Narrative
The Book of Misers
كتاب البخلاء
al-Jahiz · 850
Synopsis
Replying to a correspondent who asks him about misers, the author gathers letters, testimonies and anecdotes about people who refuse to spend, many of them from Khorasan or Merv. One eats alone, another pretends no longer to recognise his old friends, a third walks in a way that spares the leather of his shoes. Misers also speak up in defence of thrift, as in the epistle attributed to Sahl ibn Harun.
Context
The book is known only from a single manuscript kept in Constantinople, from which the orientalist G. Van Vloten published the Arabic text in Leiden in 1900. Charles Pellat translated it into French in 1951, and his translation was reissued in 1997 by Maisonneuve et Larose, with a preface by Abdelfattah Kilito. The same year saw the English translation by R. B. Serjeant, in the series Great Books of Islamic Civilisation.
Who it is for
To read funny and satirical stories of misers, in one of the great classical works of Arabic prose.
Prizes and reception
Read by part of the critics as a mockery of the Persians; the Encyclopaedia Iranica sees in it above all people from Khorasan.