Al-Jahiz's Book of Misers
About the work
Imported from the workbook's Full reassessment sheet, revised 7 October 2026 (record ID 85). The assessment below is the workbook's comparative judgment under its stated criteria; source links and limits are retained.
Workbook assessment: Spread only
Date or witness: 9th century CE; author died 868/869
Region: Abbasid Iraq and wider Arabic-speaking world
Workbook date-sort bounds: 800 CE to 869 CE; these bounds are not automatically invention or disappearance dates.
Description
A collection of comic portraits of tightfisted people and their rationalizations: recurring miser stereotypes gathered into literary anecdotes.
Evidence of adoption or transmission
Al-Jahiz records and develops recurring miser anecdotes within a literary collection.
What remains uncertain
Ordinary people portrayed in anecdotes are not evidence that those people adopted the book or independently circulated a particular meme. No popular dissemination mechanism is established here.
Workbook revision note: Reassessed using grassroots criteria