Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Addressee and the Occasion of Writing
- 2 Epistolary Confrontations and Dialectics of Parody
- 3 Undisclosed Origins and Homelands
- 4 Faulting Misers in the Introduction to Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ
- 5 Passive Addressee and Critical Reader in the Abū al-ʿĀṣ/Ibn al-Tawʾam Debate
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Undisclosed Origins and Homelands
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Addressee and the Occasion of Writing
- 2 Epistolary Confrontations and Dialectics of Parody
- 3 Undisclosed Origins and Homelands
- 4 Faulting Misers in the Introduction to Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ
- 5 Passive Addressee and Critical Reader in the Abū al-ʿĀṣ/Ibn al-Tawʾam Debate
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
While the epistolary conversations we saw in the preceding chapter bring personal biases and extreme positions to the forefront through dramatic portrayals of contrasting views, in this chapter we will see a number of texts on various lands and peoples in which the author's dialogue with the addressee serves to establish a certain distance and objectivity. The author's impetus to write about specific races or lands is shared with addressees or other individuals whose own origins are unclear. These persons’ motivations and partialities are obscured or diffused through the role they play in the text, which is sometimes a deceptively simple one. As we shall see, al- Jāḥiẓ's conception of the relationship between peoples and their homelands is closely connected to the views on occupations that we saw in the previous chapter: the attachments of peoples to their native lands are part of God's plan to create harmony through the differences that exist between groups. Perhaps because the contentions and prejudices involved were more sensitive and less productive, he does not, as in the texts we saw in the previous chapter, stage heated debates between himself and the addressee that play into the reader's own biases, making their impact on his reading more clear and bringing them under scrutiny. In some of the texts we will now examine, he instead seeks to bring an atmosphere of distance, fairness, shared Muslim identity and admiration for diversity to the discussion; his conversations with the addressees serve to diminish the impact of his own biases, at least in the rhetorically sensitive opening of the text. The unknown racial or geographical origin of the addressee (in one case, not of the addressee but of a person who has said things to offend him) leaves the reader guessing and lends ambiguity to the discussion. The reader, in this case, is encouraged to view the text from multiple points of view rather than sharing or contesting the biases he might otherwise tend to see in the author's treatment of the nations or groups involved.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Reader in al-JahizThe Epistolary Rhetoric of an Arabic Prose Master, pp. 121 - 172Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014