al-Jāḥiẓ Author

Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Fuqaymī al-Kinānī, known as al-Jāḥiẓ, "Goggle-Eyes," as a result of an eye defect, was born in Basra in the last half of the second/eighth century. A man of insatiable curiosity, he wrote over two-hundred and fifty works on a variety of subjects from theology to law and zoology, the majority of them as commissions for powerful members of Abbasid society. After a career at the caliphal courts of Baghdad and Samarra, he moved back to Basra, paralysed by a stroke, where he died in 255/868 or 869. Legend has it that he met his end when crushed under a collapsing book shelf.

Robert G. Hoyland is a Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History at New York University. He is the author of Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, and Arabia and the Arabs.