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The 9th-century essayist, theologian and encyclopaedist 'Amr b. Ba?r al-Ja?i? has long been acknowledged as a master of early Arabic prose writing. Many of his most engaging writings were clearly intended for a broad readership but were presented as presented as letters to individuals. Despite the importance and quantity of these letters, surprisingly little academic notice has been paid to them. Now, Thomas Hefter takes a new approach in interpreting some of al-Ja?i?'s 'epistolary monographs'. By focussing on the varying ways in which he wrote to the addressee, Hefter shows how al-Ja?i? shaped his conversations on the page in order to guide (or manipulate) his actual readers and encourage them to engage with his complex materials.

Offers new vistas for reading, understanding and interpreting Arabic literature as well as the culture in which it was produced.

Edinburgh University Press will publish two self-contained guides to reading al-Jahiz that also shed light on his society and its writings. This first volume, 'In Praise of Books', is devoted to bibliomania and al-Jahiz's bibliophilia. Volume 2, In Censure of Books, explores Al-Jahiz's bibliophobia. Al-Jahiz was a bibliomaniac, theologian, and spokesman for the political and cultural elite, a writer who lived, counselled and wrote in Iraq during the first century of the 'Abbasid caliphate. He advised, argued and rubbed shoulders with the major power brokers and leading religious and intellectual figures of his day, and crossed swords in debate and argument with the architects of the Islamic religious, theological, philosophical and cultural canon. His many, tumultuous writings engage with these figures, their ideas, theories and policies. They give us an invaluable but much-neglected window onto the values and beliefs of this cosmopolitan elite.