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This book documents and explores a ninth century Muslim thinker’s response to an emergent information technology—widely available books written on rag-paper. By 850, in Baghdad rag-paper books were all the rage. A book market, with its professionals: stationers, copyists, booksellers and authors, emerged. A cosmopolitan society responded enthusiastically. Al-Jā?i? had, for most of his life, earned his living as an influential counselor, a special adviser to the elite. By the time of his death in 868/9, he had become a professional author. Al-Jā?i? was a bibliomaniac and prided himself on his expertise in Kalām, a dialectical method for ascertaining the truth, the predominant intellectual discipline of his day, a rigorous study of the nature of God and the universe derived from close observation of creation and informed by inferential and analogical reasoning about the suprasensible world. Al-Jāḥiẓ: In Praise of Books concentrates on The Book of Living, the most important work by al-Jā?i?, a documentation of almost all creation, from insect life, such as beetles and flies, to reptiles, such as lizards and snakes, to birds and mammals. The primary focus of the study is the extensive praise of books that The Book of Living contains. This is also the story of how al-Jā?i? thought that his book would save his society from the disorder it had fallen into through its addiction to argument and dissent, an addiction that created social tumult.

What if we were to understand indigenous people as the active agents of global exploration, rather than the passive objects of that exploration? What could such a new perspective on the project of global exploration reveal about the meaning of geographical understanding and its place in struggles over power in the context of colonialism? The World and All the Things upon It addresses these questions by tracing how Kānaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiian people) in the nineteenth century explored the outside world and generated their own understandings of it. Written with passion, it draws on long-ignored Hawaiian-language sources. Using them, it demonstrates that the powerful words—stories, songs, chants, and political prose—of Native Hawaiian people reveal Kanaka Maoli reflections on the nature of global geography and their place in it. This book looks at travel, sexuality, spirituality, print culture, gender, labor, education, and race to shed light on how constructions of global geography became a site through which Hawaiians as well as their would-be colonizers understood and contested imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism. Rarely have historians asked how non-Western people imagined and even forged their own geographies of their colonizers and the broader world. This study takes up that task. It emphasizes, moreover, that there is no better way to understand the process and meaning of global exploration than by looking out from the shores of a place, such as Hawai‘i, that was allegedly the object, and not the agent, of exploration.