SOURCE: "Al-Jahiz," in Abbasid Belles-Lettres, Julia Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, R. B. Serjeant and G. Rex Smith, eds., Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 78-95.

In the following essay, Pellat discusses the unique contributions that al-Jahiz made to Arab literature.

Al-jahiz

Abu Uthman Amr b. Bahr b. Mahbub al-Kinani al-Basri, known as al-Jahiz, is one of the best-known and most prolific of early Abbasid prose-writers and Mutazili theologians, and also one of the most controversial. Little is known of his origins, apart from the fact that he was born in Basra, probably around 160/776, to a humble family of freedmen (mawali) who were clients of the Banu Kinanah (a tribe related to Quraysh). Jahiz's forebears were probably of African descent; his grandfather was black, and he himself retained some of the pigmentation of his ancestors; his ugliness, caused by his bulging eyeballs, became proverbial and earned him the...