Content area
Full text
A1-Jahiz: The Book of Misers, al-Bukhala'
R. B. SERJEANT (trans.), 1997
Reading, Garnet
xxvii + 259pp., hb. r60.00, ISBN 1 873938 19 5
The man who needs `just a few coins' from you to make up the price of something warm, or the 'traveller' who has lost his money and wants your help for a ticket he has to buy-these are people who chance upon you in a street or station, and you never know for sure whether they are genuine. This book tells you that their predecessors roamed the streets of ninth-century Iraq, and they were so well known that they each had their own label according to the kind of approach they employed.
Al-Jahiz makes the people of his time stand out in the stories of miserliness collected here. They are not only about misers as such, but about the miserly in everyone, and they link...