Al-Jahiz Game

Procedure
1 To introduce the topic, write the word evolution on the board and elicit a definition. Allow
anything that includes the concepts of a) species mutating or developing new
characteristics to adapt to their environments, b) the species that have adapted to their
surroundings passing their characteristics on to their offspring, and c) the resultant
change and development of species over millions of years.
2 Ask nobody to speak to their partner or look at each other’s paper, but, working alone, to write
on a piece of paper the date when they believe the theory of evolution was first put
forward.
3 Now everybody stands up and forms a line in the classroom, in order of the date which they
wrote on the paper. So the people with the earliest dates should stand towards the left of
the room, the people with the most recent dates on the right. When people have very
different dates, they can explain how they arrived at them.
4 Hand out the text on the page 2, about Al-Jahiz, an Arabic scholar who proposed an early
theory of evolution in the ninth century AD.

Author: Tom Booth Page 1/2

© Pearson Education 2008 PHOTOCOPIABLE
 Al-Jahiz Game

Al-Jahiz and the Origin of Species

Thanks to Safa Abdullah Al Sharif

Ask any British person of secondary school age or above to name the person who founded the theory of
evolution, and without hesitation they will give the same answer: Charles Darwin. While Darwin is indeed
the father of evolution in the modern era; however, to find the origins of the theory we have to go back
about one thousand years further into the past and study the work of a goggle-eyed writer from what is
now Iraq.
Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr al-Kinani al-Fuqaimi al-Basri was born in Basra around 781 AD. He was
born into a poor family that had migrated to the Middle East from East Africa, probably Ethiopia. His
striking appearance earned him the nickname Al-Jahiz – ‘The goggle-eyed one’. By the time of his death
aged 93, he had become one of the most famous and respected Islamic scholars across the region, and
written several dozen notable books. Probably his most famous and important work, however, was the
Kitab al-Hayawan – ‘The Book of Animals’.
In his Kitab al-Hayawan, Al-Jahiz included poetic and detailed descriptions and narratives on
hundreds of species. Amongst numerous other aspects of animal life, he discussed the struggle for
survival that various species face in harsh and unpredictable environments. He suggested that, in order
to survive, animals adapt and take on new physical characteristics. These characteristics, he mused,
could then be inherited by the offspring of these animals, thus giving rise to a whole new species. Does
this sound familiar at all?
The Kitab al-Hayawan was not a biology textbook. Al-Jahiz was not a biologist, he was a learned,
imaginative and wonderfully observant writer. Nevertheless, when we trace the history of our
understanding of how species adapt and develop, we should not forget the contribution made by ‘the
goggle-eyed one’.

Author: Tom Booth Page 2/2

© Pearson Education 2008 PHOTOCOPIABLE