Jahiz: Dangerous Freethinker?
Free-thinking is characterized by a reliance on reason and autonomy rather than authority or institution. It is an inquisitive and questioning state of mind, one that readily slips into scepticism and possibly even relativism. As Richard Scholar has recently argued, free-thinking ‘flourishes wherever a thinker encounters an obstacle in the search for truth’. I do not consider secularism or irreligiosity (or even atheism) to be essential to the notion of free-thinking. In my view free-thinking is characterized instead by a reliance on independent, reasoned thinking driven by a quizzical stance with regard to received knowledge.
Jahiz (d. 868-9), the ninth century thinker, certainly relied on reason and the questioning of received or inherited beliefs. He was not a sceptic, though he saw doubt as an indispensable moment on our path to truth. He was not a relativist: right and wrong were identifiable and unchanging moral qualities accessible to the human reason. And he was most definitely not anti-authoritarian. For him authority came from God and was vested in the caliph and in the apparatus of the caliph’s government, however semi- or loosely institutionalised that apparatus was.
Jahiz was a thinker who put his free-thinking to the service of the caliph and his regime. For Jahiz and his society to attempt anything else would have merited God’s wrath: society needed free-thinking to ensure it was a fit response to God’s revelation of the Qurʾan. Jahiz would have been dismayed to learn that there was anything dangerous about the promotion of his brand of free-thinking. And yet, by the end of his long life, he was castigated as an intellectual lightweight, written off as a doddering wit, and subsequently read largely as a stylist of antiquarian interest.
Let us begin in media res, with a typical example of Jahiz’s style of writing and thinking, before we learn who Jahiz was, when and where he lived and what he thought. The following passage is from volume 7 of a work called The Book of Living, by far the most ambitious work from Jahiz’s pen to have survived. Jahiz raises the question of whether birds have a language:
Every species of animal knows how to survive and get what it needs, how to evade its predators and catch its prey. It works out how to trap the animals that are inferior to it and how to protect itself against those superior to it. It chooses places to hide and defend itself and moves when it thinks they are unsuitable.
Birds use a language whereby they understand what others need. They have no reason to have or use a better language than the one they have. After all, their needs determine and shape the ideas they want to express. A wise philosopher was once asked, ‘At what age did you begin to think?’ ‘The moment I was born,’ he replied. When he saw that no-one believed him he said, ‘Okay then. I cried when I was afraid. I demanded food when I was hungry. I demanded to be suckled when I needed to be. I was quiet when I was given what I wanted. Such was the extent of my needs. If you know the extent of your needs when you are granted or denied them, you do not at that exact time need to think any further. This is why the Bedouin poet composed the following couplet:
May God bless the land where the gecko knows that it is safe, where the plants
are succulent
And where, on the top of a rock, it built its home. Every man thinks about how
to survive.’
Should someone retort, ‘This does not qualify as a language,’ here is the response: ‘The Qurʾan says that it is a language, poems refer to it as such as do the Bedouin. Maybe you refuse to classify it as clear communication and claim that it is not a language just because you do not understand it? But you do not understand the languages spoken by the other peoples of the world, and if you call their languages an incoherent babble and not clear speech, then you have made yourself liable to the accusation that you are disqualifying their languages and the words they use too. These peoples do not understand the language and the words that you use, so logically they are quite entitled to refuse to classify your language as a form of clear communication and speech.
Surely these languages are a form of clear communication and speech because their speakers understand each other’s needs, and because the languages constitute structured expressions produced by tongues and mouths? So then are not the sounds made by the various species of birds, and wild and domestic animals, also a form of clear communication and speech, given that you acknowledge that they are structured and organized, and articulated and given shape, that they understand each other’s needs thereby and are produced by tongues and mouths? Even if you only comprehend a tiny part, all these different kinds of animals only comprehend a tiny part of what you say. The structured sounds they make are determined by the limits of what they need and what they have to communicate. The structured sounds that you make are determined by the limits of what you need and have to communicate. You can teach a bird to make certain sounds and it will learn them. A man can be taught a language and he will speak it. This is the case with children and foreigners. The difference between men and birds is that in the case of the birds the notion that they talk comes is called a form of speech and a language through a comparison with human beings and on the basis of a valid connection. The notion that humans talk applies to them, no matter what.
So when the poet described the birds as capable of thought, the words he used were predicated upon this comparison. The poet could not apply these attributes to the birds absolutely and without qualification, and so you in turn are not able to refuse them these attributes in any way or in any circumstance.
You must understand this. May God help you to understand this! Almighty God has commanded you to ponder, acknowledge and heed His lessons. In the Qurʾan God says that Sulayman declared: ‘We have been taught the language of the birds.’ (27:16). The Almighty referred to it as a language and singled Sulayman out as someone to whom He had given comprehension of the thoughts and ideas expressed in that language, someone whom He had put in the position of the birds. And what’s more, if He had had Sulayman say, ‘We have been taught the language of domestic animals and predators,’ then that too would constitute an indicative miracle, a sign from God. God taught Ismaʿil the language of the Arabs when he was fourteen years old. This took place without any instruction or teaching, and without any need for pedagogical supervision or drills. Ismaʿil did not even grow up there. That is why this qualifies as a convincing proof, a miracle, and a sign from God.
I hope that once the reader who may never have heard of Jahiz before, let alone read any of his words, has a chance to get her bearings, she will appreciate the sprightly nimbleness of thought, the pace of argument, the inexorable dilemma the addressee finds himself at the end of the passage. I hope also that a host of questions spring to mind. What is the point of the argument? Is it mere sophistry, an empty battle of words? Did anyone really care whether birds are said to have a language tropically and figuratively, by way of a comparison with humans, or in a literal sense?
I will attempt to answer some of these questions. But let me make one point at the outset. In ninth century Arabic intellectual culture, the meaning and interpretation of words were of vital importance. Muslim intellectuals thought long and hard about how to develop the correct responses to the Qurʾan, how to read it and understand it, and how to fashion a linguistic and interpretative tradition out of it. It was important to get this right, because almost all ninth century Muslim intellectuals believed that the fate of their souls depended on them getting it right. To make an erroneous interpretation, to get it wrong, meant quite literally to be consigned to eternal damnation. So whether birds can be said to have a language or not goes right to the very heart of how we interpret the Qurʾan.
Writer and Legend
Jahiz composed many works during his long life: we know of some 245 titles. Not all have survived, of course, and there is considerable overlap between some of these titles. A conservative estimate would fix his corpus at around 200 compositions. His writings are greatly cherished. He is admired and loved as the ‘father of Arabic prose.’ Few would nowadays refer to him outright as a buffoon, but most discern in his joyous (childlike) sense of wonder a childish fascination with the mundane and the everyday. Many read this presumed childishness in his mercurial and tumultuous corpus of writings and in his style of composition—full of digressions, asides, meanderings, a helter-skelter inability to stick to the point, an exuberant relish for arguing both sides of a case, because they think he loved argumentation so much but also because they think he could not decide which side to root for. He is notorious for his witty and often apparently irreverent caricatures, for his indefatigable curiosity, and his sophistry.
Jahiz’s works are alive with a vital presence; they must have been uttered by a strong personality. What kind of a man wrote such remarkable pieces of prose? When we try to reconstruct Jahiz’s biography, we discover that Jahiz the Writer has created Jahiz the Legend and concealed Jahiz the Man. This is certainly true of the classical biographies of Jahiz which have survived and it also applies to their modern avatars.The legend of Jahiz is constructed out of key moments in, and unusual features of, his books. Take the name ‘Jahiz.’ This is a rare word from a root which means ‘to suffer from bulging eyes.’ The only occasion I can recall encountering it in a ninth or tenth century text is in a treatise on physiognomy. ‘Jahiz’ is a cognomen, a nickname that means ‘Pop-eyes’ or ‘Goggle-eyes.’ We do not know how he acquired it. We normally assume that it indicated a physical deformity, but perhaps, as was sometimes the case, he was given it because he had used it in a memorable phrase and so came to be known as Jahiz, ‘the man who used the word jahaza.’ At all events, Jahiz became legendary for the ugliness of his ocular deformity.
Jahiz was not only legendarily ugly, Mahbub his grandfather is said to have been black. Jahiz’s full name was Abu ʿUthman (his teknonym, meaning ‘Father of ʿUthman’), ʿAmr (his given name), ibn Bahr (‘son of Bahr’, his father’s name), ibn Mahbub (‘son of Mahbub’, his grandfather’s name). He also had two titles which indicate tribal affiliation: al-Fuqaymi and al-Kinani. The Banu Kinana were a tribe related to Quraysh, the tribe of Prophet Muhammad. Mahbub (‘Beloved’) is an unusual name and may indicate slave status. The tribal affiliations would then indicate the clan and the tribe who owned Mahbub and with which he was connected when he was manumitted. In technical terms this would indicate that Jahiz’s was a family of mawali, non-Arabs who enjoyed the protection of a network of contacts, presumably the family of the owner of Mahbub, within the tribal conglomeration known as Banu Kinana. A curio within the Jahizian corpus is a work entitled Treatise on the Vaunting of Blacks over Whites, in which the author argues in favour of the superiority of the black races to the white races. There are a couple of problems with moving back from this work to the man however. The text as it survives is not complete: it exists in an excerpted form within an anthology. We have really no way of knowing which position, if any, Jahiz supports in the work because he regularly uses a variety of talking heads when he writes: he ventriloquizes all sorts of positions, but adopts none.
Jahiz grew up in Basra, a city which he often describes in his writings and where he returned at the end of his life. As a child Jahiz is said to have attended the kuttab, the elementary Qurʾan school. Of course Jahiz must have received some form of education. However another unusual work within his corpus is The Treatise on Teachers and it is natural to connect this work with Jahiz’s own life.
A life of idleness ensued. Jahiz may have sold fish for a short time, and he whiled away his life among the lower classes—artisans, tradespeople, sailors, hucksters and criminals—but he was drawn to the congregational mosque where lectures, classes, discussions and debates were held on the most important topics of the day. He also frequented the Mirbad, the camel depot on the outskirts of Basra where the Bedouin tribesmen came to trade, and where the sciences of Arabic philology, grammar and lexicography are said to have been born, as the great scholars of Iraq questioned the Bedouin about Arabic language. (The Bedouin were thought to have kept alive a purer form of Arabic, one closer to the Arabic that Prophet Muhammad spoke and that pre-Islamic poetry was composed in, than the degenerate forms of Arabic spoken in the garrisons and townships.) However if we turn to Jahiz’s body of writings, several works seem relevant: An Epistle on the Crafts of the Leading Exponents in which Jahiz analyses the speech patterns of all manner of tradesmen, from street-cleaners to horse-surgeons; his most famous work The Book of Misers contains a celebrated description of the habitués of Basra’s congregational mosque; his abiding, scientific, interest in Arabic as a language and in the correct use of that language is celebrated in his four volume masterpiece The Book of Clarity and Clarification.
It was through exposure to these cultural currents, to osmosis, that Jahiz is thought to have acquired the expertise that distinguishes all of his works. It was also in Basra and in the mosque that Jahiz met a man who was to exert an enormous influence on his intellectual development: Abu Ishaq al-Nazzam (d. 836 or 845), a charismatic scientist, theoretician, poet, and nephew of the famous speculative thinker Abu al-Hudhayl (d. 841-2).
Abu al-Hudhayl and Nazzam were avid critics of the newly emergent translations into Arabic of the philosophical and scientific legacy of Greek Antiquity. Nazzam was a serial controversialist who engaged Christians and Manicheans in debate. He developed a radical cosmology which replaced ‘spirit’ for the Neo-platonic and Aristotelian ‘soul’ and devised a theory of causality based on the properties inherent in a series of primary natures. Jahiz fell under the spell of Nazzam and became a card-carrying member of the Muʿtazila school of thought. In the process he gained access to the latest works of Greek philosophy and science in translation.
In Jahiz’s masterpiece, The Book of Living, the presence of Nazzam and Aristotle is most evident. Jahiz relies extensively on current translations of Aristotle’s works on animals (Historia Animalium), and often he does not acknowledge that he is doing so, but equally he is vociferous about his disagreements with Aristotle. In fact one of the aims of The Book of Living is to excavate ancient Arab Bedouin knowledge of animals and nature and place it alongside the insights and ideas of the Stagirite. It is also clear from a close reading of the work that Jahiz has adapted and modified many of the principal theories of Nazzam—that he was the best kind of disciple, an engaged and constructive critic.
The legendary Jahiz slips out of focus until his death in December 868 or January 869. According to a very late and unreliable source, Jahiz died in frail old age when a pile of books collapsed and crushed him to death.
The Ideologue
Jahiz saw his role as that of spokesperson for his society. He thought that his pronouncements and compositions could save society. This is an unlikely role for the legendary Jahiz, but it is apt for an intellectual who positioned himself as both apologist and ideologue. He emerges from the mists of legend into something like the cold light of history, because of a comment he makes in The Book of Clarity and Clarification written in the early 850s. The Imamate was the burning political and theological issue of the day—who had the spiritual and thus temporal right to lead the Islamic community: the descendants of ʿAli ibn Abī Talib (the Shiʿa), the best man in the community (the Zaydiyya), or the descendants of al-ʿAbbas (the ʿAbbasids)? It appears that sometime around 815-16 Jahiz was invited to write on the subject.
Maʾmun read my books on the Imamate and found them to be as he had commanded. So I was given an audience. He had ordered the grammarian Yazidi to examine them and furnish him with an account. Maʾmun said, ‘We have been informed by an individual of commendable intelligence, a man whose word we trust, that these books are extremely well crafted and very useful. We said to him, ‘Descriptions often exaggerate: they do not agree with what we see with our own eyes’. But when I read the books, what I saw for myself was far superior to what Yazidi had described. Then, when I picked over them, I realised they were in fact far superior to when I read them for the first time.
A number of Jahiz’s works on the subject of the Imamate have survived in partial and excerpted form: An Epistle on the Affirmation of the Imamate of ʿAli ibn Abi Talib; That ʿAli Acted Correctly in Appointing the Two Arbiters; On Meriting the Imamate; The Responses and Meriting the Imamate. The Tenets of the Zaydiyyah and the Rafidah, a work on the two principal branches of Shiʿism prevalent in Jahiz day, touches on the issue of the Imamate.
Caliphal approval of these writings led to a move to Baghdad. Jahiz found employment in the imperial chancellery as secretary to Ibrahim ibn ʿAbbas al-Suli (d. 857), an influential politician and scion of an old Turkic family. This appointment may have been short-lived though: Jahiz’s tenure in some sources is said to have been a mere three days. The sources make scant mention of further official employments. A brief spell as tutor to the caliphal children was reputedly terminated because the princes were too scared by his grotesque appearance.
So from around the year 820 until his death in 868-9 it seems that Jahiz was unemployed. Yet suddenly in the 840s he bursts on the scene as a member of the entourages of some extremely powerful figures. The shadow cast by his reference to the success of his works on the Imamate led Charles Pellat, the foremost expert on Jahiz in the twentieth century, to argue that Jahiz ‘acted as an adviser to and apologist for the government, and seems to have exercised this role quite openly.’ It is of course difficult to accept this broad generalisation without some qualification. There was no ‘government’ in the sense that Pellat may have intended, but if we substitute ‘elite’ for ‘government’ we can begin to get a good sense of Jahiz’s role as ideologue and apologist.
Jahiz’s patrons included many of the then controllers of the Islamic world, such as the philosophically inclined Caliph Maʾmun (r. 813-833); the Vizier Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyat (d. 847), head of the imperial administration; the Hanafī Chief Cadi Ahmad ibn Abi Duʾad (d. 854), a formidable intellect, the chief of the imperial judiciary; his son and deputy Abu al-Walid Muhammad (d. 853); and the caliph Mutawakkil (r. 847-861), stabiliser of the imperium, the Caliph who prepared the ground for what is today known as Sunni Islam. Jahiz’s opponents included the pious scholar Ahmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 855); and the philosopher Kindī (d. ca 866), the first intellectual to attempt in Arabic a synthesis of the Islamic monotheism and Greek-Arabic philosophy.
So what did Jahiz do for a living during these thirty years or so spent in the company of the leaders of the empire?Jahiz was admitted into the entourages of the caliphs Maʾmun, Muʿtasim and Mutawakkil and of his other powerful patrons as a scholar and a special advisor—as both a counsellor and an expert in religious, legal, political, scientific and historical matters. He wrote as proselytizer, apologist and ideologue. He advised, counselled and admonished the imperial elite. He offered them and their gubernatorial agents a vision of how to regulate their society through a correct theologico-political system and in the process offered his readers a way to save their souls. His was a vision of their society informed by his beloved Muʿtazilism.
The portraits I have drawn of Jahiz the Writer, Jahiz the Legend and Jahiz the Ideologue present us not with an anti-authoritarian free-thinker but a member of the establishment, a spokesperson of the elite, a communitarian and consensualist thinker driven by a desire to save his society. So why did posterity neglect his ideas? What was it that was so dangerous? In order to answer this question we need to think about the role of theological and political belief in the ninth century; to look at the details of how Jahiz viewed man and God’s creation; and to consider reading as free-thinking.
Kalam and the Muʿtazila
Abu al-Hudhayl and Nazzam were among the figures claimed as founding fathers and spiritual progenitors by the theological movement known as the Muʿtazila. The origins of his group are fairly obscure. The name, which means “those who withdraw” may have originally been a derogatory term, as was the case for most of the theological groups who emerged during the eighth and ninth centuries— though it is not clear what precisely the Muʿtazila withdrew from. Jahiz prefers the term ‘the people who profess divine justness and unity, ’ahl al-ʿadl wa-al-tawhid. Jahiz seems to have been instrumental in writing the history of the movement and defining its principal contours.
The Muʿtazila, and other theologico-political movements, identified themselves as practitioners of the craft of Kalam, a style of thinking and debating. They were Kalam masters or experts, mutakallimun. Jahiz was renowned as a Kalam master. By the 840s the Kalam was well established as a set of identifiable, epistemological and social practices. It could boast of a cadre of exponents, the the Kalam Masters. It had established an etiquette and code of conduct for its regularly heated and always fully committed debates —the fate of one’s soul was at stake.
There were two complementary sides to the Kalam. ‘Speculation’, nazar, was the rational and logical exploration of problems. ‘Eristics’, jadal, was the process of subjecting them to debate. As its name suggests, the Kalam, literally, ‘talk’, ‘speech’ or ‘discourse’, was a pronouncedly and profoundly oral activity, practised in groups, usually in the mosque but also in refined salons and in doorways to people’s houses and even on walks in the outskirts of the city. This is one of the reasons why we do not have any books of Kalam to have survived from the ninth century.
The defence of the religion was widely recognised as a core component of Kalam activity. There was a close intimacy between Kalam as a profession and the conduct of forensic inquiries. The Kalām and so many other intellectual activities of the period were predicated upon the question and answer style. And it has often been remarked that many early solutions to theological questions were legal solutions: most theologians were jurists.
Yet it would be wrong to think of the Muʿtazila as in any sense an organized group. What beliefs did Muʿtazilite thinkers share? Until about 50 years ago, it was fashionable to think of the Muʿtazila as the ‘free-thinkers’ of early Islam. Their prioritisation of reason and their openness to the logic and argumentation of the ancient Greeks as represented in the Organon of Aristotle made them seem the most ‘western’ of the Islamic creeds. The Muʿtazila were thus feted as ‘rationalists,’ as continuators of the Greek tradition of logical analysis, and as the promoters of free will. They seemed to many scholars to prefigure the modern virtues of rationalism and philosophical mindedness. Of course this is not only an untenable retrospective history a distortion based on a limited number of sources previously available, it is also a complete misreading of ninth century society and Muʿtazilism as a complex system. The Muʿtazili notion of ‘reason’ has very little in common with rationalism.
An account of Muʿtazila beliefs should begin with ‘divine unity.’ For the Muʿtazila God was absolutely one, and they recognized no qualifications to His oneness. They were vehement in their opposition to any form of anthropomorphism (the idea the God shared any attributes or characteristics with man) and contemptuous of corporealism (the idea that God was or had a physical body), notions common to some early Shiʿi groups and the emergent Prophetic Hadith movement. This meant that the Muʿtazila paid extremely close attention to how God can be described in human language, for they were chary lest any statement implied that an attribute such as ‘knowing’ was somehow co-eternal or even co-extensive with God. This led them to develop an uncompromising stance on the question of the Qurʾan. The Qurʾan is God’s speech. Did God always have the power of speech? If He did not, how, why and when did He acquire it? If He did, was speech then co-eternal with God, for if it were, then a qualification to His absolute unity would have to be admitted.
The Muʿtazila were also marked out by their highly developed theory that the Qurʾan was created in time, and not eternal. They tasked themselves with ensuring that an uncontaminated form of monotheism prevailed. This not only established caliphal legitimacy and authority, but also guaranteed that if the End Time were to come (and the Caliphs and their entourages were convinced it could come at any moment), the Caliph would not be judged by God to have been deficient in his promotion of the one, true faith. The Caliph, after all, was responsible for the salvation of his subjects and without the means for the enforcement of belief, a rightly ordered society could not be produced.
The desire of the Muʿtazila to preserve God’s absolute unity at all costs also led them to locate moral responsibility for good and evil firmly within the human domain. This is part of what is meant by the notion of ‘divine justness.’ God may have the power to create good and bad (though some thinkers denied the latter), but He would never exercise the latter. Instead man was charged with the responsibility for his own actions.
The Muʿtazila argued that man had the ability to choose between right and wrong in his actions, though we should remember that a belief in moral responsibility and an ability to choose between right and wrong are not quite the same as holding a doctrine of free-will (many Muʿtazila seem to have held a sort of compatibilism: man could choose but God in His omniscience knew what man would choose). How could man make such a choice? The Muʿtazila argued that God had equipped man with a special faculty, that of the ʿaql, ‘reason.’ It is here that the Muʿtazila encountered a conundrum: if God wanted man to choose between good and evil, and had given him reason to make his choice, how does man know what good and evil are? If the answer is through God’s revelation, then He is not giving man that much moral responsibility in the end, is He? The Muʿtazila did not like this answer. It was too great a compromise for the notion of ‘divine justness’ and of man’s moral responsibility for his actions. Many seem to have ended up arguing that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were universal verities. They were aware that this seemed to compromise the notion of ‘divine unity,’ but seemed prepared to live with it. Their opponents were not, however.
The ideas of divine justness and man’s moral responsibility led some Muʿtazila, Jahiz among them, to worship a providential God and to devise a theodicy according to which God’s creation was optimally designed for man to discharge his moral responsibility. This in turn led Jahiz and others to develop notions about the optimal form of political system in which man could achieve this. Like many ancient thinkers, Jahiz was optimistic about man’s ability to discharge his moral responsibility, but profoundly pessimistic about man’s base and animal nature. Therefore man required restrictive political structures in which to operate: he had to be protected from himself.
The best social structure for Muslims was one which was stable and operated on the basis of a strict segregation according to birth and social function. The Caliph was at the head of this structure, as the Imam, God’s chosen representative of the Prophet Muhammad, a spiritual and temporal leader. Then came the khassa, the ‘special ones’: the aristocracy (the caliphal family, descendants of the Prophet, ancient Arab nobility), the elites (such as the old Turkic families who had come from Khurasan when the ʿAbbasids toppled the Umayyads and in 817 when Caliph Maʾmun returned from Merv to Baghdad), the senior civil servants within the imperial administration and the scholars (in Jahiz’s system the scholars were those who professed Muʿtazilism, though it was in fact a highly contested category). Then came the ʿamma, the ‘commonality,’ the ordinary people and tradesfolk who thronged the streets of the cities such as Baghdad. The ‘people of the Book,’ the religiously sanctioned belief systems incorporated within the community: Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, were accommodated within this model and could belong to the civil administration, the community of scholars (as doctors or philosophers, for example), or the common people. These broad categories were to a certain extent porous at the level of the individual or the family unit: thus an individual skilled in the use of Arabic or a gifted poet could rise from fairly humble beginnings to a position of some privilege among the khassa. And this is precisely what Jahiz did, according to his legend.
What was it that held them together, that ensured this structure remained in place and functioned as well as it possibly could for man to achieve his God-given mandate to exercise moral responsibility? Jahiz’s answer was Muʿtazilism. Jahiz promoted Muʿtazilism as a middle-way between the extremes of Shiʿi charismatic authority and the denial of reason required by allegiance to the Hadith-based method for constructing the Sunna, the paradigmatic life and practice of Prophet Muhammad. Without such a middle way, society would be thrown out of kilter.
It is time to let Jahiz speak. The following passage occurs in The Proofs of Prophethood his exploration of why Muhammad should be accepted and recognised by all creeds as God’s Prophet:
You must understand that the only reason Almighty God made men’s natural tendencies differ was in order that He might reconcile them, but He did not want to reconcile them in a manner contrary to their wellbeing. For if people were not subject to differing motivations and under compulsion in matters which suited and did not suit them, then, each and every one of them could conceivably choose to be merchants and craftsmen, or each and every one of them could conceivably seek kingship and rule.
This would make it impossible for men to live and would be disastrous for their wellbeing—it would spell perdition and ruin. If they were not subject to motivations and bound by incentives, they would avoid bloodletting, animal surgery, butchery and tanning altogether. All classes of people have a reason for thinking highly of what they do for a living. It is this which makes it easy for them to bear. Thus if the weaver sees some shoddy work or poor technique or clumsiness on the part of his colleague he will say to him, “You oafish blood-letter!” and if the blood-letter sees some shoddy work on the part of his colleague, he will say to him, “You clumsy weaver!” This is why they will only permit their sons to follow their own professions: weaving, blood-letting, animal surgery and butchery.
Had Almighty God not intended to make difference a cause of agreement and sociability, He would not have made one person short and another tall, one handsome and another ugly, one rich and another poor, one a man of reason and another a lunatic, or one clever and another a dolt. He made them all different to put them to the test, for it is through being put to the test that they obey and through obedience that they are given true happiness. Therefore He made them distinct that He might bring them together and He wanted to bring them together in obedience in order to bring them together in the reward to come.
Praise and glory be to the Exalted One! How good and fitting is His test, how magnificent His fashioning, how perfect His governance! For if everyone were to avoid the stigma of weaving, we would walk around naked, and if, to a man, people were to avoid the labor of construction, we would lvie in the open fields, and if they were to avoid agriculture, foodstuffs would disappear and life would basically be unsustainable. Therefore He subjected them without distressing them and He filled them with desire without rousing them.
If it were not for the difference in people’s natures and incentives, they would only chose the most attractive things, the most temperate regions and the most central cities. If they were to make this choice, they would come to blows in their quest for central locations, and would contend for the high lands; no region could contain them all and no peace treaty would be observed. Therefore they have been led to the utmost contentment by God’s subjugation. How can it be otherwise? If you were to move the forest dwellers to the deserts, the plain dwellers to the mountains, the mountain dwellers to the oceans, and the tent dwellers to brick houses, their hearts would be eaten up by anxiety and they would be consumed with excess competitiveness.
For Jahiz human society is the way it is because God has created it thus. And He created it thus as a test, in order that difference become a cause of agreement. We could be forgiven for finding in this passage an intimation of Isaiah Berlin’s concept of ‘positive freedom’ whereby reason becomes an instrument of control, interference and oppression.
Jahiz the Thinker
So how did Jahiz view man? What did he think man’s role was, as part of God’s creation? Let us begin with epistemology, and the surviving traces of Jahiz’s Questions and Responses concerning how we Know. This work, which survives in scattered and disjointed excerpts, was originally a doxography, that is it presented accounts of competing epistemologies as articulated by other Muʿtazilite thinkers. In this section Jahiz presents his own views. He seeks to clarify those conditions under which we assume the moral responsiblity imposed upon us by God for it is only then that we will be held to account for our response to the decisive proof which He has sent in the form of His messenger and the Qurʾan. We will see that Jahiz sets some very stringent conditions for men to qualify as responsible under God’s moral obligation:
Now I will describe my doctrine on knowing and respond to my opponent on the meaning of ‘capacity,’ on the modes of capacity in which moral obligation is appropriate and good and the decisive proof is established, and those modes in which moral obligation is inappropriate and bad and the decisive proof is not established.
My first point is this: God does not impose on anyone the performance or avoidance of any action, except of course for those beyond excuse and impervious to the decisive proof. Moral obligation is only imposed on a person who has a healthy body, a well-balanced temperament, and ample means to act; when he has cleared his mind of distractions and knows how to perform the action; when the opportunity for wishing it done are present; when his thoughts are in equipoise and he is cognizant of what he may do and what he ought to do.
He will only be capable in a real sense when these features and the well-known conditions enumerated obtain. They are the basis on which actions occur. They result in choice. Man’s moral obligation is seemly and good, his religious duties are incumbent, the Punishment is possible and the Reward is meet because of them. If a man were capable simply because his body is sound and healthy, then we would be capable of climbing up a height without a ladder. A man will only choose to act and be capable in a real and not a tropical sense when his incentives are exactly equal to his disincentives. Thus when you compare what he hopes to receive with what he is afraid of, when you compare his preference for pleasure with his fear of the afterlife, when you compare his experience of what is unpleasant here and now with his hopes of the world to come, you will find them equal in terms of how they attract and dispel hardship and ease.
Furthermore, it is only when he is known to persist in this last condition that a man can be deemed to be under moral obligation. This is because the reasoning intellect is there to act as guardian whereas nature, in which our soul is vested, is to be guarded against. If the guardian is stronger than its natural inclinations, the soul will yield naturally because it is the way of the soul to yield to the stronger of its two guardians and the more robust of its two causes. When the two faculties are equivalent in force, action occurs through choice and is no longer to be defined as coerced. However coercion varies in severity and leniency, and may be less evident in some cases and more evident in others. Take for example when a man, who has no motives for enduring a scorching wind through staying put, runs away, whereas he flees more quickly, leaps further and moves more swiftly from the flames of a fire!
When nature prevails over the reasoning intellect it debilitates and alters it. When it is debilitated and altered, the ideas in his brain are altered and projected to him as images which are not their true ones. When like this, a person is too weary to perceive what he is due to receive in the world to come— his desires make indulgence in the present world attractive. But when the strength of his intellect is superior to the strength of the elements of his nature, these elements are debilitated. In this situation, his preference is for resolute behaviour and he opts for the pleasure of the afterlife over pleasure in the here and now. It becomes his nature. He cannot fight against it—it is compulsory and he is incapable of anything else. Only when his humours are well balanced, the motives are equal, and the causes equiponderant, does the soul choose in a real sense and avoid the actions of nature.
Thus when God gives balance to man’s constitution, shapes his reasons and teaches him his rights and obligations, man is in a real sense capable of action, and moral obligation becomes incumbent upon him as a result of the conclusive proof provided by God.
The ‘reasoning intellect’ is my translation for ʿaql, a word often rendered simply as ‘reason’ and sometimes in philosophical texts as ‘rationality’ or ‘intellect’. This reasoning intellect and nature are ‘two faculties’. The soul is in the sway of human nature, though it is not identical with nature. It is rather a third entity between the two faculties. One’s fate in the afterlife will be determined by the outcome of the conflict between the two faculties and the soul seems to be both battleground and prize.
Jahiz implies that it is not a good thing at the outset for the reasoning intellect to overpower nature too easily, but does not say why. I presume that the reason it should not be too hasty to dominate nature and the soul is because this might make it liable to an unquestioning acceptance of opinion and belief (which Jahiz thought was a very bad thing to do). It seems that equiponderance between reason and nature is required for there to be choice and that regular choice leads to habituation and presumably moral improvement.
Choice and moral accountability can only occur when a man is in a state of emotional and mental equipoise, when his fears balance his desires, when his reasons for doing something match his reasons for not doing something. Thus man is only really free when he is not under duress. And when he is not under duress he will perceive with clarity that it is in his best interests to act in this life in ways that will secure for him a life in Paradise.
Much of this will seem strange to readers unfamiliar with ninth century anthropology and ethics. I agree—the thought-world is unusual and its expression dense. What is this reasoning intellect that must overcome nature and control the motives, inclination, disinclinations, anxieties, fears and desires that seem to rage in the soul?
The Reasoning Intellect
There is a telling passage about the reasoning intellect in an ethical treatise Jahiz composed exhorting a young charge to be careful of loose and inappropriate talk. It is known as On keeping a secret and holding one’s tongue:
I have two criticisms to make: you say the wrong things at the wrong time; you cannot keep a secret. The task I am setting you, the burden I am asking you to assume, is neither easy nor light. I know this only too well for in the course of my life, I can think of not one single person out of all the people I have met, whose control of his tongue I approve of and whose ability to keep a secret I applaud. And I am thinking here of those who seek leadership and authority through membership of the elite and inclusion in the upper ranks of society, who pride themselves on their learning, their imperturbable gravity and seriousness, their self-control and composure. This is because there is nothing harder to achieve than circumventing one’s passions, and overcoming one’s desires.
Desire has long held sway over judgement, and it is desire which is the motive for spilling a secret and letting one’s tongue loose with too much talk. The reasoning intellect is called the intellect because of the way in which it restrains and forbids—Almighty God said, ‘Surely the man guided by his restraining intellect sees that this is by God’s decree?’ (89:5) The intellect puts a halter and bridle on the tongue. It deters it by binding its legs. It manacles excess speech and restrains it, preventing it from charging headlong down the path of crass incivility, making mistakes and causing damage. This is exactly how a camel is restrained. It is how the orphan is prevented from disposing of property at whim. The tongue is the heart’s translator. The heart is a strongbox where thoughts and secrets are deposited, and where good and bad things are stored by the senses. It is where the effects generated by our appetites and desires, and the products of wisdom and learning are kept.
The breast is not a receptacle for physical matter. It stores what it does thanks to a power given it by God, a power which we humans do not comprehend. It is constructed in such a way that it is too narrow and constricted to hold its contents. It finds its burden onerous and seeks relief in disburdening itself. It derives pleasure from unloading its contents onto the tongue. It is scarcely able to find consolation by talking in private to itself about its contents and so these contents are communicated to others who do not preserve or keep them safe. This is what happens when desire dominates the tongue and goes in for excessive thinking. This in turn leads to excessive speech.
So the task of the reason, the intellect, is to keep the passions and appetites in check. It is man’s principal, God-given, mechanism for moral and spiritual improvement. This is a different conception of reason from that of the rational intellect we are familiar with from the philosophical tradition.
Doubt was one of the strategies which the Muʿtazila thought were at the disposal of the reasoning intellect. For Jahiz, doubt could either be destructive and lead to the spiritual emptiness of scepticism, or it could take the form of the aporia and become constructive. According to Jahiz’s vision of the Kalam, the aporetic query was a vital step in the progress towards certainty. Without the aporia, without questioning not only the first principles of an argument but all our inherited and cherished beliefs, we could not truly be said to have hobbled and curbed all our desires and appetites, incentives and disincentives.
The term which Jahiz and his contemporaries used to describe this all too human trait of unquestioning and uncritical acceptance was taqlid. The man of reason should not accept any belief or opinion, any item of information or meme from anyone, no matter who that someone was, no matter what their authority, no matter how attractive the memeplex was, without first subjecting it to the most robust and engaged form of scrutiny. Even the authority of Prophet Muhammad was subjected to such an inquiry and of course vindicated fully and without qualification, as Jahiz’s treatise on The Proofs of Prophethood which we have already encountered demonstrated. Jahiz would not, however, have expected his readers to take his word for this—for this would itself be taqlid, uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of Jahiz’s authority. He would have expected his readers to subject his arguments to the severest aporetic doubt. That is why Jahiz’s writings exist in a perpetual state of epistemic postponement. They aim to convince but require to be scrutinised and questioned before any reader could give them his assent.
This is what I mean by Jahiz the free-thinker: the thinker who applies doubt to any obstacle in his path to certain knowledge, in order to free himself of any notion he may unwittingly give assent to. And this style of writing in a state of perpetually deferred and postponed assent is also a style of free-thinking: it is writing which expects its reader to reciprocate and engage in the application of aporia and doubt before assent is conceded—before we agree with its author. In fact, I would go further and claim that in many works, Jahiz writes in such a way as to make it impossible for his readers to assent. These works are exercises in free-thinking as a cognitive enterprise.
Jahiz was also obsessed with language and correct speech. Speech is what makes humans human. Jahiz wrote a wrote in which he argued for The Superiority of Speech to Silence:
I have not found silence to be in any way superior to speech. Analogical reasoning supports this, because you describe silence with speech but do not describe speech with silence. If silence were superior, if quietness were more appropriate, there would be no way of knowing that human beings were superior to other creatures, and there would be no way of separating them from any other living creature or any other kind of creation, in terms of their primary substance and different natures, separate states and classes of body, in their essential identity and variety.
Indeed, it would not be possible to tell the difference between men and erected idols and graven images. Every act of being seated and standing, of moving and being at rest or being erected and fixed in the ground would be completely alike, in one ontological condition and in a similar category, since both would effectively be lifeless, because of the effect that silence produces. However humans and statues are distinct by means of reasoned discourse, because of the effect that speech produces.
Jahiz does not mean that idols and statues move, though they can be depicted as reclining or standing. The point is that without speech there is no essential difference between a statute fashioned in a sitting position and a man sitting down. People are distinguished from the rest of creation, animate and inanimate, through the faculty of speech. When silence is the accident which applies to them, they are as mute as statues or corpses, but when they assume the accident of speech, they can distinguish themselves both from the inarticulate and from each other, because not all of the sons of Adam are equal in their reasoned discourse. This has an obvious bearing on how well people can articulate their religions and on how they can express the testimonies of their faith (it being taken for granted that Islam is the consummate religion because of the Arabic of the Qurʾan). Speech is how God has asked man to respond to Him:
Speech (kalam) is so esteemed and reasoned discourse so valued that God made speech the means to glorify and praise Him—it is speech which points to the waymarks of His religion and the revealed paths of His faith, and is the sign of how to meet with His satisfaction, for when any of His creation embraces the faith, only explicit declaration will satisfy God. He has made the tongue the means of doing this, and clarity (bayan) its method. He made the tongue that which voices what the believer keeps hidden in his breast, that which clarifies the information he provides, and that which enunciates what he does not otherwise have the capacity to state clearly. It is the heart’s interpreter, and the heart is a capacious receptacle.
For Jahiz, verbal enunciation was only one of the five means of achieving clear communication (bayan): the other four are pointing, dactylonomy (counting with the fingers or knuckles), writing and the physical-ontological location of a thing. Speech however is privileged. And speech incorporates writing.
Jahiz took this idea of clear communication further. He saw it not only as man’s distinguishing feature but also as the task God has set man as the grateful response to His beneficent and providential creation. Out of all of creation, man alone has been given the gift of the ability to read God’s signs—and Jahiz thought that all creation was a giant and extensive semiotic system that pointed to God’s providential care for His creatures.
There was another reason for this interest in language. Jahiz and his contemporaries were interested in not only the production of language but in its use and in how to interpret it. Or to put it differently: they were interested in both speaking and listening. Writing and the written word were viewed as essentially another form of speaking—the Qurʾan is the word of God. Therefore this interest in listening to an utterance and interpreting the intention of its speaker included reading. And let us recall that for Jahiz reading was an exercise in seeking to rid oneself of taqlid, uncritical acceptance of beliefs. This meant that reading the Qurʾan involved interpreting it afresh, for oneself, to the exclusion of the inherited exegeses and interpretations developed by others, unless and until in the course of his reading the man of reasoning intellect reached an interpretation reached by others.
The primary task Jahiz and his contemporaries set themselves was to understand how to listen to and read the Qurʾan properly. To this end, Jahiz and the Muʿtazila generally explored a distinction in language usage which they saw as fundamental to all speech: the distinction between literal and figurative language.
The Qurʾan contains numerous verses which refer to God in human terms: God sitting on a throne, or the hand of God for example. There were some in the ninth century who argued that Muslims should accept these descriptions of God, without asking or seeking to explain what they mean (the bi-la kayf doctrine). The Muʿtazila, on the other hand, could not bring themselves to accept these descriptions at face value. For them this constituted anthropomorphism at best. At worst it was outright corporealism—the belief that God was a material body. It involved a complete violation of the principle of divine oneness (tawhid) and the related principles of divine simplicity and ineffable superiority to His creation (tanzih). But how could they revere God’s word in the Qurʾan and remain true to their vision of Him? The answer lay in tropical or figurative speech.
In his Attack on the Anthropomorphists, Jahiz rehearses and refutes a number of positions, such as the idea that God is a physical body:
The proponents of anthropomorphism disagree as to how they understand it. Some say, ‘We say that He is a body and every body is long.’ Others say, ‘We say that He is a body but we do not say that He is long, because we make Him a body simply to take Him out of the category of non-existence, for when we make a statement about a thing we render it intelligible and conceivable, and body is the only intelligible and conceivable thing. We have no need to make Him long and His being a body does not necessarily entail that He be long, because a body can be long and not be long, such as when it is circular, triangular, square and so on. But a thing must be intelligible and that which is intelligible must be a body. This is why we have made Him a body but have not given Him length.’
God have pity on you! The proponent of this position has no option but to make God wide if he does not make Him long; or if he does not make Him wide, then he must make him circular; or if he does not make Him circular, he must make Him triangular; or if he does not make Him triangular, he must make Him square. If he identifies any shape whatsoever, then he has ended up where he really did not intend to go. Yet every circle, triangle, square, pentangle, cruciform, polygon—every shape I am familiar with is too ugly to utter in this context and to vile to conceive.
In other words, no matter how perfect the circle or any other shape, be it in word or in thought, it still pales into comparison with the perfection of God and is inappropriate as a way to refer to Him.
His argument leads to his final, decisive rebuttal of the incoherence of the anthropomorphist position:
God only uses expressions which can be understood in one way or another, whether that be the primary use, upon which the meaning of the expression is predicated, or the secondary and derivative use which the Arabs call ‘tropical’. So let us consider God’s speech when He says: ‘Deaf, dumb, blind—it is they who do not understand!’ (2:171). In our view God is just and does not do wrong, so we know that if those to whom He refers actually were disabled and incompetent, they would have been obligated to fulfil something they were unable to. Now, a deity who obliges his worshippers to fulfil something they are not able to is a wrongdoer and is unjust. That description does not befit Him. Therefore we know that they must have been fully competent, and not incapable or disabled. Given this, it becomes obligatory to rule in favour of the secondary, tropical, use, and to abandon the primary use, that upon which the tropical use is predicated.
So the notion of divine justness takes interpretative priority and becomes the basis for the proper reading of the verse of the Qurʾan.
Thus an understanding of tropical, figurative language was central to how Jahiz thought the Qurʾan should be read. And the Qurʾan had to be read with the reasoning intellect, the ʿaql, the hobble of interpretation, in a state of mind in which the right-thinking human being could exercise choice and seek to evade the pernicious effects of taqlid, uncritical reading. Choice was only possible in a state of equilibrium, when motives, incentives, disincentives, and distractions had been neutralised by the reasoning intellect. This was not just a hermeneutic or epistemological position. It was personal (mistaken readings could consign one’s soul to eternal damnation) and political (an anthropomorphic regime was an outrage against God).
Reading as Dangerous Free-thinking
As the spokesperson of his society Jahiz did not seek to position himself as supreme authority. Rather his writings were designed to promote free-thinking and thus function as society’s guide (in the same way that Plato’s Socrates was both gadfly and midwife of Athens). It might be thought that such free-thinking and reading could constitute a danger to society. Would it not lead to anarchy, or relativism, or to the predominance of interpretive error, whim and caprice? Jahiz would have countered that it would lead to no such thing, that there was no such threat: the application of reason would lead inexorably to the same conclusions as its application had led him.
Others disagreed, in particular Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), a younger contemporary who may have studied with Jahiz. Jahiz’s rejection of an unquestioning acceptance of authority was too much for how Ibn Qutayba wanted to shape the next generation of writers and intellectuals who sought authoritative hegemony, who saw their moral task as speaking with society’s voice, as speaking on behalf of their society. Thanks to Ibn Qutayba’s withering critique, Jahiz was branded as capricious, as volatile, as a sophist. His books were read for amusement, or out of antiquarianism, or as an example of style.
Jahiz’s positioning of reading as free-thinking constituted a threat to an authoritarian style of writing, a style of writing in which authorship was synonymous with authority. The threat of reading as free-thinking had to be removed. His unwillingness to accept the views of others unquestioningly, his style of writing as an invitation to challenge and examine his own views through a mode of reading that required of the reader profound and extensive scrutiny, were dangerous and thought to be subversive. The task for the next generation was how best to promote a tempered form of taqlid through control of the reading and interpretation of the Qurʾan. They had no desire to subject it to Jahiz’s reasoning intellect. They had little time for reading as free-thinking.
And here’s a paradox to end on: Jahiz, the communitarian voice of the elite who argued so passionately in favour of free-thinking as central to the articulation of his society and inveighed so consistently against taqlid, the unquestioning acceptance of authority, was read as a threat to the proper articulation of society.