Al-Jahiz

Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr, known as al-Jahiz ("the goggle-eyed"), was one of the great prose writers of the Arabic language. He was born in Basra, in southern Iraq, around 160 AH (c. 776 CE), into a modest family of mawali (non-Arab clients) attached to the tribe of Banu Kinana; later tradition reports that his grandfather worked as a cameleer, and several sources describe the family as of humble, possibly African, descent. The early dates of his life are traditional estimates and should be read as approximate.

He rose through Basra's lively scholarly circles and then moved to Baghdad, the Abbasid capital, in the reign of the caliph al-Ma'mun, later spending years at the court in Samarra under his successors. There he wrote prolifically under the patronage of the vizier Ibn al-Zayyat and of al-Fath ibn Khaqan, a bibliophile companion of the caliph al-Mutawakkil.

In theology al-Jahiz leaned toward the Mu'tazila, the rationalist school that stressed reason and divine justice; some sources credit him with a distinct sub-current sometimes called the "Jahiziyya." His celebrated works include Kitab al-Hayawan ("The Book of Animals"), a sprawling work mixing zoology, anecdote and theology, al-Bayan wa al-Tabyin on rhetoric and eloquence, and Kitab al-Bukhala ("The Book of Misers"). He engaged Greek (Aristotelian) natural philosophy in circulation in his day. After al-Fath ibn Khaqan's death (861), he returned to Basra, where he died c. 255 AH (868-869). A widely repeated story, of uncertain truth, holds that a collapsing pile of his own books killed him.