Al-Jahiz

Born in Basra to a humble family — his nickname al-Jahiz means "goggle-eyed" — and rising to a position at the Abbasid court in Baghdad, al-Jahiz wrote on zoology, theology, rhetoric, ethics, and the social history of his own time in a prose style of unprecedented suppleness and irony. The seven-volume Kitab al-Hayawan (Book of Animals) intersperses zoological observation with theological argument and verse; the Kitab al-Bukhala' (Book of Misers) is a sequence of comic anecdotes about avarice that anticipates the European essay tradition by nine centuries. He is said to have died at over ninety, when a stack of his own books fell on him in his library.