The carefully crafted dialogues that al-Jāḥiẓ stages with his addressees are meant to enliven, calibrate and, in some cases, disguise his dialogues with his actual audience. The position of the latter as readers of a given text is altered, and often freed, by the presence of the addressee. Like any writer, al-Jāḥiẓ would shape his exposition in relation to what he believed were the prevailing perceptions of his readership concerning the topic at hand, that is, his referential object. Placing these dynamics within Bakhtin's framework, a speaker or writer's dialogue with the audience springs from his or her anticipation of the ‘conceptual horizons’ within which they will assimilate what is said. For Bakhtin, the writer's dialogue with the audience is also part of a dialogue with earlier statements and writings on the referential object, whose language and point of view are reflected, explicitly or implicitly, in his or her writing. I refer to the writer's purpose in approaching a given topic, forged in the context of the prior statements and of the prevailing views of the anticipated audience, as the ‘occasion’ of writing. In this chapter, I will explore the variety of ways that al-Jāḥiẓ's epistolary dialogues with his addressees relate to the rhetorical difficulties that inevitably attend the occasion of producing a text intended for circulation among a reading public.

The very fact that a writer feels a need to write on a given topic implies the existence of some difficulty that pertains, either to prevailing conceptions and prior statements on the topic, or to the audience themselves. When a writer takes open or tacit issue with the views he believes to be current among his audience or with what has been said in earlier texts, his very need to make a case in writing implies that the opposing views enjoy a degree of currency. Conversely, when he writes in support of texts already in circulation or accepted notions about the referential object, his doing so suggests a concern that they have fallen into doubt.