Culture in an Arabic Fable

March 30, 2008

The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn is a lengthy fable drawn from the encyclopedic work of the "Brethren of Purity".. an anonymous and secretive group of philosophers living in Basra, Iraq during the 10th century AD. The main effect of the fable has been to get me daydreaming about how cool it would be to teach a class on Islamic animal fables: Kalila and Dimna, parts of the 1001 Nights, the philosophical story of Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, and the Conference of the Birds by the Persian poet Attar.. and perhaps some examples from Jahiz? It would be a fascinating class because the fables are put to such different uses. We would see didactic tales aimed at the court, pure popular entertainment, and Sufi allegorizing of these tales into spiritual truths.

ama ba'd.. reading through this fable of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn I was surprised by the presence of something like a notion of culture in this 10th century work. The fable is pulling some philosophical weight as the 22nd chapter of the encyclopedia.. the one detailing "the generation of animals and their kinds." The fable spends a lot of time outlining the main branches of living creatures (who have rebelled against the mastery of human beings). After the animals receive an ordering, we also find human beings divided into groups. These groups are something like cultural divisions.. or so I will argue.

The King of the Jinn at one point surveys 70 representatives of humanity standing before him "in all of diverse forms, garbs, tongues, and colors..." (118). Not all these representatives get a chance to speak, only seven. Each is from a distinct and recognizable human group.. such as the man from India: "..a man with a lean brown body, a long beard, and a great mane of hair. He was wrapped in a red waist cloth tied, with a string, about the middle" (120).

The people of India, with their particular appearance, are settled onto a specific land: "the most plentiful of all in minerals, its trees the finest, its plants the most medicinal, its animals the most massive... Our trees are teak, our reeds are cane, our grass bamboo..." (121). We could say, then, that a group of people have a natural appearance and that they are connected to a particular place. Although it is not specified how, people are an outgrowth of their land and reflect its means or extremes.

Naturally accentuating the positive, this Indian man explains how God "vouchsafed the subtlest sciences of astrology, sorcery, wizardry, soothsaying, and divination." And a jinn breaks in to add some negative elements of the Indians, which include burning the bodies of the dead, worship of idols, fornication, and eating betel nuts. This is not a complete list, but its elements correspond to practices that we now think of as a result of cultural difference.

Later in the fable these differences are explained. For the Brethren of Purity it seems that all human religions are pursuing the same thing: slaying the self. This is accomplished in various group-specific ways, but all can make it back to God. "The laws of all religions were laid down for the sake of the liberation of the soul" (195). Human beings have a universal goal but diverse bodies and habits based on their difference experiences and environments.

This philosophical view, based on Platonist principles, would seem to take us some distance toward the recognition of individual cultures. It can be distinguished from religious views that see other groups as falling away by degrees from a single truth. In that case the true human path is defined as being the way of one group. The "correct" answer is surely to find a way to recognize universal human qualities at the same time as ingrained differences.