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Book Review: Al-Jāḥiẓ. A Muslim Humanist for Our Time, edited by Arnim
Heinemann, John L. Meloy, Tarif Khalidi and Manfred Kropp, 2009

Article  in  Die Welt des Islams · May 2015

DOI: 10.1163/15700607-00551p04

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 Book Reviews Die Welt des Islams 55 (2015) 113-140
113-116 113

brill.com/wdi

Book Reviews

∵
Arnim Heinemann, John L. Meloy, Tarif Khalidi and Manfred Kropp (eds.)
Al-Jāḥiẓ. A Muslim Humanist for Our Time. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2009.
xii + 295 pp., ISBN 978-3-89913-678-4.

Although it is imaginable that some works of the 9th-century author al-Jāḥiẓ

are still a fairly popular read in the Arab world today one cannot be but aston-
ished by the fact that a scholarly conference on the polymath of Basra is able
to attract the interest of the general public and wide coverage by mainstream
media: the daily al-Ḥayāt for example devoted two entire pages of a special
report on the subject (edition of 29 January 2005). The book under discussion
here is a selection of papers presented at that conference which was jointly
organized by the German Orient Institute (OI) and the Center for Arab and
Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) and held at the American University of Beirut
in January 2005. Any reader who is new to al-Jāḥiẓ’s works and reads this book
will become aware that the definition humanist is perhaps the most appropri-
ate tag for the author who was keen to understand and describe the human
condition, and explore everything the human mind is able to grasp. For this
reason the title of the book, Al-Jāḥiẓ: A Muslim Humanist for Our Time is well
chosen; and it reads a bit like a hopeful wish for the world we live in now which
would be better off with more intellectuals like al-Jāḥiẓ (Muslim as well as oth-
ers) who “take little for granted” and “challenge the received wisdom of the
world” (p. III). This inevitably eclectic (by the nature of the works of the author
it is dedicated to) selection of articles divides into three parts: 1. Intellectual
History. Critical Concepts, 2. Language, Literature and Communication and 3.
Texts and Works. The third part with studies on specific texts and works is the
largest with seven contributions. It seems that the editors had some difficulties
in finding a common denominator for the papers in the first part – Gregor
Schoeler’s paper ‘Writing for a Reading Public’ could easily have fitted into part
two while it is not obvious in which specific sense critical concepts of intel-
lectual history were at work in Hilary Kilpatrick’s contribution on music. In the
ISSN 0043-2539 (print version) ISSN 1570-0607 (online version) WDI1

Die
© Welt des brill
koninklijke Islams
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(2015) 2015 | doi
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 114 Book Reviews

following lines I had to content myself with a summary of the 17 papers con-
tained in the book reserving a few lines for each: limitations of space made it
impossible to discuss every single paper in satisfactory length – something that
they certainly deserve.
Part 1: Joseph van Ess’ article sheds light into the question why and under
which circumstances al-Jāḥiẓ was literally transformed into a full-time
Muʿtazilite mutakallim by Ibn al-Nadīm and others before his identity as a lit-
térateur took over in later periods. Van Ess continues with a discussion wheth-
er al-Jāḥiẓ can be seen as a humanist: he argues that al-Jāḥiẓ emphasized the
perspective of man in his theological treatises and bases his approach on five
aspects: the importance of human will, psychology, epistemology, fortuitous-
ness of knowledge and the status of the unbeliever. In his study ‘Al-Jāḥiẓ and
the Poetics of Teaching’ Sebastian Guenther shows that al-Jāḥiẓ was one of the
first Muslim scholars who elaborated didactic theories. In these theories al-
Jāḥiẓ advocates a universal training (Guenther mentions the adab-ideal) that
includes emotional and moral dimensions and engages teacher and student in
a very personal relationship which with good reason makes Guenther think of
al-Jāḥiẓ’s didactic principles in Aristotelian terms. Hilary Kilpatrick writes
about al-Jāḥiẓ’s observations on music and its importance for mankind. In her
paper entitled ‘Al-Jāḥiẓ and World Music’ she compiles the instances where
al-Jāḥiẓ writes about musical sounds produced by animals and birds and espe-
cially music made by man. One of her significant conclusions is that al-Jāḥiẓ
condemned music not for its immoral effect on its hearers but for its commer-
cial use by the owners of singing slave girls who exploited music for economic
gain. George Saliba’s paper ‘Jāḥiẓ and the Critique of Aristotelian Science’ ad-
dresses the question whether pre-Islamic Syriac texts have been the source for
the transmission of ancient Greek works into Arabic. Citing examples from al-
Jāḥiẓ’s K. al-Ḥayawān Saliba comes to the conclusion that the vast majority of
available evidence shows that classical Greek works on Aristotelian science
were translated directly from Greek into Arabic. In ‘Writing for a Reading Pub-
lic: The Case of al-Jāḥiẓ and Ibn Quṭayba’ Gregor Schoeler contends that liter-
ary books for a reading public appeared in the 2nd/8th century with epistles
for rulers, princes, and courtiers being the oldest type. Schoeler states that side
by side with the written book for a reading public written notes for the recita-
tion in front of an audience existed as the primary means of transmission of
knowledge.
Part 2: In his paper ‘Language as a Component of Arab Identity in al-Jāḥiẓ:
The Case of Ismāʿīl’s Conversion to Arabhood’ Saleh Said Agha compiles pas-
sages from al-Jāḥiẓ’s epistles, his K. al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn, and his K. al-Ḥayawān
in order to illustrate al-Jāḥiẓ’s view that a non-Arab in his adolescent age can

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 Book Reviews 115

become a full-fledged Arab by learning their language and acquiring their life-
style and manners. In ‘The Place of al-Jāḥiẓ in the Arabic Philological Tradition’
Ramzi Baalbaki gives an account of the surprisingly meagre recognition that
al-Jāḥiẓ received in grammatical and philological sources although his work is
extremely rich in matters of grammar and philology. In support of his assess-
ment Baalbaki gives some examples from al-Jāḥiẓ’s writings on grammatical
and linguistic issues. In ‘The Impact of al-Jāḥiẓ on the Genesis of the maqāma
Genre’ Vahid Behmardi discusses the impact of al-Jāḥiẓ and Ibn al-ʿAmīd on
the emergence of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamaḏānī’s Maqāmāt. According to
Behmardi al-Hamaḏānī cites al-Jāḥiẓ in order to exemplify his rhetorical and
literary merits and shortcomings. Lale Behzadi’s article ‘How Does Communi-
cation Work? Some Answers of al-Jāḥiẓ and Some Misreadings of His Succes-
sors’ revolves around al-Jāḥiẓ’s basic semiotic concepts and his assessment of
the act of communication in his K. al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn and his K. al-Ḥayawān
and the interpretation of some successors to him like Abū Hilāl al-ʿAskarī. In
one of the longest articles in this volume ‘Al-Jāḥiẓ, adab, and the Art of the Es-
say’ Peter Heath delivers a significant contribution to the poetics of al-Jāḥiẓ’s
adab studying the narrative strategies in his mostly plot-free and discursive
writings.
Part 3: In ‘Lessons from the Past: Piety, Leadership, and Good Governance in
the Risālat al-ʿUṯmāniyya’ Asma Afsaruddin argues that in his treatise al-Jāḥiẓ
defends the legitimacy of Abū Bakr’s caliphate by virtue of two Quranic con-
cepts: sābiqa (i.e. precedence or priority) and faḍl (i.e. virtue). In his paper
‘Jāḥiẓ, the Ḥanābila and the Buḫalāʾ’ Michael Cooperson puts forward that the
misers in the K. al-Buḫalāʾ are a symbol for the people of the sunna and Ḥanbalī
ascetics whom al-Jāḥiẓ condemned in his other writings. According to Cooper-
son their asceticism and renunciation of worldly enjoyments are virtually syn-
onymous to the stinginess of the misers. In ‘A New Manuscript of al-Jāḥiẓ’s
works and Its Importance for Their Transmission’ Hans Daiber comments on
how two old anthologies of al-Jāḥiẓ’s minor works will bring about modifica-
tions to the texts in the printed edition of the epistles by Hārūn from 1965. In
‘History, Culture, and Religion: A Propos the Introduction of the Kitāb al-
Ḥayawān’ Susanne Enderwitz argues that al-Jāḥiẓ regarded books as the high-
est and most valuable form of articulation in the creation of God. Enderwitz
emphasizes the role of Islam and urban Arab culture as the determinant factor
in eternalizing Arab culture in the form of books. In his paper ‘Kitāb al-Bursān:
Al-Jāḥiẓ on Right- and Lefthanded’ Geert Jan van Gelder introduces one of al-
Jāḥiẓ’s lesser known books that deal with the superior features of one group of
men over the other. Van Gelder shows that al-Jāḥiẓ’s dialectic method operates
to perfection as he praises left-handedness over right-handedness in one

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 116 Book Reviews

chapter and does exactly the opposite in the following chapter remaining just
as persuasively and convincingly. In ‘Yearning and Disquiet: Al-Jāḥiẓ and the
Risālat al-Qiyān’ Matthew Gordon engages in ascertaining whether the de-
scription of the singing slave girls in the texts of al-Jāḥiẓ and al-Iṣfahānī is more
than just a topos and a literary device. He argues that the textual evidence
lends itself for the characterization of the history and the development of a
distinctive social group. In their paper ‘It Stinks in Basra! Al-Jāḥiẓ on Odors’
Maher Jarrar and Nisrine Jaafar explore how al-Jāḥiẓ describes and categorizes
smells in his K. al-Ḥayawān paying special attention to the city of Basra and its
surrounding areas during al-Jāḥiẓ’s age.
Finally it is worth mentioning that the outer appearance, binding, layout
and overall quality of the edition is very good. A small number of typos and
inconsistencies in transliteration do not hamper the readability of this prize-
winning volume (awardee of the 2011 Iranian World Book Prize).

Hakan Özkan
Institut für Arabistik und Islamwissenschaft, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität
Münster
hakan.ozkan@uni-muenster.de

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