Kitab al-Hayawan (The Book of Animals)

Kitab al-Hayawan ("The Book of Animals") is by Abu 'Uthman 'Amr ibn Bahr al-Jahiz of Basra. It is divided into seven "masahif", that is, parts, and the last ends with the statement that with the seventh part the book is complete. ³ Its editor, Muhammad Basil 'Uyun al-Sud, says the title suggests a book confined to animals, while it contains sciences and learning larger than its title: verses of the Qur'an and hadith, a picture of the Abbasid age with its culture and customs, the diseases of people and animals and their cures, the theological questions for which the Mu'tazila were known, the features of many lands and some matters of history, all laced with humour; so that, in his words, it is "a collection of books gathered in one book". ^{1 4}

The editor takes his short biography of al-Jahiz from Shadharat al-Dhahab: Abu 'Uthman of Basra, the Mu'tazili, to whom the Jahiziyya branch of the Mu'tazila is traced, a leading figure in theology and Mu'tazilism, who lived ninety years and died in 250 AH, or, it is said, lived until 255. ¹ He studied with the judge Abu Yusuf, Thumama ibn Ashras and Abu Ishaq al-Nazzam; the author of al-Mughni quotes Tha'lab as saying he was "neither trustworthy nor reliable", while another said that the finest and most useful of his works were the Book of Animals and al-Bayan wa-l-Tabyin. ¹ The extract says he was called al-Jahiz for his bulging eyes, that al-Mutawakkil summoned him to tutor his son but, on seeing him, sent him back with a gift, that he was paralysed late in life, and that he died when volumes of learning fell on him. ¹ The editor gives his birth as 148 AH, "agreed upon", and prints his death as 250 AH on the title page. ^{5 1}

Al-Jahiz opens with a prayer for an unnamed addressee and then reproaches him, having heard that he had attacked Abu Ishaq and Ma'bad over their exchange on the faults and merits of the cock and the uses and harms of the dog. ² He then lists the books of his that this man had found fault with, so that the opening becomes a register of his works: the Tricks of Thieves, the Frauds of the Crafts, Witticisms and Rarities, the Arguments of Misers, the Pure-born and the Half-bred, the Boast of the Blacks over the Reds, Crops and Palms, the Difference between Men and Women, the Qahtaniyya and the 'Adnaniyya, Arabs and Clients, Arabs and Persians, the Idols, Minerals, the Difference between Hashim and 'Abd Shams, and the Difference between Jinn and Humans. ^{2 6 7} He says the critic also blamed his Hashimiyyat epistles, claiming they took him out of the bounds of the Mu'tazila into those of the Zaydiyya, as well as his books on the createdness of the Qur'an, on the refutation of the anthropomorphists and on the defence of the Qur'an's composition, and his preferring Mu'tazilism to every creed. ^{8 9} The editor matches each title to Brockelmann's history or to the printed Rasa'il of al-Jahiz. ⁶

Before the kinds of animals, al-Jahiz sets out a division of the world: bodies are alike, different or opposed, and in sum inanimate or growing; the growing are animals and plants; animals walk, fly, swim or creep; and those that walk are humans, beasts, predators and vermin. ¹⁰ He says that in this he follows the names established and known among the people of this language, singling out what they single out and grouping what they group. ¹¹ He then divides birds into predators, grazers and swarming insects, distinguishes predators armed with talons such as the eagle from those armed with beaks such as vultures and crows, and notes that not everything that flies on two wings is a bird: locusts, bees and flies fly but are not called birds; the bat is reckoned among birds though featherless, the ostrich has feathers but is not a bird, and not everything that swims is a fish. ^{11 12 13}

In the first part al-Jahiz writes at length on the merit of the book: the companion who does not flatter you, the friend who does not lead you astray, the teacher who obeys you by night as by day, through whom you learn in a month what you would not learn from men's mouths in an age. ^{14 15} In this context he says he saw the mosque of Damascus, and that when 'Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz came to power he covered it with cloths and coarse linen and boiled the lamp chains until their gleam was gone, judging that such beauty distracted from humility in prayer. ¹⁶

He holds that Arabic poetry is "young in birth": the first to open its path were Imru' al-Qays and Muhalhil ibn Rabi'a, and on the fullest reckoning it had a hundred and fifty, at most two hundred, years before Islam, whereas the books of Aristotle, Plato and Ptolemy preceded the beginning of poetry by ages. ^{17 18} From this he concludes that poetry cannot be translated: when it is carried over its metre is broken and its beauty lost, unlike the books of India, the wisdom of the Greeks and the literature of Persia, which were translated. He sets conditions for the translator, the best known being that his expression in the translation should match his knowledge of the subject and that he should be the most learned of people in both languages; these are set out under the translation movement. ^{18 19}

At the end of each volume the editor gives a list of al-Jahiz's chapters, from which the course of the book can be followed: ^{20 21 22 23 24 25 26}

• Part 1 (vol. 1): the introduction, what befalls a man after castration, the castration of animals, what the advocate of the cock said, and those satirised for eating dog's flesh. ²⁰
• Part 2 (vol. 1): the advocate of the dog arguing from well-known poems, and further chapters on the dog and what resembles it. ²⁰
• Part 3 (vol. 2): opens with the chapter on pigeons "and the kinds of knowledge God placed in them", then true surmise and physiognomy, the kinds of flies, crows, dung beetles, the hoopoe, the Egyptian vulture and the bat. ^{27 21}
• Part 4 (vol. 2): small ants and ants, the ape and the pig, snakes and their marvels, the sounds of small creatures of the earth, the male ostrich, and fires. ²²
• Part 5 (vol. 3): the rest of the discussion of the fires of Arabs and Persians, opposites, differences and agreements, water, the birds that live in people's houses, scorpions and mice, lice, fleas and gnats, the spider, the bee, the tick, the bustard, sheep and goats, frogs, locusts and sandgrouse. ^{23 24}
• Part 6 (vol. 3): the dabb lizard and its marvels, the names of Bedouin games, Bedouins and poets who claimed to see ghouls and hear the jinn's humming, hares, the hyena, hedgehog and jerboa, the lame, and shooting stars and the eavesdropping on heaven. ²⁵
• Part 7 (vol. 4): the senses of the kinds of animals, the differences of their natures, the elephant, "what is taken from animals as evidence of the beauty of God's making", promises and keeping them, and the cloven hoof. ²⁶

Al-Jahiz states his method in several places. He excuses his treatment of fire in a book of animals on the ground that it bears on it "in noble ways, useful to mention and prompting reflection", and says that wisdom may show more plainly in the fly, small as it is, than in the splendid horse; he does not dwell on the great-bodied for their size, but seeks "what is most marvellous, most telling in wisdom, and most indicative to the common people of the Lord's wisdom". ^{28 29} He says there is no harm in mentioning whatever comes up, except in the long chapters of bare analogies and pure theology, and that whenever he finds a chapter that can be adorned with elegant verse and curious reports he takes the trouble to do so. ³⁰

He then announces the plan for the rest: he will begin with the small, short chapters so that the reader leaves each one eager for the next — the sparrow, then the mouse and the scorpion and their enmity, then the scorpion and the beetle, then the cat, then mosquitoes, fleas and lice, then the monitor lizard and the dabb, then the jerboa and the hedgehog, then vultures, the eagle, the hare, ticks, frogs and the bustard. ^{30 31} He promises not to take the reader "from argument from the wise Qur'an except to transmitted hadith, nor from hadith except to sound poetry", then to the current proverb, then to choice pieces of philosophy and the curiosities that experience has verified. ³¹

The book carries a great deal of the theologians' discourse, above all the sayings of al-Jahiz's teacher Abu Ishaq al-Nazzam. At the start of the fifth part he sets out al-Nazzam's view that fire is a name for heat and light together, then his doctrine of latency (kumun) and his arguments against Dirar ibn 'Amr and the "people of accidents", and al-Jahiz says he must give each of "the two parties" its full due. ^{32 33 34} In the fourth part he reports a question al-Nazzam used to put to the Manichaeans, and one that al-Ma'mun put to a zindiq. ^{35 36}

He quotes Aristotle often, calling him "the master of logic" and naming his book "which is called The Animals"; he takes from him the description of the marks left by a lion's claws, and the report of a hen that laid eighteen eggs each with two yolks. In one place he sets Aristotle's statement against what he knows of the crows of Basra and says: "I am not able to judge between them." ^{37 38 39}

Al-Jahiz devotes long chapters to fire at the end of the fourth part and the start of the fifth, listing the fires of the Arabs: the fire of the offering, the rain-seeking fire, the fire of alliance, the traveller's fire, the warning fire, the "fire of the two lava fields" which he connects with Khalid ibn Sinan al-'Absi, the fire of the si'lat and ghouls, the hunting fire, the fire for frightening lions, the branding fire, the fire of war and the fire of hospitality. ^{40 41 42 43 44} In the sixth part he gathers what the Bedouins say of the ghul and the si'lat, and reports al-Nazzam's explanation of the jinn's humming and the ghouls' shape-shifting as the effect of loneliness and isolation in empty lands. ^{45 46 47}

The edition used here is the second printing of Dar al-Kutub al-'Ilmiyya, Beirut (1424 AH / 2003), in four volumes, with notes by Muhammad Basil 'Uyun al-Sud, who signed his introduction in Damascus on 19 April 1998. ^{48 49} He says the book had been printed more than once and that, for all its printings, it suffers from omissions and faults; he added what he found missing between brackets, his main aid in this being the Thimar al-Qulub of al-Tha'alibi, traced the verses, hadith, poems and proverbs, and linked the book to al-Jahiz's other works. ^{49 4} He kept al-Jahiz's long chapters, added numbered sub-headings in square brackets drawn from al-Jahiz's own words, and left al-Jahiz's headings unbracketed in the middle of the page. ⁴ The fourth volume, after the seventh part, has general indexes made by Muhammad Riyad Nasri: kinds of animals, verses, hadith, proverbs, places, tribes, battle-days of the Arabs, books, poems, persons and sources. ⁵⁰