In 750 CE, a new power swept the Muslim world. This was the Abbasid dynasty. Their rule acted as a catalyst for a burst of intellectual activity, now called the translation movement, when most Greek philosophical, scientific and medical texts were translated into Arabic and stimulated a culture full of debate in books and public spaces.

This is the milieu in which the philosopher known as al-Jahiz lived. Al-Jahiz had a curiosity and originality rarely seen in history. Born around 776 CE in Basra (in the very south of current day Iraq), he lived an incredibly long life, dying in 868 CE in Baghdad. In this time he wrote an extraordinary amount of books, spanning politics, theology, literature, studies of countries and people, from misers to singing girls, arguing the merits and demerits of different cultures and ethnicities.

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