The Life and Works of Jahiz

"Jahiz was a ninth-century figure who came from a very humble background and had nothing that we would characterise as a formal education – but he picked up a lot. Particularly from hanging around a mosque. Mosques in Basra – which is where he was, in Iraq – were treated like clubs where people hung around and debated issues and talked and, in fact, often published their books – not formally so… but they sat and read the books out in the mosque and people took notes, so it was a form of publishing. Yes, very much so. Eventually that all disappeared, though, within a century or two. But Jahiz developed his skills as an essayist and found some patronage with the Caliph in Baghdad, although not much. He never had much of a formal occupation – at one point he was given the post of tutor to one of the Caliph’s children. The children got so scared of him because of his goggle eyes. That’s actually what Jahiz means, “goggle eyes.” Well, I suppose it wasn’t, but everybody calls him Jahiz. I should say, by the way, that he seems to have an African background, though it’s not clear from which area of Africa his ancestors came. Anyway, he wrote essays – he wrote on everything, everything that it was possible to write on. He wrote on theology, he wrote on philosophy, he wrote at enormous length on animals and birds and fish. He wrote on mice, he wrote on the bum and the back and the belly. He wrote on round things and square things, he wrote on stranglers…. and it just goes on. Yes, poetry is considered ‘real, true literature’…. But Jahiz was seen in that way, I think, yes; it’s fair to say he was recognised as the first great prose stylist. One of his problems though, was that he was a Mu’tazilite, which was a version of Islam that began to flourish in recent decades, during Jahiz’s youth. It was for a time the dominant orthodoxy. It’s a kind of rationalist philosophy and, while there are many aspects to Mu’tazilism, part of it was the belief that the world is marvellous, a manifestation of God’s justice, and that man has free will. There is no predestination, so one makes ones own fate, whether for salvation or not. “If you are an independent minded academic and you learn the Arabic language – my God the amount of stuff you could do!” The age of Mu’tazilism comes to an end within Jahiz’s lifetime, and the Caliphs reverse their position and go to a much more orthodox, less rationalist position. Which makes Jahiz unfashionable and he gets dumped and widely attacked by following generations of writers. They can’t knock him in talent because he is so good, but he is rather discounted nonetheless – ‘You don’t want to pay much attention to this buffoon, this joker, this liar’, and so on. That’s another thing actually – Jahiz’s ‘thing’, you could say –there a lot of jokes in his work. He is a serious writer, but all the time he breaks it up with jokes and digressions – brilliant digressions that remain in fashion until well into the 10th century, maybe later. It’s called al-jidd wa al-hazl, ‘seriousness and joking’, the good discourse of a cultured man. The writing of a cultured man should alternate, you see, it shouldn’t just be boringly serious all the time, and Jahiz was brilliant at that. But the fact that he goes so much for comedy did rather count against him in the long run. It’s certainly moot. Any age that can support Masudi, who comes in the next century, is still pretty golden. There are many factors to consider: partly the socio-economic breakdown of the Abbasid Caliphate didn’t help, and the devastation brought by Qarmatian heretics and the Zanj slave uprising. All that did a lot of damage to literary culture, indirectly. Possibly the main thing is the development of religious colleges, the madrasas, which placed religion in the centre. So people were encouraged to study the Qur’an, Qur’an commentaries, transmission of hadith (sayings of the prophet), religious jurisprudence and a therefore a corresponding discounting of history and geography, and all that. Then, there’s a great suspicion of the learning of other cultures, of ancient cultures; a suspicion of what might be picked up that’s heretical or just not Islamic, from the Greeks, the Indians and Persians."