The Reader in al-Jahiz: The Epistolary Rhetoric of an Arabic Prose Master 9780748692750

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The Reader in al-Ja¯h· iz·

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

The Reader in al-Ja-h.iz. The Epistolary Rhetoric of an Arabic Prose Master

Thomas Hefter

© Thomas Hefter, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f ) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ 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 9274 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9275 0 (webready PDF) The right of Thomas Hefter 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

Acknowledgements vi Introduction

1

1 The Addressee and the Occasion of Writing

34

2 Epistolary Confrontations and Dialectics of Parody

77

3 Undisclosed Origins and Homelands

121

4 Faulting Misers in the Introduction to Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ 173 5 Passive Addressee and Critical Reader in the Abū al-ʿĀ‚/Ibn  al-Tawʾam Debate

214

Conclusion

250

Bibliography 263 Index 272

Acknowledgements

T

his book project has benefited from the help, generosity, wisdom and patience of many people during the various stages of its conception and composition. During the earlier stages, I had the invaluable guidance and encouragement of faculty and students in NELC and other departments, along with Regenstein Library and the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Special thanks are due to my advisor Tahera Qutbuddin, as well as to Wadad al-Qadi and Joshua Scodel, who also served on my dissertation committee. All three contributed with a great deal of insightful advice throughout the years of researching and writing the earlier version, and I cannot imagine how I could have even begun this project without their combined expertise and gentle insistence on meeting exacting standards. I must also acknowledge the contributions of many others, including Hayrettin Yügesoy, Tahani Higgins, Robert Dankoff and Mustapha Kamal, in whose class I first developed an interest in al-JāªiÕ. I write in grateful memory of Farouk Mustafa, who taught me a great deal and has been much missed since his passing earlier this year. I would also like to thank the many faculty members, staff and students at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics and the College of International Studies at the University of Oklahoma for support, practical advice and encouragement during the final stages of writing and preparing for publication. I am particularly grateful to Michel Lantelme, Shawn Gralla, Pamela Genova and my colleagues in the Arabic Section for many considerations while this project was entering its later stages. I would also like to thank the Research Council for providing very generous assistance toward the writing of this monograph in the form of travel funds and Junior Faculty Fellowships during the summers of 2009 and 2012 and the College vi

a ck nowledg ements | vii of International Studies which kindly provided me with summer fellowships in 2010 and 2011. I also owe my sincerest thanks to my departments, the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of International Studies for approving a release from teaching and service during the Fall semester of 2012 for work on this project. I greatly appreciate the consideration of everyone at Edinburgh University Press who has assisted in the completion and production of this book for their very efficient and professional attention to the project, including Nicola Ramsey, Jenny Peebles, Rebecca Mackenzie and Eddie Clark. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the series editors, Wen-chin Ouyang and Julia Bray, who together have provided a remarkable combination of promptness, perceptive comments and meticulous attention to detail. They have helped me improve the flow and clarity of this book in highly important ways and saved me from a rather embarrassing number of errors. There are many others to whom I am grateful for support and friendship while working on this project, including my colleagues and students, far too numerous to mention, at the American University in Cairo and the College of William and Mary, especially John Eisele who has been a tremendous help in several ways over the years. I thank J. Robert Parks for many favours and everyone at Joe’s. Above all, I am thankful to my family.

Introduction

T

he theologian and polymath ʿAmr b. Baªr al-JāªiÕ (c. 160–255/776– 869) has held an almost unchallenged place among the foremost early Arabic prose writers from his own time until the present day. His texts – essays, polemics and anthologies covering diverse religious, social and scientific topics, some serious, others brimming with playful irony – continue to fascinate readers of all ideological persuasions in the Arabic-speaking world and far beyond. One reason that his name has remained almost synonymous with eloquence and rhetorical inventiveness, despite the difficulties that many of his works present, is surely his genius for crafting captivating introductions that deftly guide readers to the crux of what will be said in a given book or essay. Al-JāªiÕ has a variety of devices with which to commence a text, but the most common by far is to frame an essay or anthology as a letter to an anonymous addressee. The latter is an individual (in just one case a group) who the author claims has requested that he write on a given topic or has somehow provoked him into doing so. A grasp of the addressee’s role as a rhetorical device is often crucial to comprehending al-JāªiÕ’s intentions in a given text and to understanding his complex relations with his contemporary audience. Epistolary prefaces are a convention of essay writing in many literary traditions, as they are, indeed, in later Arabic prose, but al-JāªiÕ’s exchanges with his addressees are remarkably varied and inventive. One text that deals with the varieties of intoxicating beverages and their status in Muslim law begins with a wildly jumbled string of serious and frivolous questions from an addressee, who alternately praises and damns the assorted Near Eastern brews known collectively as ‘nabīdh’. The addressee’s inquiry is so disorderly that it begins to seem as though he may have been indulging in such drinks prior 1

2  |  the reader i n a l - j Ā h. iz. to writing. In another letter involving the same question, al-JāªiÕ sounds reckless and perhaps even drunk himself as he comically reproves a different addressee for showing insufficient enthusiasm for nabīdh. In both of these cases, the reader is left to sift through the ironies and determine what exactly are the legitimate considerations for the debate over prohibited beverages that divided Muslim thinkers of the time. Several of our author’s treatises on equally sensitive topics related to the merits of the various ethnicities and their homelands begin with the citation of an anonymous individual, whose own origins cannot be discerned from his questions or comments. This ambiguity leaves the reader to consider what the addressee’s racial or regional bias may be. One of al-JāªiÕ’s best-known works opens with a request for anecdotes on the strange behaviour of the stingy from an individual who is plainly a miser himself and soon goes on to express dismay at how misers can be unaware of a fault in themselves and readily recognise it in others.1 Some of the addressees’ petitions are strangely misguided and some dazzle us with an array of questions, while others are deceptively simple. In his response, al-JāªiÕ may humour an addressee without commenting, or confront him with exaggerated belligerence or embark on a painstaking clarification of the issues. Every approach has its particular effect on the reader’s expectations for the text, as he seeks to integrate his own perspective on the topic being discussed into the epistolary dialogue on which he is, as it were, ‘eavesdropping’. The numerous ways in which al-JāªiÕ uses his addressees will be better understood as we examine the way they function in a variety of his works in the light of their content, their tone and the rich assortment of discourses that made up the world of Arabic prose during early ʿAbbāsid times. To assert, as I will do in this book, that the addressee we meet in the text functions as a rhetorical device aimed at a broader audience is not to assume that he is a mere fiction in every case. Some of the questions that al-JāªiÕ claims to have received from his addressees, indeed, have a stylised absurdity about them that leaves little doubt that they are – at least in their present form – the author’s own creation. However, in a number of other texts, as we shall see, the addressee’s request probably does stem from a correspondence with a real friend or literary patron. Yet, even in this latter case, al-JāªiÕ restates what the addressee is supposed to have said in a highly artificial matter and shapes his quotations of the request in accord with his rhetorical

i ntroducti on | 3 concerns regarding a broader readership. My purpose in this book is to demonstrate a number of ways in which al-JāªiÕ uses his epistolary dialogue with his addressee to influence the reading experience of his expected audience. I also seek to illustrate how a working grasp of the dynamics of the author’s epistolary rhetoric can help us unravel the rhetorical threads of his texts and sharpen our understanding of his writings today. Al-JāªiÕ wrote in an astonishing number of difficult-to-categorise literary forms and not all of them are my concern in this study: some lack a secondperson addressee altogether, while others develop an epistolary conversation that flows between topics as do genuine personal letters. In epistolary texts devoted to a single topic of the sort that will be discussed in this study, the presence of the anonymous addressee on the page is crafted and circumscribed in such a way that the reader has little choice but to compare the assumptions, conceptions and attitude that he brings to a text on the topic in question with those of the addressee. Everything we learn about the addressee, when al-JāªiÕ cites his statements and questions or reports his actions, is closely linked to the subject matter of the text we encounter him in. In the addressee as presented to us on the page we find the suggestion of a manner of reading – what Bakhtin would call an ‘orientation toward the object of the work’. His presence prompts the reader to examine his own motives and preconceptions as he begins to read, and his importance ­sometimes diminishes rapidly after the opening pages. Many scholars have remarked on the conspicuous presence of the addressee in al-JāªiÕ’s texts, but the literary question of the addressee’s role has never been made the focus of an entire study. Perhaps, this is in part because difficult, even unsolvable questions concerning the development of literary conventions and the historical circumstances surrounding the composition of each work have tended to obscure the important rhetorical role the epistolary dialogue plays in this author’s writings. Explanations for the addressee’s presence are often forestalled at the question, already alluded to, of whether he is a mere fiction – as is clearly the case with addressees in many literary traditions, including Arabic essays of later centuries – or an actual correspondent of al-JāªiÕ. In the latter case, the ‘addressee’ is likely to have been one of the patrons to whom he is said to have presented many of his works in the hope of receiving monetary reward. The extraordinarily varied

4  |  the reader i n a l - j Ā h. iz. ways in which al-JāªiÕ portrays his addressees and his own relationships with them have meant that no one answer to this question can prove adequate. Perhaps because of these variations, the lack of an answer to this historical question has hitherto been an obstacle to systematic literary exploration of the addressee’s role. To understand the unique literary directions which the epistolary frame takes in al-JāªiÕ’s texts, we must first turn to the evidence we have for the kind of support he received from patrons and of the conventional roles of epistolary addressees in earlier prose writings in Arabic literature and the surrounding traditions from which it borrowed. We have long known from a number of sources that al-JāªiÕ earned much of his living from the generosity of prominent officials in the ʿAbbāsid state, who supported him during the latter, more literarily productive decades of his life, and a brief account of his life is necessary for an appreciation of how thoroughly he depended on them for his livelihood. After rising from his poor origins in Basra, in southern Iraq, and studying with the acclaimed linguists of the city, he had been drawn into the company of the Muʿtazila, a school of rationalist Muslim theology.2 When some of his early writings on the office of the Muslim caliph or ‘imām’ pleased the Caliph al-Maʾmūn (r. 198–218/813–33), he travelled to the ʿAbbāsid capital in Baghdad and then to Samarra, where it was later moved. For a time, he seems to have enjoyed a close relationship with the state, particularly after al-Maʾmūn instituted the unpopular ‘inquisition’ (miªna), compelling judges and scholars to publicly declare that the Qurʾān was created in time rather than co-eternal with God, a point on which the caliph agreed with the Muʿtazilī doctrine. Al-JāªiÕ was supported by a number of state officials for writing in defence of this and other issues related to ʿAbbāsid legitimacy, as well as for a rich variety of entertaining and informative texts that he presented to them. An often-quoted anecdote found in Ibn al-Nadīm’s (d. 385/995) Fihrist has al-JāªiÕ confiding that he received the sum of five thousand dīnārs from different ʿAbbāsid officials for each of three of his major works, Kitāb al-Óayawān (The Book of Animals), al-Bayān wa-al-tabyīn (Elucidation and Exposition) and the now lost K. al-Zarʿ wa-al-nakhl (On Green Crops and Date Palms). The writer describes this remuneration to his friend as ‘a plantation that requires neither boundaries nor manuring’. Al-JāªiÕ himself reports

i ntroducti on | 5 the information on his patrons to the narrator of the anecdote, who had guessed that the former’s wealth came from a more literal sort of plantation – a fact which suggests that these payments were not well-known, even to his own acquaintances.3 Of the three books mentioned, the prefaces of the two that are extant could not differ more: in K. al-Óayawān the addressee is given a very prominent role as a harsh critic of al-JāªiÕ’s writings from whom he comically attempts to defend himself, while al-Bayān wa-al-tabyīn begins with the more impersonal convention of the ªamdillah (praise be to God) formula and contains only scattered instances of the second person with no restatement of questions or comments from the addressee.4 On another occasion, the vizier Ibn al-Zayyāt (d. 233/847), the purported patron of K. al-Óayawān, is reported to have given al-JāªiÕ a gift of actual land.5 Al-JāªiÕ also makes quite explicit mention of his hope for reward – for which he promises to show appropriate gratitude – in a number of texts, notably in short, personal letters to two of his patrons, the chief judge Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād (d. 240/854) and his son Muªammad (d. 240/854), which were written in part to encourage them to read – and apparently to help circulate – al-JāªiÕ’s other works and to reward their author with a display of their characteristic generosity. Our author also mentions having other books of his that the chief judge might find profitable reading when his time permits, showing that he, at least sometimes, composed works prior to securing patrons for them, rather than simply writing to order.6 When the caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 232–47/847–61) rescinded the miªna and began to identify himself with proto-Sunnī Traditionists who held the Qurʾān was the eternally uncreated speech of God, al-JāªiÕ initially feared for his safety and returned to Basra, but it was not long before he was sufficiently restored to favour to receive support from the ʿAbbāsid state. In a letter to al-JāªiÕ reported by Yāqū† (d. 626/1229), the secretary al-Fatª b. Khāqān (d. 247/861) informs him of a gift he is to receive from the caliph for writing K. al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā (The Response to the Christians), which he is urged to complete quickly, and of a monthly stipend to be paid.7 It appears that al-JāªiÕ’s astute assessment of these officials’ widely differing views and personalities – and of the image the state wished to see projected in writing during various periods – allowed him to remain alive and prosperous until his death in Basra in 255/868 or 9.

6  |  the reader i n a l - j Ā h. iz. The courtly patronage of prose works was probably quite a recent phenomenon in al-JāªiÕ’s day and certainly not subject to the sort of timehonoured traditions that governed relations between Arabic panegyric poets and their benefactors. Too many of the works of writers who played an important role in the early development of Arabic prose have been lost to allow us to trace the history of prose forms and identify which writers’ literary techniques al-JāªiÕ may have appropriated. From the great variety of ways in which al-JāªiÕ approaches the addressees of the anthologies and monographs that I will be discussing throughout this book, we can safely assume that there was no conventional manner in which a prose author was expected to praise or acknowledge his patrons within the dedicated text. Of course, an author had to offer some expression of gratitude for a monetary gift received or expected, but there were alternatives to doing so within the text itself. The existence of personal letters introducing texts written for broader circulation, such as those to Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād and his son mentioned above, shows that, where needed, a separate note could be directed to the patron in acknowledgement of his anticipated generosity. Moreover, it is quite possible to imagine authors in al-JāªiÕ’s day conveying their appreciations to a patron in person, whether in private or at gatherings hosted by the latter. No set convention, then, seems to have existed for acknowledging the patron in the preface of a book that is dedicated to him, and the addressees we find in al-JāªiÕ’s monothematic works are almost never named within the text. However, this should not lead us to assume that there is never a connection between the anonymous addressee presented to the broader readership in the text and a patron or other real correspondent of our author. When we examine each text, in certain cases it does seem probable that al-JāªiÕ is indeed writing to a specific person, even while being mindful of the perspective of the broader readership that he hopes his text will eventually acquire. Al-JāªiÕ’s attention to the outside reader’s perspective is evident, first of all, from the almost total absence, in his monothematic works, of the sort of obscurities that naturally occur in real correspondences between individuals who know each other well, unless the author expects his letter to be read by others.8 Allusions to specific events in the life of the addressee and to acquaintances he shares with al-JāªiÕ are rare in the sort of epistolary monographs I will discuss in this book, although they are to be found in his polythematic

i ntroducti on | 7 personal letters. Most tellingly of all, the request from the addressee’s letter is often restated at great length in a manner that would hardly have been necessary if only the addressee were meant to read it. Reaching a broader audience is clearly important to al-JāªiÕ – perhaps more so than communicating with the individual patron – even in those cases where it appears likely that he does exist. If the patron is to be addressed in the text, the manner in which this is done is shaped with a view toward its effect on the larger audience. Some of the texts we have of al-JāªiÕ’s works are accompanied in the manuscripts by titles naming an alleged recipient, and, while we may not be historically certain, it is by no means impossible that these titles do come from well-informed sources. Al-JāªiÕ’s relationships with his various patrons and supporters in the ʿAbbāsid court seem to have varied greatly, but his literary resourcefulness allowed him to craft the prefaces of some of his texts to fit both his immediate need to please the patron and his rhetorical purposes with regard to a broader readership. R. ilā al-Fatª b. Khāqān fī manāqib al-Turk wa-ʿammat jund al-khilāfa (‘Letter to al-Fatª b. Khāqān on the Merits of the Turks and of All the Caliphate’s Troops’), addressed to the same ʿAbbāsid secretary who assured al-JāªiÕ of reward for his Response to the Christians, is at once a celebration of the military virtues of the addressee’s own ethnic group and a plea for harmony and mutual respect among the Muslim forces. The letter begins with a prayer for divine support of the addressee, tinged with an air of moral fervour rather unusual in al-JāªiÕ’s texts.9 This is followed by praise of the secretary’s scrupulous efforts to serve and protect the caliphal state. As we shall see in Chapter 3, the atmosphere of piety and loyalty to the Commander of the Faithful in which the encomium is couched gently puts the reader in a frame of mind to deal with the sensitive and dangerous issue of ethnic rivalries within the ʿAbbāsid army. A similar dignity attends the addressee in R. fī al-Maʿāsh wa-al-maʿād aw al-akhlāq al-maªmūda wa-al-madhmūma (‘On This Life and the Hereafter or Praiseworthy and Blameworthy Character’), a short manual of advice and moral instruction that – so the title that appears in one manuscript claims – was written to Muªammad b. Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād, the son of the chief judge, who was later to succeed his father. As we shall see in Chapter 1, al-JāªiÕ opens this text with glowing praise of the maturity and good

8  |  the reader i n a l - j Ā h. iz. character he says he has been secretly observing in the addressee since the latter’s youth. An air of admiration and of aspiration to moral excellence is thus established before the author even announces his intention of providing him with a book of conduct.10 For the reader, as much as for Muªammad himself, this sort of introduction goes a long way toward dispelling the tone of confrontation or moral superiority that advice literature can all too easily assume. With other high-ranking officials, it seems – to judge by the personal letters he wrote to them – that al-JāªiÕ enjoyed a much more free and familiar relationship. With Ibn al-Zayyāt, who according to the above-mentioned report of Ibn al-Nadīm was the patron of his longest work, K. al-Óayawān, he appears to act the part of the boon companion (nadīm) and, at times, nearly that of a court jester with his playful ribbing and frantic defensiveness.11 In the prolix introduction to K. al-Óayawān, al-JāªiÕ claims that the addressee (anonymous in the text itself) has objected to most of his earlier works (which al-JāªiÕ lists and defends) and even finds fault with writing in general and especially when it concerns itself with trivial subjects such as animals. With comic pathos and boundless irony, al-JāªiÕ pretends that it is for the sake of this unfortunate critic that he is writing his seven-volume magnum opus on living beings. For the reader embarking on what must have seemed the monumental task of reading a book of a length unprecedented – outside of the established religious and linguistic sciences – in Arabic prose at the time, this elaborate self-parody shows that al-JāªiÕ is very much aware of how far he is departing from what was normally seen as a theologian’s business in this work. Only gradually does he give voice to his thesis that all creation speaks to the wonders of its Creator and begin to justify the demands he is making on his reader’s patience by writing so voluminously on the lower creatures.12 It is probably in an attempt to forestall criticism for these demands that he devised the elaborate parody of his correspondence with Ibn al-Zayyāt, and it is here that his flippant relationship with the vizier served him well. We do not have to assume, then, that the addressee we meet in the text has no relationship with a real correspondent of al-JāªiÕ in order to place our primary focus on how the addressee’s presence would likely have affected a broader contemporary readership. But, as I have already made clear, we cannot always be certain of the facts concerning these real correspondents in any case: another manuscript of R. fī al-Maʿāsh wa-al-maʿād lists Ibn

i ntroducti on | 9 al-Zayyāt as the recipient in this letter’s title.13 This attribution, if true, would invalidate the conclusion of my above historical speculations on this text, but this would have made no difference for a contemporary reader unaware of the identity of the patron, who is nowhere named in the text. If unsolved historical questions concerning the addressee’s existence and identity are one factor that has kept scholars from discussing the rhetorical functions of the addressee, comparison to more conventional uses of addressees in later Arabic and other traditions may be another. Given the prevalence of essays beginning with questions posed by addressees, the comparison cannot be overlooked. G. Schoeler goes so far as to suggest that al-JāªiÕ’s use of epistolary prefaces may have been the origin of the topos of a questioning addressee which prevailed in Arabic prose in the following centuries.14 While the possibility that our author’s epistolary introductions did have their influence, albeit superficially, on later generations of Arabic writers must be taken seriously, the question of whether his works were the origins of the practice in Arabic is more difficult to answer. The writings of many authors who likely played a significant role in the development of early Arabic prose, among them several whose work al-JāªiÕ praises and whose texts are referred to as ‘letters’ (rasāʾil ), have not survived.15 It is quite possible that the prevalence of epistolary introductions in Arabic prose writing owes something to the fact that its earliest masters were secretaries in the caliphal chancellery, the bulk of whose writing, apart from their translations, were letters written on behalf of rulers or for their own personal purposes.16 It is quite conceivable that the ensuing generations of writers, through the time of al-JāªiÕ, felt comfortable retaining the guise of an epistolary preface in imitation of the best models they possessed of prose writing in their language and gradually began to adapt these epistolary conventions for their own rhetorical ends. These early writers may also have had some access to other literary traditions where epistolary prefaces were known: particularly Greek, Pahlavi and Syriac. Some of the pioneers of Arabic writing were, indeed, native speakers of the latter two languages themselves and may have adopted some familiar conventions when writing in Arabic. Nevertheless, nothing like the richly varied use of the addressee we meet in al-JāªiÕ appears in extant Arabic texts from before his time, and the tone and structure of his epistolary prefaces are quite unlike what we meet in the

10  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. most closely related traditions. Letters in Greek, Latin and Syriac serve, in large measure, as a means of maintaining relationships during periods of travel and frequently begin with the writer’s expression of the pain he feels at being separated from the addressee and his wish that he were with him. This pain, a sign of the writer’s undiminished affection for the addressee, often goes with a statement of his reluctance to communicate through writing when he would greatly prefer to converse with him face to face. Even when it appears likely that the addressee is a mere fictional device, complaints of the anguish of separation and of the inadequacy of the written word are among the stock motifs of these traditions.17 Al-JāªiÕ, in contrast, expresses less personal affection for the addressee and almost never mentions being separated from him.18 They are, very possibly, both living in the same city, and he communicates through writing, as we shall soon see, because he sees rhetorical advantages in that mode of communication. While it would not be wise to generalise boldly about the Arabic letter without a thorough examination of the sources, it does appear that relatively little emphasis is placed on personal relationships and separation in comparison with the Greco-Roman and Syriac traditions. To judge by the most substantial collection of letters from the early centuries of Islam – Aªmad Zakī Íafwat’s Jamharat rasāʾil al-ʿArab – lengthy personal letters, written merely for the sake of maintaining friendships, if they existed at all, were not deemed worthy of preserving and collecting for the sake of later generations. The largest share of the earlier letters in Íafwat’s collection, compiled from Arab anthologists and historians of later centuries, are political exchanges between prominent figures of the early Muslim community, especially caliphs and their governors or counsellors, whose correspondences were transcribed (or forged, as the case may be) for largely historiographical ends.19 We also have letters of prominent men of religion and ascetics, such as al-Óasan al-Ba‚rī (d. 110/728), that were collected (or fabricated) for doctrinal and didactic ends. Nearer to al-JāªiÕ’s time, a greater variety of epistolary materials appear, including letters in verse, exchanges of witticisms and what seem to be ‘model’ letters collected as demonstrations of how to compose for various epistolary functions (e.g. greetings or condolences). What seems to be rare among the Arabic letters from the early centuries of Islam, at least among those deemed fit for collection by later anthologists, are

i ntroducti on | 11 letters meant to evoke the presence of the writer to his correspondent and vice versa during separation, as were common in the Greco-Roman traditions.20 One of the ways in which the writer in these traditions could ‘conjure’ his friend’s presence was through detailed description of his own surroundings, allowing him to share the experience as if he were there. Such correspondences of the elite appear to have held an attraction for many: numerous letters like Pliny’s long-winded description of his summer residence in Tuscany for his friend Domitius were duly copied by Latin scribes through the centuries.21 By comparison, even the more personal of early Arabic letters often seem almost abstract. Al-JāªiÕ’s letter announcing the death of one close friend to another, R. fī mawt Abī Óarb b. al-Íaffār al-Ba‚rī, is so sparing in detail and universal in its description of the deceased and the loss felt by his loved ones that much of it could have been written about anyone of similar station.22 The deceased is referred to once as ‘Abū Fulān’ (the father of so-and-so; p. 20), suggesting that it was either composed as a model of such an announcement or has been altered from its original form for this purpose. A mark of al-JāªiÕ’s sensitivity as a writer is that, even while emphasising the universal over the individual, he can create a lament that is humanly compelling.23 If prominent Arabs did exchange letters with greater individualising detail, they seem to have avoided allowing them to be copied and preserved – or perhaps it was the copyists and anthologists themselves who lacked interest in letters in which the relationship between the c­ orrespondents took precedence over ideas and social conventions. Recognising that al-JāªiÕ’s use of addressees is something of far more literary significance than dependence on inherited topoi should not lead us to ignore the ways in which he makes use of basic conventions of letter-writing in his day. Fortunately, we possess an excellent source for the structures and formulaic phrases that characterised the letter in al-JāªiÕ’s lifetime in finds of discarded papyri. These contain numerous letters written by ordinary individuals, which have been collected and thoroughly examined by a number of scholars.24 Often brief, highly conventional and obviously the work of marginally literate individuals, the papyrus letters are still replete with formulae that appear in al-JāªiÕ’s most literarily sophisticated writings, as they do in other famous Arabic letters. Most letters datable to the third/ninth century begin with an invocation of blessings upon the addressee using verbs in the

12  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. optative perfect tense.25 The sender prays for the addressee in a long chain of invocations such as: ‘God give you long life’ (a†āla Allāh baqāʾaka; abqāka Allāh), ‘. . . preserve you’ (ªafiÕaka), or ‘. . . bring the fullness of His bounty on you’ (atamma niʿmatahu ʿalayka).26 When al-JāªiÕ’s blessings have not been omitted by the copyists of the extant text, they are generally in this construction but are more varied, artful and often – as I will explain in my readings of individual texts – geared toward the topic of the letter and his rhetorical aims in it.27 After the invocation, the majority of senders of papyri include – as does al-JāªiÕ, sometimes – the difficult-to-translate transitional device ammā baʿd (‘now to begin’ or ‘having said that’).28 With this, the body of the letter begins, but another phrase of invocation (e.g. ‘ªafiÕaka Allāh’) is customarily interjected soon after, often at the first pronoun or conjugated verb indicating the addressee. This convention – frequently observed in al-JāªiÕ’s letters as well – probably meant to suggest that the sender’s mind is constantly returning to his concern for the addressee. If the letter is a reply to an earlier one from the addressee, the sender next writes that he has read this letter (qaraʾtu kitābaka) and understood it (fahimtuhu). The latter phrase would appear to be a survival from the beginnings of Arabic literacy when the comprehension of even the simplest letter was not a given, but even al-JāªiÕ occasionally includes it. When he does so, it is difficult to say whether it is mere convention or whether he is really emphasising, for one reason or another, that he has understood the addressee’s letter.29 Letters on papyrus often end with a long string of invocations very similar to their openings or with an invocation on the Prophet and his family; neither of these is common in al-JāªiÕ’s corpus.30 Some letters, in both papyri and literary collections, end with a brief invocation for peace on the addressee (wa-al-salām) or on the Prophet and his family; there are some instances of the former in al-JāªiÕ’s works, but he does not appear to favour the latter.31 Some of al-JāªiÕ’s other letters sometimes lack any sort of epistolary closing, ending abruptly with quoted materials such as anecdotes, sayings or Prophetic ªadīth.32 We can never rule out the possibility that the original closing has been omitted by copyists. It is also possible, however, that al-JāªiÕ never completed these works, perhaps continuing to add whatever new materials on their topics he happened to come across. When he does end a text with a clearly demarcated ending, the form he overwhelmingly prefers is a

i ntroducti on | 13 statement of dependence on divine aid in his – and sometimes his addressee’s – endeavours: ‘God alone is sufficient for us and how wonderful a disposer of affairs he is!’ (ªasbunā Allāh wa-niʿma al-wakīl ), ‘We ask of Him aid and support’ (nasʾaluhu al-ʿawn wa-al-tasdīd ) or ‘It is from God that aid is sought’ (wa-Allāh al-mustaʿān).33 Although invocations of this particular type occur at the very end of some works, in other texts we find them at the end of the introduction immediately before the exposition proper of the topic begins.34 Since al-JāªiÕ makes little or no reference to the addressee after this point in a number of works, we might suggest that he is thereby taking leave of him as an individual and that what we have, then, is a brief letter of introduction attached to a monograph or anthology. The language of the invocation itself is ambiguous because, even if it is employed as the closing of some letters, it serves equally well as a prayer for divine assistance and a pious acknowledgement of the author’s dependence on God as he embarks on his exposition. Perhaps the ambiguity is intentional and the intermediating presence of the addressee is meant to fade gradually as the reader slowly comes to realise that the author is now speaking to him as a member of a broader audience rather than correcting or humouring the correspondent to whom the text is initially addressed. Dynamics such as this will be better understood during the course of our discussions of individual texts. By employing all of these conventions, derived from contemporary letterwriting practices, in works that are, in their actual conception, essays, monographs and encyclopedic collections on well-defined topics, al-JāªiÕ creates the rhetorical figure of the addressee. The addressee’s presence indicates that the exact language the author uses and the approach he takes in a given work is directed, in the first instance, not to the entire readership of a genre, but to a specific individual, whose significance must be discerned by the reader as he delves into the text. The presence of the addressee goes far beyond the mere use of the second person singular, which might simply refer to any individual member of the audience. In the monothematic texts that we are concerned with, the reader is presented with facts about the addressee that are patently not true of himself: most often, the addressee has written a letter to al-JāªiÕ to ask about a specific question for a specific reason, while, in a few other cases, his statements or actions serve as the ostensible occasion for which the text is

14  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. being written. For the reader, this marks the text as one written for another, not to him. Even if the addressee’s question should happen to be the very one he was most anxious to ask himself, the reader experiences it as coming from another individual with whom he happens to share a common interest. Virtually everything the reader learns about the addressee in such texts is intimately related, in one fashion or another, to the topic of the work and the reasons it is deemed important. It is my conviction that the narrow focus of the epistolary setting leaves the reader little choice but to compare and contrast his own orientation toward the object of the work with that of the addressee. Whether the reader believes that the addressee is a real person or not, he is confronted with a text addressed to a person whom he knows only as a set of predispositions regarding the very topic which he, by opening to the first page of the work, has himself chosen to read about. Coming to the text with a set of expectations, curiosities, opinions, conceptions and feelings, he encounters an author addressing himself to another person whose orientation may, or may not, differ from his own. He is brought to ask himself how he ought to read accordingly. By the ‘addressee’, as may already be obvious, I always mean the specific individual we find addressed in the text itself, a purely literary figure. As I have said, my guiding purpose in this study is not to determine whether the addressee had his origins in a real correspondent of al-JāªiÕ. In the few cases where we have reason to speculate on the significance of such a real correspondent in a given text, I refer to him as the ‘recipient’ rather than the ‘addressee’. By the ‘reader’ I mean any member of al-JāªiÕ’s anticipated audience other than any original recipient(s) from whose words the addressee presented on the page may have derived. My approach emphasises the role of the audience in shaping the text at the time of its composition. The only reason al-JāªiÕ has cause to resort to the elaborate rhetorical devices that he does is because he expects to find an equally elaborate layering of defences and mental obstacles in his readership.35 The reader we refer to is one who shares the heritage, values, identifications and conceptions that are operative in the text and are reflected, sometimes positively but often by way of contrast, in the statements that are attributed to the addressee. The circle of readers is, therefore, one of greatly varying breadth, depending on how culture-specific or universal the values involved at a given point in a text

i ntroducti on | 15 are. In many cases, what we infer about the reader can only apply to near contemporaries of al-JāªiÕ who belong to certain classes of well-educated Arabic-speaking Muslim males of the Muʿtazilī school. But al-JāªiÕ is also conscious of writing for an unknown posterity, an audience who may one day be reading his works from a context unknown to him, just as he reads works of the ancients in his own day.36 Thus, as modern readers, we may consider ourselves a part of al-JāªiÕ’s anticipated audience at certain points in his ­writings but not at others. The various modes of address and audience response involved in the production and reception of a given text have been discussed in enormous detail in criticism of the last several decades, particularly with regard to the narrative genres that now prevail.37 Leaving aside the philosophical differences that separate the various schools of thought in reader-centred criticism, I have found the simple terms ‘reader’ and ‘addressee’ most adaptable to the varied rhetorical dynamics and interpretive issues that affect my readings of al-JāªiÕ’s texts. My use of ‘reader’ corresponds roughly to the term ‘implied reader’ in the rhetorical criticism of Wayne Booth, the ‘extradiagetic narratee’ of narratology and what Janet Altman calls the ‘external reader’ in her influential work on uses of the letter form in fiction and drama.38 My use of ‘addressee’ has much in common with what narratologists have called the ‘intradiagetic narratee’ or simply the ‘narratee’, and with Altman’s ‘internal reader’.39 Deriving as they do from analysis of narrative genres, these terms imply a fairly sharp and stable separation between the fictional world and the audience. The ‘implied reader’, ‘extradiagetic narratee’ and ‘external reader’ are tied to the actual reader’s activity of interpreting the work as a whole, while the ‘intradiagetic narratee’ and ‘internal reader’ are located within the framework of the fictional narrative. The former group shares a level with the ‘implied author’ of rhetorical criticism and narratology, while the latter group functions on the same level as the ‘narrator’ within the fictional or ‘diagetic’ world of the narrative.40 The situation is markedly different in the sorts of expository writing in which al-JāªiÕ employs his addressees. There is no framework of fictional events in which the intradiagetic narrator and narratee are both involved much more closely than are the reading audience. In an expository text, the reader is engaged in the same activity that the addressee

16  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. is purported to be: discovering what the author has to say about the topic at hand. These differences between narrative and expository writing can have profound consequences for our understanding of the addressee and how his presence affects the relationship between the author and the reader. As I will discuss more fully below, al-JāªiÕ sometimes speaks to his audience through an addressee whose conceptions and attitude toward the topic will likely be close to their own. At other times, he seems to be beside himself as he chides or humours an addressee whose approach to the topic is clearly at odds with what he expects from his readership. Thus, when I speak of what ‘al-JāªiÕ’ says to his addressee, the significance of his name will vary: in some cases he may indeed be speaking for himself – occupying the level of an ‘implied author’ – or he may, by quarrelling with or humouring an addressee, be constructing a persona for himself. In the latter case, he becomes as much a part of the fictionalised correspondence he has crafted for rhetorical ends as the addressee himself. It is often precisely this ambiguity in al-JāªiÕ’s role that gives his texts rhetorical richness. The intermediating presence of the addressee allows the reader to establish a comfortable distance between himself and the text: he can determine for himself whether the author’s presumptions about the addressee apply to him as well. In many texts, the credibility of the correspondence with the addressee that al-JāªiÕ describes is undermined in stages as the reader progresses through the text and absurdities and contradictions accumulate. The rhetorical nature of the addressee’s presence becomes gradually more obvious, and the loss of distance between the reader, on the one side, and the author, the text and its subject matter, on the other, influences his experience of the text. I have mentioned these terms deriving from narrative theory mainly for the sake of comparison: in many ways, a better paradigm for describing the varying relationships al-JāªiÕ establishes between himself, his fictional addressees and his contemporary audience can be had by starting with the ‘dialogical’ view of literature developed by Mikhail Bakhtin. In Bakhtin’s conception, any author orients his text toward the conceptual horizons in which he believes his audience will assimilate what he says.41 In some texts, the author directly conveys his own conception of the rhetorical object, but, in the types of indirect writing that Bakhtin calls ‘double-voiced discourse’,

i ntroducti on | 17 the author’s intention is refracted through the voice of another speaker.42 Similarly, we might say that, in a work with a fictionalised epistolary frame such as those al-JāªiÕ writes, the author’s intentions toward the actual audience, and his assumptions about them, are refracted through his words to the addressee. If an epistolary work is written with a readership beyond the addressee in mind – or perhaps even for this readership alone through a fictional addressee – the reader is left with the task of discerning how the author’s dialogical relationship with him is refracted through what is said to the addressee. In Bakhtin’s paradigm, the author can relate his intentions through another speaker (a fictional character, a pseudonym, etc.) either ‘unidirectionally’ or ‘varidirectionally’. Whenever the other speaker’s purpose as portrayed is similar to the author’s own but still corroborates his views from another life experience, the double-voicing is unidirectional, while when the speaker’s opinion is plainly at odds with the author’s and, thus, the object of parody, their relationship is varidirectional.43 For our purposes in this study, it is a natural extension of this conception to suggest that an author like al-JāªiÕ’s orientation toward a real or fictional addressee can similarly refract his intentions toward, and assumptions about, a broader readership either unidirectionally or varidirectionally. The relationship between addressee and reader is unidirectional when the assumptions the author makes about the former’s interests, conceptions, prior knowledge and attitudes are similar to those he anticipates in his broader audience. The reader experiences such an addressee as a sympathetic figure – an ‘agreeing other’ who shares his curiosities and concerns – and feels it a fortunate coincidence to open a book and find the author addressing someone who shares his attitude toward the object of the work. When the reader is given to see the addressee as his superior in some respect (e.g. in moral character, knowledge or stature in the community) the relationship may still be unidirectional in that the reader will identify with the values and aspirations the addressee embodies. We can, conversely, call the author’s use of the addressee varidirectional when the latter is endowed with conceptual horizons that differ palpably from those he expects among his audience or with traits that he assumes are somehow contrary to their values and aspirations. The preceding conception is, to be sure, an oversimplification: in composing some texts, the author may well imagine a number of groups or

18  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. intellectual levels among his readership, whose members will relate unidirectionally or varidirectionally to the addressee at various points in the text. Still, in some works the author may have ways of ensuring a unidirectional response to the addressee among the vast majority of his readers, by endowing the addressee with the most cherished ideals and convictions of the community, or a varidirectional one, by projecting upon him an attitude so extreme that few readers are likely to identify with him. Unidirectional or varidirectional relations can also exist between the addressee and the author himself: the occasion for writing may be an interest or enthusiasm the author claims to share with the addressee, or he may pretend to be writing on a given topic reluctantly and only because the addressee has asked. In such a case, if the addressee is a mere fiction, the author is really speaking through a parodic persona himself – yet another involved form of double-voicing, which we will discuss in relation to a number of texts, particularly in the second chapter. Especially when we turn to the uses of addressees in al-JāªiÕ’s controversial writings on religious and social issues, we need to be mindful of the premises of his arguments and the textual authorities on which they rest. In works of this type, the premises and proof texts from which the author builds a persuasive case for his view are among the most important ways in which the presumed beliefs, education and group identities of the readership are encoded. When used in ways likely to be accepted by the audience to construct convincing arguments, they encode a unidirectional relationship between addressee and reader. When unlikely premises, twisted logic and dubious interpretations of texts are used in such a conspicuous way that the reader will doubt the argument is intended seriously, they encode varidirectional relationships: the reader is given to see the irony and the flaws in the argument that the humoured addressee is apparently expected to miss. A failure to grasp the dynamics of these unidirectional and varidirectional relationships will lead to serious misunderstandings of al-JāªiÕ’s rhetorical aims and of his complex relations with his contemporary audience. My own experience in reading al-JāªiÕ has often been that meaning began to flow readily from what had been a difficult and puzzling text once I developed a satisfying theory of the addressee’s basic role, and this is what I seek to show through my close readings of texts in each chapter.

i ntroducti on | 19 While unidirectional relationships between author, addressee and reader are important in some of al-JāªiÕ’s writings as we shall see, it is his playful and innovative use of varidirectional relations that, in combination with the subtle ironies and self-parody in his own replies, sets his epistolary introductions apart. When we examine uses of addressees by the best-known Arabic authors of later centuries, we find them, by and large, answering the questions they purport to have been asked or, at most, gently clarifying and expanding upon them. The addressees share the author’s purpose and, thus, his responsibility for writing on the topic at hand and provide, at least, a starting point for the interests and conceptions of an ideal reader. What we do not seem to find in these later authors are the inventively varidirectional patterns in which al-JāªiÕ will confront an addressee over the appropriateness of his request, or humour another with obvious irony, or quote yet another’s barrage of fascinating questions only to leave them unanswered. In drawing this comparison I cannot pretend to have consulted more than a small fraction of the expository texts composed in Arabic over the centuries in which we could conceivably find such uses of addressees. Perhaps subsequent scholarship will uncover parallels to al-JāªiÕ’s techniques that I am not aware of in other authors. It is also possible that, deriving my paradigm from patterns observed in al-JāªiÕ’s writing, I have overlooked rhetorical strategies and subtleties of a different character in the epistolary introductions of other authors. I would certainly be delighted if my attempts to delineate important dynamics of al-JāªiÕ’s use of addressees led to broader investigations and comparative scholarship. Naturally, to suggest that an author as varied in his interests and selfconscious in his craft as al-JāªiÕ employs certain rhetorical devices invites the question of whether he in any way alludes to them in his extant corpus. While I will shortly discuss how a number of passages relate to the question of the addressee in intriguing ways, I have not been able to locate any clear allusions to the particular devices that I attempt to identify in my study in his own writings. It may be that al-JāªiÕ’s own grasp of the workings of these devices was an instinctive or intuitive one rather than something he was prepared to verbalise in detail. Or, perhaps, he preferred not to divulge the secrets of his rhetorical craft, which could then be employed by his rivals for the attention and support of ʿAbbāsid courtiers in his intensively competitive times, and

20  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. which would, furthermore, have lost some of their effectiveness on the reader if openly acknowledged. Yet the passages I will now discuss reveal that, even if al-JāªiÕ fails to discuss the role of the addressee in his writings directly, at least two strains in his thought indicate his awareness of rhetorical concerns closely related to the dynamics I will discuss in this book. The first is his observation of how speakers naturally adapt their manner to the mentality of the listener, an idea which arises in the context of a defence of the teaching profession. The second can be found in his well-known celebration of the advantages of the written word over the spoken, in which he emphasises the competitive emotions that arise in face-to-face conversation. The first passage is found in K. al-Muʿallimīn (On Teachers), a book in which al-JāªiÕ purports to be replying to an addressee who, as we shall see in the third chapter, has attacked and disparaged the entire profession of educators.44 Part of al-JāªiÕ’s reply is a lengthy quotation of what a teacher might say in vindication of his occupation. The teacher’s remarks may contain elements of parody, but, in the passage we are concerned with here, he may be serving as a mouthpiece for the author on a topic very germane to this study. The passage begins with the teacher noting that many people contend that children understand things best when told by other children (the same going for other classes of people and their own respective kinds), and that God has therefore blessed children by endowing their teachers with natures and intellectual levels similar to their own. The teacher responds to this demeaning view of his profession with logic that may well apply to al-JāªiÕ himself in relation to certain of his addressees: Do you not see that, if the most eloquent individual, the most capable of elucidation, the keenest in discernment and the deepest in reflection were to address a toddler or prattle with a child, he would strive to affect a child’s intellectual capacity and mimic a child’s manner of articulation, and that he would have no choice but to set aside all the sublime knowledge and dignified language that God has favoured him with? So it is, also, with the conformity that exists among peers in their various professions.45

We might speculate that, even though this argument fits squarely into the context of the defence of a specific vocation, our author is sending forth a

i ntroducti on | 21 subtle hint that he may, at times, be setting aside some of his own verbal and intellectual capacity for the sake of some rhetorical end. Perhaps we are being given to understand that he has sometimes had to simplify his language and logic for the sake of the lower educational strata among his readership. And, perhaps, when an addressee is present in a text embodying a distinct mentality and manner of reading, we, as readers, may be invited to explore for ourselves how the implications of the author’s arguments can extend well beyond the intellectual horizons to which he has limited himself for the sake of the addressee. These conjectures regarding the author’s intentions reach far beyond the context in K. al-Muʿallimīn and can hardly be proven. What is more significant is how the final sentence connects the way peers in a trade conform to each other (in language and intellectual levels, presumably) with the more drastic process of a teacher’s stooping in order to communicate with his young pupils. The basic resemblance and equality that exists among colleagues or social peers in their communication is a matter of adaptation (they are not necessarily equal in knowledge and understanding) as is the educator’s affectation of childish speech. Our author’s conception of language is, then, at least rudimentarily, what Bakhtin would call a ‘dialogical’ one in which a speaker’s words and logic are shaped by the listener as well as the broader social environment. The logic is related to that expressed in an Arabic proverb al-JāªiÕ is fond of quoting; ‘Every occasion has its form of speech’ (li-kull maqām maqāl ) if we consider the mentality and predisposition of the audience addressed part of the occasion.46 We, then, have all the more reason to assume that, when al-JāªiÕ communicates with his audience by writing as to another, he has thought about what he is doing and has his reasons. The second passage, while also not treating the role of the addressee directly, shows us how closely the rhetorical dynamics involved fit into al-JāªiÕ’s self-understanding in his craft as a writer in a time when books in Arabic were just beginning to circulate among a reading public. The passage comes in the context of his vindication of his writings and the written word itself in the introduction of K. al-Óayawān, which we have already mentioned above. While this introduction is not free of self-parodying bombast at certain points, the passage I will examine here seems to be a quite serious one about the advantages of written communication over the spoken word. The passage treats one of the most important benefits of writing: the physical

22  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. separation between the author and the reader which allows the latter to contemplate matters by himself. If al-JāªiÕ sees the author’s and reader’s absence from each other as an asset to communication, it requires but a small extrapolation to suggest that introducing the intermediating figure of the addressee is a means of further absenting himself and his anticipations about his audience from the reader as he peruses a text. We will return to this extrapolation after discussing the passage, which is one of several in which al-JāªiÕ develops his ideas about the advantages of writing: Reading books is more effective in guiding people than meeting with them, since when people meet affectation intensifies, trespasses on either side are frequent, partisanship is taken to excess and ardour gains ascendancy. When people face each other and converse, the desire to win and the longing to boast and gain mastery grow stronger, as does the shame of backing down and disdain to concede. Out of all this enmities arise and differences emerge. Once minds (qulūb) are in this state, and have taken on this disposition, they are prevented from cognition and blinded to the means of guidance. However, in books, there is no such factor preventing one from attaining the goal and succeeding in one’s argument. For one who is alone as he studies it, and comes to understand its meanings in private, is not in rivalry with himself or vying with his own intellect, and there is no one to compete or contend with him.47

In an earlier passage, al-JāªiÕ praises a book as a companion superior to a person and cites a long list of reasons, among them that he knows no one ‘. . . more inclined to avoid quarrel, foreswear discord, renounce arguing and abstain from strife than a book’.48 As I have said, the physical absence of the writer from the reader is seen as an asset to persuasion, or, to be more precise, his presence would be considered a liability which the written word has the advantage of dispensing with. In the long passage quoted above, the grammatical agency and perspective of the writer or speaker, on the one hand, and the reader or listener, on the other, are cleverly manipulated to suggest how the reader can make the understanding of a written argument his own in a way that the hearer of the spoken word may find difficult. The verbal nouns in the initial sentence shift curiously from

i ntroducti on | 23 the agency of the audience – ‘reading’ (qirāʾa) – to that of the writer – ‘guiding’ (irshād). The agency and the responsibility for impaired communication quickly become mutual as the passage moves to a description of contentious feelings that prevail in conversation, and then to the humiliation experienced by the one who ought to concede that he can learn from the other. This is followed by an impersonal and thoroughly objectified description of the unfortunate state of ‘minds’.49 When the passage returns to books, perspectives and agency are, at first, ambiguous: a goal is to be reached, that is, an argument is to succeed, but this success could be construed as either the writer’s, in persuading, or the reader’s, in comprehending the logic. Finally, at the end of the passage, it is the reader whose agency is once again emphasised in his apprehension of the meaning. Apparently, he does not contend with himself or with his own mind because, in the privacy of his reading experience, he has managed to identify with the thoughts expressed and treat them as his own.50 These grammatical shifts hint at the psychological process by which a reader appropriates meaning from a text and comes to identify with an arguing voice whose perspective had differed from his own. To accept the argument of an erstwhile opponent, or the instruction of an equal, he needs to think it through as if the thoughts were his own, and he must objectify his own former thinking on the matter in question in order to see its limitations. The very act of reading assists in this because he must voice the words of the text – inwardly, at least, and quite possibly out loud in the case of a premodern reader – in order to understand it. The context in which this passage appears is al-JāªiÕ’s argument that writing is a valuable tool in guiding people to what the writer believes to be true. This being the case, the portrayal of the reader in such an active role might appear somewhat disingenuous: what the reader feels to be his autonomy in understanding the text is merely part of the rhetorical strategy of the writer for attaining his goal of persuasion and changing the reader’s conceptions or opinions. But, if we examine the wording of the sentences immediately preceding the passage we have quoted, we find that the question of the writer’s agency is also complicated: I say that it is a matter of thankfulness – for the bounty [of God] that is in being aware of what misleads people or guides them aright, harms

24  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. or ­benefits them – that the heavy burden of setting people straight is to be borne and it is purposed to guide them, even when they are ignorant of the merit of what is conferred upon them. For knowledge will not be retained except by sharing it, nor will the blessing in it be preserved except by spreading it.51

Aside from calling attention to the ultimate origin of knowledge in divine favour rather than the knower’s intrinsic worth, the passage downplays the writer’s agency by describing him with only passive verbs throughout. The paradox that knowledge is only kept by sharing is posed as an argument against the supposition that it is the property of an individual. These factors combine to suggest that the writer, too, has psychological barriers that must be set aside if he is to persuade his audience effectively: his active role becomes a passive one as the text awaits the active eye of the reader. His thoughts are objectified without the opportunity to reply, and the knowledge which he may have regarded as a personal possession becomes the property of all who read and accept it. In the light of these lines, the passage that we have already seen about the difficulties of face-to-face conversation implies that it is as much the speaker’s attitude as the listener’s that becomes an obstacle to persuasion and guidance. By choosing the medium of writing, the author modestly withdraws his physical presence, allowing the reader to objectify and critique his thoughts and ultimately appropriate them as his own. The reader is then free to decide, in his own time, what credit is due to the writer. It is at a point very near where al-JāªiÕ’s argument here leaves off that the significance of the addressee that I am discussing in this book begins. Having shown the rhetorical advantage he finds in the written mode of expression, he says nothing about the possibility of further emotional or psychological obstacles remaining between a reader and an author when an argument has been reduced to writing and the two are physically separated. He says nothing of how even a written text tends to presume an attitude and level of knowledge on the part of its readership, or how some readers may find offence in these presumptions. These difficulties are, if anything, exacerbated in written communication since the reader finds no opportunity to challenge these presumptions as he would in conversation. The argument does not take into account the assumptions regarding the beliefs, attitudes, prior knowledge and

i ntroducti on | 25 conceptual horizons of the audience that any text is bound to reflect. Nor does it take into consideration how the reader is inclined to attribute undeclared motives and intentions to the writer, who cannot respond as he might if challenged in conversation. Lastly, nothing is said about how a written argument anticipates counterarguments from its reader and can easily appear contentious to him. Clearly, the mere physical separation of writer and reader does not eliminate the presence of either to the other in an important sense which may still give rise to competitive feelings and inhibit persuasion. Yet if al-JāªiÕ was so concerned about the dangers of competitive feelings that arise in face-to-face conversation, it is fair to suggest that he, at least intuitively, grasped the need to prevent them from arising in different forms in writing. While he does not seem to discuss these problems, the argument of this study has been shaped by a growing conviction that his texts show an author who is highly sensitive to such rhetorical problems and often ingeniously skilful in overcoming them. The letter frame is one of al-JāªiÕ’s most important devices for avoiding confrontation with the reader by introducing the intermediating presence of an addressee. By so doing, al-JāªiÕ places responsibility for composing a text on a given topic on this individual and leaves the reader to determine how his own interest in, and attitude toward, the topic compare to those of the addressee. In this study, I will, then, be attributing an acute authorly ‘sensitivity’ – by which I mean both a certain psychological vulnerability and a refinement of perception and communicative finesse that likely sprang from it – to al-JāªiÕ, and this, if true, may have something to do with developments in the literary culture of his times. As a number of scholars, most notably Gregor Schoeler and Shawkat Toorawa, have been making us increasingly aware, the ninth century was a time when Arabic writers were in the later stages of a transition from a largely oral culture to a ‘writerly’ one.52 For the first time in the language, ‘proper books’ were being put in a definitive form to be circulated under their authors’ names rather than serving as mere aids to oral performance, and authors of this period were becoming increasingly aware that their texts might be freely shared and copied by booksellers to circulate broadly. That al-JāªiÕ himself was among the earliest Arabic authors to master the art of bringing clarity and persuasiveness to a text destined for purely written circulation is clear from the fame he rapidly acquired. It is also

26  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. evident in the declaration (noted by Schoeler in this regard) of the caliph al-Maʾmūn upon first perusing one of our author’s books: ‘Now this is a book that does not require the presence of its author or depend on others to argue in its favour.’53 In later centuries, a writer who achieved the pinnacle of the exact form of eloquence deemed appropriate to his era could be called a ‘JāªiÕ’.54 Clearly, our author’s distinctive contribution to an era of pivotal importance and vibrant experimentation in Arabic prose was felt long after his own lifetime. My hope is that my argument in this book will be complementary to the path-breaking scholarship on early writerly culture in Arabic, by focusing specifically on one of the more fascinating instances of rhetorical experimentation of the period. In the first chapter, I examine the broader issue of how the epistolary frame helps al-JāªiÕ solve problems related to the impetus or ‘occasion’ which has brought him to write on the topic of a given text. The presence of the addressee in the texts I discuss helps al-JāªiÕ to finesse his way through difficulties regarding his own motives in writing, to avoid uncomfortable presumptions about the audience and to alter expectations his audience may have from earlier texts on similar topics. Especially important in this discussion will be texts related to theological and legal debates – where al-JāªiÕ was reluctant to concede that rival parties were his intellectual equals or sincerely interested in debate – and works of ethical advice where he does not want to assume a position of moral superiority. In the following chapter, I show how al-JāªiÕ sometimes stages a heated confrontation with the addressee, who is often portrayed as having taken an unreasonable stance on the issue with which the work deals. Arguing against him, al-JāªiÕ sometimes adopts an equally unreasonable stance from the opposing point of view. I suggest that the reader is prompted to sense the irony and arrive for himself at a sensible and moderate position between the extremes represented by the addressee, on the one hand, and al-JāªiÕ’s own self-parodying persona, on the other. This sort of ironic debate is especially prominent in al-JāªiÕ’s works on specific crafts or occupations, and I posit reasons why his thinking on these particular subjects leads to rhetorical ­difficulties for which the technique of ironic debate is helpful. The third chapter will be a discussion of several of our author’s writings on various ethnicities and homelands and the contentious debates that

i ntroducti on | 27 often arose concerning their respective merits. I attempt to demonstrate how al-JāªiÕ seeks to defuse accusations of bias in his handling of races and lands by quoting addressees and other speakers, whose own origins go unmentioned. The delicacy of the situation and the ingeniousness of his rhetorical strategies will become all the more apparent as we discuss how his own theological understanding of divine purpose led him to a conviction that a person is naturally biased by a particular love of his own birthplace – a bias from which a writer could not exempt himself even as he sought to compare lands and peoples in a spirit of fairness. The remaining two chapters focus on one of al-JāªiÕ’s masterpieces, K. al-Bukhalāʾ (The Book of Misers), which contains some of his richest and most elaborate uses of the letter frame and the addressee. The fourth chapter is an examination of the book’s introduction, in which the obvious hypocrisy of the addressee’s request for a book on miserliness in others is taken through a number of unexpected turns. The shifting stances of the addressee invite the reader to contrast himself with him in contradictory ways that lead him on a path of self-examination and an exploration of the economic motives that shape his perceptions. The final chapter looks at an exchange of pseudonymous letters between an advocate of limitless generosity and a proponent of extreme miserliness, each marshalling a wide variety of arguments and texts in support of his position. The two writers do not address their letters to each other but to an unfortunate addressee whose property, ethical outlook and social aspirations they treat as their own concern rather than his. The reader can hardly help but contrast himself with the helpless addressee as he sorts through the arguments posed from either extreme. Notes   1. The texts described are Kitāb al-Shārib wa-al-mashrūb (The Book of the Drinker and What He Drinks), Rasāʾil al-JāªiÕ, ed. A. Hārūn, 4 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1991), IV, pp. 259–81; Risāla fī Madª al-nabīdh wa-‚ifat a‚ªābihi (‘In Praise of Date Wine and the Characteristics of Those who Drink It’), Rasāʾil III, pp. 111–28; K. al-Buldān (The Book of Homelands and Countries), Rasāʾil IV, pp. 107–47; R. fī Manāqib al-Turk (‘On the Merits of the Turks’), Rasāʾil I, pp. 1–86; K. Fakhr al-Sūdān ʿalā al-Bī∂ān (The Vaunting of Blacks over Whites), Rasāʾil I, pp. 173–226; R. fī al-Óanīn ilā al-aw†ān (‘Epistle on Longing for

28  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. Homelands’), Rasāʾil IV, pp. 379–412; [Kitāb] al-Bukhalāʾ (The Book of Misers), ed. ˝. al-Óājirī (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1997).  2. For brief accounts of al-JāªiÕ’s life, see J. Montgomery, ‘al-JāªiÕ’, in M. Cooperson and S. Toorawa (eds), Arabic Literary Culture, 500–915 (The Dictionary of Literary Biography, 311) (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005), pp. 231– 42, and C. Pellat, ‘al-JāªiÕ’, EI2 II, pp. 385–7. For fuller accounts, see C. Pellat, Le Milieu Ba‚rien et la Formation de ĞāªiÕ (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1953) and ‘ĞāªiÕ à Ba∫dād et à Sāmarrā’, Rivista degli Studi Orientali 27 (1952): 47–67.   3. Ibn Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, ed. A. Sayyid, 4 parts in 2 vols (London: Muʾassasat al-Furqān lil-Turāth al-Islāmī, 2009), I, part 2, pp. 582–3.  4. Kitāb al-Óayawān, ed. A. Hārūn, 8 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1996), I, pp. 3–15; al-Bayān wa-al-tabyīn, ed. A. Hārūn, 4 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, n.d.), I, pp. 3–14.   5. Ibn al-Murta∂ā, Kitāb ˝abaqāt al-Muʿtazila, ed. S. Diwald-Wilzer (Beirut: Dār Maktabat al-Óayāt, 1980), p. 69.   6. The two letters that introduce other texts are R. ilā Muªammad b. Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād fī nafī al-tashbīh (‘In Disavowal of Anthropomorphism’), Rasāʾil I, pp. 289–91 and 301, written by al-JāªiÕ in recommendation of his K. fī al-Radd ʿalā al-Mushabbiha (In Reply to the Anthropomorphists), Rasāʾil IV, pp. 3–16, and R. ilā Abī ʿAbd Allāh Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād yukhbiruhu fīhā bi-Kitāb al-Futyā, Rasāʾil I, pp. 314 and 317–8, which introduces the now lost K. al-Futyā (Book of Legal Opinion).  7. Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ: irshād al-arīb, ed. I. ʿAbbās, 7 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1993), V, pp. 2,114–15. We cannot be certain whether the book mentioned here is identical with the extant work of the same title in Rasāʾil III, pp. 301–51, or a separate work or revised version. See my discussion of the historical issues in Chapter 1 below.   8. I mean to contrast al-JāªiÕ’s meticulous transparency – at least in the type of epistolary writings that this study focuses on – with the obscurities naturally occurring when a letter writer is not anticipating a broader audience. Such is the case, for example, in the first sentence in a letter of the noted Byzantine prose writer Libanius to Themistius: ‘I thought that after that letter I was freed of every charge and that your attitude towards me was as it was before the complaints were made.’ Libanius: Autobiography and Selected Letters, ed. and trans. A. Norman, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), II, p. 155. In such cases, an outside reader can only speculate on the nature of the conflicts and letters the writer is referring to. In al-JāªiÕ, when past correspondences

i ntroducti on | 29 and dealings with addresses are alluded to, the context is made clear in the text itself; the sheer number of epistolary texts exhibiting such ‘friendliness’ toward the outside reader makes clear that our author is well aware of having a broader audience.  9. Rasāʾil I, pp. 1–8. 10. Rasāʾil I, pp. 87–96. 11. Risāla fī al-Jidd wa-al-hazl, Rasāʾil I, pp. 227–78; Kitāb al-JāªiÕ ilā Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt, in A. Íafwat, Jamharat rasāʾil al-ʿArab, 4 vols (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-ʿIlmiyya, n.d.), IV, pp. 43–5. 12. K. al-Óayawān I, pp. 3–37. 13. See the editor A. Hārūn’s introduction to the text, Rasāʾil I, p. 89. As Hārūn correctly observes, the identification of the recipient with Ibn al-Zayyāt is unlikely because of al-JāªiÕ’s claim to have known the former from youth (p. 91). Still, if this attribution has entered the manuscript tradition through a copyist’s error, it is quite possible that some apparently plausible attributions are mistaken as well. 14. G. Schoeler, ‘Writing for a Reading Public: The Case of al-JāªiÕ’, in A. Heinemann et al. (eds), Al-JāªiÕ: A Muslim Humanist for our Time (Beirut: Orient-Institut Berlin, 2009), p. 55. 15. A few examples of earlier Arabic authors whose eloquence al-JāªiÕ celebrates and who are known to have composed rasāʾil (letters or treatises) that have not survived are: Wā‚il b. ʿA†āʾ (d. 131/748–9), the prominent theologian and founder of the Muʿtazila, the poet Bashshār b. Burd (d. 167–8/784–5), Sahl b. Hārūn (d. 215/830) and Ghaylān al-Dimashqī (d. early second/eighth century). For al-JāªiÕ’s praise of these writers see al-Bayān wa-al-tabyīn: Wā‚il, I, p. 15; Bashshār, I, p. 49; Sahl, I, pp. 51f; Ghaylān, I, pp. 323f. 16. I. ʿAbbās (ed.), ʿAbd al-Óamīd ibn Yaªyā wa-mā tabaqqā min rasāʾilihi wa-rasāʾil Sālim Abī al-ʿAlāʾ (Amman: Dār al-Shurūq, 1988). For a case for the authenticity of these letters, see W. al-Qadi, ‘Early Islamic State Letters: The Question of Authenticity’, in A. Cameron and L. Conrad (eds), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, Vol. I: Problems in the Literary Source Material (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1992), pp. 215–73. 17. J. Muir, Life and Letters in the Ancient Greek World (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 7; M. Stirewalt, Studies in Ancient Greek Epistolography (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), pp. 4–5; S. Stowers, Letter Writing in GrecoRoman Antiquity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), p. 58. For an analysis of the Syriac tradition with examples of prefaces and their translation, see E. Riad, Studies in the Syriac Preface (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis,

30  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. 1988), pp. 73–99. Also illustrative of the tenor of Syriac prefaces are the letters of Saint Ephraim; see (last accessed 1 September 2013). 18. The only instance I have encountered where al-JāªiÕ mentions living at a distance from an addressee is in K. fī Khalq al-Qurʾān (On the Createdness of the Qurʾān), where he praises the frequency of the addressee’s letters of theological inquiry despite the distance of his house; Rasāʾil III, pp. 285–7. To all appearances, the significance of the distance is the inconvenience of sending a letter (probably by dispatching a servant) across a large city, most likely Baghdad, rather than maintaining a friendship between distant lands. 19. A. Íafwat, Jamharat rasāʾil. 20. Stirewalt, Studies in Ancient Greek Epistolography, pp. 4–5. 21. Pliny: Letters and Panegyricus, ed. and trans. B. Radice, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), I, pp. 337–55. Examples of private letters of this sort also abound in Cicero: Letters to Friends, ed. D. Shackleton Bailey, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Saint Basil: The Letters, trans. R. Deferrari, 4 vols (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926–34); and Libanius: Autobiography and Selected Letters. 22. Majmūʿ rasāʾil al-JāªiÕ, ed. ˝ al-Óājirī (Beirut: Dār al-Nah∂a al-ʿArabiyya, 1982), pp. 17–27. The editor titles this text ‘A Letter of Lamentation and Commemoration’ (Risālat Rithāʾ wa-taʾbīn) but suggests that it may be the same letter written for Abū Óarb that Yāqūt mentions, Majmūʿ, p. 19. See C. Pellat, ‘Nouvel Essai d’Inventaire de l’Œuvre ĞāªiÕienne’, Arabica 31 (1984), p. 148, no. 139. 23. Similarly, his R. ilā baʿ∂ Ikhwānihi fī dhamm al-zamān (‘Letter to a Friend in Condemnation of the Age’), Jahmhara IV, pp. 49–51, presents a bitter but stereotypical portrait of a society that no longer rewards or respects virtue. Again, an individual, whose merit is being overlooked, is referred to as ‘fulān’. Much of the letter could have been written about any place and, ironically, any time. 24. Among the most important collections are A. Grohmann, Arabic Papyri in the Egyptian Library, 6 vols (Cairo: Egyptian Library Press, 1934–62); W. Diem, Arabische Briefe auf Papyrus und Papier aus der Heidelberger Papyrus-Sammlung, 2 vols (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1991); W. Diem, Arabische Briefe aus dem 7.–10. Jahrhundert, 2 vols (Vienna: Verlag Brüder Hollinek, 1993); and G. Khan, Arabic Papyri: Selected Material from the Khalili Collection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 25. In earlier letters, the name of sender and recipient – ‘From so-and-so to

i ntroducti on | 31 so-and-so’ (min fulān ilā fulān) – is placed after the basmalah, which indicates the beginning of any Muslim document; Khan, Arabic Papyri, p. 25. Al-JāªiÕ never uses the more archaic form except in the pseudonymous R. al-Qiyān, ed. and trans. A. Beeston as The Epistle on Singing-Girls by JāªiÕ (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1980), p. 12 (translation); p. 1 (Arabic text). 26. See examples, Khan, Arabic Papyri, pp. 143–248. Many instances of all the epistolary conventions discussed in this and the following paragraph are also found here. My generalisations about conventions in letters on papyrus are also based on examining a large number of samples in the museum of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. I thank the staff, especially Raymond Tindel, for their assistance with these collections. 27. For example, a letter concerned with the dangers of doctrinal error, K. fī Khalq al-Qurʾān, begins ‘God set you fast with proof, fortify your religion against doubt, take you from this life as a Muslim and count you among the grateful’ (thabbataka Allāh bi-al-ªujja wa-ªa‚‚ana dīnaka min kull shubha wa-tawaffāka Musliman wa-jaʿalaka min al-shākirīn), Rasāʾil III, p. 285. 28. Copyists of literary sources that preserve letters often omit the invocation and begin from this point. See Jamhara III, p. 478; IV, pp. 6 and 216, for examples. 29. For example, Rasāʾil III, pp. 285 and 303. Is al-JāªiÕ stressing that he has taken great care in reading the addressee’s letter or is he implying that its message was not easy to decipher? The context in this particular letter seems to allow either possibility. 30. Exceptions would be the closings of two of his letters to the chief judge, Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād, both obviously personal missives in the first instance and not the sort of letter-monographs I am primarily concerned with in this book; see Rasāʾil I, pp. 309 and 319. 31. Rasāʾil III, p. 128. Invocations on the Prophet in texts from the Dāmād manuscript, published as Rasāʾil volumes I and II, are the addition of a copyist. See the copyist’s closing, Rasāʾil I, p. 134. 32. For example, Kitāb al-Bur‚ān wa-al-ʿurjān wa-al-ʿumyān wa-al-ªūlān, ed. A. Hārūn (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1990), p. 563; K. al-Wukalāʾ and K. fī al-Nisāʾ, Rasāʾil IV, p. 105, and III, pp. 147–59; K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 212 (possible original ending). 33. Rasāʾil I, p. 171; I, p. 86; and III, p. 351. 34. For example, K. al-Bur‚ān, p. 45. The same invocation, ‘Success is from God’ (wa-bi-Allāh al-tawfīq), actually occurs earlier in the text (p. 34), but al-JāªiÕ

32  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. continues his conversation with addressee for several more pages. However, few references to the addressee occur after p. 45, leaving the division between the epistolary introduction and the rest of the text truly ambiguous. 35. In the thought of Bakhtin, a speaker (or writer) does not ‘own’ an utterance any more than does the listener (or reader) and those who have spoken on the topic before. See M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, trans. V. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 121–2; G. Morson and C. Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 129. 36. Rasāʾil I, p. 216. 37. For a discussion of important trends in audience-oriented criticism, see S. Suleiman and I. Crossmann (eds), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 3–45. 38. W. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 123–7. For Booth, the implied reader in any text is one who discerns the intentions of the ‘implied author’, as far as they can be known from the text. Compare G. Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), entry on ‘implied reader’; G. Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. J. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 259–60; J. Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), pp. 88 and 111–12. 39. See Genette, Narrative Discourse, pp. 259–60; G. Prince, Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative (New York: Mouton, 1982), pp. 16–23; Prince, Dictionary, entries on ‘diagetic leve87 and ‘narratee’; Altman, Epistolarity, pp. 88 and 111–12. 40. Prince, Dictionary, entries on ‘implied author’, ‘narratee’, ‘narrator’, ‘diagesis’ and ‘diagetic’; Booth, Rhetoric of Irony, p. 126. 41. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 282; Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 128. 42. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. C. Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 185. 43. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, pp. 189–91, 193–5, and the chart on p. 199. See also Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 146–54. 44. Rasāʾil III, pp. 25–51. 45. Rasāʾil III, p. 37. 46. Rasāʾil II, p. 93; K. al-Óayawān III, p. 43.

i ntroducti on | 33 47. K. al-Óayawān I, pp. 84–5. Similar passages appear in Rasāʾil I, p. 315; III, p. 235, and IV, p. 296. 48. K. al-Óayawān I, pp. 41–2. 49. Literally ‘hearts’ (qulūb; singular qalb), the idiom does not necessarily refer to people’s emotional capacity as in English, but to a person’s inward thoughts, and is sometimes used as a synonym for ʿaql, ‘mind’ or ‘intellect’. 50. ‘Himself’ (nafsahu): in the Arabic, there may be a play on two senses of the word nafs. One sense indicates that the object of a verb is the same as its subject and must be translated with the suffix ‘-self’, while the other refers to the human soul, the source of passions, which is frequently portrayed as being in contention with the person’s ʿaql, ‘reason’ or ‘intellect’. The latter sense of nafs becomes clear in the following clause where the reader is portrayed as no longer ‘contending with his own intellect’ (yughālib ʿaqlahu). The psychological complexities of appropriating another’s thinking as one’s own are illustrated in the paradox of these lines: it is the wilfulness of the passionate soul that insists that reason is on one’s own side and does not allow one to experience the other as correctly reasoning intellect and accept his point of view. In reading one can at least be alone while experiencing the embarrassing hesitancies of the moment where the voice of reason is recognised as coming from the other and can then be incorporated into one’s own reasoning. 51. K. al-Óayawān I, p. 84. 52. G. Schoeler, The Genesis of Literature in Islam: From the Aural to the Read, trans. S. Toorawa (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); Schoeler, ‘Writing for a Reading Public’, pp. 51–63; S. Toorawa, Ibn Abī ˝āhir ˝ayfūr and Arabic Writerly Culture: A Ninth Century Bookman in Baghdad (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005). 53. Schoeler, Genesis, pp. 99–103. Al-Maʾmūn’s statement is reported by, among others, al-JāªiÕ himself; Bayān III, p. 375. 54. See M. Omri, ‘“There Is a JāªiÕ for Every Age”: Narrative Construction and Intertextuality in al-Hamadhānī’s Maqāmāt’, Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures 1 (1998): 31–46.

1 The Addressee and the Occasion of Writing

T

he carefully crafted dialogues that al-JāªiÕ stages with his addressees are meant to enliven, calibrate and, in some cases, disguise his dialogues with his actual audience. The position of the latter as readers of a given text is altered, and often freed, by the presence of the addressee. Like any writer, al-JāªiÕ would shape his exposition in relation to what he believed were the prevailing perceptions of his readership concerning the topic at hand, that is, his referential object. Placing these dynamics within Bakhtin’s framework, a speaker or writer’s dialogue with the audience springs from his or her anticipation of the ‘conceptual horizons’ within which they will assimilate what is said.1 For Bakhtin, the writer’s dialogue with the audience is also part of a dialogue with earlier statements and writings on the referential object, whose language and point of view are reflected, explicitly or implicitly, in his or her writing.2 I refer to the writer’s purpose in approaching a given topic, forged in the context of the prior statements and of the prevailing views of the anticipated audience, as the ‘occasion’ of writing. In this chapter, I will explore the variety of ways that al-JāªiÕ’s epistolary dialogues with his addressees relate to the rhetorical difficulties that inevitably attend the occasion of producing a text intended for circulation among a reading public. The very fact that a writer feels a need to write on a given topic implies the existence of some difficulty that pertains, either to prevailing conceptions and prior statements on the topic, or to the audience themselves. When a writer takes open or tacit issue with the views he believes to be current among his audience or with what has been said in earlier texts, his very need to make a case in writing implies that the opposing views enjoy a degree of currency. Conversely, when he writes in support of texts already in circulation or accepted notions about the referential object, his doing so suggests a 34

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 35 concern that they have fallen into doubt. If his undertaking to write does not imply that the points of view he is attempting to counter possess a degree of cogency, then the problem must lie in the failings of his audience. The more forcefully writers seek to impress the importance of what they are saying upon their audiences, the more they call attention to matters at odds with their rhetorical ends or less-than-flattering assumptions about their readers. Thus, they risk exacerbating the tendencies that ineluctably attend the occasion of writing an expository text. There are, to be sure, cases where the dilemma may be less acute, particularly when the writer can lay claim to a type of specialised knowledge that the reader cannot be expected to be familiar with, or happens to possess information that is genuinely new to the audience and when they have not been exposed to contrary views on the topic in question. The writer’s occasion, in such a case, lies comfortably in the new knowledge that is his or hers to impart to the audience. Al-JāªiÕ, in contrast, was often plunging into some of the most longstanding and contentious debates of his times and was sometimes basing a good part of his case on well-known texts and familiar arguments. Especially when writing in defence of the ʿAbbāsid state’s more controversial policies or touching on issues related to the sectarian and ethnic rivalries of the period, his task in declaring his purpose in an introduction was frequently a perilous one. In other texts, his project was one of compiling materials from widely circulated sources into encyclopedic collections on particular topics or of purveying time-honoured advice on what made for good character and success in society, and he had to be wary of sounding as though he presumed his readers needed to read these materials because they were poorly read or morally reckless and obstinate. Even at his most original – in his keen observations on language, the natural world and human foibles (as in K. al-Bayān, K. al-Óayawān and K. al-Bukhalāʾ, respectively) – he was largely calling his readers’ attention to things they might have seen, heard and read on a daily basis and bidding them to view them from a fresh perspective. One can see, then, the advantage a writer like al-JāªiÕ, living in an age when Arabic texts had only recently begun to circulate in finalised forms, might have found in posing as though he were writing to an imaginary addressee. The questions and statements of the latter can be cited to show that he is in need of the explanations, arguments or advice given while the

36  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. individual actual reader need not assume that the author intends all this for him as a member of the work’s reading public. As we shall soon see, al-JāªiÕ is quite adept at creating addressees whose naïve or simplistic questions not only deflect unflattering presumptions from the reader but can prove quite entertaining, while covertly suggesting that further issues to be explored may lie behind them. Whether the reader believes that the text before him is actually a letter written for the sake of the individual being addressed, or whether he senses the latter’s function as a literary ploy, he experiences the addressee as a disposition toward the topic of the same text he is about to read and is given to compare and contrast his own disposition toward it. Indeed, when al-JāªiÕ’s quotation of the addressee’s questions goes on, as it often does, for several pages, the reader will become increasingly aware of the artificiality of the ­situation – the addressee, after all, does not need to have his own letter repeated in such detail. The reader then senses that the author has a broader audience in mind and may well feel challenged to ponder what his own answers to the questions might be long before the author’s reply begins. At times it appears that subtle hints at al-JāªiÕ’s own views on the issues at hand are implicit in the language of the questions, while even the addressee himself seems unaware of them. Not all of al-JāªiÕ’s addressees, however, are so naïve or misguided: in a few texts, they appear as intelligent individuals the reader is expected to admire and, perhaps, emulate in his reading. The carefully formed questions these addressees ask and the very specific needs they show suggest an unobtrusive and limited – though always important – role for the author and, therefore, provide a comfortable position from which the reader can approach the text. In these works al-JāªiÕ encodes what I have called unidirectional relations between the addressee and the reader. In texts in which heedless addressees serve to deflect unwelcome assumptions from the reader, varidirectional relations prevail. This distinction is by no means hard and fast: the reader may be meant to emulate the addressee in certain respects while distancing himself from him in others and, when the author anticipates an audience with differing views or levels of education, the role of the addressee in relation to each group can differ accordingly. My discussion of the varying ways in which al-JāªiÕ’s contemporary

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 37 readers might have oriented their reading in relation to the addressees of texts differing greatly in purpose and tone will begin with a colourful essay treating a point of religious law that was subject to vigorous debate during the early centuries of Islam. Al-JāªiÕ’s approach crosses the line between jurisprudence (fiqh) with its exacting methods and the broader possibilities of the informal styles of ethical literature that have come to be called ‘adab’.3 In his confusion of categories and reckless mingling of serious legal questions with purely frivolous ones, the addressee serves as a foil to the author’s more careful manner of bridging the boundaries of discourses. Next, we will see how, in a pair of polemics al-JāªiÕ writes to assist his coreligionists in replying to their sectarian adversaries, the addressees’ request for help is shaped in such a way as to avoid betraying doubt or conceding that their adversaries are their intellectual equals or sincere in the arguments they raise. This will be followed by a discussion of a book anthologising materials on notable individuals who suffered from various physical deformities, in which al-JāªiÕ establishes a sharp contrast between his own approach and the work of an earlier author on the same topic by chiding the addressee for requesting a text in the vein of the earlier book. Lastly, we will see how the addressee can also serve as a positive model for reading through an investigation of two letter-treatises of ethical advice, which al-JāªiÕ begins by praising the addressees’ moral character, showing that his advice is not directed at those who are devoid of virtue or incapable of discernment, while carefully delimiting his purpose in order to avoid prejudicing his audience at the outset of the text. ‘Stung by a Scorpion’ – from Delirium to Legal Reasoning The rambling, enthusiastic addressee in K. al-Shārib wa-al-mashrūb (The Book of the Drinker and What He Drinks) is one of al-JāªiÕ’s more elaborately stylised and obviously fictional creations; it will serve as an excellent place to begin our exploration of how epistolary framing can be used to shape the author’s implicit dialogue with his adversaries and prompt the reader toward an active role in working out the implications of a text.4 Although al-JāªiÕ admits to having ‘mingled . . . earnest with jest and combined . . . argument with witticism’, he makes quite clear that his ultimate purpose in the text is to discuss the status of various beverages in Muslim law and to make a case for allowing moderate consumption of intoxicants other than grape wine.5

38  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. In this position he joined many of his fellow Muʿtazila and members of the Óanafī school of jurisprudence in his day in opposing the majority view among scholars, which forbade all intoxicants and was eventually to prevail in Muslim law.6 Sincere and heated disputes had persisted about whether the ‘khamr’ denounced in the Qurʾān originally referred to drinks other than grape wine (5:92). In an era when Prophetic traditions – which would not only make clear that the range of ‘khamr’ extends to drinks made from other ingredients, but explicitly forbid all intoxicants – had only begun to be canonised and the discovery of a single chemical (ethanol) behind the effects of all these beverages was long in the future, the confusion over categories was understandable. With his wildly eclectic string of questions and musings, the addressee is a humorously exaggerated embodiment of this confusion, and, while al-JāªiÕ does provide a few direct arguments in support of his legal position at the end of the text, it is the reader who must infer the significance of the addressee’s provocative remarks and bewildered queries. The addressee’s questions are replete with the terminology on ingredients, containers and methods of preparation that those who forbid intoxicants employed in their attempt to distinguish them from harmless fruit and cereal beverages. This can readily be seen by even a passing comparison of the addressee’s opening salvo of inquiries with the compilations of Prophetic ªadīth on the questions at hand, such as the section on drinks in Íaªīª al-Bukhārī or the treatise of al-JāªiÕ’s erstwhile student Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889), who became a prominent advocate of the emerging Sunnī position, al-Ashriba wa-dhikr ikhtilāf al-nās fīhā (Drinks and People’s Differences Concerning Them).7 While some of the addressee’s questions to al-JāªiÕ imply that he has heard much in praise of the various types of non-grape beverages referred to by the term nabīdh (pl. anbidha) – obviously including their intoxicating varieties – his inquiries about the significance of terms related to vessels such as ‘gourd bottle’ (dubbāʾ), ‘pitch-sealed’ (muzaffat) and the hollowed palm trunk (naqīr), along with many others, show that he has heedlessly absorbed a large number of circulating traditions in which the Prophet prohibits the storage and fermenting of inebriants.8 Near the end of the texts al-JāªiÕ clearly reproaches the proto-Sunnī Traditionists – bitter rivals of the Muʿtazila on doctrinal issues as well – for ‘declaring narrators liars and reports true’ (tazyīf al-rijāl wa-ta‚ªiª al-akhbār), that is, for showing partiality

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 39 and accepting traditions on early Muslims’ views on drinks that fit their own legal point of view.9 When he asks ‘What is Satan’s portion and what remains for a human being?’ (mā na‚īb al-Shay†ān wa-mā ªā‚il al-insān) he is referring to the opinion of those who held that even grape wine could be licit if boiled until two thirds of it evaporated, removing the ‘demonic influence’ of the intoxicating portion.10 Only an exhaustive search of the extant ªadīth and fiqh sources of the period could tell us whether the myriad varietals and terms the addressee lists have parallels in the legal literature, and even this would not tell us whether they were mentioned in sources now lost. It may be that, by filling the addressee’s questions with obscure terms, al-JāªiÕ meant to show the bewilderment the jurist’s categories were engendering in ordinary believers, but it is also possible that some items in the long list are included to show that not every drink fitted neatly into the definitions used in fiqh. For example, the addressee asks about nabīdh of the black currant (kishmish) which Arabic dictionaries refer to as a type of grape (ʿanab).11 Would this be classed as a type of the disputed nabīdh or with the (almost) universally prohibited khamr?12 Yet, despite the rather innocent, apparently sincere tone of his inquiries as to the licitness of vessels and drinks, many of which clearly reflect the language and categories used by those who forbid all strong drinks, the addressee’s vivid description of drunken experience on the following pages unmistakably shows that he has either indulged in considerable quantities quite often or spent enough time in the company of avid drinkers to know what it is like to be drunk.13 This comes in the context of his request for al-JāªiÕ’s opinion concerning a fine nabīdh that has been aged until it has become clear and strong. While he feels a need to ask al-JāªiÕ if this drink is indeed permissible, he anticipates the response by listing its benefits, such as promoting digestion and sleep and contending that ‘it will not harm [even] a flea’. He then launches into a long-winded rhetorical question of his own, asking how it could be permissible to abstain from something so agreeable to one’s body or to decline treatment for the worst of illnesses. From this, he proceeds to enumerate its propitious effects before turning abruptly to list its harmful effects in a passage of nearly equal length.14 The many benefits he catalogues in his description, throughout which grandiloquent rhymed prose predominates, vary richly in vocabulary but actually come down to a few

40  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. categories: promoting health (e.g. improving digestion and restoring colour), capacity for pleasures (mostly gustatory and sexual), sociability (eliminating bashfulness and encouraging speech) and virtues such as courage, forbearance (ªilm) and generosity. His subsequent, equally ornate listing of the adverse effects of nabīdh consists mainly of detriments to one’s health (e.g. eye diseases, insomnia and emaciation), irritants and lost pleasures, social transgressions (heedless laughing, revealing secrets), along with vice (unfairness and profligacy), dangerous accidents (falling into wells or rivers) and sin. The drinker may, declares the addressee at what appears to be the close of the passage, ‘kill unwittingly and apostatise inadvertently’ (yaqtul min ghayr ʿilm wa-yakfir min ghayr fahm). So much for his earlier claim that nabīdh cannot hurt a flea. There is a gap in the text immediately following the mention of these abominations with their eternal consequences, and we may never know what the addressee says next, but when the text resumes he seems to have gone back to enumerating benefits and inquiring about obscure varietals, as though he has quite forgotten the frightful risks of drinking he has mentioned. He can only list the effects of drink that he has seen, heard or experienced as his mood and the flow of his thoughts and rhyming language carry him. He appears as incapable of weighing and evaluating them as he was of discerning the import of the legal terminology that permeated his earlier questions. For him, the abundance of both beneficial and harmful effects seems to be no more than a bewildering paradox – all he says when he turns from enumerating the former to the latter is ‘and despite all that . . .’ (wa-maʿa kull dhālika). Perhaps there is nothing in the heedless rambling the addressee displays throughout the long passages that al-JāªiÕ quotes from him that could not result simply from extreme naïveté and impulsiveness of nature, but, given the context of the work, we may well wonder whether he has been indulging (and heavily) in the drinks he is describing.15 Whatever the source of the addressee’s amusing recklessness, al-JāªiÕ’s response, as we shall soon see, proceeds in other directions, and it is the reader who must reconcile and weigh the very serious considerations that have been raised. The question the addressee begs by merely juxtaposing his lists of the benefits and dangers of nabīdh, without the slightest attempt to resolve the paradox, is how they are related to the quantity of drink consumed. Of the

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 41 consequences of drinking that he lists, the more unpleasant and the deadliest are of the sort that tend to result from extreme intoxication: falling into wells, killing or renouncing one’s religion without thinking are rarely the fate of one who stops after a light drink or two. The position of those Muslim theologians and jurists who, like al-JāªiÕ, deemed all drinks except grape wine licit was that they could be consumed in quantities not leading to intoxication, and this is the implication the reader is prompted to infer from the addressee’s description of the effects of nabīdh.16 Al-JāªiÕ himself, in the extant text, says nothing about the principle of moderation or stopping short of inebriation, either in his own name or through the voice of the addressee: the reader is left to draw the conclusion for himself if he is so inclined. However, the passages with the addressee’s description of the effects of nabīdh is shot through with terms derived from the Greek medical tradition, in which the concept of balance of the humours and, hence, moderation is the key to health, as well as with ethical concepts belonging to a system where the golden mean is the ideal. His use of medical categories does reflect a confusion of the concepts: he declares that drinking nabīdh balances one’s constitution (ʿaddalta bihi †abīʿataka), but later lists among its benefits that it ‘reduces bile and phlegm and lessens blood in the veins’ (yaªdir al-mirra wa-al-balgham wa-yula††if dam al-ʿurūq), and includes among its evil effects that it ‘brings on excesses and humours’ (yūÕhir al-fu∂ūl wa-al-akhlā†). The Greek theory held that consuming a given substance increased certain humours, which countered the influence of the opposing ones, but, if we take ‘bile’ to refer to the black and yellow varieties, the addressee is effectively declaring that nabīdh can lessen or increase all four. Similarly, he avers that it turns laziness to vitality and vice versa, and that it alleviates and causes jaundice (‚ufār), along with a host of other opposite effects on health and temperament.17 It may be that, through these contradictions in the addressee’s speech, al-JāªiÕ is illustrating how the physicians’ categories have confused people as much as those of the jurists and ªadīth transmitters have done. Still, simply by raising these medical concepts, he calls the reader’s attention to issues of balance and the quantitative effects of drink on individual constitutions and thus steers him in the direction of the questions he prefers to ask concerning the a­ ppropriateness of intoxicants. The effects of nabīdh on character and behaviour that the addressee mentions are all concerned with traits for which al-JāªiÕ elsewhere asserts that virtue

42  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. lies in moderation. Drinking it, declares the addressee, ‘arouses generosity and munificence’ (yabʿath al-jūd wa-al-samāª) and ‘makes the frightened one courageous’ (yushajjiʿ al-murtāʿ). Conversely, it ‘ruins one’s fortune’ (yujªif bi-almāl ) and ‘exposes people to death’ (yu‘arri∂ lil-ªutūf ).18 The addressee does not say that it is carrying drinking to excess that can lead one to take generosity or courage to harmful excess, but the inference, given the prevalence of the theory of humours in the passage, is not far off for the reader. After his lengthy quotation of the addressee’s letter – which, as we shall see, he later seems to hint he has fabricated himself – al-JāªiÕ deals with the legal issue of intoxicants in his own voice. Unfortunately, the manuscripts we have of K. al-Shārib wa-al-mashrūb – as with the texts of several works we shall be discussing – are lacking sections of unknown length which were removed by later compilers of al-JāªiÕ’s writings.19 It is therefore impossible to know what else al-JāªiÕ may have said in his reply, but the text we have contains no direct response to the addressee’s many questions. We do have his acknowledgement that he has understood the addressee’s questions and observations on drinks and his comically smug comment ‘you remain among those who inquire and search, and I, among those who explain with eloquence’. Shortly after this, he says that it is better for one like himself to render the path to knowledge easy for someone like the addressee when discussing an issue for which the ‘signposts’ and ‘paths’ (maʿālim; manāhij; i.e. the practices of the earliest Muslims) have fallen into obscurity. He then declares that, if it were truly a difficult matter to prove his point and if he needed to clarify the issue (of nabīdh) through a discussion of opposing and parallel categories, he would not be ashamed to do so, and asks rhetorically, ‘And how so, when capability – God be praised – is abundant and the proof is clear?’20 The arrogant and belittling attitude toward the addressee is, of course, a different matter for the actual audience, who can easily distance themselves from the latter’s delirious enthusiasm and probably recognise the fictionality of his letter and the playful irony in al-JāªiÕ’s response. It seems clear that al-JāªiÕ is implicitly declining to reply to the addressee’s questions just as he does with the vast majority of the equally provocative questions posed by the addressee in Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ, which I discuss in Chapter 4.21 The brief legal arguments al-JāªiÕ does make in the remainder of the extant text seem relatively prosaic and (a pun being difficult to avoid) sober in

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 43 comparison to the addressee’s remarks. Along with illustrating the bewilderment the jurists’ categories can cause and indirectly hinting at the principle of moderation, the comic portrait of the addressee has lightened the atmosphere of the legal dispute and made what the author now has to say appear laconic and, hence, confident. His remarks on intoxicants amount to four major points, some of which are mere refutations of arguments made by his opponents. Responding to anyone who may ask how it can be known that in prohibiting khamr, the Qurʾān (5:90) did not intend to forbid the various types of nabīdh as well, al-JāªiÕ avers that, had this been the case, Muslims of the Prophet’s generation would have all concurred on the matter and conflicting reports on their views of intoxicants would not have proliferated. He next argues that, for everything God forbids, he permits something resembling it ‘that has the same or similar effect’ (mā yaʿmal ʿamalahu aw qarīban minhu), mentioning parallels in the case of pork and licit meats, forbidden sexual relations and marriage, along with other examples.22 He then dismisses the argument that Muslims ought to follow the consensus of the people of Medina – where the Prophet lived and established customs – in forbidding intoxicants, declaring that the residents of a city, however great, do not determine what is allowed or forbidden and mentioning that some Medinans allowed anal intercourse with women and forbade the sacrifices of black African Muslims – both of which he expects his pious readers to find objectionable. He goes on to say that, if the Medinans were serious in what they said, they would have punished those who frequented the houses of the famous singers of their city who were said to drink nabīdh. This mention of song then leads him to declare that, if his differences with those who forbade all intoxicants were merely like differences in musical taste, he would have no point of contention with those who claimed to know something he did not. Unfortunately, a gap in the text follows here and we cannot know whether al-JāªiÕ explains in what sense the question of nabīdh differs from preferences in music.23 After this gap and the brief passage I have already mentioned accusing the Traditionists of mishandling reports, we have another gap that is followed by an intriguing passage in which al-JāªiÕ explains why he has chosen to write this text on a question of jurisprudence in this unusual form:

44  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. What led me to set down all of these beverages and discuss their varieties and countries of origin was a fear that this book should fall into the hands of someone who may not be familiar with all of them or have even heard of them and that he would imagine that – in mentioning the reprehensible types and unrecognised varieties among them (ajnāsihā al-mustashnaʿa wa-anwāʿihā al-mubtadaʿa) – I was like one raving from the sting of a scorpion, while my true intention in mentioning them at the outset of the book was to inquire into what was permissible and forbidden among them and how the Community has differed concerning them and the reason doubts have arisen and ambiguities remained, as well as to argue in favour of what is licit and affirm its merit and expose what is forbidden and give it due attention.24

We can note, first of all, that the fiction of the addressee’s letter has clearly been abandoned: the discussion of ‘varieties’ and their ‘countries of origin’ all come in the extant text in quotations from the addressee. Even if we suppose that al-JāªiÕ did mention types and origins of beverages in the passages that have been lost, this would have been in response to the addressee’s questions and not for the reason he gives here. With the artifice of the letter frame admitted, al-JāªiÕ also explicitly mentions the possibility of the book freely circulating to unknown readers. The adjectives ‘reprehensible’ and ‘unrecognised’ (i.e. as accepted Muslim practice) are clearly meant to reflect how a reader who does not agree with al-JāªiÕ’s view allowing intoxicants would describe the drinks he has mentioned. Still, the surviving text of the passage is quite confusing because al-JāªiÕ appears to be saying that he has mentioned the various drinks and countries so that certain readers will not think he is delirious when he does so. How are we to understand this explanation, then? Given that al-JāªiÕ only mentions these various types in his quotation of the addressee, I find it quite plausible to suppose he had directly mentioned inventing the addressee’s letter in the omitted passage that immediately preceded this statement. The point of the passage would then be that he has placed his discussion of nabīdh in its bewildering varieties on the lips of the addressee, so that it would be the latter who would sound as though he had been ‘stung by the scorpion’ of intoxication and not the author himself. The reader will have gone deeply into the text and

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 45 al-JāªiÕ’s arguments before he realises what is going on, and, by this time, the author will have established a foil who makes him appear sober by comparison in his manner of addressing the question at hand. His treatment of the issue will seem serious even if he has not followed the systematic procedures of fiqh. If the reader’s views have been challenged or clarified in the course of reading as al-JāªiÕ undoubtedly hopes, much of this will have come from his own discernment of the implications of the addressee’s delirious questions. On Behalf of Friends and Against Enemies If the legal issue al-JāªiÕ treated in K. al-Shārib wa-al-mashrūb was a divisive one that called for clever rhetorical planning in order to support the view of his own side and, perhaps, win over a few members of the opposing camp, the topics of some other works were the source of far graver contentions in the cities of Iraq in the ninth century. When composing polemics in refutation of claims advanced by sectarian rivals that threatened the faith of the Muslim community, or called into question points held dear by the Muʿtazila – ­especially when the issues at hand were connected with ʿAbbāsid policies – he was traversing delicate territory. In these texts, we see the harshly sectarian side of al-JāªiÕ, which differs markedly from the broad-minded, congenitally curious voice we meet in a greater number of texts. When he questioned the reasonableness and sincerity of his opponents’ views and found them threatening correct belief and the social order associated with it, he was loath to lend dignity to his opponents’ claims by engaging them in argument. At the same time, he needed to be wary of patronising readers in his own camp by presuming they needed to read refutations of attacks he himself held in disdain. Al-JāªiÕ makes clear his reluctance to engage directly in the sort of arguments posed in these texts in a telling passage appearing in the second of the two polemical texts I am going to discuss, Kitāb fī khalq al-Qurʾān (On the Createdness of the Qurʾān): One only writes against those who oppose one as equals, or on behalf of friends against their enemies, and to those who see the validity of logical inquiry and the merit of learning, who believe in fairness and have the means to acquire knowledge.25

46  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. To argue with a sectarian opponent is, then, to concede that he is one’s ­intellectual peer and sincere in pursuing truth through reason. Al-JāªiÕ was hardly willing to concede that Christians living in Muslim lands, or the ªadīth partisans (‘Traditionists’), who held that the Qurʾān was uncreated and co-eternal with God, were fit opponents for a competent Muʿtazilī theologian to debate.26 At the same time, he acknowledges that one may write ‘on behalf of friends against enemies’, in which case the worthiness of the opponent does not matter since an ally or coreligionist is in need of defence from him. The friend’s being in need of defence from such an opponent is, however, a far more sensitive matter for the reasons I suggest above, and it is here that an addressee can prove useful in a variety of ways. In the pair of well-known texts I am about to examine, the addressees are used to assist the audience in rebutting challenges from rival sects without conceding that the latter are sufficiently sincere or intellectually fit to warrant serious debate with competent scholars in their own camp. In K. al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā (The Response to the Christians), the Muslim audience is invited to identify with a group of Muslims who have written for help in refuting Christian claims against the veracity of the Qurʾān that have troubled the young and naïve but, apparently, not themselves.27 In contrast to their relative confidence, the contradictory and unrealistic expectations of the addressee in K. fī Khalq al-Qurʾān for easy proofs of a Muʿtazilī doctrine allow the reader to distance himself from such unreasonable demands for easy answers.28 The Response to the Christians (Kitāb al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā) Al-JāªiÕ remarks on the hypocrisy and doctrinal incoherence of the Christian communities he knows of in a number of works, but K. al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā is the only example of a sustained polemic against them that has survived. It is possible that al-JāªiÕ prepared more than one version of this work for differing purposes during his long career or that he composed other texts on similar themes which – given that the titles of texts in this period are often simply fluid phrases describing their content – could be referred to by the same title or similar ones in our sources. We cannot be certain, then, whether the text we have is identical with the K. al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā, written with the support of the caliph al-Mutawakkil, that I have already mentioned. If

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 47 indeed written at the behest of al-Mutawakkil, this work, ostensibly refuting Christians’ attacks on the Qurʾān, was probably written, at least in part, with a view to justifying the caliph’s enforcement of dress and social restrictions on non-Muslims. Even if the extant text is not the one prepared in al-Mutawakkil’s time, it is clear that tensions over the status of Christians in Muslim-ruled society loom large behind the scriptural questions on which al-JāªiÕ purports to have written the work at the addressees’ request.29 The complex and interesting rhetorical role that these addressees play in the text’s introduction owes much to the combination of religious and social purpose behind its composition. The addressees are a group of Muslims who have written to al-JāªiÕ, asking his help in refuting claims of Christians that the Qurʾān is in error on several points, some of which involve the Christians’ own beliefs. These questions and their refutation are but a part of K. al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā – which develops several religious and social themes about Christians and their insidious effects on Muslim society. Opening the text with the device of the addressees’ request allows al-JāªiÕ to present the questions in a rhetorically safe and yet provocative manner, while preparing the way for the social issues that follow later. The work’s introduction must convince the Muslim audience that the Christians’ charges pose a genuine challenge – otherwise the reader can have little interest in reading al-JāªiÕ’s reply – but it must avoid implying that Muslims have reason to feel their faith in the Qurʾān can be shaken while waiting for their refutation. The addressees’ request and the quotes of Christians it contains show every sign of being carefully shaped to secure the reader’s receptivity and cooperative attention. An emphasis on a powerful solidarity within the Muslim community is evident when the text opens with a brief word of praise to God for the faith al-JāªiÕ shares with the addressees. The description of that faith plainly emphasises the particular tenets that separate them from Christians: belief in the absolute unity of God (tawªīd), not making distinctions between the prophets (i.e. seeing Jesus as merely human, like the others) and not denying any of the authentic scriptures.30 This affirmation of shared identity and convictions prepares the Muslim reader to relate himself sympathetically toward the addressees that he meets in the passage that follows immediately:

48  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. I have read your letter and understood what you describe in it: the questions put to you by the Christians, the confusion that has come upon the minds of the young and the slower-witted among you (dakhala ʿalā qulūb aªdāthikum wa-∂uʿafāʾikum), your fear of being unable to respond to them and your request that I settle these questions for them and do the favour of helping them reply.31

Already in this brief passage, the Muslim community is effectively divided into three levels with respect to the questions posed. At the bottom are the youthful and the least intellectually gifted, whose shaken faith alone illustrates the dangers posed by the Christians’ attacks and justifies the writing of a text like this. At the top are able theologians like al-JāªiÕ, whose help can be sought in rebutting the attacks, and between these two groups are those like the addressees who cannot answer the Christians’ charges themselves, but seem confident that the charges levelled against the Qurʾān do have answers and that their community possesses those who can answer them, like al-JāªiÕ. The reader is then free to identify his own purpose in reading al-JāªiÕ’s response to the Christians’ attacks with that of the addressees, who are only seeking help in finding answers to be given to young people rather than being desperate to rescue their own convictions. The addressees’ admission of need is, in this sense, limited, and al-JāªiÕ’s approach to his Muslim readers here is less alarming or belittling than it would have been in a non-epistolary text that began with direct warnings to his readership in general of the dangers of Christian critiques of Islam. The account al-JāªiÕ relates of what the addressees have told him of the Christians’ charges against the Qurʾān is a curious mixture of voices, layering direct and indirect citation with pronouns shifting unexpectedly among the first, second and third persons. His manner of citing their letter can be seen through a fairly literal translation of its opening passages: You have mentioned that they [the Christians] have said that the proof that our Scripture is invalid and our whole affair in vain is that we charge them with something they do not know of, whether from one another or from their predecessors – for we claim that God, the Almighty and Exalted, has said in his book through the tongue of his Prophet Muªammad, God bless him and grant him peace: ‘Then God will say: O, Jesus, son of Mary, did

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 49 you tell the people: Take me and my mother as two gods in place of God?’ (5:16) And [you mentioned] that they claimed that they never believed in secret that Mary was divine, nor professed this in public, and that they claim we have charged them with something they do not even know of, and that we have, likewise, charged the Jews with something they do not know of, when our Scripture announced and our Prophet bore witness that the Jews have said that Ezra (ʿUzayr) was the son of God (9:30), that ‘the hand of God has been fettered’ (5:64) and that God was poor while they were rich – all of which is neither held by a single person nor known of among any of the various religions. ‘And, if they did believe what you have claimed and attributed to them concerning Ezra, they would not disavow it as part of their religion. And, since they are no more entitled to deny the sonship of Ezra than we are to deny the sonship of Christ, there would not be any impairment upon us from you apart from making the pact of protection and collecting the poll tax.’32

The switching between direct and indirect citation and the shifting of voices that results forces the reader to follow attentively (especially in the case of a pre-modern Arabic manuscript lacking punctuation and paragraphing) and brings to life the dynamic of circulating ideas – in this case, the Christians’ attack on Islam at its very Qurʾānic foundations. The Christians’ aggressive stance toward Islam comes through clearest when cited directly in their own words, while the addressees’ concerns about the effect of the attacks on the young of their own community are felt most poignantly when they employ the first person to convey the conclusion the Christians would have them draw: ‘. . . our scripture is invalid and our whole affair in vain’. The danger of such thoughts passing unrefuted from Christian to Muslim lips and disturbing the young and faint-hearted is, then, vividly conveyed through this apparently sloppy mixing of voices. But, in boldly rehearsing the offending words received from the addressees at the opening of his essay, al-JāªiÕ is only conveying his own confidence in the replies that he, naturally, has in store. Moreover, the length and detail of al-JāªiÕ’s citation of their letter (which goes on for several more pages) is far greater than what the addressees

50  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. themselves would need as a reminder of their own question: al-JāªiÕ thus signals that he is aware of a possible reader beyond the addressees, who is prompted to compare his approach to the Christians’ questions with theirs. Whether or not the reader feels as incapable of answering the attacks as the addressees do, he will have their example of patient confidence in the Qurʾān before him. He can feel he belongs to a community that has deeply rooted beliefs and possesses scholars who can be counted on to defend them. In this sense he is invited to view the addressees, in their patient trust, as a positive model for his reading, while remaining perfectly free to ponder how he might answer the questions for himself if he so chooses and to anticipate how al-JāªiÕ will respond. But, as the reader progresses through the text, he may also find a subtle invitation to avoid the addressees’ example in another regard. In the passage cited above, the addressees give voice to no anger or indignation over the offensively blunt questions the Christians are said to have asked: their only concern is for the effect on their young and less competent ones. Nor do the addressees appear to notice what the nature of the questions they describe reveals about the Christians’ real motives in raising them. In the later part of the citation of their letter, the Christians are said to have remarked that, if Jesus had indeed spoken as an infant in the cradle as the Qurʾān claims (3:46–53; 19:30–3), the various sects among them would not all concur in rejecting a miracle that would be ‘the greatest proof in favour of their master’.33 Thus, they appear more concerned with faulting the Qurʾān than with adding to the glory of Christ, which is the very basis of their religion. Similarly, when they charge that the Qurʾān misrepresents the doctrines of the Jews, their motive is not to defend a group toward whom – as al-JāªiÕ repeatedly hints – they bear particular enmity; they are simply using this alleged misrepresentation to attack the sacred book of Islam.34 The fact that the addressees do not complain over the Qurʾān being attacked or question the Christians’ motives in doing so may reflect the overly favourable attitude among Muslims toward them, the reasons for which al-JāªiÕ attempts to explain later in the text.35 If the reader has noticed the addressees’ strange failure to remark on the obvious insincerity of the Christians’ attack and al-JāªiÕ’s own conspicuous reticence on this, he will be ready for several passages in the remainder of the

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 51 text in which the author implies Christians are indeed an insidious danger to the community. Leaving the reader to draw the connection to the preceding material for himself, al-JāªiÕ prefaces his reply to their questions with a number of historical and social explanations for the Muslim masses’ finding them ‘nearer in affection’ and ‘less treacherous’ than Jews.36 He suggests that they actually have little concern for the truthfulness of their own beliefs, observing that one cannot get a comprehensible explanation of their doctrine and that even individuals within the same sect profess different doctrines on the nature of Christ. They avoid these problems by insisting that religion is not subject to analogical reasoning and cannot be confirmed by rational examination: it must simply be accepted from books and received from their forebears, an excuse which al-JāªiÕ says a religion like theirs compels them to take.37 Because of their desire to undermine Islam, Christians have been more of a trial to the community than the Jews, Zoroastrians and Mandeans. Their theologians, physicians and astrologers are in the habit of confronting young, simpleminded or frivolous Muslims and introducing them not to their own scriptures but to those of the Manichaeans and other Gnostic and Persian sects.38 This image, coming near the end of al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚arā, of educated Christians conniving to lead unsophisticated Muslims astray, and not even for the sake of drawing them to their own religion, bears a striking ­resemblance to the situation the addressees unwittingly describe near the beginning of the text. Here, however, we find an emphasis on their malicious intentions toward the Muslim community that has escaped the addressees’ notice entirely. Through his use of the addressees’ letter in the introductory pages, al-JāªiÕ has allowed himself to capture his Muslim audience’s attention through the Christians’ provocative questions, while delaying his own response until he has carefully laid the groundwork for his own reply with a discussion of social questions. The reader has been free to imitate the addressees in their calm reliance on the theologians’ answers, but he has also had time to answer the Christians’ questions and contemplate the motives behind them for himself. ‘Restoring the Errant’ in Kitāb fī Khalq al-Qurʾān Kitāb fī Khalq al-Qurʾān (On the Createdness of the Qurʾān) begins with al-JāªiÕ’s description of his frustrating correspondence with the addressee,

52  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. a devout but hopelessly confused friend who demands a defence of the Muʿtazilī doctrine named in the title.39 In his rather comical combination of enthusiasm over his own views and inquiries couched in utter dependence on al-JāªiÕ for answers to conundrums, he resembles the addressee in K. al-Shārib wa-al-mashrūb, but the source of his confusion is not so much the difficulties posed by the opposing camp as shortcomings in the ideas of the Muʿtazilī writers and thinkers who have been heedlessly playing into their rivals’ hands. The opening pages of this unique text have some characteristics of a personal letter that set it apart from the other epistolary frames of al-JāªiÕ that I discuss in this book: there is more emphasis on the closeness of the relationship between the author and the addressee, along with mention of frequent letters and the possibility of a visit between the two men, all of this despite their taxing affairs and difficult circumstances.40 Still, careful reading discloses that the text meets this study’s criterion that everything we learn about the addressee is intimately related to the topic of the text. The friendship, letters and potential visit described are all reflections of the addressee’s theological enthusiasms and contribute to a portrait with which the reader is invited to contrast himself in approaching the questions raised in the text. By the end of the work, the addressee’s importance seems to have faded. The text concludes with an ominous warning of how Muʿtazilī scholars have grown careless in their writing and have failed to realise the growing sophistication of their sectarian opponents and the popular support they have come to enjoy. It is quite possible that these theologians are an important part of the intended audience of this work and that al-JāªiÕ has created the exasperating correspondence with the addressee that he describes in order to illustrate the perplexity among the naïve faithful that their cavalier treatment of vital doctrinal issues is causing. The addressees in K. al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā and the young Muslims they were seeking to help were only concerned with questions they had heard that challenged the Qurʾān’s veracity, problems a committed Muslim could hardly avoid once doubts were raised. The addressee we meet in K. fī Khalq al-Qurʾān has much more intellectual ambition and appears concerned to see that Muʿtazilī scholars will adequately answer every argument raised by the Traditionist opponents, with whose writings he has been diligently comparing theirs. But, despite his hunger for religious knowledge and apparent zeal

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 53 for the Muʿtazilī view, this addressee is thoroughly befuddled, and his correspondence with al-JāªiÕ appears to be a source of endless frustration for the latter. The contradictory demands in the addressee’s request for theological explanations and the comically frantic way in which he plies his theologian friend with them leave little doubt that this is a fictionalised correspondence. While al-JāªiÕ is, at least initially, tactful in handling his misplaced enthusiasm, it soon becomes clear that the addressee embodies the communal problem described in a statement from K. al-Radd ʿalā al-Nā‚ārā: ‘every man among the Muslims considers himself a theologian’.41 The author’s complex predicament in dealing with the addressee relates to a number of communal problems and, in rhetorical terms, it may well function differently for different types of readers. The addressee’s demand that al-JāªiÕ deal with these problems thoroughly, but also briefly and in an appealing form, may prompt the less knowledgeable among his readers to avoid his impatience and overconfidence in dealing with theological matters. More importantly, the addressee’s anxieties over these doctrinal issues reflect the confusion and spiritual danger which the careless writing of certain well-intentioned Muʿtazilī theologians has caused: the comical but alarming portrayal may be al-JāªiÕ’s way of showing them the effects of their logical and rhetorical errors. On still another level, by addressing his text to a misguided member of his own camp, al-JāªiÕ may be taking an opportunity to respond to his Traditionist opponents without stooping to debating with them directly. Finally, the text may contain a note of self-parody as well: by humouring and even flattering the addressee in his reckless pursuit of theology, al-JāªiÕ may be demonstrating how theologians have encouraged misplaced self-confidence among the less educated and less intellectually prepared members of the community. Perhaps al-JāªiÕ is offering an admission that he himself is among the theologians who have aggravated the community’s problems with would-be theologians by failing to deal frankly with those who demand solutions to questions beyond their ready capacity. From the first page of K. fī Khalq al-Qurʾān, we see the problematic relationship between the ordinary believer and theology that the addressee’s enthusiasm exemplifies. The letter begins with a brief prayer for the protection of the addressee from error and unbelief: ‘God keep you firm through proof, fortify your religion against everything suspect, make you pass from

54  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. this life as a Muslim and count you among the grateful ones.’42 The things al-JāªiÕ prays for are the concern of all Muslims, but they focus attention on issues of doctrinal guidance where the careful leadership of theologians is most important. We shall soon see, however, that the careless writings of many scholars have failed to protect sincere believers like the addressee from unnecessary troubles. In the following paragraph, al-JāªiÕ praises the addressee for his love of knowledge in terms that will, in the light of the misguided questions that later follow, merely heighten the pathos of his theological pretensions and call attention to the dangers that attend them. He is commended for seeking the gift of knowledge and – more ironically, given the criticism that is to come – for understanding it. Al-JāªiÕ also expresses admiration for the addressee’s desire to avoid the ‘blind imitation’ (taqlīd) of received doctrines – a human failing the Muʿtazila frequently blamed for the persistence of error, particularly that of the Traditionists.43 But, as his ensuing questions will show, this avoidance will hardly help him if he is not reasoning properly or receiving appropriate instruction. When al-JāªiÕ goes on to describe the earlier of the two letters he has received from the addressee, his reference to ‘the exchange of knowledge and cooperation in inquiry that you have urged’ implies that the addressee considers himself on equal footing with his theologian friend.44 Yet the addressee will soon reveal that he is helpless without a scholar like al-JāªiÕ to settle the doubts the Muʿtazila’s opponents have raised: he has neither the patience nor the intellectual discipline to ascertain where these increasingly knowledgeable rivals have gone astray from the truth of Islam. The irony and tension become still more obvious when al-JāªiÕ quotes from the addressee’s initial request for a letter on the Qurʾān, insisting that it meet his exhausting standards of comprehensiveness and yet be simple and brief. The addressee’s language shows that he expected the letter to complete the entirety of the theologian’s and the apologist’s task once and for all. It was to provide what people need and free them from (doctrinally) ‘suspect notions’ (khawā†ir al-shubuhāt). Al-JāªiÕ was to act ‘as a gentle teacher’ (ka-al-muʿallim al-rafīq) and as ‘a caring physician (al-muʿālij al-shafīq) who knows the illness and its cause, the remedy and its place’, while patiently administering treatment and not growing weary of repetition. His aspiration was to be ‘the reform of the corrupted and the restoration of the errant’ (i‚lāª

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 55 al-fāsid wa-radd al-shārid), and to effect ‘the suppression of every deviant and the removal of every apprehension’ (qamʿ kull nājim wa-‚arf kull hājis). Succeeding in giving proof, al-JāªiÕ would ‘savour its blessing’, ‘delight in the coolness of certainty’ (tathlaj bi-bard al-yaqīn) and ‘arrive at the truth of the matter’ (tuf∂ī ilā ªaqīqat al-amr). He was, then, to provide a ‘summary of the foundations’ (istijmāʿ al-u‚ūl ) and an ‘exhaustive treatment of the derivations’ (istīfāʾ al-furūʿ), implying that the addressee believed the former were already familiar and could be dealt with quickly and that he considered himself ready to progress to the latter. Al-JāªiÕ is further asked to denounce ‘arbitrariness’ (istibdād) and ‘haste in forming beliefs’ (al-ʿajala ilā al-iʿtiqād ) and to describe ‘the preliminaries of the fields of learning and their utmost limit’ (muqaddimāt al-ʿulūm wa-muntahāhā). At the same time, the addressee demanded that al-JāªiÕ avoid the ‘prolixity’ (ta†wīl ), ‘profundity’ (taʿammuq) and ‘complexity’ (taʿqīd ) that theologians are prone to, and charged him not to imitate their ‘undertaking what is unnecessary while leaving what is necessary’. If, however, ‘the accidental properties of incapability’ (ʿawāri∂ al-ʿajz) and ‘the by-products of falling short’ (lawāªiq al-taq‚īr) could not be avoided, it was best for al-JāªiÕ to avow them (al-barr lahā ajmal ) so as to lessen their harm to the addressee. Al-JāªiÕ was expected to begin all this with ‘what is most to be feared [in the way of error?] and the next most after it’ (al-akhwaf fa-al-akhwaf ) and ‘everything that is more elegant to the ear and soothing to the breast’ (kull mā kāna ānaq fī al-samʿ wa-aªlā fī al-‚adr).45 As if to put the finishing touches on this portrait of a misguided believer placing impossible demands on a theologian, al-JāªiÕ closes his account of the addressee’s request with the latter’s warning that al-JāªiÕ would need to accomplish all of these things in a manner he could understand without the aid of gestures or facial expression. Otherwise, he would be forced to pay him a visit in spite of the distance between their homes and even though al-JāªiÕ was busy and might fear a waste of time that would ruin his livelihood.46 The reader may well gather from the exaggerated naïveté and contradictory demands of the addressee – along with his many echoes of al-JāªiÕ’s own style – that his request is really a fiction devised to show something about the author’s purposes in writing on the createdness of the Qurʾān. The artificiality of the correspondence becomes still clearer when al-JāªiÕ, despite the

56  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. addressee’s conflicting demands, claims to have written a reply that, he had supposed, would fulfil his utmost wishes.47 He goes on to assert that in this letter he had put forth his best efforts in defence of the Qurʾān and neglected no question posed by a Rāfi∂ī Shīʿī, a Traditionist (ªadīthī, ªushwī), ‘an open unbeliever’ or a dissimulator who is prevented from avowing his views (munāfiq maqmūʿ). To this dangerous assortment of doctrinal enemies, he adds – with what must be a touch of biting humour – his own Muʿtazilī teacher, al-NaÕÕām, and those of his followers who ‘avow that the Qurʾān is created but that its composition (taʾlīf ) is not an argument and that it is a revelation but not a proof or sign [i.e. of its divine origin and the prophethood of Muªammad]’.48 In all likelihood, he does not mean to imply that these views are unbelief or heresy on a par with the teachings of the preceding groups, but he may be suggesting that such claims, by undermining the rational defence of Muslim faith, represent as great a danger to the community. Such discussions show al-JāªiÕ’s zeal to defend correct doctrine, and may be his model of how a simple-minded believer, as portrayed in the addressee, is to be given a firm sense that issues raised by sectarian rivals have been settled. Al-NaÕÕām and his Muʿtazilī followers have only made this task more difficult by raising unneeded challenges to Muslim apologetics. All of this gives a context for the addressee’s second letter which becomes al-JāªiÕ’s justification for setting down an argument that he believes should not have been necessary. Al-JāªiÕ declares that, when the addressee wrote back to say that he had not wanted arguments for the divine ordering (naÕm) of the Qurʾān, but, rather, for its createdness, the request was baffling to him: this was not something on which he would have wished to write for him. As if to discourage the addressee from pursuing this matter at all, he avows that this response will not meet his expectations of brevity and simplicity: ‘So I am writing for you the more tiresome, the duller, the more obscure in meaning and the longer of the two letters.’49 Thus, the question of whether the Qurʾān is created is treated as one that a believer like the addressee was never expected to raise. The following passages make clear that al-JāªiÕ is approaching the issue with great reluctance and only because the state of the debate in his time has compelled him to. He would not have troubled the addressee with the arguments of the ‘theologians

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 57 of the rabble and upstarts’ (mutakallimī al-ªashwiyya wa-al-nābita) – those Traditionists who were beginning to engage the Muʿtazila in debate – for fear they cause him to stumble and share their unfortunate fate.50 These are the unworthy partners for debate mentioned by al-JāªiÕ in the passage I cite near the beginning of this chapter. But the addressee has pointed out that the assertion of some Muʿtazila that the workings of nature are created in a figurative sense rather than a literal one has been used in their opponents’ arguments. Perhaps more dangerously, the Traditionist theologians have attained a degree of acumen (baʿ∂ al-fi†na) by debating with Muʿtazila and reading their writings.51 The following passage, in which the addressee’s demands for the present letter are cited, reveals the pernicious effects that these newly savvy Traditionists – along with the careless Muʿtazilī thinkers who underestimate them – have had on the faithful. The addressee divides the texts he has read of the Muʿtazila (presumably among those devoted to the createdness of the Qurʾān) into those he cannot understand and those in which the author’s argument is not as strong as his opponents’. He warns al-JāªiÕ not to rely on an estimation of his enemies’ powers ‘without exhausting the potential of their falsehood and granting them their full due’. He ought to be as comprehensive in treating their views as he is with his own so as to be ‘more effective in educating and bring more despair to the disputant’. The last part of the addressee’s request cited is a specific point in the Traditionists’ argument with which he expects al-JāªiÕ to deal: They say that you are compelled to say that the Qurʾān is not created except in a figurative sense, and that Muʿammar, Abū Kalada, ʿAbd al-Óamīd and Thumāma and all who hold their opinion and employ the same analogies have compelled themselves to do the same.52

To all appearances a dedicated Muʿtazilī until now, the addressee now presents the matter as if he can see no way around conceding this highly contentious point to their rivals, which would have put supporters of the miªna in a difficult bind indeed. Throughout the introductory pages, the reader has been given little choice but to contrast himself with the addressee in his hasty dismissal of theological complexities and his unrealistic demands for answers. Al-JāªiÕ has prepared the reader to distance himself from the

58  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. addressee, while he berates the latter for including him among the theologians who have led themselves into implying the truth of what the Muʿtazila considered a reprehensible doctrine. Even if the reader shares in some of the confusion the addressee expresses, he is not likely to feel himself included in the exaggerated impatience with which al-JāªiÕ next responds to his remarks given that the latter’s impossible demands and misplaced enthusiasm have earned some form of reproof. The strained tone with which al-JāªiÕ begins his response to the addressee is in sharp contrast to the flattering tone with which the letter began: ‘So try to understand – God make you understand – what I will describe to you and convey to you: be informed that . . . (fatafahham fahhamaka Allāh mā anā wā‚ifuhu laka wa-mūriduhu ʿalayka iʿlam anna . . . ).’ The point which follows this plea for the addressee’s attention is that the claim that the Qurʾān is created only in a figurative sense is unnecessary and that theologians are only compelled to say what they have compelled themselves to say (al-qawm yalzamuhum mā alzamūhu anfusahum). This is the result of their own ‘departing from the theoretical principles of their doctrine and the derivations of their foundations’ (dhahābihim ʿan qawāʿid qawlihim wa-furūʿ u‚ūlihim). Therefore, the addressee must beware of attributing this failure to the doctrine itself and of ‘imputing that error to others’ (taªmil dhālika al-khi†āʾ ʿalā ghayrihim), that is, he should not believe their opponents’ assertion that al-JāªiÕ is compelled to follow what the other ­theologians have led themselves into.53 Of course, the rhetorical situation here is very different for any theologians among the reading audience who might recognise themselves in the trends among the Muʿtazila that al-JāªiÕ is criticising. While the ordinary reader is invited to contrast himself with the addressee when al-JāªiÕ berates him for suggesting that he must follow these theologians’ missteps, the ­theologians – apparently a group extending far beyond the four individuals named – are quite plainly being chided for their failures. The harshness of this attack is mitigated, to some extent, by the self-parodic elements of the text. Al-JāªiÕ has been humouring the addressee all along, but now he is turning suddenly against the false confidence he had himself encouraged; if the theologians named have been remiss in guiding the community in one way, al-JāªiÕ appears to have done so in another. The text we possess of K. fī Khalq al-Qurʾān is fragmentary with four

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 59 passages of uncertain length and content missing, and we have only those parts of al-JāªiÕ’s response that were chosen for the source of our extant manuscripts. We do not know whether al-JāªiÕ actually responded to the addressee’s requests as thoroughly – or as tediously – as he promises to. The segments we have begin with a passionate description of how a noble doctrine can be dishonoured and pass into disrepute through the carelessness of its advocates, and an illustration of this through a discussion of the problems attending a claim that the Qurʾān is mere body.54 There are several segments describing how writers ought to proceed cautiously in their expositions, developing their arguments from clearly delineated first principles and explaining patiently so that the faithful will understand the final steps of learning as easily as the first.55 In all this, al-JāªiÕ is still writing ostensibly to the addressee, and the theologians whose carelessness has been criticised are allowed to overhear what is most likely meant as advice for them. Similarly, they will be reading, as it were, over the shoulder of the addressee when they arrive at a passage much more charitable to them, in which al-JāªiÕ declares that their mistakes are nothing like the open anthropomorphism of the Traditionists and the Shīʿa and that, if they revisited their errors, they would easily remove them.56 The createdness of the Qurʾān itself is treated only backhandedly in the context of a digression in defence of the proceedings of the miªna, which leads to al-JāªiÕ’s famous account of the trial of Aªmad b. Óanbal. It is only here that al-JāªiÕ stoops to treat the doctrine of the uncreated Qurʾān and to attempt to display its incoherence.57 The text closes with al-JāªiÕ describing how perilous the state of the umma has become with the Traditionists growing in popular support and argumentative savvy, while the Muʿtazila remain cavalier in dealing with them.58 It is this carelessness that the Traditionists have been exploiting so successfully in misleading less-informed believers, and this is exactly the situation al-JāªiÕ dramatised so passionately and comically in his correspondence with the addressee at the opening of the letter. Kitāb al-Bur‚ān wa-al-ʿurjān wa-al-ʿumyān wa-al-ªūlān First published as recently as 1972, Kitāb al-Bur‚ān wa-al-ʿurjān wa-alʿumyān wa-al-ªūlān (The Book of Lepers, the Lame, the Blind and the Squinteyed ) has drawn by far the least attention of al-JāªiÕ’s longer works. Bringing together materials – as in other collections, a mixture of poetry, anecdotes,

60  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. proverbs, ªadīth and Qurʾān – on individuals afflicted with a host of physical abnormalities, it succeeds in showing the variety of perspectives on these conditions to be found in pre-Islamic and early Islamic culture. But unlike the more artfully structured K. al-Bukhalāʾ and K. al-Óayawān, the individual textual items are largely left to speak for themselves, without the lengthy debates and personal statements through which the author can relate dialogically with the various materials. For Pellat, it is but a ‘minor’ work, reflecting little of its author’s ‘personality’.59 While it is difficult to find in this book anything like the elaborate rhetorical ploys and rich ironies of K. al-Bukhalāʾ, we can read its introduction as an invitation for the reader to assess the validity and implications of the varied materials in the book for himself. Lacking a coherent line of argument, the book succeeds – through the large number of well-known individuals who suffer from varied afflictions portrayed and the extraordinary variety of texts describing them – in all but eliminating any normative image of the human body. Taken together, the varied tones and perceptions reflected in the texts quoted show the power of the individual imagination to shape and interpret any condition in affirmative or disparaging ways. As we shall soon see, al-JāªiÕ uses the addressee’s request as an occasion to contrast his own approach with a simplistic, and perhaps patronising, earlier work by the chronicler al-Haytham b. ʿAdī (d. 207/822), whom he attacks for being satisfied to simply list eminent individuals who were lepers or lame.60 Given the presence of a fairly substantial section on those stricken, like him, with semi-paralysis (al-mafālīj), it seems likely that al-JāªiÕ would count himself among the book’s protagonists, those challenged with some deviation from the perceived norm of physical appearance and capability.61 But, unlike his works gathering materials on the merits of ethnicities, tribal groupings or occupations, K. al-Bur‚ān does not present the perspectives of the afflicted as one side of an argument or boasting match for which another work might provide countering perspectives. Rather, it emphasises the varied responses of individuals facing similar conditions and the benefits that knowledge of their experience can have for all. Al-JāªiÕ uses his correspondence with the addressee in the book’s introduction to encourage the reader to evaluate the materials collected critically and to contrast his approach with that of al-Haytham. The advice given to the addressee – to approach his study with

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 61 seriousness and awareness of priorities along with a sense of realism born of experience – indirectly suggests to the reader that the book will treat its topic with seriousness and objective neutrality. In this letter, the addressee’s request is cited only briefly, giving no real sense of his personality or orientation toward the topic, and his voice is rather overwhelmed by al-JāªiÕ’s long-winded advice to him on exercising good judgement in his life and his study. There may even be a note of self-parody in the lengthy exhortation to avoid the harmful extremes of ‘inconstancy’ (talawwun) and ‘being headstrong’ (lajāj). The emphatic and repetitive advice remains vague and ultimately gives the addressee no help in determining the practical application of these relative terms. Unlike in K. fī Khalq al-Qurʾān, the reader is given little evidence that the addressee is personally in need of such correction. If the addressee were indeed a real person, the barrage of vague advice implying that he is prone to the extremes described would have been more likely to offend him than persuade him.62 But what would be a poor rhetorical strategy for the addressee may be more effective for the outside reader, who need not take these implications personally and can decide for himself whether he is in need of being reminded of the dangers of these extremes. Moreover, what al-JāªiÕ says about the addressee’s needs is less important than what his advice implies about his own purpose in writing this book. He is not presenting these materials on physical anomalies in a patronising attempt to show their worth or as a plea for sympathy. By gathering the materials in one place, he is showing how much a part of human experience physical abnormalities have always been and how different the responses of individuals to these conditions have been. A work in the former vein would presuppose a readily positive disposition on the part of its audience toward the individuals described, while the book al-JāªiÕ is, in fact, writing is meant to withstand critical scrutiny. What the reader knows about the addressee from the text is that he has requested ‘a letter giving names of the lame, the leprous, the blind, the deaf and the squint-eyed’.63 In this respect, he embodies what most contemporary readers who have been attracted to K. al-Bur‚ān would have had in common: a respect for the author’s capabilities and knowledge and an interest in the topic as it would have been indicated by the title or a brief word-of-mouth

62  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. description.64 But even this simple request from the addressee is sufficient to trouble al-JāªiÕ, who says he had ‘feared’ it was the sort of interest he has just ‘forbidden’ and ‘discouraged’ the addressee from pursuing (min al-bāb alladhī nahaytuka ʿanhu wa-zahhadtuka fīhī).65 Most likely, this refers to the preoccupation with novelties and the derivative branches of learning over which al-JāªiÕ warns him in the opening pages. The addressee has also ‘mentioned’ (dhakarta) the book of al-Haytham – we learn no more of what he has said of it. Al-JāªiÕ declares that he has already told him that he does not approve of this work or of its approach (madhhabihi).66 Again, the reader will likely be comparing himself to the addressee since he may well be familiar with what may have been the only other known work in Arabic on this topic. With this scant information on the addressee’s interest, the reader is left to ask himself whether he would like to see merely an expanded book in the vein of al-Haytham’s or something of a different nature. By speaking of what he had ‘feared’, al-JāªiÕ does not commit himself in his judgement on the addressee’s interest. The reader may ask whether he can see anything to justify al-JāªiÕ’s fear. The simple matter-of-fact wording of the request can give him little basis for distancing himself from the addressee – there is no attitude toward al-Haytham’s work or purpose in reading it with which he can contrast his own. Without any scope for contrast, the reader can ask few questions about the addressee that he cannot pose for himself as well. Several interwoven themes in the advice given to the addressee in the introduction suggest the spirit in which this book has been conceived and ought to be read, and it is the role of the relatively silent addressee in this text to accept this advice passively while the audience looks on. In his exaggerated badgering of the addressee about fickleness and obstinacy, al-JāªiÕ reveals that the conclusions to be drawn from this work must depend on the reader’s judgement, which must neither be swayed too easily nor prove resistant to learning something new. Later in the introduction, the addressee is instructed on the benefits and dangers of relying on suspicion or conjecture (Õann) and particularly negative suspicion toward people (sūʾ al-Õann).67 The need for the reader to rely on his own impressions and experience rather than the logic of the author’s argument in this book is implied, as is an invitation to see the negative aspects of the individuals described along with the positive. A few strangely ironic uses of proof texts in the introduction further encourage the

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 63 reader to evaluate the materials collected in the book for himself. And, importantly, the addressee is exhorted to seek the ‘foundations’ (u‚ūl ) of knowledge before the derivatives (furūʿ).68 Al-JāªiÕ suspects that the addressee may be overlooking this principle in his inquiring about such a topic – he has even mentioned al-Haytham’s book – but clearly believes he can answer it in a book characterised by ‘earnestness’ (jidd ) that relates to the foundations of human experience and is very much worth his time and that of intelligent readers.69 The attention al-JāªiÕ devotes to this book of al-Haytham’s, which seems to have been little more than a list of notable individuals under headings mentioning the affliction they suffered from, can hardly be meant as a refutation since that book contains no real argument. Perhaps he mentions it in connection with the addressee’s request as a means of showing a contrast that will help him justify his own approach to the topic.70 He quotes a brief passage from al-Haytham listing ‘the eminent who were lame’ (al-ʿurjān al-ashrāf ), and says that this is all the names mentioned.71 Commenting that those eminent persons who were lame or blind and are omitted from this list are more than those mentioned, al-JāªiÕ wonders what purpose there can be in such an approach: What did he mean by saying ‘So-and-so was blind’ if he has not collected the names of the lame and blind solely for the sake of making this the occasion for telling stories about these lame persons and [relating] the benefits of reports about these blind ones and how some of them attained, in spite of their lameness, what most of the able-bodied do not or, in spite of their blindness, what most of the sighted do not, as well as what authentic poems and proverbs have come to us and how people would exchange poems of abuse and praise, and how some were vexed while others endured patiently, and what profitable reports, circulating stories, apt phrases and felicitous notions people have related, and how a certain defect can be obvious and a certain fault show in some while not being apparent in others?72

The benefit that al-JāªiÕ claims can be derived from these stories seems to lie in the accomplishments of individuals. It is only by comparing their achievements with those of the able-bodied that efforts of those facing physical disadvantages can be truly appreciated. The emotional resilience of those who

64  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. accept their fate bravely can only be seen as praiseworthy when viewed in comparison to those who were embittered by their conditions. To merely list names in al-Haytham’s manner is more than a simple sin of omission for al-JāªiÕ. To mention individuals who suffered from a socially stigmatised ailment such as dropsy (man suqiya ba†nuhu) without discussing their experiences in coping with the disease and seeking treatment appears to be a kind of malicious voyeurism. A writer who is not serving some useful purpose has no more right to reveal such information that has come to him than a doctor who examines a patient in private: When one does not speak of such ailments for the purpose of mentioning such benefits, his mentioning the diseases of the eminent is not praiseworthy, nor is his extolling of some whose afflictions had been concealed acceptable. The first rule that has been placed upon the necks of physicians is to conceal what they observe in the bodies of their patients, just as it is with those who wash the corpses of the deceased.73

Yet telling of an individual’s experience of a disease such as dropsy within a broader context can be of great benefit, evidently justifying a writer’s revealing it. Speaking of those who are ailing can serve to illustrate their composure (ªusn ʿazāʾihim) and to relate their witticisms (nawādir kalāmihim) spoken in the face of misfortune or in expectation of relief. One might also discuss the legal aspects of treatment and relate Prophetic traditions concerning them. Also important are the consolations offered by visitors and the responses of the patients, as well as their supplicatory prayers. In all of these things, the reader or listener finds ‘admonition’ (ʿiÕa), ‘refinement of character’ (adab) and ‘advantage’ (‚alāª) for whoever applies the lessons they teach.74 To have written a book merely listing those who suffered from these conditions as al-Haytham did is, in contrast, a fate that al-JāªiÕ could wish for him neither during his life, nor even as a legacy for his children after he is dead (lam uªibbahu lahu ªaÕÕan fī ªayātihi wa-lā li-wuldihi baʿda mamātihi).75 This sharp philosophical difference with al-Haytham over approach led al-JāªiÕ to the composition of a book of vastly greater proportions and complexity.76 With books of such length still relatively rare in Arabic outside the religious sciences, philology and history, readers of the mid-third/ninth century may have needed persuading that K. al-Bur‚ān was worth the time

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 65 needed to peruse it. For an author to argue directly that the length of his book is justified is to risk sounding defensive. Al-JāªiÕ had already faced this problem with the far longer and more digressive K. al-Óayawān. His solution there was to parody his own defensiveness, vehemently arguing for the value of his work to an addressee who, he claims, has criticised all of his previous writings and even the composing of books in general.77 To write another defence equalling the comic pathos achieved in K. al-Óayawān would have been difficult indeed and would hardly have been in accord with the more sober tone that prevails in K. al-Bur‚ān. Instead, al-JāªiÕ opens his book by strongly admonishing the addressee to be moderate in his goals for learning and not to pursue the derivative branches of knowledge before mastering its foundations. He warns against studying novelties (al-†uraf ), relating ‘jokes and anecdotes’ and ‘all that comes lightly to the minds of the idle and pleases the ears of the simple’. One must first erect the foundational buttress (al-ʿamūd) and guard against anything that will weaken it. As examples not to be followed, he mentions those who memorise minor poets before learning superior ones, jurists who study rules for minting coins before the issues surrounding divorce, and theologians who delve into the properties of physical objects before considering the basic Muʿtazilī principles of divine oneness and justice.78 Having so warned the addressee that he must be mindful of his priorities in his study, al-JāªiÕ later declares that he would not have written this book for him if it were not ‘a book of earnestness and not of jest’.79 By so emphasising these considerations as a personal admonition to the addressee in the introduction, al-JāªiÕ tacitly implies that the subject matter of the book will be very much in keeping with those priorities, even with its length exceeding anything that had been ­written on the topic before. The rather long-winded, digressive advice – replete with quotation from poetry and the Qurʾān – on recklessness in learning and on presuming too well or poorly of people with which al-JāªiÕ opens the book is directed quite bluntly at the addressee.80 Since this advice is only vaguely linked to the topic of the book, it does not imply that the author is wary of these extreme attitudes on the part of his broader readership. More important for the reader is what the digression on presumption (Õann) implies about the author’s neutrality toward the individuals he will mention in the book and the materials

66  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. he is collecting. Appearing at the beginning of K. al-Bur‚ān as it does, these admonitions to the addressee tell the reader that the book is not written with a fully sympathetic audience in mind. He is not expected to presume well of every individual he is to meet in the book simply because that individual lived with some unusual trait or physical disadvantage. Rather he is invited to summon all that his experience of dealing with people has taught him and decide for himself how to judge the merit of the persons mentioned. The long exhortation to the addressee of K. al-Bur‚an, we have seen, serves nicely as a way for al-JāªiÕ to deflect some of his concerns about the reception of his book. Without insinuating anything in particular about the attitude of the audience, expectations relating to the work of al-Haytham and to his own earlier, more humorous or one-sided anthologies are quietly diffused through comments directed at a specific individual. The author’s own neutral and critical stance toward the material is implied in ways that are less likely to appear defensive than a declaration directed at the readership as a whole. ‘One Matter Remains for Me’ Al-JāªiÕ’s use of the epistolary frame to influence his audience’s perceptions of his own occasion in writing is not always a matter of working from an addressee’s position with regard to an opposing point of view or an earlier text. In his writings of a more didactic nature – offering advice that seeks to unite ethical exhortation with inculcating an awareness of what is to one’s advantage socially – there is no specific doctrinal or textual adversary, no palpable ‘other’ against which to define his views. Moreover, the sources he could appeal to in support of his wisdom were widely-available texts, sacred and profane, Arabic and translated, along with proverbs that enjoyed currency and, naturally, the lessons of personal experience. The author’s only true opponent in writings of this sort may be his audience’s own failure, either through stubbornness or from a lack of discernment, to apprehend what all of these available sources might have provided. The risk of sounding superior and waxing confrontational is, then, quite high. The later theologian al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), for example, begins his letter of general advice purportedly written in response to a young student’s request with a reminder to the youth that, had he truly apprehended the divine message he had before

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 67 him in the Qurʾān, he would not be in need of the author’s instruction, which is nevertheless given in the remainder of the book.81 The reader’s situation in such a case, if he is indeed coming to the book in search of guidance, will be quite similar to that of the young addressee. Perhaps, if the audience had sufficient respect for the eminent theologian’s wisdom, this brisk, challenging approach might have been effective. Al-JāªiÕ, however, seems to prefer a more politic approach in which his rhetorical creativity serves him well. In R. al-Maʿāsh wa-al-maʿād (‘The Letter on this Life and the Hereafter’), as well as in K. Kitmān al-sirr waªifÕ al-lisān (Keeping Secrets and Holding One’s Tongue), he addresses his advice to an admirable (apparently young) man whom the audience is plainly given to emulate and identify themselves with.82 Both essays have echoes of the concerns and style of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s pioneering manual for courtly advancement from the previous century, al-Adab al-kabīr.83 But, where Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ addresses his audience from a position of superior knowledge, relying heavily on the imperative, and rather depressingly contrasts his contemporaries with the unapproachably superior men of the past from whose wisdom they must benefit, al-JāªiÕ begins by praising the character and accomplishments of both addressees and diplomatically circumscribes the area of need he has identified in them.84 In R. al-Maʿāsh wa-al-maʿād, the more general of the two books, the addressee is described as a wealthy individual whose development al-JāªiÕ has been observing from his youth and to whose private company he has later gained access.85 Although it appears to have been originally written for a specific recipient, the letter contains few individuating details that do not contribute to the impression of dignified person or man of stature that the reader will desire to emulate.86 If this letter had been written for the sake of this individual – well known to the author – alone, we would expect to find more mention of specific places and events, particularly when the author describes the many occasions when he observed the addressee’s maturity and self-control in contrast to the behaviour of his peers.87 Since part of the goal of advice literature is to show the means of personal success in a highly competitive environment, addressing the text to a specific individual who has already enjoyed success is a more effective strategy than directly addressing the entire audience who are all competitors with one another. While al-JāªiÕ

68  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. does not begin his collection of advice for the addressee until he has finished with the long introduction, the praise he lavishes on him in the opening pages can effectively serve as advice and exhortation for the reader as well.88 Al-JāªiÕ’s description of how the addressee’s disciplined behaviour during his youth – in contrast to the dissolute ways of his peers – has led to the wealth, pleasures and divine blessing he enjoys now is meant to create a powerful example for the reader to follow, especially if the latter is young.89 Even more astutely, al-JāªiÕ tells the addressee ‘you have given rule to God’s viceroy in you – that is, your intellect – over your passions, and have given over the reins of your life to it’ (ªakkamta wakīl Allāh ʿindaka wa-huwa ʿaqluka ʿalā hawāka wa-alqayta ilayhi azimmat amrika).90 The addressee, and like him the emulating young reader, is encouraged to identify himself with his own faculty of reason as he reads the text. It is not a matter of the author as the sober mind reproving the addressee as the wayward soul (nafs), but of his enlisting the latter’s mind to pursue further progress in self-control and good management of his life. Al-JāªiÕ only broaches his occasion for offering advice with the modest realisation that, despite his astonishment with the addressee’s virtue, he still has something to offer him in the way of compiling a collection of wisdom that his reading has taught him: ‘Then I perceived that a certain matter remained for me in which I was able to benefit you.’91 From this al-JāªiÕ launches into his lengthy advice on how to reach happiness in this world and the hereafter; the advice is actually given with considerable urgency and relies as much on personal experience as it does on the collection of texts, but it is not advice directed only at the unlearned or obstinate. In K. Kitmān al-sirr, we find a similarly well-born and virtuous addressee for the reader to emulate, but the fine character of the former also serves to illustrate the danger of a specific vice: carelessness in divulging secrets. Al-JāªiÕ begins by declaring that he has carefully observed the moral character and personal qualities of the addressee and found that he has ‘come close to perfection’ (nāhazta al-kamāl ). Emphasising that the advice in this book is not directed at the ignorant, al-JāªiÕ tells him that ‘no scholar would be ashamed to learn from you’.92 Once again, individuating details are lacking and the addressee is little more than the embodiment of virtue in the abstract. But here the celebration of his individual qualities only serves to show how a person’s accomplishments and refinements of character can be brought

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 69 to naught. This is what al-JāªiÕ warns will happen if he neglects the two matters in which he has been found lacking but which constitute ‘the axis around which virtues revolve’ (al-qu†b alladhī ʿalayhi madār al-fa∂āʾil ).93 These two faults become the focus of al-JāªiÕ’s exhortation in the letter; as he explains: ‘the two matters which I hold against you are: saying things that are out of place and betraying secrets by divulging them’ (wa∂ʿ al-qawl fī ghayr maw∂iʿihi wa-i∂āʿat al-sirr bi-idhāʿatihi).94 But it is precisely because the addressee has shown exceptional virtue that he is being chided over these failings: ‘You are more worthy of reproach and more deserving of correction than one who has not attained the heights you have or risen to the station you have.’95 Moreover, al-JāªiÕ concedes that the virtues to which he is exhorting are far from easy to attain and that he does not know a single person of virtue and stature in his age that he can praise for them.96 It might be argued that these strategies make the virtue of controlling the tongue sound impossible to attain and that not all readers will be able to identify with the lofty character described in the addressee. Still, we can at least be certain that al-JāªiÕ is at pains to avoid implying that the virtuous are not in need of his advice. Notes  1. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 282; G. Morson and C. Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 128.   2. Any human utterance is part of the ‘chain of speech communication’ reflecting the language and conceptions of prior statements. See M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, trans. V. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 91–4; Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 136–9.   3. The range and implications of the term ‘adab’ as applied to certain trends in pre-modern Arabic prose writing, in the development of which al-JāªiÕ is always credited as a pivotal figure, remain objects of scholarly debate. My principal concern here is that al-JāªiÕ departs from the expectations of jurisprudence in the text under discussion. For an analysis of the development and varied senses of ‘adab’, see S. Bonebakker, ‘Adab and the Concept of Belles-Lettres’, in J. Ashtiany et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: ʿAbbasid Belles-Lettres (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990),

70  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. pp. 16–30. For a discussion of the characteristics of the adab tradition and the particular contributions of al-JāªiÕ with a fruitful comparison to the European essay, see P. Heath, ‘Al-JāªiÕ, Adab and the Art of the Essay’, in A. Heinemann et al. (eds), Al-JāªiÕ: A Muslim Humanist for our Time (Beirut: Orient-Institut Berlin, 2009), pp. 133–72.  4. Rasāʾil al-JāªiÕ, ed. A. Hārūn , 4 vols in 2 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1991), IV, pp. 259–81.  5. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 280–1.   6. For brief discussions of these early debates, see A. Wensinck, ‘Khamr’, EI2 IV, pp. 994–7; J. Sadan, ‘Mashrūbāt’, EI2 VI, pp. 721–3; and P. Heine, ‘Nabīdh’, EI2 VII, p. 840.  7. Al-Bukhārī, Íaªīª al-Bukhārī bi-ªāshiyat al-Imām al-Sindī, 4 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1998), III, Kitāb al-Ashriba (The Book of Drinks), pp. 589–96; Ibn Qutayba, al-Ashriba wa-ikhtilāf al-nās fīhā, ed. M. H. Muªammad (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfa al-Dīniyya, 1995).  8. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 261–2, 269–71; al-Bukhārī, Íaªīª, pp. 582–4.  9. Rasāʾil IV, p. 280. 10. Rasāʾil IV, p. 262; see Ibn Qutayba, al-Ashriba, p. 63. 11. Rasāʾil IV, p. 262 and note. 12. Ibn Qutayba, al-Ashriba, p. 26, mentions ‘a number of impudent and dissolute theologians’ (qawn min mujān a‚ªāb al-kalām wa-fusāqihim) who depart from the consensus on grape wine, but these are clearly distinguished from those, like al-JāªiÕ, who do not object to other beverages not mentioned explicitly in the Qurʾān. 13. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 263–7. 14. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 263–5. 15. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 267–72. 16. Ibn Qutayba, al-Ashriba, pp. 63–108, describes this position, with which he does not himself agree, and the arguments from reason and Prophetic tradition used to support it. 17. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 263–7. 18. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 264–7. For a statement of al-JāªiÕ on moderation in generosity, courage and other personal qualities, see K. al-Nisāʾ (On Women), Rasāʾil III, p. 140. 19. For a dating of the manuscripts and the early fifth-/eleventh-century compilation, see Hārūn’s introduction, Rasāʾil III, pp. 6–7, and C. Pellat, ‘Nouvel Essai d’Inventaire de l’Œuvre ĞāªiÕienne’, Arabica 31 (1984), p. 119.

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 71 20. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 273–4. 21. Al-JāªiÕ, [Kitāb] al-Bukhalāʾ, ed. ˝ al-Óājirī (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1997), p. 5. 22. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 274–6. 23. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 276–9. 24. Rasāʾil IV, p. 280. 25. Rasāʾil III, p. 288. 26. Traditionist: those groups of early Muslims who emphasised the authority of Prophetic traditions or ªadīth, preferring to avoid debate of theological questions, and referred to themselves as ahl al-sunna wa-al-jamāʿa, particularly the followers of Aªmad b. Óanbal (d. 241/855), whose name al-JāªiÕ conspicuously avoids mentioning in all of his extant works. For a brief discussion of these groups, sometimes also referred to as ‘proto-Sunnīs’, see M. Cooperson, Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of the Prophet in the Age of al-Maʾmūn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 33 and note, pp. 112–17. 27. Rasāʾil III, pp. 301–51. 28. Rasāʾil III, pp. 283–300. 29. The letter in which al-Mutawakkil’s support is mentioned is found in Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ irshād al-arīb, ed. I. ʿAbbās, 7 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1993), V, pp. 2,114–15. Al-JāªiÕ is told of the caliph’s promised gift by al-Fatª b. Khāqān, who urges him to concentrate on K. al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā and finish it quickly. D. Thomas discusses the references to anti-Christian texts by our author that appear in surviving sources in ‘Al-JāªiÕ’, in D. Thomas and B. Roggema (eds), Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Vol. I (600–900) (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), pp. 706–12. Thomas questions the identification of the extant Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā with the work written for alMutawakkil because the addressees’ request in response to which al-JāªiÕ claims to be writing does not match the political purposes of the caliph. Thomas does allow that the request could be a ‘literary ploy’, a possibility which I, obviously, take very seriously. In my own view, the text we have fits the situation during al-Mutawakkil’s reign quite well, particularly since the Christians are quoted as tying their refutation of what the Qurʾān says concerning their beliefs with the removal of impairments over and above the normal poll tax, Rasāʾil III, p. 304, and al-JāªiÕ’s discussion of their overly honoured status in Muslim society, pp. 308–22. The only passage I have found that makes a dating to al-Mutawakkil’s reign problematic occurs at the end of the text, when al-JāªiÕ equates the anthropomorphism of Christians with that of Muslim groups he refers to as

72  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. ‘anthropomorphists’ (mushabbiha), ‘rabble’ (ªashwiyya) and ‘upstarts’ (nābita), labels he had long applied to the very Traditionist movements whose beliefs al-Mutawakkil had come to embrace. We cannot lightly dismiss the difficulty of such a harsh denunciation of the Traditionists being included in a work commissioned by al-Mutawakkil, but perhaps al-JāªiÕ reasoned that the caliph and those around him would deny that such harshly pejorative labels could be applied to them. For a discussion of the usage of these terms, see J. van Ess, ‘Tashbīh wa-tanzīh’, EI2 X, pp. 341–6. 30. Rasāʾil III, p. 303. 31. Rasāʾil III, p. 303. ‘Slower-witted’, literally ‘your weak ones’ (∂uʿafāʾikum), conceivably refers to those who are weak in their commitment to Islam rather than mere intellectual weakness. G. S. Reynolds, in his A Muslim Theologian in the Sectarian Milieu: ʿAbd ul-Jabbār and the Critique of Christian Origins (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 193n, suggests that al-JāªiÕ may be referring here to recent converts from Christianity to Islam, translating aªdāthakum, ‘your young’, as a reference to ‘new’ Muslims. While we cannot rule out this reading, we ought to consider it in the light of a passage in al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā, where al-JāªiÕ groups the young Muslims (aªdāthinā) with the simple-minded, frivolous and shameless (aghbiyāʾinā wa-Õurafāʾinā wa-mujjāninā), whom Christian scholars confuse by showing them strange books, associating them with those who lack intellectual experience and seriousness; Rasāʾil III, p. 321. We must also consider the suspicious attitude al-JāªiÕ displays toward recent converts from Christianity, when he points out that many of them were punished for practising Manichaeism (al-zandaqa) while professing Islam; Rasāʾil III, pp. 315–6, p. 321. 32. Rasāʾil III, pp. 303–4. 33. Rasāʾil III, p. 307. 34. Rasāʾil III, pp. 304, 310, 314, 325–6. 35. Rasāʾil III, pp. 308–18. 36. Rasāʾil III, pp. 308–20. The phrase ‘nearer in affection’ (aqrab mawaddatan) derives from a Qurʾānic passage (5:82–5) that al-JāªiÕ insists the Muslim masses are misunderstanding when they apply it to Christians as a whole; pp. 310–11. 37. Rasāʾil III, p. 324. 38. Rasāʾil III, pp. 320–1. Al-JāªiÕ also claims that most of the nominal Muslims executed on the charge of apostasy to Manichaeism (zandaqa) were children of Christian parents and that Christian teachings on forgiveness, abstention from

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 73 meat and admiration of celibacy show the similarity between their religion and this despised sect; pp. 315–16, p. 320. 39. Rasāʾil III, pp. 283–300. 40. Rasāʾil III, pp. 285 and 287. 41. Rasāʾil III, p. 320. 42. Rasāʾil III, p. 285. The phrasing of this prayer echoes numerous passages from the Qurʾān (e.g. 7:125 and 6:63). 43. It is, for example, responsible for the erring doctrines of Christians and Jews; Rasāʾil III, p. 330. 44. Rasāʾil III, p. 285. 45. Rasāʾil III, pp. 285–6. I have elected not to follow the decision of the editor to amend the text of all the manuscripts, ‘the most to be feared and the next most after it’ (al-akhwaf fa-al-akhwaf ), to ‘the easiest [to understand] and what is easiest after it’ (al-aqrab fa-al-aqrab), p. 286, note. (The editor’s comparison to p. 293, line 10, is a typographical error for p. 291, line 10, which matches the amended phrase.) The manuscripts’ reading, however, seems to fit the pattern of conflicting demands in the addressee’s request. The addressee is hardly what al-JāªiÕ considers a model for the method of education he recommends in the later passage from which the editor derives his emendation. 46. Rasāʾil III, pp. 286–7. 47. Rasāʾil III, p. 287. 48. Al-JāªiÕ departed doctrinally from al-NaÕÕām by asserting that the inimitability of the Qur’ān lies in the ordering (naÕm, taʾlīf ) of its own language; see W. Heinrichs, ‘NaÕm’, EI2 XII, pp. 668–9. 49. Rasāʾil III, p. 287. The Arabic text of the final sentence begins: ‘fa-katabtu laka ashaqq al-kitābayn wa-athqalahumā’. Despite the use of the past tense, this most likely refers to the present letter: al-JāªiÕ adopts the time perspective of the addressee who will be reading after the planned letter is completed. There is no mention of the correspondence continuing beyond this second letter, nor any other mention of how the present text came to be. In introductions, al-JāªiÕ sometimes refers to a book as already written (K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 8) or even already presented to the addressee (Rasāʾil IV, p. 274). 50. Rasāʾil III, p. 288. See W. al-Qadi, ‘The Earliest “Nābita” and the Paradigmatic “Nawābit”’, Studia Islamica 78 (1993): 27–61, for a discussion of the various uses of the label ‘nābita’ in polemics and satire before al-JāªiÕ’s more wellknown use of the term to refer to the more intellectually savvy members of the movement I have chosen to call ‘Traditionist’. Al-Qadi discusses the beliefs

74  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. al-JāªiÕ ascribes to this party (among them, that the Qurʾān was not created; p. 42) and identifies his use of the term as referring to ‘the anti-Muʿtazilite, non-Shīʿite groups in society at the beginning of the third/ninth century, especially those who resorted to theology in either defending their own beliefs or attacking the Muʿtazilī’s contrary beliefs’; pp. 42–3 and note 61. The group mentioned in the final clause of this definition closely corresponds to the newly educated Traditionists whose exploitation of Muʿtazilī inconsistencies is the central ­concern in K. fī Khalq al-Qurʾān. 51. Rasāʾil III, pp. 287–8. 52. Rasāʾil III, pp. 288–9. Muʿammar b. ʿAbbād al-Sulamī (d. 215/830) was a Muʿtazilī theologian and leader of a school; Rasāʾil III, p. 287n. See H. Daiber, ‘Muʿammar b. ʿAbbād’, EI2 VII, pp. 359–60. Thumāma b. Ashras (d. 213/828) was a prominent and politically influential Muʿtazilī (Rasāʾil III, p. 287n; K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 285n), frequently cited by al-JāªiÕ and portrayed as a miser and wit (e.g. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 209). See J. van Ess, ‘Thumāma b. Ashras’, EI2 X, pp. 449–50. Abū Kalada and ʿAbd al-Óamīd appear to be theologians who argued in a similar vein, the former cited in several half-serious discussions of animals in K. al-Óayawān I, p. 234; III, p. 395; IV, p. 332; and Rasāʾil III, p. 287n. For a discussion of these thinkers, see J. van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra: Eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam, 6 vols (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991–5), III, pp. 88–90. 53. Rasāʾil III, p. 289. 54. Rasāʾil III, pp. 289–90. 55. Rasāʾil III, pp. 291 and 299. 56. Rasāʾil III, p. 296. 57. Rasāʾil III, pp. 291–6. 58. Rasāʾil III, p. 300. 59. C. Pellat, ‘al-JāªiÕ’, CHALABL, p. 82. Despite this remark, he later compares the book’s spirit of irony to that found in K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 88; The Life and Works of JāªiÕ: Translations of Selected Texts, trans. from the French by D. Hawke (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 27, using an alternative title Kitāb al-ʿUrjān wa-al-bur‚ān wa-al-qurʿān (The Book of the Lame, Lepers and the Bald). 60. The surviving passages of al-Haytham’s apparently untitled book appear at the end of the Hārūn edition of K. al-Bur‚ān, pp. 564–70. For a discussion of the possible nature of al-Haytham’s original work, on the evidence of al-JāªiÕ’s citations and parallel passages in other authors, see S. Leder, Das Korpus al-Haitam ¯

t h e ad d ressee a nd the occasi on o f wr iting | 75 ibn ʿAdī (st. 207/822): Herkunft, ܡberlieferung, Gestalt früher Texte der aŸbār Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991), pp. 214–20. 61. K. al-Bur‚ān, pp. 435–50. Al-JāªiÕ never mentions his own condition in connection with this, but for at least some of his readership it must have been well known. Only a few pages before this section, we find mention of a man whose eyes protruded (jāªaÕat ʿaynuhu; p. 432), the feature which is said to have been the source of his sobriquet ‘al-JāªiÕ’ (the Pop-eyed), and the proximity may not be a coincidence. 62. The text’s editor, A. Hārūn, notes that he is unaware of any patron or individual recipient being named in our sources, but holds out some hope that a name may eventually be found; K. al-Bur‚ān, pp. 13–14. His claim that most of al-JāªiÕ’s writings are ‘directed to those whose names are known to history’ (p. 13) is not entirely true since a good number of the texts have no named recipient, ­including the majority of those discussed in this book. 63. K. al-Bur‚ān, p. 30. 64. Arabic titles in this period were not necessarily fixed, but often a simple indication of a book’s content. Al-JāªiÕ himself refers to this work with more than one tag: ‘Kitāb al-Jawāriª’; al-Bayān I, p. 94; ‘Kitāb al-ʿUrjān’; al-Bayān III, p. 74. In any case, they give a brief indication of a book’s topic and this is what triggers the reader’s initial expectations of its contents. 65. K. al-Bur‚ān, p. 30. 66. K. al-Bur‚ān, p. 31. 67. K. al-Bur‚ān, pp. 32–4. 68. K. al-Bur‚ān, pp. 29–30. 69. K. al-Bur‚ān, p. 34. 70. K. al-Bur‚ān, p. 30. Al-Haytham’s original book was apparently slightly longer than the version – consisting of a few pages listing names under five headings indicating the conditions they suffered from – which appears at the end of our manuscript of K. al-Bur‚ān, and is included on pp. 564–70 of Hārūn’s edition. The conditions listed are ‘The Eminent who Were Blind’ (al-ʿumyān al-ashrāf ), ‘The One-eyed’ (al-ʿūr), ‘The Squint-eyed’ (al-ªūlān), ‘The Blue-eyed’ (al-zurq) and ‘The Crooked-jawed’ (al-fuqm). The editor, Hārūn, describes the place of these pages in the manuscript, pp. 18–19, and notes the absence of the passage quoted by al-JāªiÕ on p. 34. 71. K. al-Bur‚ān, pp. 34–5. 72. K. al-Bur‚ān, p. 35. 73. K. al-Bur‚ān, p. 36.

76  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. 74. K. al-Bur‚ān, pp. 35–6. 75. K. al-Bur‚ān, p. 31. 76. The text we have of al-JāªiÕ’s book is over five hundred pages even though it is clearly missing sections on blindness and other conditions; see Hārūn’s comments in his introduction to K. al-Bur‚ān, pp. 10–11, where he discusses al-JāªiÕ’s own allusion to this section on p. 68. The surviving text of al-Haytham’s work is clearly missing sections as well, but al-JāªiÕ appears to be quoting the entirety of al-Haytham’s section on the lame (p. 34), and this is as brief as the other sections of the extant text. 77. K. al-Óayawān I, pp. 3–13, p. 38. 78. K. al-Bur‚ān, pp. 28–30. 79. K. al-Bur‚ān, p. 34. 80. K. al-Bur‚ān, pp. 28–34. 81. Al-Ghazālī, Letter to a Disciple: ayyuhā al-walad: Bilingual English-Arabic Edition, trans. T. Mayer (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2005), pp. 2–5. 82. Rasāʾil I, pp. 87–134; Rasāʾil I, pp. 135–72. 83. In ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muqaffaʿ al-āthār al-kāmila, ed. ʿU. al-˝abbāʿ (Beirut: Sharikat Dār al-Arqam lil-˝ibāʿa wa-al-Nashr wa-al-Tawzīʿ, 1997), pp. 51–99. 84. They were even physically larger (aʿÕam ajsādan), stronger and longer-lived; al-Athār al-kāmila, pp. 51–3. By making this the reason for following their legacy of wisdom, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ risks implying that his contemporaries cannot hope to equal their moral stature either. 85. Rasāʾil I, pp. 90–4. 86. As I have mentioned in the Introduction above, the book was most likely addressed initially to Muªammad b. Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād. See the editor A. Hārūn’s introductory remarks in Rasāʾil I, p. 87. 87. Rasāʾil I, pp. 92–5. 88. Rasāʾil I, p. 99. 89. Rasāʾil I, pp. 91–2. 90. Rasāʾil I, p. 92. 91. Rasāʾil I, p. 95. 92. Rasāʾil I, p. 139. 93. Rasāʾil I, p. 139. 94. Rasāʾil I, p. 140. 95. Rasāʾil I, p. 139. 96. Rasāʾil I, pp. 140–1.

2 Epistolary Confrontations and Dialectics of Parody

I

n most of the texts we saw in the preceding chapter, the addressees are portrayed as troubled, puzzled or simply misled by a rival sect or camp of opinion whose views al-JāªiÕ sets out to refute. We now turn to a group of writings in which he enters into an often heated argument with the addressee himself. In many such texts, which tend not to deal – at least not directly – with the more sensitive issues of doctrine or political authority, al-JāªiÕ’s own tone is so inappropriately harsh and his language so fraught with ironies that we are bound to suspect he is really parodying himself. As obvious as this parody becomes, it hardly overwhelms the substance of the author’s attack on the addressee and the errant opinions he represents. At the same time, certain points in the addressee’s favour become apparent through the ironies or hypocrisies that show through al-JāªiÕ’s self-parodying persona. Al-JāªiÕ, the arguing persona, and the addressee, as each is presented in the text, sometimes embody opposing views often inclining toward extremes, and the closest the reader can come to ascertaining the author’s actual intentions is to assess the validity of the arguments involved on either side and arrive at a sensible position between them. The reader’s desire not to be hoodwinked by parody and thus miss what the author is attempting to say to his savviest readers becomes the motivation for active engagement with the text and critical reading. The contradictions, hypocrisies and flaws that mark the positions parodied in the persons of the JāªiÕ-persona and the addressee become signposts leading the reader on the path of a partially hidden dialectic which the reader must travel for himself. I am thus arguing that behind al-JāªiÕ’s famous penchant for portraying both sides of an issue – criticised by contemporaries such as Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889) and admired by modern scholars such as A. F. L. Beeston and 77

78  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. Abdelfattah Kilito – was a definite goal of persuasion.1 This goal is the reader’s arrival – via his free critiquing of the arguments offered and of the way texts are cited as proofs – at some intermediate position between that expressed by the JāªiÕ-persona and that attributed to the addressee. Variations on this basic pattern occur in a few texts where, for instance, the addressee himself is ironically reproached for holding the moderate position while al-JāªiÕ’s arguments for one extreme suggest the existence of an opposing one, or where their supposedly differing positions turn out to be two sides of the same coin. In any case, the implicitly dialectical argument made is more than a simplistic prodding of the reader toward some approximation of the Aristotelian golden mean. The weight of arguments and the force of parody may tilt the argument considerably in the direction of one pole or the other, even if both remain problematic. A great deal is left to the reader who must evaluate the structure of logical arguments, nuances of semantics and textual interpretation, and contemplate paradoxes and incommensurables, along with the role of personal biases on either side of the debate. Moreover, the form of parodied debate brings passion, humour and psychological depth to texts on topics where a simple argument for the mean might have led to a great deal of bland writing. The presence of double-edged parody means that the often simple relationship of confrontation that al-JāªiÕ has with his addressees in the texts we are now discussing will lead to more complicated relations between both and the actual reader. In this book, I am advancing the claim that the device of the addressee absents the reader from his ordinary place in an expository text and, thus, tends to lessen the atmosphere of confrontation that may arise between author and audience.2 In the works I will now be discussing, al-JāªiÕ stages a confrontation between himself and the addressee rather than his real anticipated audience. I am far from suggesting that merely making the object of his rhetorical diatribe a third party rather than the actual reader would necessarily be more effective rhetorically than confronting the reader directly. On the one hand, if the reader happens to share the views the author is arguing in favour of against those attributed to the addressee, the latter may simply become an objectified portrait of their common opponent: the result would not likely be as intellectually involving and challenging as al-JāªiÕ’s better writings are. If, instead, the reader’s own stance happens to

e pi stola ry conf rontati o n s  | 79 be closer to that of the confronted addressee, he may well feel included in the confrontation and the polemical portrait of the addressee. In this case, he will likely become as defensive toward the author’s arguments as he would be if confronted directly. Even if the author’s portrayal of the addressee is more extreme than the actual camp the author is critiquing and obviously satirical, the reader may take this portrayal as polemical and take offence. It is the notes of self-parody in al-JāªiÕ’s own voice that introduce ambiguities into his adversarial stance toward his addressees and, by thus involving the reader in a process of discernment, make them rhetorically effective and thought-provoking. We should not be surprised that this doubly parodic pattern appears not in his overtly political and sectarian writings, but in texts on less contentious issues where he could risk having his own views misunderstood without serious consequences. As we shall see in a later portion of this chapter, a number of al-JāªiÕ’s half-serious confrontations with his addressees are found in works discussing the merits and failings of various professions, a topic on which al-JāªiÕ appears to have been among the first Muslim writers.3 An explanation for the frequency of this technique in works on various occupations and the relations between them may lie in his own theological convictions on the predispositions that lead people to adopt given trades and the biases he believes these predispositions naturally lead to. This interaction between theology and literary form will shape part of my discussion of the dialectics of parody, but it is best to begin with a number of apparently simple texts on other topics where the pattern is more obvious and variations on the basic doubly parodic pattern can be clearly illustrated. Reducing Silence to Silence Perhaps none of al-JāªiÕ’s writings is more thoroughly shaped by doubleedged parody in its very structures and in its farther-reaching implications than a brief essay entitled Risālat Taf∂īl al-nu†q ʿalā al-‚amt (‘Letter on the Preferability of Speech to Silence’).4 This text will likely strike a modern reader who overlooks al-JāªiÕ’s self-parody as rather simplistic: a conventional didactic essay written in refutation of a letter the author claims to have received from a broadly stereotyped advocate of silence. But, as soon as the patterns of parody become apparent – neatly symmetrical and yet

80  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. dramatising the incommensurability of the merits of speech and silence – a subtler and more original treatment of the problem emerges. Al-JāªiÕ, the dialectical theologian and philologist by training, one of the more voluminous writers of his era and – to judge by the countless anecdotes of acquaintances he relates – a social person with a love of playful conversation, was by no means a man of few words. We would hardly expect his treatment of the comparison to be entirely neutral, and this work is, as its title promises, a defence of speech, which is in fact portrayed as humanity’s very essence and the vehicle of its salvation. Still, in other texts, he acknowledges that silence is often appropriate and has an important place in life. In K. Kitmān al-sirr wa-ªifÕ al-lisān, discussed in the previous chapter, he warns of careless speech as an obvious danger. In al-Bayān wa-al-tabyīn, after including a section quoting proverbs, anecdotes and verse in praise of silence, he concludes that, with speech as with many other matters, moderation is the ideal.5 The short fragment that survives of an essay entitled Risāla fī al-Balāgha wa-al-ījāz (‘Epistle on Eloquence and Brevity’) also revolves around the ideal of moderation and rhetorical adaptability, with every style having its place.6 In Risālat Taf∂īl al-nu†q, silence is given its due through hints and carefully placed omissions, but most of all through ironies in speech that emerge from the voices of al-JāªiÕ and the addressee. Behind the parodic dialogue between the two, a more serious dialogue between speech and silence thus emerges. Meanwhile, the ironies behind the attempts of the addressee and al-JāªiÕ himself to prevail in their respective positions and end the conversation become a defence of dialogue itself as an ongoing process against the dangers of finalising argument. After the customary opening invocations, the text begins with al-JāªiÕ’s description of the letter he claims to have received from the addressee, in which the latter praises the merits of silence and asserts its general superiority to speech, even when the latter is true and correct.7 The irony of such a letter is not obvious if we take ‘silence’ (‚amt) too literally and ‘speech’ in its more restrictive sense as the oral variety of communication: of the Arabic words used to designate speech, ‘nu†q’ and ‘man†iq’ are often used when emphasising aspects of pronunciation and aural clarity, even if the latter also has the sense of ‘logic’. Throughout the letter, both words are used interchangeably with ‘kalām’, another noun which might refer exclusively to oral communication

e pi stola ry conf rontati o n s  | 81 or include written discourse as well, but – perhaps tellingly, as I will argue below – also refers to the practice of dialectical theology. The sense in which these words are in fact being used throughout the debate and the resulting irony of the addressee’s letter become perfectly clear when al-JāªiÕ argues that without speech no difference could be known between human beings and animals or between all the various types of things and states.8 The ‘speech’ that is being disparaged and defended in this debate is, thus, not merely the spoken word but language itself: the power of the verbal sign to distinguish between a referent of one type and another and, thus, to begin to create what linguists now call a ‘system of differences’.9 The addressee is, then, relying heavily on speech, in this sense, and on its articulatory and persuasive powers in composing his letter in disparagement of speech, even supposing it is ­written and read without a word said aloud. From the opening of the letter, al-JāªiÕ’s language subtly signals his awareness of the irony of the addressee’s reliance on language in his ­celebration of silence: I have read your letter, in which you describe the excellence of silence, set forth the merits of reticence, summarise their clear occasions, praise some of their beneficial outcomes, proceed through varieties of statements concerning them, mention that you find silence preferable to speech (kalām) – even if the latter is correct – and deem reticence more commendable than talking (man†iq) in a great many situations, even if one is in the right. You asserted that the tongue is among the paths leading to obscenity, which brings misfortune upon one, and said: ‘Truly, holding the tongue is nearer to perfection than becoming entangled in speech.’10

The multiplicity of the verbs itself suggests that the addressee had been unduly verbose and prolix in arguing for silence, and there is a general progression in the passage toward verbs that more clearly evoke the connection between composing a letter and speaking. The gentle crescendo of irony culminates in the juxtaposition of the last verb, ‘said’ (qulta), with the addressee’s admiration of holding the tongue. The greatly varied methods of argumentation and persuasion evoked by the verbs betray defensiveness concerning his opinion and underscore the one-sided nature of argument via the letter form, where the recipient (al-JāªiÕ, here) is unable to reply immediately as each

82  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. argument is presented. His representation of speech (kalām) as an ‘entanglement’ (tawarru†) suggests that speaking is always part of a dialogical process leading to ongoing interaction with others and the constant development of one’s own position that this entails. Given the addressee’s obvious willingness to express himself, by writing his letter, his preference for silence may spring ultimately from a fear of entry into ongoing dialogue. As al-JāªiÕ continues his description of the addressee’s letter, he uses language chosen to underscore the irony of his verbal attack on speech and show how far at odds he is with the sensibilities of the Arabic tradition. Thus the addressee is accused of misrepresenting the relative virtues of the reticent and those who speak: You have called the fool ‘rational’, the silent ‘forbearing’, the reticent, ‘intelligent’, the one who bows his head, a ‘thinker’, while you have called the eloquent, ‘long-winded’, and the orator, ‘a babbler’, the well-spoken, ‘verbose’ and the articulate, ‘prolix’ (sammayta al-ghabī ʿāqilan wa-al‚āmit ªalīman wa-al-sākit labīban wa-al-mu†riq mufakkiran wa-sammayta al-balīgh miktharan wa-al-kha†īb mihdhāran wa-al-fa‚īª mafri†an wa-almin†īq mu†niban).11

It is not clear whether the nouns used as epithets here are al-JāªiÕ’s own description of specific individuals whom the addressee has named and described with such adjectives in his letter, or whether these nouns are the addressee’s own words and he was referring to ‘fools’ and ‘the eloquent’ and so on in general. In the latter case, the addressee would truly be at war with his own language, attempting to reverse the indelibly positive or negative connotations of the nouns he uses and pair them with adjectives that carry nearly opposite judgements. In any event, the variety of descriptions mentioned suggests that the addressee has gone to excess verbally himself, once again showing defensiveness and heightening the irony of his writing in disparagement of speech. Al-JāªiÕ finds the same irony in the verses of poets that the addressee has employed as proof-texts for his argument, describing ‘their excess in blaming speech and prolixity in praising reticence’ (ifrā†ihim fī madhammat al-kalām wa-i†nābihim fī maªmadat al-sukūt).12 We know from his arguments, in the works already mentioned, in favour of silence when it is appropriate that al-JāªiÕ was familiar with a considerable

e pi stola ry conf rontati o n s  | 83 body of texts commending silence and was also capable of marshalling arguments of his own in its favour. He might have compiled a reasonable case to be presented under the voice of the addressee to serve as the opposing side of his dialectic, but in this text he prefers to let ironies and deficiencies of speech play this role. In place of the addressee’s ill-advised attempt to compile an exhaustive case for reticence, silence is largely left to speak for itself once speech has finished supporting and undermining itself. Beyond this description of the addressee’s language and the nature of his quoted poetic sources – without any citation of their content – we are given only one sentence cited from the addressee’s argument: ‘And you said that you had not once regretted silence, even when it was because you could not find your tongue (wa-in kāna minka ʿayyan), while you had regretted speaking (al-kalām) several times, even when you were right.’13 The first half of this neatly paralleled claim is put in starkly absolute terms and is clearly part of al-JāªiÕ’s parody of the addressee. Can anyone have never found it beneficial to speak? And, supposing he has not, why has the addressee preferred to write his apparently substantial letter on the topic instead of keeping silent? Another writer might have carried this parodied absolutism through to the second statement, having the addressee declare that he has always regretted speaking, but al-JāªiÕ changes tack here, having him state the converse in more moderate language. The fact that the addressee has regretted speaking on a number of occasions, on some of which what he said was correct in itself, only shows that silence has its place and that there are other reasons, beyond the danger of error, for refraining from speaking. Criticism of the addressee culminates in al-JāªiÕ’s claim to have thoroughly examined his letter and found it the words (kalām, ironically again) of a man who has grown arrogant in his thinking and believes that by simply stringing together words and meanings he can equal his sources. Thus, al-JāªiÕ goes on to compare the addressee to one who supposes he can permanently settle the question on silence and speech: His endeavour is to find no one to contradict him in his times once he establishes it, nor come upon any antagonist in his age once he settles it, his argument having obligated all humanity to accept it and invalidated the arguments of the people of all religions without exception because of the

84  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. logical demonstration he has set forth in it and what he has made clear with his elucidation . . . And he will be in a place where not a person challenges him over it. He will rarely find anyone to debate with him and never meet anyone who can compete with him. He will be victorious in his argument, speaking in a manner all his own, since he occupies his position alone, with his sociability in his solitude (wa-al-uns bi-al-khalwa). In this he will be like one who appears by himself before the ruler to importune him with his case.14

The passage quite powerfully illustrates how a person’s natural desire to prevail in an argument – showing one’s skill, vindicating an opinion one holds to be correct and having an end to the trouble of disputation – would lead, if ultimately fulfilled, to an intolerable state of isolation. The appealing images of victory in argument and of presenting one’s case without a rival lead into the more frightening prospect of losing the dialogical condition that makes speech, and any human relationship, possible. By triumphing to the point where he would eliminate any possibility of rebuttal and any need for further discussion with his opponents, the addressee would effectively silence himself. But immediately upon delivering these incisive, though scathing comments on the ironies of the addressee’s argument for silence and the selfabsorbed arrogance behind it, al-JāªiÕ turns to self-parody. Describing how he will reply to the addressee, he displays a self-defeating triumphalism hardly better than that he has just criticised: And I shall truly make this [refutation] plain through conclusive demonstration and revelatory elucidation, setting forth in it arguments that prevail and the truth that vanquishes – in commensuration with what I have covered in my learning, attained with my powers and mastered with my capacities – so that no one will manage to refute it or be able to deny or reject it. There is no power save in God, in Him I seek refuge, to Him I entrust my affair and to Him I ever turn in repentance.15

The highly conventional pious lines with which the passage ends usually signal that al-JāªiÕ has completed an epistolary introduction and is now entering into the main body of his argument, but here the manifest contradiction they pose to what has just gone before prods the reader to recognise the self-parody

e pi stola ry conf rontati o n s  | 85 he has just been indulging in. If successful in delivering as decisive an argument as he promises, he prevents his opponents from continuing the dialogue and, in effect, losing his own justification for speaking further on the topic. While the addressee was at least advocating silence when he presented an argument meant to reduce his opponents – and consequently himself – to silence, here al-JāªiÕ, even more ironically, does so while defending speech. It is with the ironies surrounding these passages describing the addressee’s and al-JāªiÕ’s hopes of prevailing once and for all in their debate that overtones of theological polemic emerge from the text. The defence of ongoing dialogue that is intimated through the parody in these passages is closely related to the practices of dialectical reasoning and debate that were part and parcel of the approach of the Muʿtazila and other groups that emphasised the role of reason. The fundamentally dialogical discourses of these movements frequently brought them into conflict with conservative elements that emphasised textual authority alone and sought to avoid debate and speculation concerning questions not addressed in the Qurʾān or the sunna of the Prophet. We have seen such a disposition in al-JāªiÕ’s portrayal of the Traditionist leader Aªmad b. Óanbal in our discussion of K. fī Khalq al-Qurʾān in the previous chapter.16 The paradox that arose for such Traditionists is that they often had to defend their position via argument and, in fact, tended to adopt methods akin to the dialectical approach of kalām in defending views they believed to derive from the sunna, hoping that this would settle matters of doctrine.17 I am far from suggesting that the addressee in R. fī Taf∂il al-nu†q ʿalā al-‚amt is a parody of Traditionist argumentation: no mention is made of his referring to the sunna in his arguments, and his approach to issues – as it emerges from al-JāªiÕ’s description – differs drastically from theirs. But the defence of ongoing dialogue that emerges from the work’s double-edged parody is very close in spirit to the author’s advocacy of the speculative and dialogical approach of kalām in an environment where it was threatened by rote appeals to texts. I have said that al-JāªiÕ avoids approaches involving self-parody when addressing sensitive issues touching on religious or political divisions within the community for fear of having his own views misunderstood. But the theological subtext I am suggesting here would be recognised by the audience only if they understood the ironies and their implications, precluding any such danger.

86  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. After concluding the epistolary introduction with the broadly selfparodic promises of a final triumph in his case for speech, al-JāªiÕ reverts to what seem to be fairly straightforward arguments in favour of his view, with only a few clear notes of parody to balance the debate. While portions have been left out of the surviving text, creating some doubt as to the run of the argument and its tenor and certain points, the emphasis is upon the integral role speech plays in human life and dealings and, above all, in the revelation of God’s will through scripture. Along with logical arguments, Qurʾānic verses are quoted at several points, and – tellingly if I am correct regarding a strain of anti-Traditionist polemic – ‘reports from the trustworthy and transmitted traditions’ (al-riwāyāt ʿan al-thiqāt wa-al-aªādīth al-manqūla) and other sayings in celebration of speech are said to be countless.18 The fact that the most eloquent of men, Muªammad, was sent as the noblest of God’s messengers is argued to be a sign of the merit of speech.19 The celebration of speech closes with a description of a person who is capable of communicating, stressing that such a person has a greater share of capacity for logic than of desire to triumph in what he says.20 The largest share of the materials described appears to be rather straightforward and only in a few places do they tend toward the extreme, but, taken together, the cited texts form a stronger and less-qualified statement praising and encouraging speech than what we find in al-JāªiÕ’s other writings. In many cases, it is difficult to determine whether a statement is entirely serious, and this, in itself, encourages active reflection on the reader’s part. The highly parodic introduction with which al-JāªiÕ’s supposedly conclusive reply to the addressee began will have made the sensitive reader wary of ironies, deliberate excesses and questions begged in the arguments that follow. The fact that these ironies and omissions are not immediately obvious only involves the reader further in critically assessing them. Among the subtle parodic elements in al-JāªiÕ’s argument are his opting for brevity over exhaustiveness in this text itself and a suggestion that people recognise the merits of speech more readily than they do those of silence. Rather than qualifying his praise of speech with the concession that brevity is appropriate on many occasions, al-JāªiÕ signals his recognition of its importance only backhandedly here. At one point, he asserts that the materials he could cite on the merits of speech have no end but that what he has

e pi stola ry conf rontati o n s  | 87 mentioned is sufficient, and, at another, he declares that he might go on in his illustration of the Arabs’ eloquence, but has refrained for fear of prolonging his argument.21 To opt for brevity is, in fact, to opt for appropriate silence rather than extending one’s speech, but al-JāªiÕ, in his self-parodying persona, does not see how this conflicts with his unqualified praise of speech. Also backhanded and even more at odds with the persona’s argument is his admission that people show a certain bias in their perceptions of speech and silence: I have not seen silence – God grant you happiness – drawing praise on any occasion on which speech was not praised more, this because of people’s haste in preferring speech (tasāruʿ al-nās ilā taf∂īl al-kalām), because of the prominence of the occasions that call for it and because its clarity is manifest and its results beneficial.22

To claim that people are quick to judge in favour of speech is to all but admit they are slow to recognise the advantages of silence. If these perceptions are true, then it is to one’s social advantage to speak where possible, but the inevitable suggestion is that what merits silence has are often overlooked in society. The reader is left to ponder what these benefits of silence may be. Throughout the letter speech is given its due and the reader is left to consider how silence can speak for itself. Losing the Struggle with Virtue If the JāªiÕ-persona and the addressee in R. fī Taf∂īl al-nu†q ʿalā al-‚amt are parodies of contrary extremes, their counterparts in K. al-Nubl wa-al-tanabbul wa-dhamm al-kibr (On True Nobility vs Affectation and in Denunciation of Pride) seem rather alike in their arrogant readiness to fault others, even if the same vice leads them on different paths.23 The text is a discussion of how the quality of ‘nubl ’, indicating noble bearing that draws the esteem of others, cannot be attained if sought directly or affected and of how such affectation is among the evils that spring from pride (kibr). Pride is, for al-JāªiÕ, the root cause of all sins and failings from the rebellion of Satan (Iblīs) onwards.24 Thus, it is not, as with other vices, merely one extreme whose opposite is equally to be avoided while one seeks the appropriate mean. If abasement (dhilla) is also undesirable and shameful, it may itself be brought on by pride

88  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. and foolish ambition, which can lead one to disapproval in society or to seeking the company of the proud and disdainful for the sake of perceived social advantage.25 In the epistolary introduction, we find al-JāªiÕ berating the addressee for complaining of arrogant mistreatment by certain associates while refusing to withdraw from them. Al-JāªiÕ accuses the addressee himself of glorying in his own intellect while continuing to subject himself to such humiliation, and declares his regret that he cannot physically punish or ­incarcerate people who show such pride.26 In this work, al-JāªiÕ’s rhetorical aim is, then, to simply condemn pride and the reckless ambition it leads to rather than to critique it as part of a larger dialectic. This is why the parodic dialogue has a different structure from other texts we are examining, with both the addressee and the author’s persona embodying the vice and both reflecting its varied consequences. The addressee is tormented in his own vanity by his association with proud individuals, while the JāªiÕ-persona unwittingly embarrasses himself with his self-righteous and excessive condemnation of them. Through these personalities portrayed in the introductory passages, the author illustrates the harm pride in its various forms does to self and others and brings to the fore the problematic of self-perception with regard to noble bearing and pride. Since a reputation for noble character comes most readily to one who does not seek it and pride itself is ultimately an error in self-estimation, one can hardly be aware of one’s own share of this virtue or this vice.27 When the question of pride is addressed, the problematic of self-perception will attend the author’s own voice as well: he must somehow assert the authority of his own learning, experience or insight while modelling the modesty and sober self-estimation that he is advocating. By constructing a parody of himself as a rash and hypocritical denouncer of pride in others, al-JāªiÕ attempts to forestall accusations of pride in his own wisdom, leaving the reader to ascertain when his argument becomes serious. It is in the remainder of the essay, with the addressee for the most part forgotten, that al-JāªiÕ – quietly abandoning his initial parodic voice – relates the problems of kibr and nubl to the workings of society. By connecting questions of noble bearing, affectation and pride in an individual to the leadership dynamics of a community and to the perceptions of others rather than those of the individual himself, he attempts to transcend the problematic of self-perception.

e pi stola ry conf rontati o n s  | 89 Thus he encourages the reader to consider a broader context in reflecting on the problems these traits pose for an individual mindful of his reputation in society. Even in the opening passages of the text, in which al-JāªiÕ criticises the letter he claims to have received from the addressee, the subtleties of his language betray certain ironies in his attack on the addressee and his companions: I have read and understood your letter, examining and inquiring into all that was in it, and found that what you keep returning to after your ­prolixity – and settle upon in the end – is what we have already declared a fault: reports have already gone forth of how we have denounced it and become the enemy of all who are known for it, forsaking them, expressing astonishment at them and openly repudiating them. In short, when exceeding arrogance is accompanied by great ignorance and defiance of censure coincides with heedlessness, reproofs are useless and all thoughts die off. When the disease becomes critical and the required treatments conflict with each other, a warning becomes worthless prattle and one opts for punishment. But your shaykh has come to the point where he has nothing but correction to punish them with, and nothing but instruction to chastise them with. If we only had a ruler’s authority over them, or governors’ power of coercion, we would truly crush them with punishment by blows or subdue them through detention.28

It will become clear from the context that emerges from the following pages that the fault al-JāªiÕ wishes he could take such severe measures against is pride, the vice for which he criticises the addressee himself, as well as the companions the latter has written to complain of. I am not certain whether the wished-for punishments mentioned are meant to apply to the addressee himself as well as to these companions, but a hypocritical tone is clearly established here, whose parodic nature will become apparent through comparison with the remainder of the text. A hint of irony already emerges from the unnecessary repetitions in al-JāªiÕ’s own self-consciously eloquent complaint of the addressee’s prolixity in his letter.29 It is also probably not a coincidence that the word for his being astonished (al-taʿajjub) shares a root with the word used for these persons’ arrogance (al-ʿujb) in the following line. While

90  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. the two words have quite different senses in other contexts, the derivational relationship between them – given the tone of indignation here – underscores what is hypocritical in his self-righteous astonishment at their arrogance. Al-JāªiÕ’s referring to himself by the title ‘your shaykh’ (in the sense of a learned teacher here) is also rare, and the emphasis he places on the wide circulation of his prior statements, along with the pompously impersonal language with which it is described, further helps to create a tone of selfimportance very much at odds with a denunciation of pride. While al-JāªiÕ’s declaration that, were he in the authorities’ place, he would resort to physical punishment – without any reference to a tangible offence or a justification on the basis of religious law – is startlingly harsh, its irony only becomes clear in relation to certain passages in the text that follow later. After a brief discussion of the evils of pride and of the shame of bearing with it in others, al-JāªiÕ goes on to specify why he is so exasperated with the addressee personally: If they have gone to excess in reproaching the clan (al-ʿashīra) and behaving arrogantly toward the venerable (dhawī al-ªurma), you have gone to excess yourself in choosing badly and in persisting so long in ignominy. And you, despite your great arrogance and satisfaction with your own intellect, have associated yourself with those whose death would make one grin broadly, whose living brings grief and with whom your involvement is the greatest folly. You have complained of their superior attitude (tanabbul ) toward you, and their belittling you even though you surpass them in terms of achievements and of the intelligible facts. But, if you were as you say you are, you would not continue in abasement and endure patiently when you have an alternative to their company and could get away from them. You would oppose them with pride enough to crush them and resentment enough to overwhelm them.30

The addressee is thus himself ultimately guilty of the same vice with which these people have vexed him and provoked al-JāªiÕ to advocating severe punishment. What is worse, al-JāªiÕ chides him for not returning their arrogant behaviour when he is capable of so doing. It is true that any charge of showing disrespect toward kin and, especially, toward respected elder members

e pi stola ry conf rontati o n s  | 91 of a tribal grouping could be serious indeed in the sort of tribal community to which the addressee appears to belong. But the very use of the word for going to excess (afra†ū) marks the offence as a matter of degree rather than an objectively defined infraction, and, given the glee he shows in contemplating their demise, al-JāªiÕ hardly appears in a frame of mind to assess such an offence fairly. Despite their shared vice of pride, throughout these passages, a contrast is established between the addressee, whose vain and defensive character makes him all the more vulnerable to the slights of these companions, and al-JāªiÕ, who has only called attention to the personal offence he has suffered from their behaviour by spreading word of his denouncing them. His own pride and emotional susceptibility to their arrogant behaviour is further exposed by the indignation and violent anger he shows: his declaration of how he would punish them if only he had the authority reveals his actual weakness. Perhaps the first part of al-JāªiÕ’s advice, that the addressee withdraw from the company of these individuals when he is free to do so, is the moderate solution that would be consistent with noble character. This mean lies between vicious extremes represented by the tortured passivity of the addressee and the hypocrisy of returning their arrogance as advocated by the author’s persona. However, both of the latter courses stem from pride and selfish ambition. Considering these opening pages on their own, we might suppose that the text is a real personal letter written in the heat of a quarrel and that the writer does not realise how self-righteously arrogant he has become himself while denouncing the pride of the addressee and his associates. Such a lapse would be as human as it is self-contradictory and we have no right to assume that al-JāªiÕ could not have fallen into it. We might then suppose from these initial pages that the introduction’s ironies are unintentional. But the tone abruptly changes, and the remainder of the text is a dispassionate and carefully reasoned treatise on the qualities that make for genuine nobility and how they develop, along with a discussion of pride and its destructiveness. The anger disappears never to return after the opening pages, and al-JāªiÕ’s stated intention to continue his reproof of the addressee is never fulfilled. Since some passages are missing from the extant text, one might argue that al-JāªiÕ could have turned to the addressee’s failings in a section now lost, but it hardly seems likely that he could return to his bitterly reproachful tone

92  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. toward the addressee. Later in the text, al-JāªiÕ links severity (al-qaswa) to pride and mercy to humility, bringing the irony of his feigned harshness of the introduction into further relief, and making the ironic intentions of the opening pages, in my judgement, perfectly clear.31 It is true that, with several passages left out of the surviving manuscripts of K. al-Nubl wa-tanabbul, the exact flow of the argument is interrupted and the tone of the text is less clear than it might have been. Still, we have enough of the text to see the abrupt change in tone and contradictions through which the author signals to the reader that his intentions in the epistolary introduction were parodic. While al-JāªiÕ implies that he is going to continue his criticism of the addressee once he has dealt with these offending companions, he quickly turns to a discussion of nobility and the social dynamics that attend it in general terms, with only a single brief allusion to one of these companions in the extant text.32 It soon becomes clear that what we actually have is an essay of advice for males of distinguished ancestry who seek an influential role and a reputation for noble character. A palpable paradox here is that al-JāªiÕ is quite adamant that those who possess true nobility do not need to – and in fact could not – affect or cultivate this trait, which is always ‘cleaving to one who refuses it, highly averse to one who seeks it’.33 At the same time, he hints that that noble bearing is acquired through a preparatory process (uhba) without which all efforts to appear noble only bring one hatred and blame. Nevertheless, one who is indifferent to the insults and censure of others is counted ‘dead though he is alive, a dog though he is human’.34 Thus society’s esteem for one’s noble character comes to those who are not concerned with acquiring the admiration of others, and, yet, concern for the respect of others is part of being truly human, and there does appear to be a distinct path toward acquiring a noble character. Unfortunately a passage has been omitted between these sections in which the problematic of noble character is posed and the following passage in which the noble trait of forbearance (ªilm) is discussed, but it seems clear that this latter passage is al-JāªiÕ’s attempt to deal with the problems raised in the preceding ones. Here al-JāªiÕ describes how a chieftain or leader (alsayyid) learns to suppress his anger only after a long endurance and hardship, as his virtue and capability become apparent and the group comes to obey him. Interestingly, he characterises this development as the man’s struggle

e pi stola ry conf rontati o n s  | 93 not with vice but with the very virtues he is acquiring: ‘The war between him and forbearance goes back and forth, and fortune turns between him and suppression of rage (al-kaÕm).’35 Thus, the leader’s requisite patience and selfcontrol grow out of his position itself and are very much against the inclinations of his own nature. Success is not a matter of his conquering vice but of virtue conquering him in his self-seeking aspirations, through the demands of his position. In the following paragraph, al-JāªiÕ makes clear that it is ambition and the hope of attaining leadership that initially prompt a person to cultivate forbearance, but it is enduring hardship (al-iªtimāl ), habituation (al-iʿtiyād) and the obedience of others that eventually make these traits an actuality. He goes on to assert that it is the fear of having people suppose that their long-suffering is mere powerlessness and lowliness that prevents those who do not possess all the factors necessary for leadership from vying for power.36 When he discusses the nature of these factors, it becomes clear that they include both native characteristics of individuals, such as reputable ancestry and noble appearance, and those that may, in varying degrees, be cultivated, such as refined speech, moral character and far-reaching aspiration.37 A path toward acquiring leadership and the noble traits that naturally accompany it does exist, even if it is not open to all classes and individuals. However, it is not through estimating himself but through the obvious compliance of others that an individual can know that the requisite virtues are prevailing in him. In the remainder of the essay, al-JāªiÕ relates the evils of pride to broader contexts. He defends God’s describing himself as ‘proud’ (mutakabbir) in the Qurʾān, asserting that it is as appropriate to the creator’s greatness as it is unsuitable to the creature’s weakness.38 He goes on to discuss the special case of Bedouin societies and those that resemble them, where pride is still despised but less so than in other walks of life. Even these groups only approve of pride in three cases: when one is a desert-dweller still living in the rough manner of pre-Islamic Arabia; when one is in the midst of seeking vengeance or confronting rivals; or when one is showing defiance toward tyrannical rulers. It is here that al-JāªiÕ returns briefly to the addressee’s case, mentioning that none of these conditions apply to his companion – here referred to as an individual – who, in fact, behaves arrogantly toward friends, guests and those who show forbearance.39 It seems clear that the addressee and the

94  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. companions who have offended him are part of a tribal grouping with roots in old Arabian society: perhaps al-JāªiÕ is suggesting that some people with such roots are still in need of adapting their ways to an urban environment where law prevails. Later in the essay, al-JāªiÕ – in what may be a veiled defence of ʿAbbāsid ceremony – also distinguishes between the types of pride he is criticising and the pomp of the Sassanid Persian kings, whose displays were only meant to impress the grandeur of authority on their subjects.40 Throughout the essay, about which much more could be said than my purpose here allows for, al-JāªiÕ builds a complex picture of how certain individuals come to be esteemed in society. He also seeks to show how much the individual’s desire for such esteem is at odds with the community’s needs and counterproductive to the ambitious individual’s own goals. Still, concern for one’s reputation and even ambition for leadership have their place in developing character, even if lofty aspirations in society are only achieved when one is purged, by burdens of leadership, of the selfish feelings that initially spurred one toward these goals. Quite obviously, K. al-Nubl wa-altanabbul is directed at a well-born male reader who shares such far-reaching goals and problematic motivations. On the way to his goals, personal vanity must give way to the trying and humbling behaviour through which noble bearing and leadership are acquired. Focus on oneself and one’s own progress toward personal ideals must be lost in a focus on society’s needs and the exigencies of the role aspired to. The parodic debate between the addressee and al-JāªiÕ is an attempt to remove the self-flattering presence that the reader and author might have in an essay of advice. Many today will argue that an ideal of humility in leadership only masks the structures of privilege, but such a radical critique of society was hardly in the air in al-JāªiÕ’s time, and its absence does not diminish the subtlety of his social and rhetorical insights. Appealing to Sober Judgement Another variation on the doubly parodic pattern can be clearly seen in a comic, personal letter involving the same question we saw in K. al-Shārib wa-al-mashrūb in the previous chapter, the licitness of intoxicants other than grape wine. In Risāla ilā al-Óasan b. Wahb fī Madª al-nabīdh wa-‚ifat a‚ªābihi (‘Letter to al-Óasan b. Wahb in Praise of Date Wine and Describing its Partakers’) the addressee – a real secretary in the ʿAbbāsid administration

e pi stola ry conf rontati o n s  | 95 – is made to embody the reasonable position on the question at hand, while al-JāªiÕ parodically plays the role of an advocate of excess. Our author backhandedly praises the addressee by reproving him for his failure to employ his great eloquence to celebrate this noble beverage. He eventually goes on to intimate a hope that the addressee, in keeping with his renowned generosity, will favour him with a gift of this very drink.41 This is a light and facetious, though eloquent, personal letter which, to judge by its length and elaborate structure, may have been written in the hope of securing a monetary gift along with the nabīdh.42 Nevertheless, the topic itself – given the tense sectarian environment – evokes the same issue of religious law that was treated in K. al-Shārib wa-al-mashrūb. The addressee in this text, obviously a close friend and supporter of al-JāªiÕ, is thus portrayed as keeping to the Muʿtazilī position of enjoying these drinks only in moderation, while the author affects an enthusiasm for unrestrained indulgence. The opposing extreme position, the prohibition of intoxicants in any quantity – inevitably in the air – is never mentioned, but its presence is certainly felt against the defiantly cheerful tone of al-JāªiÕ’s celebration of nabīdh. The letter opens with the author describing himself as a ‘preoccupied petitioner’ (al-†ālib al-mashghūl ).43 While the author’s being preoccupied may sound innocent enough on its own, it is interesting to note that al-JāªiÕ elsewhere uses two words deriving from the same root in describing a round of nabīdh drinking with the recipient of this letter, al-Óasan b. Wahb. 44 In the following lines al-JāªiÕ goes on to declare that he is excused if he errs, being ‘in the state that necessitates it and subject to the cause that leads to it’(fī al-ªal alladhī yūjibuhu wa-al-sabab alladhī yuʾaddī ilayhi).45 Relating these lines to the title may be enough to alert the reader to the state of inebriation that al-JāªiÕ is feigning (presumably) to be writing in, a reversal of the same comic ploy we met in the addressee of K. al-Shārib wa-al-mashrūb. The writer’s intoxication shows still more clearly in the letter’s many profoundly convoluted passages, such as when he questions the addressee: Why do you control yourself without growing delirious, and why do you see gravity as the essence of manhood before showing levity, and why is delirium delirium itself and folly manhood itself and contradiction correctness itself? What else distinguishes you if this is not the case, and what

96  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. meaning have you grasped? Why haven’t you let go of the reins and why haven’t you gone beyond any limit? (lam takhruj ʿan kull miqdār).46

While parodying the destructive effects of overdrinking on reason and portraying the danger of being overcome by such states, he is also defending the place of levity and abandoning dignity in the appropriate circumstances, as comparison to other passages in his writings on the role of mirth will show.47 Encouraging the addressee, with this last phrase in the context of such ironic raving, to exceed the ‘limit’ is to suggest that drinking nabīdh can be enjoyed within a certain limit (miqdār), a word al-JāªiÕ often uses to describe the golden mean in matters of ethics or advice.48 He also evokes the ideal of moderation in speech – which, in the context of praising nabīdh, is the same as advocating moderation in drinking – by reproaching the addressee for ‘failing to be prolix’ (qillat i†nābika) in commending it.49 Having alluded to the existence of an appropriate limit, al-JāªiÕ describes the effects of escalating amounts: Truly, the second cup goes down more smoothly that the first, the third still easier, and the fourth is more delicious, the fifth better flowing, the sixth more enrapturing – until it surrenders you to sleep, which is your very life or, at least, a part of your subsistence. There is no benefit in it, given that its intoxication overcomes one and inebriates when it goes to one’s head, unless its strength is enough to kill off sensation, its force enough to floor the drinker . . .50

Excess has clearly been reached here and the process of intoxicants quite gradually overcoming reason and leading to further excess is skilfully suggested. The JāªiÕ-persona appears delighted to negate the value of his own mental life, as sleep becomes preferable to the state drinking leaves one in. The result of excess is clear, but, once again, the reader is left to determine at which glass harm and danger begin. Al-JāªiÕ persists in this strongly parodic vein throughout the letter (while finding many occasions to praise al-Óasan for his generosity), and only changes his stance when making his final request for the gift of some nabīdh at the end: ‘Be certain that if you give too much, I will head to depravity, while, if you give a little, I swear I will exercise moderation.’ Al-JāªiÕ goes on to jest about the results of too much drink for him as a man with a connection to the caliphal house:

e pi stola ry conf rontati o n s  | 97 The least I would do if you give me too much is to claim the authority of a king, and the least they would do to me is exile me from the earth. So if you give me a little, you’re a sincere son to me, and if you give too much, you’re a hostile deceiver.51

The final lines show that R. fī Madª al-nabīdh is a personal letter written in a highly familiar tone to an official for whom al-JāªiÕ plays a role akin to that of a boon companion. It may contain further hidden ironies and allusions that would only have been understood by al-Óasan himself and, perhaps, by a few other acquaintances with whom the letter would be shared. Still, the whole text appears to be written to be accessible to a broader audience, and the author’s relationship with the recipient is exploited to cultivate a certain entertaining tone and a certain disposition toward the question of intoxicating beverages. While the letter reflects a legal position closely tied to the sectarian tensions of the era, its primary purpose is surely to amuse al-Óasan and sympathetic acquaintances among whom it might be shared (or perhaps read aloud at a gathering). The passages parodying drunken exuberance have such a ring of experience that I am inclined to suspect that al-JāªiÕ and al-Óasan had not always been as committed to the rule of moderation with nabīdh in practice as they were in theory. However, the danger of excess is at least acknowledged through parody of drunken carelessness and then openly declared as the letter closes, and the author is careful to shield al-Óasan by assuming the role of excess himself. Al-JāªiÕ’s use of another variant on the self-parodying structure in the service of friendly amusement is still telling of his rhetorical strategies and throws light on his more serious writings. Occupations, Parody and the Divinely Ordained Social Order We have seen how in K. al-Nubl wa-al-tanabbul, al-JāªiÕ negotiates the problem of self-perception with regard to the virtue of noble bearing and the vice of pride by means of a complex parodic structure. In the case of that text, the very nature of his views on the dangers of pride and the elusiveness of noble stature made it unsuitable for him to adopt a stable position as an author proffering advice. Nor was it fitting to allow the reader to envision a clear trajectory toward realising his social ambitions. Staging a contentious argument between a parodic version of himself and a probably fictional

98  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. addressee allows him to avoid seeming self-righteous or making any pretence of objectivity. It also gives the reader the opportunity to engage with the questions raised from a certain distance before considering how they apply to his particular situation. In a number of his texts dealing with the relative importance and merits of various trades and professions, al-JāªiÕ adopts a similarly confrontational stance toward an addressee who has erred in his judgement of the importance of certain professions or fallen to generalising about the character of those who practise it. When he criticises the addressee for his error, he is not simply stating his views on the relationship between various occupations and moral character but involving his readers in an examination of how their own views of such matters are biased by their own interests and position in society. The parody involved in these texts may be subtler than in three texts we have so far examined in this chapter, but it is no less complex and inventive. The need for such involved rhetorical planning is best understood in the light of the author’s social views, which dictate that an individual’s perception is inevitably, and indeed ought to be, biased in favour of his own type of work and role in society. All of this is part of al-JāªiÕ’s view that God has created differences among people in order to promote unity among them, a view he articulates most clearly in K. fī Óujaj al-nubuwwa (On the Proofs of Prophethood): Know that God, may He be exalted, has only made the natures of people differ in order to bring agreement among them. He did not prefer to make them agree amongst themselves in what is contrary to their benefit. For if people were not compelled by differing factors . . . perhaps all of them would choose to be merchants or craftsmen, or perhaps they would all seek kingship and authority. With this would come the loss of subsistence, the frustration of benefits, ruin and destruction. If they were not compelled by certain factors and subject to certain causes, they would all be averse to cupping, farriery, butchery and tannery. But, for each type among people, there is something that makes what pertains to them appealing and something that facilitates that for them. Thus, when one weaver sees a shortcoming, a failure of judgement or ineptitude in another, he says to him, ‘You cupper!’ While, if one cupper sees a ­shortcoming in another, he says, ‘You weaver!’52

e pi stola ry conf rontati o n s  | 99 While this view clearly acknowledges the crucial role played by every occupation and, in a sense, justifies the pride that members of even the lowest trades have in their own particular type of work, it hardly implies that no profession is better than another. Careful reading and comparison to al-JāªiÕ’s other writings reveal how closely this characterisation of professions is tied to maintaining the existing social order. The verbal play with which this passage begins, implying that universal agreement on the relative desirability of professions would lead to discord, resonates strongly with an account of a saying of the theologian Wā‚il b. ʿA†āʾ that al-JāªiÕ approvingly relates elsewhere: ‘People never gather without doing harm, nor do they disperse without doing benefit.’ According to the account, Wā‚il is told that the harm of their gathering (in protest, presumably) is obvious and is asked to explain the advantage of their separation. He explains that each man then returns to his particular task of plastering, sailing or weaving and so on, thus benefiting the Muslim community and all who need their services. This quotation occurs in the context of al-JāªiÕ’s argument that the educated elite (al-khā‚‚a) are vulnerable to the numbers of the common people, should they become united in opposition – as they might under the influence of anthropomorphist teachers (mushabbiha) who opposed the ʿAbbāsids on doctrinal grounds.53 A little more distantly, the passage also echoes al-JāªiÕ’s many statements on the prevalence of enmity between those who are near to each other in kinship or residence.54 These views are nuanced in R. fī Manāqib al-Turk (‘On the Merits of the Turks’), where he argues that the penchant for competition and mutual envy to which those sharing ties of kinship or residence are prone is tempered by a sense of tolerance and a lessening of rancour existing between such groups.55 Similarly, rivalrous tensions are reflected in the weaver’s chiding of his colleague, while his calling him a ‘cupper’ implicitly appeals to their shared pride in their often-disparaged trade. It is quite clear that al-JāªiÕ expects his literate audience to see no great difference in social status between the five trades mentioned in the second paragraph above. And, being part of the same social order, the weaver himself would not attempt to disparage his colleague by calling him a king or a scholar. The crafts mentioned are among those to which all might be averse if not ‘compelled’ by the factors that God has created to dispose the right number of people favourably toward them.56 While al-JāªiÕ never explains

100  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. what these ‘factors’ (asbāb) compelling a person to pursue a given calling are, it seems safe to guess that they include the means to education or the lack thereof, location, one’s father’s trade in many cases, as well as native ability and the various temperaments that suit given ways of life. Al-JāªiÕ does not hesitate to generalise about the negative traits and character failings of members of certain professions, declaring that weavers and livestock-traders of all places and times are equally prone to bitterness, foolishness and wronging others, while cuppers are all prone to reckless nabīdh-drinking.57 But, true to his Muʿtazilī convictions on the justice of God, he declares that, even though circumstances may ‘constrain’ (taq‚ur) a man to become a weaver, they do not constrain him to miss promised dates or perform his work negligently or dishonestly, and so with money-changers and the vices they are prone to.58 As for his own craft as a dialectical theologian (mutakallim), he asserts that without it the true religion given by God would be lost, and that it surpasses every craft and field of learning in excellence since it is the standard that keeps other disciplines in line.59 The pride al-JāªiÕ shows in his profession as a theologian must be understood in the light of pressures the Muʿtazila felt from groups that placed less emphasis on rational inquiry in matters of religion.60 And, in the light of his views on divinely ordained social order, part of his celebration of theological practice can be understood as the natural enthusiasm proper to those who fulfil that role in the Muslim community. Conservative and ineluctably elitist as al-JāªiÕ’s social outlook is, it implies that individuals – theologians and rulers not excepted – are inevitably biased in their perceptions of their own role relative to that of others and that even those who practise the least-respected occupations are entitled to their own perspectives on their work. If al-JāªiÕ were to declare that all are, in the end, equal in power, importance and character, objectivity would lie in levelling all. As it is, he is committed to a hierarchical structure attended by ambiguities, at least from the perspective of any individual occupying a place within that structure. When writing about human society in general, al-JāªiÕ can discern the existence of a divine plan, but when discussing specific occupations or social roles in relation to his own or his readers’, he cannot claim to be seeing with the eyes of God. The framework of confrontation with the addressee and double parody is naturally suited to contemplating such a social vision and mediating disputes within it. In a pair of texts we will examine,

e p i stolary conf ronta ti ons  | 101 he uses the framework of subtly ironic debate to challenge his relatively elite readership to reflect on how their status in society shapes the tensions they experience with those who exercise subordinate responsibility for them. Entrusting One’s Affairs to Agents . . . and to God While the surviving text of Kitāb al-Wukalāʾ (The Book of Financial Agents) is incomplete – with sections of unknown length missing between the seven extant excerpts – it is interesting for the subtle ways al-JāªiÕ uses his confrontation with the addressee to illustrate the biases that attend people’s perceptions of those they employ in various capacities.61 The ostensible purpose of this work is to bid the addressee to reconsider the harsh criticism he has circulated in a letter criticising the agents (wukalāʾ) who manage his financial affairs under contract. But this business conflict is treated rather briefly, at least in the extant text, while the broader issue of avoiding rash judgements in general, and negative generalisations about one’s social inferiors in particular, becomes the central concern.62 While the possibility that K. al-Wukalāʾ is al-JāªiÕ’s response to an actual letter that arose from a real quarrel between a real recipient and his agents cannot be ruled out, the addressee and his situation can just as easily be part of a literary construct. In the latter case, al-JāªiÕ would appear to have invented the addressee’s conflict with his agents to provide a specific example of the broader dynamics of prejudice in dealing with those to whom one must delegate authority. What is clear is that al-JāªiÕ’s letter is written to be intelligible to a broader audience who may not have access to the addressee’s letter, if it ever existed, and goes beyond the immediate situation with these specific agents to examine how anger and worry may lead a person to unjust judgements concerning those who exercise subordinate responsibilities for him. The causes of the addressee’s faulty judgement – anger and the pressure of times he is going through – are thoroughly explored before the reader even learns the nature of his error. Throughout the text, the addressee’s anger is portrayed as something natural to someone in his position with anxieties over his property. Al-JāªiÕ cleverly structures all in such a way as to gently encourage his reader to consider whether his relatively powerful position in society can bias his judgement toward those beneath him. For part of the letter, he poses as though he is relating how the agents themselves might respond, but the line between

102  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. their views and his own is difficult to discern here. Through the addressee’s case with his agents, al-JāªiÕ suggests that a person’s failure to appreciate the essential role all occupations have been created to play in the community may even undermine his position among the elite and threaten his own place in the existing social structure. As the letter opens, praise of the addressee’s erstwhile probity of judgement and longstanding habit of refraining from circulating what he writes without careful consideration prepares the reader to look for specific causes of his error. The addressee never used to circulate letters without examining them carefully, and it is only the pressures of the day that have led him to grow careless and be deceived in his thinking.63 The errors of the addressee are presented to the reader as ones that even the thoughtful and perceptive may fall into. At this point, the addressee’s role is rather similar to the one we have seen in our discussion of K. Kitmān al-sirr wa-ªifÕ al-lisān in the preceding chapter: an intelligent and responsible individual whom the reader can identify with and emulate – apart from one crucial error on which he needs advice here. Al-JāªiÕ continues in his explanation of the addressee’s lapse by discussing the evils of anger: how it endangers lives and is only less dangerous than drunkenness or the lover’s passion because of its tendency to subside more quickly. Still, it has led to worse than the crimes and recklessness of the insane.64 Al-JāªiÕ continues, describing the addressee’s errors, his persistence in his crime, his insisting on what he has said, immortalising it in writing and then boasting of this, each level suggesting a stage at which greater harm might have been avoided. He goes on to chide the addressee on the evils of growing resolute (al-ta‚mīm) on something without discretion or verification, and attributes this error to ‘irascibility’ (∂īq al-‚adr), whose opposite, ‘equanimity’ (saʿat al-‚adr), he describes as the root of all good qualities. Al-JāªiÕ’s dwelling on the harm of his past errors and confrontational tone hardly strike us as a constructive way of persuading the addressee to mend his ways. At times, al-JāªiÕ thus shows some of the same rashness he is criticising in the addressee. While it is hard to imagine the addressee in this position benefiting from criticism of bygone errors in such a tone, the situation is very different for the reader, who is able to contemplate the situation from a distance and possibly even consider the reproach the addressee is receiving from his friend al-JāªiÕ one of the evils his rashness has brought

e p i stolary conf ronta ti ons  | 103 upon him. But the reader still does not know the nature of his offence (apart from the ambiguous clue the title might offer) but is given more opportunity to distance himself from the awkward position the addressee has placed himself in. The universal experience of anger and regret is held before him and he is left to wonder how some unknown matter has led an otherwise thoughtful person on some highly dangerous course. When the addressee’s error is finally revealed, it turns out to have a breadth of social significance going far beyond his quarrel with his agents. He has made not only the profession of agents as a whole, but copyists and teachers – also professions involving subordinate responsibility – as well, the object of his universal condemnation. Al-JāªiÕ goes on to describe how the addressee has noted their faults and overlooked their merits, while merely giving mention to the faults of leaders and eminent men. He has taken this prejudice to the point where anyone reading or hearing his letter would be correct in thinking that he is ‘one who denies the truth out of ignorance, or abandons it out of stubbornness’. The reader is thus invited to look through the eyes of the audience who read the addressee’s attack on those who rank below him in society and see the embarrassment he has caused for himself.65 After yet more denunciation of the addressee’s rashness, the next description we get of his attack on agents is a brief anecdote he has told that well illustrates the intensity his loathing of them has reached: You made an assertion at the start of your reproach of them, saying: ‘When Yaʿqūb b. ʿUbayd was ill and one of his sons asked him “What do you have an appetite for?” He replied “The liver of an agent!”’ And he had already abandoned commerce because of their abuses and the monstrosity of their abominations.66

The citation of the addressee’s anecdote in full not only shows al-JāªiÕ’s awareness of an audience beyond the addressee but signals this awareness to the reader. The final sentence can as easily be taken as continuing the quotation of the addressee with his comment on Yaʿqūb’s experience, adding to the intensity of his rage. If, however, we follow the reading that Hārūn – by allocating the sentence to a new paragraph in his edition – evidently prefers and take this as al-JāªiÕ’s own comment on the story, the hyperbolic reference to ‘the monstrosity of their abominations’ (fuªsh khabāʾthihim) will be

104  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. taken as parodying the addressee’s exaggeration. Such mockery would only add to the rather vindictive tone of al-JāªiÕ’s criticism established through the preceding passages. Al-JāªiÕ makes clear that the addressee’s errors do not stem from any shortcoming in his intellectual powers, telling him ‘knowledge is at your beck and call’ (†awʿ yadayka). Rather, through carelessness and letting himself be overcome by his ‘free-flowing thoughts’ (nawājim khawā†irika), and making these unconsidered views public, he has given his enemies in society complete power over him. He would have done better to act in accord with what both nature and custom dictate by restraining the inclinations of the wayward self (al-nafs) especially within the hearing of society’s elite (al-malā). Instead, his careless writing has placed him in a position where his enemy or rival can attack his honour without need to lie or falsify anything.67 The paradox of the addressee’s error is that he has allowed his own high standing in society to delude him into prejudices against his subordinates that actually leave him vulnerable among his peers. Al-JāªiÕ may be thinking here along the lines of the social philosophy expressed in the passage we have seen above from K. Óujaj al-nubuwwa. As a man of some station – evidently a scholar or man of letters of note to judge by the attention his writing appears to have drawn – the addressee is naturally prone to a heightened awareness of the importance of his own role in the community. He may, therefore, be tempted to disdain the work of those who only manage the affairs of people like him or serve them in other capacities. While such natural feeling perhaps cannot always be checked in private, the addressee’s position as part of the knowledgeable elite also demands that he adopt a broader, fairer-minded perspective in public and acknowledge the benefits of all professions. While it is too late for the addressee to retrieve his injudicious denunciations of his agents, the reader, of course, has the advantage of perusing the whole of this discussion in private and considering whether it has implications for what he will say in the future. Al-JāªiÕ also makes use of a clever ploy as he presses the addressee to concede that his negative judgements on agents have been misplaced and to reflect on his position within the divinely ordained social order. He tells the addressee that, having placed too much faith in his own thoughts, he has not only forsaken the correction (adab) of God, but has failed to follow the

e p i stolary conf ronta ti ons  | 105 advice of the Prophet, who told a man to obtain God’s pardon by simply saying ‘ªasbī Allāh’ (God is sufficient for me) whenever he feels overcome by something.68 Al-JāªiÕ simply stops here, but many of his contemporary Muslim readers would hardly have needed help in completing the widely used phrase which derives from the Qurʾān by adding ‘wa-niʿma al-wakīl ’ (‘. . . and what a wonderful disposer of affairs is He!’; 3:173). We have here, then, an unspoken play-on-words that reinforces the very point the addressee is being encouraged to acknowledge. The participle wakīl is usually construed in an active sense as ‘disposer’ when referring to God, and in the passive sense of ‘one to whom [something] is entrusted’, that is ‘agent’, when referring to human beings. Still the hint is hardly a mere pun: both senses refer to one in whom one places trust concerning one’s affairs. This, of course, does not mean that agents are to be likened to God, but the connection between even widely varying senses of words was a fascination of al-JāªiÕ, and the use of a word or root in reference to God in the Qurʾān was an argument for its positive connotation.69 The unspoken pun leaves the suggestion not far off that relying upon agents and other subordinates is part of relying upon the creator who has channelled human affairs so as to include such roles. Al-JāªiÕ pretends to overlook the connection, so helpful to his own argument, and proceeds in the sentence that follows to relate the addressee’s above-cited account of the plea for an agent’s liver. If the reader has the completion of the Qurʾānic phrase ringing in his mind’s ear, the contrast of the addressee’s wrathful attack on the wakīl as a type will be quite striking. The connection between the divine disposing of affairs and the defence of agents pervades the two sections that follow next in the extant text. The first of these, labelled the third, bears a brief heading: ‘From his Reply on Behalf of Agents’ (min jawābih ʿan al-wukalāʾ). From this and the use of the plural verb ‘they have said’ (qālū) in the following, fourth, excerpt of the text, it seems clear that al-JāªiÕ is here giving an example of how agents might reply to the addressee’s attacks on their profession.70 The topos of giving voice to how a group or a typical member of one might speak in defence of themselves is common in al-JāªiÕ’s writings, such as Kitāb al-Muʿallimīn (The Book of Teachers) and Kitāb Fakhr al-Sūdān ʿalā al-Bī∂ān (The Vaunting of Blacks over Whites), which we shall see below and in the next chapter.71 Through the cleverly structured arguments he relates as part of the agents’

106  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. reply, al-JāªiÕ seeks to place the conflict he has illustrated between the addressee and his agents in a far broader social framework. The agents begin by reproving the addressee for attacking all agents – and, by implication, custodians and trustees whose responsibilities are parallel – because of the failure of some and go on to describe the ruin of commerce and agreements that would follow a loss of trust in their professions. They follow this with citations of Qur’ānic verses referring to husbands’ roles as guardians over their wives, trustees’ responsibilities over under-age orphans, and the prophets Joseph and Moses, both of whom were entrusted with delegated authority before their emergence as prophets.72 By failing to heed the implications of such verses, the addressee has fallen into reasoning that nullifies God’s admonishment of the community and what He has ordered for the sake of their benefit in this world and the next.73 The link between these brief citations appears to be that God has entrusted a part of the affairs of some human beings to others (as those of wives to husbands or the property of orphans to trustees). Some are entrusted with authority and power over others by God, while others – including some who were later made known to be prophets – are entrusted with responsibilities by those more powerful than themselves, but both can be praised for fulfilling what God wills for human welfare. The connection the reader is apparently invited to draw is that those who are entrusted with authority over others by God’s law are not so different from those who are charged with subordinate responsibility over their affairs, since all is part of the divine plan and ought to be exercised with integrity and a view to human welfare. As if to illustrate such connections between responsibilities and their benefits in vastly different rungs of the social ladder and system of power relations, the agents go on to compare the roles of the very highest and lowest levels of society. They relate the addressee’s need to bear the harmful aspects of agents’ work for the sake of their benefits to the need to bear with an unjust Muslim ruler (imām), whose benefits overwhelm the harm he may do through appropriating communal property or ignoring points of sacred law. They compare the ruler’s injustices to rain which may, despite its vital benefits, ruin crops and drown some of the cultivators (akara), and thus intimate that the trials of living under periods of unjust rule are part of the created order. When they turn next to comparing this example of benefit mixed with

e p i stolary conf ronta ti ons  | 107 harm from on high to the case of agents, they move immediately to an analogy from a class far less privileged: And so it is with agents, trustees and custodians. You do not know of any group among whom evil is more the general rule or deception more frequent than cultivators. But, despite this, we may not issue a general verdict on them, even though the need for them is great and [the difficulty of] freeing them from these ways and such a nature is greater.74

Al-JāªiÕ does not seem to devote much attention to peasant farmers in his writings, and it is difficult to know how much in sympathy he is with the agents’ sweepingly negative description of cultivators and whether he shares their callous acceptance of their drowning as a fact of life. The agents certainly expect their audience (the addressee to whom they are replying, first and foremost) to agree that the evils described are more prevalent among cultivators than among any other profession. The implication is that, if fairness dictates that even they cannot all be judged alike, and if the necessity of the labour they provide means that the offences of some must be borne with, then certainly the failings of agents and their like must be endured for the sake of their benefits as well. It is quite possible that the contemporary audience would have seen a certain amount of prejudice toward cultivators on the part of agents, particularly if they were managing their clients’ lands and had to deal more closely with those who worked on them. All of this relates closely to the tensions of proximity, which, as I have discussed above, are very much a part of al-JāªiÕ’s social vision. We have seen that al-JāªiÕ has already raised the possibility that someone in the addressee’s position can damage his own standing among his elite peers by failing to show a noble equanimity with regard to his agents’ shortcomings while bearing more patiently with those who rank above him. If a similar judgement on the agents’ perceptions of their own subordinates is evoked here, a widerreaching social pattern is suggested. Also involved in this larger pattern is the agents’ discussion of the unjust imām that immediately precedes that on the cultivators. The reader’s attention has been channelled swiftly from the sense of injustice and anger that results from the actions of an unjust ruler – which might well affect his own rights – to the very different sort of rage and indignation he might feel toward those he has engaged to manage

108  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. his property, and on to how these in turn may feel when deceived by the peasants they collect from. For al-JāªiÕ and, certainly, much of his readership, an imām claiming what ought to be property of all Muslims as his own, an agent cheating his employer and a peasant hiding part of his produce from the landowner commit an injustice by overstepping the rights of others in the divinely ordained social order. But the juxtapositions here prompt the reader to question how differently he is inclined to think in each of these situations. In which of these cases is he inclined to voice anger and, perhaps, take action to redress the wrong done, and in which is he inclined to bear the situation patiently, weighing the transgressions done against the necessity of the roles played by those who have committed offences? These questions are raised in the context of the agents’ defence of their own class but, if the reader suspects that their portrayal of the situation is biased toward the interests of their own class, the broad social vision of the passage suggests that such biases are to be found at any level, including that occupied by the reader himself. The need for members of propertied classes like the addressee to acknowledge the biases that go with their position and bear with the resulting uncertainty is most convincingly illustrated by an analogy the agents draw early in their defence of their trade: If merchants and outfitters (ahl al-jihāz) were to accompany the cameleers, muleteers and sailors and see for themselves what befalls their properties passing through those roads, waters, paths and inns, it is possible that the majority of them would cease to outfit shipments.75

Given the close parallels between the roles of these occupations involved in transporting goods and those of agents, this statement is likely meant to strike a client like the addressee as quite provocative. The dangers to properties alluded to could apply to the opportunities for cheating or theft on the part of those so employed. However, it could just as easily apply to other threats (thieves, weather, etc.) with which they could be diligently coping while even risking their own safety to protect their employers’ goods. Similarly those who contract agents cannot always know every hardship agents face in their work or eliminate every opportunity for corruption. The analogy clearly implies that those who play a given role in society have a

e p i stolary conf ronta ti ons  | 109 sphere of knowledge proper to themselves and seems to suggest that they inevitably have the power to make some choices on whether to use this knowledge honestly and responsibly. If merchants or property owners knew too much of the sphere proper to those they engage for shipping or managing, they might not be able to fulfil their own roles, since worry would distract or discourage them. If concern over these uncertainties leads to universal suspicion of those they employ and harsh reaction against them, they risk not only committing injustice but the ruin of their own affairs and thus harming the economy of the whole community. Coming on the lips of the agents who emphasise the uniqueness of their own perspective, the analogy is phrased so as to pique the anxiety of someone like the addressee, but the way it ties into the broader social patterns illustrated in the surrounding passages we have discussed suggests that al-JāªiÕ would concur with its logic. After presenting the addressee with the challenging arguments of the agents, al-JāªiÕ occasionally returns to advising the addressee in his own voice, but, here, the former harshness and the emphasis on damage already done by his attack on the agents is replaced by a gentler call to reconsider his judgements. With this change of tone, the distance between the confronted addressee and the reader, challenged only indirectly, is effectively bridged as al-JāªiÕ suggests possible causes for the conflict that has arisen: And I myself suspect that the offence is shared between you and your agents. So, examine yourself and perhaps you will see that you have merely been undermined by your own judgement of character (innamā utīta min qibal al-firāsa), by your failure to allot the prescribed rents to them or by your having burdened them with the utmost difficulty in maintaining their trust and being perfectly sincere.76

For the first time in the surviving text, al-JāªiÕ acknowledges the likelihood that the addressee’s agents had wronged him in some regard before his illconsidered attack on them. While the addressee is advised to be sure he is paying his agents fairly, it is also clear that they are as capable of transgressing as anyone else and that the addressee has a right to be wary. The suggestion that he has failed in his discernment of their character may mean that he has allowed appearances to raise suspicions of individuals who are actually honest, or that he has failed to perceive the signs that betray unworthy

110  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. individuals when engaging them and has now wrongly projected his error onto an entire profession.77 The possibility raised that he has burdened them with undue difficulty in remaining honest can even be taken to mean that he has entrusted them with so much that temptations to corruption were inevitable. The addressee and those in similar positions are, after all, entitled to their concerns over those who exercise responsibilities for them, but they must not lose sight of the importance of the roles these professions play and the danger of blaming them for their employers’ own lapses of judgement. Of course, al-JāªiÕ’s own motives in crafting a persuasive call for caution and fairness in dealing with agents and other subordinates in Kitāb al-Wukalāʾ may relate, in part, to his own interests in maintaining the stratified social order in which he and his audience enjoyed privileged places. His sense of the autonomy of those who play roles and the distinctiveness of the knowledge they possess, after all, implies the need for their willing cooperation if society is to function properly. Still, the fluidity of perspective he shows in drawing parallels between the experiences of different classes, from the imām all the way to peasants, shows a willingness to engage the experience of other classes on an imaginative level that separates him strikingly from many of his contemporaries. Kitāb al-Muʿallimīn and Other Texts on Occupations Given that teachers were among the professions that the addressee in K. al-Wukalāʾ attacks in parallel to his denunciation of agents, it is not surprising that we find close rhetorical parallels to that work in Kitāb al-Muʿallimīn (The Book of Teachers), al-JāªiÕ’s defence of educators generally, but especially those engaged by fathers as tutors for their sons.78 In this text as in K. al-Wukalāʾ we find (1) the JāªiÕ-persona harshly criticising a friend for his sweeping denunciation of all members of a profession, (2) an attempt to relate that profession’s work to larger issues and the most basic needs of human society, (3) passages giving enthusiastic voice to what members of the profession can say in their own defence and (4) a calmer appeal to reason in the author’s own voice near the close of the text. While these similarities are apparent, the fragmentary extant text of K. al-Muʿallimīn is interrupted by serious textual gaps, often with little or no discernible continuity between the successive sections and little clue as to the context in which their contents

e p i stolary conf ronta ti ons  | 111 arose. The tone changes from vigorous argumentation, sometimes laden with irony, to calm advice, but the gaps in the text make it difficult to discern the rhetorical purpose behind these changes. It seems likely that the original K. al-Muʿallimīn was quite a long, digressive work and that the copyists who have preserved what we have of it were not interested in the text’s overall argument and only chose passages that captured their interest. From the opening of the text a strain of self-parody as obvious as that in any of the texts we have mentioned prevails. Even the opening invocation is coloured with implicit criticism of the addressee as al-JāªiÕ prays that God protect the addressee from ‘violent anger’ and ‘the excess of passion’ and instil in him a love of justice and equanimity. But, as he goes on to explain the error of the addressee that has called for this prayer, it becomes clear that al-JāªiÕ is hardly in control of his passions himself: For [in speaking] of teachers you have taken to the buffoonery of the impudent, the prattle of the ignorant, the obscenity of the dissolute, showing deviation from the ways of the wise, the disdain of the powerful and the confidence of the conceited. One who exposes himself to envy finds it close by, and you have no need to tax yourself, so long as you are given what you need.79

While pretending to be driven by the same reckless anger he has just faulted the addressee for, al-JāªiÕ seems to be describing the addressee as the sort of person (unrefined, ignorant, subject to whims) who has not benefited from the kinds of training a teacher provides. The suggestion would appear to be that the addressee’s lack of appreciation for teachers as a vital part of society shows in the deficiencies of his own character and ways. At the same time, it seems clear that the addressee, like his counterpart in K. al-Wukalāʾ, is a person of considerably higher standing than the profession he is criticising, which has allowed him to grow bold in denouncing them. The enmity he is said to be bringing on himself may, also echoing that text, be the censure of his peers for his failure to appreciate such a necessary profession, an oversight whose consequences are evident in his own character. The irony of all this is that, in the course of defending teachers and hinting at the results of disparaging them, al-JāªiÕ is initially posing as one who displays similar deficiencies. A gap immediately follows this passage in the

112  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. extant text and we may be missing some clues as to the import of these ironies. Quite possibly, the untutored recklessness al-JāªiÕ feigns here is meant to suggest that a mere appreciation of what teachers do is not sufficient for one who does not do his own part in acquiring the refinements educators can provide. In any case, the reader is once again left to determine for himself what ought to be taken seriously and what significance this petty and bitterly contentious – and therefore stimulating – argument between the author and the addressee can have for him. The excerpt that follows – with some form of transition obviously omitted – is a celebration of the role of writing, for which teachers are the first to be thanked after God, in maintaining human civilisation. To the written word one owes what one can know of those who have gone before and what one can leave to those who come later, while the tongue is only for those who are present. Only through writing can a ruler know the working of the reaches of his domains and keep its affairs in order. Sound management and the ‘pillars of welfare in the hereafter and this world’ (ʿamūd ‚alāª al-dīn wa-al-dunyā) can only be maintained by means of writing and arithmetic. Returning to the recriminating tone of the opening, al-JāªiÕ goes on to describe the addressee’s attack on those through whom God has deigned to bless the world with the gift of writing. In denouncing teachers, the addressee has grouped the greater of them with the lesser and judged the diligent along with the neglectful. He has pitied fathers for teachers’ slow progress in teaching their boys and overlooked the shortcomings of the boys themselves, whose tutors find all the frustration of shepherds and horse-trainers in dealing with them. When the extant text resumes after a gap, al-JāªiÕ appears to be in the midst of a subsidiary argument on the proper role of memorisation in learning, and we can only speculate on how exactly this relates to his larger point in defence of teachers.80 In the excerpt that follows, al-JāªiÕ has clearly returned to his defence of educators, with an argument from how kings, in writing their legacies, have entrusted teachers with overseeing their sons’ affairs and leading them to refinement. From this, he turns to a boast of how many members of honoured professions in scholarship and statecraft were once teachers.81 Having placed the indispensable role of facilitating literacy played by teachers in human society in the foreground through his quarrel with the unappreciative addressee, al-JāªiÕ eventually turns to relating what a teacher

e p i stolary conf ronta ti ons  | 113 might say on behalf of his own profession. The first such passage follows another gap and we do not know how al-JāªiÕ may have introduced this section and whether the sections we have in the teacher’s voice are part of a larger argument. The surviving argument of the teacher begins with his claim that there are teachers for every type of knowledge that people need taught. This leads to a quite exhaustive list of teaching specialities, ranging in importance from vital fields such as writing, accounting, the Qurʾān, religious occupations, swordplay and horsemanship to games of boys and tricks taught to various sorts of animals.82 The length of the list reflects the teacher’s pride in his own profession and his reflection on the breadth of its possibilities. It might appear as though the teacher has lost sight of his goal of defending the dignity and vital importance of his professions by including more frivolous pursuits among his list, but he eventually turns to the claim that none of the many types of teachers listed has the merit of those who train the young in proper literacy. Among the essential arts taught by such tutors, he lists speech in prose, ‘argument and description’, poetry, rhymed prose and arithmetic.83 In addition to the enthusiastic knowledge of his broader profession that he shows in being able to relate such a varied list of teaching specialisations, this teacher shows a heightened sense of the importance of tutoring the young, which seems to be his own specialisation from the detailed knowledge of it he displays. Placing these arguments on the lips of a representative teacher naturally creates a certain distance between the views expressed and the author’s own voice, with the reader left to question to what extent they differ. If the detailed description and digressiveness of the passage are meant to speak to the teacher’s natural zeal for his own occupation, the fact that al-JāªiÕ is willing to marshal such an exhaustive case, with little to undermine its logic, suggests that he is showing some sympathy for educators’ defence of their work. It is quite possible that the views attributed to the addressee represent a parody of the sort of criticism of tutors that al-JāªiÕ was accustomed to hearing from some fathers in his times. Rather than placing his representative teacher in direct confrontation with the addressee’s scathing attack and likely thus giving his case a defensive tone, al-JāªiÕ plays the role of the arguing disputant himself. With the vitriol of this parodic debate largely expended in the opening pages, the views of teachers are expressed in serenely confident

114  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. passages, argued at some remove from their bitter conflict with some of the fathers that employed them. After the teacher’s defence of his own profession, the extant text continues with more disjointed fragments – probably digressions for which we do not have sufficient context to do more than speculate as to how they arose from the main argument. The last of these digressions leads to a concluding section on teaching a young boy. Only as this advice concludes does it become clear that the addressee has a young son – whom al-JāªiÕ calls ‘a tear in an enemy’s eye’ – and that this is why advice on teaching is being directed toward him. In the final passages, the addressee is urged to win the boy’s affection and ‘be more beloved to him than his own mother’. Through a quotation of Qur’ānic verses citing the prayer of Zakaria for an heir (which led to the birth of the prophet John the Baptist), he is reminded that a son is among the most treasured gifts of God.84 The defence of teachers, to this point, has been focused on their benefits to the community, but here the needs of an individual father competing with his peers for social standing come to the fore. What began as an exaggeratedly bitter defence of teachers and led to a description of effective teaching has become advice to a father. This conclusion shows how closely related his own role in the son’s life is to that of teachers and how closely the community’s need for instructors in religion and skills is related to the interests and affections that make up family ties. All is seen as part of a divinely ordained system of interrelated needs. Denouncing any profession which has a role in this order, or the generality of its members, is a failure to see the interdependence which God has created between individuals of varying likes, interests and roles. Several other texts devoted to the respective merits of various occupations provide examples of yet more variations on the pattern of confrontation with the addressee. In Kitāb fī Íināʿat al-kalām (On the Craft of Dialectical Theology), a work exploring the contributions and dangers of the profession he was best known for himself, al-JāªiÕ claims to be replying to a letter in which the addressee has written exuberantly in praise of theology, which he appears to view as a means of unifying Muslims.85 Al-JāªiÕ thus places himself in the position of a wary, experienced theologian trying to check the excesses of his correspondent’s enthusiasm and warn him of the pitfalls of their science without destroying his proper esteem for it as his chosen profession. This

e p i stolary conf ronta ti ons  | 115 epistolary situation allows the author to alternate between concurring with the addressee’s celebration of theology and its role in the community and correcting him with mild sarcasm and warnings of the difficulty of theology and the damage done by errors and heresy.86 By structuring his text as a reply to an enthusiast, al-JāªiÕ places himself in a position where he can display a natural love of his own occupation and a sense of its importance without appearing at all defensive or unaware of the dangers and controversies that surround his work. In Risāla fī Madª al-tijāra wa-dhamm ʿamal al-sul†ān (‘Letter in Praise of Commerce and Denunciation of State Employment’) al-JāªiÕ’s quarrel is not with the addressee himself but with an unnamed friend of his.87 This friend, apparently a minor functionary in the ruler’s retinue, has written to the addressee to express – as far as we can tell, given the fragmentary state of the extant text – his contempt for the moral character of merchants and to charge them with ignorance in religious matters. Al-JāªiÕ expresses his reluctance to employ the ‘eloquence’ (balāgha), rhymed prose (sajʿ) and ‘craftsmanship’ (‚ināʿa) that he is known for in such an unworthy task as replying to this letter.88 There is nothing in the surviving text to indicate whether the addressee shares the views advanced in the friend’s letter or whether he has been challenged by the arguments it contained. The addressee here is a passive figure apparently lacking the ability or willingness to respond to the friend’s attack on merchants. The presence of the addressee deflects the responsibility for deigning to respond to such an unworthy opponent from al-JāªiÕ. At the same time, the addressee, in his passivity, serves as a contrast to the reader who may be encouraged to critique the arguments advanced for himself. While we do not possess enough of the text to assess the extent of self-parody present in al-JāªīÕ’s arguments, it does seem that parts of the case he makes are not intended very seriously. The Prophet’s tribe of Quraysh is portrayed as exemplary of merchants as a whole and their virtues, while in K. al-Muʿallimīn al-JāªīÕ stresses that Quraysh were an exceptional case among merchant tribes.89 The use of a passive and voiceless addressee while a partially ironic argument is carried on with a third party is a technique that we will find more fully exploited in the final chapter in the pseudonymous exchange between Ibn al-Tawʾam and Abū al-ʿĀ‚ in K. al-Bukhalāʾ. In Risālat al-Qiyān (‘The Letter of the Singing Slave Girls’), al-JāªiÕ

116  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. pretends to be merely transmitting a letter he has found in which traffickers in the prized singing concubines of Baghdad defend the practices of their trade against their prudish critics.90 While the interpretation of this unique and richly ironic text requires much fuller treatment than I have space for here, we may safely conclude that al-JāªiÕ has little sympathy for the views of these traders or for their accusers, who appear to include elements of the proto-Sunnī Traditionist movement. In many ways this work typifies the dialectic-of-parody pattern: both sides of the debate are clearly under satiric attack while it becomes clear that they are in some respects two sides of the same coin. The traders use arguments based on their opponents’ favoured authorities, ªadīth and other reports of early Muslims, to justify the interaction between the sexes that their trade entails. At the same time, they employ the principle that everything not explicitly forbidden in the Qurʾān and sunna is permissible in order to defend trading practices that quite obviously corrupt morals and have become little more than a cloak for prostitution.91 It seems clear from the text as a whole that al-JāªiÕ is hinting that the atmosphere created by the strict confinement of free-born women in his era has something to do with the darker sides of the trade in slave girls. Notes   1. Ibn Qutayba, Taʾwīl mukhtalif al-ªadīth, ed. A. al-Sittārī (Cairo: Dār al-Óadīth, 2006), pp. 111–12; A. Beeston (ed. and trans.), The Epistle on Singing-Girls by JāªiÕ (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1980), p. 1; A. Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speak my Language, trans. W. Hassan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), pp. 36–7.   2. Chapter 1 above.   3. A. Ghabin, ‘Íināʿa’, EI2 IX, p. 626.  4. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 229–40.  5. Rasāʾil I, pp. 137–72; pp. 68–9 above; al-Bayān I, pp. 194–209; al-JāªiÕ’s statement on moderation as the ideal in speech appears on p. 202. Al-JāªiÕ also gives a prominent place to a phenomenon known as ‘location’ (ni‚ba), in which meanings are silently delivered by situations or inanimate objects, as when the sight of the heavens and earth, for example, ‘speaks’ of their creator; al-Bayān I, pp. 81–2. On this, see J. Montgomery, ‘Al-JāªiÕ’s Kitāb al-Bayān wa al-Tabyīn’,

e p i stolary conf ronta ti ons  | 117 in J. Bray (ed.), Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 128–31.  6. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 151–2.  7. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 229–30.  8. Rasāʾil IV, p. 232.  9. See F. de Saussure, ‘Nature of the Linguistic Sign’ (from Course in General Linguistics), trans. W. Baskins, in H. Adams and L. Searle (eds), Critical Theory Since 1965 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), pp. 649–51. 10. Rasāʾil IV, p. 229. 11. Rasāʾil IV, p. 229. 12. Rasāʾil IV, p. 330. 13. Rasāʾil IV, p. 330. 14. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 230–1. 15. Rasāʾil IV, p. 231. 16. Chapter 1 above. On the objections of Ibn Óanbal and like-minded Traditionists or ‘proto-Sunnīs’ to speculative debate in doctrine or law, see C. Melchert, Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), pp. 62–3 and 89–90; and M. Cooperson, Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of the Prophet in the Age of al-Maʾmūn (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 108–9. 17. See, for example, Cooperson, Classical Arabic Biography, p. 125. Needless to say, the Muʿtazila were as dogmatic and intolerant as their rivals on points they considered essential to Islam. 18. Rasāʾil IV, p. 233. 19. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 227–9. 20. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 239–40. 21. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 233 and 238. 22. Rasāʾil IV, p. 233. 23. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 167–88. 24. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 178–82. 25. See, for example, Rasāʾil IV, pp. 170 and 172. 26. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 169–70. 27. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 171–2; pp. 179–80; p. 185. 28. Rasāʾil IV, p. 169. 29. Al-JāªiÕ more than once parodies such a long-winded defence of brevity in his writings, e.g. Rasāʾil IV, p. 151; [Kitāb] al-Bukhalāʾ, ed. ˝ al-Óājirī (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1997), p. 2. 30. Rasāʾil IV, p. 170.

118  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. 31. Rasāʾil IV, p. 181. 32. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 171 and 176. 33. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 171–2. 34. Rasāʾil IV, p. 172. 35. Rasāʾil IV, p. 171. 36. Rasāʾil IV, p. 173. 37. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 171 and 173. 38. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 174–5. 39. Rasāʾil IV, p. 176. 40. Rasāʾil IV, p. 182. 41. Rasāʾil III, pp. 111–28. 42. The letter’s combination of flippancy, self-deprecating humour and warm praise is rather similar to Risāla ilā Abī al-Faraj b. Najāª al-Kātib (Rasāʾil I, pp. 321–32), which was also written with the hope of securing the generosity of an ʿAbbāsid secretary. 43. Rasāʾil III, p. 113. 44. The description appears in a preface accompanying a copy (apparently meant for circulation) of a letter to the vizier Ibn al-Zayyāt: ‘I was occupied (tashāghaltu) for some days drinking nabīdh with al-Óasan b. Wahb . . . when Muªammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik (Ibn al-Zayyāt) requested I come to socialise. He was informed of my ongoing business (shughl ) with al-Óasan b. Wahb and grew hostile toward me’; Jamharat Rasāʾil al-ʿArab IV, p. 43. 45. Rasāʾil III, p. 113. 46. Rasāʾil III, p. 114. 47. E.g. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 5–7; Rasāʾil II, pp. 91–3. 48. See K. fī al-Nisāʾ, Rasāʾil III, pp. 139–40; also al-Bayān I, p. 202. 49. Rasāʾil III, p. 113. 50. Rasāʾil III, p. 123. 51. Rasāʾil III, p. 128. 52. Rasāʾil III, p. 242. 53. Rasāʾil I, p. 283. 54. E.g. Rasāʾil I, pp. 264–5 and p. 292. In the last cited passage, al-JāªiÕ quotes a proverb to similar effect: ‘As used to be said, “It will ever be well with people, so long as they differ, but if they draw close to one another, they will perish.”’ Similarly, the greater hostility experienced by early Muslims from the Jews than from Christians was, in al-JāªiÕ’s view, due to their proximity to the former in Medina; Rasāʾil III, pp. 309–10.

e p i stolary conf ronta ti ons  | 119 55. Rasāʾil I, p. 34. 56. Thus, he asserts that ordinary Muslims are (wrongly) more favourably disposed to Christians, among whom are secretaries, physicians, apothecaries and moneychangers, than they are to Jews, who are said to be mostly dyers, tanners, cuppers or butchers; Rasāʾil III, pp. 215–16. 57. Al-Óayawān II, p. 105. This statement actually comes in digression from a long argument in the voice of the ‘Advocate of Dogs’ (‚āªib al-kalb), but al-JāªiÕ does not appear to distance himself from the views expressed or place a reply on the lips of the ‘Advocate of Roosters’ (‚āªib al-dīk). 58. Al-Óayawān I, pp. 141–2. 59. Rasāʾil I, p. 285. 60. His defence of the excellence of theology comes in the context of describing how ‘anthropomorphists’ have led a campaign of ‘denying [true] monotheists’ professions of faith and intimidating learned theologians’; Rasāʾil I, p. 285. 61. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 93–105. 62. For a discussion of the role of the wakīl (pl. wukalāʾ) and their contracts and responsibilities in Islamic law, see M. Izzi Dien, ‘Wakāla’, EI2 XI, pp. 57–8. 63. The addressee has been pressured by ‘demands’ (al-mu†ālaba) for many days: perhaps the suggestion is that pressure from creditors has led him to scapegoat his agents; Rasāʾil IV, p. 95. 64. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 95–6. 65. Rasāʾil IV, p. 97. 66. Rasāʾil IV, p. 99. 67. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 97–8. 68. Rasāʾil IV, p. 98. 69. For example, K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 6, where the Qurʾān’s reference to God as one who makes His creatures laugh (wa-annahū huwa a∂ªaka; 53:43) is offered as proof that laughter is salutary. 70. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 100–2. 71. Rasāʾil III, pp. 31–7; Rasāʾil I, pp. 193–225. 72. The verses quoted are 4:34, 4:6, 12:55 and 28:26, respectively. 73. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 100–1. 74. Rasāʾil IV, p. 102. 75. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 100–1. 76. Rasāʾil IV, p. 102. 77. ‘Judgement’ (firāsa) may refer to what is evident in a person’s manner and behaviour or to the contemporary science of physiognomy (the knowledge of

120  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. character traits from facial features). In either case, the addressee has erred in resorting to generalisations about classes rather than focusing on individual character. 78. Rasāʾil III, pp. 25–51. 79. Rasāʾil III, p. 27. 80. Rasāʾil III, pp. 29–30. 81. Rasāʾil III, pp. 30–1. 82. Rasāʾil III, pp. 31–3. 83. Rasāʾil III, pp. 34–5. 84. Rasāʾil III, pp. 50–1. 85. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 241–50. 86. The addressee is chided for his ambitions of correcting and conciliating sectarians as being a ‘theologian of consensus (al-mutakallim al-jamāʿī), a Sunnī jurist, a Muʿtazilī theorist, whose aspiration has risen to the craft of theology while the world has turned its back to it’; Rasāʾil III, p. 243. Al-JāªiÕ closes the letter by warning that the title of theologian (mutakallim) is shared by members of a wide variety of sects he lists, including those he and most of his audience would have seen as highly dangerous such as the Azraqī Khawārij and the Ghūlāt (Extreme) Shīʿa; p. 250. 87. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 251–8. 88. Rasāʾil IV, p. 253. 89. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 255–6; Rasāʾil III, p. 46. 90. Rasāʾil II, pp. 139–81. For an alternative text accompanied by an English translation, see Beeston, The Epistle on Singing-Girls by JāªiÕ, pp. 1–24. 91. Rasāʾil II, p. 147.

3 Undisclosed Origins and Homelands

W

hile the epistolary conversations we saw in the preceding chapter bring personal biases and extreme positions to the forefront through dramatic portrayals of contrasting views, in this chapter we will see a number of texts on various lands and peoples in which the author’s dialogue with the addressee serves to establish a certain distance and objectivity. The author’s impetus to write about specific races or lands is shared with addressees or other individuals whose own origins are unclear. These persons’ motivations and partialities are obscured or diffused through the role they play in the text, which is sometimes a deceptively simple one. As we shall see, al-JāªiÕ’s conception of the relationship between peoples and their homelands is closely connected to the views on occupations that we saw in the previous chapter: the attachments of peoples to their native lands are part of God’s plan to create harmony through the differences that exist between groups. Perhaps because the contentions and prejudices involved were more sensitive and less productive, he does not, as in the texts we saw in the previous chapter, stage heated debates between himself and the addressee that play into the reader’s own biases, making their impact on his reading more clear and bringing them under scrutiny. In some of the texts we will now examine, he instead seeks to bring an atmosphere of distance, fairness, shared Muslim identity and admiration for diversity to the discussion; his conversations with the addressees serve to diminish the impact of his own biases, at least in the rhetorically sensitive opening of the text. The unknown racial or geographical origin of the addressee (in one case, not of the addressee but of a person who has said things to offend him) leaves the reader guessing and lends ambiguity to the discussion. The reader, in this case, is encouraged to view the text from multiple points of view rather than sharing or contesting the biases he 121

122  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. might otherwise tend to see in the author’s treatment of the nations or groups involved. In addition to relating these subtle devices to the themes and arguments that emerge from the texts, I will be exploring how the relationship between remembered oral transmission and writing is used to introduce further ambiguities between the roles of author and addressee, speaker and listener, oral addressee and reader. In some respects, the functions of the addressees in all of these texts resemble those we met in the first chapter: the addressee shares responsibility with the author and reader for the occasion of writing. The techniques involved in these four works are, however, more subtle and can only be understood in relation to the ideas of al-JāªiÕ and some of his contemporaries on the relationship between peoples and their lands of origin. These ideas, which have yet to receive the scholarly attention they deserve, will be better appreciated if we have some grasp of how they relate to his conceptions of lineage and language, as well as to his own identity and origins and his theologically inspired views on human differences. Al-JāªiÕ on Lands, Lineage, Character and Language The opinions expressed in the many passages in al-JāªiÕ’s writings that relate to various races are by no means uniform. Many of them are merely cited as quotations providing the voice of imaginary speakers (e.g. the ‘Advocate of Dogs’, the vaunting of Black Africans), sometimes leaving us uncertain to what extent al-JāªiÕ himself agrees.1 Despite these variations, most of his statements on race are predominated by a few basic conceptions that reflect a certain variety of Muslim optimism, with some roots in traditional Arabian views of heredity and heavily influenced by a variety of environmental determinism which derives from the Greek theory of elements and humours. A book on al-JāªiÕ’s literary techniques is not the place for the kind of systematic treatment of his racial conceptions and those of his contemporaries that is badly needed. Still, some careful observations on the basic paradigms he uses in treating races, lands and constitutional predispositions will help us avoid a number of misconceptions that would prevent us from understanding the texts to be discussed. Al-JāªiÕ’s thinking on the differences between geographical regions

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 123 and ethnicities, as well as on individual character, is permeated by concepts deriving from Greek medicine which had become widespread in the Muslim world with the proliferation of Arabic translations. His engagement with Aristotle, especially in K. al-Óayawān, is well known, and he also has some familiarity with works attributed to Hippocrates (Buqrā†) and Galen (Jālīnūs).2 Perhaps the most influential ancient treatise linking not only disease but the characters and tendencies of racial groups to the climates of their lands of origin was Airs, Waters and Places, attributed to Hippocrates. While we cannot be certain whether al-JāªiÕ read this text, it was translated by his near contemporary Óunayn b. Isªāq, which reflects a growing interest in this line of inquiry in the early Islamic society.3 The wide variety of long-surviving and racially charged ideas that sprang from these concepts are sometimes referred to collectively as ‘environmental determinism’ or simply ‘environmentalism’.4 The former term would probably be misleading with regard to al-JāªiÕ: as important and pervasive as the influence of climate is to his conceptions of race and character, it must be understood in relation to his Muʿtazilī convictions on freedom of the will and divine justice, as we shall see. Unlike many of the medically oriented ancient thinkers and Muslim writers influenced by them, al-JāªiÕ generally shows little interest in identifying how the specific aspects of a given land’s winds and waters lead to a particular balance of humours (†abāʾiʿ, akhlā†) and specific tendencies of character in its people.5 Most often he has heard of, or believes he has seen, differences in the morals, skills and conduct of people hailing from different lands and simply assumes that these differences are due, at least in part, to differences of some sort in the elements that prevail in these lands.6 An exception comes in several passages on those originating from exceptionally cold or warm climates which al-JāªiÕ relates without making clear his own views, as in a statement attributed to the ‘Advocate of Dogs’ (‚āªib al-kalb) who denounces the crow as a species in K. al-Óayawān: It is . . . pitch black, severely burnt, just as the Zanj (East Africans) are among people. For they are the most wicked of people, vile-natured in constitution and humour, just like those [humans] whose land is so cold

124  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. that wombs do not finish cooking them, or so warm that they burn them. The minds of the people of Babel and its environs surpass all others, just as their beauty does, because of moderation [in climate].7

Al-JāªiÕ elsewhere in K. al-Óayawān attributes this same view on human races to the ‘Advocate of Pigeons’ and to his own Muʿtazilī teacher, al-NaÕÕām, without any refutation or countervailing voices defending the racial groups disparaged in these sections of the book.8 However, in K. al-Bur‚ān, he attributes a similar conception to pretenders to medicine and philosophy (muta†abbibūn, mutafalsalfūn), while in K. Fakhr al-Sūdān ʿalā al-Bī∂ān (The Vaunting of Blacks over Whites) he attributes a similar saying – but applying to colour alone rather than character or intellect – to the East African Zanj in their refutation of the charge that their colour is a hereditary punishment or deformity.9 While al-JāªiÕ may not explicitly endorse or reject this geographical conception in his own voice, he shows consistent regard for the character and accomplishments of certain civilisations – notably Arabs, Persians, Indians and Greek-speaking Byzantines – while tending to make less of other nations.10 He may have wavered in his prejudices at times, or perhaps changed his mind during his long writing career, but, in any case, there is a tension between his penchant for ranking peoples and his views of divine justice, as we shall see below. Although assumptions about the influences of environment on the character and intelligence of different nations pervade his works, we must be aware that his generalisations about peoples apply in full only to those living in the land where he believes the associated culture to have originated. The situation of those who have long been living in other geographical and cultural environments is more complicated. While some advocates of the environmental theory imagined that differences in climate led to permanent hereditary traits passed on to a nation’s descendants wherever they lived, al-JāªiÕ clearly assumes that environmentally caused characteristics of a person or lineage can change.11 Thus, according to an example he offers of the influence of an individual’s birthplace, Bedouin Arabs whose fathers settled in Farghana in Khurasan become indistinguishable in their physical features from the inhabitants (nāzila) of that land.12 In a similar vein, he reminds the addressee of Kitāb al-Aw†ān wa-al-buldān (On Homelands and Countries) of

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 125 the importance of both physical geography and changing circumstances in shaping all aspects of people’s lives: You have forgotten – God keep you – the influence of lands (ʿamal al-buldān) and the fluctuation of times (ta‚arruf al-azmān) and their effects on people’s appearance and disposition, on good qualities and refinements, on languages and desires, on aspirations and physiognomy and on their livelihoods and occupations, in accord with what God, the exalted, has arranged with lofty wisdom and wondrous designs.13

The impact of changing times (we would now say ‘cultures’) appears to operate in all the same areas of life that are affected by the land of one’s birth and ancestry. Perhaps most counterintuitive to modern readers is the fact that al-JāªiÕ lists language among the characteristics that are shaped by lands, but numerous passages imply that the differing physical character of each land is the cause of the differences in languages and speech patterns that prevail in different regions.14 Perhaps key to understanding the relationship between the influence of environment and hereditary traits is the Arabic term ʿirq (pl. ʿurūq/aʿrāq), which refers literally to a ‘root’ or ‘stem’ and also to a human or animal vein and, by extension, is used to denote blood.15 When used with reference to traits in humans, it is somewhat misleadingly translated as ‘race’ or ‘stock’, implying that it transmits fixed hereditary traits. In fact, at times it is used to describe changeable traits and ‘anomalies of birth’, as in a well-known ªadīth in which the Prophet convinces a man that the son his wife has borne is his own even though the child is black. The man is pressed to acknowledge that his red camels sometimes have grey offspring because ‘an ʿirq has drawn’ (nazaʿa) this trait to them, upon which the Prophet declares that the same is the case with his son.16 While the source of this altered ʿirq is not clear, a passage from al-JāªiÕ’s al-Bayān wa-al-Tabyīn may offer a clue as to how such changes were conceived of. Understanding that language is among the characteristics that al-JāªiÕ and his contemporaries ascribe to the influences of the land, we can appreciate the significance of a statement al-JāªiÕ relates from his teacher of philology, Abū ʿUbayda (d. 209/824), describing the generations of a Persian family, transplanted to the area where Arabic originated:

126  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. Yazīd b. Abān, the paternal uncle of al-Fa∂l b. ʿĪsā al-Raqāshī, was among the companions of Anas and al-Óasan, and used to speak in al-Óasan’s gathering. He was a pious renunciant, an outstanding scholar, an orator and a skilful preacher. Abū ʿUbayda said, ‘Their father was an orator, as was their grandfather. They were orators for the Persian kings (al-akāsira). When they were taken prisoner and sons were borne to them in the lands of Islam and the Arabian Peninsula, that ʿirq drew them and they came to occupy the same position among the people of this language [Arabic] as they had in that language [Persian], with their poetry and sermons. They remained thus until foreigners (al-ghurabāʾ) intermarried with them and ruined that ʿirq, introducing weakness into it.’17

Abū ʿUbayda, in this quotation (which al-JāªiÕ appears to approve of), implies that a talent for eloquent speaking in one language can be transmitted through the paternal line and transformed, through contact with the ʿirq (perhaps the closest translation would be ‘disposition’ here) of another land, into eloquence in the local language. Taking Abū ʿUbayda’s account together with al-JāªiÕ’s description of Yazīd, we have the suggestion that these two factors can combine with association with great religious teachers, personal piety, study and the mother’s influence (probably hereditary) in the making of an excellent orator. In al-JāªiÕ’s conception, the ʿirq, which seems be reflected in the constitutional balance of humours (†abāʾiʿ), is an inborn property in an individual, apparently under the influence of heredity and birthplace, but can be altered by physical changes or by habituation. That the ʿirq is, ultimately, a physical property for al-JāªiÕ can be seen in a passage from K. al-Óayawān in which he states that the castration of a eunuch causes foulness of ʿirq to pervade the rest of his body, altering its members. In other passages he argues that castration tends to improve the capabilities of Slavs while harming those of Black Africans (perhaps by correcting the humoral imbalance of the former and exacerbating that of the latter) and that a eunuch’s character tends toward qualities associated with women and boys.18 But just as physical mutilation can alter the inborn constitution, it appears that beliefs and traits acquired through learning can change it as well, perhaps for the

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 127 worse, perhaps for the better. Thus al-JāªiÕ argues that the pacifistic ideals he attributes to Christianity have mingled with the ‘humours’ of the Romans (Byzantines) (khāmarat †abāʾiʿahum) and ‘penetrated their flesh and blood’ (sarat fī luªūmihim wa-dimāʾihim), making them cowardly and reluctant in warfare, unlike their ancestors who avenged themselves capably against the Persians. Similarly, Manichaeism, even stricter in its prohibition of violence, has destroyed the courage and vigour of the Taghazghuz Turks.19 Conversely, in R. al-Maʿāsh wa-al-maʿād, he proposes to advise the addressee on ways in which he can destroy blameworthy natures in people that grow estranged from him and turn them into better traits.20 Given that al-JāªiÕ frequently asserts that lands and the balance of the humours affect character and an individual’s temperament, we should not be surprised that changes in these brought about by beliefs, education, habit or interaction with others could also lead to changes in the humoral balance of the constitution. Even if we construe the statements we have seen about religion or social factors altering people’s ‘humours’ or ‘flesh’ as metaphorical, the suggestion is that the resulting changes are very much akin to the differences in people produced by different environments and lineages. Only in the light of the varied, changing factors that interact to form, in al-JāªiÕ’s view, a person’s character, appearance and capabilities can we appreciate the significance of the little evidence we have as to our author’s own origins. Most of the brief biographical accounts we find in later sources include both a claim that he was a pure-blooded descendant of the important North Arabian tribe of Kināna (the larger grouping from which the Prophet’s and the caliphate’s tribe of Quraysh traced its lineage) and a conflicting claim that he was only a mawlā of that tribe – a non-Arab client or the descendant of a freed slave. One report attributed to al-JāªiÕ’s great-nephew Yamūt b. al-Muzzaraʿ adds that his grandfather was a black cameleer.21 Charles Pellat argues convincingly that this report is quite possibly true since Yamūt would have had no reason to ascribe such an ancestry to his own mother’s maternal uncle if it were untrue.22 While his vigorous defence of the Arabian cultural heritage against the attacks of the non-Arab Shuʿūbiyyah movement is well known, what little al-JāªiÕ says about his origins in his extant writings is of little help in settling the question of his ancestry. As we saw in the previous chapter, in R. fī Madª al-nabīdh he declares himself a man of Kināna who

128  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. thus has a relationship to the caliphal house without mention of having only mawlā status, but such an omission could be part of the self-parody that pervades the drunken boast in which it occurs. Even more ambiguous is an anecdote he relates about his encounter with a guard who knows him. This man has grown so lonely through having no one but foreign peasants to deal with that, when he sees al-JāªiÕ, he curses any land that does not have Arabs, saying Arabs in their small numbers are like the blaze on a horse’s forehead amongst the other nations. He goes on to compare foreigners to asses that do not recognise the superiority of noble horses and declares that they would have wiped out the Arabs if not for the mercy of God. In saying all this, the man might seem to be taking al-JāªiÕ for an Arab, but he himself is an Ethiopian slave who al-JāªiÕ says has grown wild (waªshī) and incorrigible (muªarram) through isolation.23 The connection the man feels to al-JāªiÕ is by way of language alone, as is his estrangement from the foreign cultivators that surround him. His sympathy for the Arabs is because he feels that his association, even as a slave, with the powerful Arab landowners of his area places him above the peasants, and, even if al-JāªiÕ were a mawlā, he too would share a connection to them. In any case, whether al-JāªiÕ was of solely Arabian descent or had some Black African ancestry, he saw himself as a man of Basra, a city with prominent contributions to Arabic linguistics and Muslim theology, whose intellectual and physical environment was seen as conducive to producing intellects capable of such accomplishments. Like any city outside the Peninsula, it was seen as corrupting the natural, spontaneous perfections of its residents’ Arabic. Still, its proximity to the desert allowed for contact with the pure language of Bedouins, who served as the linguists’ informants.24 In fact, while he frequently refers to Arab Bedouins (aʿrāb) of his own day, when he uses ʿarab, the more general term for Arabians, urban and nomadic, he is most often speaking of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic past, before the conquests produced large diasporas and brought more foreigners into the Peninsula. Doubtless, counterexamples can be found in his large corpus, but al-JāªiÕ clearly tended to think of the pure Arabian culture as a thing of the past in cities. Similarly, when he makes disparaging remarks against Black Africans and their cultures or quotes them from others, he is probably thinking especially of those dwelling in their native lands or the first generations to arrive

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 129 (mostly as slaves) in Iraq. If he was indeed known, or suspected, to have Black African ancestry by his acquaintances, such remarks could well be motivated by a desire to distance himself from a group that was often the victim of prejudice. And certainly he saw himself as quite different from arriving Africans because of the social and geographical influence of his more recent roots in Basra. While he celebrates the achievements and talents of some nations far more than those of others, al-JāªiÕ’s Muʿtazilī convictions on the justice of God lead him to declare that the apportioning of these blessings among the peoples is ultimately fair and for the good of all. According to a passage in K. al-Wukalāʾ, each nation from the first has been given its particular gifts, which are to eventually contribute to the spread of skills and knowledge that promote the welfare of humanity as a whole: Some have said ‘There is no saying people use which is more harmful to knowledge and to scholars, nor more harmful to the elite and the masses than their saying “He who has gone before has left nothing to him who comes after.”’ If people were to apply this saying, abandoning all effort to develop (al-takalluf ), and undertook nothing beyond the measure already in their possession, they would lose a great deal of knowledge and uncounted advantages. But God has disdained to do anything but apportion his blessings among all the classes of his servants (ʿibādihi), granting to each bygone nation and each living one its share or portion toward the perfection of guidance in religion and the completion of benefits in this world.25

A passage in R. fī Manāqib al-Turk makes clear that the need for such a distribution of the various skills among the nations is shown in the fact that each nation which has distinguished itself in a particular accomplishment (e.g. crafts, eloquence or warfare) has been constrained to pursue this line of endeavour by circumstances. They would not have achieved so much had their passions and minds been divided among other things, and, thus, it would seem that nations are in need of appropriating each other’s particular discoveries and excellences.26 Still, a tension exists between the claim that the apportionment of these bounties by God among all peoples is a matter of justice and al-JāªiÕ’s frequent celebration of the capability and character of some nations and

130  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. disparagement of those of others. Especially when so much of a given group’s inborn nature seems tied to the environment of its land of origin and inherited from recent ancestors, we may ask how it is fair that skills and salutary traits are distributed so unevenly. As we saw in the preceding chapter, al-JāªiÕ may generalise about the character tendencies and vices that members of certain professions are prone to but rejects the idea that such tendencies compel them to commit sins as inconsistent with the justice of God.27 Such logic, if applicable to a person’s occupation, which is ultimately a matter of choice, certainly ought to apply to his land of birth, which is obviously beyond his control. It seems that for al-JāªiÕ, every individual is born with a certain balance of the various tendencies that characterise all human beings and that only God knows exactly what their proportions are, as he explains in a ­passage on certain character traits in R. al-Maʿāsh wa-al-maʿād: These characteristics, which can all be gathered under the heading of two basic characteristics [love of what benefits and aversion to what harms], are innate in individuals’ constitutions (gharāʾiz fī al-fi†ar) and hidden in their nature as a fixed disposition and created temperament, although they are greater in some than in others, and no one knows how little or how much there is of all this except the One who has fashioned them.28

While he does not explicitly say that God will consider the degrees of desire and aversion he has created in a given person when judging whatever sins or merits result from them, for a Muʿtazilī like al-JāªiÕ to assert that God alone knows such degrees seems to imply that his justice would make fitting allowance for them. Love of One’s Own Homeland and Harmony through Diversity Despite all the complexities we have seen, al-JāªiÕ’s thinking on the attachments of racial groups to their lands of origin follows the same basic lines of logic that we saw in his views of occupations in the passage from K. Óujaj alnubuwwa, discussed in the previous chapter. God has created people with differing preferences and inclinations in order to foster harmony among them: they inadvertently contribute to the social order by the different choices they make. Just as people of differing circumstances and temperaments do not all pursue the same professions, people born in different lands are naturally

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 131 attached to their respective climates and do not all desire to occupy the most pleasant and fertile lands: If not for the differences in people’s natures and factors affecting them (†abāʾiʾ al-nās wa-ʿilalihim), they would choose nothing but the best of anything: the most equable of lands and the most temperate of cities. They would thus be doing battle with each other over the temperate cities and quarrelling over the highest lands, and no one country could contain all of them and no reconciliation could be effected among them. But, as it is, their being compelled [to choose differently] has brought them to the utmost contentment (‚āra bihim al-taskhīr ilā ghayāt al-qināʿa). And how could it not be so when, if you transferred the dwellers of jungles to deserts, the dwellers of plains to mountains, the mountain-dwellers to the coasts and those who live in tents to towns, their minds would be consumed with cares and bitter strife would overtake them? It has been said ‘God populated the countries through love of homelands’ (ʿammara Allāh al-buldān bi-ªubb al-aw†ān).29

This view is developed in several of al-JāªiÕ’s other writings, notably R. al-Óanīn ilā al-aw†ān (‘Epistle on Longing for Homelands’) and Kitāb al-Aw†ān wa-al-buldān (The Book of Homelands and Countries), both of which will figure in my discussion of the role of addressees.30 As with occupations, it is not that all lands are equally desirable in themselves: clearly al-JāªiÕ views the most temperate lands and the highest cities (i.e. the most easily defended) as the most innately desirable. His equating the intrinsically best lands with the most temperate may reflect the assumptions behind the passages we have discussed in which such lands are seen as more conducive to human accomplishments and refined character than extremely warm or cold climates. Nevertheless, people are born with a preference for the climate and conditions of their birthplace (or, perhaps, of their recent ancestry) that keeps the majority of them from competing to occupy the safer, more pleasant environments. Leaving aside the question of how some groups were first moved to take up residence in the more unpleasant climates in the first place, al-JāªiÕ appears to attribute a people’s attachment to their place of origin to a God-given desire for ‘their soil and their countries’.31 Given that he attributes this attachment to their ‘natures’, he may be imagining a

132  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. certain affinity between the humoral balance of peoples’ constitutions and the elements that dominate in the respective lands of their birth as the means by which God has achieved this harmony through difference. In more than one passage, he asserts that these attachments are, in some cases, very much contrary to what the intellect and passions would otherwise incline to: if the dwelling places of peoples were left to ‘intellects and choices born of desires’ (al-ʿuqūl wa-ikhtiyārāt al-nufūs), no one would dwell in jungles, mountain tops and open deserts.32 And yet, an individual is not concerned that his choice of remaining in his own land seems irrational to others: There is no person on the face of the earth who is not proud of his own intellect, who does not secretly tell himself that he has – considering all that he has – as much as anyone else. If not for this, they would die of grief and melt from envy. Rather, every person, even if he thinks that he has something to be envious over, also thinks that he has something else to be envied over.33

Seeing themselves and their respective homelands, occupations and other choices as they do, people occupy the world’s places and stations in a relatively peaceful manner that appears to be freely chosen, while it in fact reflects the hidden apportioning of God. They are unaware of their role in God’s planning and how it benefits all.34 As with the works on occupations that we saw in the preceding chapter, al-JāªiÕ’s problem in dealing with homelands is the tension that exists between the theory, which seeks to be universal in perspective, and the inevitable bias it presumes will affect individuals’ views of their own ethnic groups and homelands. In writing about these issues, al-JāªiÕ can hardly exempt himself or his audience from the biases that he considers part of a universal pattern in human nature. But, unlike boasting matches over occupations which might even have led to productive enthusiasm, tensions over the superiority of lands, cities and people groups were a source of deeper political and social divisions. As if to avert these tensions and promote as neutral and objective an atmosphere as possible at the opening of each text, he creates an addressee of unknown identity in the first three texts we will be examining. These addressees not only share responsibility for the texts’ being written with the author but divert attention from the reader’s own need

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 133 for instruction on matters of race and regional differences. Although it also involves a person with unknown origins as a means of defusing ethnic tensions, the final work we shall discuss could not be more different in structure and tone. The addressee is, in fact, a real recipient, an influential secretary and patron of al-JāªiÕ, whose own ethnic group, the Turks, are to be celebrated in the text. In order to avoid creating resentment among other groups by praising the Turks, al-JāªiÕ cleverly uses this patron’s complaint about statements made by an individual, whose own origins are never revealed, to commend the other groups involved indirectly and avoid giving offence. In this case, there is no attempt to defuse and bypass the racial sentiments of the reader toward the various groups that make up the caliphal army. Instead the ethnic pride of all the races concerned and their potential to resent slights from other groups are brought to the fore in a carefully shaped context where the claims of all can be systematically addressed and all can be assured that they enjoy the respect of the author and his patron. A Homesick Ruler Risālat al-Óanīn ilā al-aw†ān (‘Epistle on Longing for Homelands’) is, despite its title, actually a non-epistolary work, without any conventions specific to ­letter-writing or an addressee to whom the text in its finished form is directed. But even if the text is not, in the strict sense, a letter-monograph like the other texts discussed in this book, the main matter of the text is introduced as a conversation the author claims to have had with ‘a certain ruler’ (baʿ∂ . . . al-mulūk) who has come to enjoy power in a land far from his birthplace. We have, then, an oral addressee whose remarks are said to have served as the author’s initial occasion for speaking on the topic and later committing its materials to writing. Whether his conversation is a genuine experience the author has had or whether it is a mere literary convenience, this powerful addressee is used in such a way as to illustrate how homesickness affects even the successful and mighty, lending dignity to the sentiments described and demonstrating the universality of the experience of homesickness. The story of the conversation with the ruler is presented in such a way that the reader will not be certain when the author’s report of the conversation has ended and the main matter of the text has begun: the line between the oral addressee and the reader is thus blurred and the latter’s identification with the former is encouraged. The attribution of this text to

134  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. al-JāªiÕ has been the object of a longstanding debate over the style and manner of presentation of materials along with the lack of references to it as his work in the best early sources.35 I am inclined to side with those who favour al-JāªiÕ as author, but even if I were in doubt as to the attribution, I would find the use of the addressee in the text germane to my analysis in this book since it represents a variation on patterns discussed in this book and serves to illustrate the possibilities of the addressee as a literary device. Unlike many of al-JāªiÕ’s introductions, which quickly involve the reader in contemplating the importance of the topic of the work and raise provocative questions to be engaged in the coming exposition, the nonepistolary opening of R. al-Óanīn is a general defence of the practice of collecting materials on any given subject. Every branch of learning, al-JāªiÕ declares, has ‘some cause which calls for the compilation of everything that is scattered concerning it’ (sababan yadʿū ilā taʾlīf mā kāna fīhi mushattatan). When scholars neglect to separate reports by topic and ‘join every precious gem with what resembles it and unite every precious bit of wisdom with its like’, knowledge, wisdom, refinements (adab) and unique incidents recorded will be lost to later generations.36 Al-JāªiÕ thus establishes a certain distance between any personal inclinations he may have toward writing on homelands and places this text within the community’s larger, disinterested project of gathering knowledge on specific topics allowing for easy access and comparison. The passage is thus a justification for the genre of the thematic anthology in which al-JāªiÕ was one of the most important and innovative early practitioners.37 The justification for collecting reports and quotations on similar topics in general begs the question of what has led the author, at this time, to write on this particular topic among the many for which there are scattered and neglected materials to be compiled. The conversation with the ruler, by revealing the depth of his homesickness, shows he shares the author’s interest and provides the answer to this question. Al-JāªiÕ’s report of the conversation with the ruler follows immediately upon the short introductory passage on the merits of gathering materials and carefully avoids revealing his identity or the country of his origins: Truly, the reason that prompted me to gather some bits of reports of the Arabs on their longing for their homelands, their yearning for their soil

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 135 and countries and their description in poems of fire burning within them (tawaqqud al-nār fī akbādihā) was that I conversed with a certain ruler, who had changed his residence, concerning [people’s] abodes and their longing for their homelands. Then I listened as he told how he had departed his native country for another that was more level than his homeland and more flourishing than his region . . . while remaining a man of great eminence and tremendous authority, with the tribes of the Arabs . . . obeying him, along with the nations of the non-Arabs . . ., commanding armies and leading into battles . . . And whenever he mentioned that soil and his homeland, he would yearn for it as camels do for their watering-places.38

Al-JāªiÕ conceals the identity of the individual – if he is indeed a real person – perhaps because the conversation was a private one and the sentiments expressed were not fitting for one in authority to publicly disclose. It is possible that this ‘ruler’, in authority over numerous Arab and non-Arab groups, would be either one of the ʿAbbāsid caliphs who changed residence at some point or – more likely, given that his rule seems tied to a specific land – one of their powerful governors or commanders, whose authority in his assigned region, in the absence of direct orders from the caliphate, would be analogous to that of a ruler.39 More relevant to our concerns here is the fact that al-JāªiÕ avoids mentioning either of the regions involved, with his description only serving to emphasise the greater prosperity and prestige that the ruler has enjoyed in his new land of residence, and the resulting implication is that his nostalgia flows simply from the universal experience of attachment to one’s birthplace. There is a striking contrast between the stately figure described and the longing of brute beasts for their watering holes, but the sentiments he expresses are immediately compared to lines by two Arab poets, showing that these feelings are part of time-honoured human experience. Although it is clear from the first line of the passage quoted that this collection will emphasise Arabic materials, as if to demonstrate that he is not speaking of this yearning as a particularly Arab trait, al-JāªiÕ moves immediately from the lines of two poets to a pair of non-Arab proverbs with which he claims to have replied to the ruler: So I said ‘Just as you are saying, foreigners (al-ʿajam) say “Among the signs of uprightness is that a soul longs for its birthplace and pines for its homeland.”

136  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. ‘And the Indians say “It is your duty to revere your country just as you do your parents. For your nourishment came from them and their nourishment came from it.”’40

In the first quote, homesickness is a product of the soul (al-nafs), the source of wayward passions, even if it is part of upright character (al-rushd ), a sign that reason is in control of the passions. In the second, reverence for one’s native land is to be cultivated as a duty, but its rationale points to one’s inescapable ties to the place of one’s physical origins and suggests that these physically rooted ties to a land go back at least a generation before one’s birth. The conceptions behind the two quotes are quite different, but both link attachment to the homeland to individual virtue, while at the same time portraying it as part of the natural order. These two quotes are followed by a pair of anonymous sayings on one’s ties to one’s birthplace, the rhymed prose of which makes clear their Arabic provenance and shows the similarity of the Arabs’ traditional conceptions to those of the other nations just mentioned. These quotations are all related in succession and there is nothing to indicate that al-JāªiÕ has concluded his account of the conversation with the ruler: the reader is likely to suppose, at first, that the author recited all of these sayings on that occasion. But the text continues with more citations on the individual’s bond with his home country: anonymous sayings, a few lines of verse, and one quote each from Galen, Plato, Hippocrates and the countercaliph ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Zubayr (d. 73/692), who led a revolt in Mecca against the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus. Over twenty citations follow in quick succession, interspersed with only a few sentences in al-JāªiÕ’s own voice. The reader is never told of the ruler’s reaction and it only gradually becomes clear that al-JāªiÕ has effectively merged his account of that conversation with the collection he is presenting to the audience of his book. The reader may gradually come to sense that the list of sayings has become rather long to have been remembered exactly from an extemporaneous conversation, and perhaps will not even realise the subtle means by which al-JāªiÕ has brought him into the story of the homesick ruler. The introductory section then concludes with the author declaring, in a highly conventional manner, that the book would be much longer if he were to gather all of the reports and poems of the Arabs on this topic and that he has only striven to choose the

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 137 best that come to mind. After the introduction concludes with a customary invocation, ‘Success is in God’ (bi-llāh al-tawfīq), the main body of the text immediately resumes with more citations, which, although beginning with verses from the Qurʾān which al-JāªiÕ frequently places first when he cites the sacred text among other materials, continue very much in the vein of the introduction. The motivations and circumstances of writing the text are seamlessly joined to those of comforting a ruler in exile from an unknown land, and the universality of love for one’s homeland is underscored through the experience they share with him. The gathered treasures of Arab and nonArab poets and sages are tacitly endorsed as something worthy of the time and attention of even the mighty. The Mother of Towns and the Best House in the World The addressee in Kitāb al-Aw†ān wa-al-buldān (The Book of Homelands and Countries) is, in contrast to his counterpart in R. al-Óanīn, concerned with prosperity at the expense of loyalty to his birthplace.41 We never learn from which land he hails, but he clearly views a person’s attachment to a homeland, wherever it may be, as a puzzling weakness. Al-JāªiÕ quotes him, at the opening of the text, as having asked him to describe ‘how people become content with their homelands, what failure and deficiency comes from cleaving to them and what knowledge comes through experiences and reasoning upon setting out from them’. Claiming that remaining in one place is among the causes of poverty, he cites a well-known saying: ‘People have more in common with their own generations than with their fathers’ (al-nās bi-azmānihim ashbah minhum bi-ābāʾihim). Al-JāªiÕ, in a passage already cited, replies that the addressee has overlooked how countries, as well as times, have their effects on people’s appearance, character and aspirations – differences which serve to create harmony by the wisdom of God. We may infer that, while the addressee’s request implies that love of the homeland is impractical and contrary to reason, he appears to have overlooked rational explanations for the existence of these attachments.42 This addressee appears to lack the very human attachments that are so warmly celebrated in R. al-Óanīn; his insensitivity to this point serves as the occasion for al-JāªiÕ’s long defence of people’s love of their respective countries in a context which has little connection to his own origins in Basra. In K. al-Aw†ān, al-JāªiÕ is attempting to provide a

138  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. reasonably objective description of the various blessings enjoyed by people in the various lands of Islam, while advancing a theory that human beings were not created to be objective regarding the merits of their own birthplaces. Through the presence of an addressee guilty of slighting his own debt to an undisclosed homeland, al-JāªiÕ is able to draw attention away from his own feelings toward his birthplace until later in the text, where he can indulge in a rich parody of the biased perceptions of residents of his hometown and its rivalling neighbours. Given the addressee’s disdain for emotional attachments to lands, the order in which he has requested the various countries be treated appears to reflect the priorities we have seen from him. As al-JāªiÕ reminds him of his words: You said ‘Begin with Syria and Egypt, the difference between their degrees of excellence (wa-fa∂l mā baynahumā), and an account of their beauty (taª‚īl jamālihā).’ And you mentioned that this will lead to Iraq, the Óijāz and the highlands and depressions and to descriptions of villages and cities, deserts and seas.43

While there may be several reasons why his desire to hear of Syria and Egypt first is significant, it seems clear from what we have seen that knowledge and economic matters are high among his concerns, and both provinces were important for agricultural revenue and trade.44 Even when he expresses desire to hear of the lands’ beauty, the word he uses for description, taª‚īl, here translated as ‘account’, is often associated with tallies of profits or tax revenues. While we never learn the origins of this addressee, given his aversion to remaining in one’s homeland, it seems he is less likely to be from the countries he mentions first. The fact that al-JāªiÕ’s native land of Iraq is not placed first nor relegated to the last tends to dispel expectations of a chauvinistic confrontation with the addressee over regions. The author’s feelings toward his own region are quietly removed from the foreground, especially when he fails to comment on its ranking in the introduction. Since the addressee’s judgement on the importance of lands has already been called into question, the reader will be wondering how al-JāªiÕ’s own perspective may differ. Even if the reader suspects that this addressee is a fiction created by the author, the arrangement of the lands will likely keep him guessing as

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 139 to what is being insinuated by his having the misguided addressee choose this particular order. In his response, al-JāªiÕ avoids commenting on the lands mentioned in their own right and instead chides the addressee for overlooking the most important places of all: Be advised – may God sustain you – that, if we were to mention what comes last first and what comes first last, order would be ruined and rankings lost. I do not see fit to put any town before the mother of all towns. The most appropriate thing for us is to discuss the qualities of Mecca, then those of Medina. For, were it not necessary to put first what God has put first and put later what God has put later, mention of homelands and their place in the heart of a person would likely prevail among people.45

Rather than contesting the relative merits of the two countries the addressee places first, or trumpeting his own land over these two, al-JāªiÕ calls attention to where their priority should lie as Muslims. Slighting the site of the Qurʾān’s revelation and the destination of pilgrimage, along with the city where the Prophet was buried, by relegating their region (the Óijāz) to the fourth place on his list, the addressee has not only failed to honour the places God has honoured most highly but has opened the door of contention about which other lands are best. While this addressee does not appear to set much store on homelands, by overlooking the holy cities with their power to unify the community in pride and by appearing to rank the various lands on the mere basis of their beauties and benefits, he has invited a kind of comparison in which most people will argue for the merits of their own lands of origin.46 We should also be aware that, in chiding the addressee over the ordering of places he has requested, al-JāªiÕ is not necessarily accepting his assumption that the most important or honoured things or places should come first chronologically in a book: his own practice may be to maintain a relatively even level of interest throughout a book.47 His insistence on placing the holy cities first here may simply be in response to the literary assumptions the addressee shares with many contemporaries in wanting to read of the cities he sees as important first. The mistaken priorities reflected in the addressee’s request give al-JāªiÕ an occasion to affirm his Muslim loyalties and to elaborate on his views of

140  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. homelands at the outset of the text without raising questions about his own origins and attachments. He qualifies his statements on the universal experience of loving the homeland with the admission that a person’s financial interests often lie in travelling. This observation has already been made by the addressee, but for al-JāªiÕ the apportioning of blessings to those who travel is as much a reflection of the wisdom of God’s plan as is people’s attachment to their birthplaces.48 The contrast established with the addressee allows al-JāªiÕ to emphasise this side of the created order without appearing insensitive to human loyalties or acquisitive in mentality and also without appearing ­defensive concerning his views on homelands. Of course, if al-JāªiÕ were to continue throughout the book in the objective tone of the epistolary introduction, the reader would likely wonder whether the author has any more appreciation of his native land than the addressee he reproves. Having subtly structured what he relates of his conversation with the addressee to lift his discussion of the merits of different lands above the fray of regional chauvinism and avoid sparking dissensions, he must somehow present his audience with a portrait of himself that reflects the assumptions he has advanced. While the extant text of K. al-Aw†ān, after the introductory passages, is even more fragmentary than many of his works, the passages we have allow us to gather an idea of how he proceeds in a disinterested description of lands and of how the tone changes dramatically when he begins to discuss his own region. As he has insisted he must, he moves from his general discussion of the role of homelands in the human condition to treat the holy cities, although most of what survives of the section on Mecca is a description of honours bestowed on the clans of Quraysh.49 What we have on Medina is a celebration of the uniquely pleasant qualities of its water and soil, in which al-JāªiÕ goes so far as to mention that there people seek out the places where date pits are sold because of the aroma, while they flee from such places in his native Iraq.50 The extant passages on Egypt include a discussion of the distinction it enjoys for being mentioned several times in the Qurʾān and a description of its agricultural production and wealth.51 The section in the surviving text on the western Muslim lands (al-maghrib) is a brief mention of how the members of schismatic sects are fewer and less deviant there than in the eastern lands and gives us little clue as to what its original content and tone were.52 Nearer al-JāªiÕ’s own home

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 141 of Basra, however, the fair-minded analysis that has pervaded the preceding sections disappears. Defending Basra and attacking the rival urban centres of Iraq, Kūfa and Baghdad, al-JāªiÕ gives free rein to his natural biases in favour of his birthplace. A strain of self-parody becomes obvious, as if the author is tacitly acknowledging that he possesses the uncritical enthusiasm for his homeland that his own theory dictates he ought to have. The change in tone first becomes obvious in the sections on Kūfa, where the Umayyad governor Ziyād b. Abīhi (d. 53/673) is quoted comparing Kūfa to a penniless young woman who is married for her beauty, while Basra is an aged, malformed woman who is married for her property.53 This is followed by a section in which the purity of the water of the Euphrates around Kūfa is praised in contrast to that of the Tigris, especially near Basra, where there is an unhealthy mixing of salt and fresh water. While the beginning of this section is missing in the extant text, it becomes clear when the speaker refers to the Euphrates as ‘our water’ that the entire section is al-JāªiÕ’s quotation of the vaunting of the Kūfans, which he is parodying.54 Al-JāªiÕ is, of course, conveying this attack on his native city in preparation for delivering a stronger response on its behalf. The section on Basra that follows includes a spirited defence of its water, pointing, among other things, to the straightness with which its palms grow – in contrast to the bent trunks of those nearer to Kūfa – as proof of the quality of its water and soil.55 When we remember the influence that the environment was held to have on the development of human beings, we can understand that such comments – whether intended seriously or partly in playful jest – had implications for the character and intellect of those who hailed from these regions. Al-JāªiÕ goes on to criticise the minarets of Kūfa’s mosques, which he compares to those found on Jacobite and Melchite churches, and charges the Kūfans with leaving a mosque dedicated to the caliph ʿAlī b. Abī ˝ālib in ruins, inhabited by dogs and wild beasts.56 He quotes Baghdadis’ criticism of Basrans for using polluting animal dung to fertilise their crops, only to respond by claiming that Baghdadis do far worse by spreading human excrement on the leaves of theirs and build their houses with bricks taken from trash heaps!57 Al-JāªiÕ may indeed feel he has reason to boast of his city and may have been genuinely angry over attacks from its neighbours, but the petty chauvinism of this section, so clearly differing in tone from the rest of the book,

142  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. undermines much of its own ire. The tacitly acknowledged bias of the section is most plainly seen in a quotation from a fellow Basran, Jaʿfar b. Sulaymān, who proceeds from declaring his love for his city to an unlikely claim about his own residence: ‘Iraq is the prize (ʿayn, literally the ‘eye’) of the world, Basra, the prize of Iraq, al-Mirbad is the prize of Basra, and my house is the prize of al-Mirbad.’58 The quotation appears near the opening of the section, where al-JāªiÕ relates it without comment. By advancing a quotation that reflects an even narrower bias in support of his praise of his home city, he is probably hinting that objectivity is not to be expected in this section. The reader is trusted to read what will be said in the light of what has gone much earlier on the primacy of Mecca, on the one hand, and God’s wise gift to humanity of ‘making them desire whatever is in their hands’ (al-targhīb fī kulli mā fī aydayihim).59 The Vaunting of Blacks over Whites As we have seen earlier in this chapter, there is evidence to suggest that al-JāªiÕ may have had some sub-Saharan African ancestry. Being more certain on this question would inevitably influence our understanding of the purpose behind his well-known collection of what the East African Zanj and other darker-skinned peoples can say on their own behalf, Kitāb Fakhr al-sūdān ʿalā al-bī∂ān (The Vaunting of Blacks over Whites).60 Writing a book in defence of a group among whom one identifies oneself even remotely is quite a different gesture in society from reaching out to support an oftenmarginalised group with which one shares no special connection. Even if we assume the sources claiming that al-JāªiÕ was descended from a Black slave are correct, this would not tell us whether this fact was widely known by his contemporary audience, which would also affect our understanding of his rhetorical ends. But I have already stressed that, attached to the tribe of Kināna as a freedman, at least, very learned and born in the favourable physical environment of Basra, al-JāªiÕ would, in any case, have viewed his own origins and potential as quite different from those of East Africans recently arrived from their native lands. He is, then, not one of the people whose boasts he is primarily conveying, but may have shared a certain association with them in the eyes of some of his contemporaries. But whether he is in part defending his own heritage by defending a group from which he could

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 143 not entirely dissociate himself in his society, or whether he has for some reason decided to give voice to the accomplishments and rights of another group, in conveying the boasts of the Zanj, he is making a case that would not be welcomed by some among the elite of ʿAbbāsid society, Arab and otherwise.61 What interests us here, in the light of these questions, is the way in which al-JāªiÕ carefully balances the impetus toward writing the book, along with the responsibility for circulating it, between himself and an addressee whose origins can only be guessed at. The role of the addressee in the brief epistolary introduction is so subtle as to almost pass unnoticed, but it effectively ties the justification for compiling K. Fakhr al-Sūdān to what al-JāªiÕ has said in an earlier book, while also allowing him to drop an ambiguous hint as to his ongoing strategy as a writer: You mentioned – God protect you from deception – that you had read my book on the arguments of pure Arabs against those with foreign mothers (al-hujanāʾ), the response of the latter, and the reply of their maternal uncles. And [you mentioned] that I had not said a word there about the boasts of Blacks. Be informed – God preserve you – that I have delayed doing this quite intentionally. And you mentioned that you would like me to write down the boasts of Blacks for you, so I am writing to you with the boasts of theirs that come to my mind (ªa∂aranī).62

By presenting his readers with an addressee whose reading of the now lost book on Arabs of pure and mixed ancestry prompted him to request a book on the merits of Black people, al-JāªiÕ calls attention to a set of intertextual relationships with that book.63 The fact that the absence of any mention of the boasts of Blacks is conspicuous for the addressee suggests that the need for the new book flows implicitly from the structure and logic of that book, which thus forms an incomplete statement without this one. Apparently, the replies of the ‘maternal uncles’ were non-Arabs of other races, or, if they were Black, were confined to refuting the boasts of full-blooded Arabs, rather than vaunting on their own behalf. The addressee calls attention to the gap which fairness, apparently, calls for filling and assumes, in his ensuing request, that al-JāªiÕ is quite capable of filling it with materials which he curiously left out of the earlier book. But al-JāªiÕ, we next learn, had already perceived

144  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. this need while writing the other book, and had apparently been planning to write on it even before receiving the addressee’s request. Although al-JāªiÕ’s own reasons for reserving materials that might appear to belong in the other book are a mystery at this point, the addressee’s role is to support and corroborate al-JāªīÕ’s intentions in writing on this topic, while perceiving from the outside its connection to the other book. Moreover, the request serves as the author’s occasion for approaching the topic at this time, even though he implies that he would have done so eventually in any case. But the reader has only the slimmest evidence from which to speculate on who this addressee might be and what has motivated him to make such a request. By repeating the terms ‚uraªāʾ (pure Arabs) and hujanāʾ (Arabs born to non-Arab mothers, but also ‘lowly’) from the earlier book without criticism, he perhaps seems to recognise the special honour accorded to Arabian descent by virtue of its connection to the Prophet and the language of the revelation.64 In any case, he has shown sufficient interest in the importance of full or mixed Arab ancestry to read that book in its entirety, and yet he feels the boasts of Blacks must be heard as well. If he is a full-blooded Arab and proud of his lineage, he still recognises that the merits of a race his own ancestors had a long history of enslaving are worthy of his attention. If he is Black himself and looking to see the accomplishments of his own group celebrated, he has nevertheless already taken the trouble to read a book on the debates over Arab lineages with the privileges and honour they entailed. If he is a member of some other racial group within the Muslim community, he still appears to acknowledge the special importance of Arab descent along with the rights of Blacks – and thus probably all others – to boasts of their own. If al-JāªiÕ did indeed have some Black ancestry, one can see how an addressee of uncertain origins and an interest in both the Arab and the Black points of view would be useful in justifying his writing a book on the merits of Blacks. The way in which al-JāªiÕ evenly balances the responsibility for undertaking the compilation of this text between himself and the addressee parallels the way he divides the reportage of materials in the remainder of the text between himself and the collective voice of the Zanj that he quotes. The main body of the text opens with a section of approximately fifteen pages in the modern edition of the text in which al-JāªiÕ, in his own voice, names noted Black individuals from Islamic history and their accomplishments, and

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 145 directly quotes poets and the scholars and others who are his sources.65 Some passages in this early portion of the book, such as an account of the martyred Julaybīb being carried by the Prophet himself to his grave, show the sincerity of the author’s desire to acknowledge the honoured place some Blacks had attained in the Muslim community.66 For almost the entirety of the remaining text, which is more than double the length of what has gone before, he relates boasts and arguments as quotes from Blacks and sometimes from the Zanj specifically.67 Al-JāªiÕ is clearly not always quoting materials that he has actually heard from Blacks here but rather gathering materials and assertions that they might advance in defending themselves.68 Relating arguments in the voice of a hypothetical group of vaunting Blacks, al-JāªiÕ does establish a certain distance between himself and the materials, but there is no dramatic change in the tone from the earlier section. Even the manner of presenting arguments is similar: where al-JāªiÕ introduced noted Black individuals with the formula ‘and among them is . . .’ (wa-minhum), the Blacks introduce individuals with ‘and among us is . . .’ (wa-minnā).69 Certain passages in both sections are also thematically related: when the Blacks describe the Prophet’s prayers over the Abyssinian ruler, al-Najāshī, as the only instance in which he prayed for a deceased individual from a distance, the reader may well be reminded of the passage on the burial of Julaybīb.70 Such similarities tie these portions of the text together and suggest there is a unity of purpose throughout the work, while leaving the reader to consider whether al-JāªiÕ means to support all of the claims he attributes to the Blacks. At certain points later in the text, the arguments of the Blacks do appear to diverge from the views al-JāªiÕ strongly advocates in other texts, while others are meant to reflect their natural enthusiasm for their own form of being and skills and for their native lands. The Zanj argue that, while their two main groupings, al-Naml, ‘the ants’, and al-Kilāb, ‘the dogs’, are essentially one, the North Arabian descendants of ʿAdnān have less in common with the South Arabian descendants of Qaª†ān.71 In contrast, al-JāªiÕ, in al-Bayān wa-al-Tabyīn, seems very sympathetic to an adamant argument he attributes to the educated among the Northern Nizārī tribes that the Arabs of the entire Peninsula are one in character, customs and language.72 The Blacks’ natural inclination to emphasise what is admirable in the particular skills they are blessed with can be seen in a passage in which they move from boasting

146  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. of their courage and generosity, ‘two traits never found in any but a noble individual’, to celebrating their natural talent for dancing and drumming, skills for which they do not need teaching.73 As if to underscore the fact that they put the two universally cherished virtues with two of their particular skills, the two rhythmically balanced sentences are even linked by a rhyme between their final words ‘noble’ (karīm) and ‘teaching’ (taʿlīm). If there is parody here, it is of the milder sort, and the point may be that a people can have its share in the highest ideals of humankind while having pride in its particular traits and perspectives. The enthusiasm of the Blacks for their own perspective is probably most evident in their long celebration of the colour black, in which they list many types of black animals, plants and other things (e.g. the pupil of the eye, the black rock of the Kaʿba) that are valued for their colour.74 While this passage may strike a modern reader who knows that skin colour is due to a particular pigmenting protein in skin cells as strange, al-JāªiÕ’s contemporary audience may have believed that the colour of peoples reflected deeper elemental differences or that colours considered appealing were signs of divine favour towards peoples and things. However seriously al-JāªiÕ meant his readers to take their vaunting of blackness in nature, with the accompanying evidence of quotations from Arab poets, it at least refutes the suggestion that there is anything ignoble in their colour or that it could be a sign of divine punishment. Whether reflecting al-JāªiÕ’s own views or not, the arguments the Blacks advance in their own favour are frequently directed toward Arabs specifically, rather than toward all the various peoples who may have harboured prejudices toward them. The Arabs are charged with rejecting Blacks as suitable spouses for their daughters after the ‘justice of Islam’ had been revealed to them, while they had not done so in the time of pagan ignorance.75 On a more conciliatory note, the Blacks argue that Arabs can ultimately be counted among them. Their argument is based on the assumption that the wellknown ªadīth in which the Prophet declares that he has been sent to the ‘Red (i.e. the lighter-coloured peoples whose skin showed pinkness) and the Black’ must include all the peoples of humanity under either of these two colours. Thus they group the Arabs, along with the Egyptians, the Chinese and others, with the Black peoples of Africa and India, while considering the Persians, Slavs, Romans and others among the Red. Perhaps most tellingly,

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 147 the vaunting Blacks frequently cite Arab proverbs, anecdotes, reports and poetry that celebrate their merits, especially in a long passage devoted to poets’ praise of Black rulers.76 In this respect, K. Fakhr al-Sūdān is as much a vindication of the Arabic literary heritage as it is of the Blacks. The materials collected in the book show how many examples can be found of that tradition’s acknowledging the merits non-Arab groups, even those whom Arabs had the longest history of enslaving. It is perhaps this that led al-JāªiÕ to tie this book to his earlier book on Arab ancestry and create an addressee to share his perception of the connection. This emphasis, throughout the book, on particularly Arab prejudices toward, and praise for, Blacks is difficult to reconcile with Bernard Lewis’s suggestion that K. Fakhr al-Sūdān was intended as a parody of the ethnic boasting of the mostly Persian, Shuʿūbiyya movement, who disparaged the Arabic literary heritage.77 If there is a sense in which al-JāªiÕ – who, after all, praises the Persians himself on occasions – intends the book as a response to the Shuʿūbiyya, it may be through showing how members of another group can retain their pride while acknowledging the central place the Arabic language and heritage enjoyed in Muslim education and culture. By employing quotes of Arab poets and Muslim traditions, along with arguments of their own expressed in Arabic, to celebrate their merits, the vaunting Blacks, as given voice by al-JāªiÕ in this text, implicitly acknowledge the unifying power of that heritage among Muslims. Al-JāªiÕ never reveals his own reasons for delaying mention of the boasts of Blacks rather than incorporating them into his earlier work on full-blooded and mixed-race Arabs. It might be suggested that such a delay reflects the preferential ordering of topics according to their merits and dignity, a principle we have seen that he evokes in K. al-Aw†ān when he insists on describing Mecca and Medina before moving on to other lands. Thus, the boasts of Blacks would not merit inclusion on the same level as the boasts of Arabs. On the other hand, we have also seen in the introduction to R. al-Óanīn that the purpose of collecting scattered texts on a given topic together in a single book is the preservation of knowledge that might otherwise pass into obscurity. It would, then, be the importance of the topic that calls for treatment in a separate volume. In fact, the fifty pages of materials that fill K. Fakhr al-Sūdān would likely have taken a very considerable place among the boasts of pure

148  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. and mixed-race Arabs in the earlier text, unless the latter was a truly compendious book. It seems most likely that al-JāªiÕ’s reason for delaying these materials was in order to accord them their full due in a manner that would command the reader’s attention. In fact, al-JāªiÕ closes the book with what may be a subtle hint that his decision to delay his treatment of this topic does not imply that it is less important than his works on Arabs and their boasts: This is the summation of boasts of Blacks that come to my mind. I have already discussed the boasts of Qaª†ān, and will be discussing the vaunting of ʿAdnān over Qaª†ān in much of what the latter have said, God willing.78

This present book thus falls in the midst of yet more writings on the Arab groupings and their respective merits, and the turn of ʿAdnān – from which the origins of the Prophet, the caliphal house and al-JāªiÕ’s own patron tribe of Kināna were traced – was yet to come. By suggesting that K. Fakhr al-Sūdān somehow belongs among these texts, al-JāªiÕ may be hinting that his purpose throughout the ongoing project of these texts is less to document the various Arab groups’ claims to superiority than to illustrate the long tradition of peoples celebrating their natural pride in their origins in the Arabic language. If al-JāªiÕ was indeed motivated by a desire to defend groups to whom he was inextricably linked by his origins and, perhaps, his appearance, he had at last found a suitable place within the vast encyclopedic range of his ongoing writings where his personal biases effectively merged with his more objective purposes. A brief and subtle conversation with his addressee was all he needed to draw the necessary connections. The Merits of the Turks Racial and geographical tensions appear to be simmering just beneath the surface in the three texts discussed so far in this chapter, with each of the addressees, in his way, helping al-JāªiÕ avoid provoking disord and bring a certain balance to his discussion. In Risāla ilā al-Fatª b. Khāqān fī Manāqib al-Turk wa-ʿāmmat jund al-khilāfa (‘Letter to al-Fatª b. Khāqān on the Merits of the Turks and all the Troops of the Caliphate’; hereafter, R. fī Manāqib al-Turk), by contrast, our author is attempting to defuse a tense situation that has already arisen, one that might even pose a threat to the ʿAbbāsid state.79 The addressee of this letter is a real patron of al-JāªiÕ,

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 149 al-Fatª b. Khāqān, the same secretary who helped commission K. al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā, as we saw in Chapter 1. Al-Fatª is quoted as having complained to al-JāªiÕ over a speech given before an assembly of respected figures from the military and state apparatus. The unnamed speaker has drawn the indignation of al-Fatª by, among other things, neglecting to mention the Turks after praising the military prowess of other ethnic elements in the Muslim armies: Khurasanians, Arabs, clients of Arab tribes (mawālī, sing. mawlā) and the Abnāʾ (‘sons’, sing. Banawī), a contingent whose origins are debated but, in any case, had supported the initial revolt of the ‘Abbāsids from Khurasan and were later garrisoned in Baghdad. The offending speaker would very possibly belong to one of these other groups himself, although the reader never learns which group that might be. As a Turk himself, al-Fatª may have taken some personal offence at this slight of his people, but he likely also had concerns about the future role of Turks in the caliph al-Mutawakkil’s military policy. Whether the offence of the anonymous speaker was the real impetus for al-JāªiÕ’s composing this text in its present form, or merely a pretext for addressing al-Fatª’s concerns, the goal is clearly to celebrate the unique merits of the Turkish soldiery, while not raising further contentions among the other contingents. Written during the reign of al-Mutawakkil (847–61 ce), the letter to al-Fatª is actually a frame introducing an earlier text in praise of the Turks that al-JāªiÕ says he wrote during the reign of al-Muʿta‚im (833–42 ce) – the first caliph to import large numbers of Turkish slave troops – but never circulated.80 While the older portion of the text presents interpretive challenges and historical puzzles of its own, my concern here is with al-JāªiÕ’s artful presentation of al-Fatª’s account of the speech and the way it negotiates the delicate ethnic situation that had arisen.81 Also important for my discussion are the closing pages of the letter, probably composed at the later date along with the introduction, in which al-JāªiÕ appears to hint at his own role in shaping the passages quoted from al-Fatª.82 Outside of this text, al-JāªiÕ has fairly little to say about the Turks and their accomplishments, and it is likely that both stages of its composition were motivated out of a desire to please his patrons: al-Muʿta‚im, first, and, later, al-Fatª. Perhaps al-JāªiÕ also felt a need to protect the stability of the Muslim state if sentiments had risen against the Turks, given their prominent place in the army. In the case of the

150  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. later stage of the book’s composition, which is our primary concern here, it seems probable that al-JāªiÕ, at the behest of al-Fatª, was seeking to apply gentle pressure against al-Mutawakkil’s policy of gradually wresting control of the military leadership away from the Turks.83 Beyond this, we can do little more than speculate on the immediate political motivations behind the letter without knowing at what point during al-Mutawakkil’s reign it was composed, or what specific pressures al-Fatª was under at the exact time of its composition.84 Al-Fatª was known as a litterateur and prodigious reader himself, and, given the sensitivity of the topic at the time, we ought to consider the possibility that he played some role in determining the shape of the new parts of the text, even if al-JāªiÕ’s own contribution cannot be doubted.85 Al-Fatª may have requested that al-JāªiÕ compose a text in this vein to assist him in his support of the Turks, or al-JāªiÕ may simply have gathered from his account of the offending speech that such a book would be useful to his patron. In either case, both al-JāªiÕ’s unique literary skills and his collaborating voice as a non-Turk would have brought elements of effectiveness that al-Fatª could not have achieved on his own. The opening epistolary dialogue has a rhetorical inventiveness which, while quite unique in its structure, is very much akin to what we have seen in many of al-JāªiÕ’s other letter-monographs, and the patterns of merging voices are very much a part of his rhetorical art, as we are seeing throughout this study. Al-JāªiÕ proceeds astutely in his exposition, making clear where his and al-Fatª’s loyalties lie from the first, but only gradually revealing just why the speaker’s words were so objectionable. The manner in which the merits of the other groups are ultimately given their due through the speaker’s inappropriate words is at once provocative and conciliatory. The resulting merger of voices is deftly integrated into a framework that will not diminish the force of al-JāªiÕ’s vindication of the Turks and their accomplishments or the implicit warning against further challenges to their position. From the first, al-JāªiÕ strives to show that the concerns he will be expressing on behalf of al-Fatª are not voiced in defiance of al-Mutawakkil but, rather, in support of the stability of his rule. The text opens with al-JāªiÕ’s invocatory prayer, asking God to include both himself and al-Fatª among those who not only know the truth but devote themselves to acting

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 151 in accord with it.86 The atmosphere of sincerity and pious zeal established in the invocation is quickly tied to an admiration of al-Fatª’s devoted obedience toward the caliph and his earnestness in protecting his interests from threats no matter how small. This leads to an enumeration of the sorts of threats the ruler continually faces from refractory elements among his subjects who demand more than is their right. Among these we find a clear allusion to the coming description of the offending speaker when we are told that the ruler will never be rid of the likes of: . . . one enamoured of his own judgement, given to prolixity in his pronouncements, eager to disparage what is right by opposing sound management, as if he were himself a leader to the entire community and responsible for all who dwell in the realm, placing himself in the positions of those who oversee and of giving scrutiny to caliphs and viziers.87

Al-JāªiÕ continues with a long description of insubordinate elements among the caliph’s subjects, including those weakened by deprivation, those made ambitious by the caliph’s past favour and sowers of discord, hardly known to most but powerful within their own factions. Whether or not all of these are meant as insinuations concerning the offending speaker or discontented nonTurkish elements in the army, they contribute to a portrayal of a state based on a delicate balance which the loyal al-Fatª is seeking to preserve. The list is followed by still more praise of al-Fatª’s vigilance and prayers for continued blessings upon the caliph through him and for God to keep both al-Fatª and al-JāªiÕ from saying anything approaching falsehood.88 Thus, everything to come is tied firmly to the author and addressee’s sincere Muslim commitment to protecting the interests of the caliphate while affirming the rights of all concerned. From here al-JāªiÕ follows by rehearsing, mostly through indirect citation, al-Fatª’s account of the offending speech on the groups within the army along with al-Fatª’s own arguments on the essential unity of the troops.89 We are never told whether the account, which continues for over twenty pages, is based on a prior letter from al-Fatª to al-JāªiÕ or comes from a conversation between them. In either case, memory will have to have played a role in the preservation of the speech, a fact whose implications we shall soon discuss. It is also clear that the purpose here is not to remind al-Fatª of what he has said

152  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. himself, but to unite his voice with that of the author for the sake of those to whom the book would circulate or be read at gatherings – undoubtedly including those in the military apparatus among whom the speech has raised tensions. As usual in such rehearsed accounts of what an addressee has said, al-JāªiÕ intersperses indirect citation with passages of direct quotation, keeping the reader aware of the presence in the text of two voices, which in this case appear to be in full agreement. Al-JāªiÕ’s rehearsal of al-Fatª’s account begins with a description of the gathering at which the speech occurred, emphasising the dignity of the assembly, which will throw the recklessness of the speaker’s remarks into relief. Among those described are ‘an assortment of the caliphate’s soldiers’, implying that all the groups involved were represented, and ‘venerable elders among the [ʿAbbāsid] partisans’ (shuyūkhan min jillat al-shīʿa). Those who were in attendance are praised for the sincerity of their obedience, which is motivated by piety rather than fear of the caliph, or desire for his favour. According to al-Fatª’s account, this assembly was interrupted when: an ordinary man from this assembly, from the retinue of those honourable ones (rajulan min ʿur∂ tilka al-jamāʿa wa-min ªāshiyat tilka al-jilla) presumed to make an extemporaneous speech, vainly taking this upon himself, and . . . not consulting the leaders among them, or regarding the skilled ­orators . . . being careless with his meanings and butchering his expressions.90

While it is clear that al-Fatª is charging this individual with a failure to respect the dignity of the assembled company and to recognise his modest place within it, his main purpose here may be to aver that the leading members of the assembled group were not responsible for what the speaker said.91 The offence that al-Fatª has taken – as we shall now see – is on two counts, the first concerning the emphasis the speaker placed upon differences between the groups, and the second being his failure to mention the Turks while ­praising the other elements at length. The first offence occurred when the speaker went on, according to al-Fatª, praising God for what he describes as ‘copious blessings’ (subūgh niʿamihi) and ‘abundant gifts’ (jazīl mawāhibih), by which he has ‘united these differing hearts, varying types and disparate passions in obedience’.92 The speaker, thus, has not suggested that there are actual tensions or quarrels

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 153 among the troops but merely implied that potential differences among them have been avoided by the grace of God. The fact that al-Fatª’s strong protests are directed toward what was, after all, a rather subtle and unintended offence all the better conveys a warning that no one may dare to raise the slightest prospect of discontent within the ranks of the military. Al-JāªiÕ continues his account with a long description of al-Fatª’s severe indignation at the divisions the speaker drew between the lineages and circumstances of these groups and al-Fatª’s own arguments in favour of their longstanding unity. Through these arguments al-Fatª points to bonds of common environment, heredity and clientage that make all five groups concerned one in essence, while cleverly arranging the ties so as to portray the Turks as the unifying element among the troops. He begins with a bold assertion that the Turks and Khurasanians are brothers and virtually one because of the region they share in the east. He argues that, if their roots (aʿrāq) were not originally one, they are similar and that, if the ranges of the lands that contain both groups are not identical, they have much in common. Thus, members of both groups are wholly Khurasanian, even if they differ in certain respects. He continues, asserting that the difference between these two groups is not like that between Byzantines and Slavs, or between the Zanj and the Ethiopians, but more like that between Arabs from different regions, as between Meccans and Medinans. He contends that differences in language and appearance between Turks and Khurasanians are no more significant than those between Arabs from regions known for their deficiency or eloquence in language, and so with appearance and character traits – and yet all of these can be considered pure Arabs. Moreover, Turks and Khurasanians do not even differ as much as the descendants of the two fathers of the Arabs, ʿAdnān and Qaª†ān, who share the environmental influence of a single land because God apportions the same appearance, character and language to all who hail from a given region.93 In the following passage, a confusing change of voice occurs, which may leave us asking whether it is al-Fatª or al-JāªiÕ who is speaking. While the above has been related by al-JāªiÕ from al-Fatª via indirect citation, ‘You claimed that . . .’ (zaʿamta anna), the passage turns to a hypothetical debate in which the second person is used very differently: the debate is introduced with a question quoted directly in the second person:

154  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. If you were to say ‘How are their children all Arabs despite their having different forefathers?’ (maʿa ikhtilāf al-ubuwwa) we should say that since the Peninsula was one, and they [the Arabs] shared one soil and one language, along with characteristics and aspiration . . . they were cast in the same mould: their parts were alike and their humours were comparable.

The reply continues with an explanation of how these similarities, rooted in the shared environment, made the Arabs of Qaª†ān and ʿAdnān more alike than children of the same mothers and led to intermarriage between the two groups to the exclusion of all others.94 Since al-JāªiÕ has been relating al-Fatª’s account indirectly until this point, grammatical logic and modern epistolary practice might lead us to expect that it is al-JāªiÕ speaking in his own voice here, anticipating that al-Fatª, his addressee, might ask the question quoted and then showing how he would reply. It is conceivable that al-JāªiÕ could have been brought to introduce this exchange as a friendly qualification of al-Fatª’s account and the latter’s suggestion, in the preceding paragraphs, that the two Arab groupings have no more in common than the Turks and Khurasanians. However, the argument attributed to al-Fatª already implies that shared environment is the key factor uniting both the Turks and Khurasanians on the one hand and the two Arab groups on the other, despite differing lineages, and the qualification hardly seems necessary. Alternatively, we can read the second-person questioner not as al-Fatª, but as a mere hypothetical opponent such as numerous Arabic prose writers introduce in their disputative texts in order to anticipate possible objections. We would then understand al-Fatª as the one quoting and answering this imaginary questioner. While the latter reading involves an abrupt shift in the usage of the second person from the preceding paragraph, it seems more consistent with context, in that it appears more like an elaboration on what has gone before than an objection to it. This reading is admittedly awkward and makes the passage sound as though al-JāªiÕ has forgotten that he has been addressing al-Fatª, but the resulting merging of voices is quite consistent with the unity of purpose between himself and al-Fatª that he has been projecting throughout the introduction. While shared environment is plainly the determining factor in al-Fatª’s argument for the unity of the Khurasanians and Turks, when he turns to

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 155 argue that the Abnāʾ should also be counted as Khurasanians, he abruptly shifts to emphasising lineage over environment. As al-JāªiÕ continues with his account of al-Fatª’s reasoning: ‘You also claimed that the Banawī is a Khurasanian, and that the lineage of sons is that of their fathers, that the good deeds of fathers and longstanding achievements of ancestors are the noble heritage (ªasab) of sons.’95 While the biological origins of the Abnāʾ have been debated, as has the history of the application of this title to them, al-Fatª appears to assume that they are of Khurasanian descent.96 We can understand how the environmentalism of the time may have led some to view the Abnāʾ, with their roots in Khurasan but having lived in Baghdad for nearly a century by this time, as virtually a distinctive ethnic group. Al-Fatª, however, chooses not to emphasise their recent history in Baghdad, or their close ties to the caliphal house. Instead, he affirms their place among the unified soldiery of the caliphate through their distant ties of lineage with the Khurasanians, who have already been linked to the Turks. He goes on to describe how near the mawālī are to the Arabs by reason of a Prophetic tradition declaring that they belong to them. Even practices of inheritance and accepting bloodwit treat mawālī effectively as members of the tribes to which their clientage binds them. Lastly according to al-JāªiÕ’s account, al-Fatª claims that the Turks, too, share such bonds of clientage with Arabs and have the special distinction of enjoying the patronage of the hearts of the two leading clans of Quraysh, ʿAbd Manāf and Hāshim. Thus the Turks are themselves to be counted among the mawālī and consequently have the same relationship to the Arabs as a whole, while enjoying a special link to Hāshim from which the ʿAbbāsid house was descended.97 Rather than blandly asserting that all of the caliphate’s troops are ultimately one, al-Fatª, as al-JāªiÕ presents his arguments to the reader, draws a series of ties that link the groups together, making sure that no group appears more central in binding the troops to the caliphate than the Turks. The latter are tied by their land of origins and environment to the Khurasanians, who are in turn tied to the Abnāʾ through ancestral lineage. The mawālī, of whatever origins and birthplace, are tied to the Arabs via sacred tradition and tribal custom and the Turks are themselves mawālī who possess ties to the most honoured of Arab patrons. Nothing is mentioned to link the Abnāʾ and the Khurasanians to the Arabs and the mawālī apart from the factors

156  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. mentioned that connect all to the Turks. The arguments are cleverly arranged to make the strategy of portraying the Turks as the primary element unifying the entire ʿAbbāsid army less obvious. The other groups, it is true, could have claimed their own reasons for special ties to the caliphate, but al-Fatª’s account is structured to make the Turks appear most central and honoured. These arguments for the unity of the troops, presented as having come from the secretary himself, are clearly meant to be recognised as the underpinnings of al-JāªiÕ’s later claim – in his own voice – that all he will say in praise of the Turks will be to the greater credit and honour of all these groups by virtue of the ties they enjoy to the Turks.98 This racially conciliatory portion of the account of al-Fatª’s complaint against the offending speech precedes the more provocative parts to follow and prevents the reader from supposing that his criticism of the way the speaker praised the other groups is meant as an attack on them. Still, the reader will likely not know immediately that the assertions al-JāªiÕ presents as having come from al-Fatª are not meant to parody the arguments advanced on behalf of these groups or to expose their weaknesses. The reader will only gradually realise that the parts of the speech quoted are relatively cogent arguments for the virtues of these groups and their contributions to the ʿAbbāsid state and that they are too long to have been remembered offhand by a listener who was not already well aware of the merits mentioned. The lengthy quotation of the offending speech is preceded by al-Fatª’s own description of its content. As al-JāªiÕ relates what he claims to have heard (or read) of the secretary’s criticism: And you mentioned that he recounted an assortment of the boasts of these races and a collection of the merits of these groups, and that he gathered all this and classified it, summing it all up and explicating, and that he omitted mention of the Turks and paid no heed to them: he disregarded them and gave no account of them, as he had of the arguments of each nation and the cases made by each group.99

The repetitive phrasing of the latter portion of the statement – on the speaker’s failure to give the Turks their due, as he had the others – reflects the intensity of al-Fatª’s indignation. The redundant verbs in the earlier part emphasise the prolixity of his praise of the other groups, which ought to have

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 157 led to a similar celebration of the Turks, the gap which al-JāªiÕ’s text will more than fill. As the account of al-Fatª’s complaint continues with a quotation of the boasts of the Khurasanians recounted by the speaker, the reader may well suppose that al-Fatª’s purpose is to underscore what he found offensive or untrue in the speech. Instead the reader will find a speech in which the longstanding efforts of the Khurasanians in defence of the ʿAbbāsid state are celebrated, with no apparent parody. Prominent among the boasts advanced are the sacrifices and courage of the Khurasanians who supported the ʿAbbāsid daʿwa in its early secretive stages and during the bitter struggle with the Umayyads that ensued. Al-Fatª’s basic sympathy with these claims in themselves is implied by his relating two lengthy quotes from Muªammad b. ʿAlī, the father of the dynasty’s first two caliphs, in acknowledgement of the vital role played by the Khurasanians in the early part of the struggle. When the speaker quotes the Khurasanians as boasting that they proved Muªammad’s optimism in the success of the Eastern troops correct, their claims for themselves are made one with his boast on their behalf.100 Through al-Fatª’s recounting the speaker’s quotation of the dynasty’s founder at such length, the Khurasanians’ boasts are inescapably connected to the theme of loyalty to the caliphal house that permeates R. fī Manāqib al-Turk. The boasts of the sufferings endured by Khurasanians in service of the ʿAbbāsids are complemented by descriptions of how they brought victory to the cause and avenged themselves on its enemies, along with boasts of their ferocity in battle and their great numbers. But these military boasts are tempered, in turn, by claims that they are also honest and restrained and do not share the penchant of the Syrian troops (of the Umayyad regime) for outraging women and violating all that is sacred.101 The balanced picture that emerges of disciplined, honourable soldiers who have endured much for the cause helps make clear that the view of the Khurasanian troops presented is a considered one rather than a parody of arrogant enthusiasm. By quoting the speech, as related by al-Fatª, at such length and in such detail without obvious indications of parody, al-JāªiÕ seems to imply that both he and his addressee concur with the substance of the speech they have troubled themselves with remembering and relating. What they do find objectionable in the speech are certain comparative

158  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. elements in which the boasts of the Khurasanians go beyond enumerating their merits to assert their superiority over other groups. The suggestion that they ought to be the dominant element within the caliphal army is evident when they boast of their superior numbers and of their strength and vigour (al-ayd wa-shiddat al-asr) surpassing all living peoples in these qualities.102 Their claim to highest honours among the troops (as al-Fatª relates from the speaker’s description of their boasts) comes at the conclusion where they are said to have asserted ‘Thus, we are most deserving of preference and most suited to an honoured position’ (fa-naªnu aªaqq bi-al-athara wa-awlā bisharaf al-manzila).103 It is this manner of ‘comparing’ and ‘parleying’ over the merits of groups that, as we shall see, al-JāªiÕ later criticises and claims he will avoid in his own celebration of the Turks. While the boasting of the Arabs that follows next in al-Fatª’s account of the speech is shorter and less grandiloquent than that of the Khurasanians, a similar pattern prevails with boasts containing little parody marred by contentious comparisons to the other groups. The Arabs’ boast of their lineage and intertwined kinship amongst themselves (al-arªām al-shābika) is connected, in its logic, with the ʿAbbāsid house’s own claim to legitimacy. Their description of the immortalising power of their poetry and prose is similar in tone to al-JāªiÕ’s own well-known celebration of the Arabic tradition. But these claims are advanced as a reason why they more deserve to enjoy close ties (qurba) with the dynasty than the other groups. Similarly, the rhetorical question that introduces their enumeration of the prominent Arabs among the original cohort of the ʿAbbāsid daʿwa – ‘Are most of the notables anything but pure Arabs and from the offspring of this lineage?’ – tends toward contentious comparison with the achievements of the other groups, as does the claim that Arabs are the most notable for seeking vendettas apart from Sijistānīs.104 Still, the names listed show the importance of their contribution, and the fact that al-JāªiÕ bothers to convey the list as part of al-Fatª’s account implies that they are both well aware of these Arabs’ accomplishments. The boasts of the mawālī and Abnāʾ that follow in al-Fatª’s account of the speech also consist largely of fairly cogent arguments, sympathetically conveyed but interrupted by partisan contention at a few points. The claims of the mawālī are concentrated less on their military prowess than on their close relationship with the ʿAbbāsid rulers, and their own honour is tied to

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 159 that of their patrons in the dynastic house. Much is made of how al-Man‚ūr and other caliphs extended hospitality and affection to mawālī, even Blacks and those in lowly professions. These considerations are compared to the Prophet’s honouring of his own mawlā, Zayd b. Óāritha and his son, along with positions of leadership over Arabs that he gave to each of them. The boasts of the mawālī close with the seemingly humble claim that they are closer in nature to the common subjects of the caliphate and thus more compassionate and sympathetic toward them. But these traits are unexpectedly used to justify their contentiously asking who could therefore be more entitled to preference and position.105 The boast of the Banawī presses the advantage of his sharing with the ʿAbbāsid dynasty both its Khurasanian origins and its current headquarters in Baghdad and thus leads to his claim that he is more deserving of favour than an Arab or mawlā. This is followed by a long celebration of the varied styles of combat mastered by the Abnāʾ and of their patience through hardships, punishments and harsh treatment from their own kin. Their history is effectively tied to the triumph of the dynasty itself so that any suggestion that the boast is exaggerated would diminish the whole ʿAbbāsid endeavour along with them. Still, the boast ends with virtually the same rhetorical question as the mawālī are said to have asked, and the similar wording betrays the futility of the boasting at the expense of other groups.106 Even as the arguments of the speaker conclude, the reader may still expect that al-Fatª, or al-JāªiÕ on his behalf, is about to deliver a refutation. Instead, he will only find al-JāªiÕ making subtle criticisms of the manner in which the arguments were presented, and it gradually becomes clear that the merits praised by the speaker are being tacitly acknowledged as ­complementary to the coming praise of the Turks. We can easily appreciate the gravity of such ethnic competition rising within an army, but the particular delicacy of al-JāªiÕ’s task lies in seeking to praise the virtues of the Turks without entering into direct comparisons with the other groups. The points to be celebrated – courage, stamina, ingenuity in battle, fearsome reputations and past victories, to name some important points of boasting – are largely relative and have little meaning unless they are used to set those praised apart from other groups. This would appear to be al-JāªiÕ’s reason for suggesting that to follow the speaker’s account of the

160  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. boasts of the other groups with similar boasts on behalf of the Turks could only be divisive: If I chose, God preserve you, after all these arguments, and at the end of these claims, to resort to parleying over the merits of the Turks and comparing their traits with those of all these groups, I would be writing this book in accord with the method used by controversialists in their books, and the way of sectarians in the disagreements that occur among them.107

Instead of attempting to outdo the speaker’s boasts on behalf of the other factions and feeding the flames of controversy, al-JāªiÕ proposes to compile a book that unites rather than divides the troops and increases the harmony that already exists among them. To do this he will simply convey a summary of reports he remembers or has ‘snatched from the mouths of men’, along with a few things he has witnessed himself.108 The reader will then be left to assess the evidence if he wishes to compare the different groups’ accomplishments.109 It seems, then, that al-JāªiÕ is indeed inviting the reader to weigh what he will say of the Turks against what can be said of the other groups, but he does not want his account of the Turks’ merits to be seen as an attempt to counter or outdo the speaker’s praise of the other groups. One sentence in this passage is, perhaps, puzzling given what actually follows in the text: ‘We will mention the tools and instruments that have been retained by all of these groups (jamīʿ al-a‚nāf ) and then consider which groups were best in employing them and most self-reliant in using them.’110 Most of the text after this point refers to the Turks specifically, with only a few largely irrelevant references to the other groups praised by the speaker. If ‘tools and instruments’ are to be understood as physical weapons, al-JāªiÕ may be referring to certain points in a long passage, in which the ʿAbbāsid commander Óumayd b. ʿAbd al-Óamīd (d. 210/825 or -6) is quoted comparing the skills of the Turks with those of the feared Kharijite sectarians. During the course of his long argument for the superiority of the Turks, Óumayd makes a few tangential references to the skills of the Khurasanians, nomadic Arabs and the Abnāʾ, in mounted attacks, archery and the use of lances.111 But these references alone could scarcely be held up as a fair comparison of these groups to the surrounding materials celebrating the Turks.

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 161 In the context of the entire work before us it seems more likely that al-JāªiÕ only means that he will complement the description of the military virtues of the other groups who have already been praised in the statements related from the offending speaker by offering an account of the Turks’ merits and thus make the description of the soldiery complete. Al-JāªiÕ would then be taking responsibility for all he has related from al-Fatª in the latter’s quotation of this speaker and effectively endorsing its content, though not its intention in the original context of the speech. This view finds support on the final page of the text, where al-JāªiÕ claims to have related the virtues of all the contingents involved in more general terms: ‘We have spoken of the merits of all the groups, summing up what has come to us and what we know of.’112 Unless we are to understand these statements as referring to other (lost or forgotten) books as well, we can only assume al-JāªiÕ is acknowledging his own responsibility for including what he related from al-Fatª of the speaker’s enumeration of the other groups’ merits and implying that it has helped to complete the book. If it is not already clear, the author is acknowledging that the speech has not been remembered verbatim but reconstructed from his own knowledge of these groups’ true merits, which he knows al-Fatª­ ­appreciates as well. In the light of al-JāªiÕ’s implicit admission of responsibility for the entire text, we can better appreciate how carefully he has structured his account of al-Fatª’s angry complaint against the speaker so as to dramatise the dangers of ethnic contentions while leading up to the desired form of reconciliation. Through the account of the speaker’s words, the competing ambitions of the Khurasanians, Arabs, mawālī and Abnāʾ for a greater role in the ʿAbbāsid military are portrayed as dangerous threats to the community for which the offending speaker, rather than the prominent members of these groups, is responsible. The reader is meant to feel the atmosphere of reckless ambition and competition raised by the form and tenor of the speech while gradually becoming aware that neither al-Fatª nor al-JāªiÕ means to deny the praise it contains for the groups involved. Such a dramatisation gives the sentiments of the other groups a spirited and provocative voice, while ultimately drawing all into a conciliatory whole that is very much designed to protect the status quo of Turkish domination within the army. Al-JāªiÕ has carefully arranged all in R. fī Manāqib al-Turk to forestall

162  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. any challenge to the Turks’ dominance in the military and to emphasise the particular position occupied by al-Fatª. He may assert that his long description of the Turks’ military virtues will be of another order than the offending speaker’s account of the other groups’ boasts, but simply by relating them as justified by the competitive claims advanced on the lips of al-Fatª, he effectively enters the fray of comparison on terms very favourable to his own purpose. The fact that the boasts conveyed are portrayed in a largely sympathetic light and tacitly acknowledged as valid in themselves – but still objectionable in the context – makes almost anything further to be said on behalf of their rights within the state appear dangerous. Al-Fatª has been portrayed rather intimidatingly as the closest link between al-Mutawakkil himself and the group that enjoyed effective hegemony over the dynasty’s military. The way he claims to be relating the offending speech on the claims of the other groups can only suggest that he considers himself fully aware of all their merits and past accomplishments. The suggestion seems to be that each of the groups is an essential part of the state’s power but that the contributions of each have already been considered in the formation of the existing structures. Any challenge to the status quo risks upsetting the harmony of the state and risks the wrath of the man most responsible for holding the Muslim umma together under its rightful ruler. Notes 1. E.g. quotes of his Muʿtazilī teacher al-NaÕÕām, K. al-Óayawān V, pp. 35–6; statements of Blacks (sometimes specifically the East African Zanj) in K. Fakhr al-Sūdān ʿalā al-bī∂ān, Rasāʾil I, pp. 193–225, passim. My references to passages in al-JāªiÕ’s writings in this section has benefited from the references compiled by J. al-ʿAttār, ‘The Views of al-JāªiÕ Concerning Nations as Reflected in his Works: An Exposé and Critique’, MA thesis, American University in Beirut, 1989. 2. E.g. Rasāʾil II, p. 387; III, p. 315. For a discussion of al-JāªiÕ’s use of Aristotle’s treatises on animals, see A. Hārūn in his introduction to his edition of K. al-Óayawān, pp. 20–2. For a discussion of al-JāªiÕ’s original contributions, see S. Enderwitz, ‘Culture, History and Religion: À Propos the Introduction of the Kitāb al-ªayawān’, in A. Heinemann et al. (eds), Al-JāªiÕ: A Muslim Humanist for our Time (Berlin: Orient-Institut Berlin, 2009), pp. 229–37.

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 163 3. J. Mattock and M. Lyons (eds and trans.), Kitāb Buqrā† fī al-amrā∂ al-bilādiyya: Hippocrates: On Endemic Diseases (Airs, Waters and Places) (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons for the Cambridge Middle East Centre, 1969). For a discussion of the attribution and importance of the Greek original of this work, see B. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 60–9. For a brief description of the influence of the theory of humours in Muslim thought, see L. Conrad, ‘˝aʿūn and Wabāʾ: Conceptions of Plague and Pestilence in Early Islam’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 25/3 (1982): 274–9. 4. For a history of these ideas in Ancient Rome and the modern West, see Isaac, The Invention of Racism, pp. 8–13 and 55–109. 5. E.g. Hippocrates on the gentle, compliant nature of Asiatics in relation to the equable climate of their land, quoted in Isaac, The Invention of Racism, p. 62. 6. E.g. al-JāªiÕ, Kitāb al-Akhbār wa kayfa tu‚iªª, fragment, ed. and trans. into French by C. Pellat in ‘Al-ĞāªiÕ, Les Nations Civilizées et les Croyances Religeuses’, Journal Asiatique 255 (1967): 101. Al-JāªiÕ is criticising those who attribute religious or political factionalism to the influence of the soil, but is clearly in agreement that the other traits of character, appearance and language are shaped by physical environment. 7. K. al-Óayawān II, pp. 314–15. On the deleterious influence of hot or cold climates, compare the views of Galen discussed in Isaac, The Invention of Racism, pp. 85–7. 8. K. al-Óayawān III, pp. 244–5; V, pp. 35–6. See also K. al-Óayawān IV, pp. 70–3, and ʿAttār, The Views of al-JāªiÕ, pp. 109–10. 9. K. al-Bur‚ān, p. 78; Rasāʾil I, pp. 219–20. B. Lewis, in Race and Slavery in the Middle East (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 123–4, n. 9, suggests that al-JāªiÕ’s allusions to those who view blackness as a deformity and punishment may derive from the tradition found in later sources that they are descended from Ham, the son of Noah, who in some Muslim versions of the story deriving from Genesis 10 prays that Ham be cursed with blackness and servitude. Compare al-˝abarī, Tārīkh al-rusul wa-almulūk, 7 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2005), I, p. 126. 10. See, for example, al-Bayān I, pp. 137 and 385. In K. al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā (The Response to the Christians), al-JāªiÕ draws a firm line between the Christian Byzantines (Rūm) of his own era and Greeks (Yūnān), whom he regards as a bygone nation, accusing the former of co-opting the sciences and civilisation of the latter without contributions of their own; Rasāʾil III, pp. 314–15.

164  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. 11. See Isaac, The Invention of Racism, pp. 76–8, 81–2, 90–9. 12. Rasāʾil I, pp. 62–3. Similarly, the corrupting elements of Ahwāz would have erased the noble features that characterise members of the Prophet’s clan of the Banū Hāshim living there, were it not that God’s will has prevailed; Rasāʾil IV, pp. 135–6. 13. Rasāʾil IV, p. 190. 14. Thus differences in the elements of the lands across Khurasan and Fars have produced noticeable differences of language among Persians who share a single origin; Rasāʾil I, p. 211. Language is also listed among the characteristics of peoples affected by differences in waters, air and substance (†īna); al-Akhbār wa kayfa tu‚īªª, p. 101. See also al-Bayān I, p. 163; al-Bayān III, pp. 292–4. Apparently, fertile land and fine food were considered distractions from poetry, but in the case of the tribe of Thaqīf, al-JāªiÕ maintains that it is the share in poetry apportioned by God, along with their lands and their accompanying dispositions (aʿrāq), that has caused their talent for poetry; K. al-Óayawān IV, pp. 380–1. 15. See Ibn ManÕūr, Lisān al-ʿArab, 18 vols in 9 vols (Beirut: Dār Íādir, 2005), X, p. 116, s.v. ‘ʿ.r.q.’; J. Chelhod, ‘ʿIrk’, EI2 IV, pp. 78–9. ˙ 16. Al-Bukhārī, Íaªīª al-Bukhārī bi-ªāshiyat al-Imām al-Sindī, 4 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1998), III, p. 497, no. 5,305; IV, p. 351, no. 6,847; Chelhod, ‘ʿIrk’, p. 78. ˙ 17. Yazīd’s companions are Anas b. Malik (d. 93/712) and al-Óasan al-Ba‚rī (d. 110/726); al-Bayān I, pp. 290 and 308. While Anas and al-Óasan spent most of their careers in Basra rather than the Arabian Peninsula and this may be among the places included in ‘the lands of Islam’, al-JāªiÕ, at least, considers his native city the line between the place of (Arabic) eloquence (al-fa‚āªā) and the place where the corrupting effects of ‘foreignness’ (ʿujma) begins; al-Bayān I, pp. 19 and 163. 18. K. al-Óayawān I, p. 106, pp. 116–20, p. 135. Of course there is no question of heredity with eunuchs, but the belief that the removal of a member causes effects that pervade the body resembles a statement of Hippocrates that semen descends from all members of the body, passing on their healthy or diseased traits. Thus the legendary race of ‘long heads’ began the practice of moulding the soft heads of their babies with their hands, but the practice has led to a permanent hereditary trait; Kitāb Buqrā†, pp. 127–30 (Arabic and English translation). See Isaac, The Invention of Racism, pp. 74–5. 19. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 126–7. Nothing would prevent us from taking the reference to

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 165 these teachings ‘penetrating flesh and blood’ as a metaphor, but in the light of the assumptions on humours and ancestry we have seen, it seems quite possible that al-JāªiÕ is thinking in literal terms here. Of course, he is not implying that the Byzantines were actually pacifist in practice, but that their natural inclination to warfare and courage had been destroyed. As ʿAttār, The Views of al-JāªiÕ, p. 79, n. 2, suggests, a passage in C. Pellat (ed.), Kitāb al-Tarbīʿ wa-al-tadwīr (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1955), p. 77, points to the irony of the Byzantines not being enslaved or pillaged even though their religion, as al-JāªiÕ understands it, has no place for fighting. 20. Rasāʾil I, p. 98. 21. Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, ed. A. Sayyid, 4 parts in 2 vols (London: Muʾassasat al-Furqān lil-Turāth al-Islāmī, 2009), I, part 2, p. 578; Yāqūt al-Óamawī, Muʿjam al-Udabāʾ Irshād al-arīb ilā maʿrifat al-adīb, ed. I. ʿAbbās, 7 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1993), V, p. 2,101. There are more references in C. Pellat, Le Milieu Ba‚rien et la Formation de ĞāªiÕ (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1953), pp. 51–2. 22. Pellat, Le Mileu Ba‚rien, pp. 52–3. 23. Al-Bayān II, pp. 71–3. Another version appears in K. al-Óanīn ilā al-aw†ān, Rasāʾil II, pp. 405–6. 24. It is the Bedouins’ inability to comprehend broken Arabic and solecisms that qualifies them as informants. Al-JāªiÕ views his ability to comprehend the broken syntax of his servant as a defect in his own language; al-Bayān I, pp. 162–3. Of course it is precisely this ‘defect’ that allows urban theologians and litterateurs like him to serve as interpreters of the pure language of revelation to a changing polyglot society, while Bedouins are seen as helpless when dealing with ‘corrupted’ language. On the tendencies of urban dialects to change more rapidly than those of peripheral areas, see P. Trudgill, ‘Contact and Isolation in Linguistic Change’, in L. Beivik and E. Jahr (eds), Language Change: Contributions to the Study of its Causes (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989), p. 228. 25. Rasāʾil IV, p. 103. They said: the speakers may be the imaginary agents whom al-JāªiÕ has been quoting in early parts of K. al-Wukalāʾ, but the gap which precedes this passage in the surviving text leaves the attribution uncertain. In any case, al-JāªiÕ is in sympathy with the speakers’ argument here, making similar claims elsewhere, e.g. Rasāʾil I, p. 67. On the divine apportionment (qisma) of blessings, see also J. al-ʿAttār, ‘Al-JāªiÕ’s Original View of Arabic in Relation to the Holy Qurʾān’, in Democracy in the Middle East: Proceedings of

166  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. the Annual Conference of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, 8–10 July 1992, University of St Andrews (Exeter: BRISMES, 1992), pp. 25–6. 26. Rasāʾil I, p. 67. 27. Chapter 2 above. 28. Rasāʾil I, pp. 102–3. 29. Rasāʾil III, p. 243. 30. Rasāʾil II, pp. 379–412; Rasāʾil IV, pp. 107–47. 31. Rasāʾil II, p. 383. 32. Rasāʾil III, pp. 110–11. 33. Rasāʾil III, p. 244. 34. Rasāʾil III, p. 244. 35. The attribution was rejected on stylistic grounds by Óasan al-Sandūbī in his 1931 book (cited by Hārūn in his introductory note; Rasāʾil II, p. 380). Hārūn himself is equally adamant that the style resembles that of al-JāªiÕ and notes that all materials cited are datable by his time, while mentioning that C. Brockelman leaves the question undecided; Rasāʾil II, pp. 380–1. C. Pellat is puzzled that the text is not included in the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm, but declares that the question cannot be easily settled; ‘Nouvel Essai d’Inventaire de l’Œuvre ĞāªiÕienne’, Arabica 31 (1984), p. 138. More recently, two scholars, both working on a text by Ibn al-Marzubān that shares some materials with our R. al-Óanīn, have argued that the text heretofore ascribed to al-JāªiÕ is the work of a third-/ninth-century litterateur, Mūsā b. ʿĪsā al-Kisrawī; J. al-ʿA†iyya, in his introduction to Ibn al-Marzubān, Al-Óanīn ilā al-Aw†ān (Beirut: ʿĀlam al-Kitāb, 1987), pp. 9–12; S. al-Hadrūsī, in his introduction to Al-Muntahā fi l-kamāl des Muªammad Ibn Sahl Ibn al-Marzubān al-KarŸī (Berlin: Klaus Shwarz, 1988), pp. 43–4. I consider this attribution highly doubtful on the evidence of the two texts. Quotations on the motif of homesickness were a commonplace of early Arabic literature to which numerous anthologies and sections of longer works were devoted. In the surviving examples, frequent borrowing of quoted materials from prior collections is the rule. See al-ʿA†iyya’s introduction, pp. 9–10; W. al-Qadi, ‘Dislocation and Nostalgia: al-ªanīn ilā al-aw†ān: Expressions of Alienation in Early Arabic Literature’, in A. Neuwirth et al. (eds), Myths, Historical Archetypes and Symbolic Figures in Arabic Literature: Towards a New Hermeneutic Approach (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), pp. 3–31. For both al-ʿA†iyya and al-Hadrūsī, a central argument for the attribution of our R. al-Óanīn to al-Kisrawī is the similarity between its introduction and a quotation appearing at the opening

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 167 of Ibn al-Marzubān’s K. al-Óanīn ilā al-aw†ān, which the author quotes from al-Kisrawī as the latter’s explanation for compiling his earlier book of the same title. The passage, in which al-Kisrawī claims to have been brought to write his book by a conversation he claims to have had with a man who prospered while homesick for his native land, is obviously related to the passage from our R. al-Óanīn in which the author tells of his conversation with a ‘king’; al-Hadrūsī, p. 145, p. 147n (Arabic text); Ibn al-Marzubān, K. al-Óanīn, p. 35; Rasāʾil II, pp. 383–4. Even though Ibn al-Marzubān claims to have read al-Kisrawī’s book, the differences between the brief passage that he quotes and the passage in our text are striking, not least because the individual mentioned in the former is not referred to as a ruler. The veracity of the claim that al-Kisrawī had this conversation with the exile himself is called into question by comparison to a later passage on a conversation with a Bedouin which Ibn al-Marzubān quotes from the author of the K. al-Óanīn that he knows (i.e. al-Kisrawī’s); al-Hadrūsī, pp. 150–1, with the parallel section of our R. al-Óanīn, Rasāʾil II, pp. 393–6. The author of our R. al-Óanīn claims to have heard the story from al-Tūzī (d. 230 ah) via a man of ʿUrayna, who heard it from a certain Hāshimī man, who had the conversation with the Bedouin; p. 393. In Ibn al-Marzubān’s quotation, al-Kisrawī claims to have heard it from the Hāshimī himself; al-Hadrūsī, p. 150. If Ibn al-Marzubān (or al-Kisrawī) abridges the transmission of his source through carelessness or literary convenience here, we have no reason to assume he has not done so in the case of the opening passage, on which the attribution of our R. al-Óanīn to al-Kisrawī rests with all of its weight. Al-Kisrawī’s K. al-Óanīn was most likely a highly derivative collection including many passages remembered or copied in gist from materials heard at an oral reading of our R. al-Óanīn and/ or later works that shared materials with it. In some cases, passages in our R. al-Óanīn are verbally closer to parallel ones in al-JāªiÕ’s other works than to the versions Ibn al-Marzubān provides: compare the comment on a verse from the Qurʾān, Rasāʾil II, p. 389, to Rasāʾil IV, p. 112, and al-Hadrūsī, p. 149. The passages Ibn al-Marzubān’s K. al-Óanīn shares with our R. al-Óanīn are mainly quotations of verse or sayings, the texts of which are often closer to parallel citations in other compilations such as al-Bayhaqī’s Kitāb al-Maªāsin wa-al-masāwī (Beirut: Dār Bayrūt, 1984), pp. 301–4, and [Pseudo-] al-JāªiÕ, Kitāb al-Maªāsin wa-al-A∂dād, ed. Y. Faraªāt (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1997), pp. 102–7, both of which may derive from al-Kisrawī’s lost book. 36. Rasāʾil II, p. 383.

168  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. 37. For a discussion of the rise of the anthology and a perceptive categorisation of its varieties and forms, see B. Orfali, ‘A Sketch Map of Arabic Poetry Anthologies up to the Fall of Baghdad’, Journal of Arabic Literature 43/1 (2012): 29–59. Note, however, that the author follows the mistaken attribution of our R. al-Óanīn to al-Kisrawī; p. 51. 38. Rasāʾil II, pp. 383–4. 39. Al-JāªiÕ does sometimes associate the title ‘ruler’ or ‘king’ (malik) with lawless despotism, alien to Islam, as in his harsh criticism of the caliph Muʿāwiya (Rasāʾil II, p. 11), but he also frequently praises the statecraft of the Sasanian kings of Persia, suggesting that the traditions of their rule were a basis for the practices of the Muslim state. See, for example, Rasāʾil III, pp. 103–4 and 182, and K. al-Akhbār, p. 100. As for the identity of this ‘ruler’, a possible candidate may be the ʿAbbāsid commander and governor al-Afshīn, whose name was actually the hereditary title of his princely family from Ushrusana, near Samarqand. See H. Kennedy, When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005), pp. 6 and 216. I thank Julia Bray for this suggestion. 40. Rasāʾil III, p. 385. 41. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 107–47. 42. Rasāʾil IV, p. 109. 43. Rasāʾil IV, p. 110. 44. The description of Egypt in K. al-Aw†ān, Rasāʾil IV, pp. 131–4, emphasises its economic riches. If al-JāªiÕ included a section on Syria, it is missing from the extant text but likely stressed its importance for learning and trade. 45. Rasāʾil IV, p. 10. 46. It is not entirely clear from the language of the final sentence cited what would prevail if the holy cities were not placed first: it may be a given individual’s inclination to discuss his own homeland or it may be a discussion of people’s disposition toward their homelands in general. While the actual phrasing may appear closer to the latter possibility, al-JāªiÕ, in fact, goes on to discuss just this as he puts forth his theory of the divine plan that is evident in people’s attachments to different lands and climates – before beginning his description of Mecca – and, later, argues that he has not been guilty of placing what should come later first, since he has been speaking of homelands in general and not a specific country; Rasāʾil IV, p. 113. 47. This can be seen when he excuses himself for not beginning al-Bayān with the

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 169 section delineating the operative concept of bayān (exposition) ‘for the sake of a certain strategy’ (li-baʿ∂ al-tadbīr); al-Bayān I, p. 76. 48. Rasāʾil IV, p. 112. 49. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 114–28. 50. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 128–31. 51. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 131–4. 52. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 134–5. 53. Rasāʾil IV, p. 136. 54. Rasāʾil IV, pp. 136–8. 55. Rasāʾil IV, p. 142. 56. Rasā’il IV, pp. 142–3. 57. Rasāʾil IV, p. 143. 58. Rasaʾil IV, p. 139. This Jaʿfar b. Sulaymān may be the Basran ªadīth transmitter of the second/eighth century, known by the tribal nisba of al-¤ubaʿī. See al-Bayān II, p. 173n. 59. Rasāʾil IV, p. 110. 60. Rasāʾil I, pp. 173–226. 61. An example of a contemporary reaction to K. Fakhr al-Sūdān is Ibn Qutayba’s apparent assumption that the book reflects al-JāªiÕ’s ‘fondness for magnifying the insignificant until it is momentous’; Taʾwīl Mukhtalif al-Óadīth, ed. S. al-Sinnārī (Cairo: Dār al-Óadīth, 2006), pp. 110–11. 62. Rasāʾil I, p. 177. 63. Al-JāªiÕ mentions this book under the title Kitāb al-Íuraªāʾ wa-al-ªujanāʾ; K. al-Óayawān I, p. 4. For additional references, see Pellat, ‘Nouvel Essai’, p. 158 (no. 210). 64. Muªammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Fayrūzābādī, al-Qāmūs al-muªī†, ed. M. al-ʿArqsūsī (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1998), pp. 1, 239, s.v. h-j-n. 65. Rasāʾil I, pp. 178–92. 66. Rasāʾil I, p. 181. 67. Rasāʾil I, pp. 192–226 passim. 68. For a discussion of the arrangement of cited materials in this text, see M. V. McDonald, ‘Al-JāªiÕ’s Method of Composition: An Analysis of Risālat Fakhr al-Sūdān ʿalā al-Bī∂ān’, in Democracy in the Middle East: Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, 8–10 July 1992, University of St Andrews (Exeter: BRISMES, 1992), pp. 302–8. 69. Compare al-JāªiÕ’s direct statements, Rasāʾil I, pp. 179–80 and p. 192, with statements of the Blacks, p. 194.

170  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. 70. Rasāʾil I, p. 202. 71. Rasāʾil I, p. 211. 72. Al-Bayān III, pp. 291–2. Compare a passage sympathetically attributed to alFatª b. Khaqān, the addressee of K. Manāqib al-Turk; Rasāʾil I, p. 11. 73. Rasāʾil I, p. 195. 74. Rasāʾil I, pp. 203–9. 75. Rasāʾil I, p. 197. 76. Rasāʾil I, pp. 197–202. 77. Lewis, Race and Slavery, p. 32. The suggestion is that al-JāªiÕ wants to show that even ‘the lowly and despised Zanj’ could boast as the Persians do. Lewis, nevertheless, concedes that the praise of Blacks is partly serious. 78. Rasāʾil I, p. 225. Al-JāªiÕ mentions these two, now lost, books in R. fī al-Nābita, Rasāʾil II, p. 22, and K. al-Óayawān I, pp. 4–5. For other references, see Pellat, ‘Nouvel Essai’, pp. 129 (no. 15) and 153 (nos 173 and 174). 79. Hārūn’s edition contains two texts based on separate branches of the manuscript tradition, Rasāʾil I, pp. 3–86; Rasāʾil III, pp. 127–220. 80. Rasāʾil I, p. 36; Rasāʾil III, p. 196. For a discussion of the entire letter’s structure and its historical context, see M. V. McDonald, ‘Al-ĞāªiÕ and his Analysis of the Turks’, in U. Vermeulen and J. Van Reeth (eds), Law, Christianity and Modernism in Islamic Society (Leuven: Peters Press, 1998), pp. 27–38. 81. For a discussion of questions surrounding the composition of the text dedicated to al-Muʿta‚im, see McDonald, ‘Al-ĞāªiÕ and his Analysis of the Turks’, pp. 28 and 32. 82. McDonald, ‘Al-ĞāªiÕ and his Analysis of the Turks’, p. 36, suggests that the earlier letter ends at Rasāʾil I, p. 77, where anecdotes about al-Fatª’s ancestor Khāqān begin. While I find the suggestion plausible, my concern here is with the final page, where al-JāªiÕ mentions having written on ‘the merits of all the types’ (manāqib jamīʿ al-a‚nāf ), something he only does in the context of quoting al-Fatª’s account of the offending speech; p. 86. The text in Rasāʾil III lacks all of the materials from p. 74 of Rasāʾil I onwards, apart from the final two paragraphs, the texts of which differ only slightly; Rasāʾil III, p. 220, Rasāʾil I, p. 86. Of these later materials, only these final paragraphs shared between the texts will figure in my argument. 83. For a brief account of al-Mutawakkil’s ongoing quest to counter the influence of the Turks, see Kennedy, When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World, pp. 236–9, 241–2, 261–7.

u nd isclosed ori g i ns and home l a n d s  | 171 84. For a discussion of the possible circumstances of the letter’s composition, see McDonald, ‘Al-ĞāªiÕ and his Analysis of the Turks’, pp. 28–9 and 36–8. 85. Ibn al-Nadīm, K. al-Fihrist, pp. 578–9. 86. Rasāʾil III, p. 163. 87. Rasāʾil III, p. 164. 88. Rasāʾil III, pp. 164–8. 89. Rasāʾil III, pp. 168–88; Rasāʾil I, pp. 8–28. 90. Rasāʾil I, pp. 8–9. The parallel text in Rasāʾil III, p. 167, lacks ‘not consulting the leaders among them, or regarding the skilled orators ’. 91. Rasāʾil III, p. 171. 92. Rasāʾil III, pp. 167–8. 93. Rasāʾil I, pp. 9–11. The parallel text in Rasāʾil III, pp. 168–70, lacks mention of Meccans and Medinans. As McDonald, ‘Al-ĞāªiÕ and his Analysis of the Turks’, p. 30, notes, ‘as a member of the Turkish ruling family in Far∫āna, where much of the population was still of Iranian stock, al-Fatª would have been most anxious to discourage any hostility between the two groups’. 94. Rasāʾil III, p. 170. 95. Rasāʾil III, p. 171. The two mentions of sons (abnāʾ) here are, perhaps, a sort of pun, referring to both descendants in a general sense and the title of this group specifically. 96. For a discussion of the scholarly views of the history of the Abnāʾ and the political implications of their title, see J. Turner, ‘The abnāʾ al-dawla: The Definition and Legitimation of Identity in Response to the Fourth Fitna’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 124/1 (2004): 1–22. 97. Rasāʾil III, pp. 171–2. 98. Rasāʾil III, p. 195. 99. Rasāʾil III, p. 172. 100. Rasāʾil III, pp. 174–5. 101. Rasāʾīl III, pp. 172 and 177–8. 102. Rasāʾil III, pp. 176–7. 103. Rasāʾil III, p. 179. 104. Rasāʾil III, pp. 179–82. The attribution of these boasts to the Arabs is missing from the parallel passage in Rasāʾil I, p. 21, but the omission there is likely to be an error. 105. Rasāʾil III, pp. 182–5. 106. Rasāʾil III, pp. 185–8. 107. Rasāʾil III, p. 189.

172  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. 108. Rasāʾil III, p. 189. 109. Rasāʾil III, p. 190. 110. Rasāʾil III, p. 189. It is clear that a‚nāf (literally ‘types’) refers to human groups in this text. See, for example, pp. 172 and 189. 111. Rasāʾil III, pp. 205 and 210–11. On Óumayd, see K. al-Óayawān VI, p. 421, n. 1. 112. Rasāʾil III, p. 220.

4 Faulting Misers in the Introduction to Kitaˉb al-Bukhalaˉʾ

I

n the preceding chapters we have seen how the epistolary frame often liberates the audience from authorial presumption and leaves them free to assess the significance of the materials for themselves. The intervening presence of the addressee allows the author to dispense with what an expository text normally implies about the needs and predispositions of the reader. We have seen, however, that the resulting freedom of the reader can be al-JāªiÕ’s way of gently prompting – we might even say manipulating – him to arrive at the desired conclusion. The reader may be steered toward adopting a confident and yet circumspect attitude toward sectarian or doctrinal adversaries. He may be guided toward finding a position intermediate between two extremes or be impelled to reflect on the biases he is bringing to his reading. But, while it seems clear that al-JāªiÕ has carefully planned the direction his audience is likely to take in response to the text, the reader is given to feel a great degree of independence in evaluating the cogency of the arguments and materials presented. The introduction to one of al-JāªiÕ’s most popular and entertaining texts, Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ (The Book of Misers), may initially strike us as offering the reader a similar freedom, as he is prompted to distance himself from the patently hypocritical stances adopted by the addressee, who wants to read stories of greed in others.1 Invited to contrast himself with the carefully planted contradictions in the addressee’s stance toward miserliness, the reader is indeed guided toward adopting a moderate position: neither overlooking miserliness in himself while ridiculing it in others, nor making an ill-advised attempt to alter his own nature by affecting generosity. But the path on which the reader is effectively led as he is prompted to distance himself from the shifting and contradictory stances of the addressee turns out to be 173

174  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. a treacherous one. By the end of his request the addressee reveals himself to be not the innocent he initially seemed but a cunning social manipulator bent on securing a reputation for generosity for himself, while conserving his resources. The reader is thus led, by way of contrasting himself with the addressee, through the steps of an implied dialectic leading him to face the social contradictions that attend his wanting to read of and mock avarice in others. This, perhaps the most sophisticated of al-JāªiÕ’s epistolary prefaces, is, in a sense, designed more to ensnare than to liberate. Yet the goal ultimately remains one of encouraging reflection and the reader’s examination of his own motive in reading. There is nothing malicious in the traps al-JāªiÕ lays for his unsuspecting audience and by the end of the introduction to K. al-Bukhalāʾ a tone of self-parody becomes obvious, showing the author understands well that his audience’s motives for reading such a book are no more problematic than his own motives for writing it. The trap al-JāªiÕ appears to lay for his contemporary readers is, then, one which leaves them to contemplate the attitudes and presuppositions that have brought them to read the text. The rhetorical ends that led him to construct this elaborately layered frame cannot be discussed without an adequate understanding of his larger purpose in compiling K. al-Bukhalāʾ, and this is a question to which scholars have given differing, although not necessarily contradictory, answers. In general, criticism has focused more on the anecdotes that constitute the larger share of the book’s materials, while the epistolary and oratorical sections, most likely pseudonymous constructions of al-JāªiÕ himself, have received less attention. In her perceptive analysis of Arabic compilations on miserliness, Fedwa Malti-Douglas emphasises how al-JāªiÕ’s delineation of miserly behaviours plays out against well-defined social norms. She groups the anecdotes into morphological categories, the most important of which concern either an individual’s eccentric measures of conservation in the use of a given object, or his clever attempt to circumvent social expectations of hospitality and giving.2 As important as these observations are to an analysis of the internal structure of the anecdotes, they fall short of suggesting a unifying principle because the ethical and social priorities involved in each of these categories differ considerably. We are still left wondering what has led al-JāªiÕ to include such varying materials in the same book.

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 175 Other studies have read K. al-Bukhalāʾ as covertly addressing contentious issues in ʿAbbāsid society, drawing connections between the misers al-JāªiÕ portrays and ethnic groups, social classes or, more recently, a rival religious faction.3 Lastly, Abdullah Cheikh-Moussa has shown how the more sophisticated misers’ abuse of eloquent language in justifying their ways violates and threatens the hierarchies of language and the social structure with which it is intimately connected.4 Scholarly debate on the relative merits of these readings is likely to continue, but, as useful as they all are for identifying certain strains running through K. al-Bukhalāʾ, all of them tend to overlook the equivocal, selfundermining tendencies of the book. Studies thus far have either focused on the misers themselves as the primary object of description in the text and overwhelmingly the target of its satire or have extended al-JāªiÕ’s mockery of misers to specific social groups and trends by way of association. It can hardly be doubted that part of the author’s aim is to portray miserliness as a pathetic and, unfortunately, prevalent vice. In addition, the book probably does insinuate some comparisons between misers and the groups these scholars describe, as the examples they offer attest. But one only needs to recognise a little of what is said between the lines – and, in fact, shapes the book’s entire parodic structure – to become aware of how the satirical bite of K. al-Bukhalāʾ strikes as sharply at gossip and fault-finding over alleged miserliness as it does at miserliness itself. Some descriptions of miserly behaviours are taken to such an extreme that one can hardly believe the author intends them to be taken seriously. Some of the stories related take place in the privacy of the homes of the misers concerned and are patently fabrications, unless we suppose – what would be still meaner in spirit – that al-JāªiÕ maintains a network of informers among the households of these alleged misers. Moreover, a book of the scope and detail of K. al-Bukhalāʾ, if understood merely as an unequivocal satire of miserliness, would be as eccentric an undertaking as any of the absurd measures of conservation taken by the individuals portrayed in the anecdotes. The self-parodying hypocrisy of the text has a great deal to do with the ironies of its structure as a collection: the gathering and keeping store of anecdotes and reports about miserliness in others is a ‘miserly’ practice in a very palpable sense, which I will be discussing shortly. Yet despite the double-edged satire of miserliness and gossip that pervades

176  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. the book and the differing forms and situations in which avarice is explored, K. al-Bukhalāʾ remains one of the most unified and least digressive of al-JāªiÕ’s major works: aside from a few tangential remarks, everything in the text can be related with little extrapolation to the word ‘miserliness’ (bukhl ). But, as Wadīʿa al-Najm emphasises in her lengthy discussion of K. al-Bukhalāʾ, the early ʿAbbāsid society in which this book appeared was one in which cultural systems with greatly differing values and expectations concerning generosity and the accumulation of property were colliding.5 Traditional Arabian, Islamic and foreign (notably Persian) urban cultures each brought their understanding of the ideals and social expectations behind the concept of miserliness and its opposite ‘generosity’ (jūd ), all intimately connected with the economic conditions of their origins. The social tensions and personal dilemmas associated with these conflicting ideals and the pressures of changing economic conditions were played out in the contested semantics of the word bukhl, along with those of synonyms, antonyms, euphemisms and their derivatives. The cluster of terms surrounding expectations of sharing has its basis in an attempt to establish standards of behaviour in economic matters. The morally reprehensible implications of the word ‘bukhl ’ were fixed by its usage in the Qurʾān and other Muslim sources, while the shame it carried had deep roots in the Arabian heritage that was still transmitted in poetry and proverbs but stemmed from a society whose conditions and values differed markedly. But notwithstanding this confluence of cultural ideals, for al-JāªiÕ, as we shall see, the values implicit in the words bukhl and jūd were inevitably relative ones. And in this his conception was very much at odds with the usage of many of his contemporaries. It is precisely over the dynamics of assigning a word with such a contested range of meaning to a person that the addressee’s requests in the introduction become a challenge for the reader and compel him to face the problems of self-interest and self-perception that attend its usage. As in the texts we have studied in the earlier chapters, the reader is invited to distance himself from the addressee in the latter’s naïveté and hypocrisy and is effectively steered toward adopting a relative conception of miserliness. But when the addressee unexpectedly turns to adopt this stance himself, his motives in doing so are soon exposed for being as hypocritical and miserly as anything that has gone before. When we see how intimately related the addressee’s views of

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 177 miserliness are to the opinions al-JāªiÕ expresses elsewhere – but never gives voice to directly in K. al-Bukhalāʾ – we will be in a better position to appreciate the depth of self-reflection behind what has been seen as one of the author’s lighter books. Generosity and the Golden Mean Al-JāªiÕ’s actual views on generosity and altruism as ideals are revealed most clearly in philological passages scattered throughout his writings, where his take on the concepts is distinctive and telling. They are also found in texts of ethical advice, where his purpose is more straightforward. Contrary to what those who read K. al-Bukhalāʾ as a defence of the ideals of generosity in the Arabic heritage seem to assume, his discussions of generosity and miserliness in other texts treat them in an ethical framework resembling that of Aristotle: virtue is cast as a golden mean between two vicious extremes. One example, among a number of conceptually similar passages, occurs in al-Bayān wa-al-tabyīn, in the context of a report by al-Aªnaf b. Qays, who objected to being praised for his ‘diffidence’, since the word indicates weakness and ‘good is never a cause of evil’. Al-JāªiÕ rejects this account, asserting that the word indeed refers to something appropriate. He then digresses in a passage on the relationships between words for virtues and the corresponding vices which clearly emphasises the mean as the highest good in the matters mentioned: Truly ‘diffidence’ (ªayāʾ) is a word for a certain ideal (miqdār min al-maqādīr), and what exceeds the ideal, you may call what you will. Similarly, ‘generosity’ (jūd ) is a word for a certain ideal and ‘prodigality’ (saraf ) for what is in excess of that ideal. Discretion (ªazm) has an ideal degree and ‘cowardice’ is a name for what exceeds the ideal. ‘Economy’ (iqti‚ād ) has an ideal degree and ‘miserliness’ (bukhl ) is a word for what departs from this ideal. And courage has an ideal degree and ‘recklessness’ and ‘rashness’ are words for what goes beyond the ideal.6

Attempting to show how the Arabic language identifies virtuous qualities taken to excess as vices, al-JāªiÕ carefully structures his pairings of words to counter traditions in the heritage that tended to valorise unrestrained courage and generosity. Prodigality (saraf ), which might as often have referred to

178  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. reckless indulgence and waste, is placed in the context of excess in giving or sharing, and this is what becomes here a fault on par with the highly pejorative label of miserliness. Economy or thrift (iqti‚ā∂), through the contrast established in the passage with miserliness, is also effectively linked to the contexts of monetary gifts and hospitality and, thus, all but conflated with generosity as a second side of the same coin: moderate sharing with others. In such passages, al-JāªiÕ is subtly undermining a more common conception in pre-modern Arabic-speaking society, in which the word describing the vice, bukhl, is defined as the antonym of the word for the virtue of generosity (jūd or karam).7 The traditional pairing of bukhl and jūd as opposites suggests an altruistic ideal, implying that the more one shares with others the more one is to be praised. Al-JāªiÕ, by instead pairing these words with words describing excess – and tying them more to the context of managing finances than to giving and hospitality – emphasises moderation and concern for oneself as well as for others. The similarity of al-JāªiÕ’s conception to Aristotle’s discussion of moderation in the Nichomachaean Ethics is readily recognised, even if we have no record of an Arabic version of that book by his time.8 Given al-JāªiÕ’s frequently attested interest in the philosopher he calls ‘the author of The Logic’ (‚āªib al-Man†iq), and the abundance of derivatives from the Ethics in classical sources that might have found their way, orally or in now lost translations, into Arabic, some type of dependency is possible. But the ideas involved are fairly simple, and it is also quite possible that the changing lifestyles of urban Muslims in the ʿAbbāsid era had led the thinking of some to develop along lines similar to Aristotle’s, or that al-JāªiÕ’s conception is his own invention and only resembles the Ethics by coincidence. Whatever their history, the similarities are undeniable, even if, as we shall soon see, al-JāªiÕ’s cultural milieu – and, therefore, his concerns and rhetorical aims – differed conspicuously from Aristotle’s. As linguists have taught us, words in a given language are part of a system of differences: a set of descriptive terms that may be exchanged one for another in a particular context, such as bukhl, iqti‚ād, jūd and saraf, have meaning only in relation to each other, as do their approximate counterparts in English. Limits in the meaning of each word are set by the presence of the others in the language, and yet the assignment of these labels to actual acts

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 179 of giving or withholding is variable.9 Without clearly delineated criteria to determine what exactly qualifies as meritorious giving or appropriate withholding, a vice such as miserliness (bukhl ) can easily be represented as the neighbouring virtue, economy or thrift (iqti‚ād). The possibility was recognised, and even approved of, by Aristotle, and, as a standard technique of persuasion known as ‘paradiastole’, was often discussed by classical and later European rhetoricians.10 Even while acknowledging the usefulness of this possibility when attempting to sway the masses toward a legitimate cause, Aristotle seems to assume that the discerning orator, in fact, knows what separates a given virtue from the neighbouring vice of excess. Al-JāªiÕ, more concerned in his writings on such matters with private relations among individuals than with the exigencies of public oratory, places more emphasis on the problems of self-perception. In the passage from al-Bayān above, he may show confidence in the ability of a sensible person to make such judgements concerning neighbouring virtues and excesses when he speaks of the ‘ideal’ (al-miqdār). But the difficulty with a highly negative word such as bukhl – clearly a dangerous vice in every Qurʾānic verse it appears in and a potent weapon in invective poetry – is that a person will rarely apply it to himself, unless he finds his own behaviour a cause for shame that requires immediate reform.11 To call oneself a miser is either to utterly reject the community’s scale of values (defying the Qurʾān’s condemning usage, as well as the shame the word carried in the pre-Islamic tradition) or to experience a powerful pressure to alter one’s behaviour and become more generous. Thus, in any person’s usage, the range of bukhl tends to begin somewhere farther down the continuum of withholding than that person’s own habit of behaviour. When we consider the wide variety of situations to which the concepts of generosity and miserliness can be applied and the fact that people generally have only limited knowledge of each other’s finances and expenses, the use of these labels becomes still trickier and their a­ pplicability to the real world more problematic. For all the variability in their application, the order of each of these words in the chain – bukhl, iqti‚ād, jūd, saraf – remains fixed along the continuum of possible behaviours, as do the positive or negative judgements they effectively declare. In any one person’s usage for a given context, the positive iqti‚ād cannot refer to withholding more than the negative bukhl.

180  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. The line between iqti‚ād and jūd is less clear for al-JāªiÕ, since both indicate an appropriate balance between giving and managing one’s finances, but saraf must mean giving inadvisably beyond the ideal amount denoted by jūd. The words bukhl and saraf cannot be made into virtues without coming into conflict with the community’s most basic values and authoritative texts. They can, however, be robbed of their meaning by ‘sliding’ them toward the respective extremes along the continuum of behaviours and using the neighbouring positive words, iqti‚ād or jūd, to refer to conduct most would consider extreme and inappropriate. Throughout K. al-Bukhalāʾ al-JāªiÕ systematically avoids mention of the views on these terms expressed in the passage we have seen from al-Bayān, but he frequently exploits their possibilities in parodic passages placed on the lips of extreme misers and advocates of unrestrained generosity.12 Despite the conceptual similarities to the Aristotelian view, al-JāªiÕ’s discussions of the ideal of generosity reflect markedly different assumptions and emphases. Aristotle conceives of generosity as a mean between wastefulness and avarice, but he sees far less need to caution about the former in the context of sharing as opposed to spending on one’s own pleasures. In the Ethics, a degree of ‘excess’ in giving is even a sign of a person’s unselfish character.13 Only giving to the wrong persons or on the wrong occasions meets with his explicit disapproval. His assumption appears to be that the threat of reducing oneself to poverty will prevent any dangerous excess, unless the giver is truly a fool.14 In contrast, al-JāªiÕ, as we saw in the passage from al-Bayān, treats the dangers of waste and miserliness evenly and obscures the difference between the contexts of giving and spending on one’s own needs. He does very little to illustrate the concrete situations in which giving may be overdone, and the passage thus has little meaning apart from the assertion that the virtues and vices in question are relative ones. His point of contention would appear to be with those who see vice and danger toward only one end of the continuum: those who – often drawing on the culturally important texts I will discuss shortly – admire unlimited generosity and reliance on God and fail to acknowledge the danger of impoverishing oneself. In R. fī al-Maʿāsh wa-al-maʿād, he strongly cautions his young addressee against carrying generosity too far and warns him of Satan’s scheming to rob him of prudence by encouraging the illusion that he is trusting in divine provision:

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 181 I warn you, as strongly as I may, against Satan’s leading you to stray from discretion by showing you negligence in the guise of reliance upon God. Thus, he would rob you of caution and leave you with laxity, turning you over to the fates. Truly, God has commanded reliance only when there is no way out and surrender to what He has fated when there is no help for it. This is what He has revealed in His Book and established in His sunna. For He has said ‘Take precautions!’ and ‘Do not throw yourselves into destruction with your own hands!’ The saying of the Prophet, peace be upon him, is ‘Bind her [your she-camel] and rely upon God!’ He was asked ‘What is discretion?’ and replied ‘Caution.’15

The urgent tone here is best understood as al-JāªiÕ’s criticism of strains in the cultural heritage which encouraged extravagant largesse and often failed to take an individual’s concern for himself and the future of his household into account. The pre-Islamic poet often vaunted his indifference to money, describing his reckless spending on wine for himself and his companions in defiance of a scolding wife.16 He might also boast of giving his camels to be divided through the ritual of drawing arrows (maysir) and of his readiness to share with orphans and the destitute.17 In the maxims of the poet al-Muthaqqib al-ʿAbdī, indifference to one’s possessions is part of a cheerful character, and their chief benefit is to fend off blame and protect one’s honour by dispersing them readily.18 While Islam, when it came, condemned wine-drinking and maysir, the tendency to admire extravagance remained prevalent in Muslim culture. The old poems continued to circulate, and verse was still composed in a similar vein. The accusation of avarice or poor hospitality remained a common theme in invective verse (hijāʾ) as well. In the Qurʾān itself, bukhl, or any of its derivatives, appears twelve times, all in strongly negative contexts. On the Day of Judgement, the miserly will find whatever they withheld in life hung around their necks (3:80). While saraf and its derivatives are used in negative senses even more often (in twentythree separate verses), many of these instances are in reference to excesses in areas other than giving (e.g. the sexual indulgence of the people of Lot; 7:81; and the Christians’ exalting Jesus as divine; 4:171, 5:77). Importantly, one verse does use the verbal form, ‘yusrifūna’ with reference to excess in giving:

182  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. God’s servants are described as ‘those who, when they spend [i.e. give], do not go to excess or give barely enough: there is a proper place between these [extremes]’ (25:67). Thus the Qurʾān can be read as affirming the danger of excessive giving, even while sternly warning against miserliness. But even if such verses can be reconciled with the emphasis al-JāªiÕ places on due caution in sharing with others, we must not fail to notice that he quietly steers away from the Qurʾān’s emphasis on helping the poor and on advancing the cause of Islam in most of his writings on avarice.19 In K. al-Bukhalāʾ the social context in which the issue of generosity arises most often is between individuals of relatively equal social standing, such as when hospitality is expected or a friend experiences a momentary need. Beggars occasionally appear in the book, but with nothing to suggest their need is particularly dire.20 When the poor are described, they are often tending to their own needs with amusing resourcefulness rather than seeking assistance from the wealthy, and the grimmer side of poverty is rarely evident.21 Thus even while al-JāªiÕ probes issues surrounding the psychology of a potential giver and a would-be recipient with great subtlety and insight, he tends to keep a considerable distance between the ideal of generosity and concern for the truly destitute. Still less does he relate it to broader questions of need and responsibility within the community. The ʿAbbāsid-era Reader and the Anecdotes of K. al-Bukhalāʾ The role played by the addressee – the way he is used to prevent the reader from establishing a comfortable distance between himself and the misers described – will be better appreciated if we first consider how a contemporary reader might have responded to the book’s anecdotal materials in the absence of such an epistolary frame. The anecdotes, for the most part, describe the stratagems or eccentricities of individuals who behave contrary to the Arab and Muslim ideals of generosity, hospitality and reliance upon God. Because these ideals are relative and greatly dependent on individual perceptions, anyone who reads such anecdotes with amusement is necessarily relating the individuals described to himself, the author and the community at large in some way. The reader is invited, then, to assign places along the bukhlsaraf continuum to all of these, positioning them in relation to each other, a process which greatly affects the quality – and social significance – of the

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 183 amusement he experiences. Bearing in mind his views expressed directly in other writings and, thus, realising that al-JāªiÕ is likely to ridicule not only misers but those who hold unrealistic expectations for generosity and readily fault others for avarice, we can consider the varied responses these relations make possible. Upon reading the initial anecdotes, a typical reader may focus on how each of the extreme misers described deviates from the ways of the community, but as his reading progresses, he encounters an increasing number of misers – among them individuals from a variety of scholarly fields and other walks of life. As the number of individual targets of ridicule increases, he becomes less likely to experience the book as a lampoon directed at particular eccentrics than as a commentary on the prevalence of avarice in the community. The reader, in this case, is now left to decide whether he himself is part of the social phenomenon implied with increasing clarity by the text as he reads. The quality of the reader’s laughter will change as he progresses from responding to the anecdotes with ‘This is the way a few deviant people are!’ to ‘This is the way far too many people are!’ to, perhaps, ‘This is the way, alas, we are!’ (Naturally, this response will also depend on how credible the reader finds the reports he is reading, a problem I shall discuss shortly.) Whatever the case, the tone of the humour is greatly affected by how the anecdotes reflect on the reader’s own self-image in relation to the virtues and vices involved. In the case of relative virtues, the self-image may undergo considerable revision in comparison to what one reads of others’ behaviour. If the reader decides that he does not share the avaricious tendencies portrayed, he can pride himself on his own relative generosity, as it is thrown into relief by stingy behaviour he reads of. But, even if he admits to sharing the avaricious inclinations of the group, he can at least claim for himself a degree of self-awareness that the misers in the anecdotes appear to lack. In this case, the reader still enjoys what Bakhtin calls a ‘surplus of vision’ in comparison to the avaricious individuals portrayed: he has the ability to perceive something about them that they cannot see in themselves, while being ready to admit the failings he shares with them.22 While the target of the satire in K. al-Bukhalāʾ tends to broaden, as reading progresses, from the individuals described toward, at least, a broader section of society, even the casual reader will sense that it is not only miserly

184  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. behaviour that is the object of the book’s satire. Many of the anecdotes al-JāªiÕ relates from his own experience or claims to have heard from acquaintances will likely test the limits of the reader’s credulity. As I have said, in the case of some stories, we are told of events that only the miser and members of his own household would be likely to know.23 Sometimes, we are even told what is going through the miser’s own greedy mind.24 When the reader suspects the reports he reads of have been embellished or fabricated outright, the text becomes more a parody of malicious gossip than of miserliness itself. And, even when he supposes the stories may be true, he may find something petty, even ‘miserly’, in the gathering and collecting of such a volume of stories on the avaricious as the book contains. The relativity of the virtues and vices in question dictates that the accumulation of reports of miserliness in others makes the behaviour of those who relate them to each other appear generous in comparison. Sharing a great many stories of extreme miserliness tends to slide the definition of the vice further down the continuum of possible behaviour and leaves those who exchange them feeling more justified in withholding their money and possessions from others. From this perspective the anecdotes have a material value as real as that of coins, and gathering them is equally self-serving. Moreover the sheer number of anecdotes and the energy that must have gone into gathering them shows the same eccentric obsessiveness and lack of a sense of proportion that many of the misers described exhibit. In many ways, then, the collected anecdotes of K. al-Bukhalāʾ take on a strong air of irony and become as much a satire of fault-finding and gossip in the community as of miserliness itself. As these ironic strains in the text gradually become more apparent, al-JāªiÕ, as the collector of the materials, may initially strike the reader as a relentless and hypocritical gossip himself, but the inescapable exaggeration in some of the stories and the vast number of reports provided will almost certainly lead him to suspect a note of self-parody. Al-JāªiÕ will then be seen as having constructed a persona for himself as collector of the anecdotes: a humorous portrait of a hypocritical and exaggerating gossip. (This portrait becomes more complicated when it is seen in relation to the addressee, as we shall soon see.) Also part of the satire of gossip are those from whom he claims – truthfully or not – to have heard the anecdotes he did not witness himself, and the number of individuals involved eventually transforms this

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 185 aspect of the book into a commentary on the community as well. The reader is again faced with a decision on how he will compare himself with those being satirised – in this case, for their quickness to fault others as misers and their eagerness to hear and repeat stories of them. If he acknowledges that he does share in this failing, he can, again, console himself with the knowledge that he is aware of this fault in himself, unlike the hypocritical transmitters of these stories. The reader still enjoys a surplus of vision over those whose gossiping ways are being parodied. When the element of satire directed at gossip and faulting miserliness in others becomes clear, the satire of misers themselves acquires a note of ambiguity and, perhaps, loses its sting, but it hardly disappears. Some of the funniest anecdotes are those in which the source’s exaggeration of the miser’s behaviour is obvious but the latter still reminds us of actual human folly we may have witnessed. The tension that results from keeping exaggeration and realism in balance heightens the reader’s amusement while maintaining the double edge of the social parody targeting both avarice and gossip.25 Those who feel they are free from a share in the avaricious tendencies portrayed cannot so easily avoid including themselves among the fault-finders, given that they have chosen to read a book about misers. Still, encountering the collected anecdotes alone without the epistolary introduction, each reader would be free to claim a degree of self-awareness if he admits to a share in either or both of these faults. He could still feel he enjoys a surplus of vision over the misers or fault-finders in either case. Without the intermediating presence of the addressee and the carefully timed shifts in his stance, the reader would be free to change his defences as his perceptions of the materials change, but would likely overlook the contradictions that such adaptations were likely to entail. Parallel to all the ways in which the reader might relate himself and the community to the social questions raised by the anecdotes run questions concerning his assumptions about al-JāªiÕ as compiler of the materials in the book. Does the writer mean to imply that he is himself free from the social phenomenon of avarice that emerges from the book? Does he endorse the credibility of those he reports the anecdotes from or is he simply relating what he has heard and leaving the reader to judge? Is he aware of exaggeration within individual anecdotes and in the overall scope of a book on supposedly

186  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. eccentric behaviours? As I have already suggested, once the text begins to undermine itself through the ironies that attend it as a project, al-JāªiÕ, as the ostensibly serious compiler, becomes a self-parodying persona quite distinct from the author himself. These complexities emerge from the collection of anecdotes in itself, but they are brought into relief and deepened in light of the author’s highly problematic relationship with his probably fictional addressee. A reader of the ʿAbbāsid era, approaching K. al-Bukhalāʾ with only its title and perhaps a brief word-of-mouth recommendation to guide him as to its contents, may well have considered reading it something of a guilty pleasure. The merits and even the licitness of laughter in itself were still a debated issue in some parts of the Muslim community, and no earlier Arabic prose work devoted to such a humorous or lightly entertaining topic of nearly its length has survived.26 Becoming involved in the exchange of stories of the miserly was to risk an accusation of slander or backbiting, vices that the Qurʾān (68:11) and the increasingly influential body of Prophetic tradition condemned.27 Spying surreptitiously on the failings of others and mocking them was also proscribed.28 Conceivably, the serious moral purpose which emerges from the layered insights and self-parodying aspects of the book could ease the reader’s conscience in this regard, but the reader might not have been fully aware of these layers without the introduction to bring them into focus. The relatively limited scope of prose genres circulating in the early Islamic centuries did not prepare the audience for such a complex and ironic treatment of serious ethical questions as K. al-Bukhalāʾ certainly is. The reader, then, would likely have approached the work, at least initially, as a frivolous, even slightly mischievous amusement, though hardly a scandalous one in an age when so much licentious verse was in circulation. Behind the light, largely good-natured and not-quite-innocent laughter the book must have provoked in its earliest audience lay a host of anxieties connected with early Muslim society’s noble and scarcely attainable ideals of generosity, and these are what the reader is confronted with in comparing himself to the addressee. The Addressee and the Trap of Self-awareness In the strategically arranged opening passages, al-JāªiÕ cites – without comment on his own part – the convoluted request of an anonymous addressee

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 187 who wants to read stories of the miserly. As the passages I discuss will show, the reader is invited to contrast himself with the addressee as the latter’s stance shifts unexpectedly. Successive stages of deceptively comfortable contrast with the changing addressee lead the reader through an implied dialectic toward the admission that self-interest tends to shape one’s perceptions of miserliness and generosity in oneself and others.29 The book opens with a brief invocation followed immediately by al-JāªiÕ’s citation of the request (apparently in the form of a letter) that he claims to have received from the addressee. While the reader may not initially suspect that the addressee’s letter is a fiction, the way in which al-JāªiÕ repeats the questions he purports to have received will clearly strike the reader as artificial and signal the author’s awareness of a broader audience. The addressee himself would require at most a brief allusion to the questions he had asked. The thorough citation al-JāªiÕ provides, in approximately four pages of questions restated in detail, becomes progressively more conspicuous – a wink to the outside reader indicating that the author is aware of him. The reader is thus encouraged to be wary of a possible duplicity in the author’s voice. What al-JāªiÕ will say or decline to say in what follows may not reflect what he intends for his wider audience. He may well be aware of the ironies and contradictions in the addressee’s words as he rehearses them without comment. By devoting so much space to the details of the addressee’s request, al-JāªiÕ further imputes to him a larger share of the responsibility for such a book being written, an excuse for which he will later satirise himself, as we shall see. The first paragraph of his request establishes the addressee as a man with an inordinate zeal for guarding his possessions, and the irony of his desire to laugh at miserliness in others is immediately apparent. The combination of direct and indirect citation along with the odd use of vocabulary subtly prompts the reader to consider how the author’s voice and purpose relate to those of the addressee and suggests he may be poking fun at him for the sake of a broader audience: You mentioned – God preserve you – that you had read my book classifying the tricks of daytime thieves and categorising the tricks of nighttime robbers. You said it had availed you in sealing off every crevice and fortifying every gap. You progressed – through subtle stratagems, which benefited

188  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. you, and odd tricks, which alarmed you – to a level that scheming could scarcely reach or craftiness surpass. You said the scale of its benefit was tremendous, and that to persist in studying was imperative. And you said ‘Write me some anecdotes of misers and some pretexts of the stingy: some that can be classed as humorous and some as quite earnest, so I can make of the humour a resting point and this rest, recuperation. For earnestness involves pains that keep one from rereading, and whoever seeks to benefit from a book must keep going back to it.’30

Some of the words employed here, especially in the indirect citation of the first paragraph, are hyperbolic (e.g. ‘tremendous’, ʿaÕīm; ‘alarmed’, nabbaha; and ‘imperative’, wājib), while others derive from incongruous contexts, underscoring the addressee’s excessive vigilance in guarding his property. ‘Classifying . . . and categorising tricks’ (ta‚nīf . . . wa-taf‚īl ªiyal ) rings of an elaborate, scientific taxonomy, while ‘fortifying every gap’ (ªa‚‚anta . . . kulla . . . ʿawrah) suggests an armed fortress to be protected. The use of indirect citation in the first paragraph, in contrast to the direct quotation of the second, prompts the reader to imagine the author’s voice in relation to that of the addressee he is citing and to consider how their tones may differ. This, together with the hyperbolic vocabulary in the first paragraph, may raise the possibility in the reader’s mind that al-JāªiÕ is deliberately exaggerating his paraphrase. Perhaps he is signalling to the reader that he is aware of the contradiction between the addressee’s anxiety over his own possessions and his desire to hear amusing stories about misers. Thus al-JāªiÕ invites his reader to share a surplus of vision he all too easily enjoys over the addressee with the latter’s obvious hypocrisy. While the request for a mixture of jest and earnest echoes similar statements in al-JāªiÕ’s other works, it also creates a certain impression of the addressee’s personality.31 His insistence on earnestness and desire to study the book thoroughly shows that the topic is, for some reason, a highly serious one for him. While this keen interest in the subject of misers will take on a new significance in the pages that follow, at this point the reader may simply suppose that the addressee desires to be prepared to counter the excuses and arguments of the stingy in refusing him hospitality, just as he has sought to arm himself against the tricks of thieves. Jest, he would have al-JāªiÕ believe,

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 189 is not an end in itself but a way of making the necessarily protracted study tolerable. The humour in avaricious behaviour for him appears to be connected with its deviance from the community’s standards, as the word ‘anecdotes’ (nawādir), with its connotations of eccentricity and rarity, implies.32 References, in the passages that follow immediately, to misers’ indifference to praise or blame and to the consensus of the Muslim community in its disapproval of avarice reinforce the suggestion that the vice is unusual and departs from the norm.33 But these initial implications of the rarity of miserliness may be undermined in the reader’s mind, if not by the presence of the fairly substantial volume before him, promising a large number of stories about misers, then by the great variety of miserly behaviours implied in the addressee’s own list of questions that follow. At the same time, the addressee attributes language to the miserly that implies they are curiously unaware of their own deviance: Why do they call miserliness ‘sound management’ (i‚lāª) and greed (shuªª) ‘economy’? Why do they honour withholding, ascribing it to prudence, and show hostility toward altruism, equating it with waste? Why do they deem generosity prodigality (saraf )? Why do they dash headlong into miserliness (bukhl ) and why do they choose what must be called by that name despite their scorn for it?34

Even when misers reject the charge of ‘miserliness’ that the addressee regards as incontestable, their disdain for having it applied to themselves suggests that they acknowledge that the vice does exist. The addressee enjoys the same surplus of vision over them that the reader has been invited to enjoy over him. Even when his own avarice and inability to recognise it in himself has been made evident, the addressee is confident in his ability to judge miserliness in others. He accuses them of misapplying terms that distinguish vice from neighbouring virtues and, in doing so, employs the very set of terms al-JāªiÕ uses in his own voice in other texts. But – to all appearances, so far – he shows no sign of recognising the same tendencies in his own behaviour. If we consider the case of a contemporary reader having just begun reading a book which he has heard contains amusing stories of misers, it is not hard to imagine him experiencing some pressure to examine himself already at this point. Misers themselves are portrayed as unaware of their own faults

190  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. and excesses and resistant to criticism from others. The addressee represents a person who is astonished at this failure of self-perception in others, but shows no sign of acknowledging the miserliness that his own zeal for protecting his property makes apparent. The suggestion is not far off that there may be some connection between his own avarice and the eagerness to read about, laugh at and study the miserliness in others which has led him to request that al-JāªiÕ write on the topic. The reader, having himself chosen to take up a book on this topic, may be led to wonder whether his own motives are entirely free of the hypocrisy the addressee so thoughtlessly displays. Given the high ideals of generosity and reliance upon God that prevailed in his milieu and the financial pressures they were likely to bring upon a household, and given the fact that they can only be defined in relative terms, the reader may well have found it difficult to deny that he might have at least some share in the vice he had been expecting to read about in others. In doing so, he could comfort himself with the belief that he was, at least, more aware of himself than the addressee with his embarrassing naïveté and hypocrisy. While the reader takes stock of his own motives and preconceptions in reading in the light of what he sees in the addressee, he may also be brought to question the relationship between the addressee and the author who purports to be writing at his request. From the first paragraphs, the addressee’s unstinting praise for al-JāªiÕ’s earlier book on thieves and his assumption that he will be able to answer the long list of profound questions that follows may raise suspicions as to whether this is an authentic request. It may be nothing more than a ploy devised by al-JāªiÕ as an excuse for writing what some may find a frivolous and gossipy book or a vehicle for selfadvertisement. Naturally, readers familiar with al-JāªiÕ’s writings may have additional reason to suspect the authenticity of an inquiry in epistolary form, and the style of the addressee’s questions with their unpredictable layering of parallelisms and complex interplay of synonyms and antonyms may sound conspicuously similar to the author’s own prose. Two sharply divergent perspectives on al-JāªiÕ as the author of this book seem possible at this point, depending on whether the reader accepts the addressee’s request as genuine or suspects it is an artifice. In the former case, al-JāªiÕ is writing about misers at the behest of the addressee, whom he is humouring by refraining from direct comment, but subtly mocking before

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 191 the broader audience by juxtaposing his observations on misers with his comments on thieves and, perhaps, by playing up the ironies of his language. In the latter case, al-JāªiÕ has invented this self-righteous inquirer as an excuse for circulating a book that may offend some. Neither possibility will be of much help to the reader in justifying his own desire to read a work that springs from the motives implied. Conceivably, some readers, sensing this defensiveness, would decline to read further, but those who cannot resist curiosity will have to bear with their own share in the doubts that have been raised. The two layers of artificiality in al-JāªiÕ’s relationship with the addressee – his signalling awareness of a broader audience while purporting to write at his request alone, and the possibility that the request itself is a ­fiction – are discernible from the first paragraph and become increasingly clear as we proceed through the introduction. All the while the quotation of the addressee’s questions continues and the artificiality of this device becomes more obvious, the questions themselves heighten the irony of his own lack of self-awareness: Why do they defend – in spite of the strength of their intellects – what the community (umma) has unanimously declared reprehensible, and why do they boast – despite their extensive knowledge – of what people concur in abhorring? How is it that he [the miser] can be discerning when making justification for it [his miserliness], and penetrate, when defending it, to the greatest of depths and the subtlest of notions while not discerning how obviously shameful it is and how repulsive its very name is? . . . How is it possible for his mind to perceive the ambiguous and remote and be oblivious to what is close at hand and momentous?35

From the addressee’s much longer list of questions, it appears that he has in mind several varieties of misers, or at least several patterns of avaricious behaviour that puzzle him for different reasons. Some advocate a life of hardship (Õilf al-ʿaysh) and bring misery upon themselves – quite possibly reflecting al-JāªiÕ’s view of ascetic movements. Others are not ashamed to indulge in fine foods when dining in others’ homes but not at their own expense. Some are unmoved by the praise and blame of others and consider those who are so motivated to be weak.36 The questions I have chosen to quote in the passage above concern misers who devote a great deal of energy to defending

192  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. themselves without realising how glaringly their behaviour belies all they say. Their failings are perfectly obvious to all but themselves. The flaw in the social vision of such a miser is brought on by the very agility of his own mind when applied to defending his behaviour. A reader who fancies he thinks intelligently and subtly in making decisions regarding his own finances and sharing is naturally most vulnerable to the problems raised here. The safest course, again, for such a reader is to allow that he may sometimes have a share in the vice of miserliness himself, or that it might reasonably appear so to others for all he can know. Upon this admission the reader can at least claim a degree of self-awareness that the misers described, and the miserly addressee himself, so glaringly lack. Of course, the question begged throughout the addressee’s baffled queries on misers is one of how people’s individual economic interests influence their reasoning and self-perception in matters of sharing and spending. It is a question the reader will be brought to face on a much more intimate level as the layered ironies of the addressee’s letter unfold still further. To this point in the text, the emphasis remains on misers’ deviance from the community, which reacts to their vice with stern disapproval. While the addressee’s questions imply an assumption that miserliness is irrational, making life a burden and souring relations with others, his own reaction to misers themselves is more one of baffled curiosity than one of indignation. Nowhere in his long list of questions does he attribute avarice to wickedness of character. His request seems to imply that miserliness is, rather, the result of some form of intellectual blindness, a disturbance to a mind that might otherwise be innately sharp: Explain to me what it is that has confounded their intellects, corrupted their minds, cast a veil over their perception and upset the balance. For what cause do they oppose the truth and resist guidance? What is this paradoxical constitution and contradictory temperament?37

Several terms used (e.g. ‘balance’, iʿtidāl; ‘temperament’, mizāj) most likely derive from the Greek medical theory of the four humours and the belief that illness, and in some cases flaws of character, are caused by the imbalance of these. In fact, al-JāªiÕ, in a passage from K. al-Óayawān, lists ‘biles’ (mirār) among the causes of confounded intellects. Al-JāªiÕ’s reason for including this idea in the addressee’s request may be less to advance an ultimately

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 193 physiological explanation than to hint at the underlying concept of perfection as a matter of balance or moderation, the principle al-JāªiÕ applies to the ethical question of generosity.38 Whatever the cause of misers’ confusion, the addressee expects that al-JāªiÕ will be able to provide an explanation, and this, naturally, challenges the reader to contemplate for himself. If the reader has begun to feel the pressures I have described to examine himself and admit that he might not be entirely free of the vice he is expecting to see ridiculed in others, the suggestion that miserliness is not a sign of mental weakness may be something of a comfort. The addressee’s puzzled questions about the causes of miserliness and its paradoxes are fascinating in their breadth and help to represent this self-examination as an intellectual challenge worthy of a highly capable mind. Such a self-examination, given the shamefulness the label of miser bore in Muslim society, would likely be accompanied by a desire to reform one’s ways to the extent possible and to consider when one’s behaviour might be drawing the attention and tacit censure of others. However, accepting the addressee’s assumption, as it appears to this point, that misers are deviant exceptions in the community would leave the reader in the difficult position of isolating himself from the majority if he acknowledges a degree of avarice in himself. The reader may be tempted, therefore, to question the addressee’s emphasis on the deviance of misers. Perhaps the reader can derive comfort from the size of the volume before him, which seems to indicate that al-JāªiÕ has found more examples of miserliness than the addressee might have expected. The reader has been invited to distance himself from the addressee and the misers he has been discussing but, in the following paragraph, sudden changes occur in the addressee’s tone and assumptions, undermining defences the reader has been encouraged to adopt until this point. The addressee now appears much more aware of the prevalence of miserliness in society, while the sort of misers he is most baffled by are those who have recognised their own faults and are seeking to reform them: I am not so much astonished by one who gives free rein to his miserliness, exposing himself to reproach, and is not satisfied with anything he says unless it defeats his adversary, or any argument that is not inscribed in books, nor [am I so astonished] by the feeble-minded one who cannot help

194  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. but reveal his fault, as by one who has become aware that he is miserly and knows the excess of his greed, but struggles with himself and contends with his own nature. Perhaps he even suspects that others have become aware of him and know what he is thinking. So he gilds something that will not take gilding and sews a patch over a tear that will not hold one. If he were to become aware – just as he is aware of his fault and aware of those who are aware of it in him – of his inability to remedy himself, to re-establish the balance of his humours, return to his former habits and transform his defective ways, restoring them to soundness, he would leave off affecting what he cannot attain, turn what he spends on those who reproach him into profit and not attract the notice of onlookers. He would not draw poets to his table nor mingle with informing couriers from every horizon (burud al-āfāq), nor hobnob with those charged with gathering intelligence, and so gain respite from the trouble of affectation and merge into the whelming masses of the community (dakhala maʿa ghimār al-umma).39

As we saw in the first paragraph of the introduction, vocabulary inappropriate to the context is used for hyperbolic and comic effect. The money that might be saved by curtailing hospitality is treated in the calculating terms of an investing merchant. Potentially gossiping guests are compared, by way of metaphor, to the spying postal networks of hostile empires, while the mere mention of poets at the table evokes the threat of invective verse to be directed at any host whose hospitality does not satisfy. The reader may imagine that al-JāªiÕ is merely humouring the addressee by passing along his words with the social fears and calculation they betray. If the reader has by this point come to suspect that the addressee is a fiction, the parodic aspects of the portrait will be obvious. In either case, the reader is tacitly invited to laugh at the addressee along with al-JāªiÕ, who offers no comment in his own voice while he purports to be quoting him. When the addressee suddenly lets on, in the final line, that he finds misers so common in society as to pass unnoticed, it may come as something of a surprise to the reader, since this is so much at odds with the implications of the addressee’s earlier descriptions of misers living in defiance of the community’s consensus. The word translated here as ‘whelming masses’

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 195 (ghimār, literally ‘floods’) could also have the sense of ‘lavish ones’, that is, those whose largesse flows abundantly. Of course, if misers may so easily be seen as exceptionally generous, their avarice is even less in deviation from the norm in society.40 The reader has been tempted to distance himself from the addressee in his rather naïve assumptions about the community, but that distance is quite abruptly bridged in this final line and the reader’s sense of being relatively more perspicacious is undermined. While it has been those misers who lack any awareness of how they offend the community’s values that face embarrassment and opprobrium, now misers who make no effort to hide or reform their failings are indistinguishable from the rest of the community. Through the foibles displayed by the addressee and the misers he first described, the reader has been invited to see a self-critical mindset, showing wariness of offending the community’s ideals of generosity and hospitality, as the safest course. In this passage it is the miser who is mindful of miserly tendencies in himself and seeks to change anything in his behaviour that draws unwelcome attention and makes him the target of gossip. The embarrassing position of such a self-conscious miser and the ironies that attend his counterproductive attempts at self-reform reach a new level of complexity as the addressee continues: And how is it that he is aware of people’s faults when they serve him food but not aware of his own fault when he serves them, even though his fault is obvious and that of the one who serves him is hidden? Why is such a one generous with a great deal of gold but stingy with a little food, when he knows that what he withholds is cheap in comparison to what he expends and that, if he wished to obtain – with a fraction of what he so generously gives – double what he is withholding, it would be ready at hand, cheap and available?41

This passage follows immediately upon the preceding quotation, and the addressee is apparently still discussing the sort of miser who is aware of his fault and aware that others perceive it as well. The fault he is unaware of here is not, then, his mere falling short in offering hospitality, but complications that arise from his self-consciousness and his attempts to resist his own nature, which the addressee assumes is unalterable. The miser described here is, according to the addressee, unaware of problems brought about by his own

196  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. self-consciousness which are quite obvious to other people. (In this case, he gives what the situation does not demand, gold – and in excessive amounts which not only impoverish him but embarrass the recipient – while denying the expected quantities of food.) Once this level of complexity has been suggested, the reader’s imagination can easily suggest an ongoing reduplication of the process: any level of self-awareness attained can be accompanied by unawareness of its consequences, even when these are obvious to others. The addressee’s comments here illustrate the potential anxiety inherent in a person’s adopting the defensive posture that if he has faults he is, at least, aware of the possibility. All the while the addressee describes how these problems affect misers of a certain type, he expresses amazement at the irrationality of their attitude and of their counterproductive efforts to reform their ways. Given the shifts that the addressee’s stance on miserliness has gone through, the reader is likely, at this point, to want to position himself between the two rather frightening poles he has now seen: the obsessively self-conscious miser we have just seen described, and the type embodied – to all appearances, so far – by the addressee himself, a miser who is utterly incapable of seeing his own avarice or of feeling society’s pressure to change his ways. Al-JāªiÕ now appears to have jockeyed the reader into adopting the ideal of a mean between excessive worry over acquiring a reputation for stinginess and indifference to the opinion of others in matters of generosity. In the following passages, yet another unexpected shift occurs in the addressee’s position as he shows a willingness to question whether he is a miser himself and appears to adopt a moderate stance very much like the one the reader has been lured into adopting. But the addressee’s language here belies the purity of his motives in questioning himself, and the self-serving side of his questioning emerges as the real reason for his requesting a book about misers. You said ‘And by all means you must acquaint me with the defects that betray their affectations, show the truth concerning those who pretend, rend the strongest curtains that conceal imposters, distinguish the truth from dissimulation and separate those who have been shamed and compelled from the natural and willing . . .’ – so that you might, you claimed, ponder them, assess yourself in relation to them and envision their impacts

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 197 and consequences. Then, if scrutinising them alerted you to a fault you had overlooked, you would know what its occasion was and so avoid it. If it were something familiar, obvious and well known to you, and your endurance surpassed your miserliness, you would continue to serve them [your guests] and to acquire their affection through feeding them. But, if pursuing this were an overwhelming effort (ghāmir al-ijtihād), you would conceal yourself and enjoy your licit sustenance (†ayyib zādika) by yourself, merge into the whelming masses (al-ghimār) and live the life of those whose faults are concealed. However, if the wars between you and your own nature were of alternating success, and if the two of you possessed like and equivalent means, you would heed the call of discretion, by ceasing to expose yourself, and the call of caution, by abandoning affectation. You deemed one who attains freedom from blame to have made a gain and one who prefers to be confident over taking a risk to have exercised discretion. You mentioned that you were especially in need of becoming familiar with this case, that a man of noble nature is especially dependent on having this sort of knowledge and that, if I were to fortify your reputation against blame – after having fortified your property against thieves – I would have attained for you something no devoted father or doting mother can attain.42

The motives behind the addressee’s endless questioning are revealed in stages that involve the reader in unmasking layers of hypocrisy. At first, his request to learn about the signs that distinguish affected generosity from genuine appears to spring from a desire to recognise when others are sincere in giving, but he later reveals an intention to focus this questioning upon himself. Here, he tacitly admits that he realises he is indeed miserly, and conspicuously so, himself. What might then appear to be a sincere desire to critique his own behaviour to see how well it meets the ideals of his community is shortly exposed for a very calculating attempt to secure his own interests. He hopes to gain friends and a reputation for generosity where possible, while sacrificing as little of his wealth and personal enjoyment as he can and, above all, to draw no unneeded attention to his ultimately selfish ways. When al-JāªiÕ switches from quotation to indirect citation in the above passage, we again notice carefully chosen vocabulary that may be seen as

198  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. a wink to the reader signalling that he is aware of the self-serving purpose behind the addressee’s request. The addressee wants to ‘acquire the affection’ of his guests (iktisāb al-maªabba), a phrase suggesting that even this is a commodity with a measurable value. He refers to the food he may allow himself to enjoy alone with a noun, ‘sustenance’ (zād ), most often used for travelling provisions, underscoring the fact that it is a necessity, while the adjective ‘†ayyib’ can refer to its permissible status under law, as my translation reflects, but also to its delicious taste. Thus, in this phrase the addressee’s need and legal right to feed himself are tied to the boon of solitary enjoyment without the expense of feeding others, all with an unmistakable ring of defensiveness. ‘Overwhelming’ (ghāmir) is from the same root as the word translated as ‘whelming masses’ (ghimār), used in the following line and in a passage we have previously seen to indicate the community as a whole. Perhaps, we have here a hint that almost everyone is facing a similar private struggle with ­overwhelming expectations, which they are all hiding from each other. In the shifting stances of the addressee as he poses questions about miserliness, the reader is ultimately given a portrait of a person who is able to perceive the circumstances and dilemmas of others, to redefine the operative words, to assess the capacities of his own innate nature and to manipulate the standards of his society all for the sake of maximising his own economic and social advantage. He is even capable of admitting his own vices to himself for the sake of gaining useful perspective without feeling, so it appears, the least shame or compunction. The book he hopes to read from the pen of al-JāªiÕ will allow him to reconcile, as much as possible, the social demand of maintaining his honour and a reputation for largesse with his own need for economic security. At the same time, the book should amuse him with the ridiculous habits of other misers so as to maintain his interest while he diligently pursues this goal. The offence given by individuals who appear indifferent to society’s disapproval, the lack of self-awareness displayed by some and the questions this raises about how each of us appears to others, the need to believe that others share our failings and experience the same doubts, the contradictions that spring from a community’s failure to live up to the ideals that shape its very identity, the realisation that self-interest often shapes our perceptions and may also be the motivation behind displays of altruism, and, not least, an admission that many may be hiding the same dilemmas and

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 199 hypocrisies from each other – such are some of the densely layered tensions and anxieties that have their part in a reader’s mirth when reading stories about misers. When we are laughing, these complexities rapidly slip our minds, but the unexpected, ‘slow-motion’ reversals of the addressee bring us to confront our motivations in ways we cannot easily escape. For the reader, who knows little else about him, the addressee is n ­ othing more than a set of possible motivations for reading the very book he has chosen to read himself for some reason. As with most of al-JāªiÕ’s addressees, the reader’s experience of him will largely be one of comparing his own orientation toward the text and its topic to an alternative one. In the addressee of K. al-Bukhalāʾ we have a less-than-believable portrait of a man who can penetrate layers of contradiction patiently enough to make them obvious to the reader, all the while he forgets or simply overlooks them himself. To distance himself from this self-serving heedlessness is the challenge to which the reader is ultimately led as he sets out to read. Motives for Reading and Motives for Writing If the introduction has called attention to problems of motive and perspective inherent in an individual’s reading about miserly behaviour in others, the suggestion is not far off that the problems inherent in writing about such a topic will not be fewer. As we have noted, the addressee’s long list of questions is related through alternating passages of quotation and indirect citation. The changes between these two forms call the reader’s attention to the author’s role in relating the addressee’s words and his ultimate responsibility for their inclusion in the book. But, as I have already suggested, a reader with any sensitivity to the involved stylisation and ironies of the addressee’s request will not reach the end of the introduction without sensing that it is, at least in its present form, a fiction designed by al-JāªiÕ for the sake of a broader readership. Whenever this realisation sets in, the reader will naturally wonder why the author would have chosen to present his book to his real audience in this indirect, even coy manner. The fact that al-JāªiÕ offers no comment on the questions or the assumptions behind them and, in the end, declines to answer any of them will make the reader all the more curious about his own attitude toward the questions he purports to relate from the addressee. The reader

200  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. might well guess that al-JāªiÕ has constructed this elaborate parody as a way of forestalling critics and signalling that he is very much aware of the book’s ironies and the accusations of hypocrisy it is likely to provoke. The reader may further surmise that al-JāªiÕ ultimately intends this ruse to be seen through by his audience: in this case, the speaker who relates the addressee’s obviously fictional letter is not the author himself but a self-parodying persona, a mischievous gossip who attempts to pass blame for his collection of anecdotes on to an imaginary questioner. As if to remove any lingering doubts as to his self-parodic intentions, al-JāªiÕ closes the introduction with a humorous reversal of the conventions of authorial modesty: I have written many stories naming their protagonists and many others without naming them, because I either fear them, or wish to show them due honour. And if you had not requested this book from me, I would not have taken the trouble to write it and would not have addressed a topic entailing injury and vengeance. So, if there is any reproach or shortcoming, it is upon you, and if anyone has an excuse, it is I, not you.43

To close the introduction of a book poking fun at the avarice and selfishness of others with such an ignoble and self-serving remark addressed to a fictitious addressee amounts to an ironic avowal of responsibility on the part of al-JāªiÕ for the book he has written. The author signals he is well aware of the problems of motive that attend the writing of such a book, but, coming so close on the heels of passages satirising the hypocrisy and selfish motives that can underlie a quest for self-awareness, this self-parody hardly prevents similar questions from being turned on the author as well. With the elaborate layering of self-deception suggested in the addressee’s request, the reader’s own mind may well suggest similar layers of irony here. This closing passage can then be taken as an acknowledgement that the author recognises that he cannot extricate himself from the problems for self-reflection that he has posed for the reader. Digressions . . . or Veiled Comments on the Question of Miserliness? I have momentarily passed over two passages occurring between the close of the citation of the addressee’s request for a book on misers and the remarks we have just seen, in which al-JāªiÕ closes the introduction with an ironic

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 201 attempt to blame all on the addressee. The first of these passages is a description of a further request on the part of the addressee for an explanation of the reasoning of three eccentric thinkers, the second al-JāªiÕ’s comparison of the merits of earnestness and jest. At first glance these passages may seem out of place: as I have said, K. al-Bukhalāʾ is the most unified of al-JāªiÕ’s longer works with every other passage, anecdote or quotation – apart from a few brief remarks – having clear connection to the word bukhl in one of its varying senses and contested applications. The suddenness with which these two rather long passages intrude at critical junctures in the introduction, and the implausibility of al-JāªiÕ’s ostensible purpose in including them where he does, may lead us to suspect that they contain some form of veiled comment on the questions of miserliness and generosity from which they appear to distract. Al-JāªiÕ cites the addressee’s questions about the three thinkers in far more detail than the addressee himself would require. The reader, who by this point will probably suspect that the addressee himself is a fiction in any case, may suppose that the citation is meant to introduce topics to be discussed to a broader audience. When the author abruptly announces that he will not be discussing these questions in this book after all, the reader may wonder whether al-JāªiÕ, by having his fictional addressee’s mind shift unwittingly to these issues from his inquiries on miserliness, is not hinting that there is some connection between the questions raised. The discussion of laughter is at once al-JāªiÕ’s response to the addressee’s excuse for requesting humour in the book, and, in its treatment of the relative merits of jest and earnestness, a lightly disguised model for approaching questions of miserliness and generosity in relative terms. The addressee’s description of the three thinkers ranks among the more fascinating passages in al-JāªiÕ’s corpus, not only for the bold independence of mind they show, but also for the subtle parallels between them and the highly nuanced manner in which they are presented so as to make them all the more provocative for the contemporary Muslim audience. The tone of the passage can only be conveyed by a full translation: You have asked me to write down for you the reasoning of Khabbāb in rejecting jealousy and claiming that offering one’s wife to another belongs to the domain of liberality and altruism, that sex with a slave girl on loan

202  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. falls under the same legal category as other service, that a wife is, in many respects, like a slave girl, who is an asset just like gold or silver, that a man has more right to his own daughter than a stranger and is better suited to his sister than an outsider, that it is an outsider who has more right to become jealous, while the nearer relation would more properly show disdain, and that seeking increase in one’s descendants is just like seeking increase in one’s crops. However, it is custom that has estranged people from all this and religions that have forbidden it. And, indeed, people have exaggerated its gravity still further and claim to find it more repugnant than they actually do. And [you asked me to write] the reasoning of al-Jahjāh in approving of lying in some instances and disapproving of truthfulness in others, raising lying to the same status as truthfulness and lowering truthfulness to the level of lying, claiming that people do lying an injustice by overlooking its merits and paying heed to its shortcomings while showing favouritism toward truthfulness by taking note of its benefits and overlooking its harm. For, if they were to compare the consequences carefully and judge between the respective merits of the two fairly, they would not find such a gulf between them nor look on them as they do. And [you asked me to write] the doctrine of Íaª‚aª that oblivion is preferable, in many cases, to mindfulness, that heedlessness, on the whole, is more beneficial than being aware, that the life of beasts would be more appealing to people than their life as rational beings, that, if you attempted to fatten a beast and a man of noble nature – or a rational, high-minded woman and a doltish and clueless one – the fat would come more quickly to the beast, and would be slower to grow on the rational, high-minded woman, this because reason is accompanied by caution and concern, and heedlessness by freedom from care and a sense of security. This is why a beast puts on fat in a matter of days, which you do not find in a man of high aspiration who expects trial upon trial even when nothing is troubling him, while a heedless man lives in hope until calamity overtakes him. Were it not that you can find all of these subjects and more described in my book entitled The Book of Issues (Kitāb al-Masāʾil ) I would have dealt with much of this in this book.44

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 203 The creative hand of al-JāªiÕ is clearly in evidence throughout the passage. While the possibility that the three thinkers represent real historical figures cannot be ruled out, the descriptions of all three are shot through with suspiciously coincidental similarities and parallels not only among the three but hearkening back to ideas that emerge earlier in the addressee’s request.45 All three names are rare, two-syllable ones derived from biconsonantal roots, albeit with differing morphologies. All three boldly take exception to principles or values not openly contested in Muslim society, but the phrasing of each is nuanced and qualified (e.g. ‘in many respects’, ‘in some instances’, ‘on the whole’), giving them the air of considered thought. These statements, then, contain elements of what Bakhtin calls ‘internal dialogue’ resulting from past debates or reflections that have caused the thinkers to insert these qualifications, showing that al-JāªiÕ’s portrayal of them is something quite different from a simple, objectifying polemic.46 But the qualifications themselves are maddeningly vague. Any objection the reader may find to these arguments could be – for all he can know – just the exception that the thinker is alluding to by allowing these qualifications to his doctrine. Even al-JāªiÕ’s own statement that he would have dealt with ‘much of this’ is similarly qualified, suggesting he cannot necessarily marshal a defence of every criticism raised here to traditional points of view. Moreover, each thinker’s arguments contain similarly self-undermining threads. Íaª‚aª’s argument against the benefit of knowledge and reason and in favour of a life of untroubled ease reads like a call to face an uncomfortable truth and even contains a proposal for a sort of scientific experiment. Jahjāh equates the community’s condemnation of lying with ‘injustice’ (Õulm), a word which, in Arabic, is very closely connected with dishonesty when referring to speech. And even Khabbāb’s rejection of jealousy and defence of incest are built on a twisted affirmation of a father’s traditional sway over a household and his control of its dealings with outsiders. On the surface, the views of these almost-unknown thinkers have n ­ othing to do with the question of miserliness, and the ostensible justification for including them here falls apart when we realise that al-JāªiÕ will not be answering them in this book. We might argue that al-JāªiÕ is merely calling attention to his (now lost) K. al-Masāʾil with these tantalising questions, but, in this case, the placement of the passage between the addressee’s request for

204  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. a book on misers and al-JāªiÕ’s reply would seem oddly disruptive given the care that has gone into crafting the addressee’s request. The addressee himself has already been established as a person whose mind gravitates toward ideas that serve his interests without making connections that might expose his self-deception or hypocrisy. It seems entirely consistent with the artistic (as we can certainly call it) design of K. al-Bukhalāʾ to look for implicit connections to the issues already raised on the question of miserliness in this passage. The teaching of Khabbāb appears to play upon a paradox closely related to the tensions between property and reputation that were raised by the addressee’s questions about miserliness. A number of scholars have read Khabbāb’s views as an attempt to revive the ideals of the fifth-century ce Persian reformer Mazdak, who is said to have called for a radical egalitarianism and sharing of wives and property.47 While a case can be made for certain parallels between this passage and ideals of marriage found in certain preIslamic Persian texts, what predominates in Khabbāb’s view is more a radical extrapolation from the right of property than a call for greater equality.48 The relations of men with their wives, daughters, sisters and slave concubines, with all the rights and custodial responsibilities that society expected to attend them, are here reduced to the simple logic of owning property to be exploited for profit or pleasure, or shared with others, as the owner chooses. This emphasis on privilege conferred by property to the exclusion of all else brings to light tensions existing between individual privileges of possession and the social codes of honour and morality that attend them which are just as applicable to the realm of money as they are to the sexual and familial arena. A man regarded as fortunate in society to have daughters, sisters, wives and concubines had to comply with the expectations of morality, jealousy against rivals and propriety that attended each relationship whether these suited his personal inclinations or not. By collapsing the varied roles of mastery or ‘belonging’ that these different types of relationships with women implied into the simple right of property, Khabbāb throws into relief the tensions that existed between possession and honour in Muslim society.49 In a very similar way, a man with money (or food) was, in fact, governed by expectations to share, show hospitality and spend without conspicuous worry. This was, moreover, as much a factor of people’s perceptions of his wealth as of his actual possessions. The pressure in early Muslim society to match people’s

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 205 perceptions of one’s wealth with suitable largesse and hospitality, and perhaps also the desire to create a perception of wealth and status through lavish sharing, introduced more tensions into the realities of possessing wealth than a person might be immediately aware of. By provocatively illustrating the tensions that exist between the privileges of a patriarchal household and the accompanying expectations and taboos, al-JāªiÕ draws the reader’s attention to subtler paradoxes in questions of property as well. The final lines of the passage on Khabbāb also serve to support the ideal of moderation in human affairs, which is part of al-JāªiÕ’s own thinking on generosity, as we have seen above. Khabbāb divides the possibilities concerning sexuality into three levels: one he sees as natural, allowing a man to use the women of his household as he pleases, another in which desires are curtailed by custom and the prohibitions introduced by religion, and a third in which people take these curtailments to excess and exaggerate their abhorrence of any transgression. While Khabbāb himself clearly defends the first level in a way much of the ʿAbbāsid audience would have found scandalous, the passage suggests another danger at the opposite pole, in which some in a society may go far beyond the dictates of its religion in restraining sexuality. Much like al-JāªiÕ’s reasoning on generosity and other ethical questions, Khabbāb’s conception suggests three possible stances toward bodily desires and concerns of self-interest: (1) indulging them at whim, (2) subordinating them to the prohibitions of religion and the dictates of reason as necessary, and (3) constantly resisting them or feigning to do so. The difference between the two thinkers is that Khabbāb appears to favour the first, while al-JāªiÕ is inclined toward the second. The final stance is similar to that exemplified by some of the ascetically inclined misers portrayed in K. al-Bukhalāʾ.50 In the passage on al-Jahjāh, no mention is made of the types of situation in which lying may be beneficial, but it is not hard to understand how this sort of thinking would appeal to the addressee. He is, in fact, intent on deceiving others by striving to maintain a reputation for generosity while expending no more than necessary, and lying about how much food he has on hand, for example, would serve his interests. Successful lying often gives one an advantage over others in knowledge of situations, while lying to oneself may be useful if one is troubled by pangs of conscience. The claim that people’s assessment of lying is unjust – that is, not honest or truthful – suggests there

206  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. is a tendency to deny how useful lying may be to one’s self-interest even in a community that claims to honour truthfulness. The heedlessness advocated by Íaª‚aª can apply to the question of miserliness in a number of ways. We have seen how the addressee overlooks his own miserliness and hypocrisy, as well as miserliness in the community at large, and then shows an awareness of all these when they are needed to serve his interests. Heedlessness or forgetting goes together with the selfdeception on the individual and communal levels discussed in regard to the passage on al-Jahjāh. The claim that heedless beasts or humans put on fat more readily than the rational might refer to those who are able to ignore the shame their miserly ways bring to them and thus can fatten themselves with the food they fail to share or, by way of analogy, accumulate wealth in other ways. In another interpretation, the heedless may refer to those willing to spend what they have on food and live in freedom, while the miserly waste away with worry about the future, denying themselves in order to conserve what they have. The supposed benefits of heedlessness are contrasted with harms done by reason, but all of this is being quoted by a Muʿtazilī theologian well known to embrace reason as the God-given guide toward human welfare. If the arguments for the benefit of heedlessness are indeed convincing (that is, rational), there would appear to be a place for a kind of ‘heedlessness’ that is actually in accord with reason. This is a theme that al-JāªiÕ appears to revisit in his subsequent discussion of laughter, as we shall soon see. While many subtle connections to the question of miserliness seem likely, extracting a clear and consistent view of their significance is more difficult and a great many puzzles are left to the reader. The enthusiastic addressee relates the dangerously immoral, un-Islamic and unrealistic doctrines of the thinkers with a bemused fascination and, at times, sounds almost convinced by their views. While he shows no signs of being able to critique the thinkers’ claims for himself, he is strangely asking al-JāªiÕ, the theologian, not to refute their deviant ideas but to explain their reasoning. Al-JāªiÕ may well have hoped that this rich and provocative passage would lead some of his readers to seek out what he says on the topics in K. al-Masāʾil if they were able to find it, but he surely expected them to finish the business at hand in reading the long K. al-Bukhalāʾ first, and the questions could be related to

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 207 that book’s themes in the meantime. Leaving them to deal with the complex and beguiling arguments for themselves while they read, he shows a remarkable confidence in his audience to face the challenges for themselves. Once again, the addressee serves as a negative model for reading which stimulates and involves the reader in a powerful way. The passage on the merits of crying and laughter follows a brief description of the contents of K. al-Bukhalāʾ, which al-JāªiÕ suggests can be read ‘absorbed in laughter when you choose and in amusement when you weary of earnestness’.51 A reader familiar with al-JāªiÕ’s style would probably expect to find ‘earnestness’ or some word that contrasts with ‘laughter’ in the place of the near-synonym ‘amusement’ here. By shaping the sentence as he does, al-JāªiÕ appears to take responsibility mainly for the lighter side of the book, with any seriousness of purpose coming from the addressee himself. From this, al-JāªiÕ turns immediately to his defence of crying (al-bukāʾ) – as beneficial and praiseworthy in its proper place – which leads into a longer defence of laughter (al-∂aªik). While the addressee had requested that the book contain humorous elements merely to make his real goal of serious study in pursuit of personal advantage tolerable, al-JāªiÕ defends laughter as a praiseworthy end in itself under appropriate circumstances and when not taken to excess. Parts of his defence of laughter in moderation and warning against crying to excess echo the language of Íaª‚aª: one who is crying experiences a ‘trial’ (balāʾ) just like Íaª‚aª’s man of aspiration, while laughing makes a child fat, reminding us of his proposed experiment. Moreover, one who laughs experiences ‘ultimate delight’ (ghāyat al-surūr) until the reason for his laughter comes to an end, very much like Íaª‚aª’s heedless man living in freedom from care until calamity strikes. Al-JāªiÕ concludes this discussion with a strong assertion that laughter has its place and proper measure which it is harmful to either exceed or fall short of. When the intention behind laughter and joking (mazª) is benefit and the purpose for which they were created, they become earnestness (jidd ) and dignity (waqār). The paradoxes of laughter and seriousness here very much echo the ironies raised in Íaª‚aª’s discussion of heedlessness and reason.52 Given the levels of mockery we have seen in al-JāªiÕ’s treatment of the addressee, misers, the community as a whole, the reader and then himself, and how these have served to support and problematise the ideal of moderation in

208  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. generosity, we begin to see how laughter has its role in arriving at a balanced perspective on concern for self and others. It may be a long process of reflection and laughter that will bring one to a balance that is truly sincere in its concern for all and not one dictated by the calculating self-concern we have seen in the addressee. Notes  1. Al-JāªiÕ, [Kitāb] al-Bukhalāʾ, ed. ˝. al-Óājirī (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1997), pp. 1–4.  2. F. Malti-Douglas, Structures of Avarice: The Bukhalāʾ in Medieval Arabic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1985), esp. pp. 67–89 and 117–37.   3. C. Pellat, in his Le Milieu Ba‚rien et la Formation de ˛āªiÕ (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1953), p. 253, reads the book as a defence of the traditional Arab values of generosity and hospitality from the attacks of the (mainly) Persian Shuʿūbiyya. M. al-Juwīlī, Naªw dirāsa fī sūsīyūlūjiyat al-bukhl: al-‚irāʿ al-ijtimāʿī fī ʿa‚r al-JāªiÕ min khilāl Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ (Tunis: al-Dār al-ʿArabiyya lil-Kitāb, 1990), emphasises how the work reflects the growing acquisitiveness of the emerging urban classes in al-JāªiÕ’s time. M. Cooperson, ‘Al-JāªiÕ, the Misers and the Proto-Sunnī Ascetics’, in A. Heinemann et al. (eds), Al-JāªiÕ: A Muslim Humanist for our Time (Beirut: Orient-Institut Berlin, 2009), pp. 197–219, argues that al-JāªiÕ’s satire of misers contains a veiled attack on the proto-Sunnī faction. I thank him for sharing an earlier draft of this study with me.   4. A. Cheikh-Moussa, ‘Avarice ou Sophistique? Une Lecture du Livre des Avares d’al-ĞāªiÕ’, Bulletin d’Études Orientales 51 (1999): 209–27.   5. W. al-Najm, Al-JāªiÕ wa-al-Óa∂āra al-ʿAbbāsiyya (Baghdad: Ma†baʿat al-Irshād, 1965), pp. 151–3.  6. Al-JāªiÕ, al-Bayān wa-al-tabyīn, ed. A. Hārūn, 4 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, n.d.), I, p. 202. The same concepts are defined in a very similar framework in K. fī al-Nisāʾ, Rasāʾil al-JāªiÕ, ed. A. Hārūn, 4 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1991), III, p. 140, and R. fī al-Maʿāsh wa-al-maʿād, Rasāʾil I, pp. 110–11. In K. al-Muʿallimīn, al-JāªiÕ again emphasises the possibility of excess in spending money to win one’s son’s affection; Rasāʾil III, p. 50.  7. Malti-Douglas, Structures of Avarice, pp. 138–41, discusses the varying definitions of bukhl and its synonyms as they appear in the major dictionaries, with references.

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 209  8. Aristotle, Nichomachaean Ethics, Books II–IV, trans. C. Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 8–11 and 38–45.   9. E.g. F. de Sausurre, ‘Nature of the Linguistic Sign’ (from Course in General Linguistics), trans. W. Baskins, in H. Adams and L. Searle (eds), Critical Theory Since 1965 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), pp. 650–1. 10. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civil Discourse, 2nd edn, trans. G. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 79–80. Quentin Skinner, in his Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 142–53, 156–61, 161–72, 174–80, discusses the history of the techniques of paradiastole or ‘redescription’ from Aristotle through to the seventeenth century. Throughout the development of this tradition, the emphasis is on how to represent the virtues and failings of others for rhetorical ends. In K. al-Bukhalāʾ, we find most of the individuals in the anecdotes and quoted speeches and letters employing paradiastole to defend themselves (e.g. p. 1) or to advise others on how to manage money for their own benefit (e.g. p. 91). The problems of economic interest and self-perception are behind the voices al-JāªiÕ creates, and the political uses of virtue and vice words are of less interest to him. 11. But, even when one privately acknowledges a personal fault, Muslim tradition sometimes encourages one to conceal it out of fear of creating a poor example for the community. See al-Bukhārī, The Translation of the Meanings of Íaªiª al-Bukhārī (with Arabic text), trans. M. Khan, 9 vols (Gujranwala: Taleem ulQuran Trust, 1971–), VIII, pp. 60–1. 12. Such parodied misusages are particularly prominent in the pseudonymous letters of Abū al-ʿĀ‚ al-Thaqafī and Ibn al-Tawʾam, K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 154–94, as we shall see in the following chapter. 13. ‘It is highly characteristic of the generous person even to be excessive in giving, so as to leave less for himself, since not considering oneself is a mark of the generous person’; Aristotle, Nichomachaean Ethics, p. 39. 14. Aristotle, Nichomachaean Ethics, p. 41. 15. Rasāʾil I, pp. 111–12. 16. E.g. in a poem of Mutammim b. Nuwayra, in al-Mufa∂∂al al-¤abbī, al-Mufa∂∂alīyāt, ed. M. Shākir and A. Hārūn (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1993), p. 52. 17. As in the famed Muʿallaqa of Labīd b. Rabīʿa in Y. al-Ayyūbī and Í. al-Hawwārī (eds), Sharª al-Muʿallaqāt al-ʿashr (Beirut: ʿĀlam al-Kutub, 1995), pp. 216–17.

210  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. 18. Al-Mufa∂∂alīyāt, pp. 294–5. 19. Among the proper recipients of beneficence (iªsān) in the Qurʾān (4:36) are ‘parents, near of kin, orphans, the destitute, the neighbour, whether of your kin or not, companions at your side, travellers and those whom your right hands possess [as slaves]’ (bi-al-wālidayn . . . wa-bi-dhī al-qurbā wa-al-jār aljunub wa-al-‚āªib bi-al-janb wa-ibn al-sabīl wa-mā malakat aymānukum). For a discussion of the question of poverty in the Qurʾān, see M. Bonner, ‘Poverty and the Poor’, in Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān, ed. J. McAuliffe, 5 vols (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), IV, pp. 208–10. 20. E.g. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 121. 21. As in the story of Maryam al-Íannāʿ, K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 30. 22. In Bakhtin’s conception, each participant in a conversation enjoys a surplus of vision over the other in that he can see what the other experiences from an outside perspective; see G. Morson and C. Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 53–5. The relationship between an author of fiction and the characters he describes, however, is not so reciprocal, the former enjoying an immense surplus over the latter whose consciousness he is free to objectify and ‘finalise’. For Bakhtin, a notable exception to this pattern of one-sided, ‘monologic’ relations between author and characters can be found in the ‘polyphonic’ novels of Dostoevsky, where characters are aware of everything that is important in the world of the novel; see M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. C. Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 73; Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 241–3. It is clear from Bakhtin’s analysis that the reader of a monologic work enjoys a surplus similar to the author’s. My discussion of the K. al-Bukhalāʾ in this chapter may be taken as an attempt to show how al-JāªiÕ systematically undermines the surplus the reader is initially given to enjoy over the misers portrayed. The author might be said to enjoy a surplus over the reader as well as the misers and the addressee himself who are the book’s characters, but his own motives in devising his clever trap for the reader become the object of parody in turn. All of this is accomplished in a manner very different from Dostoevsky’s narrative art, but the resulting levelling of relations between author, characters and reader is similar. 23. Such as the rather disgusting report of ʿAmr b. Yazīd’s insisting on conserving oil from an enema he had taken; K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 151. 24. As in the story of Abū Māzin, who, we are told, first assumes that the knocking at his door is someone bringing a gift rather than a friend seeking hospitality and

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 211 then prides himself on his stratagem of feigning drunkenness to rid himself of his friend; K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 39. 25. It is in the light of this balance that we should probably understand al-JāªiÕ’s disingenuous claim that he is only relating ‘what takes place among people or resembles what could take place among them, along with arguments and ­methods’; K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 132. This comes in his remarks on the final part of an anonymous report about a son who condemns his father for rubbing his bread against a piece of cheese (thus creating the loss of a furrowed line in the cheese) when he might have simply pointed his bread at the cheese from a distance. K. al-Bukhalāʾ clearly contains many anecdotes that stretch the limits of credulity, but they tend to be subtler, briefer and more reflective of human nature, albeit in an exaggerated form, as are, for example, many of the stories in the famous section on Khurasanians, pp. 17–28. The cheese story is so involved in its portrayal of a miserly obsession that it becomes forced and predictable, losing the desired balance and making the author’s brief disclaimer necessary. 26. For a discussion of al-JāªiÕ and his contemporaries’ approach to levity and irony, see G. van Gelder, ‘Mixtures of Jest and Earnest in Classical Arabic Literature’, Journal of Arabic Literature 23 (1992): 83–108; 169–90. 27. Íaªīª Bukhārī VIII, pp. 50–1. 28. Qurʾān, 49:11; Íaªīª Bukhārī VIII, pp. 42–3. 29. Of course, the ‘reader’, as discussed in the following paragraphs, is my own construction, meant to suggest how a member of al-JāªiÕ’s anticipated audience might have responded to the text upon first reading it. The assumption followed in this chapter is that the reader would not initially realise that the addressee is a fiction and only gradually become aware of the author’s design. Perhaps some readers – especially those more familiar with al-JāªiÕ’s devices – would suspect that the addressee is the author’s creation, held up for mockery and critique by wary members of the actual audience. Perhaps others would read the portrayal of the addressee as the author’s insinuation about the presuppositions of his audience and their motives in reading – a thinly veiled taunt at his readership meant to challenge them as they read. But in all of these cases, the reader will still have cause to view the addressee’s attitude as encountered in the text in a negative light and be pressured to distance himself from the addressee’s motives. Even the savviest reader will not be able to guess where the challenge posed for him in the person of the addressee is going and the dynamics of attempting to distance himself from the changing addressee will be similar to those of the less wary reader I describe here.

212  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. 30. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 1. The text the addressee refers to is, in all likelihood, al-JāªiÕ’s The Book of the Tricks of Thieves (K. Óiyal al-lu‚ū‚), not extant apart from a few fragments. See C. Pellat, ‘Nouvel Essai d’Inventaire de l’Œuvre ĞāªiÕienne’, Arabica 31 (1984), p. 146. 31. E.g. Rasāʾil II, p. 91; Rasāʾil IV, p. 281. 32. See Ibn ManÕūr, Lisān al-ʿArab, 18 vols in 9 vols (Beirut: Dār Íādir, 2005), XIV, p. 223, s.v. ‘n.d.r.’: ‘nawādir al-kalām mā shadhdha wa-kharaja min al-jumhūr.’ 33. The addressee asks why ‘they are indifferent to blame’ (qalla iªtifāluhum bi-aldhamm); K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 1, and then inquires why they argue in support of ‘what the community has universally agreed in finding reprehensible’ (li-mā ajmaʿat al-umma ʿalā taqbīªih); p. 2. 34. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 1. 35. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 2. 36. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 1–2. 37. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 2. 38. K. al-Óayawān III, pp. 379–80. The other causes for confounded intellects in the same passage are the working of Satan, and that of a man who applies an unprepared mind to matters of fine detail (al-daqīq) not having first mastered what is momentous (al-jalīl ), having carelessly passed over first principles (al-muqaddimāt). The language describing this latter case is not far from the addressee’s words we have just seen describing misers who perceive the ‘ambiguous and remote’ but fail to realise what is ‘momentous and close at hand’. 39. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 3. 40. See Ibn ManÕūr, Lisān al-ʿArab XI, pp. 81–2, s.v. ‘gh.m.r.’. 41. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 3. 42. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 3–4. 43. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 8. 44. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 4–5. 45. In notes to his standard edition of K. al-Bukhalāʾ, ˝ al-Óājirī suggests that ‘Khabbāb’ may be a copyist’s error for Janāb b. al-Khashkhash, a judge whom al-JāªiÕ quotes in K. al-Óayawān (VII, pp. 28–9). The views described here, however, would seem to disqualify a Muslim judge. Al-JāªiÕ also relates several reports from a certain Abū al-Jahjāh (al-Óayawān III, p. 9; IV, p. 20; V, p. 14) and Abū al-Jahjahāh (al-Óayawān II, p. 311) but the name Jahjāh here is not a patronymic and the passages in question give us little reason to suspect a connection to the thinker described here. A Íaª‚aª is listed among a group of theologians who held that dogs go to paradise in K. al-Óayawān III, p. 395. Even if

fau l t ing mi sers i n the i ntroductio n  | 213 the same individual is intended, it seems obvious that al-JāªiÕ has freely shaped the views expressed in K. al-Bukhalāʾ to suit his own ends. J. van Ess in Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra: Eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam, 6 vols (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991–95), II, p. 396, suggests that Íaª‚aª may have been a physician or ‘Naturphilosoph’. The Book of Issues (K. al-Masāʾil ) is not extant apart from an unrelated fragment. See al-Óājirī’s comments, K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 257–9, and Pellat, ‘Nouvel Essai’, p. 148. 46. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 198. 47. Al-Óājirī, K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 257–8; R. Serjeant, note to al-JāªiÕ, The Book of Misers: A Translation of al-Bukhalāʾ, trans. R. Serjeant (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1997), pp. 4n and 227. For an account of what can be known of Mazdak’s movement and of later Muslim perceptions, see C. Pellat, ‘Mazdak’, EI2 VI, pp. 949–52. 48. Pellat, Le Milieu Ba‚rien et la Formation de ĞāªiÕ, pp. 242–3. Al-JāªiÕ, speaking through yet another pseudonymous voice, does attribute to the pre-Islamic Persians (Majūs) a belief in sexual communism and, apparently, approval of incest in K. al-Qiyān, Rasāʾil II, p. 147. 49. A modern reader will likely hope that al-JāªiÕ also meant to satirise the utterly objectifying views of women that Khabbāb’s view implies: comparison to the author’s K. al-Qiyān (Rasāʾil II, pp. 143–82) attacking abuses in the trade of singing slave concubines inclines me to believe that the satire of such views is quite intentional here. 50. E.g. the speech of the landlord al-Kindī to his children, encouraging them to combat the desires of the self (nafs) for fresh fruit; K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 92–3. For a discussion of parallels between some of al-JāªiÕ’s misers and proto-Sunnī renunciants, see Cooperson, ‘Al-JāªiÕ, the Misers and the Proto-Sunnī Ascetics’, pp. 205–12. 51. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 5. 52. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 6–7.

5 Passive Addressee and Critical Reader in ˉ s /Ibn al-Tawʾam Debate the Abuˉ al-ʿA ˙

A

fter his tongue-in-cheek attempt to foist blame for writing about misers onto an obviously fictional addressee in the introduction of Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ, al-JāªiÕ would appear to adopt a largely neutral stance toward the materials he presents in the remainder of the book. Apart from a few tangential explanations and stories involving himself, he poses as the impersonal compiler of the anecdotes, speeches and letters that constitute the largest share of the text.1 Only rarely does he comment on the credibility of the reports and other materials he claims to have received from others. The addressee of the introduction, for all intents and purposes, disappears: there is scant use of the second person, no epistolary closing or, indeed, any reference to him apart from a single interjected blessing – ªafiÕaka Allāh (God preserve you).2 Relating the addressee’s bemused questions without comment in the introduction, the author’s presence, gently mocking and enigmatic, is felt, but through much of the book he retreats into the persona of a detached collector of circulating materials that have reached him. The protagonists and speakers in the anecdotes and even in the quoted speeches are largely objectified, while al-JāªiÕ does little in his presentation to complicate his relationship with the reader. The latter is left on his own to judge how much of what al-JāªiÕ and his informers report can be believed and to decide to what extent the misers depicted, or the reports themselves, are the object of ridicule. The searching of motives prompted by the addressee’s shifting stances gives way to a focus on miserly individuals with their wiles and eccentricities. But in certain materials, particularly four long and almost certainly pseudonymous letters inserted at various points in the text (those attributed to Sahl b. Hārūn and al-Kindī and the exchange between Abū al-ʿĀ‚ and Ibn al-Tawʾam), a richer interplay of voices prevails.3 These pseudonymous 214

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 215 authors and their addressees relate to the real author and his readership in complex unidirectional and varidirectional ways. An alert reader will find strands of inescapable parody in each of these letters that bring to the fore some of the very psychological and philological problems raised by the addressee in the introduction. Even al-JāªiÕ’s own conception of the bukhlsaraf continuum appears in twisted, ironic guises. The introduction to K. al-Bukhalāʾ had closed with the author’s ambiguous assertion that simply relating stories and arguments of misers will cover the topic more comprehensively than offering his opinions.4 Yet it is obvious that his own views are to be found, scattered and often refracted through parody, among the materials he presents under the voices of others while leaving little doubt that they are, in fact, his own creations. The interplay of parodic and non-parodic elements is most obvious in the two letters that al-JāªiÕ ascribes to Abū al-ʿĀ‚ al-Thaqafī and Ibn al-Tawʾam, who give voice to opposing sides of the debate on the merits of sharing with others. In both letters, exaggerated and self-undermining arguments give way, at unexpected points, to more reasonable statements and intelligent uses of textual authorities. Much as he does in several of the texts discussed in Chapter 2 above, al-JāªiÕ constructs a confrontation between two extreme points of view, neither of which the audience is likely to accept, and prompts them to search for a virtuous mean by assessing the validity of the arguments on either side. As with those texts, mockery of misguided arguments on both sides will motivate the alert reader to discern where the author’s true intentions lie, and in this he will only have the relative cogency of the various arguments presented to guide him. In this pseudonymous exchange, Abū al-ʿĀ‚ attacks all forms of avarice and appears to call for unlimited generosity in all circumstances, while Ibn al-Tawʾam advocates extreme miserliness, which he naturally prefers to refer to by the positive term ‘economy’ (iqti‚ād).5 These two pseudonymous writers direct their heavy-handed arguments not to each other but to an a­ll-but-voiceless addressee, known simply as ‘al-Thaqafī’, apparently a younger kinsman of Abū al-ʿĀ‚, whom they both unrelentingly pressure to adopt their respective views on the use of his own financial resources. From Abū al-ʿĀ‚ we are given to understand that al-Thaqafī has recently lost control of much of his property, while Ibn al-Tawʾam strongly implies that

216  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. he still has something to lose, but we find little reference to the financial circumstances of either writer in their texts, nor do we have any indication of how well either of them lives by his ideals. Both writers refer to al-Thaqafī’s economic situation in supporting their own arguments and both make strong appeals to his self-respect: as a Muslim and fellow member of the tribe of Thaqīf, in the case of Abū al-ʿĀ‚, and as an individual responsible for his own welfare in a complex urban environment, in the case of Ibn al-Tawʾam. In varying degrees, each of the writers makes use of supposedly rational arguments and observations on human behaviour along with appeals to poetry, proverbs and authoritative religious texts in support of his point of view. As in much of K. al-Bukhalāʾ, the rhetorical leaning tends subtly away from an overemphasis on generosity: Ibn al-Tawʾam’s letter is given the last word, his letter is the longer of the two and, perhaps surprisingly, he succeeds in marshalling a larger and more diverse collection of textual arguments in support of his call to economic prudence. Even so, the real debate is not between the two pseudonymous writers: Ibn al-Tawʾam does not respond directly to the arguments advanced by Abū al-ʿĀ‚ and his letter takes different directions. Instead it is between the parodic and serious elements of each letter that the reader is given to judge prior to assessing the complex intertextual relationship between them from which the author’s own message must be inferred. As with the addressee’s internal conflict in the introduction, the reader is steered toward the middle ground in the choice between sharing nobly and preserving his resources, but the conflicting implications of the better a­rguments on both sides are by no means easily resolved. The uncertainties and dilemmas that attend the individual choices involved do not undermine the cherished Arab and Muslim values of generosity and reliance on God but rather help to ensure their survival in the changing environment of al-JāªiÕ’s audience. The rich mixture of materials in both letters, along with the absence of epistolary closings, gives them a formal resemblance to al-JāªiÕ’s own letter-anthologies. Thus both texts, particularly Ibn Tawʾam’s, blend into the larger fabric of K. al-Bukhalāʾ. The line between al-JāªiÕ and the writers he pretends to be quoting will tend to be blurred in the mind of the reader, and the latter’s task of discerning the author’s true intentions becomes all the more complicated. At the same time, the reader can hardly help but compare

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 217 himself to the hapless al-Thaqafī, whose voice is conspicuously absent from the heated debate over how he ought to manage his own life and property. Whether wishing he might speak for al-Thaqafī in the face of the superior tone adopted toward him by both letter writers or seeking to distance himself from his passivity in the face of such presumptuous criticism, the reader will find a heightened motivation to confront the arguments advanced. For the reader, avoiding the helpless position of al-Thaqafī and actively assessing the relative validity of the arguments advanced becomes inseparable from his desire to discern the writer’s true intentions behind the two masks he adopts in succession. Beyond this, the two letters together constitute a microcosm of the range of thinking on generosity and spending in the reader’s environment as an Arabic-speaking urban Muslim of the literate class in the third/ninth century. By systematically suppressing the voice of al-Thaqafī in the face of a double-edged, intermittently parodic attack, al-JāªiÕ challenges his reader to apply reason and his own experience in sorting through the competing strands of his heritage as they apply to his own choices in life. The Letter of Abū al-ʿĀ‚ The title given to the first of the two letters by al-JāªiÕ in his persona as collector seems to reveal the relative standing in the tribe of the writer and addressee, while hinting at the particular style of humour that lies behind the relationship portrayed: ‘The Letter of Abū al-ʿĀ‚ b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb b. ʿAbd al-Majīd al-Thaqafī to al-Thaqafī.’6 The contrast between the formal and dignified listing of the father and grandfather’s names following the writer’s given name and the simple tribal nisba used to indicate the addressee suggests that the former enjoys a more impressive heritage or is at least more entitled to boast on this ground for some reason. The suggestion would appear to be that the addressee, whose name as given only indicates the tribal affiliation he shares with Abū al-ʿĀ‚, either lacks such a celebrated pedigree within the tribe, or is being slighted in this regard, perhaps out of disapproval for his miserly ways. At the same time, when al-JāªiÕ can refer to the addressee by such a common appellation, we are given to understand that this is an individual well known to the author and, perhaps, to some among his most immediate audience. Very possibly, this al-Thaqafī is a rather close friend of the author who is to be the butt of some gentle ribbing over his awkward

218  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. relationship with a prominent kinsman (and subsequently over his equally difficult dealings with Ibn al-Tawʾam). The sophisticated parody we find here may have had its origins in a real exchange of letters that al-JāªiÕ remembered hearing of with amusement. If this is the case, the letters we have here probably contain exaggerated versions of things said in the actual exchange that would have been still more amusing to those among the earliest audience who were familiar with the original exchange and the individuals involved. But, even if this is true, al-JāªiÕ is careful, as usual, to maintain intelligibility for a wider audience, and the satire that pervades both letters retains its power to amuse and challenge even today. The close relationship to the author indicated by the way the addressee’s name is given is all that a more remote reader needs to receive the hint at the gently satirical tone of the humour that is to follow. We should also note that the use of a tribal nisba to refer to an individual indicates that the author is not himself a member of the group in question: al-JāªiÕ’s perspective as an outsider is thus underscored before he launches into the parodies of tribal dynamics that pervade the letter. Speculations on the origins of the parodied exchange and the relationships behind it aside, echoes of specific themes already raised in K. al-Bukhalāʾ are many in both letters. I have discussed in the preceding chapters how al-JāªiÕ sometimes makes opportunistic use of the particular relationships he enjoyed with his patrons and shapes them toward his rhetorical aims toward a broader audience. As we shall see, numerous close thematic and verbal parallels in both letters to earlier passages in K. al-Bukhalāʾ make clear that al-JāªiÕ has carefully shaped these parodies to fit into the satirical fabric of the book. My concern in this chapter is entirely with the ways in which the two letters are used to stimulate readers’ engagement with the materials presented, those readers who know nothing of the original exchange as much as those who do. The adamant and harshly critical tone of Abū al-ʿĀ‚ in the letter is established from the outset with his announcement of the conclusion he has reached on a change in the character of al-Thaqafī. The latter’s associations with known misers, among them Ibn al-Tawʾam, and his ‘frequent references to property and its management’ prove that he has embraced the ‘hidden evil’ of miserliness. This newfound avarice is in great contrast to al-Thaqafī’s former disdain for misers, whose ways and opinions he once considered repugnant, even going to excess in denouncing them. Beyond the

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 219 single-minded pettiness of his tone, which fits so poorly with an exhortation to generosity, the first clues of parody can be found in Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s implied praise of al-Thaqafī’s former excesses in condemning miserliness in others. His admiration of excess suggests that his own point of view is a rather extreme one and that he sees no danger of erring on the side of liberality. At the same time, much as with the dynamics we saw in the book’s introduction in the previous chapter, Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s keeping count of al-Thaqafī’s miserly statements and associations with those considered avaricious is a miserly practice in itself in that collecting such observations allows him to view himself as generous in comparison. While Abū al-ʿĀ‚ shows no indication that he anticipates a response from Ibn al-Tawʾam, or even from al-Thaqafī himself, the quotations of notorious misers that he relates help to situate his letter within an ongoing debate among Muslims concerning avarice. Abū al-ʿĀ‚ relates these long statements by the orator Sahl b. Hārūn, the philologist al-A‚maʿī and the notorious advocate of parsimony Ismāʿīl b. Ghazwān, which he claims al-Thaqafī has memorised or praised, as proof that he has given himself over to miserly ways. The passage from Sahl is to the effect that only those who know how to protect the bounty they have received against ‘the vicissitudes of time’ (‚urūf al-zamān) can be accounted wise. Al-A‚maʿī is said to have related a ªadīth which claims that women and the poor will be the majority in Hell, while the rich and the feeble-minded (bulh) will predominate in Paradise. The long passage attributed to Ibn Ghazwān warns those who spend and share freely that the stress of poverty will prevent them from enjoying the praise they gain and that they will end with the humiliation of seeking favour from others.7 The severe judgement of Abū al-ʿĀ‚ against what is said in these quotations is made clear by the way he uses them to denounce al-Thaqafī as a miser. Abū al-ʿĀ‚ offers no comment on the content of any of these quotations and would appear to regard the miserliness of the views expressed as obvious. Since there are already signs that his own views reflect the other extreme, the reader is given to judge between the two poles of opinion that have begun to emerge in the text and will continue through the letter of Ibn al-Tawʾam. The fact that Abū al-ʿĀ‚ relates these statements in full, even though al-Thaqafī is said to have memorised them, shows the artificiality of the situation and may allow the reader to recognise that the letter itself is a fiction constructed by al-JāªiÕ.

220  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. The reader has thus already had several clues as to the parodic nature of the letter, and, while there has been no clue that the rebuttal of Ibn al-Tawʾam is to follow, the prevailing social tensions over the question of generosity have been evoked through the interaction between the voice of Abū al-ʿĀ‚ and the alleged avarice of those he quotes. While the reader’s attention is being subtly drawn to the possibilities of parody and extreme views occurring within the context of a cultural debate over the meaning of miserliness, the suppression of the voice of al-Thaqafī becomes more conspicuous. Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s referring to al-Thaqafī’s own statements in mere generalities while repeating his quotations of other misers at considerable length underscores the marginalisation of his voice, even where it is his own character and opinions that are under discussion. The fact that Abū al-ʿĀ‚ draws the conclusion that al-Thaqafī’s ways and views on property have changed on the basis of his associations with others and his repeating their statements is another sign of the passive role he assigns to him. What clue the reader can have as to al-Thaqafī’s actual views on property and sharing and reasons behind the behaviours that have led to these harsh judgements can only be gleaned from the objectifying, and obviously one-sided, account of Abū al-ʿĀ‚ that he has before him. The reader may well feel inclined to identify with al-Thaqafī in the face of such unyielding criticism and consider what economic pressures have led him to find the supposedly miserly statements quoted so appealing. The sympathy that has been generated for al-Thaqafī will make the reader all the more aware of the stinging parody in the passages that follow as Abū al-ʿĀ‚ goes on to describe his kinsman’s economic condition with an ­appalling lack of charity: I thank God, who has not let me perish before letting me see you a mere trustee over your own property and the hireling of your heir. For you have brought poverty upon yourself before its time and have come out like one who is flogged [i.e. for fornication] without having had the pleasure.8

He goes on to ask whether one who ‘expends all his property’ is in a worse state than a miser who must endure the loss of his companions, the enmity of his family and the rigours of his own austerity. Apart from seeing how

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 221 incongruous this gloating over a kinsman’s fate is with Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s alleged aim of exhorting to generosity, the reader may notice a difficulty in the chronology here that undermines his conclusions on why al-Thaqafī has come to poverty. The introductory passages that I have discussed above clearly imply that Abū al-ʿĀ‚ has only recently come to the conclusion that al-Thaqafī has abandoned his erstwhile contempt for possessions. The reader is well justified in asking whether the change in al-Thaqafī’s views on money is not rather due to this reversal of his circumstances, which may even have been brought about by his erstwhile love of generosity. Perhaps it was his former attitude that led him to these straits and his alleged preoccupation with conserving is now an attempt to rectify his situation. In the passage that follows, parody becomes still clearer as Abū al-ʿĀ‚ begins to attack al-Thaqafī’s identity and legitimacy as a member of the tribe of Thaqīf, reinforcing the impression that he has grown unnecessarily harsh and does not have his thinking straight with respect to chronology and causality. After asserting the evil effects of black bile (al-mirra al-sawdāʾ) on the soul, honour and life of the miser, he informs al-Thaqafī that he no longer counts him as worthy of the tribal identity and lineage he is supposed to share with him. He speaks of a baseness of disposition that has prevailed in him, and even attacks his Arab lineage: ‘A foreign [non-Arab] paternal line has befallen you and a foreign maternal line has corrupted you’ (la-qad ʿara∂a laka iqrāf wa-la-qad afsadatka hujna). He then goes on with a list of quotations and proverbs to the effect that those who claim a lineage in the tribes of Thaqīf or Quraysh and do not show generosity and related traits are interlopers and imposters.9 We have seen in Chapter 3 that, for al-JāªiÕ and some contemporaries, descent from a people with geographical roots in a given region involved a constitutional disposition (ʿirq) toward certain character traits, but that this disposition could be affected by one’s behaviour and habituation, as well as by dwelling in another land. It is not clear, therefore, whether Abū al-ʿĀ‚ is saying that he has come to suspect al-Thaqafī’s parentage because of his miserly talk or whether he is asserting that his miserly behaviour has corrupted the noble constitution his tribal origins ought to have given him. If Abū al-ʿĀ‚ means that he has actually come to doubt the legitimacy of al-Thaqafī’s birth because of the admiration he has recently expressed for miserly thinking, he is begging the question

222  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. of how to account for his earlier love of generosity. If he is merely suggesting that al-Thaqafī’s newfound ways have made him unworthy of the descent he claims from Thaqīf, he is still undermining the unfailing connection between bloodlines and character which the quotations he proudly rehearses assume. It is also possible that Abū al-ʿĀ‚, the parodic figure constructed here by al-JāªiÕ, is so astonished and outraged at the change he has seen in his kinsman that he means the irrational claim he makes literally and supposes that the historical facts of al-Thaqafī’s parentage can have changed. In any case, Abū al-ʿĀ‚ is pressuring al-Thaqafī’s sense of heritage and belonging in the strongest terms possible and with a rash severity that ill suits the Arab ethos of noble character, of which generosity was part. The generational tensions within proud tribal communities were likely familiar to al-JāªiÕ’s contemporaries. They may well have seen them as the result of the differing geographical and social environment of cities like Basra, where many Arabs from the Peninsula had settled without anticipating the effect on younger generations. While al-Thaqafī may appear as a relatively strong character here, having had the courage to adapt to his urban environment in the face of such severe tribal pressure, we will find in the letter of Ibn al-Tawʾam that he has been facing equally severe pressure from his non-tribal associates as well. Closely related to his assumptions on the hereditary disposition to generosity of Arabs and tribesman of Thaqīf, in particular, is his later claim that parsimony is an unchangeable characteristic of the common man (ʿammī). According to Abū al-ʿĀ‚, the reason neither the common people nor misers ever slacken in their acquisitiveness is not that they live in the ‘abode of the mutable’. Without specifying how he could know, he goes on to declare that: Even if they were certain that the bounties they enjoy would last eternally, they would ignore them, for the miser is one to exert himself and the common man is not one to slacken. So whoever does not have recourse to a powerful nature (†abīʿa qawiyya), a strong passion (shahwa shadīda) and a clear mind in confronting what I have described is either a common man or a wretch.10

Abū al-ʿĀ‚ does seem to distinguish the moral reproof that attends the labels of ‘wretch’ and ‘miser’ and the mere social inferiority that ʿammī indicates.

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 223 This distinction is probably what leads to him referring to the ways of misers as stemming from either a person’s nature or his ‘habit’ (ʿāda).11 The possibility of miserliness being either inborn or acquired may correspond to his claim in the passage above that it can be resisted by the strength of a person’s nature or of his passion to avoid it. In either case, the message given to al-Thaqafī is that miserliness is a shame to him and an overthrowing of his heritage and identity as a noble-born Arab of Thaqīf. The explanation that Abū al-ʿĀ‚ will not accept is that parsimony has anything to do with poverty and fear of loss or concern for one’s children. The truth of these assertions can only be weighed against the reader’s own experience. If the reader is at all attuned to the gaps and contradictions in Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s logic – and in his character, as well – that establish the letter’s parodic tone, he will be ready to notice how al-JāªiÕ slyly has Abū al-ʿĀ‚ undermine the credibility of the stories of the Prophet and Arab heroes that soon follow. After a few Qurʾānic verses and popular sayings on the generosity of God, Abū al-ʿĀ‚ turns to listing what people relate of the Prophet’s generosity. Some, though not all, of the deeds mentioned are contained in traditions now part of the canonical Sunnī ªadīth collections, but their status was likely more ambiguous and the object of sectarian contentions in al-JāªiÕ’s time. According to Abū al-ʿĀ‚, Muªammad, even though he effectively held possession of the entire Arabian Peninsula, shared so lavishly that he died in debt with his armour pawned (a tradition indeed found in Íaªīª al-Bukhārī). Whenever he was asked, he gave. He would bestow flocks of livestock on individuals, even astonishing one man with a gift of a thousand camels. Abū al-ʿĀ‚ follows his celebration of the Prophet’s boundless largesse with praise for two figures of proverbial generosity in pre-Islamic lore, Óātim al-˝āʾī and Kaʿb b. Māmah, both of whom effectively gave their lives rather than be remiss in their obligation to share with travellers.12 The reader may sense notes of parody behind Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s citation of such stories, even if questioning them could be sensitive, particularly in the case of Prophetic tradition. The need for some sense of proportion and appropriateness in giving is entirely absent here, as it is throughout the letter, and a person’s regard for his own needs and those of his family hardly appears to be a consideration. The reader may wonder how even the Prophet could have possessed sufficient resources to give to everyone who asked, especially

224  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. when giving in such grandiose proportions. Even if a devout Muslim reader assumes there were special circumstances in the life of the Prophet, the value of such deeds as examples for ordinary Muslims is questionable. A cleverer and stealthier suggestion that the traditions cited are grossly exaggerated intrudes only a page later when Abū al-ʿĀ‚ goes on to celebrate the benefits of generosity for those who give freely. The Muslim community, he claims, has never shown contempt for a generous man; rather, it has loved him and his entire tribe, and gone to excess in praising them. Furthermore, he declares: . . . we have not found them despising a generous one because he went beyond the limit of generosity (jūd ) to prodigality (saraf ), nor have they ever scorned him. Rather, we find them studying his deeds and rehearsing his merits together, even to the point of adding stories of good turns he never did and attributing to him unheard-of feats of largesse that he had not really attained to.13

The implications of these last claims for the veracity of the Prophetic and pre-Islamic traditions that Abū al-ʿĀ‚ has cited only a page before are obvious enough. If people are in the habit of fabricating stories when praising the generous, much of what has come down concerning prophets’ and heroes’ deeds may stem from such exaggerations. The description of this celebration of deeds as a kind of communal study may echo the famous passage on the ‘mosque-dwellers’ of Basra, earlier in K. al-Bukhalāʾ, and reinforces a thinly veiled barb directed at the Traditionist ªadīth scholars.14 But al-JāªiÕ, perhaps realising how sensitive the questions raised regarding ªadīth have become, soon after finds an opportunity to extend the same line of parody to K. al-Bukhalāʾ itself and remind the reader that it is not to be taken too seriously. Moving naturally to the converse of what he has observed of the community’s celebration of the generous, Abū al-ʿĀ‚ goes on to describe how people despise a miser, along with his descendants and clan, and: . . . ascribe to him anecdotes of stinginess (nawādir al-luʾm) which he did not attain to, and feats of miserliness (gharāʾib al-bukhl ) which he never actually accomplished, to the point where they double his evil repute just as they double the good repute of the generous.15

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 225 Even the phrasing, echoing the addressee’s words in the introduction which we saw in the preceding chapter, makes clear the hint that such words could apply to much of the content of K. al-Bukhalāʾ itself. Having called his audience’s attention to the human tendency to exaggerate, al-JāªiÕ turns the satirical barb against his own book, reminding them that it contains many reports that are dubious to say the least. If the human tendency to exaggerate casts doubts on stories of unlimited generosity from the past, it does so as well with stories of extreme miserliness: the pressure of the former and the comfort of the latter are equally apt to misguide the audience in their own sharing and spending. Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s case in favour of generosity next turns to a series of arguments in which he implies that how much one shares has little to do with how much wealth one retains, and here the ironies become more subtle. He declares that poverty does not come any sooner to the generous than to the miserly because the latter often show no restraint in spending on their own desires or rely on their own prudence rather than trusting the providence of God. His description of such a miser spending lavishly on concubines, servants, horses and other ostentatious luxuries and losing what he has to alchemy and risky ventures shows he is thinking here of the very wealthy. To prove that miserliness does not spring from a fear of poverty, he offers the example of two kings: one possessing a wider realm, higher revenue and a less aggressive enemy who is a miser despite all this, and another with slighter lands and income and a restive enemy who still manages to be generous.16 For a reader of more modest station, the example begs the question of how much greater a share of his possessions he would need to sacrifice in order to gain a reputation for generosity than would even the poorer of these two kings. Still, the reader will have only his own experience of human affairs to guide him in assessing the accuracy of Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s observations and resolving the tensions between his assertions, and the intentions of the author, behind the pseudonymous voice he is creating, are difficult to discern. This parody of Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s harsh criticism of misers who indulge themselves while neglecting others, taken together with his recent praise for legendary figures said to have given all for the sake of others, helps to form a subtle hint that moderate sharing is al-JāªiÕ’s own ideal. The legends of Kaʿb and Óātim portray individuals abandoning concern for their own lives out

226  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. of an exaggerated sense of obligation toward sharing with others, while the Prophet, according to the traditions Abū al-ʿĀ‚ chooses to relate, exhausts all his property and dies in debt in order to present lavish gifts. In such stories, the hero neglects his own most basic needs for the sake of sharing far beyond what the persons who are the objects of their generosity need. The subsequent portrait of spendthrift misers emphasises how they indulge their bodily desires, vanity and dreams of future wealth far beyond what is necessary or practical while neglecting more basic social obligations toward others. Seeking to show how such selfish indulgence, taken to extremes, can bring ruin more quickly than sharing, Abū al-ʿĀ‚ contrasts such a miser with a moderately generous person: A miser may burden himself with troubles and compel himself to spend, taking on concubines and servants, mounts and retinue, exotic vessels, luxurious apparel and fine ornaments that exceed the expenditure of the wealthy and munificent and are double the generosity of the generous and noble.17

Having recently presented a portrait of the generous Kaʿb and Óātim who lost their own lives out of generosity, Abū al-ʿĀ‚ would appear to be arguing here that one need not be generous in order to bring one’s own finances to ruin. But in order to emphasise the particular destructiveness of this form of selfish indulgence, he inadvertently contrasts it with a moderate form of generosity quite different from that of Kaʿb and Óātim. The implication here is that, if the generous were as lavish in their giving as the person described is in buying luxuries, they would exhaust their resources as quickly, and that one can be called noble and generous while giving half of what the self-indulgent person spends on himself. While Abū al-ʿĀ‚, throughout his exhortation to al-Thaqafī in the letter, appears reluctant to concede any need for restraint or foresight in giving, some of his observations and examples effectively point to a balance between concern for self and others as a practical goal for an individual. While his own argument may force him to implicitly affirm the benefit of moderation here, Abū al-ʿĀ‚ tends to think in binary terms, following the traditional conception of miserliness as the opposite of generosity and implying that one can only err by sharing too little. Even when he employs a framework similar to al-JāªiÕ’s bukhl-saraf continuum of behavior, his purpose is

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 227 to celebrate excess rather than encourage moderation, and the ironies behind his choice of vocabulary are not difficult to discern: We do not find that the generous man flees from a reputation for ‘prodigality’ (saraf ) to [one for] ‘generosity’, as we find that the miser flees from being called ‘reckless’ (mutahawwir) and the embarrassed flees from being called ‘ashamed’ . . . For, if the excellence (fa∂īla) of generosity were found in no more than that all those who exceed the proper bounds of the various sorts of virtue despise a reputation for that [neighbouring] excess (fa∂la) except for the generous [who do not mind being labelled ‘prodigal’], that alone would make clear its worth and show its excellence (fa∂lahu).18

Abū al-ʿĀ‚ cannot declare saraf, a negative term in its very definition, a virtue; he can only point out that the social consequences of acquiring such a label are not negative. He wants to take this as an indication of the superiority of generosity over other virtues, but the reader can just as easily ask whether the community’s tendency to praise excess does not mean that it tends to praise generosity more than it ought to. While Aristotle might point to people’s praise of ‘excessive’ giving as proof that such behaviour should be considered virtuous, in Muslim society the semantics of an Arabic word were more powerful arguments in themselves. In the previous chapter, we saw that the Qurʾān uses the verbal form of the same term to criticise those who attempt to give more than they ought, and it was likely problematic to praise with language that is in tension with that of the sacred text. The sentence of the passage cited may contain a play on words: ‘excellence’ (fa∂l ) can also be taken as ‘superfluity’ or ‘excess’, a synonym for the closely related fa∂la, which is used in this sense in the preceding sentence. What Abū al-ʿĀ‚ takes for proof of the excellence of generosity among the virtues can as easily be taken for an excess in the community’s valorisation of that quality even when it is taken beyond the proper limits. While Abū al-ʿĀ‚ can note that people desire to be perceived as excessively generous, he fails to ask whether the community’s valorisation of unlimited generosity actually spurs people to such behaviour. In fact, the passage that follows the one we have just seen shows a nearly contradictory view of what people truly respect and subtly illustrates the same social dilemma that was posed by the addressee in the introduction. Abū al-ʿĀ‚ turns abruptly

228  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. to a discussion of why people are attracted to riches and show respect for the wealthy. His goal here is apparently to explain why some are prone to ­miserliness despite all the disadvantages he has attempted to show attend it. Wealth enamours and a person (al-nafs) desires. Riches are denied (mamnūʿa) and people covet what is denied to them. People have a wellknown tendency to acquisitiveness because anyone who lacks thought and insight is bound to honour one who has wealth, even if he does not obtain what he seeks from him.19

Abū al-ʿĀ‚ does not realise that he is laying out the steps of a counterargument to the assertions he has just made on people’s admiration for generosity. He uses the passive participle of the verb manaʿa (to deny) – a verb he has repeatedly used in referring to the stinginess he condemns – in describing how people’s failure to obtain money increases their desire for it. When he follows this with the assertion that people admire the wealthy even when they fail to share with them, he is close to implying that one is best off in society if one refuses to share and so retains more of one’s wealth. Apparently not realising the implications, he thus underscores the tensions between this observation that people respect the rich even when they receive nothing from them, and his assertion in the preceding passage that people desire a reputation for excessive generosity. The reader needs little imagination to pull together the conclusion that the wealthy are respected whether they share or not and, perhaps, even more likely to enjoy this respect by not sharing. In other passages, however, Abū al-ʿĀ‚ uses arguments that may have been more convincing to the contemporary audience: the distance between parody and al-JāªiÕ’s voice diminishes greatly. He argues that the wealth of misers is more subject to loss because they are less likely to rely on the providence of God than the generous. When they use the possibility of reversals of fortune (ªidthān) as an excuse for their parsimony they are failing to consider how this outlook reflects on their view of God: ‘Thinking ill of the vicissitudes of time is tantamount to thinking ill of the Creator of events.’ The generous, in contrast, are willing to rely on God rather than on their own ‘discretion’ (ªazm) and ‘cleverness’ (kays).20 The rather powerful suggestion that individuals’ future financial security is dependent on the will of God rather than their own scheming will indirectly be answered by some of the materials related by

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 229 Ibn al-Tawʾam, but in this letter they are left to carry what force they may for the Muslim audience. While the appeal to reliance on God rather than the limited wisdom of human beings may have held some sway with the Muslim audience, such an argument risked implying that the generous possess less intelligence and foresight than the miserly. It is perhaps for this reason that Abū al-ʿĀ‚ soon turns to refuting the claim that the famed generosity of the East African Zanj was due only to their perceived weakness of intellect and lack of foresight. He argues that if this were the reason for their generosity, one would expect to find the peoples seen as more intelligent more miserly than their intellectual inferiors, and so with other classes of humanity as perceived by his society: ‘Men in general, then, ought to be more miserly than women, and young boys ought to be more magnanimous than women.’21 For Abū al-ʿĀ‚, the view that generosity is a sign of weakness of intellect would lead to a view of all the social groups that runs counter to the social hierarchy and Arab pride that he has been using to persuade al-Thaqafī. While al-JāªiÕ – who, as we saw in Chapter 3 above, relates virtually the same argument in K. Fakhr al-Sūdān but shapes it there as a defence of the intellect of the Zanj – may not have shared some of the prejudices involved, it is interesting that he has the parodic figure of Abū al-ʿĀ‚ acknowledge the generosity of the Zanj. While Abū al-ʿĀ‚ considers this virtue an integral part of his identity as an Arab of Thaqīf and considers miserliness an indelible trait of the common man, he is unable to deny that a people traditionally disparaged in the Arab tradition – and one that he himself describes as the weakest in intellect – has a share of this virtue. The connections he has been attempting to make between generosity and stature in the community are thereby complicated. Closely related to his claim that the miserly are not more clever or judicious than the generous are several observations he has made on the thoughtless and contradictory behaviour of some misers. Echoing the observations of the addressee of the introduction, as we saw in the preceding chapter, he offers the example of a blatant miser who worries over his reputation: ‘His miserliness will be all the more repugnant and his meanness more reprehensible. Thus he will spend his money and devastate his treasuries and not escape unscathed.’ As part of his argument that the miserly lose their riches as readily as the generous, he attacks the supposition that they are never guilty of lapses

230  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. of caution: ‘As if you have never seen a miser duped or enticed, a wastrel or a braggart, or one who lost his money on constructions or one whose money went to alchemy or who spent it on a vain ambition.’22 Having seen Abū al-ʿĀ‚ so readily make naïve generalisations about the generous, the reader now finds him challenging al-Thaqafī to defend an equally naïve view of the stingy. In yet another passage he attacks the excuse commonly advanced by misers that they are saving for their children’s future. He declares that their present harshness toward them belies the sincerity of their concern and notes that eunuchs, monks and those whose children have died show no less avarice than those who have heirs.23 Even though Abū al-ʿĀ‚ never deigns to qualify his call to generosity by mentioning a need for judiciousness, his observations on misers who lack foresight themselves are left to the reader’s experience, and may temper the parody of the letter at unexpected moments. Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s letter concludes with several pages of proof texts: Prophetic traditions, poetry, proverbs and statements of individuals, all supporting his call for generosity.24 By this time, the reader may be wondering whether the citations will be in accord with the pattern of parody in which the letter began or whether the cogency of some of the later passages will prevail. Following the pattern we have seen in many of al-JāªiÕ’s letter essays, al-Thaqafī is never addressed directly through the remainder of the text, and there is little to remind us of the voice of Abū al-ʿĀ‚, the quotations being left to speak for themselves. The texts cited are largely free of the sort of praise of extravagant giving that the reader has met with earlier in the letter. Many of these texts stress the importance of simply giving something, and several define miserliness in extreme terms, making the less than lavish appear generous. Tensions arise between the citations of ªadīth and Qurʾān on the one hand, and the verses of poetry – deeply rooted in pre-Islamic Arabia – that follow. The former emphasise duty toward the community and the value of patience, while holding out the prospect of reward or punishment; the latter celebrate reckless sharing among companions and warn of the brevity of life and the fleeting nature of riches. Without Abū al-ʿĀ‚ intervening, as he had with some of his earlier materials, and offering interpretations of varying degrees of plausibility, the reader is given no help in sorting the countervailing strains of the materials. The unrelenting pressure upon al-Thaqafī with which the

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 231 letter began fades and the reader is left in peace to contemplate the no-doubt familiar texts and their implications for him. A few of the texts cited by Abū al-ʿĀ‚ will be given a differing significance by Ibn al-Tawʾam, while others will be counterbalanced by texts the latter marshals in favour of conserving one’s resources. The Prophetic traditions cited lack chains of transmission, and the reader can only assess their validity on the basis of content. In one report we find Muªammad sparing a delegate who has lied because of his generosity, ‘a trait God tenderly loves’, and in another he equates generosity with modesty and hence faith. In one ªadīth cited he stresses the abnormality of miserliness, asking what disease could be worse than it, but in another, he seems to declare that at least a propensity toward avarice is part of human nature: ‘Even though a human being (ibn Ādam) had two valleys of property, he would seek a third, and a human being is not satisfied except by dust [i.e. in the grave], and God turns back from [punishing] whoever repents.’25 While avarice is thus seen as the regrettable norm of human behaviour here, in the preceding citation it is defined in rather extreme terms. Although the tension between the two traditions is not easily escaped, both have the effect of making moderate sharing appear relatively generous. A tradition in which the Prophet tells Bilāl to give without fearing a shortage of benefit from ‘the Possessor of the throne’ relates to Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s earlier emphasis on trusting in God’s providence. The only tradition for which Abū al-ʿĀ‚ offers an interpretation is a famous one in which gold and silver are referred to as ‘the two stones’, which he claims to show that Muªammad wanted to derogate their value and people’s infatuation with them.26 The reader is left to consider how these Muslim traditions can be reconciled with the verse citations that follow immediately. Passages from alNamir b. Tawlab, a poet who composed at the dawn of the Muslim era, describe his defiance of his wife’s pleas for restraint as he entertains his youthful companions with wine. Knowing he is destined to die, he sees no reason to concern himself with possessions that will be left to another.27 Here and in other verses cited, concern for the poet’s community and family and even his own future are swept aside in favour of enjoying the moment with friends. The section that follows and concludes the letter is a collection of Prophetic tradition, Qurʾānic verses, popular sayings and quotations of early

232  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. Muslims. Many of these materials are to the effect that even a small gift is to be valued, and – in a vein resembling the Gospel story of the ‘widow’s mite’ (Mark 12:41–4) – that the merit of a gift depends on the extent of the giver’s wealth: ‘what the poor one gives with effort is more than what the rich give from their surplus,’ as the words of Salm b. Qutayba put it.28 By this point, the figure of Abū al-ʿĀ‚ with his vision of unrestrained largesse is all but forgotten. As is the case with many fictional debates al-JāªiÕ constructs, the point argued becomes little more than a commitment to a word, ‘generosity’ in this case, whose varying shades of meaning are brought to the fore. The more uncritical the debater becomes in marshalling arguments and texts to support his commitment, the more his ideology, and even personality, are lost in the unstable semantics that become involved. The reader is shown the complexity and ambiguity of the words employed and left to sort through the resulting chaos. With the individual voice of Abū al-ʿĀ‚, al-Thaqafī’s presence as addressee fades from the text as well, and the quoted materials have little to distinguish them from the surrounding sections of K. al-Bukhalāʾ. Having been invited to imagine himself in the place of the addressee, helplessly badgered over his finances with a mixture of obviously parodic and cogent arguments, the reader is now presented with a microcosm of the Arab Muslim heritage and left to weigh the importance of its various strands. The Reply of Ibn al-Tawʾam If al-Thaqafī and his predicament are allowed to fade from view as the letter of Abū al-ʿĀ‚ draws to a close, they are once again brought to the fore when we learn the circumstances that have led Ibn al-Tawʾam to write his reply. The invitation for the reader to distance himself from al-Thaqafī’s passivity as he deals with the unfolding intertextual tensions is subtly made clear as al-JāªiÕ, assuming his role as the disinterested collector, introduces the second pseudonymous letter: So when the letter reached Ibn al-Tawʾam, he was loath to answer Abū al-ʿĀ‚ because of the contention and discord it would involve, and he feared that the dispute would heighten into something more serious. So he wrote this letter and sent it to al-Thaqafī.29

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 233 Al-Thaqafī’s own reaction to Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s advice is thoroughly suppressed: we are not even told how the letter addressed to him has come into Ibn al-Tawʾam’s hands. The collector seems to assume that al-Thaqafī’s own reaction to the letter is of no interest to the reader. The text itself is given the agency in the sentence, and al-Thaqafī’s role in the exchange – even the passive one of receiving the letter – goes unmentioned. The reader may surmise that al-Thaqafī has appealed to his companion, Ibn al-Tawʾam, to help him respond to arguments he cannot answer, or that he simply felt a need to inform Ibn al-Tawʾam of the context in which Abū al-ʿĀ‚ had mentioned his name, but the collector does not bother to tell us even this much. Again, the addressee is simply referred to by his tribal nisba, revealing that he is well known to the author, and raising the possibility that some friendly ribbing lies behind the suppression of his role in the exchange. The reader may not know whether the parodied letters have roots in a correspondence among real individuals, and, rhetorically, the texts are probably most effective if the reader knows nothing more than the voiceless role al-Thaqafī is given, thus giving him little choice but to compare himself in his own response to the text. While the parodic nature of Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s letter may be clear from the outset, the entry into Ibn al-Tawʾam’s letter is deceptive. The collector’s remarks cited above seem to show sympathy with the claim Ibn al-Tawʾam will make in the opening of the letter that he has chosen not to reply to Abū al-ʿĀ‚ with a direct refutation since this might lead to a letter in reply which he would have as much reason to refute as the first. From this point, argues Ibn al-Tawʾam, ‘we would stray into mutual reviling . . . and whoever comes to that has accepted obstinacy as his fate and folly as his portion.’ This leads into a digression on the dangers of obstinacy (lajāj) and also of its opposite, inconstancy (talawwun), which is still worse and leads to a person’s being easily swayed by others (immaʿa) – apparently a warning against succumbing to the pressure exerted by Abū al-ʿĀ‚. He then declares (in a spirit resembling some of al-JāªiÕ’s own ‘replies’ to sectarian rivals discussed in Chapter 3 above) that he is not directing his reply to Abū al-ʿĀ‚, who would only continue in a spirit of confrontation, but addressing his advice to al-Thaqafī. Ibn al-Tawʾam links his emphatic statement that he is directing his reply to al-Thaqafī and not Abū al-ʿĀ‚ with the quotation of a proverb: ‘Keep

234  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. your secret, for your secret is our lifeblood.’ In the context, the secret that al-Thaqafī is so urgently exhorted to keep to himself would appear to be the arguments of refutation which he is not to share with Abū al-ʿĀ‚.30 The fact that these secretly related arguments are a possession of real value to al-Thaqafī is implied in the passage that follows, in which the need to preserve one’s secrets is virtually synonymous with the need to protect one’s property: It makes no difference whether you lose your life or lose that with which your life is sustained. Al-Munjāb al-ʿAnbarī said ‘No problem that money can remedy is a serious one,’ so to lose that which remedies one’s affairs is weightier than the affairs themselves. For this reason, they say of camels ‘[They are of value] if only for the fact that a blood-wite can be paid off with them.’ Therefore, that which is the price of a camel – or anything else – is even more in need of guarding.31

Keeping a secret, such as the arguments Ibn al-Tawʾam will use to refute Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s call to generosity, is intimately linked with the preserving of one’s money, which is tantamount to preserving one’s life. The secrecy of the message, which is a private acknowledgement that the publicly admired virtue of magnanimity can be a danger to one, is part and parcel of looking out for one’s economic welfare and protecting one’s very existence. Maintaining such a split between public ideals and private realism is, of course, very much in the individual’s own interests, and we are now on territory familiar from the addressee of the introduction with his secret desire to protect his reputation for generosity while preserving as much of his property as he can. Despite his insistence on avoiding obstinacy and confrontation, as Ibn al-Tawʾam progresses through his deft transition into his main argument against excessive generosity, the extremity of his own position becomes clear and the parodic nature of the letter is gradually revealed as his language betrays his purpose. Among his excuses for not replying directly to Abū al-ʿĀ‚ is an assertion of the importance of finding a middle way between obstinacy and inconstancy: ‘One whose humours are in balance, whose thoughts are weighted in even proportion, does not know of anything but moderation (iqti‚ād).’32 The context implies that this last word refers to moderation in the sense of striking a balance between two extremes, stubbornness or fickleness,

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 235 when responding to contrary opinions in general. In the context of his emerging disagreement with Abū al-ʿĀ‚, this ought to lead to seeking a balance between reckless generosity and miserliness. But ‘iqti‚ād’ has been established in many passages of K. al-Bukhalāʾ, including some we have seen, as the miser’s preferred euphemism for his vice in the sense of ‘economy’. By the following page, Ibn al-Tawʾam has already revealed which sort of iqti‚ād he really advocates. The silver dirham is for him ‘the very axis around which the millstone of the world revolves’. He further advises al-Thaqafī to ‘beware of letting a dirham depart from your possession until you see something better in its place’. When he goes on to complain that ‘people call excess “generosity” and declare it noble (sammaw al-saraf jūdan wa-jaʿalūhu karaman)’, the reader will notice the reversed echoes of Abū al-ʿĀ‚.33 The converse implied is that what Ibn al-Tawʾam sees as generosity or economy is what many regard as miserliness (bukhl ). In the light of his recent statements on the dirham, it is clear that he is taking the opposite extreme and that his calls for moderation are a thinly veiled defence of avaricious ways. As Ibn al-Tawʾam’s defence of parsimony from the criticism of Abū al-ʿĀ‚ and others unfolds, his arguments are often couched in an appeal to reason (ʿaql ). Thus, he attempts to question whether the sharing undertaken by human beings, whose actions inevitably involve some selfish motive, can be described as true generosity (like that of God) ‘in accord with rational argument’ (fī ªujjat al-ʿaql ).34 Al-Thaqafī is later told that all will go well with him as long as his intellect is keeping watch over his nature (mā kāna laka . . . ʿayn min ʿaqlika ʿalā †ibāʿika), and as long as he has the benefit of wise advice. Moreover, after telling al-Thaqafī to ignore Abū al-ʿĀ‚ and heed his own advice, Ibn al-Tawʾam attempts to counter the advantage of tribal connection with al-Thaqafī that his rival enjoys. He does this by suggesting that rational advice implies an even closer relationship than kinship: ‘Your brother is the one who tells you the truth, approaches you by way of your mind (min jihat ʿaqlika) and does not approach by way of your passions (shahwātika).’35 Reliance on reason, which for Ibn al-Tawʾam appears to entail doing one’s utmost to preserve one’s wealth, is also contrasted with the ‘intoxication of wealth’ and the destructive effect that gold and silver can have on one’s constitution (†abāʾiʿ). Money is only safe from its tendencies toward ‘escaping’ (nazawān) and ‘slipping off’ (tafallut) if its guardian is ‘right in his mind’

236  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. (‚aªiª al-ʿaql ) and keeps it ‘shackled in place’ (fī ʿiqālihi).36 The irony of these warnings in the context is clear enough and is only heightened by the fact that Ibn al-Tawʾam has already claimed that one whose humours are in balance avoids obstinacy and seeks moderation. Never considering the possibility that one might continue to seek and hoard money long after any threat of poverty is gone, he even declares that wealth leads to stupidity (balāda), while need encourages ambition and scrutiny of one’s affairs. But there is a way to enjoy the benefits of wealth without succumbing to its detrimental effects on one’s thinking, as he tells al-Thaqafī: If you would prefer to combine the perfection of soul (itmām al-nafs) of the wealthy, the glory of might of riches and the pleasure of having power with the awareness of the unpropertied and the thoughts of the destitute . . . you would be economical in your outlays and prepared for reversals of fortune.37

In his insistence on maintaining the cautious mentality of the poor after becoming rich, Ibn al-Tawʾam resembles the puzzling behaviour of certain misers that the addressee describes in the book’s introduction: ‘Why do they act, when they are wealthy, like one who is afraid of losing his wealth and not act . . . like one who has hope that his wealth will last?’38 Ibn al-Tawʾam would apparently answer the question by pointing to a realistic fear that prosperity may lead to a false sense of security, but he does not acknowledge a parallel danger of losing all sense of proportion when taking precautions, and nowhere does he suggest that looking out for one’s own welfare should be balanced by concern for others. Ibn al-Tawʾam contrasts the dictates of ‘reason’ not only with desires or the ‘drunkenness of wealth’ but, implicitly, with the sorts of authoritative texts that Abū al-ʿĀ‚ relies upon. As we shall soon see, Ibn al-Tawʾam will eventually abandon his eschewal of textual arguments, but the contempt he initially expresses for them is striking as he discourages al-Thaqafī from trusting revered texts: Do not bother me with things we do not hear of except in affected poems, invented reports and forged writings. One of our contemporaries has said ‘Noble deeds have vanished from everywhere except books.’ So pay heed to what you know and do not trouble yourself with what you do not know.39

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 237 When the pseudonymous writer dismisses ‘forged writings’, a phrase which could also be translated as ‘apocryphal letters’, al-JāªiÕ may be hinting at the ironies that underlie the entire parodic debate. Still, Ibn al-Tawʾam’s doubts concerning the veracity and authenticity of some of the Arabic literary heritage are clearly to be seen in the sentence that follows. Attacking poetry, he places himself at odds with a tradition that was an enduring source of pride for Arabs and many other Muslims. When he casts doubt on ‘reports’, he comes close to rejecting Prophetic tradition and the many stories which were Muslims’ sole source of contact with the revered early generations of Islam. In addition to these attacks on the literary heritage, Ibn al-Tawʾam shows contempt for sayings of the common people, who cannot be taken as exemplars since they ‘neither deduce nor think’. Here he is probably not only responding to the popular proverbs quoted by Abū al-ʿĀ‚, but countering his claim that miserliness is a trait of the common people by suggesting that many sayings in praise of generosity come from them. Rejecting arguments from poetry in praise of generosity, he plays on the Muslim term jāhiliyya, ‘time of ignorance’, when he refers to pre-Islamic poets as ‘ignorant’.40 But his misuse, elsewhere, of the Qurʾān and traditions concerning the early Muslims, along with the general worldliness of his outlook, which we will soon discuss, belies any pretence of pious concern over the pagan values of pre-Islamic verse. While Abū al-ʿĀ‚ inadvertently casts doubts on some elements of the textual heritage by suggesting that the deeds of the generous have led to admiring exaggeration, Ibn al-Tawʾam comes close to a wholesale dismissal of all these materials. While showing a preference for what can be known through present-day experience over idealistic accounts of the community’s past, Ibn al-Tawʾam systematically avoids mention of the eschatological future, seeming to put a focus on the individual’s earthly future in its place. He diverts language that ordinarily refers to reward in the next life to refer to a person’s future economic security, which he treats as eternal. ‘What I say here’, he promises al-Thaqafī, ‘is bitterness to be followed by an eternity of sweetness, and what Abū al-ʿĀ‚ says is sweetness to be followed by an eternity of bitterness.’ Seeming to lose sight of human mortality and the finitude of earthly existence, he fears that a habit of expenditure will in time exhaust a fortune, no matter its size:

238  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. Beware of parting with a single dirham of your property until you see something better to take its place. Do not look to the abundance of your property, for if [grains] were taken from the sand of ʿĀlij [Mountain] and not replaced, it would disappear in the end.41

Ibn al-Tawʾam even dares to appropriate a Qurʾānic verse of the Day of Judgement for the sake of warning al-Thaqafī against impoverishing himself. After asking him whether he has never seen anyone who came to poverty through giving to others helped, or even shown respect, by those he has given to, he cites scriptural verses on the gravity of that Day and even identifies himself with its terrors: God, glorify His name, says ‘ . . . a Day on which the shin will be bared [as if to flee] and they will be called on to prostrate themselves and not be able to out of fear, their eyes cast down in humiliation, for they had once been called to prostrate themselves when they were safe and sound.’ Well, I am the one who stands over you, admonishing and dissuading, commanding and forbidding, while you are sound in mind and honour, having plenty of money and in fine condition. So beware of my standing over your head tomorrow, scolding and reviling, upbraiding and reproving, while you are sick at heart, besmirched in your honour, penniless and in a dreadful state!42

The redundant phrases, imperiousness and twisting of scriptural context here are al-JāªiÕ’s signals of parody; Ibn al-Tawʾam’s excess of worldly worry, if anything, prompts the reader to weigh concerns of the present life in the light of eternity. Placed near the middle of the letter, with more cogent and reasonable arguments against excessive sharing to come, the passage helps al-JāªiÕ to distance himself from the extreme, making some passages to follow appear strikingly moderate and sensible in their use of texts. However the contemporary reader may have felt about this disparaging of celebrated texts, he is not likely to have found much to persuade him in what Ibn al-Tawʾam advances as rational arguments. After his complaint that we have seen of people calling excess ‘generosity’, he lapses into logical ­fallacies as he attempts to support his case: How can this be when giving is not excess until it has gone beyond what is right (al-ªaqq), and there is no nobility (karam) that goes beyond what is

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 239 right in the direction of wrong (wa-laysa warāʿa al-ªaqq ilā al-bā†il karam)? And if what is wrong were noble then what is right would be ignoble.43

The parodic syllogism plays on two senses of the Arabic word ‘ªaqq’: it is used first in the sense of a ‘right’ to which someone is entitled, but, when contrasted with ‘bā†il ’, ‘wrong’ or ‘falsehood’, it takes on the sense of ‘truth’ or ‘correctness’. Another logically flawed argument in the same vein occurs in the following sentence: ‘Excess – God preserve you – is disobedience, and, if disobedience to God is noble, then obedience would be ignoble.’44 After failing to explain here the reason for his assumption that excess (saraf ) is disobedience, he goes on to assume that, if the characteristic of nobility is predicable of a specific type of disobedience, then the opposite of that characteristic will necessarily be predicable of every type of obedience. Perhaps, the Muslim reader will gather, in any case, that what is truly saraf (which always denotes a vice in the Qurʾān, as we saw in the previous chapter) cannot be called obedience, but the inference will be the reader’s and owe nothing to the dubious syllogisms of Ibn al-Tawʾam. Moreover, the sincerity of Ibn al-Tawʾam’s charge that others (no doubt among them Abū al-ʿĀ‚) have made the vice of excessive generosity into a virtue is soon belied by his own attempts to rob the positive words jūd and karam (both denoting ‘generosity’ but the latter also having the sense of ‘nobility’) of all significance. Having charged that Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s usage would make disobedience noble, he proceeds to assert that nobility itself is not free of blameworthy aspects and that it is said to be caused by wealth which, we have seen, causes stupidity.45 He then turns to asserting that generosity can only be that which brings no benefit to the giver that would remove the obligation for gratitude. Enumerating the possible motives a person may have for giving, he concludes that a gift is either for the sake of God – in which case it is upon Him to reward it – or out of some ultimately selfish motive: How can I be obliged, in accord with rational demonstration, to thank him [who gives]? For if he had happened upon some wayfarer rather than me, he would not have shared a mount with me or given me anything. His giving is either for the sake of reputation – in which case, he has made me an instrument of his trade or a means to his end – or his giving to me is out of compassion and kindness, and because of the wringing and pain he finds in

240  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. his heart. If that is why he gives, he is only treating his own ill, like one freeing himself from a stranglehold. If he has given to me seeking reward or out of desire for compensation, the case with this is well known. If he gives to me out of fear of my hand or my mouth, or to draw my assistance and aid, then his case is the same as with everything we have discussed or classified.46

Seeking to eliminate generosity as a genuine possibility in human interactions, Ibn al-Tawʾam attempts to portray acts done in pursuit of divine reward or good repute and even those done in heartfelt compassion as ultimately selfish. He so emphasises the perspective of the isolated individual in discussing the motive powers of interests, conscience and feelings that community, friendship and love are excluded from the picture. By associating this stark individualism with an attack on the Arab and Muslim ideal of generosity, al-JāªiÕ’s parody underscores the centrality of this idea to the community and the consequences of losing sight of it in the urban milieu. Parody having reached a peak of intensity in his arguments in discouragement of sharing, Ibn al-Tawʾam later turns to discussing the ubiquity and unlimited resourcefulness of beggars and meal-cadgers. Their trickery, he claims, surpasses ‘the tricks of daytime thieves and the tricks of nighttime ­robbers’ – language identical to that used in the introduction of K. al-Bukhalāʾ to describe al-JāªiÕ’s earlier book. They are further compared, in their wiles, to alchemists, military commanders and magicians. Their ruses are capable of penetrating to one’s very heart, brain or liver. If one leaves an opening the size of a needle’s eye, they can make their way through, and if one keeps one’s door constantly shut and locked, they will climb over walls or dig their way under. By this point Ibn al-Tawʾam is revealing his own fears more than describing any real tricksters we can imagine. The prospect of being faced with situations entailing expectations to share threatens him in his very person. Seeing danger of these in almost any human contact, he relies on quotations of Muslim ascetics in exhorting al-Thaqafī to seek isolation: ‘Abū al-Dardāʾ said “A believer’s house is his hermitage,” and Ibn Sīrīn said “Seclusion is worship.”’47 An alert reader may be reminded of the addressee’s proposal of withdrawing from the community so as to eat without facing expectations of sharing and gossip; the exaggerated picture of isolation here makes the bleak consequences of succumbing to such fears all the more obvious.

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 241 The passage that follows, in which Ibn al-Tawʾam appears to lose sight of his purpose in warning of the ploys of cadgers and launches into a fantastically rich description of foods and the behaviour that surrounds them, is one of the most ‘carnivalesque’ – to use Bakhtin’s term – in al-JāªiÕ’s writings. The passage comes as the culmination of an argument in which Ibn al-Tawʾam reaches heights of intensity in describing the limitless desire and ingenuity of those who would deprive al-Thaqafī of his property and the infinite lengths the latter must go to to protect what is his. The ensuing carnivalesque interlude is part of a sensibility, seen in many literary traditions, which calls for relativising, even obliterating, society’s categories such as that between misers and those who would interpose on them.48 With the sudden change of tone and the dissolution of Ibn al-Tawʾam’s agenda of warning against sharing, and with the varied mixture of quoted materials with parsimony giving way to hilarity, the voice of the pseudonymous author merges with that of the real author and the boundaries between the letter and the larger world of K. al-Bukhalāʾ are obscured. Vulgar quips about belching, flatulence and even a hint of transgressive sexuality are repeated under the heading of ‘delightful conversation’, and are followed with talk of favourite dishes. The pleasantries of cadgers are interrupted by the ruse of the miser, al-Jārūd, who fools his guests into thinking a large number of fine dishes are to follow those presented so he may indulge himself while they hold back in the meantime. The miser here is one with the cadger in his trickery, selfishness and love of food. From this point the passage becomes a long celebration of the delights of eating: foods of various, often-hostile, peoples – Bedouins, Byzantines and Persians – are discussed in succession as if to combine them in a literary banquet, the healthful effects and versatility of various dishes are celebrated, and we are even advised on ways to become fat. The merging of opposites which pervades the passage culminates in Ibn al-Tawʾam’s listing notorious misers and cadgers together, as if to finally acknowledge that their vices are two sides of the same coin. Arabs and Persians are listed together, and the respective masters of ascetic and libertine poetry – Abū al-ʿAtāhiya and Abū Nuwās – are juxtaposed as examples of stinginess. Finally, in reversal of a traditional stereotype, the Bedouin is denounced as more acquisitive than the town-dweller.49 At the end of this mirthful confusion, Ibn al-Tawʾam makes a declaration

242  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. resembling al-JāªiÕ’s own language on generosity and miserliness, with its emphasis on knowing the proper place of giving: ‘How slow you [plural] are to spend on what is right, and how quick on what is futile!’ As the line between author and pseudonym has been blurred, the sudden switch to the second person plural eliminates the line between the book’s audience and al-Thaqafī. Disarmed by the preceding confusion, the reader is presented with a simple statement on generosity as a matter of appropriateness and relative value. A further reversal follows when al-Thaqafī is invited to heed some verses of poetry if he is among those who prefer to appeal to them.50 Finding the parodied appeal to reason over texts abruptly abandoned, a contemporary reader might have been surprised at the number and variety of texts that are here summoned in support of economic prudence. The remaining text, nearly as long as Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s whole letter, is chiefly devoted to the citation of poetic passages, proverbs, and reports of the Prophet and early Muslims.51 Much of the poetry cited comes from mukha∂ram poets, those whose careers bridged the pagan and early Islamic eras in the Peninsula. The choice of poets from this period perhaps underscores how this strain of prudence is part of an enduring recognition in Arab culture: the gist of much of this verse is the observation that the rich enjoy the respect of men and women and that poverty brings humiliation. The Prophetic traditions that follow warn against recklessly squandering one’s property and stress the need to ensure the well-being of one’s family. One ªadīth ties these strands together, while employing relative words that leave much to the reader’s judgement: ‘The best charity is that which leaves some wealth. The hand raised [to give] is better than that lowered [to beg], and begin with those of your household.’52 At times, Ibn al-Tawʾam’s language, concepts and even the texts he cites conspicuously echo Abū al-ʿĀ‚. His command ‘Heed what I say and forget what Abū al-ʿĀ‚ says’ comes in the midst of the quoted materials, reminding the reader of the contentious exchange of which these materials are a part.53 But Ibn al-Tawʾam’s failure to allude to specific statements in the earlier letter leaves the reader to infer the connections and determine the exact points of disagreement before weighing the merits of their arguments. Ibn al-Tawʾam quotes Qurʾānic verses – ‘They ask you what to give: tell them “The surplus” (al-ʿafw)’ – and rather dubiously interprets them as a prohibition on giving

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 243 beyond this: ‘Thus He permits [giving] the surplus and does not permit what entails effort.’54 An alert reader may recall a tradition cited by Abū al-ʿĀ‚ relating that ‘the Prophet . . . preferred the effort of those who have little over the surplus of those who have much.’55 After Ibn al-Tawʾam objects to those who see virtue in impoverishing their own children for the sake of others’ children, his sincerity is soon thrown into question when he approvingly quotes a sage who compares one’s children to a camel grazing without a herder and declares that one’s wealth ‘is not protected from molars’.56 The reader should be reminded of the Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s observation that misers who claim to be conserving money for the sake of their children often deny their children’s needs and desires despite the bitterness this engenders.57 When he turns to discussing the relationship between personal action and the divine ordering of events, Ibn al-Tawʾam’s largely textual arguments probably get the better of Abū al-ʿĀ‚, who has taken the contrary view to the extreme. As we saw above, the latter asserts that misers are more likely to come to poverty because they fail to rely on God’s provision and, in guarding themselves against reversals of fortune, show a poor opinion of ‘the Creator of events’.58 Abū al-ʿĀ‚ does not offer any religious or poetic texts to support this view, and the question of whether protecting oneself against misfortune is an attempt to evade the will of God remains unanswered in his letter. Ibn al-Tawʾam’s indirect response comes after he makes the assertion – a highly dubious one with reference to the rest of the letter, but less so here – that he is only confronting al-Thaqafī with things that God, the Prophet and the righteous have advised. He then begins to list important Muslim traditions: The Prophet . . . said: ‘Fetter her [your camel] and place your trust in God’ (iʿqilhā wa-tawakkal). Mu†arrif b. al-Shikhkhīr said: ‘Whoever sleeps beneath a leaning cliff, proposing to trust in God, let him throw himself from a high place and propose to trust.’ Where is the circumspection that God has commanded? Where is the risk that he has warned against? Whoever seeks to have security without securing himself has exchanged his aspiration for wishful thinking. God only rewards an aspiration if it is in accord with what He has ordained, and He only allows a hope to be attained when He Himself has been its cause. When ʿUmar [b. al-Kha††āb] fled from the plague, Abū ʿUbayda asked him: ‘Do you flee the decree of

244  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. God?’ He replied: ‘Yes, to the decree of God.’ And it was said to him: ‘Does caution against what is decreed benefit one?’ He replied: ‘If caution did not benefit, the commandment to exercise it would be idle talk.’59

The implication of ʿUmar’s first retort is an affirmation of God’s ultimate sovereignty over the outcomes of human choices, in that it assumes the decision to flee is as much a part of the divine plan as is the disaster that threatens. The strength of the argument, whether from a predestinarian perspective or from al-JāªiÕ’s own Muʿtazilī stance on free will, is evident, and Ibn al-Tawʾam is effectively given the last word over Abū al-ʿĀ‚, who has not addressed this side of the question. Still, there is quite a difference between the combination of trust and caution advocated here and Ibn al-Tawʾam’s earlier insistence on guarding every dirham. Yet on one important point Ibn al-Tawʾam appears to agree with Abū al-ʿĀ‚: both stress the pervasiveness of avarice in human dealings. In one of the more adamant passages in the letter, Ibn al-Tawʾam evokes a union of opposites, just as in the carnivalesque passage on meal-cadgers, but here the tone is not mirthful but unrelentingly cynical as he describes the human obsession with accumulating wealth: Money is coveted and sought in the depths of the sea, on the peaks of mountains and in the undergrowth of jungles. It is sought in rugged country and smooth plains . . . in the east of the world and the west. It is sought through meekness and good faith and through treachery. It is sought through pious devotion and murderous plotting, through truthfulness and lying. It is sought with abuse and with flattery. No trick is neglected in obtaining it, nor any spell – to the point where it is sought through disbelief in God just as it is sought with faith. It is sought with silliness and with noble mind. People have set up snares in every place and traps in every mountain pass. Perhaps you will be pursued by one who will not stop short of defeating you or envied by one who will not sleep until he gets satisfaction. A man who seeks vengeance may rest, as may the one whose very life is being sought, but the covetous one never rests.60

The final line recalls the ªadīth we have seen cited by Abū al-ʿĀ‚ in which the Prophet declares that a human being can only be satisfied by dust. The

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 245 prevalence of greed, whether in exhortations to strive for generosity and rely on God’s provision, or in calls to vigilance in protecting what one has, remains a prominent theme throughout K. al-Bukhalāʾ. A very JāªiÕian reversal occurs in the passage above when, after building momentum in listing encompassing pairs of opposites, Ibn al-Tawʾam suddenly includes a pair of synonyms, ‘snare’ and ‘trap’. In the figurative sense in which they seem intended, these hidden traps perhaps underlie, in Ibn al-Tawʾam’s imagination, both the virtuous and vicious methods of seeking prosperity that he has been listing. Throughout K. al-Bukhalāʾ, the ubiquity of avarice in all walks of life is alternately accepted with mirth as typically human and satirised more harshly for the suspicion, division and bitterness it breeds in the community and the mockery it makes of human endeavour. At the same time, the book constantly mocks the gossip and exaggeration that underlies its own narratives, at times as a typically human preoccupation and at times as quite destructive in spirit. The variety of ways in which al-JāªiÕ exposes hidden motives in individual actions and ideological discourses shows his insight into the pervasiveness of economic interests in human culture. In this sense, al-JāªiÕ often appears strikingly modern in his perceptions and even seems to anticipate some aspects of Marxian analysis, and yet K. al-Bukhalāʾ is hardly a socially radical work. Even the Qurʾān’s emphasis on a Muslim’s duty to help the needy is given no prominent place in the book.61 When poverty is mentioned in K. al-Bukhalāʾ, it often refers to a lowered condition experienced by members of the relatively comfortable classes from which most of the book’s protagonists are drawn. The harsher circumstances of the urban and rural poor are only rarely described and malnourishment is hardly mentioned. Even the passage in Ibn al-Tawʾam’s letter which I have described as ‘carnivalesque’ is not marked by a mirthful reversal of roles in the social hierarchy which is often part of carnival traditions. Instead the hilarity is directed at seeing the proprieties and taboos of the privileged classes violated at private gatherings. For al-JāªiÕ, the goal of generosity appears to be to protect amicable relations and communal spirit among those close associates within society from the divisive effects of individual property and individual indulgence of pleasures. Telling in this regard is Abū al-ʿĀ‚’s description of a miser’s attitude toward sharing a meal: ‘That the staff of religion should be split in two is harder to

246  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. bear than the splitting of a loaf.’62 While generosity in relations among the elite seems to be the emphasis, the book does contain an element of satire directed at those who show disdain for those beneath them in the social scale. Some misers portrayed, notably al-Kindī and Sahl b. Hārūn, are mocked for the petty disdain they show toward their slaves, tenants, wives and children and the meanness of spirit it reveals.63 Al-JāªiÕ, on the other hand, often appears to admire a certain degree of feistiness among those of lower status, as when he refers to a witty retort given to the exacting al-Kindī by his servant girl.64 As we saw in our discussion of K. al-Wukalāʾ in Chapter 3, al-JāªiÕ has a respect for a unique perspective and a certain degree of autonomy proper to every position on the social scale, whether or not he questioned the stratified roles involved. The social import of K. al-Bukhalāʾ seems to be an attempt to reconcile the Arab and Muslim values of generosity, hospitality, communal solidarity and reliance on God with the changing needs of certain classes in urban society who needed greater individual autonomy in their economic life. The relativity of these values and the ambiguity of the circumstances that govern the appropriateness of sharing are themes that emerge gradually through the denunciation of misers that is the book’s ostensible purpose. While an individual’s having property in the partially nomadic tribal society of the Arabian Peninsula entailed strong expectations of largesse and sharing, for merchants financing trade expeditions, writers dependent on sporadic support of patrons and many others in the cities of Iraq in al-JāªiÕ’s day, the need to conserve and plan for future needs was more pronounced. In the exchange of Abū al-ʿĀ‚ and Ibn al-Tawʾam, the conflict between time-­honoured ideals and modern needs plays out in all its intensity, while the pitiless badgering of al-Thaqafī by both pseudonymous writers forcefully draws the reader’s sympathies toward the middle ground between these extremes. The long and diverse collection of texts marshalled by Ibn al-Tawʾam in support of moderation in sharing reveals that these issues had already been of some concern in some strains of the earlier Arab and Muslim traditions. The fact that even the middle position can be a cloak for hypocrisy and calculating self-interest, as it is shown to be in the case of the addressee in the introduction, may be seen as reflecting scepticism that anything but self-interest can ever prevail in human decisions, but it can also be read as a challenge for the reader to combine

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 247 prudence in sharing with genuine communal spirit. The inward conflicts of the addressee and the colliding social pressures visited by Abū al-ʿĀ‚ and Ibn al-Tawʾam on the vanishing figure of al-Thaqafī are a significant part of what makes K. al-Bukhalāʾ one of the most incisive and searching studies of human ­motivations and perceptions in world literature. Notes   1. While he does provide a few first-hand accounts of incidents he says he has seen himself, perhaps only one anecdote reflects real involvement in the situation on his part: he waxes indignant over being refused hospitality by an acquaintance on a dangerously hot afternoon. The seriousness of the anger he expresses here is swiftly undermined when he turns to comparing the situation to a humorous story about a drunken man being refused hospitality; al-JāªiÕ, [Kitāb] al-Bukhalāʾ, ed. ˝ al-Óājirī (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1997), pp. 38–9.  2. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 100. The introjection follows a quoted anecdote which itself ends with the quotation of another speaker. Given that Arabic in al-JāªiÕ’s time lacked punctuation to indicate that both layers of quotation were at an end, a brief blessing directed toward the reader may have been the author’s way of signalling that he has returned to speaking in his own voice.  3. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 9–16, 82–90 and 154–94, respectively. ˝āha al-Óājirī makes a case for the pseudonymity of these letters in the introduction to his edition of K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 40–8, and further argues for al-JāªiÕ’s authorship of the letter of Ibn al-Tawʾam in his biographical note on the latter.  4. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 5.   5. Abū al-ʿĀ‚ was a scion of a prominent family in Basra; Ibn al-Tawʾam is mentioned several times in al-JāªiÕ’s other writings but is not otherwise well known. See al-Óājirī’s biographical notes, K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 382 and 387.  6. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 154.  7. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 154–5. On Sahl, al-A‚maʿī and Ismāʿīl b. Ghazwān respectively, see al-Óājirī’s notes, K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 271, 412–13, 254–5.  8. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 156.  9. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 156. 10. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 162. 11. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 160. 12. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 157–8. For the ªadīth on the Prophet’s armour, see al-Bukhārī, Íaªīª al-Bukhārī bi-ªāshiyat al-Imām al-Sindī, 4 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1998), II, p. 286, no. 2,916.

248  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 158. On the mosque-dwellers, see K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 29–37. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 158. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 158 and 159–60. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 159. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 161. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 161. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 160. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 160–1. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 159. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 161–2. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 162–8. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 162–3. Versions of the last ªadīth cited appear in canonical collections, including Íaªīª Bukhārī VIII, p. 296. 26. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 163. 27. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 163–4. On al-Namir, see al-Óājirī’s note, pp. 384–5. 28. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 165–6. On Salm, a governor of Basra during the reign of al-Man‚ūr, see al-Óājirī’s note, p. 342. 29. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 169. 30. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 169. 31. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 170. 32. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 169. 33. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 171–2. 34. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 173–4. 35. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 190. 36. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 170–1. 37. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 177. Ibn al-Tawʾam compares the life of the heedless rich to that of beasts, closely echoing the thoughts of Íaª‚aª, K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 4–5, discussed in Chapter 4 above. 38. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 2. 39. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 176. 40. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 173. 41. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 171. 42. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 176. The verses quoted are 68:42–3. 43. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 171. 44. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 171–2. 45. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 172.

passiv e a ddressee and cri ti ca l r e a d e r  | 249 46. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 173–4. 47. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 178. On Abū al-Dardāʾ and Ibn Sīrīn, see al-Óājirī’s notes, pp. 277–8 and 388. 48. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. C. Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 107 and 122–7. 49. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 178–81. 50. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 181. 51. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 181–94. 52. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 185. 53. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 190. 54. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 186. The verses are from 17:28–9. 55. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 191. 56. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 185 and 191. 57. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 162. 58. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 160. 59. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 192. The ªadīth on fettering one’s camel appears in al-Tirmidhī, Sunan al-Tirmidhī, 2 vols (Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, 2000), II, p. 641. On Mu†arrif, an early ascetic and preacher, see al-Óājirī’s note, K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 395. 60. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 190–1. 61. The Qurʾān, in several places, lists the recipients of the various forms of giving it commands: parents, relatives, the destitute and the wayfarer (ibn al-sabīl ) are among the types listed more than once (2:215; 4:8; 4:36; 9:60). 62. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 159. 63. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, pp. 10–11 and 81–101. 64. K. al-Bukhalāʾ, p. 81.

Conclusion

W

e have now examined the role of the addressee in sixteen essays or anthologies by al-JāªiÕ, along with some mention of his other texts that follow similar patterns. Simply discussing these highly varied and inventive introductory sections in close proximity to one another ought to be enough to show that the letter frame is something more for this author than a conventional topos of essay writing. It should also be obvious that the manner in which the addressees are portrayed in many of them is hardly that of an author whose purpose is to acknowledge and thank a patron. Even when we find deference and praise toward one addressee or good-natured cajoling of another that might reflect the author’s relationship with a highly placed individual who supported him, these dynamics contribute to the thematic development of the essay, and the perspective of a broader readership is kept in view. In all its permutations, the letter frame for al-JāªiÕ is a complex and versatile device meant to influence the reception of his texts by a reading public. Through close readings of these introductions and the lines of argument that flow from them, I have tried to give some idea of the different ways in which these epistolary conversations are meant to shape and direct the reading experience of the audience al-JāªiÕ anticipated for each text. The first three chapters of this book are organised around basic patterns I have discerned in the course of my study of al-JāªiÕ’s introductions. In the fourth and fifth chapters I venture analyses of two elaborate epistolary sections of K. al-Bukhalāʾ which I believe are vital to understanding the author’s purpose in that book. Chapter 1 is concerned with the roles of addressees in relation to certain dilemmas an author inevitably faces in electing to write on a given topic. 250

conclusi on | 251 When the author stresses the need to articulate and defend his own views, the very existence of that need will either betray the possibility of weakness in his own positions in relation to those he is attempting to counter or presuppose some deficiency in the understanding of his audience. The addressees in the six texts I discuss in this chapter are all portrayed in such a way that the need for reproof or instruction and guidance is channelled through the author’s conversation with them. This intervening conversation with each addressee creates a comfortable position from which the audience can engage with the arguments presented without betraying excessive dependence on the author. In some texts, the addressee embodies confusion and vulnerability in the face of the author’s rivals in opinion or doctrine. His questions and complaints generate a lively discussion and help to expose difficulties with the opposing views, while providing al-JāªiÕ with an opportunity to address his opponents’ arguments without conceding that they truly merit debate. In K. al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā, however, the addressees are not troubled by the difficult questions raised by Christians but are only seeking help in supporting weaker members of their own community. Lastly, in two essays of advice, the addressees are both portrayed as mature and intelligent youths who are only in need of a very specific form of instruction from the author and serve as a positive model for the reader. In the second chapter, we see a variety of ways in which al-JāªiÕ becomes involved in a confrontation with his addressee. While advancing some cogent criticism against the opinions or attitudes of his addressee, he lapses into ironies, oversights or unwarranted harshness that leave little doubt that he is deliberately making a parody of himself and inviting the reader to question whether his approach to the issue at hand is any better than that of the addressee. In most cases, the initial fervour of the confrontation appears to diminish as the argument progresses and more cogent, measured opinions prevail in parts of the text. I argue that in such works al-JāªiÕ is encouraging his readers to assess the implications of the serious and parodic arguments presented while searching for a resolution lying somewhere between those presented by his own parodic persona and the wayward addressee. The exaggerated and usually amusing vigour with which both argue their cases brings drama and conviction to what is ultimately a bid for moderation on the issue under discussion. The very difficulty of discerning just where the author’s

252  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. true intentions lie in the midst of the various overwrought and carefully nuanced statements on both sides constitutes an intriguing challenge for the reader and prompts him to engage with the subtler facets of the debate. In this chapter, I also seek to explain why a number of the texts in which a doubly parodic confrontation is staged focus on the merits of specific professions, including those of teachers, financial agents or merchants. I relate this pattern to a number of passages in al-JāªiÕ’s other writings in which he asserts that, by the mercy and wisdom of God, different people are bound by certain predilections and circumstances to choose certain occupations and view them with higher regard than most in society do. I argue that writing in this vein allows al-JāªiÕ to dramatise the biases and potential prejudices toward those who practise other necessary trades in the community and to expose the inevitable shortcomings of any individual’s point of view, as his theological conclusions on society dictate. By parodying the prejudice with which his addressee views members of a given profession with whom their dealings have led to quarrels and, at the same time, parodying his own bias toward the dispute that has arisen, al-JāªiÕ creates a view of social relations in which neither he nor his addressee, nor anyone they have dealings with, can be perfectly objective in seeing the perspectives of those in other occupations. The anxieties of interacting with others, especially when the relationships of power and responsibility involved are ambiguous and not entirely stable, are dramatised and made an occasion for reflection by the reader. Chapter 3 is devoted to four texts in which the merits of certain ethnic or racial groups or the qualities of their native lands are compared: in three cases the origin of the addressee is left unclear, while in the fourth the addressee complains that his own people have been slighted by a speaker whose group identity is not revealed. I argue that, whether the person of unknown origins is portrayed in a sympathetic or critical light, his presence is subtly used to defuse tensions and prompt the reader to contemplate the differing contributions of peoples and the factors their lands are blessed with from a variety of perspectives. Al-JāªiÕ’s views on racial groups and their attachments to the lands of their birth are closely related to his thinking on occupations: people are born with a particular love of the conditions of their homelands and by means of these varying predilections God has prevented the peoples of the world from quarrelling over the most desirable regions. While the biases of different

conclusi on | 253 professions only tend to generate enthusiasm for their own tasks in the community, the jingoism of races and lands is less productive and more likely to breed disturbance. The ruler to whom much of one text is addressed as a reported conversation sympathetically embodies the universal feeling of attachment to one’s homeland even though the land he hails from is a mystery. In another text the addressee, in contrast, displays an unfeeling contempt for those who love their homelands and wonders why people forgo the wealth they might attain through travelling to new regions. In either case, the addressee provides al-JāªiÕ with an occasion for writing on the relative merits of different lands that allows him to forestall accusations of bias in favour of his native Basra, while illustrating, in their very questions, the dynamics of peoples and lands that make up his view of the divine plan to create harmony through differences. In K. Fakhr al-Sūdān ʿalā al-bī∂ān, a book on the boasts of Black Africans – with whom al-JāªiÕ may have shared some distant ancestry – the addressee’s request allows al-JāªiÕ to tie his project in defence of a sometimes disparaged group to his earlier (now lost) book related to the purity of Arab descent. When the addressee inquires why al-JāªiÕ did not see fit to include any boasts of Blacks in his book dealing with the disputed claims of fullblooded Arabs and those with enslaved (African) mothers, he implies that something in the vision of justice and human dignity which pervaded that book implies the need for further treatment of Blacks and their boasts. This request, from an addressee whose own origins and biases are unclear, allows al-JāªiÕ to claim that he had always intended to fill this gap with a separate text and thus corroborates his view that such a project is both necessary and ultimately one in its aims with the earlier book. Lastly in this chapter, in R. fī Manāqib al-Turk, al-JāªiÕ relates an account of how the addressee, the caliph’s Turkish secretary al-Fatª, was offended by a speaker who made a long speech before an assembly that said nothing of the Turks, while praising three other groups in the Muslim military. Without revealing which of the three groups this importunate speaker belonged to, al-JāªiÕ repeats al-Fatª’s account of the speech as if it is being recited verbatim from the gathering. By providing a lengthy rehearsal of a speech – far too long to have been remembered verbatim – as the words of alFatª quoting this speaker, al-JāªiÕ effectively merges all three of their voices at many points: showing that they are all aware of the merits attributed to

254  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. each of the three groups celebrated. While the offence of omitting the Turks becomes all the more apparent in the light of this shared praise of the other races and the dangers of provoking rivalries is well illustrated, the fact that the identity of the speaker is not disclosed prevents the focus of anger being directed at any one of the groups. Al-JāªiÕ’s deft arrangement of the account defuses the tensions sparked, while upholding the unity of the Muslim forces and tacitly affirming the hegemony the Turks enjoyed over them. In Chapter 4, I discuss the highly sophisticated introduction to K. al-Bukhalāʾ, one of al-JāªiÕ’s most involved and successful experiments in framing a text with an addressee’s request. Writing to ask the author for an amusing book about miserly individuals, the addressee swiftly reveals that he is himself a miser through his praise of an earlier book he has used to protect himself from thieves. The addressee proceeds through a variety of questions concerning misers who, though intelligent, cannot perceive their fault and others who are well aware of their miserliness but only draw attention to their vice by forcing themselves to act against their nature. At last he reveals his real reason for requesting such a book from al-JāªiÕ: he wants to know what actions betray misers and cause them to give unnecessarily. Knowing this, he will be able to enjoy a reputation for generosity while sharing no more of his resources than needed. The addressee’s progression through several forms of naïveté to self-serving awareness invokes strong social pressures to lure the reader into contrasting himself with the changing figure of the addressee. The contradictory defences the reader is invited to adopt in rapid succession lead him to contemplate how economic interests may influence his perceptions of himself and others in relation to the Muslim community’s challenging ideals of generosity and hospitality. When we imagine the case of a contemporary reader – e­ xpecting to laugh at others who fail to live up to the community’s ideals in the book he has just taken up and encountering the chimerical figure of the addressee – we can better appreciate the astuteness of al-JāªiÕ’s rhetorical planning. Chapter 5 focuses on a later section of K. al-Bukhalāʾ in which the addressee of two pseudonymous letters, al-Thaqafī, is confronted first with a call to unrestrained generosity and reproof for his ‘miserly’ ways from his tribal kinsman, Abū al-ʿĀ‚, and then with an equally strident warning of the danger of sharing from an associate, Ibn al-Tawʾam. As with some of the

conclusi on | 255 texts in Chapter 2, broad parody of extreme positions prevails earlier in both letters, with more cogent arguments for moderate generosity and prudence appearing unexpectedly at later points. Sympathy for the figure of al-Thaqafī, relentlessly hounded over his own financial decisions from both sides, and a desire to discern the author’s aims behind the conflicting arguments become the reader’s motivation for assessing the points raised. Poetic and religious texts are employed in alternately convincing and dubious ways by both pseudonymous writers, and the contradictory strains of Arabian and Islamic culture are brought into a fascinating collision, compelling the reader to sort through the resulting chaos. As the collection of materials presented in both letters becomes more like the content of many other parts of K. al-Bukhalāʾ, and as phrases familiar from al-JāªiÕ’s other works and the addressee’s questions emerge, the line between author and pseudonym disappears. After the introduction, in which he is tricked by the addressee’s changing stances into contemplating his motives and perceptions on a highly personal level, the reader is freed to evaluate and decide what he thinks of the materials while contrasting himself with al-Thaqafī, whose voice is suppressed throughout the quarrel over his own property. While the addressee functions differently in each of these cases, he is always related to some sort of conflict – over beliefs, social issues or personal interests – in which the author and his audience, by virtue of the text’s being written and read, are inevitably involved. We might say that in the texts treated in Chapter 1, the author and reader are somehow kept above or beside the fray by virtue of the addressee’s presence, while in those we saw in Chapter 2, the author enters the fray in the form of a parodic persona who combats the addressee, the reader being invited to distance himself from both. Chapter 3 is related to works in which the conflict itself is mitigated or kept at certain distance from both author and reader by ambiguities concerning the addressee’s origins and biases. The text discussed in Chapter 4 invites the reader to fancy himself above the fray and free to contrast himself with the apparently naïve addressee. However, the latter’s unexpected reversals eventually compel the reader to realise how deeply he has been entangled in it all along. In Chapter 5, the author dramatises the conflict from behind the masks of two antagonists and, in the process of revealing himself in both, invites the reader to become involved.

256  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. What we do not find in any of these varying patterns are direct, unmediated needs on the part of the author or reader in relation to the issues that have brought the text into being. The addressee can share the author’s desire to defend his views or explore a certain question. The addressee can deflect the reader’s need for reproof or instruction by embodying the offence or folly the author is writing to correct in an exaggerated form from which the reader can readily distance himself. Quarrelling with an addressee allows the writer to turn an impulse toward adamant argumentation from the real reader toward a fictional disputant and allows him the option of mocking his own role in the dispute if he chooses. In many cases the need for a text to be written is related to a real and potentially painful conflict over beliefs or interests in which the best-intentioned authors and readers can find themselves enemies. But even where such palpable differences over issues are less apparent, a conflict between the roles of writer and reader – both at once passive and active – is always present, simply because the latter is asked to appropriate something from the thinking of the former. The addressee in the texts we have seen occupies what we may call a neutral territory. Milorad Pavić introduces his inventive novel, Dictionary of the Khazars, with a metaphorical warning to his reader that well illustrates this conflict in relation to any text: Imagine two men holding a captured puma on a rope. If they want to approach each other, the puma will attack, because the rope will slacken; only if they both pull simultaneously on the rope is the puma equidistant from the two of them. That is why it is so hard for him who reads and him who writes to reach each other: between them lies a mutual thought captured on ropes that they pull in opposite directions. If we were now to ask that puma – in other words, that thought – how it perceived these two men, it might answer that at the ends of the rope those to be eaten are holding something they cannot eat . . .1

The idea, as it emerges in the author’s mind, is accompanied by assumptions concerning his audience’s need to read of it. Each reader answers this objectification of his state prior to reading with his own ideas concerning the author’s motives and presuppositions about his audience that have gone into the text. The author will naturally have anticipated the readers’ ideas concerning him

conclusi on | 257 and his presuppositions about them and sought to circumvent them as he wrote. A long chain of reciprocal anticipations and objectifications proceeds from here, leading us to wonder how communication is ever achieved. Reminded by Pavić’s image of the passages from K. al-Óayawān on the writer and reader that we saw in the introduction above, I will risk spoiling the image’s poetry by suggesting how al-JāªiÕ’s addressee might become part of the analogy. The fiction of the addressee is a straw man thrown to the puma in the hope of distracting it long enough for the two men to approach simultaneously until they are so close that they can prevent it from biting. The puma – representing the idea conveyed in the text, which both author and reader must perceive to be ultimately their own – will only be fooled for a short time and the two need to move quickly in close coordination. The epistolary frame is meant to alter the normal relations between author and reader by directing the former’s role away from the latter and vice versa until the appropriation of ideas is well under way. (Of course, it is not really the thought represented by the puma that is distracted by the straw man of the addressee, but rather the author and reader who are both distracted from their own fear that the impersonal force of thought coming from the other will consume their own individuality.) Ultimately, the reader will most often realise the author’s ploy, but only after a less sensitive point in the process has been reached. Sometimes the reader will realise that the addressee is a fiction from the outset but will cooperate because of the interesting imaginary task that has been offered to him. The analogy can be pressed too far, but, just as the puma will be angrier when it lets go of the straw man, the reader and author will be more at odds over the ideas conveyed if the former feels manipulated by the addressee’s presence. Out of the author’s doubts concerning this possibility, the device takes on new complexities and becomes still more intriguing. An essay or expository text with a fictional addressee – a person marked off from the broader audience by facts that are not true of all of them, such as having written a letter that is quoted – is quite a different thing from one in which the reader is encoded in more conventional ways. The ordinary assumptions about the audience’s attitude, beliefs and prior knowledge are displaced from their usual carriers in the text and set in motion, and new freedoms, challenges and tricks may confront them at any turn. In the

258  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. introduction to this study I suggested that al-JāªiÕ’s experimentation with addressees may be related to the recent emergence of published books in Arabic-speaking society. The prospect of circulating books which the author was expected to have placed in a final form and for which he was assigned full responsibility was probably a newfound honour for authors, but also a new vulnerability. To imagine one’s words circulating, accompanied by one’s name, among people one might never see to explain or rebut as needed was probably rather frightening for many writers, even if it was also inspiring for some like al-JāªiÕ. It is not surprising to find his experiments with epistolary rhetoric coinciding with the emergence of the new patterns of circulation and the self-consciousness they must have caused for Arabic prose writers. My focus on the letter frame in al-JāªiÕ springs from an impression gathered through much exploratory reading that this author’s use of the specific forms involved may be an example of unique literary creativity. I will not be surprised if subsequent studies find parallels in other Arabic authors or related phenomena in al-JāªiÕ’s own non-epistolary writings, but the differing rhetorical dynamics must be appreciated. It seems likely that epistolary monographs such as those of al-JāªiÕ, with their elaborate relationships between characterisation of the correspondents (author and addressee) in relation to thematic development, should be seen as a literary phenomenon only distantly related to the rich tradition of Arabic state and personal letterwriting. Even the essays of later Arabic authors with epistolary introductions may share some connections to al-JāªiÕ’s literary contributions, but in those I have seen the relation between the addressee’s questions and the author’s answers tend to be more straightforward, encoding unidirectional ­relationships between reader and addressee. Among the more inventive later uses of epistolary conversation is certainly al-Hawāmil wa-al-shawāmil (Stray Questions and Comprehensive Answers), in which the polymath Abū ʿAlī Miskawayh (d. 421/1030) offers his replies to questions on widely ranging topics sent to him by Abū Óayyān al-Tawªīdī (d. 414/1023).2 While the vivid, precise prose of both authors and the conceptual tensions developed between questions and answers certainly bear some comparison to the writings of al-JāªiÕ we have discussed, I believe that this book operates on a quite different level rhetorically. Aside from the fact it

conclusi on | 259 is the work of two authors rather than an imaginary correspondence created – or at least structured – by one, the reader of this text will be coming to the book with a focus on the arts of asking and replying in themselves. He is not approaching the text with a particular topic – and questions and predispositions of his own concerning it – in mind and will have less cause to compare his own motivations for reading to those of al-Tawªīdī than he would to the addressees of al-JāªiÕ’s monothematic texts. To my judgement, the reader experiences a text like al-Hawāmil wa-al-shawāmil as spectator looking on at the unfolding epistolary drama and is much less intimately involved than he is in the texts we have been examining. Similarly even the most elaborate of al-JāªiÕ’s own polythematic personal letters, such as Risāla fī al-Jidd wa-al-hazl (‘Letter Written in Earnestness and Jest’) and Kitāb al-Tarbīʿ wa-al-tadwīr (Declaring [Something] Square or Round), while fascinating texts in their own right, are creative dramatisations of relationships between individuals for which the reader remains an outside spectator. Again in such texts, the reader is not prompted to engage with the addressee’s motivations and preconceptions in reading, since the texts move from one topic to another, none of them known in advance to the reader from the title or descriptions under which the text is circulating. It is interesting to contemplate these differences in the light of Bakhtin’s assertion that dramatic or philosophical dialogue is ultimately ‘monolithic’, in that dramatic effect requires that all the voices be subordinated to the author’s unifying field of vision. By contrast the dialogue of the ‘polyphonic’ novels of Dostoevsky reflects, for Bakhtin, multiple ‘centres of consciousness’ in the characters’ words and makes the ‘viewer’ a participant in their conversation, owing to the complex, developing relationships between the characters’ voices and the author’s.3 For similar reasons, the ambiguities in al-JāªiÕ’s voice between a persona addressing an imaginary questioner and an author addressing a reading public on a preannounced topic are largely absent from his personal letters, and readerly involvement thus retreats to a less intimate level. It may be said that in such letters, al-JāªiÕ reduces himself to a mere character in a dramatic dialogue with his addressee and the tension between this persona and the authorial voice is less involving for the audience in this respect than in the epistolary monographs I treat in this book. The

260  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. two pseudonymous letters we saw in Chapter 4 are an interesting variation on these patterns in that al-JāªiÕ is writing under the guise of two characters whose views are as much at odds with his own as they are with each other’s. But here, the topics and materials blend seamlessly into those presented elsewhere in K. al-Bukhalāʾ and a different sort of ambiguity between the voice of the author and those of the personas he speaks through emerges. But even if the rhetorical dynamics of al-JāªiÕ’s polythematic letters and non-epistolary works differ from those we have examined, they are the work of the same writer with the same particular combination of talents and rhetorical sensibilities. Surely future studies comparing the structures, the dialogical dynamics and the interplay of serious and ironic arguments to those I have attempted to identify in the epistolary monographs will be fruitful. If al-JāªiÕ went to such lengths of creativity to guide, liberate or manipulate his audience in the texts we have seen, it is quite natural to ask whether the encoding of the reader in his non-epistolary texts has its own subtleties of invention. Are the rhetorical difficulties we have seen negotiated so carefully through epistolary frames overcome with other devices in the introductions or other parts of these texts? If such devices are present, they will probably prove more subtle than the epistolary frame with the very palpable presence of the addressee, but that does not mean they could not be equally interesting. Parallel to these questions run others concerning the relationship between the epistolary frame and the topics and genres of al-JāªiÕ’s writings. While I have devoted considerable space in certain parts of this book to the ways exigencies of writing on sectarian differences, ethical advice, occupations and geographical origins appear to affect the dynamics of epistolary rhetoric, I have not suggested that the patterns identified in relation to these topics are genres in themselves. I have preferred to stress the unique structure, tone and rhetorical dynamics I have discerned in each text and generally avoided attempts to relate the patterns observed to broader genres. To avoid prejudicing my explorations of individual texts, I have declined to engage with the various attempts of scholars to classify al-JāªiÕ’s works and identify and relate them to the genres of Arabic prose that were emerging in his times.4 This is not to suggest that al-JāªiÕ or any author could write independently of the generic expectations of his audience that would have shaped their

conclusi on | 261 reception and modes of circulation. Surely he knew he was writing for an audience that sought books of certain kinds or categories and saw his task as working with – and often against – the expectations involved. While I have labelled the texts I treat ‘epistolary monographs’ and referred to the others as either ‘non-epistolary texts’ or ‘personal letters’, I am inclined to suspect that the actual patterns of generic expectation in ʿAbbāsid times would have both divided and overlapped these categories, which are based on the role of the addressee alone. Even the term risāla (‘letter’ or ‘epistle’) is absent from the titles of some works where the addressee is quite prominent (e.g. Kitāb al-Shārib wa-al-mashrūb) and present in those of some non-epistolary ones (e.g. Risālat fī al-Óanīn ilā al-aw†ān), suggesting that its range of meaning at the time these titles were applied was quite different from the English terms we use to translate it. Given the uniqueness – or at least the rarity – of the epistolary forms al-JāªiÕ employs, it is unlikely that they were themselves part of the generic expectations of his day. However, it is quite possible that these forms were among his own means of reshaping his audience’s generic expectations to fit the more original, eccentric or even controversial sides of his literary endeavour. To have approached this fascinating question would have required taking positions on just what the genres of early Arabic prose were, and any error here would likely have led my investigation of the patterns of epistolary rhetoric astray. My hope is that this study, with its far narrower focus, will lead to a clearer picture of certain rhetorical patterns that may have been an obstacle to the study of broader or more involved questions in the texts of al-JāªiÕ. His unique and enduring contribution is only part of the rich world of early Arabic prose, and I will not be surprised if the interpretive issues raised here are shown to have parallels in the writings of authors across the centuries of that tradition. Notes 1. M. Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel, trans. C. Pribićivić-Zorić (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 14. 2. Miskawayh and Tawªīdī, al-Hawāmil wa-al-shawāmil suʾālāt Abī ʿAlī Miskawayh li-Abī Óayyān al-Tawªīdī, ed. S. Kisrawī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah, 2001).

262  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. 3. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. C. Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 16–18. 4. E.g. the categorisation of C. Pellat, The Life and Works of JāªiÕ: Translations of Selected Texts, trans. from the French by D. Hawke (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 10–27.

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Index

ʿAbd Allah b. al-Zubayr, 136 ʿAbd al-Óamīd (theologian), 57, 74n ʿAbd al-Óamīd b. Yaªyā, 29n ʿAbd Manāf, 155 Abnāʾ, 149, 155, 158–61, 171n Abū al-ʿĀ‚ b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Thaqafī, 214–37, 239, 242–7, 247n, 254 Abū al-ʿAtāhiya, 241 Abū al-Dardāʾ, 240 Abū Kalada, 57, 74n Abū Māzin, 210n Abū Nuwās, 241 Abū ʿUbayda, ʿĀmir b. ʿAbd Allah b. alJarrāª, 243–4 Abū ʿUbayda, Maʿmar b. al-Muthannā (philologist), 125–6 Adab, 37, 69–70n, 134 al-Adab al-kabīr, 67, 76n addressee, 2–4, 13–14, 35–6, 251–8 geographical origin, 121–2, 135, 144 in K. al-Bukhalāʾ, 186–99, 207–8, 211n, 214, 254–5 al-JāªiÕ and, 2, 77–9 oral, 133–4 ‘reader’ and, 14–15, 17–18, 211n real patrons and, 6–9, 94–7, 148–50 social standing of, 104, 108 time perspective in letters, 73n ʿAdnān, 145, 148, 153–4 ‘Advocate of Dogs’ (Íāªib al-kalb), 119n, 122–4 ‘Advocate of Pigeons’, (Íāªib al-Óamān) 124 al-Afshīn, 168n agents, financial (wukalāʾ), 101–10, 119n, 165n Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād (chief judge), 5, 6 Aªmad b. ªanbal, 59, 71n, 85, 117n

al-Aªnaf b. Qays, 177 Ahwāz, 164n Airs, Waters and Places (attr. Hippocrates), 123, 163n, 164n ʿAlī b. Abī ˝ālib, 141 ʿĀlij (mountain), 238 Altman, J., 15 ʿAmr b. Yazīd, 210n Anas b. Malik, 126, 164n anthology, thematic, 134, 168n anthropomorphists see mushabbiha Arabian Peninsula, 125–6. 128, 145, 154, 164n, 222–3, 246 Arabs, 87, 124, 128, 134–6, 143–8, 149, 153–5, 158–61, 222, 229, 241 Aristotle, 123, 162n, 178–80, 209n al-Ashriba wa-dhikr ikhtilāf al-nās fīhā, 38 al-A‚maʿī, 219 ʿA†iyya, J., 166–7n al-ʿA††ār, J., 162n, 165n author, implied, 15–16, 32n Baghdad, 4, 141 Bakhtin, Mikhail 3, 16–18, 32n, 34, 183, 203, 210n, 241, 259 Bashshār b. Burd, 29n Basil, Saint, 30n Basra, 4–5, 128–9, 137, 140–2, 164n, 222, 224, 253 al-Bayān wa-al-tabyīn (Elucidation and Exposition), 4–5, 35, 80, 116n, 125–6, 145, 177, 180 al-Bayªaqī, Ibrāhīm b. Muªammad, 167n Bedouins, 124, 128, 241 inability to comprehend solecisms, 165n tribal values and, 93–4 Beeston, A., 77–8, 120n Bilāl, 231

272

i ndex | 273 Black Africans, 43, 122, 126, 128–9, 142–8, 159, 163n, 253; see also Zanj Bonebakker, S., 69–70n Book of Animals see K. al-Óayawān Book of Misers see K. al-Bukhalāʾ Booth, W., 15, 32n Byzantines (Rūm), 124, 146, 153, 163n, 241 cowardly nature of, 127, 165n cadgers, 240–1, 244 ‘carnivalesque tradition’, 241, 244–5 Cheikh-Moussa, A. 175 Chinese, 146 Christianity, 127 Christians, 46–51, 71–3n, 118n, 119n, 163, 181, 251 Cicero, 30n citation, direct and indirect, 48–9, 151–2, 187–8, 197–9 clients or Arab tribes see mawālī common people (al-ʿāmma), 99, 222 community, Muslim (umma), 44–5, 47–51, 53, 56, 59, 85, 99–100, 114–15, 139, 144–5, 151, 161–2, 179–80, 186, 189, 191–5, 197–9, 209n, 212n, 224, 230, 251 Cooperson, M., 71n, 117n, 208n, 213n criticism, rhetorical, 15 crow, 123–4 cultivators, peasant (akara), 106–8, 110, 128 dialectic, 77–9, 81, 83, 85, 88, 116, 174, 187 dialogical view of literature, 16–18, 21, 80, 82, 84–5, 259–60 Dictionary of the Khazars, 256–7 Diem, W., 30n Dosteovsky, F., 210n, 259 double voicing (varidirectional and unidirectional), 16–19, 215 dropsy, 64 East Africans see Zanj Egypt, 138, 140, 168n Egyptians, 146 elite (al-khā‚‚a), 11, 99, 101–2, 104, 107, 129, 143, 246 Elucidation and Exposition see al-Bayān wa-al-tabyīn Enderwitz, S. 162n

environmental determinism, 123–4, 154–5 ‘Epistle of the Singing Slave Girls’ see R. al-Qiyān epistolary prefaces, 1, 9–10, 29–30n, 174 Ess, J. van, 213n Ethiopian guard, al-JāªiÕ’s encounter with, 128 Ethiopians, 153 eunuchs, 126, 164n, 230 Euphrates, 141 Farghana, 124, 171n al-Fatª b. Khāqān (secretary), 5, 7, 71n, 148–62, 170n, 171n fiqh (jurisprudence), 37–9, 42–5 firāsa (physiognomy, discernment of character), 109, 118–20n Galen (Jālīnūs), 123, 136, 163n Ghaylān al-Dimashqī, 29n al-Ghazālī, 66–7 Greek medical theory, 41–2, 122–7, 192–3 Greeks, 163n Grohmann, A., 30n al-Hadrūsī, S., 166–7n al-Óājirī, ˝, 212n, 247n Ham, son of Noah, 163 al-Hamadhānī, Badīʿ al-Zamān, 33n ªamdillah (praise be to God) opening formula, 4 Hārūn, A., 75n, 103, 162n, 166n al-Óasan al-Ba‚rī, 10, 126, 164n al-Óasan b. Wahb, 94–7, 118n Hāshim, 155, 164n Óātim al-˝āʾī, 223, 225–6 al-Hawāmil wa-al-shawāmil, 258–9 al-Haytham b. ʿAdī, 60, 62–4, 74–6n Heath, P., 70n Óijāz, 138–9 Hippocrates (Buqrā†), 123, 136, 163n, 164n homelands, 111–30 longing for, 130–3, 137 poverty and, 137, 140 Óumayd b. ʿAbd al-Óamīd, 160, 172n humours (†abāʾiʿ, akhlā†), 41–2, 122–7, 131–2, 154, 163n, 165n, 192–4, 221, 234, 236 Óunayn b. Isªāq, 123

274  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. Iblīs (Satan), 39, 87, 180–1, 212n Ibn al-Marzubān, 166–7n Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, 67, 76n Ibn al-Nadīm, 4, 8, 165n, 166n Ibn Qutayba, 38, 70n, 77–8, 169n Ibn Sīrīn, 240 Ibn al-Tawʾam, 214–19, 222, 228–9, 254 Ibn al-Zayyāt (vizier), 5, 8–9, 29n, 118n imām, 106, 108, 110 Indians, 124, 136, 146 internal dialogue, 203 invocation, in prefaces, 11–12, 47, 53–4, 150–1 Iraq, 4, 45, 129, 138, 141–2, 151, 246; see also Basra ʿirq (pl. aʿrāq), 125–7, 153, 221 Isaac, B., 163n Ismāʿīl, b. Ghazwān, 219 Jaʿfar b. Sulaymān, 142, 169n jāhiliyya, 237 al-JāªiÕ addressee and, 2, 77–9, 251–2 as self-parodying persona, 16, 18, 26, 77–9, 87–91, 96, 110, 184, 186, 200, 217, 232–3, 251–2, 259–60 defence of Basra, 137, 141–2 ethnic origins, 127–9, 142–3, 148, 253 in the Arabic prose tradition, 1–2, 26 life, 4–5 personal letters, 5–8, 94–7, 259 relationships with patrons, 7–9, 94–5, 97, 133, 148–50, 218 semi-paralysis, 60 support of ʿAbbāsid state, 4–5, 35, 148–9, 151 views on environmental influences, 122–7, 163n views on generosity and miserliness, 177–82, 193, 225–6, 241–2 views on occupations, 97–101, 121, 131–2, 252–3 views on writing, 21–5, 257 al-Jahjāh, 202–3, 205–6, 212n Jamharat rasāʾil al-ʿArab, 10 al-Jārūd, 241 Jesus, 38–50, 181 Jews, 49, 51, 73n, 118n, 119n Julaybīb, 145 al-Juwīlī, M., 208n

Kaʿb b. Māmah, 223, 225–6 Kaʿba, 146 kalām see theology Khabbāb, 201–5, 212n, 213n Khan, G., 30n Khāqān, 170n Kharijites (Khawārij), 160 Azraqī, 120n Khurasan, 164n Arabs settled in, 124 Khurasanians, 149, 153–6, 211n boasts of, 157–8 kibr (pride), 87–93 Kilito, A., 77–8 Kināna, 127–8, 142 al-Kindī, 213n, 214, 246 al-Kisrawī, Mūsā b. ʿĪsā, 166–7n K. al-Akhbār wa-kayfa tu‚iªª, 163n, 164n K. al-Aw†ān wa-al-buldān, 27n, 124–5, 131, 137–42, 147 K. al-Bukhalāʾ (The Book of Misers), 27, 28n, 35, 42, 60, 119n, 173–7, 180, 182–208, 214–47, 254–5, 260 anecdotes in, 174, 182–6, 211n, 214, 224–5 K. al-Buldān see K. al-Aw†ān wa-al-buldān K. al-Bur‚ān wa-al-ʿurjān wa-al-ʿumyān wa-al-ªūlān, 31n, 37, 59–66, 124 K. Fakhr al-Sūdān ʿalā al-bī∂ān, 27n, 105, 142–8, 229, 253 K. fī Khalq al-Qurʾān, 30n, 31n, 45–6, 51–9, 85 K. fī al-Radd ʿalā al-Mushabbiha, 28n K. fī Íināʿat al-kalām (On the Craft of Dialectical Theology), 114–15 K. al-Óayawān, 4–5, 8, 21–4, 35, 60, 65, 123, 126, 162n, 192, 257 K. Hiyal al-lu‚ū‚ (Book of the Tricks of Thieves), 187–8, 190, 212n, 240 K. Óujaj al-nubuwwa (On Proofs of Prophethood ), 98–101, 104, 130 K. al-JāªiÕ ilā Muªammad b. ʿAbd alMalik al-Zayyāt, 29n K. Kitmān al-sirr wa-ªifÕ al-lisān, 67, 68–9, 80, 102 K. al-Maªāsin wa-al-A∂dā∂, 167n K. al-Maªāsin wa-al-masāwī, 167n K. al-Masāʾil (Book of Issues), 202–3, 213n K. al-Muʿallimīn (Book of Teachers), 20–1, 105, 110–15, 208n K. al-Nisāʾ (On Women), 70n, 208n

i ndex | 275 K. al-Nubl wa-al-tanabbul wa-dhamm alkibr, 87–94, 97 K. al-Qiyān see R. al-Qiyān K. al-Radd ʿalā al-Na‚ārā (Response to the Christians), 5, 7, 46–51, 53, 71n, 72n, 73n, 149, 251 K. al-Shārib wa-al-mashrūb, 27n, 35–45, 94, 261 K. al-Íuraªāʾ wa-al-ªujanāʾ, 143–4, 148, 169n K. ˝abaqāt al-Muʿtazilā, 28n K. al-Tarbīʿ wa-al-tadwīr, 165n, 259 K. al-Wukalāʿ (Book of Financial Agents), 101–10, 129, 165n, 246 K. al-Zarʿ wa-al-nakhl, 4 Kūfa, 141 Labīd b. Rabīʿa, 209n language change of in urban environments, 165n influence of geography on, 125–6, 164n laughter, 119n, 183, 186, 201, 206–8 Leder, S., 74–5n letters, 259–61 in Arabic and neighboring traditions, 9–11 conventions of in papyri, 11–13, 30n personal, 3, 6, 258–9 Lewis, B., 163n, 170n Libanius, 28n McDonald, M., 169n, 170n, 171n al-maghrib, 140 Malti-Douglas, F., 174, 208n al-Maʾmūn (Caliph), 4, 26 Mandeans, 51 Manichaenism, 127 Manichaeans, 51, 72n al-Man‚ūr, 159 mawālī, 149, 155, 158–61 maysir, 181 Mazdak, 213n mean, as an ethical ideal, 41, 78, 87, 91, 96, 177–82, 196, 215 Mecca, 136, 139–40, 142 Meccans, 153 Medina, 43, 139–40 Medinans, 153 miªna (inquisition), 4–5, 57, 59 al-Mirbad, 142 Mishawayh, Abū ʿAlī, 258–9 monks, 230

Montgomery, J., 28n, 116–17n Muʿammar b. ʿAbbād, 57, 74n Muªammad b. Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād, 5, 7–8, 76n Muªammad b. ʿAlī, 157 Muir, J., 29n mukha∂ram poets, 242 al-Munjab al-ʿAnbarī, 234 mushabbiha (anthropomorphists) 72n, 99, 119n music, 43 Mutammim b. Nuwayra, 209n Mu†arrif b. Shikhkhīr, 243 al-Muʿta‚im (Caliph), 149 al-Mutawakkil (Caliph), 5, 46–7, 71–2n, 148–52, 162, 170n Muʿtazila, 4, 15, 38, 45–6, 51–9, 65, 74n, 85, 95, 100, 117n, 120n, 123–4, 129–30, 206, 244 al-Muthaqqib al-ʿAbdī, 181 nabīdh, 1, 2, 35–45, 73n, 94–7, 100 ‘nābita’ (upstarts), 56–7, 72n, 74n nafs (self, soul, person), 33n, 104, 136, 213n, 226, 236 and intellect (ʿaql ), 68, 235 al-Najāshī, 145 al-Najm, W., 176 Nāmir b. Tawlab, 231 naratee, 15–16 narratology, 15 al-NaÕÕām, 56, 73n, 124, 162n Nichomachaean Ethics, 178, 180 occupations, 97–101, 121, 131–2, 252–3 On Teachers see K. al-Muʿallimīn paradiastole, 179, 209n patrons, 2, 251 in the ʿAbbāsid state, 3–7 relationship to addressee, 7–9 Pavić, M., 256–7 Pellat, C., 28n, 60, 73n, 127, 166n, 208n, 213n, 262n Persians, 124–6, 146–7, 208n, 213n, 241 see also Khurasanians Plato, 136 Pliny, 11, 30n poverty in K. al-Bukhalāʾ, 182, 220, 225, 245–6 prefaces see epistolary prefaces proto-Sunnī faction see Traditionists

276  |  the rea der i n a l - j Ā h. iz. al-Qā∂ī, W., 29n, 73–4n, 166n Qaª†ān, 145, 148, 153–4 Qur’ān, 38, 43, 46–50, 93, 105, 137, 186, 210n, 238–9 createdness of, 4–5, 51–9 divine ordering (naÕm) of, 56, 73n on sharing and miserliness (bukhl), 176, 181–2, 227, 245, 249n Quraysh, 115, 127, 140, 155 races, 121–33 reader addressee and, 14–15, 211n, 251–8 and the anecdotes of K. al-Bukhalāʾ, 182–6 implied, 32n modern, 15 Reynolds, G., 72n Riad, E., 29–30n R. fī al-Balāgha wa-al-ījāz, 80 R. fī al-ªanīn ilā al-aw†ān, 27n, 131, 133–7, 147, 261 attribution to al-JāªiÕ, 133–4, 166–7n R. fī al-Jidd wa-al-hazl, 29n, 259 R. fī Madª al-nabīdh see R. ilā al-Óasan b. Wahb fī Madª al-Nabīdh R. fī Madª al-tijāra wa-dhamm ʿamal alsul†ān, 115 R. fī Manāqib al-Turk see R. ilā al-Fatª b. Khāqān fī Manāqib al-Turk K. al-Masāʾil, 202 R. fī mawt Abī Óarb b. al-Íaffār al-Ba‚rī, 11, 30n R. ilā Abī al-Faraj b. Najān al-Kātib, 118n R. ilā Aªmad b. Abī Duʾād yukhbiruhu fīhā bi-Kitāb al-Futyā, 28n, 31n R. ilā al-Fatª b. Khāqān fī Manāqib alTurk (‘Letter on the Merits of the Turks’), 7, 27n, 99, 129, 148–62, 170n, 253–4 R. ilā al-Óasan b. Wahb fī Madª al-nabīdh, 27n, 94–7 R. ilā Muªammad b. Abī Duʾād fī nafī altashbīh, 28n R. al-Maʿāsh wa-al-maʿād (‘On This Life and the Hereafter’), 7, 67–8, 127, 130, 180, 208n R. al-Qiyān (‘Epistle of the Singing Slave Girls’), 31n, 116, 120n, 213n

R.Taf∂īl al-nutq ʿalā al-‚amt (‘Letter on the Preferability of Speech to Silence’), 79–87 Romans see Byzantines Saªīª al-Bukhārī, 38, 247n Sahl b. Hārūn, 29n, 214, 219, 246 Íaª‚aª, 202, 206–7, 212–13n Salm b. Qutayba, 232, 248n Samarra, 4 al-Sandūbī, ª., 166n Sassanids (Persian dynasty), 94, 126, 168n de Sausurre, F., 209n Schoeler, G., 9, 25–6 Serjeant, R., 213n Shīʿa, 56, 59 Ghūlāt (extreme), 120n Shuʿūbiyyah, 127, 147, 208n Sijistānīs, 158 Skinner, Q., 209n Slavs, 126, 146, 149 Stirewalt, M., 29n Stowers, S., 29n Sunan al-Tirmidhī, 249n Syria (al-Shām), 138, 168n Syriac literature, 9–10, 29–30n Syrian troops, 157 Taghazghuz Turks, 127 taqlīd, 54 al-Tawªīdī, Abū Óayyān, 258–9 teachers (muʿallimīn), 20–1, 103, 105, 110–14, 252 al-Thaqafī (addressee), 215–47, 254–5 Thaqīf (tribe), 164n, 216, 222, 229 theology (kalām), 9, 53, 74n, 80–1, 85, 114–15, 119n, 120n; see also Muʿtazila Thomas, D., 71n Thumāma b. Ashras, 57, 74n Tigris, 141 Toorawa, S., 25 Traditionists (proto-Sunnī), 5, 38–9, 43, 46, 52–4, 56–7, 59, 71–4n, 85–6, 116, 117n, 208n, 213n, 224 Turks, 133, 148–62, 253–4 Turner, J., 171n ʿUmar b. al-Kha††āb, 243–4 Umayyads, 157 umma see community, Muslim

i ndex | 277 Wā‚il b. ʿA†āʾ, 29n, 99 ‘writerly’ culture, 25–6, 258 Yamūt b. al-Muzzaraʿ, 127 Yaʿqūb b. ʿUbayd, 103 Yāqū†, 5, 71n, 165n Yazīd b. Abān, 126, 164n

al-zanadaqa see Manichaeanism, Manichaeans Zanj, 123–4, 142–6, 149, 162, 170n, 229 Õann, 62 Zayd b. Óāritha, 159 Ziyād b. Abīhi, 141 Zoroastrians, 51