4 - Al-Jāḥiẓ

Summary

Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baḥr b. Maḥbub al-Kinānī al-Baṣrl, known as al- Jāḥiẓ, is one of the best-known and most prolific of early ʿAbbasid prose-writers and Muʿtazilī theologians, and also one of the most controversial. Little is known of his origins, apart from the fact that he was born in Basra, probably around 160/776, to a humble family of freedmen (mawātī) who were clients of the Banu Kinanah (a tribe related to Quraysh). Jāḥiẓ's forebears were probably of African descent; his grandfather was black, and he himself retained some of the pigmentation of his ancestors; his ugliness, caused by his bulging eyeballs, became proverbial and earned him the nickname jāḥiẓ (pop-eyed). Nothing is known of his father, who died soon after his birth, and little of his mother, to whom jāḥiẓ must have been a source of considerable anxiety; she had managed to send him to the local Quranic school, but when he left he refused to be tied down to any regular work. It is said that he was once seen selling fish, and this, if true, confirms what other anecdotal sources say about his idle way of life. His idleness, however, was to give him an exceptionally broad experience of human nature. As he strolled around Basra he made an assortment of friends who doubtless fed and sheltered him, and who also gave him the opportunity to indulge his precocious fondness for observation, argument and reading, for despite his intelligence and insatiable thirst for intellectual and factual knowledge, he had no access to any kind of formal training higher than that given in his Quranic school.