Ever wonder about flies? Take a dive into al-Jāḥiẓ’s world of adab.
If you don’t think flies are the kinds of creatures worth marveling, you’re not alone. Kitāb al-Hayawān (meaning Book of the Animals or Book of Living Beings) written by al-Jāḥiẓ (who lived from 776 CE to 868 CE) has a whole section about flies that might change your mind. You can find a translation into English by Geert Jan Van Gelder in his 2013 anthology Classical Arabic Literature.
Kitāb al-Hayawān is an amazing example of adab, a literary act of wondering that can be used to both entertain and instruct. It is an act of marveling at the creations that roam this world, all of them held in a gaze of awe and acknowledgement as God’s creations. And yes, that includes flies!
As a member of the rationalist Muʿtazilite movement in Islamic theology, al-Jāḥiẓ’s adab is guided by the theological principle that one can know God through speculative thinking. al-Jāḥiẓ finds the knowledge of God in not just the humans who wield power, but by observing the place that a small creature, the fly, also holds in the world. His adab speaks to a kind of preciousness in knowing God through even the smallest life form that is disregarded.
To get a taste of this speculative thinking, take for example this passage from the section entitled “On the Various Kinds of Flies” in the Kitāb al-Hayawān. This passage can be found translated to English on page 187 of Geert Jan van Gelder’s Classical Arabic Literature anthology.
“Flies have one strange and amazing characteristic in common with dung beetles. If one had not seen it with one’s own eyes one would be justified in rejecting the truth of the matter. When a dung beetle is buried among roses it appears to die: all its movements cease, it turns rigid and stiff. To an observer it looks no different from a dead beetle. But when it is returned to dung it comes back to life and begins to move immediately. I have tried this with black beetles and found it to be very like the dung beetle in this respect. This must be because the black beetle and the dung beetle are so closely related.”
It’s amazing how sincerely immersed al-Jāḥiẓ is this specific detail of the way that dung beetles look buried in a rose bush, using it as a window of adab to speculate about the perceptive power of humans and what shapes our observations about the world around us. How easily do we reject truth? How much do we trust our own eyes? What distinctions matter to us that our eyes search for? What elements of nature do we take for granted and how do these disregarded creatures relate to one another? These are all questions raised from this focus on a small detail.
If you want to read more about this, here are some resources:
To learn more about Muʿtazilite theology, you can check out Richard C. Martin, Mark R. Woodward, and Dwi S. Atmaja’s book Defenders of Reason in Islam: Muʻtazilism from Medieval School to Modern Symbol
Professor James Montgomery, Professor of Classical Arabic gives a lecture on: A Book to Save Society: al-Jahiz’s Book of Living Creatures
Questions we invite you to consider (and share your thoughts in the comment section!)
- Creative prompt: Imagine you’re an astronaut looking down at the world from space. Write about how you might view living beings from that perspective?
- Creative prompt: Imagine you’re a very small creature (a fly? an ant? a squirrel?) How would you see the world — its other lifeforms and the way they relate to each other?
- What are other theological beliefs you’ve come across about the value of different life forms — how might they relate to al-Jāḥiẓ’s writings?
- How might findings from disciplines like ecology inform this way of looking at the world’s interconnectedness in wonder?
