Ibn al-Jawzi
c. 1116–1201
Biography
Abu al-Faraj Abd al-Rahman ibn al-Jawzi (c. 1116–1201) was a Hanbali scholar who lived and died in Baghdad. He preached to large public audiences, taught in the city's colleges, and wrote on an unusually wide range of subjects: the Qur'an and its interpretation, hadith, law, sermons and moral conduct, history and biography, and medicine. His output was so large that later writers counted him among the most prolific authors of the medieval Islamic world.
He belonged to the Hanbali school of law, then the smallest of the four main Sunni schools, and he worked to give it a standing comparable to its rivals. Under the caliph al-Mustadi, whose favour for Hanbalism gave him room to speak, he became one of the most influential figures in the city. His polemics were sharp. Talbis Iblis, his best-known critical work, catalogues the errors of innovators in religion and philosophy, yet his books on early ascetics and mystics show that he opposed the excesses of Sufism rather than Sufism itself.
On this site his book Akhbar al-hamqa wa-l-mughaffalin is credited to him. Its title roughly means Reports of the Foolish and the Heedless, and it gathers anecdotes about people who are foolish, careless or easily taken in, told with a moralist's dry amusement. It shows the storytelling side of his work, which sat beside his sermons and legal writing, and how a preacher of his time used tales to teach.
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Books
أخبار الحمقى والمغفلين
by ابن الجوزي
Ibn al-Jawzi, the Baghdad preacher and scholar who died in 1201, collected in twenty-four chapters the sayings and stories of fools, simpletons and the gullible, among them kings, judges, preachers and ordinary people. The anecdotes are short, dry and often funny, offered both…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.