Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 301-304

Book Review

There seems to be no end to the scholarly fascination with al-Jāḥiẓ. The book under review attests to 
that, as it is one of several recent studies 
devoted to this author.1 Hans-Peter Pökel’s 
2014 monograph is centered on al-Jāḥiẓ’s 
treatment of eunuchs, the “unmanly man” 
(der unmännliche Mann) to whom the 
title refers, paying special—though not 
exclusive—attention to al-Jāḥiẓ’s magnum 
opus, the Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (The book of 
living beings).

F o r  a n  a u t h o r  c a p t i v a t e d  b y  t h e 
infinite wonders of God’s creation, it does 
not come as a surprise that al-Jāḥiẓ, in 
addition to analyzing men and women, 
horses and donkeys, wolves, cocks, dogs, 
phoenixes, ants, flies, bees, and other 
creepy-crawlies, devoted many pages 

1.  At least two other monographs have been published recently: Thomas Hefter, The Reader in al-Jāḥiẓ 
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); and James E. Montgomery, Al-Jāḥiẓ: In Praise of Books 
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), which will be accompanied by a second volume entitled Al-Jāḥiẓ: 
In Censure of Books. 

2.  David Ayalon, Eunuchs, Caliphs and Sultans (Jerusalem: Magnes Press/Hebrew University, 1999).

of his K. al-Ḥayawān to the physical and 
ethical characteristics of eunuchs. Despite 
the Islamic condemnation of castration, 
eunuchs have always been present in 
premodern Islamic societies, most often 
as holders of important positions at the 
court. The historical and social relevance 
of eunuchs in Islam has been well known 
since Ayalon’s pioneering research on the 
“eunuch institution,”2 which paved the 
way for further studies, including this one. 
But this book is not only a work of social 
history. Pökel’s main interest is to explore 
the relationship between body and sexual 
identity in the formative period of Islam 
in the light of al-Jāḥiẓ’s understanding of 
animal and human nature; in this regard, 
this study is also an example of the 
intellectual history of gender. 

Hans-Peter Pökel, Der unmännliche Mann: Zur Figuration des Eunuchen 
im Werk von al-Ǧāḥiẓ (gest. 869). Mitteilungen zur Sozial- und 
Kulturgeschichte der islamischen Welt, 36 (Würzburg: Ergon, 2014). 

ISNB 978-3956500282. 390 pp. €48.

Ignacio Sánchez 
University of Warwick 

(Ignacio.Sanchez@warwick.ac.uk)

mailto:Ignacio.Sanchez%40warwick.ac.uk?subject=


Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019)

302  •  IgnacIo Sánchez

In the introductory first chapter, Pökel 
discusses the methodological principles 
that guide his analysis of al-Jāḥiẓ’s texts 
and his research on eunuchs. For Pökel, a 
proper understanding of the relationship 
between gender and body should take into 
account, on the one hand, the Greek and 
late antique theories of humoral pathology 
that informed Abbasid notions of human 
nature and their discourses on the body 
(Körperdiskurse), and, on the other hand, 
the moral implications that result from 
this conceptualization, since these shape 
contemporary conceptions of love and 
sexuality and even core principles of Arab 
societies such as murūʾa.

In chapter 2, Pökel reviews the figure of 
al-Jāḥiẓ and surveys the corpus of Jāḥiẓian 
works on which he bases his study. The 
most important of them is, of course, the 
K. al-Ḥayawān, which is discussed vis-à-vis 
Aristotle’s Opus Animalium. Pökel also lists 
other works that deal—sometimes only 
tangentially—with the nature of eunuchs, 
gender, humoral theory, or manly virtue, 
namely, K. al-Bighāl, K. al-Muʿallimīn, K. 
al-Radd ʿalā al-Naṣārā, K. al-Nisāʾ, Risālat 
al-qiyān, K. Fakhr al-sudān ʿalā al-bīḍān, 
K. al-Tabaṣṣur bi-l-tijāra, Manāqib al-Turk, 
K. al-Ḥijāb, Risāla fī al-nābita, Maqālat 
al-ʿUthmāniyya, and K. Kitmān al-sirr.

Chapter 3, which opens with a general 
overview of slavery in Late Antiquity and 
early Islam, is centered on the eunuch 
body and its modification. Pökel provides 
here a detailed discussion of the castration 
techniques that al-Jāḥiẓ describes in 
intricate detail in his K. al-Ḥayawān and 
that might involve surgical excision (khiṣāʾ, 
gonadectomy, and jibāb, penectomy) or 
contusions that result in testicular atrophy 
(wijāʾ, the Latin ablatio). Chapter 4 is 
focused on the physical consequences of 

castration as understood by al-Jāḥiẓ and 
his contemporaries. In this chapter, Pökel 
surveys the physiological principles that 
framed the Abbasid understanding of 
human nature, paying special attention to 
the Aristotelian tradition and the Galenic 
synthesis of humoral theory. Because of 
their relevance for the study of eunuchs, 
Greek theories on the production of semen 
are discussed at length. Al-Jāḥiẓ, who 
traces the origin of castration back to 
Byzantium (Ḥayawān, 1.125), denounces 
the practice in the context of his polemics 
against Christians. 

Chapter 5 explores this accusation 
and the treatment of eunuchs in Islam 
vis-à-vis Roman, Byzantine, and early 
Christian attitudes toward castration, the 
loss of manliness, and the protection of 
the body’s integrity. One of the examples 
treated in this section is that of the famous 
O r i g e n  o f  A l e x a n d r i a ,  w h o  a l l e g e d l y 
castrated himself and whose legend seems 
to have been known to al-Jāḥiẓ. Chapter 
6 continues this inquiry into the religious 
a n d  m o r a l  i m p l i c a t i o n s  o f  m a n h o o d 
and manliness by problematizing the 
relationship between emasculation and 
asceticism, but it soon evolves into a 
lengthy discussion of sexual preferences 
and gender identity. In this chapter, which 
contains the most theoretical sections of 
the book, Pökel discusses the emotions 
and “unmanly sexuality” of eunuchs, 
their contrasts with heterosexual and 
homosexual models, and the treatment of 
these problems in an Islamic context.

Chapter 7 centers on the ethnicity of the 
eunuchs, mostly Slavs (ṣaqāliba) and Black 
Africans (sūdān), and the implications 
that geographical determinism and ethnic 
stereotypes have for al-Jāḥiẓ’s typologies. 
The eighth and final chapter deals only 



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Hans-Peter Pökel’s Der unmännliche Mann: Zur Figuration des Eunuchen  •  303

occasionally with al-Jāḥiẓ’s texts. In it 
Pökel discusses the liminality of the spaces 
occupied by eunuchs in Abbasid society 
and explores the role they played at the 
court, especially as holders of offices (such 
as that of the ḥājib) that gave them direct 
access to the rulers, as harem attendants, 
and within the armies of the caliphs. This 
chapter also contains a thoughtful critique 
of the conceptualization of harems in 
Orientalist scholarship and its reduction of 
the figure of the eunuch to a mere harem 
servant. 

This  brief s um m ary  has  hope fu lly 
made clear the ambitious scope of Pökel’s 
thorough and well-researched study. 
It embodies, without doubt, the most 
illuminating approach to the figure of the 
eunuch in the first centuries of Islam, and 
it also constitutes a valuable contribution 
to the study of al-Jāḥiẓ; in the latter 
regard, Pökel’s research on the influence 
of humoral theory and dietetics in the 
Jāḥiẓian understanding of human nature 
is particularly insightful. The difficulties 
of al-Jāḥiẓ’s meandering prose are also 
solved competently and, apart from minor 
mistakes, Pökel’s translation is reliable.

The centrality of al-Jāḥiẓ in the study, 
however, is not always evident. The sources 
used in the book are reviewed in chapter 
2, and Pökel devotes several pages to the 
most important of them, K. al-Ḥayawān, 
but he does not say much about how 
al-Jāḥiẓ conceived of the long section on 
eunuchs in his work (K. al-Ḥayawān, 1:106–
181) or about how the section is connected 
with the rest of the chapters. Finding the 
underlying logic of the K. al-Ḥayawān is 
not an easy task, as James Montgomery’s 
recent book on the work shows, and the 
section on eunuchs is a quintessentially 
Jāḥiẓian example of apparently digressive 

prose. Pökel methodically discusses all 
the questions tackled by al-Jāḥiẓ, but it 
would have been useful for the reader to 
have a detailed inventory of the topics 
and themes that al-Jāḥiẓ addresses in 
these pages, which include, alongside the 
consequences of castration in humans and 
animals, digressions on horse-breeding, 
the differences between domestic and wild 
animals, and the nature of the giraffe. The 
relationship of this section with the rest of 
the K. al-Ḥayawān and with the K. al-Bighāl 
also deserves more attention, since the 
unnamed addressee lambasted by al-Jāḥiẓ 
in the introduction had critical opinions 
about hybrid categories and interbreeding 
(Ḥayawān, 1:102–106), which are the main 
topic of al-Jāḥiẓ’s book on mules.

Pökel is, however, very careful when it 
comes to contextualizing the physiological 
notions that underlie al-Jāḥiẓ’s discussion 
of human nature in the K. al-Ḥayawān. 
Al-Jāḥiẓ’s acquaintance with Aristotle’s 
Opus Animalium and Galen’s humoral 
theories is addressed in various instances, 
and Pökel is right to stress the importance 
of understanding these influences in the 
context of the late antique tradition. But 
the way in which al-Jāḥiẓ has become 
familiar with this legacy is an entirely 
different matter. Al-Jāḥiẓ’s elaborate 
p a r a p h r a s e s  o f t e n  r e n d e r  t h e  e x a c t 
identification of his sources a rather 
difficult—if not impossible—task. The Greek 
origin of the philosophical and medical 
ideas discussed in the K. al-Ḥayawān is 
evident, as is the weight of Aristotle’s 
works on animals, but Pökel’s insistence 
on the late antique context sometimes 
contributes to obscuring relevant aspects 
of the study of al-Jāḥiẓ’s reception of the 
Greek tradition. If we look at the indexes 
of the Aristotelian and Galenic corpora, we 



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304  •  IgnacIo Sánchez

find, in fact, very few mentions of eunuchs 
in their works. By contrast, eunuchs seem 
to have held a particular fascination for 
Abbasid scholars, so much so that they 
made their way into Arabic translations 
of Aristotelian works that in their original 
versions made no mention of eunuchs at 
all. The Arabic translation/adaptation of 
the Parva Naturalia is a good example, for 
it includes discussions on eunuchs that are 
not present in the original Greek. Eunuchs 
are even more relevant in the Problemata 
tradition, which Pökel does not discuss. 
The Problemata Physica Arabica contain 
questions concerning eunuchs’ sexual 
desire (v, 3), their change toward a female 
nature (xi, 34), the occurrence of gout 
(xi, 35) and sores (xi, 40) in eunuchs, 
and the tone of their voice (xii, 16);3 the 
Problemata Arabica Inedita include three 

3.  See Lou S. Filius (ed. and trans.), The Problemata Physica Attributed to Aristotle: The Arabic Version of 
Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq and the Hebrew Version of Moses ibn Tibbon (Leiden: Brill, 1999).

4.  Lou S. Filius, “The Genre Problemata in Arabic: Its Motions and Changes,” in Aristotle’s Problemata in 
Different Times and Tongues, ed. Pieter De Leemans and Michèle Goyens, 33–54 (Leuven: University Press, 
2006), 46–47.

further questions on eunuchs, two of 
which address the differences between 
the khaṣī and the khādim.4 The reception 
of the Aristotelian Problemata by al-Jāḥiẓ 
and, in general, by the Basran Muʿtazila 
i s  a  c o m p l i c a t e d  m a t t e r  t h a t  a w a i t s 
further research, but I cannot help but 
wonder whether many of the notions and 
argumentations that we can read in the K. 
al-Ḥayawān might not have come, in fact, 
from this tradition.

These remarks, however, should not 
distract from the importance of Pökel’s 
study. This book is a masterly contribution 
to the scholarship on al-Jāḥiẓ and on the 
history of sexuality that will be of interest 
not only to specialists on the Islamic 
world but also to scholars working on 
Late Antiquity, comparative history, and 
gender studies.