchy also encountered: Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 354–7. 74. For alternative translations of 1.37.10–38.8, see van Gelder, ‘Mixtures of jest and earnest’, p. 100 and note 63; Montgomery, ‘JāªiÕ on jest and earnest’, p. 226. I am grateful to Dr Pökel for allowing me to read his unpublished paper, ‘Ernst und Scherz in der klassischen arabischen Literatur: Überlegungen zu einem wirkmächtigen Konzept am Beispiel von al-G ˇ āªiÕ (gest. 869)’. 75. For a more extensive paraphrase, see Appendix 1. 76. For an abbreviated translation of these pages, see Pellat, Life and Works, p. 131; on the cultural implications of praising books, see Rosenthal, Knowledge, pp. 277–8. 77. Compare this with some cognate discussions by al-JāªiÕ of the divine articulation of society: Óujaj al-Nubūwa Rasāʾil 3.240.6–243.10; al-Wukalāʾ 4.100.1–101.2. See Hefter, ‘“You have asked”’, pp. 27–75; Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 259–61 and 340–6, especially p. 341, for the general concepts which inform al-JāªiÕ’s position in this section of The Book of Living. 78. See van Gelder, ‘The conceit of pen and sword’. 79. For an abbreviated translation of some of these pages, see Part 1, pp. 43–4; Pellat, Life and Works, pp. 131–2. See also Pellat, ‘Le témoignage d’al-JāªiÕ’; Webb, ‘“Foreign Books”’, misconstrues al-JāªiÕ’s criticism of these books. The Manichaeans write useless, i.e. meaningless, books and so misuse books in the process. Their activities do not diminish the value of the book as a vehicle of communication. 80. See the explanation provided by Frank, ‘Al-Maʿnà’. 81. See Endress, ‘Die wissenschaftliche Literatur’, pp. 422, 424, 426, 470; Sezgin, GAS, V, p. 225–6, on his involvement in the Euclid and Almagest projects; Saliba, Islamic Science, pp. 66–70 and 73–129 (on engagement with the Almagest); Endress, ‘Building the library’, p. 340 (and note 60: further references to the Euclid translation); Gutas, ‘Geometry and the rebirth of philosophy’ (on the centrality of Euclid to the cosmological preoccupations of the Kalām Masters). 82. A translation of 1.88.1–94.8, the ‘Manual of Composition’, is given in Chapter 5.4, pp. 365–70. Its ideas are illustrated through the quotation of three blocks of poetry: eighteen verses by Ibn Yasīr al-Riyāshī, two by Abū Wajza, a companion of the Prophet, and an anonymous line of rajaz.

notes | 485 83. See further Geries, ‘Quelques aspects’, p. 77, and Un genre littéraire, p. 45, note 5, with references. 84. See Miller, ‘More than the sum’, for an excellent analysis of al-JāªiÕ’s method in using these taxonomies and his purposes in articulating these disagreements. Notes to Part 4 1. I would like to thank Professor Rebecca Stott for pointing out to me how much I was taking for granted in this part of my book. 2. See the excellent studies by Touati, L’armoire and Kohlberg, A Medieval Muslim Scholar, especially pp. 71–4. On bibliography generally: Balsamo, Bibliography; Blair, ‘A Europeanist’s perspective’, especially pp. 210–11. Biography in Arabic: Cooperson, Classical Arabic Biography, especially pp. 1–23 (a foundational study); al-Qadi, ‘Biographical dictionaries’, pp. 23–75 (with full bibliography on pp. 23–4). For Yaªyā b. Maʿīn’s extensive library, see Touati, L’armoire, p. 48. 3. Kohlberg, A Medieval Muslim Scholar, pp. 75–81. In the following examples, I do not mean to extrapolate from later writerly practices, habits and assumptions only then to read them back into the third century. This brief excursus, informed by a technique common in the study of the history of ideas and arguments, seeks to uncover, in the light of later developments, some aspects of an earlier practice which may otherwise remain obscure. 4. Translated by Rosenthal, ‘An eleventh-century list’. 5. Alfarabius, De Platonis Philosophia; Alfarabi, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. 6. I owe this observation to al-Qadi, ‘Biographical dictionaries’, p. 34. See also Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography, pp. 101–6. Al-Qadi’s article is a response to Rosenthal’s remarks on p. 101 concerning theology, history, ­learning, biography and scholarship: see ‘Biographical dictionaries’, p. 28. 7. I will refer to this work in a shorthand form when providing page and line references as ‘Kraus’. Al-Bīrūnī does not identify the addressee who has asked him to write the work. The tone of the address has led some scholars to propose that this is an epistle exchanged between colleagues, which of course it may well be. It was not unknown, however, for aristocratic commissioners of biographical works to specify that their biographer compose the work as an epistle between intimates, as the Caliph al-Muʿta∂id (r. 279–89/892–902) required Sinān b. Thābit b. Qurra (d. 331/942) to do: Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography, pp. 48 and 104. 8. The line numbers I give do not always correspond with those in Kraus’s edition

486 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s because he does not count book titles as lines of his page! There have been numerous studies and partial translations of the work: see David Pingree, ‘Bīrūnī II: Bibliography’, EIr, IV, pp. 276–7 (with a full list of references to the relevant secondary materials). 9. Al-Bīrūnī presumably intends the Taʾrīkh al-A†ibbāʾ composed in 290/903 for the Vizier al-Qāsim b. ʿUbayd Allāh: this work was edited by Rosenthal, ‘Isªāq b. Óunayn’s Tarîh al-A†ibbâʾ’; see also his description of the MS: ‘From Arabic ˘ books and manuscripts VII’, pp. 10–11; on its chronology, see Zimmermann, ‘The chronology’; on the Vizier, see Osti, ‘Al-Qāsim b. ʿUbayd Allāh’. 10. Al-Rāzī, al-Sīra al-Falsafīya, in al-Rasāʾil al-Falsafīya, pp. 98–111; Butterworth, ‘Al-Rāzī: The Book of the Philosophic Life’; McGinnis and Reisman, Classical Arabic Philosophy, pp. 36–44; Butterworth, ‘Ethical and Political Philosophy’, pp. 272–5. 11. On these Manichaean works, see de Blois, Dictionary of Manichaean Texts, pp. 52–3 (sirr), 69 (faraqmā†iyā), 35 (jabbār), 73 (kanz), 61 (∂iªª), 31 (injīl ), 54 (al-shāburaqān). 12. Q. Nūr 24: 40. 13. I do not understand the phrase ghayr al-jirra wa-al-qa‚ʿa. 14. For this use of the q-r-b root, see qarāba in al-Bīrūnī, Fihrist Kraus 6.14, a work dedicated by al-Rāzī to the governor of Khurāsān and which bears the name of its dedicatee. 15. AR 1.363–84, translated in Adamson and Pormann, Philosophical Works, pp. 281–96; Jolivet, ‘L’épître’; Adamson, ‘The Kindian tradition’; reprised in his Al-Kindī, pp. 28–33 and 35–6 and passim; Endress, ‘The cycle of knowledge’, pp. 110–11. 16. On the Banū al-Munajjim, see M. Fleischhammer, ‘Munadjdjim, Banū ’l-’, EI2, VII, pp. 558–61; the commissioner of the epistle Abū al-Óasan ʿAlī b. Yaªyā (b. 200/815–16) is discussed on p. 559. 17. The standard edition is still that of Bergsträsser, Óunain ibn Isªāq (henceforth simply Bergsträsser); Bergsträsser, Neue Materialen; Richard Walzer, ‘Djālīnūs’, EI2, II, pp. 402–3; Gotthard Strohmaier, ‘Óunayn ibn Isªāk. al-ʿIbādī’, EI2, III, pp. 578–81; Meyerhof, ‘New light on Óunain Ibn Isªāq’; Ullmann, Medizin, pp. 36–7 and 115–16; Ullmann, Islamic Medicine, pp. 9–11; Lieber, ‘Galen in Hebrew’; Strohmaier, ‘Galen in Arabic’. 18. Compare this passage of The Book of Living with Óunayn Bergsträsser 5.13–17. 19. See further Óunayn Bergsträsser 38.15–17 and 44.6–7, where Óunayn notes the uncertainty that comes from relying on his memory.

notes | 487 20. I am unsure of the phrase shayʾan in kāna shadhdha ʿannī min-hā. I have decided to see in it a reference to Óunayn’s loss of his books and the defectiveness of his memory (a rhetorical move intended to stave off any criticism by his patron that he has not fulfilled the terms of the commission). I wonder if there is a pun in dhakara 2.2 and 2.3 (in its sense of remembrance) and ªifÕ in 1.10. 21. I have conjectured that the apostrophe of the unnamed patron ends here and Óunayn addresses ʿAlī b. Yaªyā. As so often, it is very difficult to determine the precise contours of direct speech and indirect speech. 22. I am unsure whether the phrase aqbaltu afhamu means ‘I began my studies’ or ‘I attained legal majority’? 23. This is Job of Edessa whose Syriac philosophy of nature is discussed in Chapter 5.1. 24. Entries updated by a redactor: §§33 (23.1–3), 41 (25.12–15), 48 (27.10– 12), 49 (27.13–28.15), 53 (29.9–30.9), 57 (31.5–9), 61 (31.19–32.3), 64 (32.14–17), 69 (34.8–14), 75 (36.1–4), 92 (41.3–10), 101 (43.16–44.5), 102 (44.6–11), 104 (45.1–5), 115 (47.10–48.8), 124 (50.13–51.2), 125 (51.5–9), 126 (51.10–13), 127 (51.14–16): see also 52.16–20. The information about Óunayn’s revision of his own work, production of another catalogue based upon another compilation in Greek, and comments on the relation of the copied text with ʿAlī b. Yaªyā’s exemplar are to be found on Bergsträsser 52.13–15, 52.16–20 and 52.21–53.2 respectively. 25. See Walzer, ‘Djālīnūs’, EI2, II, p. 402; Strohmaier, ‘Óunayn’, EI2, III, p. 579. 26. See, e.g. 5.3–9, 11.5–9, 12.22–23.4, 15.16–21, 16.10–13, 24.1–4, 27.1–4 (revisions); §§22, 23, 32, 77, 81, 111 (114, partially rendered), 129 (untranslated works); §123, a work in which the commissioner of the translation does the collating and improves the text. Óunayn notes that he converted two works into question and answer format (§§92 and 95) and in a number of Hippocratic works, reinserted the original text into the body of Galen’s commentary: §§88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100. Several misattributions are corrected: §§34, 35, 65, 80, 101 (in this last entry, Galen corrects an ascription to Hippocrates, Óunayn an ascription to Galen!). 27. See Óunayn Bergsträsser 18.19–19.5 and also 38.2–4 (Alexandrian distortion) and 52.11–13 (Óunayn’s outline of his yearly programme for the remainder of Galen’s books). 28. See Óunayn Bergsträsser 1.11–13, 3.5–10, (25.19–20: I think that this reference to the occurrence of an obstacle is too vague to be understood as referring

488 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s to the loss of his library), 42.5–6, 49.1–2; Strohmaier, ‘Óunayn’, EI2, III, p. 579. 29. Translation: ‘The autobiography of Óunayn ibn Isªāq (809–873–877)’, in Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, pp. 107–18; study: Cooperson, ‘The purported autobiography’; for texts as recalcitrant in this way, see Montgomery, ‘Editor’s introduction’. 30. On the confiscation of al-Kindī’s library, see D. R. Hill, ‘Mūsā, Banū’, EI2, VII, p. 640–1. 31. See Bergsträsser §§17, 37, 50, 76, 103. 32. The verb naqala, to transfer, is used at Bergsträsser 24.4. 33. See, e.g. §§3 (5.1–9), 4 (6.2–7), 5 (6.14–17), 7 (8.9–11), 11 (10.4–6), 13 (11.3–4), 16 (15.4–10), 43 (26.1–2), 79 (37.11–13), 125 (51.6); and 52.6–11 where Óunayn gives his own age and the year at the time of composing the catalogue. 34. See also al-Bīrūnī, Fihrist Kraus 1.4, 1.7 and 4.1 for comparable uses of the root sh-w-q. 35. Cf. Bergsträsser 7.20 (naªw qūwat al-mutaʿallimīn); 17.16–17, wa-huwa baʿdu ∂aʿīf lam yaqwi fī al-tarjama. There is of course an allusion here to the philosophical use of qūwa as potential and to the Galenic concept of the special bodily faculties (in Greek dynameis): see Gourevitch, ‘The paths of knowledge’, p. 130. 36. Bergsträsser 8.4, 21.19–20 (pun on tashrīª and shawāhid ), 22.2–3, 33.18, 40.3, 43.10, 43.15. 37. On the significance of the Galenic paradigm in some Arabic philosophical autobiographies, see Menn, ‘The Discourse on the Method’. I came too late to the study by König, ‘Conventions of prefatory self-presentation’. What he says about Galen can very easily apply, mutatis mutandis, to al-JāªiÕ. The Galenic presence in the JāªiÕian corpus merits further consideration. 38. Gutas, ‘The spurious and the authentic’; see also Gutas, Avicenna, pp. 200–6. 39. Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, Sayyid 2/1, 157.1–172.3 = Tajaddud 307.9–312.20 (biography: 157.1–159.2 = 307.9–308.3 and 308.25; last will and testament: 159.2–160.16 = 308.3–25; bibliography: 160.17–172.3 = 308.26–312.20). In Ibn Abī U‚aybiʿa, ʿUyūn al-Anbāʾ, 86.9–105.32, the entry is organised as follows: (1) biography: Ri∂ā 86.9–91.5; (2) the organisation of Aristotle’s books: Ri∂ā 91.6–94.19 (Íāʿid al-Andalusī: 91.6–92.24; al-Fārābī on the Organon: 92.25–94.19); (3) last will and testament: Ri∂ā 94.20–95.22; (4) biography reiterated; the education of Aristotle: Ri∂ā 95.23–98.16 (Óunayn b. Isªāq’s

notes | 489 account of the philosophical education of princes according to the Greeks and how Aristotle was instructed by Plato: Ri∂ā 95.23–96.27 and 98.10–13; with an inventory of Aristotle’s philosophical maxims recited on the occasion he was recognised as a philosopher pupil of Plato: Ri∂ā 96.28–98.9); (5) Aristotle’s philosophical maxims (ādāb): Ri∂ā 98.17–103 (including the Octagon of Justice: Ri∂ā 102.22–103.1); (6) the catalogue of Aristotle’s books: Ri∂ā 103.2–105.31 (Ptolemy: Ri∂ā 103.2–105.16; Ibn Abī U‚aybiʿa: 105.17– 31). Ptolemy’s epistle to Ghallus is mentioned at Ri∂ā 86.15–20 (biography); Ri∂ā 94.20–21 (will); Ri∂ā: 103.2 (books). The relevant section of it, folios 10a–18a of the Istanbul MS Aya Sofya 4833 (it is part of the collection which contains Falsafat Aflā†ūn), has been edited and translated by Hein, Definition und Einteilung, pp. 388–439. The format of Ptolemy’s epistle conforms to the pattern of a standard epistle commissioned in Arabic: (1) Hein 416.3–12: the request and its fulfilment – Ptolemy’s decisions about what to include and the format of the catalogue; (2) Hein 416.13–418.4: confusion over the ordering of the crafts and the method of listing only by title; (3) Hein 418.4–8: uniqueness of the epistle; (4) Hein 418.9–16: table of contents; (5) Hein 418.16–18: promise to provide additional information if requested by the addressee; (6) Hein 420–38: 102 titles are listed by name only. Thus, it contains no mention of the last will and testament. See Gutas, ‘The spurious and the authentic’, pp. 22–7; Aouad, ‘Aristote de Stagire: Prosopographie’; Endress, ‘The cycle of knowledge’, p. 108. 40. Chraïbi, ‘L’émergence’; Freimark, ‘Das Vorwort’ (especially pp. 72–86 on the third century, including brief discussions of al-JāªiÕ on pp. 74–8 and Ibn Qutayba, pp. 78–83); Bray, ‘Lists and memory’. See generally Derrida, ‘Outwork, prefacing’ in Dissemination, pp. 1–65. 41. Chraïbi, ‘L’émergence’, pp. 89 and 91–2; Hefter, ‘“You have asked”’, pp. 10–12; Hachmeier, ‘Die Entwicklung der Epistolographie’. 42. Qiyān Rasāʾil 2.143.2–10; The Epistle on Singing-girls, §1; Cheikh-Moussa, ‘La négation d’Éros’; Montgomery, ‘Beeston and the singing-girls’. Several of al-Kindī’s philosophical epistles follow this convention: Risālat al-Kindī ilā Aªmad b. Muªammad al-Khurasānī, AR 1.186.9–10; Risālat Yaʿqūb b. Isªāq al-Kindī ilā ʿAlī b. al-Jahm, AR 1.201.3. 43. Íināʿat al-Kalām Rasāʾil 4.243.3–10 (even though this text is an excerpt in an anthology, this passage reads like the prefatory address); see also Fakhr al-Sūdān Rasāʾil 1.177.6–7; Khalidi, ‘The boasts of the Blacks’, p. 3; Ducatez and Ducatez, ‘Al-GˇāªiÕ, Kitāb Fahr al-Sūdān’, p. 6; Schoeler/Toorawa, The ˘

490 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Genesis of Literature, pp. 59–60. See also my description of al-Kindī’s Risāla fī Kammīyat Kutub Aris†ū†ālīs, Chapter 4.1, pp. 183–4. 44. Óabīb b. Khidma Abū Rāʾi†a al-Takrītī: Keating, Defending the ‘People of Truth’. 45. Note the presence of a concluding prayer at 214.4–5, §45. 46. This work is an engagement, as are so many of al-JāªiÕ’s works on speech and oratorical practice, with compositions such as Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s (d. 281/894) al-Íamt wa-Ādāb al-Lisān in Mawsūʿāt, Volume 5. See generally Librande, ‘Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’. 47. It begins with the paratext ammā baʿd. 48. This matter has been excised by the fourth-century anthologiser of the collection copied in the MSS which Hārūn edited: Rasāʾil 3.55–109. 49. I have used the excellent internet resource www.arts.usyd.edu.au/ research_ projects/sibawiki/homepage but refer only to the edition of Hārūn. There is a partial French translation by Troupeau, ‘La Risālat al-Kitāb’. See the comments of Schoeler and Carter, discussed in Chapter 2.5, pp. 102–3; M. G. Carter, ‘Sībawayhi’, EI2, IX, pp. 524–31, argues that the Risāla presents an ordered statement of Sībawayhi’s ‘linguistic propositions’ (p. 526), which he discusses in more detail in Sībawayhi, pp. 65–7; see further Carter, ‘The parsings of Sībawayhi’s Kitāb’. Marogy, Kitāb Sībawayhi, discerns in these chapters the ‘basic presuppositions of grammar’ (pp. 27–30); see also Suleiman, ‘Sībawayhi’s “parts of speech”’ (a compelling comparison of Sībawayhi’s pronouncements with the style of Euclidean geometry). 50. Compare my version of these obscure headings, which I do not fully (if at all!) understand, with that of Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, pp. 87–9. 51. Cross-references: Hārūn 1.12.10, 1.14.13, 1.20.13, 1.21.14, 1.22.13, 1.24.9– 10, 1.25.2, 1.32.7–8; iʿlam: 1.17.11, 1.19.1, 1.20.17, 1.21.4, 1.22.3, 1.22.6, 1.22.9, 1.23.5, 1.23.17, 1.24.8, 1.24.16, 1.26.7. Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, p. 88, find in the paratext iʿlam and in its accompanying paratext a-lam tarā, ‘do you not see’, strong support that the Kitāb is fundamentally a written work. 52. Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, pp. 87–9, argue that the Kitāb is a syngramma which did not involve any student in its compilation (p. 87). 53. Zakeri, Persian Wisdom. 54. Al-Kindī, Oeuvres philosophiques [referred to as RJ]; I also refer to the edition by Abū Rīda, Rasāʾil al-Kindī [AR]. See also Al-Kindi’s Metaphysics; Adamson and Pormann, Philosophical Works, pp. 10–57.

notes | 491 55. See further RJ 39.22; AR 1.122.21: la-nukmil al-āna hādhā al-fann al-thānī; and the cross-reference at RJ 69.3–4; AR 1.143.10–11, as well as the concluding topic at RJ 69.4–5; AR 1.143.11–12. Note also the cross-references to other works by al-Kindī at RJ 11.5; AR 1.101.5, and RJ 13.19–20; AR 1.103.8–9. See also Ivry, Al-Kindi’s Metaphysics, p. 115, for a discussion of the opening addresses of al-Kindī’s epistles. Al-Kindī addresses the son of al-Muʿta‚im, Aªmad, at RJ 177.6–11; AR 1.244.10–16. A similar mode of address is encountered at AR 1.214.6–8, though it is not clear whether al-Kindī addresses the Caliph or his son. 56. There are three editions of the work: by Dāwūd al-Jalabī, Majallat Lughat al-ʿArab, 8 1930, pp. 686–90 (based on the no longer accessible Mossul manuscript); Pellat, ‘À propos du Kitāb al-Futyā de JāªiÕ’; and by Hārūn in Rasāʾil 1.313–319. I have consulted the text in the manuscript Mīr Dāmād Ibrāhīm Pāshā 949 folios 95a–97b and its nineteenth-century copy Leiden Or 4821, made for van Vloten and with his marginalia. I would like to thank Professor Lejla Demiri for acquiring a copy of the Istanbul MS for me. 57. On this topos, see Manāqib al-Turk Rasāʾil 1.5.2; Cheikh-Moussa, ‘À propos d’une traduction’, p. 134. Compare this opening supplication with one of al-JāªiÕ’s epistles to Abū al-Walīd Muªammad, the son of Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād: Nābita Rasāʾil 2.7.2: a†āla Allāh baqāʾa-ka wa-atamma niʿmata-hu ʿalay-ka wa-karāmata-hu la-ka, May God prolong your life and complete His beneficence and His generosity to you. 58. The quotation of this perennially popular Óadīth among thinkers on the organisation of the Islamic community displays al-JāªiÕ at his politically most mainstream and consensualist: for its afterlife, see the references given by Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, p. 270, note 58. 59. Reading ta‚duq with Hārūn for Pellat’s tu‚addaq and al-Jalabī’s mu‚addiq. Both MSS leave the first consonant unpointed. 60. I vocalise, with Hārūn, ikhtarta-hā for ikhtartu-hā in Pellat. 61. On the resonance of this phrase, see Muslim b. al-Óajjāj, Íaªīª, 1.34.1, ªummāl al-āthār wa-nuqqāl al-akhbār. NaÕar may of course be used in a less specific sense than ‘speculation typical of the Kalām’. Ibn Qutayba combines a use of naÕar with ªukm of a special kātib in the personal service of the caliph (sul†ān) in Adab al-Kātib, Grünert 9.1, note a; al-Dālī 11.9 (a marginalium which al-Dālī has restored in the text); see also Grünert 10.6 and 11.1; al-Dālī 12.13 and 13.6. 62. All three MSS give this as singular: al-daʿwā.

492 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 63. Reading naªtajja for yujnaªa (Pellat, after al-Jalabī), and Hārūn’s taªtajja. The word is unpointed in the MSS. 64. The MSS and Pellat and al-Jalabī read wa-āli-hi. 65. For versions of this saying involving the word kurāʿ, see Ullmann, Wörterbuch, 1970, pp. 131–4. 66. I think this is what this classically convoluted piece of JāªiÕian syntax seems to say. It is literally: for the tongue of his opponent’s opponent. 67. Pointing, with Hārūn, taªtamila for yuªtamal (Pellat 543.17). 68. Reading yuʾkhadh with the MSS and Pellat and al-Jalabī for Hārūn’s yūjad. 69. Reading al-ʿaqib with the MSS, al-Jalabī and Pellat for Hārūn’s al-muʿaqqib. The reading of the Óayawān is al-ʿaql. 70. I read ∂aʿufat with the MSS and Hārūn for Pellat’s dhahabat. 71. Al-Kindī, Fī al-Falsafa al-Ūlā, RJ 11.16–13.14; AR 1.102.1–103.3 expresses a similar theory of progress in order to justify his use of pre-Islamic philosophical speculation. 72. With the MSS and al-Jalabī and Pellat for Hārūn’s taʿrīf. 73. I prefer al-nā‚ir li-al-ªaqq, the reading of the Óayawān: the helper of the truth. 74. Literally: the wind of the scholars (ʿulamāʾ) has blown favourably. 75. Following the MSS and al-Jalabī and Pellat rather than Hārūn’s ʿīy. 76. See Chapter 4.3, ‘The Enigma of the Addressee’, pp. 232–3, for a discussion of some of the implications of this passage; cf. Ibn Qutayba, Adab al-Kātib, Grünert 1.8–9; al-Dālī 6.1: khawā najm al-khayr wa-kasadat sūq al-birr wa-bārat ba∂āʾiʿ ahli-hi, the star of goodness has fallen, the market of piety has crashed and the goods of its folk are worthless. In his important discussion of ‘gratitude for benefits’, Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership, pp. 78 and 196, note 40, discerns an appropriateness in the commercial approach to the ‘barter of niʿmah and gratitude’ which he argues captures perfectly the open-ended and on-going nature of the exchange. On p. 95 he also comments on the frequency and openness with which ties such as that which al-JāªiÕ hopes to establish with the Chief Judge were voiced. See further Chapter 4.3. 77. Cf. Óayawān 1.89.7–15. 78. Reading with the MSS, al-Jalabī and Hārun takhrim-hu, ‘to pierce his nose and make him submissive’, for the equally plausible tuªrim-hu, ‘banish him’, read by Pellat. 79. Hārūn reads with the MSS athabta for Pellat’s athnayta, ‘you praise it’. 80. Reading with the MSS, al-Jalabī and Pellat mūjiban (bis) for Hārūn’s second mūªiyan, which I suppose means, ‘an inspiration for’. I have preferred to see

notes | 493 in the slightly ungainly repetition of mūjiban an emphatic expression of the obligations governing the code of gift-exchange. 81. Cf. al-Kindī, Fī al-Falsafa al-Ūlā, RJ 9.15–11.1; AR 1.101.1–2, on the superiority of knowledge of the ʿilla to knowledge of the maʿlūl. 82. For a similar expression, see Óayawān 1.61.8–9 (Yūnus b. Óabīb) and Rosenthal, Knowledge, p. 249 with note 4; on ªukm: Frank, ‘Al-Aªkām’; cf. the phrase wa-laysa ªukm al-kitāb fī hādhā al-bāb ªukm al-kalām: Ibn Qutayba, Adab al-Kātib, Grünert 16.2; al-Dālī, 17.6. 83. The exact expression is ‘to join my rope (ªabl ) with your rope’. 84. Rosenthal, Knowledge, pp. 70–154; cf. El Shamsy, ‘The first Shāfiʿī’, p. 318, note 56, for the suggestion that ʿilm is synonymous with fiqh in Shafiʿite writings. Al-Kindī criticises the equation of knowledge as a trade in Fī al-Falsafa al-Ūlā, RJ 15.6–12; AR 1.104.5–7. 85. For this (less common?) meaning of the verb dalla bi, which I have rendered as ‘to assent’, see Lane, Lexicon, p. 900, column b. Professor van Gelder is in favour of Hārūn’s reading madhilat bi-hi as the lectio difficilior: he refers to ‘al-Qāmūs al-Muªī† under QWL: al-qawl: al-kalām aw kull lafÕ madhila bi-hi l-lisān’. He notes that ‘the phrase is taken from Ibn Jinnī’s Kha‚āʾi‚ (ed. al-Najjār, i, 17): ammā al-qawl fa-a‚lu-hu anna-hu kull lafÕ madhila bi-hi l-lisān’. Unfortunately, while attractive, the reading is Hārūn’s improvement: the Topkapi, Dār al-Kutub, al-Azhar and British Library MSS all read dallat bi. 86. Compare al-JāªiÕ’s statements with Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s description of his method in quoting, representing and refuting the ideas which he opposes in his Nihāyat al-ʿUqūl: Shihadeh, ‘From al-Ghazālī to al-Rāzī’, p. 164 and pp. 168–9. Shihadeh argues that al-Rāzī’s method of taqsīm is a combination of Aristotelian demonstration and ‘the “investigation and disjunction”’ characteristic of the Kalām. Like al-JāªiÕ, al-Rāzī was criticised for being overly interested in the arguments of others to the detriment of his own position. 87. On the cultural dynamics of al-JāªiÕ’s overture to Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād, cf. the rich and important article by Touati, ‘La dédicace’. A comparison with al-Muqaddasī’s stratagem in his Aªsan al-Taqāsīm as explored by Touati, pp. 326–9 is very instructive. See further his discussion of the patronage of manuscripts: L’armoire, pp. 77–97. For al-NaÕÕām’s political theories, see van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, III, pp. 380–92 (epistemology) and 416–18; The Flowering, pp. 146–8; Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 66–7. 88. See Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 28–9. It is worth comparing al-JāªiÕ’s stance in this work with Crone’s description of his Muʿtazilī

494 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s contemporaries (Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 65–9), with whom he is radically at variance, and with her depiction of Sunnism: Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 219–55, with which he has much in common. 89. For the development of this process during al-JāªiÕ’s lifetime and the caliphate of al-Mutawakkil, a process to which I think he alludes in this Risāla, see the studies of Melchert, ‘The religious policies’; Melchert, ‘Traditionistjurisprudents’; Lucas, ‘The legal principles’; and El Shamsy, ‘The First Shāfiʿī’. 90. Peter Freimark, ‘Muk. addima’, EI2, VII, pp. 495–6 (on the format); Chraïbi, ‘L’émergence’, p. 93. He argues for the impact of the Greek materials on the transition from risāla to muqaddima, particularly of a genre I do not consider in this part, the madkhal. 91. Translated by Beeston, ‘JāªiÕ “On the difference between enmity and envy”’. 92. See Lecomte, Ibn Qutayba (mort en 276/889), pp. 130–4; Montgomery, ‘Of models and amanuenses’. 93. Montgomery, ‘Serendipity’, pp. 202–9; Zadeh, ‘Of mummies, poets and water-nymphs’. 94. For a translation, see Juynboll, ‘Muslim’s introduction’. 95. This is the isnād muʿanʿan, in which the preposition ʿan, on the authority of, is the sole indicant of how the tradition was transmitted: see Juynboll, ‘Muslim’s introduction’, p. 296, note 4. He identifies the opponent tentatively as alÓusayn b. ʿAlī al-Karābīsī (pp. 293–4, note 3). 96. On the khu†ba, see Qutbuddin, ‘Khu†ba’. 97. In this respect, the Risāla is formally parallel to The Book of Living and The Book of Clarity and Clarification. See A. J. Wensinck, ‘Khu†ba’, EI2, V, pp. 74–5, who describes how Prophet Muªammad’s preaching favoured brevity and included the shahāda and ªamdala. The doxology in al-Shafiʿī’s text contains the ªamdala at Shākir 7.9, §2; the shahāda at Shākir 8.10–11, §8. Lowry, Early Islamic Legal Theory, p. 372, identifies §§1–178 as the Introduction to the Risāla, which he partitions as follows: ‘A. Mission Topos (¶¶1–43) B. Importance of Law (¶¶44–52) C. Discussion of the Bayān (¶¶53–130) D. Arabic in the Qurʾān (¶¶131–178)’. 98. Montgomery, ‘JāªiÕ’s Kitāb al-Bayān’, pp. 115–22. 99. Adab al-Kātib, Grünert 1–20.8; al-Dālī 5–20.12; Lecomte, Ibn Qutayba (mort en 276/889), pp. 102–7 (the comment khu†ba bi-lā kitāb occurs on p. 106 but is unattributed); Lecomte, ‘L’introduction du Kitāb Adab al-Kātib’; Günther, ‘Praise to the book!’, pp. 133–8 (on Adab al-Kātib); Ibn Qutayba began his

notes | 495 khu†ba with ammā baʿd, the fa‚l al-khi†āb, presumably in imitation of the khu†bas of Prophet Muªammad: see Wensinck, ‘Khu†ba’, EI2, V, p. 74. 100. Literally ‘body’: jism. 101. Q. Íad 38: 20; see Bray, ‘The physical world’. 102. Ibn Qutayba’s engagement in this work with al-JāªiÕ’s Kitāb al-Bayān requires some further study. For example, he mentions the extraordinary mental discipline shown by Wā‚il b. ʿA†āʾ in avoiding in his public pronouncements the letter ‘r’ which he could not pronounce properly but damns it with faint praise (Grünert 15.8–16.2; al-Dālī 17.2–5) and so does not participate in the encomium which al-JāªiÕ lavishes upon Wā‚il in The Book of Clarity and Clarification. 103. Chraïbi, ‘L’émergence’, pp. 95–6. 104. This matter has an essentially epistemological or literary theoretical dynamic according to Thomas Hefter, ‘You have asked’, who discerns the presence of ‘self-parody’ (and in The Book of Living ‘comic pathos’: p. 119) in al-JāªiÕ’s representation of his own positions (or those close to his own positions) in the debates he depicts in order to empower the reader to make sense of the arguments and decide for himself by avoiding a confrontation between author and reader. The Addressee thus becomes, in his words, an ‘intermediating presence’ (p. 28). Unfortunately (for this is a brave and considered thesis), Hefter is unable, in my opinion, convincingly to demonstrate the presence of JāªiÕian ‘self-parody’ in the epistles he singles out for discussion in his Chapter 2. In the first instance one would need to demonstrate that such a notion of ‘comic pathos’ was entertained by al-JāªiÕ or his society. 105. Touati, ‘La dédicace’, p. 331 with notes 22 and 23, and p. 332, note 26, describes, under the ʿAbbasids, the caliphal institution of the ʿa†āʾ, the stipend, for the ulema: al-Muʿta‚im, for example, suspended the stipend of those who did not declare the createdness of the Qurʾān under the Miªna. Emoluments of the judiciary such as those received by Abū Yūsuf (‘La dédicace’, p. 331, note 22) were probably distinct from the ʿa†āʾ of the ulema. 106. See Touati, ‘La dédicace’, pp. 329–30 for those scholars who kept aloof from this system or who, constrained to accept benefactions, used the money to do charitable works. In the emergence of this trend we can discern the hegemony of the reluctance of the Óadīth scholars and especially the Óanābila to have anything to do with those in power and authority. The examples which he cites from the second and third centuries stand out, of course, because they are exceptions to the predominant social paradigm. His discussion of the semantics

496 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s of hadīya, pp. 338–9, is indispensable as is Mottahedeh’s discussion of i‚†ināʿ: Loyalty and Leadership, p. 83. The studies of Jocelyn Sharlett are a welcome addition to the field: Patronage and Poetry, ‘Tokens of resentment’, ‘The thought that counts’; Stetkevych, The Poetics of Legitimacy (on the panegyrical poem as part of the gift exchange). 107. See Touati, ‘La dédicace’, pp. 339–40 with note 51 (as is so often the case, we only hear about this aspect of the system when it does not work). 108. On patronage and clientage see the articles contained in Bernards and Nawas, Patronate and Patronage; Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership (on the tenth and eleventh centuries: pp. 82–93 are especially relevant); see Montgomery, ‘Al-JāªiÕ’s Kitāb al-Bayān’, pp. 114–15 (on multivalency); Montgomery, ‘Abū Nuwās’, pp. 79 and 103–5 (on this aspect of Badīʿ and on the truth value of poems). Touati, ‘La dédicace’, is essential for the phenomenon described in this paragraph. 109. Of course we can never be sure that this is not a feature of the textual tradition as it has been preserved. Were the names removed by the author or the copyists as the work moved from the patron’s circle to a wider readership, presumably the paying public? 110. See Touati’s discussion of al-Tawªīdī’s al-Imtāʿ wa-al-Muʾānasa: ‘La dédicace’, p. 346, note 66. 111. On this, see van Gelder, The Bad and the Ugly, p. 88 and note 78; Smoor, Kings and Bedouins, pp. 53–62 and 211, note 404. 112. See Part 6 for more on this possibility. 113. Marinelli and Mayer, Dreaming by the Book, p. 16. 114. See Hefter, ‘You have asked’, pp. 14–18 and 25 for some thoughts on how al-JāªiÕ may seek to guide a reader to a judicious appreciation of his words. 115. Al-JāªiÕ crosses swords with the Eternalist once more at 4.85.16–93.6 (and probably also in the discussion of isti†āʿa at 4.77.12–85.15, in refutation of his argument that the actions of animals are determined; see Geries, ‘Quelques aspects’, pp. 83–8 (though his page references are not always reliable); van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, III, pp. 392–4 (for al-NaÕÕām’s engagement with the dualists and eternalists) and IV, pp. 451–5 (on the Dahrī position). In his Epistle on the Quantity of the Books of Aristotle, Risāla fī Kammīyat Kutub Aris†ū†ālīs, AR 1.375.9-376.11, al-Kindī associates the Eternalist’s basic position with the unbelievers who opposed the prophethood of Muªammad. 116. Some have proposed that the Addressee is the reader who is critical of Muʿtazilism: Geries, ‘Quelques aspects’, pp. 69–70; Un genre littéraire, pp.

notes | 497 28–31; and Man‚ūr, The World-View, p. 41. Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature, pp. 101–2, see in the address a ‘literary conceit’. See also Hefter, ‘You have asked’, p. 119 and note 44. For Miller, ‘More than the sum’, the Addressee is a fellow Muʿtazilite who advocates abstract speculation over the analysis of material reality advocated by al-JāªiÕ. 117. Carter, Sībawayhi, pp. 132–3. 118. Geries, Un genre littéraire, p. 30, note 1, who notes that in his Interpretation of the Divergence of the Óadīth, Taʾwīl Mukhtalif al-Óadīth, Ibn Qutayba also answered some of the queries posed in the Kitāb al-Tarbīʿ wa-al-Tadwīr: see Part 1, pp. 36–7. Al-JāªiÕ’s relationship with the Vizier is studied in Montgomery, ‘Al-GˇāªiÕ and Hellenizing philosophy’, ‘Beeston and the singing-girls’, and ‘JāªiÕ on jest and earnest’. 119. Pökel, ‘Ernst und Scherz in der klassischen arabischen Literatur’ (unpublished) argues that for al-JāªiÕ seriousness and levity form a pedagogical concept and that reflection on jidd and hazl was related to notions concerning dietetics. 120. Montgomery, ‘JāªiÕ on Jest and Earnest’, pp. 215–16. 121. The phrase is used to commend the dead at Óayawān 1.76.5–6, when al-JāªiÕ applies the phrase raªima-hu Allāh taʿālā (May God the Exalted have mercy on him!) to Ibn al-Bi†rīq. For the second person used to refer to someone who has passed away: al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā Rasāʾil 3.331.7 (al-JāªiÕ engages and disagrees with a position taken by al-NaÕÕām, who is presumably dead by the time of writing the work); Risāla fī al-Óakamayn, p. 431.4: as we cannot identify the Addressee Ibn Óassān, we have no way of knowing whether he is dead or not. See also Óayawān 5.524.10 (it is unclear again whether the Addressee is living or dead). This is not to be confused with the paratext, voiced in the mu∂āriʿ, directed at one’s opponent encountered in some third-century texts: yarªamu-ka Allāh at Óayawān 1.25.9, 1.163.11 and 7.7.1; Maqālat al-Zaydīya Rasāʾil 4.311.1 (yarªamu-nā wa-iyyā-ka). Cf. Muslim, Íaªīª, 1.24.2 (ammā baʿd yarªamu-ka Allāh bi-tawfīq khāliqi-ka); 1.37.15 (wa-baʿd yarªamu-ka Allāh); 1.76.7 (wa-hādhā al-qawl yarªamu-ka Allāh fī al-†aʿn fī al-asānīd ). Compare this with the scribal gloss: qāla Muslim raªima-hu Allāh (1.56.1) and see also Muslim, Íaªīª, 1.63.11–12. 122. There are other references to The Book of Living: Bayān 1.60.15: ‘there is a speech (kalām) on this subject included (yaqaʿu) in The Book of Living’; 1.225.16–18: ‘were it not that this is more appropriate and proper as part of the Treatise on Man and Woman and of the Chapter of the Speech on Man (qawl al-insān) in The Book of Living, then we would mention it here at this point’. The reference

498 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s to Óayawān at Bayān 1.186.11–16 is a scribal gloss: ‘this chapter is included (yaqaʿ) in the Treatise of Man (kitāb al-insān) [MSS other than Dār al-Kutub 4370 Adab: ‘in the Kitāb al-Óayawān’] and in the difference between the male and the female, as an entirety (tāmman), for this chapter is not the sort of thing which belongs in the subject matter (bāb) of The Book of Clarity and Clarification. But the opportunity (sabab) presents itself and so it is presented along with it inasmuch as it will energise (tanshī†) the reader of the book – taking it out of its proper chapter, when it is long, for a particular reason to do with knowledge (libaʿ∂ al-ʿilm), is more relaxing for the mind (qalb) and will augment its energy (nashā†), if God wills’. Al-JāªiÕ here and at Bayān 1.225.16–18 seems to refer to the version of The Book of Living which Ibn al-Nadīm says included The Book of Women (see Chapter 2.2, p. 61). 123. Touati, ‘La dédicace’, pp. 335–7 discusses the identity of the dedicatee and is inclined to prefer Ibn Abī Duʾād over Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik, and notes the political expediency of concealing the name of the Addressee. 124. Al-Tanūkhi, al-Faraj baʿd al-Shidda, I, p. 361. The public denunciation of al-JāªiÕ by Ibn Abī Duʾād and the latter’s magnanimity are paradigmatic for the Valencian Ibn al-Abbār (595–658/1199–260), Iʿtāb al-Kuttāb, 154.7– 156.14; see Touati, ‘La dédicace’, p. 337 with note 41. 125. See Touati, ‘La dédicace’, p. 337, for this. 126. Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-Udabāʾ, 16.99.15–100.10; translation also given by Pellat, Life and Works, pp. 7–8. 127. See Part 1, p. 470, note 2, for studies of al-Mutawakkil’s reign. 128. Rasāʾil 3.301–351; translated partially into English by Finkel, ‘A Risāla of JāªiÕ’; into French by Allouche, ‘Un traité de polemique’. Reynolds, A Muslim Theologian, pp. 141–2 (on al-JāªiÕ’s works against the Christians), and pp. 148–50 and 167–70 on features of his polemic; Thomas, ‘Al-JāªiÕ’, pp. 709–12. 129. There is no indication in the text that the letter to which al-JāªiÕ refers is actually from al-Fatª. In fact The Rebuttal of the Christians is slightly unusual for his epistles in that its uses the second person plural mode of address: in other words al-JāªiÕ is either addressing a group of people or he is addressing the Caliph (using the deferential plural). A misconstrual of aªdāth at Rasāʾil 3.303.8 as ‘new’ rather than ‘young’, ‘immature’ (in the sense of theologically under-developed) has led some to wonder whether al-JāªiÕ is addressing new converts to Islam: see Reynolds, A Muslim Theologian, p. 34, note 66 and p. 193, note 11; see also p. 136, note 210. I take the word to refer to groups such

notes | 499 as the Nābita and the Óashwīya whom al-JāªiÕ repeatedly refers to in terms of juvenility. See my forthcoming edition and translation of the Nābita and al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā for The Library of Arabic Literature. 130. Al-˝abarī, Taʾrīkh, III/3, 1436.3–17; Al-˝abarī, The History of al-˝abarī. Volume XXXIV, pp. 151–2; Hugh Kennedy, ‘Al-Mutawakkil ʿalā ’llāh’, EI2, VII, pp. 777–8 (p. 778); see also Part 1, pp. 31–2. 131. The World-View, pp. 92–6 and 11–13 (respectively). Geries, ‘Quelques aspects’, p. 69, also puts the composition of the work to what he identifies as the waning of Muʿtazilism and the beginning of the period when al-Mutawakkil promoted Sunnī Islam, two characterisations of the period with which few scholars are nowadays in sympathy. See further Melchert, ‘Religious policies’. 132. Touati, ‘La dédicace’, p. 333. 133. See Hallaq, Origins and Evolution, pp. 99–101 (‘extra-judicial tribunals’). 134. See van Gelder, ‘Compleat men, women and books’, p. 242. Mamlūk bureaucrats were expected to know a great deal about ‘snow’: van Berkel, ‘The attitude towards knowledge’, especially p. 163. 135. See Montgomery, The Vagaries of the Qa‚īda, pp. 169–71 and p. 177. 136. The metre is khafīf. Professor van Gelder notes that the poet is Mūsā b. Yasār, known as Mūsā Shahawāt. 137. I am grateful to Professor van Gelder for his help with this phrase, which I had not understood. 138. Ibn Abī U‚aybiʿa, ʿUyūn al-Anbāʾ, 99.12–14 and 100.15 respectively. 139. See also Óayawān 1.24.3, ʿayb qawl Ziyād, and 1.24.4, laʿn qawl shāʿiri-him. At 1.15.6, al-JāªiÕ explains a verse of poetry by alluding to the expectation that those close to a person ought to share that person’s views on who and what is to be found blameworthy. At Óayawān 6.16.8–17.1, he acknowledges that his omission of marine life, however justified, makes his book defective. 140. De Goeje 29.9–35.11; Shākir 95.1–101.6, §§112–28. See for example Qudāma, Kitāb Naqd al-Shiʿr, 100.3 and 104.3 (ʿuyūb al-lafÕ), 106.2 (ʿuyūbi-hi), 108.9 (ʿuyūb al-wazn, ʿuyūb al-qawāfī), 111.6 (ʿuyūb al-maʿānī); van Gelder, The Bad and the Ugly, pp. 62–75. 141. See further Íaªīª 1.74.5–7, the ‘faults (maʿāyib) of the transmitters of the Óadīth’. 142. Pellat, ‘Une risāla de GˇāhiÕ’. For mustaʿmal Pellat, p. 283, note 2, proposes mustahmal, which would render the last clause pleonastic with its predecessor: ‘the punishment is something to be despised’. By al-waʿīd and al-ʿiqāb ­eschatological punishment as well as earthly chastisement is intended.

500 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 143. In addition to the instances of the verb ʿāba listed in Part 3, §3.2, p. 130, see: Óayawān 1.37.10, 1.38.11 and 12, 1.38.14, 1.41.10. 144. See van Gelder, ‘Mixtures of jest and earnest’, pp. 95–106; van Gelder, ‘Arabic debates of jest and earnest’, p. 204, on the destabilising effects of mixing jest and earnest. 145. See the passages translated by van Gelder, ‘Mixtures of jest and earnest’, pp. 100–6. 146. See Montgomery, Vagaries, pp. 199–200. 147. Dīwān Abī Nuwās, 1.3.8–12 (the new, revised, edition of Wagner’s 1958 Cairo edition). 148. See van Gelder, The Bad and the Ugly, pp. 6 and 33. 149. For a translation and discussion of his invective of Hāshim b. Óudayj, see Montgomery, ‘Abū Nuwās’, pp. 99–100. 150. For the Greek and Syriac precursors of this style of thinking, see van Ess, ‘Disputationspraxis’, pp. 52–9; van Ess, ‘The beginnings of Islamic theology’ (Greek and Byzantine rhetorical practice, the Patristic tradition and Christian polemic); Cook, ‘The origins of Kalām’ (Syriac theology). For an overview of the theological munāÕara, see, in addition to van Ess’s ‘Disputationspraxis’, his Theologie und Gesellschaft, IV, pp. 725–30; for the centrality of manners to the debates, see Stroumsa, ‘Ibn al-Rāwandī’s sūʾ adab al-mujādala’; Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam. The poetic materials are studied in Reinink and Vanstiphout, Dispute Poems and Dialogues; see also the in-depth study of Ibn al-Rūmī by McKinney, The Case of Rhyme. 151. See Hans Daiber, ‘Masāʾil wa-Adjwiba’, EI2, VI, pp. 636–9; Calder, Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence, pp. 39–66, on its use in early Óanafī legal texts. 152. Van Ess, ‘Disputationspraxis’, pp. 42–4 and 52; van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, IV, p. 727; Kennedy, ‘Labīd, al-Akh†al and the oryx’. There is a substantial body of scholarship on literary theft, borrowing and plagiarism in Arabic: see Naaman, ‘Sariqa in Practice’ who reviews this scholarship on pp. 271–2. On imitating the Qurʾān: Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam, pp. 137–9. For an assessment of the muʿāra∂a as a reductio ad absurdum in later Kalām, see Shihadeh, ‘From al-Ghazālī to al-Rāzī’, p. 159. 153. My thinking on this topic has been informed by Williams, Shame and Necessity, especially Chapter Four (‘Shame and Autonomy’) and Endnote One (‘Mechanisms of Shame and Guilt’). Hefter, “‘You have asked’”, p. 31, note 11 and pp. 79–80, drawing on the work of Bakhtin, makes a distinction between ‘unidirectional’ and ‘varidirectional’ statements and relationships. In the

notes | 501 former the addressee is portrayed as representative of the concerns and interests of the audience, while in the latter, he is not. Hefter argues that the author is in agreement with unidirectional statements and in disagreement with varidirectional ones. In terms of my reading of the ‘Introduction’, the relationship between addressee and audience is unidirectional (they share the discourse of ʿayb) while that between the author and the addressee and audience is varidirectional (al-JāªiÕ participates in but does not share their discourse of ʿayb). 154. For the extent to which he is at variance with the paraenetic literature, compare the sentiments in favour of avoiding ªusn al-Õann expressed by ʿAlī b. ʿUbayda, Jawāhir al-Kilam, Zakeri 6.15–8.7. 155. This is the subject of one of al-JāªiÕ’s extant treatises: Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, **§31, Kitāb Ta‚wīb ʿAlī fī Taªkīm al-Óakamayn, The Justification of ʿAlī’s Appointment of the Two Arbiters. 156. Jaʿfar and ʿAlī were sons of Abū ˝ālib and brothers of ʿAlī the son-in-law of the Prophet, married to his daughter Fā†ima. I would like to thank Professor van Gelder for his help with this passage. 157. All aspects of the ʿAbbasid cultural and intellectual canon are touched upon in this list, from topics of theology, to legal scholars, poets, singers, cities, grammarians and Óadīth practitioners. See Jidd Rasāʾil 1.240.11–241.4 for a similar denunciation of the damage wrought on society and social relations by the fanaticism engendered by such debates. 158. See e.g. Geries, Un genre littéraire, pp. 11–12 for the cultural tradition of debate, pp. 20–3 for al-JāªiÕ’s works in which he contrasts or compares two polarities, and pp. 26–7 for the proposal that he wants to go beyond a ‘simple reproduction of the quarrels of the a‚ªāb al-khu‚ūmāt’; van Gelder, ‘Arabic debates’, pp. 204–9. Compare this vision of ‘factionalism’ with the account of factions given by Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership, pp. 158–67. 159. See Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 284–5 on al-Bīrūnī; Rosenthal, ‘The study of Muslim intellectual and social history’; Bray, ‘Lists and memory’, p. 213 and pp. 220–1 for an assessment of Ibn Qutayba’s introduction to his Kitāb al-Maʿārif, a compendium, its author informs his reader, designed to promote social success by avoiding any risk of being embarrassed through lack of knowledge. 160. The verb faqaʾa echoes part of the excursus on the Bedouin practice of blinding stallion camels at Óayawān 1.17.3–10, one of the several verbal echoes (with tawaqquf, tathabbut, shubha, and ªurrīya) in this section of Volume 7 suggesting that the first section of the ‘Introduction’ (if I am correct in thinking that

502 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s it is later than the original version of the treatise) resumes certain concerns of the preface to Part 7. 161. The idea seems to be that these signs point to the same message (and so are effectively synonyms) and come in close succession to one another, as if one was riding behind the other on the back of a camel. The root rdf has both meanings. 162. For this sense of ªāl, see Óayawān 1.99.4–8; Muslim, Íaªīª, 1.34.3–4 (al-ªāl wa-al-martaba); al-Kindī, Risāla fī Kammīyat Kutub Aris†ū†ālīs, AR 1.369.6 (‚alāª al-ªāl fī dār munqalabi-hi). 163. The surfa is a kind of caterpillar or bug, red with a black head, which builds its house in the shape of a coffin. 164. This phenomenon merits further study. On the contours of dahrī thinking and the kinds of people who seemed to have espoused dahrī beliefs, see now the important series of articles by Patricia Crone which I was unable to take full account of in this book: ‘Dahrīs,’ EI3, pp. 59–66; ‘The Dahrīs according to al-JāªiÕ’, pp. 63–82; ‘Ungodly cosmologies’; and her book, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran. Rural Rebellion and Local Zoroastrianism, ­especially Chapters 12 and 19. 165. See Man‚ūr, The World-View, pp. 46–8; Adamson, Al-Kindī, pp. 181–206 for how al-Kindī integrated this notion of the celestial spheres into his monotheism. 166. On the collocation of ʿiqāb and thawāb, see e.g. Muslim, Íaªīª, 1.25.2, which Juynboll, ‘Muslim’s introduction’, p. 265, note 4, describes as one of the ‘main categories of traditions’ as they had been established in the third century. 167. Compare al-JāªiÕ’s description of the Eternalist position, informed by the condemnation of a group of unbelievers in Qurʾān Jāthiya 45: 24, with Crone’s account of how society without revelation was figured, a state in which there would be no morality or law (Medieval Islamic Political Thought, p. 264). Al-JāªiÕ’s position is that the Eternalist thus requires revelation or God in order to engage his treatise in debate. See also Man‚ūr, The World-View, p. 48, who views al-JāªiÕ as seeking to rise above his own ‘individuality’ and address all of humanity. 168. Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment, especially Chapter 8, ‘The Ultimate Encyclopédie’, pp. 395–459. 169. See van Gelder, ‘Compleat men’, p. 244 (knowledge as incommensurable), pp. 247–51 (‘walking encyclopaedias’). Compare the views of Pellat, ‘Les encyclopédies’; Charles Pellat, ‘Mawsūʿa’, EI2, VI, pp. 903–7; Biesterfeldt,

notes | 503 ‘Enzyklopädie’. See also Rosenthal, The Technique and Approach, especially pp. 60–3 (‘Specialization and Encyclopedism’); Heinrichs, ‘The classification of the sciences’. 170. d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse; Schwab, ‘Translator’s introduction’, in d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, pp. ix–lii (especially pp. xxxi and xlv); Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture, pp. 241–2, characterises the encyclopaedia, of which Isidore’s Etymologiae is paradigmatic, as ‘a transgeneric literary form or macrogenre’. See also Harvey, ‘Introduction’, in Harvey, The Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias; van Ess, ‘Encyclopaedic activities’; Blair, ‘A Europeanist’s perspective’, pp. 201–5. 171. For a convenient summary of the centrality of exegesis of the Qurʾān in the development of Arabic learning and of al-˝abarī’s tripartite account of the levels of comprehensibility: Leemhuis, ‘The Koran and its exegesis’. On the Bible as a structure for organising the world of human knowledge: Sheehan, ‘From philology to fossils’. 172. Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, pp. 170–87; Druart, ‘Al-Fārābī’s causation’; Druart, ‘Al-Fārābī and emanationism’; Druart, ‘Al-Fārābī, emanation and metaphysics’; Endress, ‘The cycle of knowledge’, pp. 116–18 and 120–1); Gutas, ‘The starting point of philosophical studies’; Gutas, ‘The “Alexandria to Baghdad” complex of narratives’; Gutas, ‘The meaning of Madanī’; O’Meara, Platonopolis, with a special chapter on ‘Platonopolis in Islam: Al-Farabi’s Perfect State’, pp. 185–97; Reisman, ‘Al-Fārabī and the philosophical curriculum’. 173. Rudolph, ‘Reflections on al-Fārābī’s Mabādiʾ’. 174. In this respect, I differ in my choice of text representative of the early GreekArabic encyclopaedia from those proposed by Biesterfeldt, ‘Medieval Arabic encyclopedias’. Elaborations: Gutas, ‘The Greek and Persian background’, and Endress, ‘The cycle of knowledge’. I do agree with the several basic assumptions underpinning these studies: that the originary encyclopaedia in the GreekArabic tradition is the Aristotelian corpus (authentic and spurious) because Aristotle attempted a philosophical investigation of what there is and what there is to know about it; that the Arabic-Islamic reproduction and transcription of the Aristotelian encyclopaedia was inspired by its comprehensiveness and its philosophical acuity; and that in their recreation of the Aristotelian encyclopaedia, the philosophers writing in Arabic strove to capture the unity of knowledge: in their classifications we can discern most clearly their aim to figure the all-embracing cycle of knowledge informing every rational and

504 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s intellectual activity; that the cycle of knowledge thus figured the way in which existence was really ordered and arranged. 175. As Professor Bray remarked to me in a personal communication, all medieval Arabic books are parasitic in this manner. 176. My characterisation of the encyclopaedia leans heavily on Fowler, ‘Encyclopaedias’, and North, ‘Encyclopaedias and the art of knowing ­everything’. Berio made this comment à propos his choral work Coro: Two Interviews, p. 67. 177. See the excellent discussion of ‘The strategies of encyclopaedism’, by Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture, pp. 17–40. Rosenberg, ‘Early modern information overload’, suggests that a significant difference between the medieval and early modern encyclopaedia is the transition from reflecting the universe to reflecting possible ways of knowing ‘a changing universe of representation’ (p. 5). 178. The phrase is Gian Biagio Conte’s: ‘The inventory of the world’, Genres and Readers, p. 68. For the meeting between Mahler and Sibelius: Ross, The Rest is Noise, p. 178. 179. Genres and Readers, p. 68. I have also been profoundly influenced by Conte’s marvellous discussion of the role of the addressee and reader in Lucretius’s De rerum natura, in the chapter entitled ‘Instructions for a sublime reader’. Notes to Part 5 1. Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt 251.4–13. See Ormsby, Theodicy, p. 244 and note 99. 2. Abrahamov, ‘Al-K. āsim ibn Ibrāhīm’s Argument’; Abrahamov, ‘Introduction’, in Al-K.āsim b. Ibrāhīm on the Proof of God’s Existence, pp. 1–20; Roger Arnaldez, ‘Khalk. ’, EI2, IV, pp. 980–8; Burrell, ‘Creation’; Davidson, ‘John Philoponus’; Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, esp. Chapter 7, ‘Arguments from Design’, pp. 213–36; van Ess, ‘Early Islamic theologians’; van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, IV, pp. 459–77; Goodman, Islamic Humanism, pp. 122–60; Man‚ūr, The World-View, pp. 99–147. 3. For the interweaving of the ‘Design Complex’ and other aspects of the relationship between God and man, see van Ess, Die Gedankenwelt des Óārit al-Muªāsibī, pp. 160–229, esp. pp. 162–95, where many of the items in my series are discussed. Al-Muªāsibī’s pronouncements on ‘die Einzigkeit Gottes und die universale Ordnung’ and ‘Schöpfung in der Zeit und Ewigkeit Gottes’ are reviewed on pp. 163–74; see also Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, p. 224. 4. Al-Khayyā†, Inti‚ār, 49.1–9, §37. See further al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 225.14– 226.3, for a similar argument attributed to Hishām and his student ʿAbbād b.

notes | 505 Sulaymān which seems to support Ibn al-Rāwandī’s interpretation rather than al-Khayyā†’s; see van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, IV, pp. 1–44 and VI, pp. 222–70 on both thinkers (the doctrine is translated in VI, p. 225 as §11). 5. Q. Shūrā 42: 11. The quotation is apposite as the verse deals with God’s creation of heavens, earth, men and animals. 6. See Gutas, ‘Ibn ˝ufayl’, p. 235, note 27. This chapter is intended as a partial response to his request (in the penultimate sentence of his footnote 27) for an investigation of whether in the development of theology ‘the two sides of the same issue were actually related’. 7. Q. Ghāshiya 88: 17–20. 8. Ibn Rushd, Kitāb Fa‚l al-Maqāl, pp. 5.10–6.3; see also Hourani’s notes to Averroes, On The Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, pp. 83–4; Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, pp. 229–31. 9. He reiterates this theme on many occasions: e.g. 62.11–16 (elaborated in 62.16–64.9); 64.17–66.9 (expanded in 70.9–76.13); 68.7–13; 68.14–70.8 (an excoriating attack on those who maintain that knowledge of God is innate to man but who cannot verify or corroborate their statement); 122.2–3; 140.15– 16; 150.15; 152.5; 154.15–16. 10. This use of āthār is Qurʾanic: Q. Rūm 30: 50. 11. In Q. Fā†ir 35: 11. 12. See, e.g. 80.3–4 and 11–12; 84.10; 86.10–11; 90.13–15; 98.8–110.4; 104.18– 116.10; 134.12–136.6; 140.13 and 17–18. 13. See also 66.8–68.6; 74.10–76.13; 112.10–14. 14. I have been guided by the following entries in the Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān: ‘Book’ (Daniel Madigan); ‘Cosmology’ (Angelika Neuwirth); ‘Creation’ (Daniel C. Peterson); ‘Nature as Signs’ (Ian R. Netton); ‘Signs’ (Binyamin Abrahamov). 15. Here bayān is used as a designation of the Qurʾān. 16. My account here is deeply indebted to Sedley, Creationism. See also Johansen, ‘Introduction’, in Plato, Timaeus and Critias; Frede, ‘Galen’s Theology’; Tieleman, ‘Galen and Genesis’; Hankinson, ‘Philosophy of nature’. 17. Galeni Compendium Timaei Platonis. See Óunayn, Bergsträsser 50.13–51.2. The work was prepared for Muªammad b. Mūsā, on whom see Chapter 4.1, pp. 188–9 and 191. A later translation is said to have been done by the physician ʿĪsā b. Yaªyā Abū Sahl al-Masīªī (d. 401/1010), on whom see Endress, ‘Wissenschaftliche Literatur’, p. 426 and note 70. This work is not to be confused with Galen’s treatise on the medical theories of the Timaeus, also

506 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s translated by Óunayn and Isªāq, some scattered fragments of which survive: see Ullmann, Medizin, pp. 64–5; Sezgin, GAS, III, pp. 48–9. 18. There are elements in the Graeco-Arabica to suggest that the Greek heritage could be adapted to overcome these and similar problems. There is the outright denial of the existence of a model in the Arabic doxography of PseudoAmmonius, pp. 126–30, §§I–IV. The non-providence of Aristotle’s and Plotinus’s divinity (as it is conveyed in Arabic in The Theology of Aristotle) was supplemented through recourse to Proclus’s role for a providential deity in the Kitāb fī al-Khayr al-Maª∂, the Arabic version of his Elements of Theology, known in the West as the Liber de Causis. The eternity of matter, an axiom of Greek physics, resisted such malleability, however. In The Theology of Aristotle, Aflū†īn 27.7–28.3 we learn that the philosopher’s account of creation in time (that of Plato in the Timaeus?) is misleading – that it is simply a result of how difficult it is to use language, a product of time and rooted in causality, to discuss things which are not subject to causation or time. 19. D’Ancona, ‘The Timaeus’ model’; Gutas, ‘Geometry and the rebirth of philosophy’, pp. 205–6, notes how in one work al-Kindī is indebted to the Platonic geometrical arrangement of the constituents of the universe but far exceeds its fivefold scheme in his numerology. On the Arabic translations of selections from the Timaeus and of Galen’s epitome of the Timaeus, see Arnzen, ‘Plato’s Timaeus’. On the remnants of Plato Arabus: Rosenthal, ‘On the knowledge of Plato’s philosophy’; Klein-Franke, ‘Zur Überlieferung’; Gutas, ‘Plato’s Symposion in the Arabic tradition’; Gutas, ‘Galen’s Synopsis of Plato’s Laws’; Reisman, ‘Plato’s Republic in Arabic’; Arnzen, ‘On the contents, sources and composition’. 20. Translated by Mauro Zonta in Fasso, Alessandro di Afrodisia., pp. 87–165. Further bibliographical details: Goulet and Aouad, ‘Alexandros d’Aphrodisias’ (On the Governance of the Spheres: see p. 135, no. 22 and p. 137, title no. 30, another partial Arabic translation of the work); Sharples, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias on divine providence’. 21. Peter Adamson, al-Kindī, pp. 197–206. See the passage from On First Philosophy, extant only in Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi’s al-ʿIqd al-Farīd, translated by Adamson, al-Kindī, p. 205. The text is given by Rashed and Jolivet, Oeuvres philosphiques, pp. 129–31. See also Adamson, al-Kindī, p. 58; Adamson and Pormann, Philosophical Works, p. 57. 22. See Óunayn, Bergsträsser 46.22–47.3. It was translated into Syriac by Óunayn for his son Isªāq, into Arabic by Thābit b. Qurra for Muªammad b. Mūsā, and later by ʿĪsā b. Yaªyā: Ullmann, Medizin, p. 51, §64.

notes | 507 23. The work is translated by Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968); Óunayn, Bergsträsser 27.13–28.15; Ullmann, Medizin, p. 41, no. 15; Sezgin, GAS, III, pp. 106–8. Óunayn’s lemma leaves us in no doubt that this is a work on the ‘wisdom of the Maker in his perfect creation of the form’ of the various body parts. There is also an Arabic translation of a partial commentary on the work by John Philoponus: Ullmann, Medizin, p. 90; Sezgin, GAS, III, p. 107. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Ahmed El Shamsy (University of Chicago) who generously let me see a copy of his insightful paper ‘Galen’s Influence on Islamic Theology’, presented at the American Oriental Society in Boston March 2012, from which I derived enormous benefit. 24. Pseudo-Galen, Pseudogaleni in Hippocratis de Septimanis Commentarium; see also Roscher, Die hippokratische Schrift. 25. Mansfeld, The Pseudo-Hippocratic Tract Peri Hebdomadōn; Vincentelli, ‘La cosmologie’. 26. Balīnūs, Kitāb Sirr al-Khalīqa; translated by Weisser, Das ‘Buch Über das Geheimnis. 27. I follow in this the summary of Haqq, Names, Natures and Things, pp. 29–30, who was in turn following Zimmermann’s review of Weisser’s Das ‘Buch Über das Geheimnis des Schöpfung’ von Pseudo-Apollonius von Tyana. Zonta, ‘Nemesiana Syriaca’, pp. 223–58, detects the mediating presence of the Monophysite Bishop Iwānnīs of Dārā, active in Mesopotamia around 224/837: Vööbus, ‘Important manuscript discoveries’. Óunayn b. Isªāq’s translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian problēmata has been edited: Pseudo-Aristotle, The Problemata Physica. The text advertises itself as an introduction to the art of medicine. See further Bertier and Filius, ‘Problemata Physica’; Sharples, ‘Pseudo-Alexander or Pseudo-Aristotle’; and Filius, ‘The genre Problemata in Arabic’. I am grateful to Dr Rotraud Hansberger, then of King’s College, London, for discussing this tradition with me. 28. We know of at least seven manuscripts of the work. I have not consulted them but simply endeavour to give a digest of the copious discussions this work has excited in the secondary sources. One MS is that contained in the Madrasa ʿUthmānīya in Aleppo and edited by al-˝abbākh. According to the colophon printed by al-˝abbākh, it is dated to the month of Rabīʿ al-Ākhar in the year 1023, i.e. May 1614. There is one in the Aya Sofia in Istanbul attributed to Jibrīl b. Nūª b. Abī Nūª al-Anbārī and has the title Kitāb al-Fikar wa-alIʿtibār, The Book of Reflections and Study (MS 4836, ff. 160r–187r). According

508 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s to Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, p. 219, n. 40, this belongs to the same family as the manuscript which is the basis for al-˝abbākh’s edition. According to Daiber, however, based on a personal communication from Fuat Sezgin, this MS is to be identified as the primary source for all the other versions: Daiber, Das theologisch-philosophische System des Muʿammar, pp. 159–60. In an article from 1991 Daiber refers to it as the ‘unique’ MS: ‘Nestorians of 9th Century Iraq’, pp. 45–6. Daiber notes the presence of a MS in Berlin (Or. Oct. 1501). Gibb drew the scholarly world’s attention to a version in the British Library (Or. 3886, Add. 684), written in a Yemeni hand and dated to 1258/1842, which has the title Kitāb al-ʿIbar wa-al-Iʿtibār, The Book of Paradigms and their Study. This has a different introduction to that contained in the Aleppine recension edited by al-˝abbākh and lacks its concluding survey of philosophical arguments against eternity. Gibb, in his study of the BL manuscript, mentions that three further manuscripts were discovered in the Yemen: Gibb, ‘The argument from design’, p. 151. Bahmān, ‘al-Mawrūth al-JāªiÕī’, p. 287, notes the existence in Yemen of a late copy of a Kitāb al-ʿIbar wa-al-Iʿtibār in the family library of Āl Óumayd al-Dīn dated to 1347/1929–30. Van Ess, Early Islamic Theologians, pp. 78–9, note 7, refers to another MS in Íanʿāʾ: Maktabat ʿAbd al-Raªmān al-Shāmī, a film of which is available in Dār al-Kutub, Cairo F 299. He notes that it is the same as the BL MS. Gutas, ‘Ibn ˝ufayl’, p. 235, n. 26 refers to a late (late seventh or early eighth century ah) copy of the work in the Escorial MS 698 Derenbourg (695 Cassiri): Derenbourg, Les manuscrits arabes, pp. 494–5. 29. Kitāb al-Dalāʾil wa-al-Iʿtibār, al-˝abbākh 21.5–15. An English translation is available: Abdel Haleem, Chance or Creation? See pp. 35–6 for this passage (my rendering differs from his). For an excellent study, see Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, pp. 219–24. 30. In this last sentence I read naÕāʾir for al-˝abbākh’s na∂āʾir. The rejection of dualism in this passage picks up on the condemnation of Manichaeism as unbelief (kufr) at al-˝abbākh 2.15. 31. Pellat, ‘Inventaire’, p. 135, ghost entry between §57 and §58 (Pellat refers to al-Sandūbī’s suggestion of the authorship of al-Muªāsibī); van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, IV, p. 208; Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, pp. 223–4. I am unable to read Baneth, ‘The common teleological source’, apart from the English summary on pp. iv–v. 32. I follow the text as printed by Rieu, Supplement, pp. 466–7. On Jibrīl, see Graf, Geschichte, II, p. 155, who notes the reference to Jibrīl by al-Bīrūnī

notes | 509 in his Kitāb al-Āthār al-Bāqiya, 208.4; Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, p. 219, n. 40; Plessner, Vorsokratische Philosophie, pp. 103–5; van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, IV, pp. 208–9; Daiber, Das theologisch-philosophische System des Muʿammar, p. 159; ‘Nestorians of 9th century Iraq’, p. 46, where he dates the work to the caliphate of al-Mutawakkil; Griffith, ‘ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī’s Kitāb al-Burhān’, pp. 153–4. We might conclude that Jibrīl b. Nūª al-Anbārī is disavowed by such criticism as the author of the BL MS, The Book of Paradigms but not as the author of the Aleppine MS, The Book of Signs. We might also then conclude that the Aleppine MS may therefore precede the recension (or version or adaptation or independent composition) contained in the BL MS. Or perhaps the name Jibrīl b. Nūª is a mistake for his uncle, the Abū Nūª b. al-Íalt al-Anbārī active in 782 in the company of Patriarch Timothy: Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, p. 47, notes that c. 166–7/782 Abū Nūª al-Anbārī, then secretary to the Governor of Mosul, assisted the Patriarch Timothy I in his translation of Aristotle’s Topics for the Caliph al-Mahdī. This is Abū Nūª ʿAbd al-Masīª b. al-Íalt al-Anbārī: see Graf, Geschichte, II, pp. 118; Swanson, ‘Abū Nūª al-Anbārī’; van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, II, p. 469; III, p. 23; IV, p. 208. 33. See Baumstark, Geschichte, p. 105. 34. Theodoret of Cyrus, On Divine Providence. 35. Plessner, Vorsokratische Philosophie, p. 104; Crone, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law, pp. 12, 92–3; van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, IV, pp. 132– 33; Hutter, ‘Iranian literature’, p. 168; Jokisch, Islamic Imperial Law, p. 72; Thomas, ‘Óumayd ibn Bakhtiyār’; King, ‘The genesis and development of a logical lexicon’, p. 235, note 39. 36. ‘ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī’s Kitāb al-Burhān’, p. 154. 37. Daiber, Das theologisch-philosophische System des Muʿammar, pp. 159–60, Aetius Arabus, Die Vorsokratischer, pp. 398–400, and ‘Nestorians of 9th century Iraq’, p. 46, has proposed that The Book of Signs draws on a version of the Placita which is not the same as that translated by Qus†ā. He speculates that this tradition may represent a Greek compilation previously rendered into Persian. 38. See Daiber, ‘Nestorians of 9th century Iraq’, pp. 49–52, on the doxographical features of the epistle; Holmberg, ‘The trinitarian terminology’; Holmberg, ‘Israel of Kashkar’. 39. Compare this with Óayawān 1.210.10–14, which it reiterates: see Part 6, §4.11.

510 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 40. Lamoreaux, Theodore Abū Qurra, noting that the three parts of the work appear to be independent of one another, divides the work in his translation. Thus Part 1 appears as ‘On Natural Theology’, pp. 165–74, Part 2 as ‘Theologus Autodidactus’, pp. 1–25; and Part 3 as ‘That Christianity is from God’, pp. 41–7. While the pamphlet as it is extant today does not conform strictly to the tripartite epistemology evident in other Christian compositions (nature, the Old Testament, and the New Testament as stages of understanding on the path to God), it gestures towards it in a significant and explicit enough manner for us to read it as the unfolding of one complex argument. I have generally been guided by the excellent articles of Sidney H. Griffith, in this and the other Christian texts I discuss: ‘Faith and reason in Christian Kalām’. See also Lamoreaux, ‘Theodore Abū Qurra’. On al-Murdār: van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, III, pp. 134–42 and V, pp. 331–9; Thomas, ‘Al-Murdār’; Boudignon, ‘Logique aristotélicienne’; and for al-Qāsim’s debt to Theodore, see Madelung, ‘Al-Qāsim ibn Ibrāhīm and Christian theology’. 41. See Davidson’s seminal study: ‘John Philoponus’, p. 374. In Alexandria John was the student of the Neoplatonist Ammonius whose synthesis Wisnovsky has argued lies at the heart of Avicennian metaphysics: Avicenna’s Metaphysics. For Nonnus, it is man, and not the universe, which is a stentorian ‘bundle of contrarieties’ which loudly announces the unity of his maker: Griffith, ‘The apologetic treatise’, p. 121. 42. Griffith, ‘Faith and reason’, pp. 27–30, and the works cited in his n. 70, for this relationship. John of Damascus was himself of course indebted to PseudoDionysius the Areopagite and Nemesius of Emesa. John attests the presence of a controlling creator from the combination of opposites in his Expositio fidei: Schriften, II, p. 1–-12, §3; I 3, lines 44–53. 43. Griffith, ‘Faith and reason’, pp. 36–7, on the swerve away from reason by Abū Rāʾi†a and ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī. 44. Kraus, Jābir b. Óayyān, pp. 275–80; Lewin, ‘Job d’Édesse’; Levey, ‘Chemical notions’; Weisser, Das ‘Buch über das Geheimnis’, pp. 55–63; Degen, ‘Galen im Syrischen’; Sezgin, GAS, III, pp. 230–1; Endress, ‘Wissenschaftliche Literatur’, pp. 410–11; van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, III, pp. 333–41, 355–6, 359; VI, pp. 86–94 (translation of the debate with al-NaÕÕām); Reinink, ‘The “Book of Nature” and Syriac apologetics’, pp. 73–4; Roggema, ‘Job of Edessa’, pp. 506–9. Sorabji, Matter, Space and Motion, pp. 56–7, notes that Job treats the four elements as ‘bundles of qualities’: van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, III, p. 44. Again I should like to record my thanks to Dr Rotraud Hansberger.

notes | 511 45. Thomas, ‘Abū l-Hudhayl’. 46. Once again I am guided by a magisterial study by Griffith: ‘ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī’s Kitāb al-Burhān’; Beaumont, ‘ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī’. 47. See Griffith, ‘ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī’s Kitāb al-Burhān’, p. 150. 48. Griffith, ‘ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī’s Kitāb al-Burhān’, pp. 160–1. 49. See Griffith, ‘ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī’s Kitāb al-Burhān’, pp. 174–5. 50. On Philoponus: Robert Wisnovsky, ‘Yaªyā al-Naªwī’, EI2, XI, pp. 251–3. 51. See also Cook, ‘The origins of Kalām’. 52. Di Matteo, ‘Confutazione’; Madelung, ‘Al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm’. 53. Madelung, ‘Al-Qāsim ibn Ibrāhīm and Christian theology’. For the extent and nature of the Syriac contribution to Syrian and Iraqi intellectual and religious life in the third century, see Klinge, ‘Die Bedeuting der syrischen Theologen’; Saliba, ‘Al-JāªiÕ and the critique of Aristotelian science’, pp. 39–40; Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, pp. 45–74 and 106–28. The studies of Henri Huggonard-Roche on Sergius of Reshʿayna (d. 536 AD), the earliest known link between Neoplatonising Aristotelians in Alexandria and the Christian communities of Syria, are vital, as is his excellent monograph: La logique d’Aristote. 54. For some Christian examples of this appeal, see Griffith, ‘Faith and reason’, pp. 11, 30, 31, 35; ‘ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī’s Kitāb al-Burhān’, pp. 160, 161 and 174–5; ‘Óabīb ibn Hidmah Abū Rāʾi†ah’, p. 186. Griffith’s work has brought ˘ out the shared similarities in structure and lexicon between the Christian and Muslim Kalām texts. See also Pines, ‘Some traits of Christian theological writing’. For al-Qāsim: Di Matteo, ‘Confutazione’, 321.14–331.20; Ibn Qutayba: Julia Bray, ‘Lists and memory’, pp. 214–21; al-JāªiÕ: al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā Rasāʾil 3.334.8–10. 55. In view of my ignorance of Syriac, I have relied on the German translation by Kayser, Das Buch von der Erkenntnis der Wahrheit, and the excellent article by Reinink, ‘Communal identity’. My attempt to understand this text has been indelibly stamped by his reading of the work. 56. In this respect I think its structure is informed by the method of Job of Edessa in The Book of Treasures and also by the rudimentary method (at least as far as the extant text indicates) of Theodore Abū Qurra in his On the Existence of the Creator. 57. I am entirely reliant upon the Latin translation offered by van Roey, Nonnus de Nisibe, pp. 35*–68* and the discussion of Griffith, ‘The apologetic treatise’; see also Teule, ‘Nonnus of Nisibis’.

512 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 58. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity, pp. 115 and 117 (for references to its deployment by Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement and Didymus). 59. Sheldon-Williams, ‘The Greek Christian Platonist tradition’, p. 425, and note 3; Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, pp. 108–9. 60. Abū al-Hudhayl: al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 312.1–2; van Ess, ‘Early Islamic theologians’, p. 66; al-Qāsim: Kitāb al-Dalīl al-Kabīr, 80.3–4 and 11–12 (for the assertion that no sect would deny God’s signs); Theodore: ‘The Eucharistic Bread is the Body of Christ’, in Lamoreaux, p. 219 (the phrase is adduced by the Saracen in the debate); Nonnus: Griffith, ‘Nonnus’, pp. 136–7; John of Damascus: Expositio fidei, Schriften, II, pp. 7–8, §1; I 1, lines 14–15. The notion probably has Stoic origins: van Ess, ‘Early Islamic theologians’, p. 67; see also Algra, ‘Stoic theology’, and Hankinson, ‘Stoic epistemology’. I think we are dealing here with a descendant of what Chrysippus designated a prolepsis, a preconception, formed through repeated exposure to perception of the world (empeiria). This is, in fact, how al-JāªiÕ accounts for knowledge acquired through experience, tajriba, in Maʿrifa Rasāʾil 3.60.1–65.2. 61. Frank, ‘Fundamental assumptions’, p. 16, note 3, remarks that ‘the initial knowledge of God’ was, according to the fully developed Basran school, ‘autonomously attained’ through the signs of creation and so was a prior but not an implanted knowledge. 62. The appeal of the idea of God confronting man with an irrefutable proof is attested to by its inclusion in the pamphlet ascribed to al-Óasan al-Ba‚rī: Ritter, ‘Studien zur islamischen Frömmigkeit’, pp. 68.5–6 and 70.6–8; Schwartz, ‘The letter of al-Óasan al-Ba‚rī’, p. 20; Abrahamov, Al-K.āsim ibn Ibrāhīm, p. 182, note 6. See generally Cook, Early Muslim Dogma, Chapter 12; the case for a fourth-century Zaydī identity of this epistle is forcefully put by Mourad, Early Islam between Myth and History, pp. 176–239. 63. Jawābāt wa-’stiªqāq al-Imāma Rasāʾil 4.298.10–11. 64. Montgomery, ‘JāªiÕ’s Kitāb al-Bayān’, esp. pp. 100–10. 65. Reinhart, Before Revelation, e.g. the discussion on p. 107 and pp. 108–13 (the quotation is from p. 113). I have corrected the transliteration of ridāʾ to ri∂ā. 66. Jawābāt wa-’stiªqāq al-Imāma, Rasāʾil 4.298.13–14. 67. Recall van Ess’s point, Flowering, pp. 153–4, that ʿaql was the primary faculty given by God to human beings. 68. Reinhart, Before Revelation, p. 122. 69. For an overview of the question, see El-Bizri, ‘God: essence and attributes’, p. 123.

notes | 513 70. Jawābāt wa-’stiªqāq al-Imāma, Rasāʾil 4.298.15–16. 71. See further Michot, ‘Revelation’, p. 194. 72. Montgomery, ‘JāªiÕ’s Kitāb al-Bayān’, in a section entitled ‘the ʿArabiyyah as Sacral’, pp. 101–2; Otto, The Idea of the Holy. 73. Ikhwān al-Íafāʾ, Rasāʾil, 1.114–157; the translated text is 1.149.15–21. 74. See Michot, ‘Revelation’, p. 188. 75. See further El-Bizri, ‘God: essence and attributes’, p. 122. 76. Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt 225.11–226.3. See Martin, ‘The role of the Basrah Muʿtazilah; also his article ‘Inimitability’, EQ, II, pp. 526–36. In my discussion of these attitudes, I resolutely exclude any consideration of the much intoned culture wars between Arabs and the Shuʿūbīya and/or Zanādiqa which scholars often rely on to contextualise them, such as, for example, al-JāªiÕ’s attacks on the Persian secretaries: Martin, The Role, p. 179; Vasalou, ‘Miraculous eloquence’, p. 26. I do not deny that in large part we should see ‘the iʿjāz discourse as externally directed’ (Vasalou, ‘Miraculous eloquence’, p. 47, note 27), though my primary interest in any such externality is in how it was first played out within the Islamic community: El-Bizri, ‘God: essence and attributes’. 77. The problem with restricting the attributes to the essence is that it is effectively a reduction which deprives believers of the object of their piety: El-Bizri, ‘God: essence and attributes’, p. 124. Michot, ‘Revelation’, p. 187, describes this phenomenon as a process whereby humans in some way acquire a divine status but in the process disappear. 78. Sophia Vasalou, ‘ʾIʿjāz’, in EALL, II, pp. 302–7, especially her remarks on p. 305. 79. Vasalou, ‘Miraculous eloquence’, p. 28, notes that the emergence of this aspect of Muªammad’s mission may have been a response to the articulation of a Christian theology in Arabic, according to which Moses’s special skill was magic, Jesus’s was medicine, and Muªammad’s was eloquence. The idea of an eloquence that was special to the Arabs was developed into what she calls the ‘circumstantial’ argument (p. 33), according to which the recourse Muªammad’s Arab opponents had to warfare instead of rhetoric is construed as evidence for the inability to imitate the Qurʾān. See Montgomery, ‘Of models and amanuenses’, pp. 9–22, for the natural eloquence of the desert Arabs. 80. Al-NaÕÕām, according to al-Shahrastānī, Al-Milal wa-al-Niªal, 1.56.16–57.3; G. E. von Grunebaum, ‘Iʿdjāz’, EI2, III, pp. 1018–20. Vasalou, ‘ʾIʿjāz’, EALL, pp. 303–4, explains that ‚arfa was rejected because God’s act of aversion, and

514 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s not the Qurʾān, became the locus of the miraculous. She notes, ‘Miraculous eloquence’, p. 31, that there could be a miracle only as long as people tried to imitate it. 81. I am not sure of al-JāªiÕ’s point here: who are ‘those like the Arabs’ and how are they like them? Why does he single women out and what does he mean by ‘those like women’? 82. See Part 1, p. 28, for the suggestion that the death of the Caliph al-Wāthiq echoes the Qurʾanic account of the death of Solomon. 83. Martin, ‘The role’, pp. 179–83; for an overview of al-JāªiÕ’s views on Iʿjāz, see al-Kha†īb, Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, pp. 133–53. Vasalou, ‘Miraculous eloquence’, p. 34, points out that al-Bāqillānī’s emphasis in the Iʿjāz was not that the Qurʾān surpassed customary forms of eloquence but rather that it ‘broke the custom of the existing literary forms’. The Qā∂ī ʿAbd al-Jabbār reports that Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī also denied the homonymy of naÕm and balāgha: Vasalou, ‘Miraculous eloquence’, p. 50, note 65. 84. Khalq al-Qurʾān Rasāʾil 3.290.14. 85. See Chapter 5.1, pp. 285–9; Kitāb al-Dalīl, pp. 66.8–68.6 and Abrahamov, ‘Introduction’, pp. 20–5. 86. Quotations taken from Otto, The Idea of the Holy, pp. 20–1, 27 and 28 respectively. 87. El-Bizri, ‘God: essence and attributes’, p. 138. 88. Al-Kindī, Kitāb al-Mu‚awwi†āt al-Watarīya, in Muʾallafāt al-Kindī al-Mūsīqīya, pp. 67–92: 70.18 (ʿilm al-taʾlīf huwa al-mūsīqī), on which see Endress, ‘Building the library’, pp. 343–4; al-Kindī, Risāla fī Kammīyat Kutub Aris†ū†alīs, AR 1.369.16 and 1.370.4 (taʾlīf as music); cf. AR 1.377.6–8, 21 and 1.378.1–2 and 6 (as a branch of computation). Of course music was itself a branch of mathematics. 89. See Montgomery, ‘Speech and nature’, Parts 1–4. A translation of the entire chapter of the Kitāb al-Bayān under discussion is given in Part 1 of this article. Note: rhyming segments of sajʿ utterances are italicised. 90. For this and following excerpts, please see Part 2 of Montgomery, ‘Speech and nature’, for identification of the locutors and other relevant details. 91. Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism (the German original was published in Berlin in 1936); Frank, The Metaphysics; Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalâm, pp. 466–517; Frank, Beings and their attributes, pp. 39–52; Baffioni, Atomismo e antiatomismo; Frank, ‘Bodies and atoms’; Ben-Shammai, ‘Studies in Karaite atomism’; Dhanani, The Physical Theory of Kalām; van Ess, ‘60 years after’;

notes | 515 Sabra, ‘Kalām atomism’. In addition, there is a wealth of material contained in the respective volumes of van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft: e.g. III, pp. 67–74 (on Muʿammar); 224–9 (Abū al-Hudhayl); 309–23 (al-NaÕÕām); IV, pp. 459–77. See especially the translations in volume VI. I have found the discussions of Richard Sorabji especially insightful: Sorabji, ‘Atoms and time atoms’, especially pp. 78–84; Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum, pp. 384–402; Sorabji, Matter, Space and Motion, pp. 44–59 (p. 57 for the term ‘bundle theory’). 92. See Dhanani, The Physical Theory, p. 21; van Ess, ‘60 years after’, pp. 28, 30 and 31; Sabra, ‘Kalām atomism’, p. 227. 93. Frank, The Metaphysics, pp. 42–4 (quotation from p. 44). 94. See the discussion and translation in Sabra, ‘Kalām atomism’. 95. Translated by David Bennett and me from our edition and translation (in progress) of the work for The Library of Arabic Literature. 96. Gutas, ‘Geometry and the rebirth of philosophy’, argues for a closer and more determinative influence of Euclid’s Elements in the emergence of early cosmological thinking. See further Part 1, pp. 33–4, for more thoughts on this mode of exposition. 97. Al-Kindī, Mu‚awwi†āt, p. 72.18–20. 98. An extreme statement of how this similarity determines the sublunary world is Al-Kindī’s De radiis, translated by Adamson and Pormann, Philosophical Works, pp. 219–34. See Adamson, Al-Kindī, pp. 188–91. 99. This section is a paraphrase of material presented in my study ‘Convention as cognition, ’pp. 161–71. 100. Tarbīʿ Pellat 82.1–84.4, §§150–154. See my ‘Convention as cognition’, pp. 161–6. 101. See the lucid explanation by Adamson, Al-Kindī, pp. 161–6. 102. Murūj al-Dhahab Pellat 2:46.9–11, §742 (Pellat’s translation 2, p. 278). 103. Pseudo-Aristotle, Aflū†īn Badawī 52.12–18. On this work, see Zimmermann, ‘The origins of the so-called Theology of Aristotle’; Aouad, ‘Théologie d’Aristote et autres texts du Plotinus Arabus’; Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus, especially pp. 49–68 (on the soul-body relationship); D’Ancona, ‘Greek into Arabic’, especially pp. 24–6. D’Ancona has also devoted many fine articles to this text. On Pythagoreanism: O’Meara, Pythagoras Revived. 104. These are respectively Mu‚awwitāt, 86.8–10; 86.21–87.3; 87.14–17; 88.3–5. The reference in the following paragraph is to Mu‚awwitāt 88.6. 105. Plato, Theaetetus, p. 53; Annas, Platonic Ethics, pp. 52–71 (‘Becoming like

516 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s God: ethics, human nature and the divine’); Sedley, ‘The ideal of godlikeness’; O’Meara, Platonopolis, especially pp. 31–9; Berman, ‘The political interpretation of the maxim’. 106. Al-Fārābī, Risāla fī-mā yanbaghī an yuqaddam qabla taʿallum al-falsafa, in Friedrich Dieterici (ed.), Die Philosophie der Araber, 53.13–22; translated into German by Dieterici as Volume 15 of this series, pp. 82–91. Earlier in the treatise, the fourth and fifth preliminaries are: ‘understanding of the aim which the learning of philosophy intends’ and ‘understanding the path which he who wishes philosophy must follow’ (Dieterici 49.8–9). 107. Kraus, ‘Kitab al-Akhlāq li-Jālīnūs’, 41.1–4; see Walzer, ‘New light on Galen’s moral philosophy’, p. 145 and note 3, and ‘A diatribe of Galen’. An English translation is available: Mattock, ‘A translation of the Arabic epitome’. 108. Aflū†īn Badawī 22.1–23.12 and 90.9–91.21; see also Plotinus, La discesa, 229.9–232.1 and 256.9–258.16; Gutas, ‘The text of the Arabic Plotinus’; Endress, ‘Building the library’; O’Meara, Platonopolis, pp. 36–9 (for Plotinus’s theory and its rejection by later Neoplatonism). 109. Al-Kindī, Al-Qawl fī al-Nafs al-Mukhta‚ar min Kitāb Aris†ū wa-Flā†un wa-Sāʾir al-Falāsifa, AR 1.274.11–14 and 1.274.18–275.7; Adamson and Pormann, Philosophical Works, pp. 113–18; Druart, ‘Al-Kindi’s ethics’; Adamson, Al-Kindī, pp. 157 and 236, n. 37, notes that in The Book of Definitions attributed to al-Kindī, it is a question of making actions only resemble God; Endress, ‘Building the library’, pp. 329–32; generally see Adamson, ‘Two early Arabic doxographies’. 110. Abū al-Hudhayl’s position on taqarrub and Ibn al-Rāwandī’s imputed misrepresentation of it are discussed by al-Khayyā†, Kitāb al-Inti‚ār, 57.20–59.14, §47; Frank, The Metaphysics, pp. 30–1, note 25. It is also used by al-Rāzī, al-Sīra al-Falsafīya, Kraus 105.17; O’Meara, Platonopolis, pp. 38–9, on the increasing remoteness in Neoplatonist metaphysics of the highest principle; Gimaret, Dieu à l’image de l’homme. 111. Text contained in Kraus, Jābir b. Óayyān, p. 99, note 5. 112. Al-Rāzī, Al-Sīra al-Falsafīya Kraus, pp. 98–111; these topics are Kraus 99.1–101.4; 101.5–108.13; 108.4–111.7 respectively. On the Galenic precept: al-˝ibb al-Rūªānī, ed. Kraus, 35.8–12; see Goodman, ‘Muªammad ibn Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī’, p. 209 and p. 215, note 49. 113. Van Ess, Flowering, pp. 85–6. 114. Weiss, ‘Covenant and law’, p. 81. 115. Khalq al-Qurʾān, Rasāʾil 3.290.14; Óayawān 4.90.11.

notes | 517 116. I have been encouraged by van Ess’s characteristically erudite and brilliant survey of the epistemological reach of Kalām atomism and its analogy with how the grammarians developed their vocabulary and by his hint that al-JāªiÕ’s notion of the taʾlīf of the Qurʾān was intended to signal that God ‘put it together, “composed” it in an unsurpassable way’: ‘60 years after’, pp. 40–1. 117. I have been guided by Frank’s discussion of Abū al-Hudhayl’s notion of man: The Metaphysics, pp. 28–38, especially how Frank explains that man’s oneness and identity are ‘not his in any way’, being made up ‘out of elements which are not himself’ (p. 38). 118. See Endress, ‘Wissenschaftliche Literatur’, p. 422 and note 38. The extant translation of the Physics is that by Isªāq b. Óunayn (d. 289/910–11): Aris†ū†ālīs, al-˝abīʿa. See Peters, Arsitoteles Arabus, pp. 30–4; Pellegrin, ‘La Physique’; Ibn Qutayba, Adab al-Kātib, Grünert 3.10–4.11/al-Dālī 7.6–8.2. 119. Cf. the comparison in Aristotle, Metaphysics Lambda (10), 1075a 11–25 between the way in which the whole possesses that which is good and best and the efficient ordering of an army: Sedley, Creationism, pp. 198–9; Sedley, ‘Met. Lambda 10’. 120. Translated from the quotation given by Rosenthal, ‘On some epistemological and methodological presuppositions’. I have paraphrased Rosenthal’s discussion of the similarity on p. 150. 121. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 69 (his unfinished and undelivered Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985–1986). 122. See Part 6, §4.6, pp. 405–6. 123. Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters, p. 272. Cf. the discussion by Eco of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Philosophy of Composition in ‘The Poetics and Us’, in On Literature, p. 239. 124. Or without its mark, like an unbranded camel which is not counted towards the tax for the poor (ghufl ). This term is also used of books which are published anonymously and for men who are inexperienced in life, a notion which is cognate with the adjective fa†īr (dough which has not been left long enough to rise) in the next phrase: see al-Wukalāʾ Rasāʾil 4.95.7, al-raʾy al-fa†īr. 125. The poet is Ibn Harma, the metre basī†. 126. Your horse will always win the race if it races alone; speaking and writing books are not solitary pursuits (unlike reading) but are social activities. 127. Cf. al-Kindī, Fī al-Falsafa al-Ūlā, RJ 13.23; AR 1.103.12, ʿuqad al-ʿawī‚ al-multabisa. 128. The use of tadbīr is polysemous: he means the way in which he has managed

518 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s to make a living, the way in which he has managed his books and the way in which he has organised these books. See the statement by Democrates at 1.101.18. 129. This develops the reference to kutub al-shurū† at 1.87.14. 130. Montgomery, ‘Of models and amanuenses’, pp. 9–13 (where Bishr’s theories are discussed); Montgomery, ‘JāªiÕ on jest and earnest’, pp. 227–9 (for an account of intellectual capacity). 131. See his discussion of memory in al-Muʿallimīn Rasāʾil 3.29.7–30.4; Günther, ‘Praise to the book!’, pp. 131–3. 132. Ullmann, Islamic Medicine (Chapter Four is an excellent overview of humoral physiology); Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine; van Ess, Flowering, pp. 79–115 (on Kalām science); Montgomery, ‘JāªiÕ on jest and earnest’, pp. 214–21 (for a similar pathology of ire). 133. I presume that al-JāªiÕ intends the Elements by kitāb. See Sezgin, GAS, V, pp. 83–120, especially pp. 103–15. 134. Street, ‘Arabic logic’, pp. 529–33; Schoeler/Toorawa, The Genesis of Literature (on the teaching system). 135. Rasāʾil 4.151–152. 136. Good overviews of the theories, methods and techniques of Arabic grammar: Carter, Sībawayhi, and Vertseegh, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought. The best study of al-JāªiÕ and the grammarians is that by Baalbaki, ‘The place of al-JāªiÕ’; Letizia Osti, ‘The practical matters of culture’, discusses how scholars made their living and reveals how canny and shrewd they were; Toorawa, Ibn Abī ˝āhir ˝ayfūr, is a fundamental study of how ‘commercial’ authors made their living through writing. 137. See also Óayawān 3.7.1–11, for an iteration of similar ideas. 138. Given in the text as ʾfrsmwā, with the alif presumably being alif al-wiqāya often written after a long ū. 139. I have not been able to establish the provenance of this statement by Democrates who is presumably ‘Gnomicus’: see Dimitri Gutas, ‘Démocrate “Gnomicus”’, reprinted as ‘Democrates “Gnomicus”’, and the article on ‘Démocratès’ by Jean-Marie Flamand. He features prominently in the company of Buqrā† in al-JāªiÕ’s al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā: ka-dhālika kutub dīmuqrā† wa-buqrā† wa-ʾAflā†ūn wa-fulān wa-fulān, the same holds true for the books of Democrates, Hippocrates, Plato, so-and-so and so-and-so (Rasāʾil 3.315.2); Óayawān 1.74.3–4, the books of Aristotle (Aris†ā†ālīs) and his teacher Plato (Aflā†ūn), then Ptolemy (Ba†lyamūs), Democrates (Dīmuqrā†s), so-and-so

notes | 519 and so-and so; Tarbīʿ Pellat 98.5–7, §190. See Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, pp. 86–7. 140. See Pseudo-Aristotle, Kitāb Sirr al-Asrār, in Badawī, al-U‚ūl al-Yūnānīya, p. 126.10–17 and p. 127. See the study of this work by Forster, Das Geheimnis der Geheimnisse; Gutas, ‘The spurious and the authentic’, p. 23 (for the reference to its inscription on Aristotle’s tomb by Ibn Juljul, ˝abaqāt al-A†ibbāʾ); p. 24 (for the ‘Octagon’ in al-Mubashshir b. Fātik’s Mukhtār al-Óikam wa-Maªāsin al-Kalim); p. 35, note 40, for its inclusion by Ibn Khaldūn in The Muqaddima, I, pp. 81–2, and note 29. 141. See Schoeler, ‘Der Verfasser der Augenheilkund, pp. 93–4 for a comprehensive survey of occurrences of the octuplet; Stephanus of Athens, Commentary on Hippocrates’ Aphorisms, Sections I–II. Stephanus’s preface (pp. 28–33) details the work’s aim (skopos), usefulness, genuineness, title, place within the curriculum, division into parts, the branch of Hippocratic medicine to which it belongs, and the form of presentation (which is, of course, aphoristic). The commentaries and relationship between Palladius and Stephanus have been extensively studied by Wanda Wolska-Conus in many publications, among them: ‘Les Commentaires de Stéphanos d’Athènes’. See the further studies by Westerink and Hadot cited by Hinrich Biesterfeldt, ‘Palladius on the Hippocratic Aphorisms’, pp. 391–2, note 21. 142. Al-Fārābī, Kitāb al-AlfāÕ al-Mustaʿmala, 94.15–95.9, §51. See the alternative, partial translation in Zimmerman, Al-Farabi’s Commentary, p. xciii, note 4. Al-Fārābī discusses naªw al-taʿlīm in AlfāÕ 86.11–94.14, §§40–50. 143. AlfāÕ 95.13–16, §51; see Zimmerman, Al-Farabi, p. xciii, note 5. 144. The MS of Palladius’s commentary of the Aphorisms is as yet unpublished. I have relied exclusively on Biesterfeldt’s account in his article on it. There is a partial, old version of the translation of the Aphorisms given in The Chronography, Taʾrīkh, by al-Yaʿqūbī (a book composed in 259/872), 107.11–116.2. On al-Yaʿqūbī’s dependence on Palladius Arabicus, see Magdelaine, ‘Le commentaire de Palladius’. 145. For the Greek materials I have relied upon: Jouanna, Hippocrates, pp. 67–8, 352, 360 and 477–8, notes 45–6; Temkin, Hippocrates, pp. 44–6, 50, and 228–30. 146. Óunayn, Bergsträsser 40.6–14; Ullmann, Medizin, pp. 28–9; Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 139. On the extent of Arabic engagement with the famous first aphorism (‘life is short, art is long’), see Rosenthal, ‘“Life is short, the art is long”’. On Ibn al-Muʿtazz’s Fu‚ūl, see Bray, ‘Ibn al-Muʿtazz and politics’.

520 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 147. Biesterfeldt, ‘Palladius’, pp. 393–4. He suspects textual corruption in the discussion of ‚inf. 148. Ibn al-Bi†rīq is mentioned at Óayawān 1.76.6. For al-Bi†rīq: Ullmann, Wörterbuch zu den griechisch-arabischen Übersetzungen, pp. 28–30, 35–48; Biesterfeldt, ‘Palladius’, p. 388–9; Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 109 (Tetrabiblos) and p. 136 (Melkite); see further Dunlop, ‘The translations of al-Bi†rīq and Yaªyā (Yuªannā) b. al-Bi†rīq’; Françoise Micheau, ‘Yaªyā b. al-Bi†rīk. ’, EI2, XI, p. 246; Endress, ‘Building the library’, p. 345. 149. Ginzburg, ‘Clues: roots of an evidential paradigm’, p. 124. 150. Jouanna, Hippocrates, pp. 291–322. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Brooke Holmes of Princeton University who discussed these matters with me. See her book The Symptom and the Subject. 151. See Abrahamov, ‘Signs’, EQ, V, pp. 2–11 for a full discussion. 152. I have been inspired in this reading by J. Hillis Miller’s ‘Introduction’ to Charles Dickens, Bleak House, pp. 11–34. 153. Madigan, The Qurʾān’s Self-Image. 154. Miller, ‘Introduction’, p. 29. 155. See Miller, ‘The problematic of ending in narrative’. Notes to Part 6 1. I can find no evidence that al-JāªiÕ was interested in what John Chrysostom found attractive in this universal appeal, namely that there were no language barriers to reading the signs of nature: Drecoll, ‘“Quasi legens magnum quendam librum naturae rerum” (Augustine, C. Faust. 32: 20)’, pp. 47–8. In view of the centrality of Arabic to his world view (as explored in Chapter 5.2 above) this is hardly surprising. 2. Óayawān 1.37.3–8 (God’s encouragement); 1.205.3–4 (= §4.2 below) and 1.212.13–14 (= §6.2) (at man’s service, with a quotation of Q. Luqmān 31: 20); see Geries, Un genre littéraire, p. 37. 3. See Óayawān 1.205.5–11, §4.3. On the ‘proper use’ argument as developed by Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–79), see Groh, ‘The emergence of creation theology’, p. 30; see Geries, Un genre littéraire, pp. 26–7 and 44–7 (on the intrinsic necessity of the good and the bad); Brunschvig, ‘Muʿtazilisme et optimum (ala‚laª)’. Al-JāªiÕ does not, I think, argue that this is the best possible world in a sort of Panglossian manner, but that the world as it is is optimally engineered (through its mixtures of good and bad) for believers to realise their taklīf. In this he follows one aspect of Bishr b. al-Muʿtamir’s ideas concerning taklīf, lu†f

notes | 521 and ‚alāª (al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt 246.8–10, 574.1–3) and anticipates elements of the doctrine as developed in the Basran tradition by the Jubbāʾīs and the Qadi ʿAbd al-Jabbār: see Brunschvig, ‘Muʿtazilisme’, pp. 12–13; Vasalou, Moral Agents and their Deserts, pp. 19 and 28–9. See also Ormsby, Theodicy, especially pp. 217–58 (‘The problem of the optimum’). 4. I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr Jeannie Miller of the University of Toronto who reminded me of this fundamental feature of the system, as well as for many astute observations on my reading of this section of The Book of Living. She offers a brilliant analysis of this passage in ‘More than the sum’. 5. Frank, ‘Fundamental assumptions’, p. 17, n. 3. 6. Dhikr maªāsin al-kha‚ī wa-masāwī-hi: 1.166.13. This passage of The Book of Living has been well studied: Asín Palacios, ‘El “Libro de Los Animales” de JâªiÕ’, partial translation on pp. 42–54; Ch. Pellat, ‘Khā‚ī’, EI2, IV, pp. 1087–92; Ayalon, Eunuchs, Caliphs and Sultans; his earlier study, ‘On the Eunuchs in Islam’, touches only tangentially on al-JāªiÕ; Cheikh-Moussa, ‘GˇāªiÕ et les eunuques’. Dr Pökel of the Freie Universität, Berlin kindly let me see copies of two unpublished studies: ‘Der Körper des Eunuchen im Kontext spätantiker Medizin. Transformation und Semiotik des deformierten männlichen Körpers im Werk von al-JāªiÕ (gest. 869)’; ‘Der Eunuch als Rivale. Eine Überlegung zur Männlichkeit im Werk von al-GˇāªiÕ (gest. 869) im Kontext der Spätantike’. The publication of his PhD dissertation at the Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena on eunuchs and masculinities in the works of al-JāªiÕ is very much anticipated. 7. Although there is no direct indication apart from the chapter heading that this disquisition is not spoken by the Addressee, the presence of cross-references and various other conventional paratexts suggest that the Addressee’s words conclude at 1.102.6 and that the subsequent material is not to be read as part of his attack. Cross-references: 1.108.8–9; 1.114.4, 1.118.5; 1.151.9–10; 157.9– 10; 158.9–11; 1.172.1–2; 1.181.10–11; 1.190.10–11; paratexts: 1.118.6–8 (authorial justification); 1.166.13 (the ‘return’ topos, which signals that the excursus at 1.163.10–166.11 is conducted by al-JāªiÕ); 1.181.10–11 (authorial guidance); 1.190.4–6 (authorial guidance); 1.190.10–11 (authorial guidance). Some of the cross-references seem to be to the book as differently conceived and not as it exists at present: ‘the lecture on hair’ (bāb al-qawl fī al-shaʿar; 1.114.4); ‘discussion of methuselahs’ (dhikr al-muʿammarīn; 1.158.9–11); ‘we have already dealt with this topic in the section of the book in which we discuss being jealously possessive of one’s womenfolk (shaʾn al-ghayrah)’ (1.172.1–2).

522 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 8. This is well brought out by Pökel’s studies. On the rebuttal of the attack on the Prophet, see 1.165.13–14 and Cheikh-Moussa, ‘GˇāªiÕ et les eunuques’, pp. 185–7. The key section of verse Q.4: 119, the significance of which was disputed, is discussed at Óayawān 1.179.5–180.13. 9. The metre is munsariª. The construction with illā requires a suppressed negative to be supplied, such as fa-lam yalbath. 10. The metre is †awīl. 11. The metre is †awīl. I translate idhā fāraqa-hu al-jahlu as ‘trained well’. Professor van Gelder notes that ‘al-Zamakhsharī in his al-Mustaq‚ā (section S-M) gives what I think is probably a better reading: idhā fāraqa-hū al-hazlū, as soon as emaciation has left him’. 12. The metre is †awīl. 13. The metre is †awīl. 14. The metre is †awīl. 15. Q. Maʿārij 70: 24–5. 16. I have tried to capture the slight regional difference in the words qumrī and shifnīn, which, according to F. Viré, ‘Óamām’, EI2, III, pp. 108–10 (p. 108), are terms for the turtle dove in Egypt and Iraq, respectively. 17. The verse by the rajaz poet al-Óimmānī is quoted earlier by al-JāªiÕ (and not the Addressee) at 1.110.5–13 (where an explanation is provided) and again at 3.149.2–4. Two further verses by al-Óimmānī are quoted in the work: on ungulates and padded animals (2.282.1–3) and possibly frogs (5.534.8–535.1). 18. The metre is rajaz trimeter. 19. I read sabīl for sahl. 20. The root ʿ-q-q, which I have rendered, on the suggestion of Dr Miller, with ‘less nurturing’, refers to disobedient and undutiful treatment of one’s family, one’s parents in particular. Professor van Gelder renders: ‘being a worse parent than the lizard’. This maxim leads the Addressee to consider the question of caring for one’s young. 21. See further Óayawān 6.49.3–8, where these three verses are quoted in the chapter on the lizard. The metre of these two verses and of the one following is wāfir. The poet of these lines is also given as Ar†āh b. Suhayya in other sources. 22. The metre is sarīʿ. 23. With the word ‘she’ I have tried to capture the metonymical aspect of the Arabic verse which does not specify which kind of animal is intended. 24. For this use of qāla, see the Appendix, pp. 452 and 532, note 24. 25. The metre is †awīl.

notes | 523 26. The metre is †awīl. Umm ʿĀmir is a name for the female hyena. 27. Aws is a proper name given to the wolf. Uways is its diminutive. 28. The poet is apparently the Umayyad Asmāʾ b. Khārija al-Fazārī who died in 66/686 or 82/701: Sezgin, GAS, II, p. 329. The metre is kāmil. 29. The poet is the pre-Islamic ʿAmr b. ʿAjlān Dhū al-Kalb: Sezgin, GAS, II, p. 254. 30. The metre is rajaz. 31. The metre is kāmil. The phrase ‘give generously’ (in Arabic yuªsinu awsa-hum) exemplifies the Addressee’s gloss that aws means ‘giving’. 32. The metre is mutaqārib. 33. I would like to thank Professor van Gelder for help with this line. He proposes the reading wa-sūdin for Hārūn’s wa-sawdin. 34. The metre is †awīl. By Nabateans the Aramaic-speaking agriculturalists of Iraq are presumably meant. 35. The metre is wāfir. 36. I do not accept Hārūn’s addition of fa-in, so if. 37. My translation of diyāna is conjectural. Professor Toorawa suggests that perhaps the reading is ‚iyāna. On the adoration which victory in dialectical encounters could bring the dialectician: Ibn Qutayba, Taʾwīl Mukhtalif al-Óadīth, 25.8 (†alab al-riyāsa wa-ªubb al-atbāʿ wa-’ʿtiqād al-ikhwān bi-al-maqālāt); Ibn Qutayba/Lecomte, Le traité, pp. 15–16, §23; Geries, Un genre littéraire, p. 11. 38. The word khashāsh describes small birds not equipped with a means of defence: Óayawān 1.28.6–7. In al-JāªiÕ’s usage, the term hamaj properly denotes any small flying insect (1.28.8–9) and ªashara any small creature which slides or creeps or crawls on the ground, especially insects, rats and reptiles: 1.28.8–10. See Eisenstein, Einführung, pp. 190–1. 39. This debate involved scrutinising and determining the range of beliefs and positions which would involve their proponent in calling God just or unjust: see al-Radd ʿalā al-Mushabbiha Rasāʾil 4.5.6–6.5. The list of Kalām topics is reiterated at 1.218.3–5, though the constituents are not identical. They are the principal intellectual obsessions of the Muʿtazila of al-JāªiÕ’s day. 40. Dr Miller referred me to Óayawān 1.306.13–14 where al-JāªiÕ mentions a book he composed on The Name and the Determining Characteristic, Kitāb al-Ism wa-al-Óukm. The context is the referential range of names and nouns and etymologies. The topic seems to belong to legal debates about language and predication. See further al-JāªiÕ’s arguments in this section about naming: Óayawān 1.211.7–215.12, §6.

524 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 41. The phrase is al-akhwaf fa-al-akhwaf, literally the most terrifying and then the next most terrifying. This paragraph picks up comments made by the Addressee at Óayawān 1.3.10–14 and 1.102.7–106.2. 42. This paragraph resumes comments made at Óayawān 1.25.1–8. 43. The metre of both these half verses is †awīl. 44. The last sentence seems to contradict the point the Addressee has just made in this paragraph, ‘depending on the power of the hereditary trait (ʿirq) in his body’. I wonder if we should read idhā, if, for idh, since. 45. By this rather obscure phrase al-JāªiÕ seems to refer to one of his regular opponents, the Óashwīya, the specialists in the transmission of the Óadīth who ‘stuff’ their heads with indiscriminate information and deny any role for individual judgement. The point seems to be that the Addressee has been over-literal in his response to the debate. He has failed to appreciate its majāz. 46. I presume that ‘mixed’ wisdom is not pure, unadulterated, wisdom and so is inferior. 47. See Geries, Un genre littéraire, pp. 48–54 on this and the following paragraphs; Pellat, Life and Works, pp. 136–7 for a translation of this paragraph. 48. See Geries, Un genre littéraire, p. 50. The phrase is found in the Óadīth collections of Muslim, Ibn Óanbal and al-Dārimī. 49. If I have understood this correctly, al-JāªiÕ means that the maʿnā, the entitative accident, of rūª, spirit/pneuma, is thought. 50. As so often in sequences of opposites of this sort, al-JāªiÕ interrupts the rhythm with a doublet (of two similar things) rather than a contrast (of two dissimilar things). 51. On the use of the terms jamīʿ and kull to imply finitude in this context, see al-Ashʿarī’s accounts of the positions held by Abū al-Hudhayl and al-NaÕÕām, and the modifications of their views, on whether God’s bounty is limited or limitless: Abū al-Hudhayl: Maqālāt, 249.14–15, 576.11–577.6; 578.4–8 (a modified view); al-NaÕÕām: Maqālāt 576.5–10; cf. 250.1–2; Frank, The Metaphysics, pp. 25–6; Daiber, Das theologisch-philosophische System des Muʿammar, pp. 253–76 on the debate concerning theodicy among the early Muʿtazila; Ormsby, Theodicy, pp. 241–2; van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, III, p. 125 (Bishr); pp. 277–9 (Abū al-Óudhayl); pp. 405–6 (al-NaÕÕām). Al-JāªiÕ’s point appears to be simply that the benefits created by God in this world constitute a totality and so are limited insofar as they exist in this world. I would like to acknowledge Dr Miller’s help with my thinking on this point. 52. Or ‘atoms’.

notes | 525 53. I am unsure of the meaning of this phrase. I think it recaps the point about the totality being the sum of its parts, a sort of inversion of the soritic paradox. Professor van Gelder suggests ‘the same is the case with things connected by implication and conditioned causes’ and glosses: ‘apparently a contrast is made between the previous example, a “body” (juththa) consisting of parts, all of them being essential, and larger constellations, such as the whole world and the things in it, mountains and pebbles, peacocks and swine, as well as nonconcrete things that are connected, such as cause and effect, or condition and implication.’ 54. Geries, Un genre littéraire, p. 48, offers a different interpretation of this sentence. 55. I am not sure of the point of the proverbial opposition between dates and coals. Professor van Gelder refers me to al-Aw†ān wa-al-Buldān Rasāʾil 4.133.6–7, mā yaʿrifu al-jamra min al-tamra, he doesn’t know the difference between dates and coals. 56. Cf. Óayawān 3.299.1–304.7. 57. Professor van Gelder remarks: ‘Although angels of various kinds and ranks are charged with running the affairs of the universe, no specific “angel of clouds” is known. A kind of word-play may be involved: saªāb is closely connected with the concepts of rain and vegetation, both conveyed by the word ªayā, which follows (note that the edition has ªayāʾ, with hamz, which is possible but uncommon). Óayā is of course closely connected with ªayāh, the opposite of mawt, which turns the “angel of death” and the “angel of clouds” into opposites of some kind.’ On Michael and Gabriel he observes: ‘Why the archangel Jibrīl, God’s messenger angel, is associated with punishment is not immediately clear. One would have expected him, rather than Mīkāʾīl, to be the bringer of “mercy”, for the Qur’an is called raªma. But the root JBR implies force, and in Jewish lore Gabriel is associated with divine punishment. Mīkāʾīl, protector of mankind in Jewish and Christian tradition, is in Islam said to provide people’s livelihood (arzāq), and charged with giving wisdom and knowledge; therefore the association with “mercy” is not illogical.’ See further Geries, Un genre littéraire, p. 47; Ormsby, Theodicy, pp. 223–5. Note Ormsby’s reading that al-JāªiÕ espouses the fundamental goodness of everything on earth. For al-JāªiÕ, everything is fundamentally good qua sign, i.e. semiotically, and not qua object, i.e. ontologically. There are things which may for example be painful or bad ontologically but become epistemologically and thus morally good because they allow us to develop the reasoning abilities needed to fulfil our duty of taklīf.

526 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s 58. I read this as a reference to the disagreements about how to categorise wrongdoing and sin and how to assess the degree of wrongness in a given action. Dr Miller suggests that what al-JāªiÕ means here is that everyone agrees on ma‚laªa in general but that disagreement arises when we try to figure out in specific cases who deserves more reward than whom. 59. This last category designates people who have not received Revelation. Geries, Un genre littéraire, p. 47, does not translate the term tafa∂∂ul. The controversy which al-JāªiÕ alludes to here is that which al-Ashʿarī describes in two accounts of the positions of Bishr b. al-Muʿtamir and Jaʿfar b. al-Óarb: Maqālāt 246.3– 247.2 and 573.9–574.3. In other words this was a debate about desert, about meriting the Reward if someone were to be given a faith by God which he did not previously possess. In the positions of Abū al-Hudhayl and al-NaÕÕām, tafa∂∂ul is a quasi-technical term for God’s gracious intervention to bestow belief. Al-NaÕÕām’s position is set out by al-JāªiÕ, Óayawān 3.394.6–395.3 (where our passage is rephrased in a manner which is easier to comprehend: note the repetition of tafa∂∂ul, gracious intervention by God in favour of men ignorant of His Revelation and of animals) (translated by van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, VI, p. 155, §200); Abū al-Hudhayl’s position: Maqālāt 266.13–267.17 (note how tafa∂∂ul is contrasted with istiªqāq at 267.14). This controversial context is further suggested by the echoes of the theories of Abū al-Hudhayl and al-NaÕÕām on whether God’s bounty is limited or limitless which I detect in §4.5 above. 60. See Geries, Un genre littéraire, p. 39. 61. Q. Tīn 95: 1. 62. I read taʾwīl bi-al-ʿitra arghabu ʿan-hu wa-dhikri-hi. 63. Of course al-JāªiÕ does not tell us how we are to interpret this verse. 64. Óayawān 5.200.9–13: ‘Even if man achieves perfection and is renowned for his acumen, even if he leaves all the other scholars floundering, his perfection will not be such that he could fully comprehend everything contained in the wing of a mosquito, for as long as the world continues, even if he were to be replenished by the power of every speculative genius (naÕÕār ªakīm) and had at his disposal the excellent memory of every researcher, of every inquirer throughout the lands, and of every bookworm (darrāsa li-al-kutub)’; see Khalidi, ‘A mosquito’s wing’. 65. By ‘tests’ al-JāªiÕ means the demands these things make of us in working out and appreciating God’s design in the creation of the dog and the rooster. 66. Q. Luqmān 31: 27. See Khalidi, ‘A mosquito’s wing’, p. 144.

notes | 527 67. The term tamthīl is difficult to translate succinctly. Firstly, an example is made of the objects compared and debated. Secondly, the debate is exemplary because it is not just about the worth of the objects debated but will also have an ulterior topic such as human responsibility. Thirdly, the objects are compared in a paradigmatic manner, which is intended to act as an example for others to follow in their approach to speculation. Fourthly, the whole exercise is done in public and so is staged. 68. This echoes the comments made by the Addressee at Óayawān 1.105.1–4. 69. The comparison of a man to a snake is positive. It signals that he is clever and strong. 70. I read min for ilā. 71. Professor van Gelder identifies the qaranbā as the ‘Cerambyx cerdo, a kind of longhorn beetle, of the family of the Cerambycidae; or perhaps a ground beetle, family Carabidae’. 72. For a translation of the whole poem, see al-Mufa∂∂al, The Mufa∂∂alīyāt, poem 72. The metre is kāmil. 73. Professor van Gelder proposes: ‘This is not something where we are allowed to use analogy.’ 74. Q. Luqmān 31: 20. 75. I did not know what this means. I thought al-JāªiÕ was creating an opposition between what he and his colleagues have concluded and what others (‘they’) have concluded. Professor van Gelder however notes that ‘the opposition, or contrast, is not between wajadnā and wajadū but between la-hū and fī-hi, one referring to man (who possesses the five senses) and the other to the universe (which contains the five corresponding sensibilia).’ The point about the macrocosm and its pertinence to the argument is elucidated by Miller, ‘More than the sum’. 76. The ‚ifrid is renowned for its timidity. I take the translation ‘corncrake’ from F. Viré, ‘Salwā’, EI2, VIII, pp. 1006–7. 77. I take al-JāªiÕ to be making two separate points here. The first is that even if a man were to combine all the features that define a bull camel, it would not actually make him one; and the second, that a comparison with an object such as the wolf does not necessarily mean that the man so compared will have all of the defining features of a wolf. 78. My translation is conjectural. Pellat, Life and Works, p. 137: ‘his four cardinal humours thus correspond to the four elements’. For this use of awtād, literally ‘tent-pegs’, see al-Khwārizmī, Mafātīª al-ʿUlūm, 132.13–14

528 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s (al-awtād al-arbaʿa). I would like to thank Dr Sánchez for this reference. Professor van Gelder notes that the awtād are ‘in astronomical and astrological terminology, the four pivotal points of the course of the sun or any of the zodiacal signs, being the points where they rise or set and the highest and lowest points, corresponding to ascendant, descendant, exaltation, and dejection, respectively.’ 79. At first sight fikra and imhāl do not seem to be natural antonyms. I think the point is between being able to think one’s way through to a conclusion and then acting appropriately and putting off applying one’s mind to something. As Professor van Gelder pointed out, Pellat, Life and Works, pp. 137–8, seems to read ihmāl, inattention. 80. The characteristics enumerated in this vertiginous list, some of which are emotions, some states of mind, some actions, are technically, in JāªiÕian anthropology, ‘natures’ which, once initiated or set in motion, entail a certain set of behavioural responses. We might say they are tantamount to ‘performances’ which demand certain, predetermined outcomes. For a translation of 1.212.11–214.16, see Pellat, Life and Works, pp. 137–8. 81. See Óayawān 1.192.7–12, especially the phrase ªāris muªtaras min-hu at p. 1.192.9, §1.2. 82. I would like to thank Professor van Gelder for his help with this line. 83. The metre of the three verses is †awīl. The 1969 third edition of the text has a misprint: it gives al-Ghulāfis for al-Fulāfis in the verse. 84. A proverbial Óadīth. 85. A recapitulation of 1.200.5–19. 86. I have disregarded Hārūn’s addition of bi-himā after shaghalat-nā. 87. See Óayawān 1.293.5–16 (kalb zarʿ), 294.10 (kalb ghanam and kalb zarʿ) and 295.5 (laysa bi-kalb zarʿ wa-lā ∂arʿ). My thanks go to Dr Miller for explaining this legal point to me. 88. A recapitulation (and abbreviation) of 1.200.13–19. Again, these are the mainstays of Muʿtazilism. 89. Al-JāªiÕ seems to mean not only the basic, primary, condition (a‚l ) of any of these human beings, but also the actions and behaviour they develop out of it (farʿ). 90. This reiterates but does not reduplicate a series of comments made at 1.173.14–174.14. 91. In a private communication Dr Miller has noted that al-Khayyā† uses this idea obsessively throughout his Kitāb al-Inti‚ār, claiming that Ibn al-Rāwandī’s

notes | 529 complaints about the Muʿtazilīs were really accurate descriptions of Ibn al-Rāwandī’s own heretical beliefs. She suggests that it was possibly a common accusation within debate – to show through ilzām that the opponent’s accusations applied most accurately to the opponent. 92. I am grateful to Dr Sánchez for this rendering of ªisba. 93. By banawī is meant a member of the Abnāʾ al-Dawla, the ʿAbbasids of Khurasan and their Arab clients who helped the ʿAbbasids come to power. It may also include the second wave of Abnāʾ who fought with al-Maʾmūn against al-Amīn and who left Merv with him for Baghdad in 202/818. 94. The dihqāns were a class of landed magnates under the Sasanians, many of whom continued to control their estates under the ʿAbbasids: Aªmad Tafażżolī, ‘Dehqan’, EIr, VII, pp. 223–225. On ‘cooked’ alcohol (any alcoholic beverage which has been boiled to remove the alcohol), see Kueny, The Rhetoric of Sobriety, p. 59; Montgomery, ‘Abū Nuwās’, pp. 120, n. 131, 153, n. 241, and 154, n. 242. 95. This is, al-JāªiÕ opines, because the eunuch will have been castrated by the Byzantines: see 1.124.3–125.7 for castration among the Byzantines; Pellat, ‘Khā‚ī’, EI2, IV, pp. 1091, on eunuchs at Tarsus; Ayalon, Eunuchs, pp. 104– 27. 96. I read with Hārūn’s MS Lām ta‚awwafa for ta†arrafa, which I cannot make much sense of. Professor van Gelder suggests ta†arrafa may mean ‘to go to extremes, or to go to remote regions, or to move on the edges (of society)’. 97. The root l-w-m is often used for reprehending conduct which is ungracious or lacking in generosity. It is thus often, as here, the antonym of shukr, thanks and gratefulness due in response to a benefaction. 98. Al-JāªiÕ means those activities at 1.221.5–8 which involve sight and hearing and so on. God has created us with these faculties and so their use cannot be such as to merit recompense. They do not constitute isti†āʿa, the power of independent and autonomous action. 99. These epistles are: Rasāʾil 4.5–16; 3.285–300; 4.243–250; 3.303–351, respectively. I refer the reader to my forthcoming edition and translation of these works for the Library of Arabic Literature. See also Daiber, ‘Masāʾil waAdjwiba’, EI2, VI, pp. 636–9. Notes to Postface 1. See above, pp. 319–32.

530 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Notes to Appendix 1. See Montgomery, ‘Why al-JāªiÕ Needs Slonimsky’s Earbox’. 2. I have adapted the method for analysing the pre-Islamic qa‚īda which I applied in ‘Dichotomy in Jāhilī poetry’. 3. See al-Kindī, Risāla fī Kammīyat Kutub Aris†ū†ālīs AR 1.376.14–377.2, al-ªayawān ghayr al-nā†iq; compare this list with Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of a similar list in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel: Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 71. 4. Geries, ‘Quelques aspects’, p. 88 makes what I think is a weak case for arguing that al-JāªiÕ is at variance with the Qurʾān on this point. 5. See the discussion of this in Geries, ‘Quelques aspects’, pp. 72–3. Aarab et al., ‘Eco-ethological data’, discuss some of al-JāªiÕ’s accounts of zoological ecology and ethology (such as ‘biodiversity’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘hibernation’) which I think he would have argued were examples of this kind of wisdom. 6. In the conclusion of this argument, I discern a reference back to 1.25.12 and the phrase jumlat al-madhāhib: it behoves us, I take al-JāªiÕ to be saying, to study all of the ways men live their lives and all of the accounts which they give in support of those lifestyles. Note also the non-restricted use of tawaqquf at 1.37.6, used at 1.25.14 in its technical Kalām sense. The Qurʾanic quotation is used, as so often in al-JāªiÕ’s compositions, as a capping device to bring this stage of the argument to a close. 7. A translation is offered by Miller, ‘More than the sum’, pp. 368–79. A convenient way of appreciating its distinctiveness is to compare it, for example, with the classifications of the natural world in early modern England, as presented by Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 51–91. 8. Contrary to how it is understood by Enderwitz, ‘Culture, history and religion’ (an important article which discerns the influence in the ‘Introduction’ of the notion of the ‘Great Chain of Being’). 9. Souami, ‘Présentation’, in Le cadi, pp. 33–5; cf. the exposition of Geries, Un genre littéraire, pp. 36–8; according to Pellat, ‘Óayawān’, EI2, III, p. 312, al-JāªiÕ ‘has to give up the attempt to adopt too rigid subdivisions’ because he cannot progress from the particular to the general in ‘defining the fundamental attributes of the species and the genera’; cf. the early modern British (Christian) views discussed in Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 143–91, especially pp. 165–72, which I found very instructive to compare with al-JāªiÕ’s vision. Miller, ‘More than the sum’, views al-JāªiÕ’s unwillingness to articulate

notes | 531 a complete taxonomy as indicative of his position that logical categories based upon the ideas of Aristotle and Porphyry were unable adequately to account for material existence. 10. See Günther, ‘Advice for teachers’ and ‘Al-JāªiÕ and the Poetics of Teaching’. 11. I offer a translation of this passage in Part 1, pp. 42–3. 12. This section is introduced with the paratext wa-baʿd: 1.39.13. 13. Note the use of the strong paratexts at 1.42.18, thumma ’ʿlam and raªima-ka Allāh taʿālā, the wish for the Addressee’s well-being expressed in a conventional phrase used to commend someone to God upon their death. See further the discussion in Chapter 4.3, ‘The Enigma of the Addressee’. 14. See the study by Cook, ‘The opponents of the writing of tradition’, and Schoeler, The Oral and the Written, pp. 111–41. 15. Al-JāªiÕ subscribed to a theory of vision which interpreted its maximal effectiveness as occurring when objects were viewed on the same plane as and in a straight line with the viewer: see the passage in al-Jidd wa-al-Hazl, KrausÓājirī 74.16–75.1; cf. Adamson, Al-Kindī, pp. 166–72. 16. I read the text of Óayawān 1.49.1 as fa-al-qalam (for Hārūn’s al-lisān) al-ān inna-mā huwa fī manāfiʿ al-yad. The Ambrosian MS reads fa-al-shaʾn: see Hārūn, p. 395. 17. See the arguments of Webb, ‘“Foreign Books” in Arabic Literature’. 18. In the absence of a speech marker at 1.55.2, I understand the paragraph which Hārūn’s edition has set apart from the previous conversation between al-ʿUtbī and Ibn al-Jahm, and to which a sub-title has been added, to be a continuation of Ibn al-Jahm’s remarks on the importance of books. 19. Yūnus’s description of ʿilm became popular maxim: see Rosenthal, Knowledge, p. 249 and note 4, for its occurrence in Ibn Qutayba’s ʿUyūn al-Akhbār and al-Mubashshir’s Mukhtār al-Óikam. 20. See Montgomery, ‘GˇāªiÕ and Hellenizing philosophy’, pp. 448–9, note 17; Baalbaki, ‘The place of al-JāªiÕ’, pp. 106–7 and notes 67–8, for al-JāªiÕ’s interest in phonetics (which Baalbaki, p. 107, establishes as being for him the ‘first element of kalām’) and his note that the term taq†īʿ was taken up by the Ikhwān al-Íafāʾ. His translation of ‚ūra on p. 99 as ‘nature’ is slightly inaccurate, since sounds have forms because they are corporeals. 21. Hoyland, ‘History, fiction and authorship’, is an excellent survey of the issues involved in assessing the reports transmitted by scholars such as al-Haytham b. ʿAdī. The methods of al-Haytham and similar Akhbārīs have been extensively studied by Stefan Leder: Der Corpus al-Hait- am ibn ʿAdī. See also his

532 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s ‘Authorship and transmission’; ‘Features of the novel’; ‘The literary use of the khabar’; ‘The use of composite form’. 22. This is what Agha, ‘Language as a component of Arab identity’, p. 70, terms the ‘discourse master’. 23. The 1907–9 edition reads: kayfa kana dhālika qāla al-haytham wa-’bn al-kalbī wa-abū ʿubayda (p. 36.12–13). See further the collation by Hārūn with the Ambrosian MS on p. 400 of volume 1. 24. See Montgomery, ‘Speech and nature, Part 2’, pp. 7–8 (§22), for this use of qāla as the equivalent of a full stop. Souami, Le cadi, p. 186, takes the subject of qāla at 1.72.8 to be Ibn al-Kalbī. 25. This is an anticipation of the Greek views on inheritance at 1.98.17–102.14; see also 1.75.15. 26. I follow Heinrichs in my understanding of badīʿ here: ‘Istiʿārah and badīʿ’, p. 195. 27. In the first printing Hārūn reads kitāba, ‘writing’, as does al-Sāsī’s 1907–9 ­edition (p. 39.13). Some scholars prefer al-kihānah. 28. The Apologist seems to describe the collaborative technique of translation typical of Óunayn b. Isªāq and his school. 29. Badawi, La transmission de la philosophie grecque, pp. 21–5; Pellat, The Life and Works, p. 133; Jackson, ‘Al-Jahiz on translation’; Salama-Carr, ‘Translation as seen by al-JāªiÕ and Óunayn ibn Isªāq’; Cassarino, ‘Traduire sans trahir’. See Bray, ‘Lists and memory’, p. 229, note 26, for Ibn Qutayba’s views on the untranslatability of the Qurʾān compared to the Bible and Torah: the majāz, which is the defining feature of the Qurʾān as opposed to other scriptures, defies translation. 30. Compare this inventory of Kalām subjects with that given at 1.200.13–17: tawªīd, al-taʿdīl wa-al-tajwīr, al-waʿd wa-al-waʿīd, al-qiyās wa-al-ªukm fī al-ism, al-radd ʿalā ahl al-milal wa-al-muwāzana bayna jamīʿ al-niªal, al-naÕar fī marāshid al-nās wa-ma‚āliªi-him wa-fī manāfiʿi-him wa-marāfiqi-him; and 1.218.3–5: tawªīd, nafy al-tashbīh, al-waʿd wa-al-waʿīd, al-taʿdīl wa-al-tajwīr, ta‚ªīª al-akhbār, al-taf∂īl bayna ʿilm al-†abāʾiʿ wa-al-ikhtiyār; Part 6, §2 and §12, pp. 400–1 and 413. 31. Cf. the arguments attributed to Meno concerning knowledge as either innate or the product of happenstance in al-Fārābī’s Falsafat Aflā†un, Rosenthal and Walzer 5.9–6.2, §5. 32. Three terms for ‘author’ are used in this passage: ‚āªib al-kitāb (1.85.6); muʾallif (1.85.6); wā∂iʿ al-kitāb (1.85.9).

notes | 533 33. Khalidi, ‘A mosquito’s wing’; Montgomery, ‘Serendipity’, p. 188. 34. This suggests that his cultural move may not perhaps be as unusual as Bray, ‘Lists and memory’, pp. 214–21 and 225–6, considers it. 35. ʿUthmānīya 154.4–7. I have tried to do justice to both of the sense of the epithet ʿadl which I discern in this use: a witness whose testimony is reliable; and a midway point equidistant between two opposites or extremes. I am grateful to Dr Sánchez for bringing this passage to my attention. 36. Madelung, ‘Early Sunnī doctrine’, p. 241, note 1, comments that Abū ʿUbayd’s use of the word fuqahāʾ must refer to the scholars whom the later texts identify as muªaddithūn. 37. Touati, ‘La dédicace’, p. 340 detects heavy irony and satire on al-JāªiÕ’s part here. He reads this passage as an attack on the practice of social networking and preferment exerted by Abū Óanīfa and his protégés. Ibn Qutayba, Adab al-Kātib, Grünert 11.1–12.5; al-Dālī 13.6–14.4, argues that a basic knowledge of the key points of the law and knowledge of its basic principles will exonerate the bureaucrat of ‘much of the long-windedness of the jurists’ (i†ālat al-fuqahāʾ). 38. See the translation of this passage in Chapter 5.4, pp. 365–70. At 1.59.2–60.6 a poem of Ibn Yasīr al-Riyāshī is criticised by al-NaÕÕām. 39. Silverstein, Postal Systems, pp. 113–14 (on homing pigeons); Lassner, Demonizing the Queen of Sheba; Lecker, ‘The preservation of Muªammad’s letters’. 40. In other words they thought that money would stultify those who inherited it without earning it. 41. In his criticism of al-Riyāshī’s poem, at 1.59.2–60.6, al-NaÕÕām denies this as an attribute of books.

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Index

Note: Arabic words are listed according to the English alphabet. Titles of works are listed in Arabic and English and are cross-referenced to their English equivalents when these have been given in the text. The letter n following a page number indicates an endnote. Aaron, 289 ʿAbbād b. Sulaymān, 325, 326 al-ʿAbbās, 139 al-ʿAbbās b. al-Fa∂l b. al-Rabīʿ, 248 ʿAbbasids caliphate, 139 ‘knowledge revolution’, 4–5 legitimacy, 134, 149 music, 350 self-chronicling, 48–9 society, 258–9 The Treatise of the ʿAbbāsīya (Fī [Masāʾil] al-ʿAbbāsīya) and, 118 ʿAbd al-Amīr, Yaªyā, 16 ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Qā∂ī, 514n83 ʿAbd al-Malik, Caliph, 338 ʿAbd al-Raªmān b. al-Mahdī, 243 ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUmar b. al-Kha††āb, 448 ʿAbd Shams, 148 Abraham (Ibrāhīm), 289, 464 Abū ʿAbdān, 337 Abū al-Akhzar al-Óimmānī, 397 Abū al-Farāj b. Najāª al-Kātib, 210–11 Abū al-Óasan ʿUbayd Allāh b. Yaªyā b. Khāqān, 213 Abū al-Hudhayl, 308, 317, 358–9, 362, 516n110, 517n117, 529n59 Abū al-Mubārak, 46–9 Abū al-Shamaqmaq, 448 Abū al-Walīd Muªammad, 29, 30, 211 Abū Amr b. al-ʿAlāʾ, 447 Abū Bakr, 139 Abū Óanīfa, 166–7, 225, 232, 462, 463, 533n37 Abū Hāshim, 149 Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī, 514n83 Abū Hurayra al-Rāwandī, 139, 336 Abū Isªāq al-NaÕÕām, 111, 145, 146

Abū Maʿshar: The Great Introduction to the Science of the Rulings of the Stars (Kitāb al-Mudkhal al-Kabīr ilā Aªkām al-Nujum), 379 Abū Nūª b. al-Íalt al-Anbārī, 509n32 Abū Nuwās al-Óasan b. Hāniʾ, 124, 149, 248–9, 448 Abū Nuwayra b. al-Óusayn, 431 Abū Rāʾi†a al-Takrītī see Óabīb b. Khidma Abū Rāʾi†a al-Takrītī Abū Shamir, 123, 160 Abū Tammām, 231, 449 Abū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim b. Sallām, 41, 42, 101, 453–4 Abū ʿUbaydah, 452 Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baªr see al-JāªiÕ. Abū Wajza, 463 Abū Yaªyā Zakarīyā b. Yaªyā b. Sulaymān, 61, 101, 102 Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb: Book of the Land Tax, 100 Abuqrā† see Hippocrates ʿāda (plural ʿādāt), 112, 367, 456 adab (plural ādāb), 9, 121, 122, 127, 198, 258, 369, 401, 441, 455, 465, 466, 468, 489 Adamson, Peter, 14 and Pormann, Peter E.: The Philosophical Works of al-Kindī, 477n29 ʿādhil, 229 adīb, 218, 414, 466 ʿAdnānīs, 112 afterlife, 24 Agha, Saleh Said ‘Language as a component of Arab identity’, 133 The Revolution which Toppled the Umayyads, 133 Aªmad b. Óanbal, 24, 462 Aªmad b. Muªammad see Ibn alMudabbir Aªmad b. Na‚r al-Khuzāʿī, 24–5

571

Aªmad Ibn Abī Duʾād, 4, 24, 28, 29–30, 63, 137, 140, 150, 160, 198, 226–7, 229, 231, 233, 234, 238 al-JāªiÕ’s epistles to, 160, 198, 201–7, 207–11, 211–13, 232, 462 al-Aªnaf b. Qays, 432, 433 ʿĀʾisha, 399 aʿjam, 434, 437 ʿajz, 78, 126, 168, 245, 396 al-Akhfash al-Awsa†, 103, 368, 372–3 alchemy, 354 Alexander of Aphrodisias: On Providence, 293–4 ʿAlī b. Abī ˝ālib, 468 ʿAlī b. ʿUbayda see al-Rayªānī ʿAlī b. Yaªyā b. al-Munajjim, 184, 185 ʿālim (plural ʿulamāʾ ), 122, 199, 202, 204, 205, 206, 214, 259, 369, 370, 374, 461, 492n74 ʿAmallas b. ʿAqīl, 398–9 ʿāmma, 100, 286, 443, 445 ammā baʿd, 194, 490n47, 494n99, 497n121 ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī, 304, 308–10 The Book of the Proof of the Guiding of the Divine Economy, 308 Kitāb al-Burhān ʿalā Siyāsat alTadbīr al-Ilāhī, 508nn32, 36, 511n54; see also under The Book of the Proof of the Guiding of the Divine Economy The Pamphlet of Queries and Responses (Kitāb al-Masāʾil waal-Ajwiba), 308, 309 Ammonius, 302, 510n41 al-amr bi-al-maʿrūf wa-al-nahy ʿan al-munkar, 145 ʿAmr b. ʿAjlān Dhū al-Kalb, 523n29 ʿAmr b. ʿUbayd, 432, 433 Anas b. Mudrik, 431 angels, 134, 406

572 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s animals, 13–14, 56–7, 61–3, 66, 97, 129 behaviour, 260, 416, 451 branding, 451 carnivores, 67, 68, 90, 92, 125, 158, 159, 264, 394, 396, 409, 410, 418, 433, 441 characteristics, 405 herbivores, 67, 92, 125, 159, 264, 394, 396, 404, 409, 410, 418, 433, 441 hoofed, 97 and man compared, 436, 438 and reason, 146 sensory perception, 92, 97 as signs, 384–5 taxonomy, 158–9 wisdom, 159, 260 see also individual animals anthropocentrism, 261–2, 293, 317–18, 438 anthropomorphism, 28, 150 lutes and, 345, 346, 347–8, 349 al-Maʾmūn’s rejection of, 24 in the Qurʾān, 354 ants, 80, 81, 91, 97 anxiety, 448–9 apes, 411 aphorisms, 377, 380, 381–3 Apollonius of Tyana see Balīnūs ʿaqīda, 289 ʿāqil, 121, 250, 371, 448 ʿAqīl b. ʿUllafa, 398–9 ʿaql, 145, 157, 219, 320, 384, 417, 420, 435, 446, 492n69, 512n67 ʿarab, 369 ʿarabī, 117, 323 aʿrāb, 369 aʿrābī, 117, 482n43 Arabic language and Arab identity, 133 bayān theory, 442 in The Book of Living, 100, 158 divisions, 437 predictive and normative capacities, 284 punctuation, 11 in the Qurʾān, 323–4, 325 translation into, 186, 188, 189–90 ʿArabīya, 278, 319, 321, 322–4, 327, 364 definition of, 323 as design, 7 and gratitude, 331 Muʿtazila and, 326 otherness of, 331–2 and social mobility, 40–1 Arabs as doctors, 482n43 eloquence of, 327 and Persians, 165–6, 453 and the Qurʾān, 329 technical advances of, 457–8 wisdom of, 166 ʿara∂ (plural aʿrā∂), 197, 207, 258, 299, 341 ʿar∂, 252, 253

argument, 31, 257; see also debate ʿārīya, 262, 428 Aristotle The Arabic Aristotle (Plotinus), 347, 352 Arabic maxims, 241–2 in The Book of Paradigms, 301 encyclopaedism, 503n174 al-Fārābī on, 379 Islamic interpretation of, 442 Job of Edessa and, 307 al-Kindī on, 184, 347 life of, 191–2 al-Maʾmūn’s dream of, 27 and music, 350 writings: The Definition of Logic (Óadd al-Man†iq), 219; Historia Animalium, 13, 38, 57, 315; Metaphysics Lambda, 292, 517n119; Nicomachean Ethics, 148; On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology, Physics, 315; Organon, 377; Physics, 361–2; Sophistici Elenchi, 461 Aristoxenus, 345 arrogance, 78, 81 ʿa‚abīya, 112, 122, 133, 147, 459 asceticism, 336 al-Ashʿarī, 526n59 Book of Blinding Insights (Kitāb al-Lumaʿ), 269 The Doctrinal Positions of the Islamists, 34, 342–4 on gratitude, 320 Maqālāt al-Islāmiyīn wa-’khtilāf al-Mu‚allīn, 141, 471n19, 504nn1, 4, 512n60, 513n76, 520n3, 524n51, 526n59; see also under The Doctrinal Positions of the Islamists a‚l (plural u‚ūl), 203, 216, 330, 528n89 al-A‚maʿī, 126 asses, 397 astrology, 322–3 astronomy, 162, 442–3 ʿA†awī, Fawzī, 16 athar (plural āthār), 85, 202, 204, 211, 215, 216, 287, 369, 396, 456, 462, 491n61, 505n10 atheism, 277 atomism, 339–44, 358–9, 360, 517n116 al-ʿAttābī, 155 authors, 45, 257, 463, 518n136; see also writers autonomy, 59 Avicenna see Ibn Sīnā aʿwān, 122, 140, 225 ʿAwf b. al-Aªwa‚, 394 ʿAwf b. al-Khariʿ, 431 ʿawī‚, 368, 517n127 awlīyāʾ see walī āya (plural āyāt), 261, 263, 289, 299, 435 ʿayb (plural ʿuyūb), 50, 122, 125, 126, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245, 254, 329, 355, 365, 432, 499n139, 140, 500n153

ʿayn (plural aʿyān), 127, 281, 282, 366, 371, 440 Ayyūb al-Ruhāwī, 187, 189, 304; see also Job of Edessa Azāriqa, 118, 138 Baalbaki, Ramzi: ‘The place of al-JāªiÕ in the Arabic philological tradition’, 442, 531n20 bāb (plural abwāb) 47, 48, 64, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 117, 124, 125, 169, 185, 187, 197, 198, 207, 357, 367, 378, 403, 474n7, 493n82, 497n122, 521n7 badīʿ, 226, 264, 330, 360, 456, 496n108, 532n26 Baghdad, 45 bahāʾim, 125, 433 Bahmān, Hudā Shawkat: ‘AlMawrūth al-jāªiÕī makh†ū†an wa-ma†būʿan’, 508n28 al-Bahrānī, 88, 94, 97 Baªya ibn Paqūdā, 300 Bakr b. al-Ashʿar, 336 balāgha, 187, 327, 514n83 Balīnūs (attrib.): The Book of the Secret of Creation and the Artisanship of Nature (The Book of Causes), (Kitāb Sirr al-Khalīqa wa-Íanʿat al-˝abīʿa ([Kitāb al-ʿIlal]), 296–7 bamm, 346, 347, 349 Banū Mūsā, 189 barāʾa, 415 bāriʾ, 353, 356 Barmecids, 458 Barnes, Jonathan: ‘The beliefs of a Pyrrhonist’, 471n18 Barthes, Roland: Michelet, 60 Bashshār b. Burd, 324 Basil of Caesarea, 520n3 Basra, 138, 259 School of the Muʿtazila, 59, 217 ba†āla, 123, 261 Ba†lyamūs see Ptolemy bā†il, 111, 195 bats, 80, 396 bayān, 66, 159, 162, 163, 202, 205, 212, 217, 250, 292, 322, 371–2, 435–6, 438, 441, 442–3, 445, 453, 483n72, 505n15 Bedouin, 124, 140, 149, 366, 367, 369, 372, 431, 453, 458, 482n43 bees, 85, 97 beetles, 79, 80, 97 benefaction, 319, 529n97; see also patrons Bennison, Amira: The Great Caliphs, 17 Berio, Luciano, 270 Berkel, Maiake van: ‘The attitude towards knowledge’, 475n22

i ndex | 573 Bernards, Monique and Nawas, John (eds.): Patronate and Patronage in Early Islam, 133 Bible, 503n171 bibliography, 179 bibliomania, 45, 427 bibliophilia, 43–4, 45, 160, 161 al-JāªiÕ, 5, 43, 45, 124, 205, 209, 427 Biesterfeldt, Heinrich, 381 biographies alphabetical arrangement of, 72 and bibliography, 179–92; Aristotle, 191–2; al-Bīrūnī, 179–83; Óunayn b. Isªāq, 183–91 birds, 77, 405, 159, 396, 400, 405; see also individual birds al-Bīrūnī Fihrist Kutub Muªammad b. Zakarīyā al-Rāzī, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 485n7, 486nn9, 14, 488n34, 508n32; see also under An Index of the Books of Muªammad b. Zakarīyā al-Rāzī An Index of the Books of Muªammad b. Zakarīyā alRāzī, 179–83 The India, 71, 242 Kitāb al-Āthār al-Bāqiya ʿan alQurūn al-Khāliya, 508n32 Kitāb al-Jawāhir see under The Treatise of Precious Stones Kitāb mā li-al-Hind min maʿqūla maqbūla aw mardhūla, 476n23; see also under The India on knowledge, 362–3 ‘Manual of Composition’, 183 The Treatise of Precious Stones, 259 al-Bishr, Battle of, 432 Bishr b. Abī Khāzim, 241 Bishr b. al-Muʿtamir, 33, 370, 529n59 al-Bi†rīq, 382 al-Bizri, Nader: ‘God: essence and attributes’, 513n77 Blair, Ann, 476n22 blame, 156, 242 blemishes, 239–47 The Book of Paradigms (Kitāb al-ʿIbar wa-al-Iʿtibār), 300–2, 303 The Book of Living (Kitāb alÓayawān), 5–8, 6, 7, 49, 67, 94, 423 accessibility, 72, 364 Addressee, 42–3, 58, 64, 93, 100, 102, 107, 109, 129, 130, 138, 140, 144, 145, 146–7, 148–9, 149–50, 151–2, 153–6, 157, 160, 167–9, 170, 192, 222, 224–38, 239, 253–4, 255, 391, 392, 393, 418–19, 419–20, 421–2, 477n39; identity of, 177, 228, 449–50 anthologies of, 16 appeal of, 152, 315–16 argumentation in, 12, 108, 109–10, 144–71 audience of, 56, 156, 227, 277

authorial directions in, 73 authorship of, 152 bibliography of, 15–17 as a book, 40, 70, 100, 101–2 categorisation of, 158–61, 437 compilation of, 134 copying of, 101 and creation, 386–7 criticisms of, 6–7, 107, 109, 111–16, 123–4, 146–7, 153, 169, 244 cross-references in, 73, 78, 79, 80, 86, 87, 92, 476n29 date of, 236–7 and debate, 56, 157; Apologist of Poetry and the Apologist of Books debate, 253, 452–9; Dog and Rooster debate 143, 146, 246, 251, 303, 391, 408, 412, 418–20 dedication of, 102, 237 defence of, 151–4 descriptions of, 60–3 dictation of, 62–3, 73 dissemination of, 71, 74, 95, 234   as an encyclopaedia, 266,   270–1, 272–3 and epistolography, 100 Graeco-Arabic heritage of, 381, 382–3 as a gramma, 103 compared with Óadīth, 99–100 compared with Hippocratic method, 384 Ibn al-Nadīm’s version of, 95–6 incompleteness of, 101–2 ‘Introduction’, 107–43, 163–4, 221–3, 391, 392–3; Apologist of Poetry and the Apologist of Books debate, 253, 452–9; argument with Addressee, 144–71, 394–422; use of ʿayb lexeme, 245; date of, 151, 237; enigma of, 238; God’s disposition of human society, 161–2; the importance of the book for social cohesion, 166–7; intercategorical phenomena, 437; Al-JāªiÕ and the Chief Judge, 211–13; khu†bas, 216–17, 222, 223; muʿāra∂a, 253–4; muqaddimas, 213–16, 223; the paean of books, 161, 162, 166–7, 439–40; reason for writing, 224; as a reproach, 247, 250, 252; risāla and kitāb, 193–201; the social and intellectual benefits of writing, 164–6; structure, 421; transition, 141; uniqueness, 221 language of, 58, 158 length of, 371, 374–5 ‘Manual of Composition’, 365–75, 484n82 message of, 278 metaphor in, 73, 481n34, 482n42 moral agency of, 129 mufākhara, 131

organisation of, 66, 70–97, 98 as a palliative work, 265 paratexts, 73–102 poems in, 86, 89 as a proselytising work, 316 prosopography of, 12 proverbs in, 140 influence of the Qurʾān, 55–6 readers of, 58, 59, 63, 70, 116–17, 123, 229 ‘reversion’ topos in, 73 schematisation in, 97 scripts in, 65 sequence of, 96–7 social vision in, 40–1 sources for, 57 statements in, 86 structure of, 375–6, 430 studies of, 17 style of, 57–8, 94 summaries of see under descriptions of as a syngramma, 73–4 table of contents, 68–9, 87 terminology of, 72–3 texts and contexts in, 13–14 theological premise of, 7 as a totality, 60–9 as a training manual, 151–2 translations of, 10–12, 16–17, 109, 110, 111–28, 365–70, 394–417 Volume One, 64–5, 74–5, 96, 97, 108 Volume Two, 75–6, 96, 97, 108 Volume Three, 66, 76–80, 94, 97 Volume Four, 66–7, 80–3, 97, 327 Volume Five, 67, 83–6, 94, 97 Volume Six, 65–6, 67, 87–90, 96, 97 Volume Seven, 90–4, 97, 256–61, 273 reasons for writing, 5, 55 books Apologist of Poetry and the Apologist of Books debate, 253, 452–9 and audition, 92 author’s relationship with, 366, 371 benefits of, 454, 465–7, 468 as companions, 439, 445 composition of, 361 comprehensibility of, 366–7, 371 costliness of, 39 and debates, 209 dedicatees of, 226, 477n39 definition of, 468 Democrates on, 376–8 al-Fārābī on, 378 faults in, 244–5 function of, 160–1, 170, 204–5 gramma, 74, 102–3, 476n27, 477n29 hypomnema, 73, 102 improving power of, 446 and information, 439 inheritance of, 189–90

574 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s books (cont.) introductions 213–16, 221, 223 and knowledge, 443, 460 lexicography in, 101 mu‚annafāt, 98–9, 103 opponents of, 42–3 orality of, 45, 97 polemical nature of, 56 polygeneric style of, 374 prefatory material in, 193, 194–6 preservation of, 166 rag-paper, 3, 4–5, 39 and readers, 257 scholars’, 39 and social cohesion, 163–4, 166–7, 256, 439–40, 444–5, 451, 459–60 superiority of, 460 syngramma, 102 as teachers, 445, 462–3 titles of, 130 value of, 56, 124 virtues of, 446–8 vulnerability of, 44–5 writing, 365, 370–6 see also Bible; bibliomania; bibliophilia; codices; encyclopaedias; Óadīth; Qurʾān bookshops, 5, 45 Borges, Jorge Luis Fictions, 58 ‘Library of Babel’, 272, 273 ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, 268 Bray, Julia ‘Ibn al-Mu’tazz and politics’, 467 ‘Lists and memory’, 132, 479n61 Brethren of Purity see Ikhwān al-Íafāʾ al-Buªturī, 449 al-Bukhārī: Íaªīª, 99 Buqrā† see Hippocrates Burckhardt, Max: Die Zeit, 479n67 bureaucrats Ibn Qutayba on, 213, 218–21, 239–41, 372 al-JāªiÕ on, 195 burhān (plural burhānāt), 118, 190, 260, 261, 309, 435, 441 bustards, 85, 97 caliphs, 4, 132, 139 calligraphers, 43 Calvino, Italo, 51, 363 camels, 431, 458, 501n160 carpentry, 50 Carter, Michael G. ‘The parsings of Sībawayhi’s Kitāb’, 490n49 Sībawayhi, 454 castration, 46–8, 65 catalogues, 179, 383 cats, 84, 397–8 The Cause of All Causes, 313–14 censure see blame centenarians: Abū al-Mubārak, 46–9 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 58 chameleons, 97

Cheikh-Moussa, Abdallah: ‘La negation d’Éros’, 477n39 children, 168, 440, 466 Chraïbi, Aboubakr: ‘L’émergence du genre «muqaddima» dans la littérature arabe’, 494n90 ‘Christianism’, 317 Christians, 84 ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī and, 310 belief of, 312 and ‘Design Complex’, 297 al-JāªiÕ on, 31, 56, 116, 151, 195–6, 208, 235, 236 and Kalām, 311 Nestorian, 41, 308 and piety, 415 al-Qāsim’s attack on, 286, 312 and universalism, 314–15 Chrysippus, 512n60 clarity, 435–6; see also bayān ‘class’, 148, 168; see also jins classification, 50, 126, 168–70, 222, 245, 255, 438, 503n174; see also taxonomy codices, 39, 72, 101, 181 commonalty, 40 communication, 162–3, 443–4, 463–4; see also bayān; epistles; letters competitiveness, 46, 259 composition Aristotle’s Physics, 362–3 books, 365–78 ‘compositional aggregations’, 360–1 compositional governance, 359 conception of, 7 see also taʾlīf concision, 367–8, 372 consonants, 450 Conte, Gian Biagio: Genres and Readers, 273, 504n179 contracts, 450 Cooperson, Michael: ‘JāªeÕ’, 133 corporealists, 28 cowardice, 89 creation divisions of, 433–9 hierarchy of, 261–2 in Plato’s Timaeus, 292–3 in the Qurʾān, 293 signs of, 385–6 creationism al-JāªiÕ and, 303–4 Theodore Abū Qurra and, 305–6 creaturehood, 332 Crone, Patricia ‘The Dahris according to al-JāªiÕ’, 502n164 Medieval Islamic Political Thought, 17, 132, 140, 210, 212, 442, 502n167 ‘Ninth-century Muslim anarchists’, 139 ‘Ungodly cosmologies’, 502n164 cross-breeds, 97 crows, 77, 78, 80, 90, 91, 94, 97

Dahrīya, 262–3, 277, 284, 327–8, 330–1, 340; see also Eternalists Daiber, Hans, 508n28, 509n37 ‘Nestorians of 9th century Iraq’, 509n32 dalāʾil, 330 dalāla, 204, 261, 435, 441, 459 d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond see Diderot, Denis and d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond dalīl, 208, 252, 281, 285, 384, 438 Damascus, 237, 406 ∂amīr, 177 daqīq, 116, 342 Darnton, Robert, 103 Business of Enlightenment, 479n67, 502n168 darrāsa, 526n64 Davidson, Herbert A., 311 Proofs for Eternity, Creation and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy, 301–2, 508n28 dawāʿin, 47, 48, 328 Day of Judgement, 386 debate appetite for, 35 argument and, 31, 33 The Book of Living and, 56, 277; Apologist of Poetry and the Apologist of Books debate, 253, 452–9; Dog and Rooster debate, 143, 146, 246, 251, 303, 391, 408, 412, 418–20 versus books, 209 dialectical, 157 internalisation of, 175 al-JāªiÕ and, 35, 37, 259 majlis, 311, 453–9, 454, 457, 458–9 al-Mutawakkil’s ban on, 5, 38, 55 responsa, 150–1 theological, 30, 31, 150 see also munāÕara Demiurge, 293, 294, 295, 299 Democrates (Dīmuqrā†), 376–8, 466–7, 468 design, 7–8, 298, 308 ‘Design Complex’, 279–318 Abū Qurra on, 305, 306 ʿAmmār al-Ba‚rī on, 310 and anthropocentrism, 317–18 The Book of Paradigms and their Study (Kitāb al-ʿIbar wa-alIʿtibār), 300–2, 302–3 The Book of Signs and their Study (Kitāb al-Dalāʾil wa-al-Iʿtibār, 297–300 Christians and, 297, 303, 304, 312–15 cognition of, 364 as contact zone, 311–13 ‘cosmological’ and ‘teleological’ arguments for, 279–85 and evil, 317 and God’s power, 333 and governance, 354, 359 Graeco-Arabic teleologies of, 292–7

i ndex | 575 al-JāªiÕ and, 303–4 Job of Edessa and, 307 as moral imperative, 319 as proselytism, 315–16 psychology of universalism, 316 al-Qāsim on, 285–9 in the Qurʾān, 289–92 desire, 84 dhamm, 244, 245 dhāt, 281, 351, 366, 371 dhikr, 65, 73, 74, 76, 77, 81, 86, 91, 94, 521nn6, 7 Dhū al-Rumma, 439, 449 Diagoras, 299, 302 dialecticians, 415 Dick, Ignace, 304 Diderot, Denis and d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond: Encyclopédie, 266, 267 Dīmuqrā† see Democrates dīn, 111, 368, 442, 446, 450, 455, 456 al-Dīn, Ibrāhīm Shams, 16 Diodorus of Tarsus: Book of Governance, 301 ¤irār b. al-A‚amm, 139 ¤irār b. al-Óusayn, 335 ¤irār b. ʿAmr, 340 ¤irārīya, 118, 138, 139 dīwān (plural dawāwīn), 39, 227, 248, 415, 443 diyāna (plural diyānāt), 82, 83, 112, 113, 451, 523n37 doctors, 482n43 doctrine, defective, 243 dogs, 167, 168, 394–6, 397–8, 411, 413, 451 Dog and Rooster debate, 143, 146, 246, 251, 303, 391, 408, 412, 418–20 doves, 37, 396, 400 doxographers, 34 doxologies, 64, 193, 199, 214, 215 dreams al-Bīrūnī, 182 Freud: Interpreting Dreams, 58, 103–4, 229 al-Maʾmūn, 27 as sources of prophecy, 27 al-Wāthiq, Caliph, 27–8, 55 drinking, 472n27 drunkenness, 91–2 dualists, 300, 508n30 Eco, Umberto: ‘The Flaws in the Form’, 477n31 eggs, 82 elephants, 90, 94, 97 elites, 40, 41, 46 eloquence, 327 Emon, Anver: Islamic Natural Law Theories, 13 employment, 401–2 encyclopaedias, 266–73 The Book of Living as, 270–1, 272–3 comprehensiveness of, 271–3 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 266, 267

Encyclopaedia Iranica, 266 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 12, 61, 266 al-Fārābī’s First Principles, 269–70 paracitism of, 270 the Qurʾān as, 268–9 End Time, 5, 23, 24, 28, 31, 55 Enderwitz, Susanne: ‘Culture, history and religion’, 530n8 Epicureans, 340 Epicurus, 299, 302, 350 epigraphy, 450 epistemology, 146, 392 epistles, 40, 114, 463–4, 476n29 Óunayn b. Isªāq, 184–91 Ikhwān al-Íafāʾ, 322–3 al-JāªiÕ see al-JāªiÕ: epistles khu†ba, 216–17 al-Kindī, 200–1 muqaddimas and, 213–16 Ptolemy to Gallus, 192, 489n39 al-Rayªānī, 198, 200–1 see also letters; risāla epistolography, 100 eristics see jadal Ess, Josef van, 17, 35, 141, 302, 358, 504n3, 517n116 Early Islamic Theologians, 508n28 Eternalists, 148, 262–5; see also Dahrīya Euclid, 166, 344, 345, 367, 457 eunuchs, 97, 107, 168, 169, 392–3, 415 evil, 317 falak, 304 falsafa, 117, 156, 230, 297 fann (plural funūn), 183, 200, 299, 378, 491n55 faqīh (plural fuqahāʾ ), 79, 208, 215, 462, 533nn36, 37 farʿ (plural furūʿ), 203, 528n89 al-Fārābī, Abū Na‚r Enumeration of the Sciences, 198 Falsafat Aflā†ūn wa-Ajzāʾi-hā wa-Marātib Ajzāʾi-hā min Awwali-hā ilā Ākhiri-hā, 488n39, 532n31; see also under The Philosophy of Plato, its Parts and the Ranks of its Parts from their Beginning to their End First Principles of the Views of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City, 269–70 Iª‚āʾ al-ʿUlūm see under Enumeration of the Sciences Kitāb al-AlfāÕ al-Mustaʿmala fī al-Man†iq, 519nn142, 143; see also under The Treatise on the Terms Employed in Logic Mabādiʾ Ārāʾ Ahl al-Madīna alFā∂ila see under First Principles of the Views of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City Necessary Preliminaries to the Learning of Philosophy, 351 The Philosophy of Plato, its Parts and the Ranks of its Parts from their Beginning to their End, 179

The Treatise on the Terms Employed in Logic, 378–9 al-Farazdaq, 140, 431 al-Farrāʾ, 41 fa‚āªa, 327 fa‚īª, 434, 437 fa‚l (plural fu‚ūl ), 123, 199, 219, 234, 328, 365, 376, 378, 380, 381, 494n99, 519n146 fasting, 48 al-Fatª b. Khāqān, 31, 32, 151, 234–5, 236, 237 Fā†ima, 139 fayʾ, 240 faylasūf (plural falāsifa), 301, 345 al-Fazarī, Asmāʾ b. Khārija, 523n28 figs, 406 fihrist, 186, 443 fikr, 62 fikra, 260, 261, 528n79 fiqh, 117, 219, 493n84 firāsa, 77, 206, 210 fire, 66–7, 82, 83, 84 fitna, 257, 365 fi†ra, 155, 288, 317 fleas, 84, 97 flies, 78, 80, 85, 90, 94, 97 Forrester, John, 103–4 fortune-tellers, 448 Frank, Richard M., 59, 341, 361, 512n61 Freud, Sigmund: Interpreting Dreams, 58, 103–4, 229 frogs, 85, 97 fukūhāt, 446 furqa, 194 furs, 453 futyā, 203 Gabriel, Angel see Jibrīl Galen (Jālīnūs), 73–4, 166, 355, 457 catalogue of works, 185–8, 189 Compendium of Plato’s Timaeus, 316 on faults and blemishes, 242 Fī al-Akhlāq see under On Ethics Fī al-Tajriba al-˝ibbīya see under On Medical Experience On Ethics, 351–2 On Medical Experience, 149 On My Own Opinions, 294 ‘On Proof ’, 190 ‘On the Order of Reading his Books’, 188 On the Usefulness of Bodily Parts, 294–5, 302 treatise on the medical theories of the Timaeus, 505n17 games, 88 gardeners, 415 Gelder, Geert Jan van, 481nn23, 29, 34, 38, 493n85, 499n136, 522n11, 525n57, 528n79, 529n96 Close Relationships: Incest and Inbreeding in Classical Arabic Literature, 132 on qalb, 472n39 genealogy, 132, 133

576 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Geries, Ibrahim, 145–6 Un genre littéraire arabe, 497n118, 526n59 ‘Quelques aspects de la pensée muʿtazilite d’al-GˇāªiÕ selon K. al-Óaywān’, 129, 135, 434, 499n131 gesture, 66 Ghāliya, 115, 118, 139, 149, 153 ghara∂, 116, 185, 186, 378 gharīza, 117, 127, 152 ghayra , 112, 131, 410, 521n7 al-Ghazālī, 300 Gibb, H. A. R.: ‘The argument from design: a Muʿtazilite treatise attributed to al-JāªiÕ’, 301, 302, 508n28 Ginzberg, Carlo, 383, 384 gnats, 85, 97 goats, 85, 97 God assimilation of, 351–4, 360 attributes of, 150 as Benefactor, 320 clemency of, 265 creative powers of, 170, 283–4, 297, 305–6, 307, 308–9, 386, 391, 409 design in the universe, 7 divine governance, 363 divine inventory and judgement, 448 eavesdropping of rebellious satans on, 328 effects perception, 151 Eternalists and, 263–5, 284 existence of, 284, 287–8, 310, 314, 317, 392; see also ‘Design Complex’ greatness of, 404–7 human society, disposition of, 161–2, 170, 440–2 justness of, 401 knowledge of, 287, 512n61 language of, 326, 333 mimicry of, 6, 7, 58–9, 270–1 omnipotence of, 314, 321, 341, 392 omniscience of, 25, 26, 268–9, 392, 417 otherness of, 288, 332 power of, 77–8, 261–2 Revelation, 24, 320, 322, 324–6, 464, 529n59 sovereignty of, 278–9 speech of, 324–6, 369 transcendence of, 320–1, 325, 340, 344 and wisdom, 159, 436–7 writing, approval of, 162 Gog and Magog see Yaʾjūj waMaʾjūj governance, 278, 359 Graf, George: Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, 508n32 gramma, 74, 102–3, 476n27, 477n29 grammar, 368, 372

gratitude, 319, 320, 331, 416 gravity, 246, 247 greed, 402 Greeks influence, 494n90 inheritance customs, 464–5 scientific and philosophical tradition, 292–7 Griffith, Sidney H., 309, 310, 311, 510n40 The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, 301, 509n32 ‘Faith and reason’, 511n54 Gruendler, Beatrice, 472n33 Gutas, Dimitri, 191 ‘Geometry and the rebirth of philosophy’, 506n19, 515n96 Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition, 468 Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (2nd–4th/8th– 10th Centuries), 17 ‘Ibn ˝ufayl’, 508n28 ‘The meaning of Madanī’, 442 Óabīb b. Khidma Abū Rāʾi†a alTakrītī, 194–5, 477n29

ªadd, 117, 127, 158, 187

Óadīth authenticity of, 45 and The Book of Living, 99–100 criticism of, 242–3 as exegesis of Qurʾanic verse, 481n40 Muslim b. al-Óajjāj on, 214–15 study of, 40, 495n106 transmission of, 71–2, 99 ªadī†h (plural aªādīth), 75, 86, 89, 92, 209, 215, 242, 243, 257, 367, 371, 381 hadīya, 225, 495n106 Óājib b. Dīnār al-Māzinī, 394 al-Óajjāj b. Ma†ar, 166 al-Óajjāj b. Yūsuf, 457 ªakīm (plural ªukamāʾ ), 158, 199, 202, 369, 433, 454, 460, 465, 526n64 ªāl (plural aªwāl ), 125, 168, 214, 261, 465, 502n162 ªamdala, 193, 214, 217, 218, 494n97 ªamīya, 112, 122, 133, 204, 459 Óamza al-I‚fahānī, 248 Óanābila, 495n106 Óanafism, 463 handasa, 351 ªaqīqa, 112, 162, 181, 261 ªaqq, 131, 205, 329, 461 hares, 89, 97 al-Óārith b. al-Kindī, 449 al-Óārith b. Óilliza, 431, 450 al-Óārith b. ʿUbād, 431, 432 Hārūn, ʿAbd al-Salām Muªammad, 11, 15–16, 72, 450, 451–2, 476n27, 477n38, 482nn47, 52, 529n96 ªasan, 242, 461

al-Óasan al-Ba‚rī, 432, 433, 512n62 al-Óasan al-Luʾluʾī, 44, 446 al-Óasan b. Hāniʾ see Abū Nuwās al-Óasan b. Jamāʿa al-Judhamī, 449 al-Óasan b. Wahb, 449, 450 ªashara (plural ªasharāt), 158, 433, 475n19, 523n38 Hāshim b. Óudayj, 248–9 Hashimites, 114, 133–4, 148–9 ªāshiya, 181 ªashw, 286, 366, 371 ªashwīya, 100, 471n26, 498n129, 524n45 Óassān b. Thābit, 119, 140 hawā, 263, 264 hayʾa (plural hayʾāt), 280, 459 ªayawān, 9–10; see also animals ªayra, 95, 111, 129, 144, 157, 403, 441, 471n18 al-Haytham b. ʿAdī, 164–5, 531n21 al-Hayyabān al-Fahmī, 431 hazl, 123, 145, 146, 149, 246, 247, 248, 287, 497n119, 522n11 hedgehogs, 81, 89, 97 Hefter, Thomas: ‘“You have asked . . .”: the addressee and the absent reader in the works of al-JāªiÕ’, 210, 495n104, 501n153 heredity, 126, 127 heresy, 180, 414 ªifÕ, 185, 290 hijāʾ, 234, 248 ªikāya, 118, 130, 137, 148, 149, 153, 167, 252, 253, 458; see also representation ªikma (plural ªikam), 204, 219, 258, 369, 376, 435, 437, 461 ªilm, 119, 154, 155, 259 himma, 62, 204, 376 Hippocrates (Abuqrā†; Buqrā†) Afūrīsmū see under Aphorisms Aphorisms, 377, 380, 381–3 Kitāb al-Asābiʿ see under On Sevens On Sevens, 295–6 reading disease, 383–4 translations of, 179 hippopotamus, 94, 97 ªisāb, 443, 455 Hishām al-Fuwa†ī, 280–1, 284, 317, 325 Hishām b. al-Kalbi, 164–5 Hishām b. Muªammad b. al-Sāʾib al-Kalbī, 449 homilies see khu†bas honour, 131 hoopoes, 79, 80, 91, 114, 134, 135, 464 horses, 91, 92, 97 Hoyland, Robert G.: ‘History, fiction and authorship in the first centuries of Islam’, 531n21 Óubaysh, 191 Huggonard-Roche, Henri: La logique d’Aristote, 511n53 ªujja (plural ªujaj), 119, 122, 204, 215, 258, 260, 261, 263, 309, 319

i ndex | 577 ªukm (plural aªkām) 111, 121,

122, 136, 169, 182, 203, 206, 244, 282, 401, 412, 491n61, 493n82, 532n30 human nature, 216, 306 Óunayn b. Isªāq, 149, 188, 380, 507n27 autobiography, 188–9 Epistle, 184–91, 252 on Galen, 242 Galeni Compendium Timaei Platonis, 292 library, 183–4, 188–9 Risāla ilā ʿAlī b. Yaªyā, 476n25, 486nn18, 19, 487nn27, 28, 505n17, 506n22, 507n23, 519n146; see also under Epistle ªurrīya, 112, 131, 260, 501n160 hyenas, 89, 97, 399 hypomnema, 73, 102

ʿibāda, 451 Ibā∂īya, 118, 138 Iblīs, 328 Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi, 475n22 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā 319 al-Íamt wa-Ādāb al-Lisān, 490n46 Kitāb al-Awliyāʾ, 140 Ibn Abī U‚aybiʿa, 188, 488n39 Ibn al-Abbār: Iʿtāb al-Kuttāb, 498n124 Ibn al-Aʿrābī, 336, 394 Ibn al-Bi†rīq, 166 Ibn al-Jahm, Muªammad see Muªammad b. al-Jahm Ibn al-Kalbī, 451–2 Ibn al-Mudabbir, Aªmad b. Muªammad, 380 Ibn al-Munajjim see ʿAlī b. Yaªyā Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, 165, 325, 431 epitome of Porphyry’s Isagoge, 13, 372 Fī al-Man†iq see under epitome of Porphyry’s Isagoge Risāla fī al-Saªāba, 140 Ibn al-Muʿtazz, 380 Ibn al-Nadīm, 57, 230, 234 al-Fihrist; 474n6, 475n15, 477n35, 478n48, 488n39; see also under The Index The Index, 61–3, 68, 73, 95–6, 101, 102, 132, 178–9, 192 Ibn al-Rāwandī, 280, 281, 282, 516n110, 529n91 Ibn ʿAsala al-Shaybānī, 409 Ibn Bihrīz: The Definitions of Logic (Óudūd al-Man†iq), 379 Ibn Fa∂lān, 140 Ibn Harma, 365, 400 Ibn Jidhl al-˝iʿān, 399 Ibn Khurradādhbih: The Treatise of the Highways and the Kingdoms (Kitāb al-Masālik wa-alMamālik), 214 Ibn Muªammad, al-Sayyid alÓimyarī, 399 Ibn Nāʿima al-Óimsī, 361 Ibn Qutayba, 36–7, 42, 145, 214, 246, 361, 458, 471n26

Adab al-Kātib, 476n28, 491n61, 492n76, 493n82, 494n99, 517n118, 533n37 The Book of Items, 312, 461, 501n159 Book of Poetry and Poets, 213–14, 242 The Education of the Bureaucrat, 213, 218–21, 239–41, 372 Explanation of Difficult Passages in the Qurʾān see under Taʾwīl Mushkil al-Qurʾān Interpretation of the Divergence of the Óadīth see under Taʾwīl Mukhtalif al-Óadīth al-JāªiÕ’s Kitāb al-Tarbīʿ wa-alTadwīr and, 497n118 Kitāb al-Maʿārif see under The Book of Items Kitāb al-Shiʿr wa-al-Shuʿarāʾ see under Book of Poetry and Poets on the Qurʾān, 136, 220, 532n29 Taʾwīl Mukhtalif al-Óadīth, 497n118, 523n37 Taʾwīl Muskhil al-Qurʾān, 136, 220, 445 ʿUyūn al-Akhbār, 468, 475n22 Ibn Ri∂wān, 179 Ibn Rushd, 284–5 Ibn Saʿd: Treatise of the Major Classes (Kitāb al-˝abaqāt al-Kubrā), 71–2 Ibn Sīnā, 344, 510n41 The Cure, 71 al-Qānūn, 481n23 al-Shifāʾ see under The Cure Ibn ˝āwūs, 178, 179 Ibn Wahb, 45 ʿibra (plural ʿibar), 122, 156, 205, 260, 261, 300, 461 Ibrāhīm b. al-ʿAbbās al-Íūlī, 63, 132 Ibrāhīm b. al-Sindī, 43–4, 164, 447 idlāl, 208 idrāk, 116, 317 i∂†irār, 280, 317 ifrā†, 247 if‚āª, 62, 114 ihmāl, 261, 298, 299, 528n79 ījāz, 220, 367, 372 iʿjāz, 150, 513n76, 514n83 ijtihād, 412 ijtimāʿ, 62, 342, 343 ikhti‚ār, 367, 372 ikhtiyār, 273, 392, 532n30 ikhwān, 114, 124, 148, 227, 477n39 Ikhwān al-Íafāʾ, 322, 531n20 ilhām, 116, 151 ʿilla (plural ʿilal ), 62, 76, 84, 91, 123, 203, 204, 252, 331, 402, 493n81 ʿilm, 114, 117, 122, 141, 185, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 212, 317, 333, 351, 376, 443, 468, 493n84, 497n122, 514n88, 531n19, 532n30 Imams, 118, 135, 138, 139, 151, 209–10, 243 imlāʾ, 98

imperial registers, 39 imtizāj, 434 ʿināya, 233, 368 indexes see al-Bīrūnī; fihrist; Ibn al-Nadīm India, 71, 162, 442 inheritance, 464–5, 466 in‚āf, 111, 140, 462 insects, 67, 79; see also individual insects interest groups, 147–8 invectives, 248 iqtidāʾ, 352 iʿrāb, 242, 372 irāda, 47, 48, 205, 298, 434 Iranians, 415 Iraq see Baghdad; Basra; Samarra ʿirq, 402, 524n44 ʿĪsā b. Íābiª al-Murdār: Against Abū Qurra the Christian, 304–5 ʿĪsā b. Yaªyā Abū Sahl al-Masīªī, 505n17 Isaac, 328 ʿIsbār, 126, 142 Isªāq b. Sulaymān, 448 Isªāq b. Óunayn, 180 ishāra, 66, 369 Ishōʿbōkht, Metropolitan of Fars, 301 Islam, 136, 152; see also Shiʿa; Sufism; Sunnis ‘Islamism’, 317 ism, 116, 401, 532n30 ʿi‚ma, 92 Ismāʿīl, 133 isnād, 193, 209, 215, 257, 376, 381, 494n95 Israel of Kashkar, 302–3 Epistle on the Oneness of the Maker and the Trinity of His Properties (Risāla fī Waªdānīyat al-Bāriʾ wa-Tathlīth Khawā‚‚i-hi), 303 Israelites, 328 istidlāl, 13, 170, 280, 286, 289, 435, 436, 438, 451 istiªqāq, 526n59 isti†āʿa, 48, 114, 134, 258, 260, 261, 328, 392, 404, 411, 417, 420, 423, 435, 496n115, 529n98 iʾtilāf, 343, 347 iʿtirā∂, 116, 117, 138 ittifāq, 299, 458 Īwannīs of Dārā, Bishop, 507n27 ʿīy, 219, 365, 461 ʿiyān, 75, 384 Jābir b. Óayyān, 296–7, 354 jadal, 31, 33, 170, 259, 363, 400–1, 460, 471n18 Jaʿfar al-Íādiq, Imam, 300 Jaʿfar b. Óarb, 33, 36–7, 529n59 Kitāb al-Maqālāt (The Book of Doctrinal Positions), 33 Jaʿfar b. ʿAlī al-Dimashqī: An Indication of the Benefits of Trade (Ishāra ilā Maªāsin alTijāra), 135 jahāla (plural jahālāt), 116, 138, 218

578 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s al-Jaªªāf, 432 jāªid, 116, 262 jāhil, 205, 448 Jāhilīya, 156 al-JāªiÕ Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baªr and, 94, 104, 217 Addressee’s accusations of, 239; see also The Book of Living: Addressee Arabic titles of works (the words kitāb and risāla have been ignored): al-Akhbār wa-kayf Ta‚iªª see under writings: The Treatise on the Reports; alʿArab wa-al-Mawāli see under writings: The Treatise on the Arabs and their Clients; A‚ªāb al-Ilhām see under writings: The Treatise on The Proponents of Inspiration; al-A‚nām see under writings: The Treatise on the Idols; al-Awfāq wa-alRiyā∂āt see under writings: The Treatise on Number Squares and Calculations; al-Bayān wa-al-Tabyīn see under writings: The Book of Clarity and Clarification; al-Bighāl see under writings: The Book of Mules; al-Bukhalāʾ see under writings: Treatise on Niggards; al-Dalāʾil wa-al-Iʿtibār (attrib.) see under writings: The Book of Signs and their Study; Dhamm Akhlāq al-Kuttāb see under writings: Treatise in Criticism of the Mores of the Bureaucrats; Fa∂īlat al-Malak ʿalā al-Jinn, 134; see also under writings: On the Superiority of the Angel to Man and Man to the Jinn; Fa∂īlat al-Muʿtazila see under writings: Deeming Muʿtazilism Superior to all other Creeds; Fa∂l Hāshim ʿalā ʿAbd Shams see under writings: The Treatise on the Difference between Hāshim and ʿAbd Shams; [Fakhr] alQaª†anīya wa-al-ʿAdnānīya see under writings: The Treatise on the Qaª†ānīs and the ʿAdnānīs; Fakhr al-Sūdān ʿalā al-Bī∂ān see under writings: The Treatise of the Vaunting of the Blacks over the Whites; Farq mā bayn al-Jinn wa-al-Ins see under writings: The Superiority of Man to the Jinn and The Treatise of the Difference between Jinn and Man and the Difference between Angels and Jinn; Farq mā bayn al-Malāʾika wa-al-Jinn, 134; see also under writings: The Superiority of Man to the Jinn and The Treatise on the Difference between Jinn and Man and the Difference between Angels and Jinn; Farq/Fa‚l mā

bayn al-Nabī wa-al-Mutanabbī see under writings: The Treatise on the Difference between the Prophet and the Would-be Prophet; Fa‚l mā bayn al-Rijal wa-al-Nisāʾ see under writings: The Treatise on the Difference between Men and Women; Fī al-Balāgha wa-al-Ījāz see under writings: On Eloquence and Concision; Fī al-Óakamayn see under writings: The Justification of ʿAlī’s Appointment of the Two Arbiters; Fī [al-Iªtijāj li-]NaÕm al-Qurʾān see under writings: Treatise on the Arguments Adduced as Proofs concerning the Ordering of the Qurʾān, its Unusual Composition and Original Arrangement; Fī al-Jidd wa-al-Hazl see under epistles; Epistle on Earnestness and Jest; Fī al-Maʿrifa see under writings: Treatise on Knowledge; Fī al-Mīrāth, 139; Fī Fa‚l mā bayn al-ʿAdāwa wa-al-Óasad see under epistles: Epistle on Distinguishing Enmity from Envy; Fī [Ba‚īrat] Ghannām al-Murtadd see under epistles: Epistle on Ghannām the Apostate; Fī Ithm al-Sukr, 131; Fī Khalq al-Qurʾān see under writings: Treatise on The Creating of the Qurʾān; Fī Manāqib al-Turk see under writings: Noble Qualities of the Turks; Fī [Masāʾil] al-ʿAbbāsīya see under writings: Treatise on the ʿAbbāsiya; Fī al-Nābita see under epistles; Epistle on the Upstarts; Fī Nafy al-Tashbīh, 137; Fī al-Nubl wa-al-Tanabbul wa-Dhamm al-Kibr see under writings: On Magnanimity, Genuine and Feigned, and in Condemnation of Haughtiness; Fī Íināʿat al-Kalām see under writings: The Treatise on the Craft of the Kalām; Fī Taf∂īl al-Nu†q ʿalā al-Íamt see under epistles: An Epistle on Deeming Reasoned Speech Superior to Silence; Fu∂ūl/ Fu‚ūl al-Íināʿāt wa-Marātib al-Tijārāt, 132; al-Futyā see under writings: The Treatise on Legal Verdicts; Ghishsh al-Íināʿāt see under writings: The Treatise on Swindling in Crafts; al-Óayawān see The Book of Living; Óikāyat Qawl A‚nāf al-Zaydīya, 138; see also under writings: Contestation of the Zaydīya; Óikāyat Qawl al-Ibā∂īya wa-al-Íufrīya wa-al-Azāriqa wa-al-Najdīya, 138; Óiyal al-Lu‚ū‚ see under writings: The Treatise on the

Stratagems of Thieves; Óujaj al-Nubūwa see under writings: The Proofs of Prophethood; al-Óujja fī Tathbīt al-Nubūwa see under writings: The Treatise of the Proof concerning the Establishing of the Prophethood of Muªammad; al-Ibil see under writings: The Book of Camels; Iªtijāj al-Bukhalāʾ see under writings; The Treatise on the Arguments of Misers; Ikhwānīyāt, 136; Ilā Abī ʿAbd Allāh Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād Yukhbiru-hu fī-ha bi-Kitāb al-Futyā see under epistles: Epistle to Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād concerning the Treatise of Legal Rulings; Imāmat Banī/ Wuld al-ʿAbbās, 139; al-Ism wa-al-Óukm see under writings: The Name and Determining Characteristic; al-Iʿtizāl waFa∂li-hi, 137; al-Jawābāt see under writings: The Treatise on the Appropriate Responses; al-Jawābāt fī al-Imāma, 137; alJawābāt fī al-Maʿrifa, 137; alJawārī wa-al-Ghilmān see under writings: The Vaunting Contest of Slavegirls and Slaveboys; al-Jawābāt wa-’stiªqāq alImāma see under writings: The Responses and Meriting of the Imamate; Kitmān al-Sirr wa-ÓifÕ al-Lisān see under writings; The Treatise on Keeping a Secret and Holding One’s Tongue; al-Maʿādin see under writings: The Treatise on Minerals; Maqālāt alʿUthmānīya see under writings: The Book of the Partisans of Uthmān; Maqālāt al-Zaydīya, 497n121; al-Maʿāsh wa-alMaʿād fī al-Adab wa-Tadbīr al-Nās wa-Muʿāmalati-him see under writings: Treatise on the Here and the Hereafter: On Education, Managing People and Ways of Dealing with them; al-Masāʾil see under writings: The Treatise on the Relevant Questions; al-Masāʾil fī al-Qurʾān, 137; Masāʾil Kitāb al-Maʿrifa, 137; al-Mawadda wa-al-Khul†a, 210; Mufākharat al-Jawārī wa-al-Ghilmān see under writings: The Vaunting Contest of Slavegirls and Slaveboys; Mufākharāt al-Sūdān wa-al-Óumrān, 131; al-Mulaª wa-al-˝uraf see under writings: The Treatise on Pleasantries and Rare Witticisms; NaÕm al-Qurʾān, 137; see also under writings: Treatise on the Arguments Adduced as Proofs concerning the Ordering

i ndex | 579 of the Qurʾān, its Unusual Composition and Original Arrangement; al-Qawl fī al-Farq bayn al-Ghayra was-I∂āʿat alÓurma, 130; al-Qawl fī al-Farq bayn al-Íidq wa-al-Kadhib, 130; al-Qawl fī Fa∂īlat alMalak ʿalā al-Insān wa-al-Insān ʿalā al-Jinn see under writings: On the Superiority of the Angel to Man and Man to the Jinn; al-Nisāʾ see under writings: The Book of Women; al-Qiyān see under writings: The Book of the Singing-Girls; al-Radd ʿalā al-Jahmīya see under writings: The Treatise of the Rebuttal of the Jahmīya; al-Radd ʿalā al-Mushabbiha see under writings: Treatise in Rebuttal of the Assimilationists; al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā see under writings: The Treatise of the Rebuttal of the Christians; al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā wa-al-Yahūd see under writings: Treatise against the Christians and the Jews; al-Radd ʿalā man Alªada fī Kitāb Allāh, 138; al-Rāfi∂a, 132; al-Rasāʾil al-Hāshimīyāt see under epistles: The Hāshimīs; Sharāʾiʿ al-Murūwa, 132; al-Íuraªāʿ wa-al-Hujanāʾ see under writings: The Treatise on the Pure-born and the Halfbreed; al-Taba‚‚ur bi-al-Tijāra (attrib.) see under writings: The Treatise on Scrutinising Trade; Taf∂īl ʿAdnān, 133; al-Tarbīʿ waal-Tadwīr see under writings: The Treatise on Quadrature and Circumference; [Taswiyat] al-ʿArab wa-al-ʿAjam; see under writings: The Treatise on the Arabs and the Non-Arabs; al-Waʿd wa-al-Waʿīd see under writings: Treatise on the Promise and the Threat; al-Wukalāʾ see under writings: Treatise on Agents; al-Zarʿ wa-al-Nakhl wa-al-Zaytūn wa-al-Aʿnāb see under writings: The Book of Husbandry and Date-Farming; al-Zuhd see under writings: Treatise on Asceticism audiences, 10, 12, 40, 42, 56, 58, 71–2, 152, 155–6, 159, 193 on benefaction, 320, 321 bibliophilia, 5, 43, 45, 124, 205, 209, 427 as chronicler, 50–1 commentaries on, 129–43 as counsellor, 153–5 and creationism, 303–4 criticisms of, 150 and debate, 35, 37–8, 38–9 discourse style, 432–3 editorial redacting, 132 and epistemology, 146, 150–1

epistles, 114, 136, 148, 221–2; An Epistle on Deeming Reasoned Speech Superior to Silence, 195, 253; Epistle on Distinguishing Enmity from Envy, 32, 210, 213, 237; Epistle on Earnestness and Jest, 154, 222, 230; Epistle on Ghannām the Apostate, 116, 138, 235, 236; Epistles on the Hāshimīs, 114, 136, 140; The Epistle on the Upstarts, 112–13, 133, 210, 491n57; Epistle to Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād concerning the Treatise of Legal Rulings, 160, 183, 198, 201–7, 207–11, 211–13, 225-6, 232, 462; ‘selfparody’ in, 495n104; see also under letters; writings and goodness, 525n57 illness, 62, 84 imprisonment, 29 use of irony, 533n37 as a Kalām Master, 208 letters, 136, 148; to Abū al-Faraj b. Najāª, 210–11; to Abū al-Walīd Muªammad, 211; to Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik, 210–11; see also under epistles library, 107, 153, 169, 192 life, 3, 4–5 and meaning, 442 and Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt, 230 ocular defect, 29 patrons, 42, 100, 163, 235 payment, 63, 102 use of satire, 533n37 significance of, 157–8 subject organisation, 479n61 as a teacher, 99 treatises see under writings use of munāÕara, 251 writings: The Book of Camels, 61, 102, 474n7; The Book of Clarity and Clarification, 30, 63, 159, 201, 217, 222, 232, 241, 322, 334–9, 359, 371, 372, 436, 445, 480n12, 495n102, 497n122; The Book of Husbandry and Date-Farming, 63, 112, 132, 201; The Book of Living see under title; The Book of Mules, 61–2, 73, 84, 93, 102, 142, 196, 474n9, 476n27, 482n47; The Book of Signs and their Study (attrib.), 297–300, 301–2, 302–3, 305; The Book of the Partisans of ʿUthmān, 56, 118, 138, 253, 402, 533n35; The Book of the Singing-Girls, 130, 194, 482n55, 489n42; The Book of Women, 61, 102, 132, 474n7; Contestation of the Zaydīya, 116; Deeming Muʿtazilism Superior to all other Creeds, 116; The Difference between Hāshim and ʿAbd Shams, 133–4; The Justification of ʿAlī’s Appointment of the Two

Arbiters, 497n121, 501n155; The Name and the Determining Characteristic, 523n40; Noble Qualities of the Turks, 31, 140, 210, 237, 251, 491n57; On Eloquence and Concision, 372; On Magnanimity, Genuine and Feigned, and in Condemnation of Haughtiness, 244; Rejection of the Clairvoyance of Ghannām the Apostate see under epistles: Epistle on Ghannām the Apostate; The Responses and Meriting of the Imamate, 137, 209, 212, 319; On the Superiority of the Angel to Man and Man to the Jinn, 92, 134, 141–2; The Superiority of Man to the Jinn, 89, 494n7; see also under The Treatise of the Difference between Jinn and Man and the Difference between Angels and Jinn; Treatise against the Christians and the Jews, 116; see also under The Treatise of the Rebuttal of the Christians; Treatise in Criticism of the Mores of the Bureaucrats, 140, 195; Treatise in Rebuttal of the Assimilationists, 115, 137, 523n39; The Treatise of the Proof concerning the Establishing of the Prophethood of Muªammad, 116, 137; The Treatise of the Rebuttal of the Christians, 31, 37, 56, 130, 137, 151, 195–6, 208, 235, 236, 312, 421, 497n121, 511n54, 518n139; The Treatise of the Rebuttal of the Jahmīya, 116, 138; The Treatise of the Vaunting of the Blacks over the Whites, 131, 194, 251, 489n43; Treatise on Agents, 129, 244, 484n77, 517n124; Treatise on Asceticism, 241; The Treatise on Keeping a Secret and Holding One’s Tongue, 196; Treatise on Knowledge, 116, 137; The Treatise on Legal Verdicts, 115, 137, 201–11; The Treatise on Minerals, 113–14, 133; Treatise on Niggards, 130–1, 236, 483n56; The Treatise on Number Squares and Calculations, 114; The Treatise on Pleasantries and Rare Witticisms, 111–12, 130, 143; The Treatise on Quadrature and Circumference, 37, 75, 196, 222–3, 230, 231, 246, 252, 345–7, 497n118, 515n100, 518n139; The Treatise on Scrutinising Trade (attrib.), 135; The Treatise on Swindling in Crafts, 130, 135; Treatise on the ʿAbbāsiya, 118, 139; The Treatise on the Appropriate Responses, 116, 137; The Treatise on the Arabs and the Non-Arabs, 113, 133; The Treatise on the

580 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s al-JāªiÕ (writings) (cont.) Arabs and their Clients, 112–13, 133; Treatise on the Arguments Adduced as Proofs concerning the Ordering of the Qurʾān, its Unusual Composition and Original Arrangement, 115, 137; The Treatise on the Arguments of Misers, 112, 130; The Treatise on the Craft of the Kalām, 136, 194, 421, 489n43; Treatise on the Creating of the Qurʾān, 115, 129, 136, 139, 196, 243, 421, 462, 514n84, 516n115; The Treatise on the Difference between Hāshim and ʿAbd Shams, 114, 133, 136; The Treatise on the Difference between Jinn and Man and the Difference between Angels and Jinn, 114, 141, 464; The Treatise on the Difference between Men and Women, 112, 132, 135; The Treatise on the Difference between the Prophet and the Would-be Prophet, 116, 138; Treatise on the Here and the Hereafter: On Education, Managing People and Ways of Dealing with them, 196; The Treatise on the Idols, 113, 133; Treatise on the Promise and the Threat, 116, 137; The Treatise on the Proofs of Prophethood, 209, 215–16, 484n77; The Treatise on The Proponents of Inspiration, 116, 137; The Treatise on the Pure-born and the Halfbreed, 112, 131, 142, 482n52; The Treatise on the Qaª†ānīs and the ʿAdnānīs, 112, 133, 149; The Treatise on the Relevant Questions, 116, 137; The Treatise on the Reports, 116, 138; The Treatise on the Stratagems of Thieves, 111–12, 130; Treatise on what is said concerning the Principles of Legal Rulings and Judgements see under The Treatise on Legal Verdicts; The Vaunting Contest of Slavegirls and Slave-boys, 56, 251; see also under Arabic titles of works; epistles; letters jahl, 111, 205, 244, 461, 522n11 Jahm b. Íafwān, 325 Jahmīya doctrine, 151 jalīl, 116, 342 Jālīnūs see Galen jamāʿa, 176, 194, 213, 216, 255, 342, 370, 375 jāmiʿ, 117, 202 jamīʿ, 524n51, 532n30 Jamra bint Nawfal, 120 jawāb (plural ajwiba), 160, 460 jawhar, 207, 281, 341, 342, 371 jawharīya, 112, 127 jesting, 159 Jesus, 314, 513n79

Jews, 84, 312, 415 Jibrīl (Gabriel), Angel, 45, 406 Jibrīl b. Nūª al-Anbārī, Bishop, 301–2 jidāl, 30, 42, 412 jidd, 76, 123, 247, 271, 497n119 jinn, 88, 89–90, 97, 134, 135, 330, 407–8 jins (plural ajnās), 50, 67, 75, 84, 113, 124, 126, 148, 168, 169, 222, 245, 260, 434 jism (plural ajsām), 258, 280, 342, 343, 495n100 Job of Edessa, 311 The Book of Treasures, 296, 304, 307–8, 316, 511n56 see also Ayyūb al-Ruhāwī John Chrysostom, 520n1 John of Damascus, 306, 311, 317 John Philoponus (Yaªyā al-Naªwī, John the Grammarian), 306 Joseph, 289, 328 Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake, 58 judges emoluments, 495n105 women as, 132 see also Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād juªūd, 299, 310 Juynboll, G. J. H.: ‘Muslim’s introduction’, 494n95, 502n166 juzʾ (plural ajzāʾ), 61, 72, 75, 81, 82, 83, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 200, 341, 371, 376, 378, 405, 412, 476nn25, 27 Kaʿb b. Zuhayr, 132, 482n42 Kabsha bint Maʿdīkarib, 115 Kalām atomism 339–44, 517n116 Kalām Masters, 33, 34, 134, 141, 150, 156, 158, 210, 216–17, 218–19, 279, 312, 333, 407–8, 414, 418, 419, 423, 450, 481n25 Kalām theology, 5, 8, 31, 33–6, 38, 56, 157–8, 285–6, 304, 314, 392 kalb, 413, 528n87 kalbīya, 411 kātib (plural kuttāb), 75, 221, 491n61 Kennedy, Philip, 19, 500n152 khabar (plural akhbār), 8, 116, 202, 215, 216, 219, 242, 360, 369, 416, 430, 432, 435, 455, 456, 491n61, 532n30 al-Khalīl b. Aªmad, 103, 123, 160, 370, 447 khalq, 125 Khaqanids, 458 Kharijites, 95, 118, 138–9, 258, 414, 481n22; see also Azāriqa; Najdīya; Íufrīya khashāsh, 523n38 kha‚m (plural khu‚ūm), 203, 365, 462 khā‚‚, 445, 456 khā‚‚a, 227, 445, 477n39 kha‚‚īya, 323

kha†al, 81, 113, 368 kha†† (plural khu†ū†), 43, 65, 96, 162, 441, 442, 443 khatm, 73 khawā†ir, 47, 62, 76, 205, 244, 437 al-Khayyā†: The Book of Victory (Ki†āb al-Inti‚ār), 33, 279–80, 281, 317, 528n91 Khidāsh b. Zuhayr, 431 khilāf, 83, 312, 332 khi‚āl, 91, 217 khi†āb, 219, 494n99 khizānat kutub, 447 Khufāf b. Nudba, 431 khuluq (plural akhlāq), 91, 125, 168, 219, 257, 350, 394 Khurasanians, 415, 458 khu‚ūmāt, 122, 501n158 khu†ba (plural khu†ab), 114, 193, 216–17, 218, 221, 222, 223, 250, 301, 414, 422, 494nn97, 99 Kilpatrick, Hilary: Making the Great Book of Songs, 475n22 al-Kindī Epistle on the Quantity of the Books of Aristotle, 148, 183, 184, 476n29, 496n115, 502n162, 514n88, 530n3 Fī al-Falsafa al-Ūlā see under On First Philosophy Ki†āb al-Mu‚awwitāt al-Watarīya see under On Stringed Instruments library, 183–4, 189 and music, 346 On First Philosophy, 198, 199–201, 294, 492n71, 493nn81, 84, 517n127 and Plato, 506n19 Pronouncement on the Soul Epitomised from the Treatise of Aristotle and the Other Philosophers, 352–3, 516n109 al-Qawl fī al-Nafs see under Pronouncement on the Soul Risāla fī Kammīyat Kutub Aris†ū†ālīs see under Epistle on the Quantity of the Books of Aristotle on stars, 434 Treatise on Stringed Instruments, 348–50, 514n88 al-Kisāʾī, 454 kitāb (plural kutub), 30, 45, 46, 72, 79, 87, 93, 94, 95, 130, 131, 193, 195, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205, 207, 218, 244, 281, 334, 366, 368, 369, 414, 443, 447, 450, 452, 453, 455, 456, 461, 463, 476n25, 479n61, 480n8, 482n52, 493n82, 494n99, 497n123, 518nn129, 139, 526n64, 532n32 knowledge acquisition of, 447 Bible and, 503n171 al-Bīrūnī on, 362–3 and books, 443, 460, 466 The Cause of All Causes, 313

i ndex | 581 encyclopaedias and, 266–8, 272 al-Fārābī on, 351 and first philosophy, 200 Qurʾān and, 268 sharing of, 461 transmission of, 71–2 and well-being, 403–4 Koran see Qurʾān kufr, 31, 508n30 kufr al-niʿma, 319, 327 kull, 524n51 al-Kumayt, 399 Kuthayyir, 434–5 kutub al-dīn, 368 kutub Allāh, 205, 456 kutub dīn, 450, 455, 456 ladhdha, 356 lafÕ, 43, 116, 366, 369, 445, 493n85, 499n140 laghw, 368 Lamak b. Qābil (Lamech, son of Cain), 345 lame people, 89, 97 Lamoreaux, John C.: Theodore Abū Qurra, 510n40 Lane, E. W.: Arabic-English Lexicon, 476n28 language bayān theory, 442 categorical schemes, 437 and discussion, 506n18 expressiveness of, 58 figurative, 408–9, 420–1 of God, 326, 333 Kalām Masters, 333 and nature, 520n1 Sanskrit, 242 and signs, 386 Syriac, 185, 186, 187–8, 190 and translation, 165–6, 455 see also Arabic; speech Lassner, Jacob Demonizing the Queen of Sheba, 134–5 Islamic Revolution and Historical Memory: An Inquiry into the Art of ʿAbbāsid Apologetics, 132 law, 210, 216, 284–5, 310 Sharīʿa, 212, 216 Sunna, 216 al-Layth b. al-MuÕaffar, 103 lecture notes, 193 Leder, Stefan: Der Corpus al-Hait- am ibn ʿAdī, 531n21 letters, 40, 193–201, 464; see also epistles; risāla levity, 246, 247, 401 lexicography, 101 libraries, 39, 178–9 Āl Óumayd al-Dīn, 508n28 Óunayn b. Isªāq, 183–4, 188 al-JāªiÕ, 107, 153, 169, 192 al-Kindī, 183–4, 189 The Library of Arabic Literature, 12, 19 lice, 84, 97 listeners, 226 literacy, 41

lizards, 81, 87–8, 89, 90, 97, 398 locusts, 85, 97 Lowry, Joseph E., 98, 100 Early Islamic Legal Theory, 475n22, 483n72, 494n97 Lucretius: De rerum natura, 504n179 lugha, 242 lunatics, 451; see also madness Luqmān, 431 lutes, 345, 346, 347–8, 349 luthgha, 217 lu†f, 265, 520n3 Maʿbad, 111, 145, 146, 147, 391, 419 Madelung, Wilferd, 311–12 madhhab (plural madhāhib), 75, 113, 122, 157, 194, 203, 205, 403, 416, 437, 530n6 madness, 33; see also lunatics maecenas, 227, 453 maghzā, 124, 162–3 mahāriq, 450, 461 maªāsin, 146, 521n6 al-Mahdī, Caliph, 139 Mahler, Gustav, 271 Maimonides, 344 majlis, 233, 234. 236, 451, 452, 453, 454, 460 male and female, 68 Mālik b. Anas, 243 Malti-Douglas, Fedwa: Structures of Avarice, 475n22 al-Maʾmūn, Caliph, 4, 23–4 man and animals compared, 436, 438 characteristics of, 409–11 dependence on God, 440–2 intelligence of, 437 and signs, 385, 435 maʿnā (plural maʿānin) 46, 90, 114, 116,123, 295, 298, 299, 300, 366, 394, 404, 408, 445, 499n140, 524n49 manfaʿa (plural manāfiʿ), 376, 378, 442, 531n16, 532n30 Mani: The Book of Mysteries, 181–2 Manichaeans/Manichaeism, 34, 43–4, 164, 181, 447n8, 484n79, 508n30 al-Man‚ūr, Caliph, 382 Mansur, Said H.: The World-View of al-JāªiÕ, 10, 236–7, 502nn165, 167 man†iq, 66, 261, 435 manuscripts, 408–9, 493n87 al-manzila bayn al-manzilatayn, 253, 365 maqāla (plural maqālāt), 38, 114, 185, 310, 378, 406, 423, 447, 523n37 maqāyīs, 121, 369 maʿrifa, 95, 111, 114, 134, 140, 168, 203, 204, 219, 257, 288, 451 Marinelli, Lydia and Mayer, Andreas: Dreaming by the Book, 103

Marogy, Amal: Kitāb Sībawayhi, 490n49 Marzolph, Ulrich: ‘Medieval knowledge in modern reading’, 475n22 masʾala, 460 Māsarjawayh the Younger, 49–50 masāwin, 146, 521n6 ma‚laªa (plural ma‚āliª), 107, 125, 202, 403, 405, 419, 420, 434, 464, 526n58 al-Masʿūdī, 136, 154, 346–7, 454 mathematics, 333 mathlath, 346, 347, 349 mathnā, 346, 347, 349 Mauristus, 345 mawlā (plural mawālin), 113, 133, 226 Mayer, Andreas see Marinelli, Lydia and Mayer, Andreas Maymūn b. Hārūn, 63 maÕālim tribunals, 240 maÕª, 114, 123, 149, 220 medicine, 482n43 Hippocrates, 380, 383–4 memory, 370–1, 443, 447, 450 Meno, 532n31 mice, 84, 97 Michael, Angel, 406 Michelet, Jules, 60 Michot, Yahya: ‘Revelation’, 513n77 midges, 85, 97 Miªna, 23–24, 30, 35, 462, 470n3, 471n13, 495n105 milk, 50 Miller, Jeannie, 523n40, 528n91 ‘More than the sum of its parts’, 13, 479n2, 480n3, 485n84, 521n4, 526n58, 530n9 mimesis, 386 miracles, 325 miʿrāj, 352 monkeys, 97 monotheism, 24 monuments, 450, 453, 454 Moses see Mūsā mosques, 41 mosquitoes, 85, 97 moths, 85, 97 Mottahedeh, Roy: Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society, 133, 492n76, 496n106 Mourad, Suleiman Ali: Early Islam between Myth and History, 512n62 muʾallif, 117, 219, 334, 348, 480n20, 532n32 muʿānada, 396 muʿāra∂a, 130, 137, 155, 171, 192, 195, 229, 250–1, 252–4, 270, 329, 383, 471n18, 500n152 Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān, 367, 372 mudākhala, 207 muªaddith (plural muªaddithūn), 208, 215, 533n36 Muhalhil, 166 al-Muhallab, 446 Muªammad, Prophet ascent to heaven, 352

582 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Battle of Uªud, 328–9 eloquence, 327 and eunuchs, 392–3 humanness, 441 letters, 464 medicinal knowledge, 482n43 preaching, 494n97 prophethood, 116, 151, 325, 496n115 Prophetic knowledge, 184, 269 quoted, 122, 409 Revelation to, 45 sayings, 203 Sunna law, 216 Muªammad b. ʿAbbād, 46 Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt, 4, 28, 29, 63, 102, 210–11, 222–3, 229, 230–1, 233–4, 238, 449, 483n64 Muªammad b. al-Jahm, 44, 446–7, 473n40 Muªammad b. Óabīb, 132 Kitāb al-Muªabbar, 479n61 Muªammad b. Mūsā, 27, 189–90, 191, 380, 505n17 Muªammad b. Salām, 126 Muªammad b. Yasīr al-Riyāshī see al-Riyāshī al-Muªāsibī, 300, 504n3 mukallaf, 273 mules, 142, 167 mulªid (plural mulªidūn), 116, 216, 262, 286 munā∂ala, 258 munāsaba, 261 munāÕara, 229, 250–2, 259, 311, 471n18, 500n115 muqaddamāt, 117, 157 al-Muqaddasī: Aªsan al-Taqāsīm, 493n87 muqaddima, 193, 200, 213, 214, 217, 221, 222, 223, 250, 301, 422, 494n90 al-Muqannaʿ al-Kindī, 449 al-Muqtadir, Caliph, 140 murakkab, 168 murūʾa, 111, 219, 446 Mūsā (Moses), 289, 328, 464, 513n79 Mūsā b. Yaªyā, 447 Mūsā b. Yasār (Mūsā Shahawāt), 499n136 mu‚annafāt, 98–9, 103 Musaylima, 329 mu‚ªaf (plural ma‚āªif ), 44, 62, 72, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 90, 93, 181, 369, 461, 475n16, 476nn25, 27 music, 333, 345–58 as cosmogony, 347–50 godlikeness and, 350–8 al-JāªiÕ on, 345–7 al-Kindī and, 346, 348–50 lutes, 345, 346, 347–8, 349 as psychotherapy, 345 Muslim b. al-Óajjāj, 242, 246 Íaªīª Muslim see under Sound Compilation

Sound Compilation, 99, 214–15, 502n166 Muslims asceticism, 336 Battle of Uªud, 328–9 belief, 312; see also Islam muswadda, 183 muta∂ādd, 478n46 al-Muʿta∂id, Caliph, 485n7 Mutakallimūn see Kalām Masters al-Muʿta‚im, Caliph, 199, 309–10 al-Mutawakkil, Caliph, 234–5, 237, 462 banning of debate on Qurʾān, 5, 38, 55, 140 court transferred to Damascus, 31–2 ended Miªna, 30 murder of, 32 punishment of opponents, 23–5, 39 succession to caliphate, 29, 30 Muʿtazilism, 35, 139, 146, 149, 150, 255, 320–1, 322, 325, 326, 332, 448, 499n131 School of the Muʿtazila, Basra, 59, 217 muwāqafa, 368 muwāzana, 111, 146, 471n18, 532n30 muÕāª, 123, 246 Naba†, 323 nabāt, 433 nabī (plural anbiyāʾ ), 122, 442 nabīdh, 142, 168, 450, 472n27 al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī, 431, 449 Nābita, 471, 498n129 nādira (plural nawādir), 46, 111, 143, 369 nafs, 168, 177, 190, 234, 366, 471n18 nafy, 202 nafy al-tashbīh, 532n30 Nahshal b. Óarrī, 431 Najdīya (Najadāt), 118, 138 naming, 409, 523n40 al-Namir al-Tawlab, 120–1, 431 nasab, 95, 111, 144, 147, 366 na‚b, 118, 244 nashā†, 93, 369, 370, 374, 407, 497n122 al-Nāshiʾ al-Akbar (attrib.): Book of Doctrinal Positions (Kitāb alMaqālāt), 33; see also Jaʿfar b. Óarb: Kitāb al- Maqālāt Nā‚iba, 118, 153 na‚īªa, 154, 155 nāsikh, 62, 116, 257, 474n11 naskh, 139 nā†iq, 435, 530n3 Naturalists, 299 Nawas, John see Bernards, Monique and Nawas, John naÕar, 33, 122, 141, 170, 194, 202, 206, 240, 251, 280, 355, 365, 368, 407, 471n18, 491n61 naÕm, 62, 111, 116, 153, 205, 325, 329, 331, 360, 514n83

al-NaÕÕām, 33, 34, 147, 150, 281–3, 308, 325, 326, 327, 368, 370, 373, 391, 419, 447, 478n46, 482n46, 529n59 naÕÕār, 526n64 Nemesius of Emesa: On the Nature of Man, 297 Neoplatonists, 348, 350, 352 Nestorian Christians, 41, 301 ‘new’ style see badīʿ niªla (plural niªal ), 38, 113, 194, 532n30 nisba, 376, 378, 381, 435, 436, 441 nits, 84, 97 Noah, 289 Nonnus of Nisibis, 317, 510n41 ‘Apologetic Treatise’, 314 numbers, 450, 451 nusª, 249 nuskha, 187, 191 nu†q, 66, 434 obedience and disobedience, 406 obligation, 319 obliquity, 35, 364–87, 423 ‘Octagon of Justice’, 377 olives, 406 opposites, 56, 57, 83, 260, 279, 281–2 orality of texts, 45, 97 oration see khu†bas Ormsby, Eric: Theodicy in Islamic Thought. The Dispute over al- Ghazālī’s ‘Best of All Possible Worlds’, 525n57 Osti, Letizia: ‘The practical matters of culture’, 518n136 ostriches, 82, 399–400 Otto, Rudolf, 331–2 The Idea of the Holy, 322 ownership, 135–6, 164 Palestine, 406 Palladius, 377, 379 Commentary on Hippocrates’s Aphorisms, 381–3 papermaking, 4–5 Patristic theologians, 350 patronage, 224–6, 493n87 patrons, 133 Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād, 24, 29–30, 137, 201 biographical works, 485n7 al-Bīrūnī, 180 enigma of, 226–7 Óunayn b. Isªāq, 185 Ibn Qutayba, 221 al-JāªiÕ, 42, 100, 163 see also benefactors peacocks, 167–8 Pellat, Charles, 129–30, 209 Études sur l’histoire socio-culturelle de l’Islam (VIIe–XVe s.), 530n9 The Life and Works of JāªiÕ, 60 ‘Nouvel essai d’inventaire de l’oeuvre GˇāªiÕienne’, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 508n31

i ndex | 583 ‘Une risāla de GˇāªiÕ sur le “snobisme” et l’orgueil’, 246, 499n142 pens, 443–4, 449 Persians, 165–6, 453 phenomenology, 340 philosophy al-Fārābī on, 351 Greek, 117, 156 al-JāªiÕ on, 199–200 al-Kindī’s definition of, 200 Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik b. al-Zayyāt and, 230 al-Rāzī on, 355–8 physical appearance, 29 physiognomy, 210 piety, 414–16 pigeons, 49, 76, 80, 82, 125–6, 140–1, 464 pigs, 81, 97, 327 Plato, 179, 489n39 and assimilation, 353 Phaedo, 347 Theaetetus, 350–1 Timaeus, 292–3, 299 Pliny: Natural History, 273 Plotinus Enneads, 347, 352 and music, 350 notion of divinity, 506n18 poetry, 89, 93, 120–1, 140 aphoristic, 336 Arabic and Greek compared, 454 audiences, 227–8 benefits of, 449 defence of, 447–8 Ibn Qutayba on, 214, 242 muʿāra∂a, 155, 250–1, 252–4 munāÕara, 250–2 compared to prose, 166, 454–5 reproach in, 247–50 Sībawayhi on, 198 translation of, 455 poets, 88, 115 Pökel, Hans Peter: ‘Ernst und Scherz in der klassischen arabischen Literatur’, 497n119 Polemon, 49 police, 411–12 Pormann, Peter E. see Adamson, Peter and Pormann, Peter E. Porphyry, 13 poverty, 467 prayers, 74, 78, 80, 81, 85, 87, 90–1, 92, 94, 144, 195, 256–7 al-Qāsim, 286, 287 preconceptions, 512n60 Preston, John, 146 Proclus: Liber de Causis, 506n18 prolixity, 147, 257 property, 465, 467 Prophets, 289; see also Muªammad, Prophet prose: compared to poetry, 166, 454–5 Pseudo-Ammonius, 506n18 Pseudo-Aristotle, 507n27, 519n140 Pseudo-Dionysius, 350 Pseudo-Galen, 295

Pseudo-Plutarch, 302 Ptolemy (Ba†lyamūs), 457, 468 epistle to Ghallus, 489n39 Tetrabiblos, 382 punctuation, 11 punishment, 244, 322, 337, 366, 431–2, 499n142 puns, 191 Pythagoras, 345, 347, 348 Qaª†ānīs, 112, 147 qalb, 45 al-Qalqashandī, 475n22 al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm, 283–4, 305 and ‘Design Complex’, 317 five principles of Islam, 135–6 Kitāb al-Dalīl al-Kabīr see under The Major Book of the Proof The Major Book of the Proof, 284, 285–9, 332, 512n60, 514n85 al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā see under The Rebuttal of the Christians The Rebuttal of the Christians, 311, 312 and Theodore Abū Qurra, 311–12 al-Qāsim b. Umayya b. Abī al-Íalt, 449 qawl (plural aqwāl ), 73, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 125, 130, 142, 216, 243, 453, 493n85, 497nn121, 122, 499n139, 521n7 qayyim, 462 al-Qays, Imruʾ, 166, 449 Qays b. Zuhayr, 431 qibla, 262 qiyās, 169, 309, 329, 384, 401, 437, 532n30 qudra, 342 Qurʾān animals in, 13, 418 anthropomorphism in, 354 Arabic language in, 323–4, 325 and astronomy, 442–3 birds in, 134 The Cave, 25–8, 30–1, 55, 59, 95, 247 costliness of copy, 39 createdness of, 24 creation doctrine of, 293 debate on, 38, 114 ‘Design Complex’ in, 289–92 eloquence of, 514n83 as encyclopaedia, 268–9 on eunuchs, 393 exegesis of, 269 on God’s clemency, 265 and governance, 359 imitation of, 252–3, 327, 329, 331 ‘Inimitability of the Qurʾān’, 150 al-JāªiÕ’s treatise on, 115, 129 King Solomon narrative, 328, 330, 435, 464 knowledge in, 166 on ‘living’, 9–10 meaning in, 384

meaning of, 148 message of, 122 miraculous nature of, 325 model of ‘compositional aggregations’, 359 al-Mutawakkil’s banning of debate on, 5, 38, 55, 140 origin of, 150 public debate on, 30 al-Qāsim’s use of, 288–9 reading of, 262–5 untranslatability of, 457 verses referred to: Baqara 2: 1-2, 461; Baqara 2: 22, 290; Baqara 2: 71, 482; Baqara 2: 129, 291; Baqara 2: 151, 291; Baqara 2: 164, 290; Baqara 2: 255, 290; Āl Imrān 3: 113, 291; Āl Imrān 3: 190–1, 290; Nisāʾ 4: 117–20, 393; Anʿām 6: 9, 441; Anʿām 6: 38, 461; Anʿām 6: 73, 290; Anʿām 6: 75–9: 290; Anʿām 6: 76–9: 289; Anʿām 6: 164, 481n39; Aʿrāf 7: 54–8, 290; Aʿrāf 7: 144, 322; Yūnus 10: 5, 442; Yūnus 10: 31, 291; Hūd 11: 7, 290; Naªl 16: 8, 142; Naªl 16: 40, 290; Naªl 16: 66, 461; Isrāʾ 17: 14, 448; Isrāʾ 17: 15, 481n39; Kahf 18: 7, 290; Kahf 18: 57, 290; Kahf 18: 79, 247; Kahf 18: 109, 292; Maryam 19: 73, 291; Anbiyāʾ 21: 16, 290; Anbiyāʾ 21: 63, 435; Muʾmimūn 23: 14, 437; Nūr 24: 40, 486n12; Nūr 24: 43–4, 290; Nūr 24: 44, 461; Naml 27: 16, 328, 435; Naml 27: 20–6, 134; Naml 27: 21, 331; Naml 27: 22–5, 328; Naml 27: 29, 464; Naml 27: 39, 134; ʿAnkabūt 29: 46, 460; ʿAnkabūt 29: 64, 271; Rūm 30: 50, 505n10; Luqmān 31: 20, 520n2, 527n74; Luqmān 31: 27, 526n66; Aªzāb 33: 34, 291; Sabaʾ 34: 12, 134; Sabaʾ 34: 14, 330; Fā†ir 35: 11, 565n11; Fā†ir 35: 18, 481n39; Íād 38: 20, 495n101; Íād 38: 35–8, 328; Zumar 39: 7, 481n39; Ghāfir 40: 35, 291; Ghāfir 40: 44, 291; Ghāfir 40: 56, 291; Fu‚‚ilat 41: 40, 291; Fu‚‚ilat 41: 53, 290; Shūrā 42: 11, 505n5; Dukhān 44: 33, 290; Jāthiya 45: 1–10, 291; Qāf 50: 2–8, 291; Dhāriyāt 51: 20–1, 290; Raªmān 55: 1-7, 291; Raªmān 55; 1–5, 442; Qalam 68: 1, 443; Maʿārij 70: 24–5, 522n15; Qiyāma 75: 36, 481n24; ʿAbasa 80: 13–15, 448; Infi†ār 82: 11–12, 448; Inshiqāq 84: 7–8, 448; Ghāshiya 88: 17–20, 505n7; Tīn 95: 1, 526n61 Qus†ā b. Lūqā, 302

584 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s Qutbuddin, T, 494n96 qūwa, 186, 190, 455, 488n35 radd, 532n30 Rāfi∂a, 115, 118, 139, 153 Rāfi∂ī, 415 raªma, 265, 525n57 raʾy, 122, 140, 205, 234, 365, 460, 463, 517n124 al-Rayªānī, ʿAlī b. ʿUbayda: Bejewelled Statements and Pearls of Wisdom (Jawāhir al-Kilam wa-Farāʾid al-Óikam), 198–9, 200, 218, 468 al-Rāzī, Fakhr al-Dīn, 493n86 al-Rāzī, Muªammad b. Zakarīyā (Rhazes), 14, 354–8 al-Bīrūnī’s index of books, 179–83 On the Divine Science, 181 The Philosophical Lifestyle (al-Sīra al-Falsafīya), 181, 355–8, 516nn110, 112 readers, 226, 446 ideal, 58, 59 as writers, 258 reading al-JāªiÕ’s patrons, 42 practice of, 40, 45, 257 of signs, 383 see also literacy reference works, 71; see also encyclopaedias Reinhart, A. Kevin: Before Revelation: The Boundaries of Muslim Moral Thought, 319–20 religion ideal and reality of, 336 al-JāªiÕ: The Treatise on the Idols (Kitāb al-A‚nām), 113 numinosity of, 331–2 Theodore Abū Qurra on, 306 The Treatise on the Idols, 113 see also Christians; Islam; Manichaeans/Manichaeism; Muslims; Zoroastrians representation, 12, 118, 138, 149, 153, 167, 222, 252, 253, 421; see also ªikāya repetition, 147 reproach, 247–50; see also ʿitāb reputation, 177–8 Rescher, Oskar: Exzerpte und Übersetzungen, 475n13 ‘reversion’ topos, 73 Rhazes see al-Rāzī, Muªammad b. Zakarīyā rība, 414, 415 ring-composition, 157, 338, 433 risāla, 98, 100–2, 193–201, 213, 221–2, 250, 332, 476n29, 494n90; ; see also epistles; letters riwāya (plural riwāyāt), 193, 242 al-Riyāshī, Muªammad b. Yasīr, 37, 447, 463, 484n82, 533nn38, 41 roosters, 111, 146, 396–7

Dog and Rooster debate, 13, 38, 76, 97, 108, 111, 129, 143, 145, 146, 246, 251, 303, 391, 396–7, 408, 412, 419–20 Rosenberg, Daniel: ‘Early modern information overload’, 504n177 Rosenthal, Franz, 259, 363 ‘On the knowledge of Plato’s philosophy in the Islamic world, with addenda’, 129 Rosenthal, K. W. and E. K. see Yale University rubūbīya, 263 rūª, 206, 250, 435, 524n49 Sabaʾ, Queen of, 134, 464 sabab (plural asbāb), 47, 66, 68, 92, 111, 144, 204, 205, 260, 287, 288, 402, 403, 405, 411, 497n122 Íabiʾans, 41, 46 sabuʿ (plural sibāʿ), 369, 433 ‚āªib, 62, 117, 146, 204, 238, 246, 258, 281, 301, 366, 479n61, 532n32 ‚aªīfa (plural ‚uªuf ), 33, 461, 464 Sahl b. Hārūn, 337 Saʿīd b. ʿAbd al-Raªmān, 432 Saʿīd b. Wahb, 127–8 Sajʿ, 285, 335–6 sakhīf, 304 ‚alāª, 462, 502n162, 520n3 Sallām al-Abrash, 361 Sallām al-Tarjumān, 23, 28 Salmān b. Rabīʿa, 368, 373–4 samāʿ, 92, 98, 117, 152, 216, 372, 447 Samarra, 23 Sánchez, Ignacio, 479n61, 481n25 sand-grouse, 97 Sanskrit, 242 ‚arfa, 327, 330, 513n80 Sarjīs, 190 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 29 al-Sāsī, Muªammad, 16 satans, 328, 330 al-Sayyid al-Óimyarī see Ibn Muªammad scepticism, 471n18 Schoeler, Gregor, 103 The Genesis of Literature in Islam: From the Aural to the Read, 17, 477n39 scholars, 140–1, 212 and books, 39, 41, 103, 462, 463 flourishing of, 208 and patronage, 224–6 scorpions, 84, 97 scripts, 65, 448 senses, 450 Sergius of Reshʿayna, 511n53 sexual desire, 46–8 Sezgin, Fuat, 474n52 al-Shāfiʿī: Risala, 98, 217, 319, 475n22, 483n72, 494n97 shahāda, 202, 262, 494n97 shāhid, 87 al-Shammākh b. ¤irār, 400

El Shamsy, Ahmed, 302 sharʿ, 285 sharª, 191, 282, 300 Sharīʿa law, 212, 216, 264 Sharlett, Jocelyn, 496n106 shayʾ, 142, 361, 366, 371, 487n20 Sheba see Sabaʾ sheep, 85, 97 Sheldon-Williams, I. P., 317 Shīʿa, 114, 118, 138–9, 153, 269, 406; see also Ghāliya; Rāfi∂a; Zaydīya Shihadeh, Ayman: ‘From al- Ghazālī to al-Rāzī’, 493n86 Shiʿites, 434 shiʿr, 242, 257, 452 Shuʿba b. al-Óajjāj, 243 shuhba, 95, 111, 129, 144, 157, 259, 329, 441, 480n5, 501n160 shukr, 320, 529n97 shukr al-niʿma, 321, 332 Shuʿūbīya controversy, 458 Sībawayhi Kitāb, 39, 103, 197–8, 201, 490n49 ‘The Question of the Hornet’, 454 Risāla, 197–201, 490n49 Sibelius, Jean, 271 ‚ifa, 204, 289, 330, 459 signs animals as, 384–5 cataloguing, 383 probative, 435 of wisdom, 437–8 see also āya, dalāʾil, dalāla, dalīl, idlāl, istidlāl ‚ila, 73, 75, 225 Simʿ, 126, 142 sima, 181 Sīmā the Turk, 25 ‚ināʿa, 33, 378 Sinān b. Thābit b. Qurra, 485n7 ‚inf (plural a‚nāf ), 66, 97, 98, 259, 261, 376, 381, 520n147 singers, 402, 415 Sinnimār al-Rūmī, 432 sīra (plural siyar), 156, 204, 369, 432 siyāsa, 368 slavery, 14 slaves, 89, 239–41, 403, 409, 447 smiling, 451 snakes, 79, 81, 83, 90, 94, 97, 115, 158–9 social mobility, 40–1 social networking, 533n37 society, 40–1 Socrates, 181, 347, 355–6 Solomon, (Sulaymān), King, 28, 134, 141, 328, 330, 435, 464 Sorabji, Richard Animal Minds and Human Morals, 14 Matter, Space and Motion, 510n44 Soritic paradox, 149 Souami, Lakhdar: Le cadi et la mouche, 60–1

i ndex | 585 soul, 177, 347–57 sound, 450 sparrows, 91 speaking ill, 147 speculation, 33, 170 speech, 66, 242, 257, 367–8, 373, 434 God’s, 324–6, 369 Ibn Qutayba on, 220 public, 177, 178 ‘speech–nature insight’, 321–2 see also language spiders, 85, 159 stars, 91 stationers, 39–40, 61, 132 Stephanus, 377, 380 Stetkevych, Suzanne P.: The Poetics of Legitimacy, 496n106 Stewart, D. 18, 137, 474n6 stipends, 495n105 Stoics, 350 Stott, Rebecca: Darwin’s Ghosts, 8 Sufis, 415 Íufrīya, 118, 138 Sufyān b. ʿUyayna, 243 Íuªār al-ʿAbdī, 367, 372 sukhf, 369, 445 Sulaymān, King see Solomon, (Sulaymān), King Suleiman, Yasir: ‘Sībawayhi’s “parts of speech”’, 490n49 Sunna, 36, 117, 152, 155, 176, 206–13, 216, 269, 326–7, 356 Sunnīs/Sunnism, 139, 153, 176, 212, 286, 371, 493n88, 499n131 school of law, 24 see also ¤irārīya; ʿUthmānīya ‚ūra (plural ‚uwar), 15, 25, 26, 28, 48, 65, 114, 327, 450, 531n20 Swain, Simon, 482n53 syngramma, 73–4, 102 Syriac, 185, 186, 187–8, 190 Taʾabba†a Sharran, 449 taʿālīq, 183 †abʿ, 46, 125, 168, 282 al-˝abari, Muªammad b. Jarir, 30, 269 tabayyun, 403, 404 †abīʿa (plural †abāʾiʿ), 65, 91, 125, 168, 207, 292, 351, 365, 401, 410, 411, 413, 423, 447, 455, 532n30 †abīb, 345 tabyīn, 319 ta∂ādd, 281 ta∂āʿīf, 73, 79, 87, 91, 476n28 tadbīr (plural tadābīr), 43, 62, 206, 217, 234, 262, 264, 278, 282, 295, 299, 304, 308, 309, 310, 329, 334, 359, 368, 376, 403, 408, 413, 414, 517n128 tafa∂∂ul, 526n59 tafaqquh, 123 taf∂īl, 258, 532n30 taf‚īl, 93, 216, 381 tafsīr, 88, 91, 94, 114, 122, 250, 376, 402, 477n34

Taghlib Wāʾil, 119 taªrīf, 312 taªrīm al-makāsib, 135, 415 taª‚īl, 242, 355, 401 tajriba, 117, 121, 199, 202, 249, 384, 446, 512n60 tajwīr, 401, 532n30 takāfuʾ al-adilla, 471n18 takalluf, 62, 78, 81 takhallu‚, 163, 243 taklīf, 6, 55, 279, 420, 438, 443, 520n3, 525n57 ˝alibids, 134 taʾlīf, 62, 91, 257, 264, 280, 295, 319, 325, 331, 333–4, 343–4, 348, 357, 359, 360, 362, 376, 381, 514n88, 517n116 taʿlīm, 378, 519n142 talkhī‚, 191 tamthīl, 403, 407, 423, 527n67 tamyīz, 215, 216, 242, 355, 401, 403, 404 tanaqqu‚, 147 tanbīh, 123, 246 tanjīm, 455 al-Tanūkhī: Deliverance from Evil (al-Faraj baʿd al-Shidda), 233 tanzīh, 324, 332, 340 taqarrub, 205, 354, 364, 516n110 taqīya, 205, 212, 461–2 ˝arafa, 149, 394 taʿrīf, 204, 378, 461 tarkīb, 264, 343, 349, 357 tartīb, 95, 301 tashabbuh, 319, 350, 351, 352, 353 tashbīh, 24, 353, 360, 413, 478n45, 532n30 ta‚ªīh al-akhbār, 216, 532n30 ta‚nīf, 98–101, 271, 479n61 tathabbut, 44, 111, 244, 259, 501n160 tawaqquf, 122, 157, 259, 365, 403, 471n18, 502n160, 530n6 tawassuʿ, 400 tawªīd, 24, 292, 324, 330, 340, 353, 455, 532n30 taʾwīl, 331, 406, 434, 437, 456, 462, 526n26 taxonomy, 158–9, 438 teachers, 41 tears, 451 technology, 166 texts and contexts, 13–14, 480n4 theodicy, 149 Theodore Abū Qurra: The Homily Concerning the Existence of the Creator and the Correct Religion (al-Maymar fī Wujūd al-Khāliq wa-al-Dīn al-Qawīm), 304–6, 311–12, 316, 317, 511n56 Theodoret of Cyrus: De divina providentia, 301 theology, 30, 31, 150, 455–6 The Theology of Aristotle, 347, 352, 362, 434, 506n18 Thomas, Keith: Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800, 530nn7, 9

The Thousand and One Nights, 241 Thumāma b. Ashras, 279 †ibāʿ, 112, 366 ticks, 85, 89, 97 tilāwa, 291 Tlili, Sarra: Animals in the Qurʾān, 13 Toorawa, Shawkat, 17, 523n37 Torah, 312 Touati, Houari L’armoire à sagesse. Bibliothèques et collections en Islam, 493n87 ‘La dédicace des livres dans l’Islam médiéval’, 493n87, 495nn105, 106, 496n108, 533n37 trade, 164 translation, 10–12, 166, 179, 186–7, 188, 189–91, 455 translators, 382, 455 treaties, 450 treatises, 252; see also under al-JāªiÕ triviality, 123, 145, 146, 149–50, 246, 247 truth, 257–8 †ūmār, 367 ʿUbyad Allāh b. Yaªyā b. Khāqān, 32, 237 Uªud, Battle of, 328–9 ʿUmar b. al-Kha††āb, Caliph, 139, 246, 337–8, 462 ʿUmar b. Farrukhān, 382 Umayya b. Abī al-Íalt, 399, 449 Umayyads, 133, 134 Umm Jaʿfar, 458 unbelief, 31 universalism, 313–15, 316–17 universe: divisions of, 437 ʿUrwa b. Udhayna, 431 al-ʿUtbī, 446–7 ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān, 398 ʿUthmān b. al-Óakam, 127 ʿUthmānīya, 118, 138, 139, 153 ʿUyūn al-Sūd, Muªammad Basil, 16 van Berkel, Maiake see Berkel, Maiake van van Ess, Josef see Ess, Josef van van Gelder, G. J. see Gelder, Geert Jan van Vasalou, Sophia: ‘Miraculous eloquence’, 513n79, 514n83 vision, 531n15 vultures, 80, 97 wa∂ʿ, 123, 186, 205, 414 al-waʿd wa-al-waʿīd, 130, 286, 532n30 wa∂aʿa, 186, 187, 368, 376 wā∂iʿ, 203, 204, 238, 378, 532n32 waªdānīya, 309 waªy, 369, 456 walī (plural alwliyāʾ ), 119, 140, 153, 154, 225, al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik, Caliph, 338 al-Walīd b. Yazīd, Caliph, 449 waraq, 44, 73

586 | a l-jĀ h. i z. : i n prai s e o f b o o k s warrāq, 39, 61, 132, 229, 234, 472n32 Wā‚il b. ʿA†āʾ, 217, 322, 495n102 wa‚īya (plural wa‚āyā), 149, 198 watchfulness, 260 water, 83 al-Wāthiq, Caliph death, 514n82 dream of Aristotle, 27–8, 55 implementation of Miªna, 23–5 ocular defect, 29 wealth, 467–8 Webb, Peter: ‘“Foreign books” in Arabic literature: discourses on books, knowledge and ethnicity in the writings of al-GˇāªiÕ’, 484n79 well-being, 403 Wensinck, A. J.: ‘Khu†ba’, 494n97 White, Hayden: ‘The context in the text: method and ideology in intellectual history’, 480n4 wine, 127, 142, 472n27 wirātha, 139, 149 wisdom, 435, 437–8 wishes, 84, 144–5 Wisnovsky, Robert: Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context, 510n41

wolves, 142, 399 women, 68 al-JāªiÕ on, 112, 132, 135 as judges, 132 men’s desire for, 46–7, 48 names for, 409 in the Qurʾān, 329 Wren, Matthew, 146 writers, 41 and composition, 334 task of, 94–5 vision of, 58 see also authors writing benefits of, 162, 164–6, 442–3, 448–59 and empire, 451 as the preserve of God, 45 reasons for, 365, 370 superiority of, 443 Yaªyā al-Naªwī see John Philoponus Yaªyā ( Yuªannā) b. al-Bi†rīq, 38, 382 Yaªyā b. al-Qa††ān, 243 Yaªyā b. Maʿīn, 178 Yaªyā b. Man‚ūr al-Dhuhlī, 431

Yaʾjūj wa-Maʾjūj, 23, 27, 29 Yale University: K. W. and E. K. Rosenthal Memorial Lecture in Ancient and Medieval Near Eastern Civilization, Third (April, 2008), 472n36 Yāqūt: Dictionary of Literati (Muʿjam al-Udabāʾ), 234–5 Yazīd b. al-Óakam, 115 Yazīd b. ʿAmr al-Óanafī, 481n38 Yūnus b. Óabīb the Grammarian, 448, 493n82, 531n19 Yūsuf al-Samtī, 368, 373–4 al-Zamakhsharī, 522n11 Zaman, Muªammad Qasim: Religion and Politics under the Early ʿAbbāsids, 140 Zayd b. Aslam, 406 Zaydism, 304–5 Zaydīya, 114–15, 139 al-Zayyāt see Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt zīr, 346, 347, 349 Ziyād b. Abī-hi, 432 zodiac, 91, 409 Zoroastrians, 84 Zufar b. al-Óārith, 119–20