Would al-Jāḥiẓ Please Make Himself Known? Reflections on the Absent al-Jāḥiẓ

Abstract

This review article sets out to think about a dominant genre in the history of ideas as it is practised within Islamic Studies: the intellectual biography of a writer, theologian or some other notable personage. It ponders the merits and demerits of such a genre with specific reference to al-Jāḥiẓ and proposes the composition of biographies based on the absence of the biographical subject.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank friends Shawkat Toorawa and Philip Kennedy for their help, insight and advice in writing this review. The author is also grateful to Hilary Kilpatrick for giving firmer contours to the argument and to Patricia Crone whose comments on an earlier attempt to write a ‘biography’ of the absent al-Jāḥiẓ proved decisive.

Notes

¹This essay is a review of Arnim Heinemann, John L. Meloy, Tarif Khalidi and Manfred Kropp, eds., Al-Jāḥiẓ: A Muslim Humanist for our Time (Beirut: Ergon Verlag Würzburg in Kommission, 2009), xii + 295.

²The Berlin excerpts, ff.18a–41b, have been edited by Muḥammad Maḥmūd al-Durūbī, ‘Risālah Jadīdah li-l-Jāḥiẓ fī Madḥ Āl Duʾād’, in Majallat Muʾtah li-l-Buḥūth wa-l-Dirāsāt 12, no. 2 (1999): 201–60. (I would like to thank Dr Balqis al-Karaki and her sister for acquiring a copy of this work for me.) Selections from the text on the ʿAbbasid caliphs and viziers have been edited by Jens Schmitt, ‘Al-Jāḥiẓ on ʿAbbāsid Caliphs and People in Basra,’ in Islamic Thought in the Middle Ages. Studies in Text, Transmission and Translation, in Honour of Hans Daiber, ed. Anna Akasoy and Wim Raven (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 613–37; and as Muḥammad Maḥmūd al-Durūbī, ed., Fuṣūl Mukhtāra min Kutub al-Jāḥiẓ (Kuwait: Kuwait University and Amman: Dār al-Bashīr, 2002). I am grateful to Dr Schmitt for discussing with me his work on the Hyderabad manuscript. Thanks to Professor Dr Daiber's great generosity, I have been able to use a copy of the Hyderabad manuscript in my forthcoming edition and translation of some of al-Jāḥiẓ's epistles and it provides many fascinating insights on the two main collections of his epistles that we have previously tended to consider as basically representative of the shape and contents and style of the works as they left his pen.

³Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 234. See also p. 87: ‘the debate itself helped to free the potentialities of Adab, to mark out new lines of expertise and to resurrect and develop a ‘humanistic’ spirit which did not always coexist in peace with the rapidly maturing Hadith.' Other relevant works by Khalidi: Tarif Khalidi, Classical Arab Islam: The Culture and Heritage of the Golden Age (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1985), esp. 51–58 (‘Islamic Paideia’); and his review of Robert Irwin, Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (London: Allen Lane, 1999), Times Literary Supplement (31 March 2000): 8. For an attempt to rethink any equivalence between adab and paideia (based on other approaches to the concept of paideia than that canonized in the classic work by Werner Jaeger), see my article: James E. Montgomery, ‘Convention as Cognition: On the Cultivation of Emotion,’ in Takhyīl: The Imaginary in Classical Arabic Poetics, ed. M. Hammond and G. van Gelder (Oxford: Gibb Trust, 2008), 147–78. I would like to make clear that I am not in principle against the application to an aspect or aspects of Islamic Studies of the term or the conceptual field of ‘humanism’ or in fact of any such an attempt to shed light on one phenomenon in terms of a phenomenon taken from a different cultural sphere. Many scholars whom I respect have been able to make ‘humanism’ do good service in their works, including George Makdisi, Mohammed Arkoun, Ahmed Shboul and Tarif Khalidi. Personally, I find the value of such an exercise to lie in the fissures, gaps, and interstices in the relevant concepts that are revealed in the process, through the very asymmetry of the attempts at mapping two such concepts onto one another. ‘Humanism’ rather tends to cloud my own judgement and so I would concur with the position of Alexander Key, ‘The Applicability of the Term ‘Humanism’ to Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī,' Studia Islamica 100/101 (2005): 71–112.

⁴An idea of the impoverishment of my reading of al-Jāḥiẓ's use of adab can be appreciated from a glance at Heath's brilliant 19-point list of the components of adab as he appreciates it (Heath, ‘Al-Jāḥiẓ, Adab and the Art of the Essay,’ 146–8).

⁵As a convenient example of what I mean by this paraphrastic account of adab I would refer the reader to the chapter of the Kitāb al-Bayān that I translated and studied in the following four pieces: ‘Speech and Nature: al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn, 2.175-207, Part 1,’ in S. Toorawa and D. Stewart (eds.), Festschrift for Roger Allen. A Special Issue of Middle Eastern Literatures 11, no. 2 (2008): 169–91; ‘Speech and Nature: al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn, 2.175-207, Part 2,’ Middle Eastern Literatures 12, no. 1 (2009): 1–25; ‘Speech and Nature: al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn, 2.175-207, Part 3,’ Middle Eastern Literatures 12, no. 2 (2009): 107–25; and ‘Speech and Nature: al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn, 2.175-207, Part 4,’ Middle Eastern Literatures 12, no. 4 (2009): 213–32.

⁶An example closer to home: Edward Ullendorff, ‘Review of Alexander Schreiber (ed.), Ignaz Goldziher: Tagebuch (Leiden: Brill, 1978),’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental And African Studies 42, no. 3 (1979): 553–5: ‘one reader … now wishes he had remained in the pre-diary state of jāhiliyya’ (ibid., 553).

⁷I refer to the edition by Ṭāhā al-Ḥājirī and Paul Kraus: Majmūʿ Rasāʾil al-Jāḥiẓ (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Lajnat al-Taʾlīf wa-l-Tarjama wa-l-Nashr, 1943).

⁸In other words, he may have suffered from kidney stones, as Montaigne did.

⁹This observation is not itself as simple as it may at first seem for we must always be careful when reading al-Jāḥiẓ to identify who is speaking. The importance of the identity of the speaker to whom he attributes a discourse in our reconstructions of al-Jāḥiẓ's arguments and position on any given topic or issue is well brought out by Saleh Said Agha, ‘Language as a Component of Arab Identity in al-Jāḥiẓ: The Case of Ismāʿīl's Conversion to Arabhood,’ 67–89. It is repeatedly overlooked, with far-reaching consequences for her reconstruction of al-Jāḥiẓ's position, by Asma Afsaruddin, ‘Lessons from the Past: Piety, Leadership and Good Governance in the Risālat al-ʿUthmāniyya,’ 175–95. Afsaruddin often attributes to al-Jāḥiẓ positions that he attributes to the ʿUthmāniyyah.

¹⁰In the course of my current project to edit a number of his compositions based on all the available manuscripts (none of the widely available editions of al-Jāḥiẓ actually does this), I have been tempted to wonder whether on occasion his Arabic style also represents the result of a similar set of responses to the dominance of his reputation—a verbal recreation or ‘restoration’ by those who preserved his writings of how as the father of Arabic prose he must have written.

¹¹Even when we read his life from his works, we must remember that it is the life of Eco's model and not empirical author to whom we should attend. For more on this distinction, see James E. Montgomery, ‘Abū Nuwās, the Justified Sinner?,’ Oriens 38 (2010): 75–164, esp. 79–80.

¹²Margaret Muldoon, trans., Against Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 193.

¹³The case of Igor Stravinsky is instructive. Stravinsky was apparently not comfortable as a conductor of his own compositions. He would supervise Robert Craft and watch him conduct, and then, when on the podium, he would mimic Craft's movements. Just as composition and conducting are two distinct performances, so too are writing and reading.

¹⁴Gary Gutting, Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

¹⁵Translated into English by Richard Howard as Michelet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987).

¹⁶It is interesting that the phrase ‘par lui-même’ was dropped from the titles of the reissued series. M.A. Screech's Montaigne and Melancholy (London: Duckworth, 1983) is a fine instance in English. This genre is brilliantly subverted by Barthes himself in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (translated by Richard Howard as Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes [London: Macmillan, 1977]), an ‘autobiography’ by someone who once famously declared: ‘I have no biography.’ Linda Coverdale, trans., The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 259.

¹⁷Translated from the French by D.M. Hawke (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).

¹⁸‘Al-G^ˇahiz jugé par la postérité,’ Arabica 27 (1980): 1–67.

¹⁹I have exemplified this point with further examples in ‘Why al-Jāḥiẓ Needs Slonimsky's Earbox,’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 131, no. 4 (2011): 623–34—a review article of Lale Behzadi, Sprache und Verstehen. Al-G^ˇāḥiẓ über die Vollkommenheit des Ausdrucks (Diskurse der Arabistik, 14) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009).

²⁰This was argued by Saʿīd Manṣūr, The World-view of al-Jāḥiẓ in Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (Alexandria: Dar al-Maʿārif, 1977), 11–13, 92–6.

²¹Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) 226–7, notes that according to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ the entourage of the early ʿAbbasid caliphs included companions who were formally designated alsinat al-raʿīya, the tongues (i.e. voices) of the subjects. Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Religion and Politics under the Early ʿAbbāsids. The Emergence of the Proto-Sunnī Elite (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 83, shows that this practice was still in place during the reign of al-Muʿtaṣim (r. 218–227/833–842). This position at court and in a patron's entourage should not be conflated with the position of the kātib (amanuensis) as imperial bureaucrat, the emergence of which function has tended to overshadow how scholars have situated historically Arabic advice and counsel works.

²²Qurʾān 3 Āl ʿImrān 104 and 114; 7 al-Aʿrāf 157; 9 al-Tawbah 71 and 112; 22 al-Ḥajj 41; 31: Luqmān 17.