Darwin's Ghosts

by Rebecca Stott

  Darwin did not read Epicurus or Aristotle. The Greeks frightened him a little. They seemed to be from a different world entirely. If he had been able to read “the ancients,” as he called them, he might have recognized in parts of Aristotle’s writings and in corners of Epicurus, Democritus, and Empedocles the glimmerings of thoughts and questions that were remarkably similar to his own. Instead he was misled by a town clerk in Redhill who managed to persuade him that Aristotle was an evolutionist, and so Darwin put Aristotle at the top of his list of predecessors. But although Darwin was, like Aristotle, looking closely at the intricate patternings of plumage on pigeons and studying the habits of worms and asking similar questions about what he had documented, he was battling with different orthodoxies, different gods, negotiating different philosophical landscapes and belief systems. Perhaps Darwin was right to be a little frightened by the gulf of time that stretched between him and the man who wandered the shores of the lagoons of Lesbos in the fourth century BC. Perhaps Aristotle was always beyond his comprehension not only because Darwin did not read ancient Greek, and thus always had to rely on others to translate and understand the words and concepts that Aristotle used, but because their ways of seeing and understanding the workings of time and of nature were so immeasurably different.

  *The ancient Greeks did not have books. They wrote on papyrus, on clay tablets, on wood, and on animal skins. Papyrus was the most widely used writing surface. From around 3000 BC the Egyptians manufactured papyrus sheets.

  *Aristotle was one of the very first book collectors. His library would have been made up of papyrus rolls.

  *Even at this young age, Alexander attracted mythical stories.

  *Some say niece, some say courtesan or even adopted daughter. The uncertainty is perhaps revealing.

  3

  The Worshipful Curiosity of Jahiz

  BASRA AND BAGHDAD, 850

  In the ninth century AD, the port city of Basra sprawled across a great web of palm-fringed canals; it was a city of water and waterways, flanked by the desert on one side and the great river Tigris on the other. The sparkling minarets of three mosques rose above streets lined with shops, markets, suqs, and warehouses. At the western side of the city, the mud brick of houses gave way to rich pastureland and palm groves and finally to the Desert Gate, where the city met the desert at the famous Mirbad, a great open space where the Bedouin caravans halted.

  Here date croppers had once dried their dates on vast racks laid out in the sun, but by the ninth century it was the busiest part of the city, the place where Bedouin traders, migrating to Basra to sell their animals or their jewelery and to restock their water supplies, kept their camels and sheep. Open to the sky outside the city walls, the Mirbad must have been breathtaking: a sea of camels, the brightly colored woolen clothes of the Bedouins, the flapping of cloth in the wind, the sounds of men singing, poets reciting, camels and mules braying, snake charmers and magicians, smoke drifting from cooking fires, the smells of cooking meats and spices, of animal dung.

  It was a meeting place of dialects and cultures. Scholars walked here from the city; philologists came to study language in use and to search out interesting grammatical constructions and unknown words. Collectors and anthologists came to record the poetry that the Bedouin poets recited here, performing on platforms to crowds of dedicated followers. The bookstalls, bookbinders, and stationers’ suqs spread out like a labyrinth from the marketplace, with books bound in gleaming leather piled on low tables or arranged on shelves in booths. Here in the dust of the Mirbad, on the edge of desert and city, as well as in the mosques, libraries, and observatories of the city itself, scholars transcribed, translated, and recorded. An oral culture was passing into a written one.

  Among the crowd of philologists and lexicographers listening to the recitations of the Bedouin poets in the Mirbad in the early ninth century was a young man of striking ugliness, a man with eyes so protruding that his friends called him al-Jahiz, or Goggle-Eyes.* Jahiz, who may have been of part African descent, had grown up in the streets of Basra, working as a boy selling fish on the banks of the canals to bring in money for his family. Though his family was not socially well connected, he attended the elementary Qur’an school and the mosques where eminent scholars gathered to teach; later he educated himself in the bookstalls of the suqs as well as by listening and talking to the Bedouins in the Mirbad. Jahiz would become one of the most prolific and versatile writers of the Abbasid Empire, producing more than two hundred books during his lifetime, works on literature, biology, zoology, history, rhetoric, psychology, theology, and polemics.

  In the extraordinary Book of Living Beings (Kitab al-Hayawan), probably written between 847 and 867, Jahiz produced the first extensive study of animals published in the Islamic world and came close to a theory of evolution and natural selection that would not be matched for another thousand years. Some Islamic nationalists, journalists, and Internet bloggers now claim Jahiz as Darwin before Darwin, the real inventor of evolution; some even allege that Darwin stole Jahiz’s work and passed it off as his own.

  But Darwin had never heard of Jahiz and could not have plagiarized his ideas. He did not read Arabic, and there were no English translations of The Book of Living Beings for him to read; there is no complete English translation to this day. But had he been able to read Arabic, he would no doubt have been enthralled by Jahiz’s book and might have recognized Aristotle’s influence in its pages. Jahiz admired Aristotle’s The History of Animals, which he had read in Arabic translation, but he was also certain that the Arabic people, and particularly the Bedouins of the desert, knew a great deal more about animals than the great Greek philosopher had. Living Beings was his attempt to bring ancient Greek and Arabic knowledge together in one place, to turn oral into written knowledge, and to demonstrate at the same time that everything has a purpose and a place in the great scheme of nature and that everything proves the existence and wisdom of God. The Book of Living Beings is a strange and beguiling jumble of insights, speculations, and facts about animals; more than a miscellany, it is virtually an encyclopedia. Through seven volumes, Jahiz weaves together pre-Islamic poetry, passages from the Qur’an, comic stories, and passages of philosophy, metaphysics, sociology, and anthropology. Its elaborate, meandering, and complex prose is very different from the sparse, precise sentences of Aristotle’s The History of Animals.

  Ideas flower in certain places and at certain moments in time. Jahiz came into adulthood in the midst of the extraordinary Abbasid translation movement. While Europe slumbered fitfully through the Dark Ages, in the eighth century the Abbasid caliph Mansur, the third caliph of the dynasty, built the great round city of Baghdad on the rich agricultural land of what is now central Iraq.* By his grandson Ma’mun’s time, Baghdad had become the center of the largest and richest empire in the world through an agricultural revolution supported by new irrigation, engineering, and drainage technologies and a network of trade routes that stretched from North Africa through Spain to the borders of France, across India and Afghanistan and the Persian Empire, to the edge of western China.

  While Vikings’ longboats were invading Britain, while European feudal dukes ruled over small courts and controlled bands of mercenaries, while Christian priests quarreled over the Book of Revelations and the anticipated date of the end of the world, in Baghdad the Abbasid caliphs and the courtly elite paid scholars to expand medical knowledge and to develop chemical and alchemical methods for the manufacture of goods, mathematics for the calculation of taxes and the administration of the empire, astronomy for mapmaking, astrology for casting horoscopes, and engineering and physics for irrigation, agriculture, and navigation.

  The caliph Ma’mun, the Abbasid court propagandists repeated as they spun richly colored myths extolling the glories of their ruler’s intellectual quests and patronage, had a direct line not only to God but also to the great Aristotle. A man with pale skin, a flushed face, and bloodshot eyes had once appeared to the sleeping calip
h, they said; when asked to identify himself, the apparition at the end of the bed replied simply: “I am Aristotle.” Before dawn he had persuaded Ma’mun that the rationality of the Greeks and the revelation of Islam could be braided together. But when the caliph awoke and ordered his eunuchs to bring him all of Aristotle’s works, the eunuchs told him apologetically that the libraries of Baghdad held only a very small number of Aristotle’s manuscripts, and these were in Greek and not Arabic; the remainder of Aristotle’s works were lost, locked away in moldering libraries and basements in Byzantium, Syria, and Alexandria.

  The extent of the Abbasid Empire in the ninth century AD.

  © John Gilkes

  For decades Ma’mun and the many wealthy courtiers and administrators of Baghdad, compelled by the desire to rediscover and translate lost knowledge, sent out emissaries to hunt for ancient Syriac and Greek manuscripts in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. Scholar-explorers knocked on the doors of monasteries and sent requests to patriarchs in Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, and Gundeshapur in the hope of discovering more Greek manuscripts, many of which, like Aristotle’s, had been banished to basements or cellars or left to rot in derelict and crumbling libraries. One emissary described finding a Greek temple library abandoned on a hillside in a state of disrepair and overgrown with trees three days’ travel from Constantinople. “And behold,” he reported in awe,

  this building was made of marble and great coloured stones, upon which there were many beautiful inscriptions and sculptures. I have never seen or heard of anything equalling its vastness and beauty. In this temple there were numerous camel loads of ancient books [perhaps thousands of camel loads, he insists]. Some of these books were worn and some in normal condition. Others were eaten by insects.… After my exit the door was locked again.

  These scholar-explorers sent back what they found carefully wrapped and crated, carried on the backs of camels and mules or stacked in the holds of merchant ships, across deserts, mountains, and seas.

  As camel caravans arrived in Baghdad bringing manuscripts quarried from the locked mountain monasteries of Syria and Alexandria or carrying dusty scholars from all over the Abbasid Empire, the caliph Ma’mun established what became known as the House of Wisdom, in Baghdad, an institute for the translation, preservation, and pursuit of knowledge centered on an extraordinary library. Wealthy patrons built elaborate palaces, libraries, and gardens in Baghdad and lavishly endowed hospitals, but they displayed their wealth most ostentatiously in competing to commission translations as a demonstration of their sophistication and their pious dedication to the expansion of knowledge.

  Each translator living and working in Basra or Baghdad spoke several languages, and though many were lowborn, they were richly paid for their work.* Many were Greek-speaking Syriac Christians. Sometimes friends or family members worked together in small translation dynasties. Within a century they had translated almost all the ancient Greek secular scientific and philosophical texts in existence, including all of Aristotle’s works, translating them from Pahlavi and Greek usually first into Syriac and then into Arabic. Once rendered into Arabic, Greek wisdom became gradually assimilated into a body of distinctly Arabic-Islamic knowledge. These translations were commissioned to enrich, cultivate, and empower the Abbasid elite, but they also provided the means by which an extraordinary body of knowledge came to be rediscovered and channeled into Europe, which would bring about what we call the Renaissance.

  The invention of paper further revolutionized the circulation of new and revived knowledge. The Abbasid Empire depended on a vast administrative and intelligence machine, which in turn depended upon the production of immense quantities of leather and parchment and, later, paper for correspondence, intelligence, and record keeping. By the middle of the ninth century, Baghdad’s mills produced enough paper for the use of all the secretaries and administrators in the War Office, the Office of Expenditure, the State Treasury, the Office of Correspondence, the Office of Letter Opening, the Caliphal Bank, and the Post and Intelligence Office. Cheap paper meant that books could be produced more easily. More than a hundred shops selling paper and books lined the Stationers’ Market in the southwest of the city. By the middle of the tenth century, ship mills—floating paper mills powered by the river’s current—were moored on the Tigris. Booksellers rented books to their customers and procured books for the expanding libraries of affluent and educated citizens.

  Jahiz, the enigmatic author of The Book of Living Beings, surfaced from this wealthy, intellectually and scientifically curious culture; he emerged from the streets of Basra and Baghdad as Rabelais did from the streets of Paris or Joyce from Dublin. But it is hard to excavate him from that history. What we know of him comes from his own beautiful and tantalizing descriptions of conversations, his descriptions of bird breeders and Bedouins, the glimpses he gives us of places, streets, and rooms. On every page of The Book of Living Beings, his voice is hauntingly alive and engaging, reaching us across more than a thousand years. Like Aristotle, he disappears now and again from the record.

  Even as a very young man, Jahiz was an extraordinary observer, attentive, insatiably inquisitive, his ear attuned to new languages and to new turns of phrase. As a young man growing up in Basra, he watched the kaleidoscopic world around him with an anthropologist’s eye, looking out for differences in behavior and manners, memorizing and recording those differences. A good Muslim, he spent much of his time at the mosque, not just for worship but also for debates and lectures. He mixed with the masjidiyyun, whom he satirized, savants who gathered in the congregational mosque of Basra to discuss all manner of questions, mostly secular, honing their conversational and dialectical skills and discussing theological and philosophical issues. There he heard lectures on grammar and lexicography and participated in political, philosophical, and ethical debates.

  The dialectical competitions that were staged in the mosque and the conversations he heard in the Mirbad probably shaped Jahiz’s writing style and method. In the pages of Living Beings he moves between different positions or theories, equivocates, raises voices and lets them speak, orchestrating them as though he were a referee rather than a participant. His prose swaggers brilliantly from one subject to another, often making no obvious connection between them, and then, when he is done with wandering, suddenly returns to his original subject. His long sentences tangle and twist and turn back on themselves, meandering down and around and back again as intricately as the canal systems of Basra and as multivoiced as the Mirbad itself.

  Jahiz was an adib, a writer of the adab, elegant collations of knowledge assembled for the amusement and edification of the cultivated man; both encyclopedic and conversational, didactic and dialogic, they were threaded through with anecdotes and aphorisms drawn from politics, ethics, religious thought, etiquette, literature, and science. In Jahiz’s prose we hear the voices of the ninth-century Basra mosque and marketplace talk about the political, religious, and moral questions that concerned them. In turning Basra conversations into words on pages, Jahiz sometimes made a kind of poetry.

  When he was not listening to the poets in the Mirbad or debating with the savants in the mosque, Jahiz would be reading or walking through the warren of streets of paper shops, pen sellers, bookbinders, book copiers, ink sellers, and booksellers in the Mirbad, shops that were multiplying by the day in Basra as the young philologists, poetry collectors, and translators produced more and more books for sale. Jahiz read every book he came across wherever he happened to be. While most readers would be content to rent a single book and return it within a few days, as was the custom, Jahiz would rent whole shops for the night and stay in them alone until morning so that he could read everything at hand without interruption.

  When Jahiz left Basra for Baghdad around 815, he almost certainly traveled by water up the main artery of the canal and then up the great Tigris. At first he was retained in Baghdad in an official capacity as an adviser and apologist for the government, writing letters and reports; later
he worked for several different powerful politicians and judges. Although he lived in Baghdad for the next forty years and produced most of his books there, he returned to Basra regularly, and he also traveled to Samarra when the seat of the caliphate moved there in 836, riding on mules or on boats navigating the great network of waterways that threaded across the country like veins, always on the lookout for new knowledge on the journey in conversation with his fellow travelers.

  Although the court at Baghdad provided him with a living and with intellectual freedom, conditions were not always safe there. Patrons were plentiful but some allegiances dangerous. Petitioning a patron, entering his entourage, and maintaining a place there was always difficult because competition for the finest patrons was fierce. Scholars and writers had to be both rhetorically skillful and canny. The life of a writer was lucrative but precarious.

  The streets and palaces of Baghdad gave Jahiz inspiration for new books. Although he had seen many domestic species of animals in the marketplaces and harbors of Basra—chickens, camels, donkeys, dogs, sheep—in Samarra and Baghdad he could wander in the zoological gardens of the Abbasid caliphate. Here he saw lions, tigers, and giraffes—animals imported from Africa and Asia, animals that walked the banks of the Tigris with their native keepers. Some say the great zoological garden in Samarra, with its ornamental rose gardens and fountains, contained a thousand animals and plants of hundreds of different species shipped in from every corner of the empire; visitors described water-wheels being turned not by oxen but by ostriches. Jahiz, like so many of his peers, was dazzled and mystified by the diversity of all these exotic species, by plumage patterns and colors, by the different structures of necks and beaks and claws. He talked to the keepers, asking questions about diet, behavior, and reproduction. Why, he asked, did some animals seem to adapt easily to their new home, while others sickened and died?