It was in a library in Baghdad that Jahiz almost certainly read Aristotle’s nineteen volumes of zoological work for the first time, now partially translated into Arabic. Sometime around 846–47 he hatched the idea of writing The Book of Living Beings, an Arabic reworking and rectification of Aristotle. It was an attempt to gather together all the facts known about animals from every possible source, to understand and to capture in writing the totality of God’s creation and man’s place in it. He began to collect facts, anecdotes, and knowledge. He may have believed he could come to an end, that he could catalog everything, get to the bottom of everything, but the list of animals he wanted to write about kept on growing and his thoughts about animals kept on expanding. Inevitably the book, seven volumes long, was still unfinished when he died twenty years later.
There was no other book in the ninth-century Abbasid Empire like Jahiz’s Living Beings, no compendium of animal knowledge, except Aristotle’s The History of Animals. That is not to say that there was no knowledge of animals in pre-ninth-century Islam. Quite the reverse. A successful civilization such as that of the Abbasids depended on a sophisticated and extensive knowledge of animal breeding, animal husbandry, hunting methods, medicine, migration patterns, and animal diet. The nomadic Bedouin tribesmen, proud and self-sufficient, were the custodians of this knowledge in the Abbasid Empire. They passed it down from parent to child, preserving it in songs and stories and in their poetry, which was prized as the highest of the art forms. When they came to the marketplaces of the great Abbasid cities to sell their camels and sheep, scholars like Jahiz came to consult with them.
In assembling Living Beings, Jahiz was not concerned with argument or theorizing. He was concerned with witnessing; he promoted the pleasures and fascinations of close looking and told his readers that there was nothing more important than this. We can approach a better understanding of God’s creation only if we examine closely, he insisted. Here and there amid the close looking there are visions, glimpses of brilliant insight and perception about natural laws, but the overt purpose of Living Beings was to persuade the reader to fulfill his moral obligation to God, an obligation enjoined by the Qur’an: to look closely and to search for understanding.
If certain historians have claimed that Jahiz wrote about evolution a thousand years before Darwin and that he discovered natural selection, they have misunderstood. Jahiz was not trying to work out how the world began or how species had come to be. He believed that God had done the making and that he had done it brilliantly. He took divine creation and intelligent design for granted. So did all the people he talked to about animals—the Bedouins and the hunters and the animal trainers in the zoological gardens in Baghdad. There was, for him, no other possible explanation.
What is striking, however, about Jahiz’s portrait of nature in Living Beings is his vision of interconnectedness, his repeated images of nets and webs. He certainly saw ecosystems, as we would call them now, in the natural world. He also understood what we might call the survival of the fittest. He saw adaptation. Like Aristotle, he believed in spontaneous generation—he had seen flies emerge from the flesh of dead animals. None of those things was remarkable or controversial in his time. His aim in writing Living Beings, he told his readers, was to prove to them that the world of animals around them was interconnected, mutually dependent, that everything had its place in the great web and that it was possible to account even for the presence of harm and danger in the world as a sign of God’s generosity and blessing.
Jahiz’s web of interdependencies foreshadows Darwin’s vision of the “entangled bank,” the exquisite and poetic extended metaphor that Darwin used to distill the key ideas of natural selection and to conclude On the Origin of Species: “It is interesting,” Darwin wrote,
to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.… Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Jahiz had his own version of the entangled-bank metaphor. In Book 2, he described the creatures gathered around a desert fire. “All you need do is light a fire in the middle of a clump of trees or in the desert and watch the various insects that converge on it,” he wrote; “then you will see creatures and shapes that you never imagined God had created. Moreover the creatures that come towards the fire vary according to whether the fire is in a clump of trees, the sea or the mountains.” To demonstrate this principle, he lit fires on the canal banks of Basra, in the courtyards of palaces, and in mountains and forests in the company of philosophers, caliphs, patrons, or the Bedouins he traveled with.
It is not difficult to imagine Jahiz a few miles outside Basra or Baghdad in the desert plains with a group of Bedouins sitting around a fire in the dark, close to a tangle of tents that have been erected from sticks, ropes, and rugs. Beyond the circle of the fire, the darkness presses; the Bedouin camels and mules are present only as brayings in the night when they are startled by a desert fox. Above them, stars of different degrees of brightness make patterns on the great arc of the night sky, patterns that the Bedouins use to map the desert. In boxes and in nets, Jahiz and his companions catch and count the flying insects and listen for the sound of desert foxes, or watch for the tracks of mice, snakes, and lizards that the fire draws out of the night. Sometimes there are as many as seventy different species in the circle of a fire, Jahiz shows his companions, but the combination is always different. You can sit by a night fire by the canals of Basra or by the great ocean or in the desert or in the forest, and the assembly will always be different. God has made it that way—every animal and every insect has its place in the great web.
When one of the Bedouins, pointing to the stinging insects, scorpions, and snakes in the trapping nets, asks why God has created so many bad animals among all of the useful ones, the men agree that everything is connected, good and bad, that nature requires opposites for balance, that man is only one animal, like the mosquito, in the great web. They discuss how everything depends upon everything else for its food: toward the top of the chain is the wolf, then the fox, then the hedgehog, the adder and other snakes, the sparrow, the grasshopper, the hornet’s brood, the bee, the fly, and finally the mosquito. “Each species,” Jahiz wrote in Living Beings, “constitutes a food for another species. Each animal cannot do without food, and so must hunt. Thus each animal feeds upon weaker species than itself. Similarly each animal is the food for a species that is stronger than itself. Divine Wisdom has decreed that some species are the source of food for others, and some species are the cause of death for others.” Hunting and defense are mutually coexistent in these webs. Jahiz wanted his reader to see that something that might appear noxious might not actually be noxious if it was comprehended properly. Everything had its place and function.
A lion eating the entrails of a cow from a later illustrated manuscript of Jahiz’s Book of Living Beings.
Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan
It is in passages like these that some historians of Islamic science have claimed that “we can see the germs of Darwin’s … natural selection.” We can; but if this is natural selection, Jahiz’s natural world is governed not by Darwin’s savage nature but by a divinely perfected and balanced universe. While there are certainly glimpses of an understanding and perception that might have led Jahiz to evolutionary speculations, the vision of nature in
his work is profoundly different from that of Darwin.
Jahiz reminded his readers that the keys to all the answers to the great metaphysical questions—life and death, good and evil—are to be found in the natural world. Everything around them was a system of signs. He told them that all they had to do was to look closely and to use their reason, that everything they saw in the natural world—miraculous, interconnected, interdependent, diverse—was proof of the existence of a creator; he wrote his book so that
every man endowed with reason may know that God did not create His creation to no purpose, and did not abandon His creatures to their fate; that he overlooked nothing, left nothing without his distinctive mark, nothing in disorder or unprotected; that He makes no mistakes in His wondrous farsightedness and no detail of His dispositions fails him, nor yet the beauty of wisdom and the glory of the powerful proof. All of that activity extends to everything from the louse and the butterfly to the seven celestial spheres and the seven climates of the globe.
Like Aristotle before him and Darwin after him, Jahiz depended on animal trainers, beekeepers, pigeon trainers, and animal breeders; he depended on the Bedouins above all. Everything that he had read in Aristotle’s zoology, he claimed, was already known by Bedouin traders and already contained in the great Arabic poetry that passed by word of mouth, from father to son, from philosophers to poets and from poets to philologists, in deserts and marketplaces and menageries across the empire. “We rarely hear of a statement by a philosopher on natural history,” he wrote, “or come across a reference to the subject in books by doctors or dialecticians, without finding an identical passage in Arab or Bedouin poetry, or in the everyday wisdom of those who speak our language and belong to our religious community.”
In the Wild Beast Park of Baghdad, the caliphal menagerie reached via the Perfume Market, Jahiz talked to the elephant and giraffe keepers and asked them why their animals did not mate in captivity. He watched elephants, lions, giraffes, and leopards, and he asked the animal trainers why the crocodiles that had been imported from India had died in the Tigris. He traveled to a gazelle farm outside Basra to talk to a farmer about breeding. In the bird markets of Basra and Baghdad he talked to pigeon breeders from Antioch who described the time and money they spent in breeding and training their birds. These pigeon breeders and trainers were valuable men in the Abbasid Empire; trained pigeons carried important reports, letters, and instructions between geographically distant cities in one of the first systems of pigeon post. Jahiz was impressed by how much they knew and how skilled they were: “They carry [the pigeons] on their backs after transporting them by boat, shut them up in houses, separate and reunite them at the appropriate times, take the females far away from the males, put the males with other females, and are at pains to avoid the ill effects of close inbreeding.… They are less solicitous for the wombs of their own wives than for those of hen pigeons that yield thoroughbred chicks.”
Yet while Jahiz clearly admired Aristotle’s observations and depended on them, he did not always trust Aristotle’s eyes or very much of what the Greek philosopher had to say about fish, believing he had relied too heavily on the claims of sailors and fishermen. He explains:
We have not devoted a separate chapter to fish and other denizens of salt and fresh water, canals, rivers, swamps and streams because for most of these species we have been unable to find key passages of sufficient exactitude to inspire confidence.… The only material available is information provided by sailors, and sailors are not renowned as respecters of the unvarnished truth. The stranger the story, the more they like it; and moreover they use vulgar expressions and have an atrocious style.… Aristotle devoted much space to the subject, but I could find no evidence in the book beyond his own assertions. I once said to a sailor: “Aristotle claims that whenever fish eat anything they swallow some water at the same time, owing to their voraciousness and the size of their mouth aperture.” His own answer was to say: “Only someone who has been a fish or been told by a fish can know for certain.” … That sailor must have been a dialectician, and have prided himself that he understood the causes of things to have answered me so.
However, while Jahiz, unlike Aristotle, may have been humbled by the unknowability of fish, like Aristotle he became increasingly preoccupied with anomalous organisms in the natural world. Everywhere in Living Beings, Jahiz defends and celebrates hybrids and crossbreeds, creatures that are interstitial or transcategorical in some way. He lost no opportunity to point out when creatures did not fit comfortably or easily into one category but extended across several: birds, for instance, that were both herbivorous and carnivorous. After a long preface about the usefulness of written as opposed to oral knowledge, the first book of Living Beings begins with a sixty-page disquisition on hybrids, crossbred birds, giraffes and mules, marriages between people of different races, and the eunuch, an important figure in the Abbasid court and in the military, whom he describes as having a greater life expectancy and superior intelligence to other humans. Books, he pointed out, were also hybrid creations, collages, mixtures, compilations, yet they were profoundly important as a way of bringing different races and peoples together under one commonwealth.
Like Aristotle, Jahiz attempted to generalize about species and about their positions and function in the natural world and found it increasingly difficult to do so the more he investigated. Hybrids, anomalies, and organisms that seemed to be both animals and plants preoccupied him precisely because they forced orthodox taxonomies to collapse and opened up new questions about how to produce a coherent taxonomy of creation. Had he pursued his investigation of anomalies as Darwin did later with his barnacles, for instance, he might have reached different conclusions about how species had come to be, explanations that might have centered on the idea of descent with modification. Instead, Jahiz used the collapse of taxonomies to question categories of high and low in creation, to show, again, how the All-Powerful Creator had fashioned a world of endless complexity and sophistication in which every organism had its place and depended on everything else.
It was the scientific curiosity of the world Jahiz lived in, a curiosity enjoined by the Qur’an, that taught him to value observation and empiricism and that led him to the writings of the great philosopher of zoological empiricism, Aristotle. But Jahiz could never take his patrons or his safety for granted. Eighteen years after he had arrived in Baghdad, and while he was still compiling Living Beings, the extraordinarily centralized Abbasid caliphal power was beginning to move into a stage of slow decline. Every day, postal envoys brought news of insurrections and disturbances in the provinces, and of occasional riots in Baghdad. The caliphs, fearing that the increasingly powerful Turkish slave-soldiers would stage a coup or an uprising, had moved their entire court up to Samarra some years before, seventy-five miles north of Baghdad, taking their administrators, military leaders, and savants with them. Baghdad had become too small for a garrison complex.
Jahiz’s principal patron at Baghdad had until now been the vizier Zayyat, a wealthy Arabized Persian whose family had traded oil and who had managed to retain power through three caliphates. It was Zayyat to whom Jahiz had addressed and dedicated Living Beings, because Zayyat was funding his great book. But in 847 the caliph al-Wathiq died and was succeeded by his brother al-Mutawakkil, whom Zayyat had slighted. Zayyat’s main rival at court, the chief cadi (judge) Ahmad ren Abi Du’ad, seized the opportunity to discredit Zayyat with the new caliph. As part of a campaign of retribution against the powerful men who had once threatened his authority, the caliph ordered his Turkish soldiers to arrest and imprison Zayyat. For six weeks the vizier was tortured by being placed inside an iron maiden, a wooden cylinder lined with spikes. All his houses in Samarra and Baghdad, his furnishings, his libraries, his slaves and singing girls and his warehouses of grain, raisins, figs, and garlic—everything was confiscated. The great libraries were broken up, the books dispersed. Zayyat died in prison from the wounds inflicted during his torture.
Jahiz, fearing for his life, fled to Basra and went into hiding, but he was discovered and brought back to the court by soldiers under orders of the cadi. For two years he worked as a propagandist for the chief judge, Ibn Abi Du’ad, and his son, Muhammad, but when the balance of power shifted again among the ruling elite, Ibn Abi Du’ad and his son were removed from high office. They were arrested days later, their estates confiscated, their libraries sold. Ibn Abi Du’ad was so badly tortured that he was partially paralyzed; he died three years later in 854, a few days after his son.
The new caliph, Mutawakkil, put an end to the court-sponsored inquiry into the nature of the Qur’an that had been conducted by the last three caliphs and pronounced that the Holy Book was uncreated rather than created, as his predecessors had maintained, promoting a form of monotheism that incorporated the Bible, the Gospels, and the Torah. At the same time he ordered all Christians to wear yellow sleeves on their outer garments and decreed that all newly built churches and synagogues be demolished. The rewards for writers and poets in the new court were good, particularly for poets who defended and justified the actions of the caliphate and who were prepared to participate in the work of the secret police.
The aging Jahiz, now in his seventies, forever adaptable, enjoyed an Indian summer of prosperity under Mutawakkil. He began by proposing a book on the primacy of Islam against the Christians. He wrote to tell the new vizier, al-Fath ben Khaqan, about this proposed book and petitioned him to secure a position in the court. Fath was a Turkish aristocrat, part of the growing and influential Turkish praetorian guard. He had an enormous library in his palace and a thriving courtly salon and was intimate with the caliph. Fath replied to Jahiz’s petitions with enthusiasm and flattery. “The Commander of the Faithful has taken a tremendous liking to you,” he wrote. “He rejoices to hear your name spoken. Were it not that he thinks so highly of you because of your learning and erudition, he would require your constant attendance in his audience chamber to give him your views and tell him your opinion on the questions that occupy your time and thought.” He urged Jahiz to finish his book. “You will be receiving your monthly allowance: I have arranged for you to be credited with the arrears and am also having you paid a whole year in advance. There is a windfall for you.”
Darwin's Ghosts Page 7