Key Pages:
Home
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
[email protected]
Abu 'Uthman 'Amr ibn Bakr al-Kinani al-Fuqaimi al-Basri, also known as al-Jahiz. Born in Basra in 781, al Jahiz is considered a great Muslim thinker and writer. Over the course of his lifetime, which spanned approximately 90 years, he wrote over two hundred books on various subjects including animal evolution, human psychology and behavior, and language and grammar.
Although al-Jahiz travelled to and lived in the Abbasid capitals of Baghdad, and later Samarra, he never held a position in the Baghdad court, which many scholars view as the reason al-Jahiz had such intellectual freedom.
Al-Jahiz has also been credited with the enhancing the style of Arabic Prose.
Posted at Apr 12/2009 09:12AM:
ian: A social critic and developer of the literary tradition. Recall the kinds of things he had to say in his Avarice and the Avaricious.