What can a ninth-century scholar teach us about friendship, ambition, learning and how to deal with other people? More than 1,100 years ago, ʿAlī b. ʿUbayda al-Rayḥānī assembled thousands of pieces of practical advice, many of which remain surprisingly relevant today.
Living in the Abbasid Caliphate during the late eighth and early ninth centuries, al-Rayḥānī was a writer, scholar and high-ranking civil secretary who served the caliph al-Maʾmūn. Born around the year 757 in Basra to an Iranian family originally from Khorasan, he reportedly began his career as a soldier before rising into the intellectual and political circles of the Abbasid court.
Al-Rayḥānī became known as a prolific man of letters. Medieval sources attribute around sixty books to him, dealing with subjects ranging from friendship and love to music, language and biography. Most have disappeared, but one particularly important work survives: The Jewels of Speech and the Pearls of Wisdom (Jawāhir al-kilam wa-farāʾid al-ḥikam).
A medieval guide to living well
The work contains slightly more than 2,000 maxims, proverbs and pieces of advice, arranged into thirty chapters. Some drew upon older Greek and Persian traditions, while others appear to represent al-Rayḥānī’s own observations about human behaviour.
Rather than offering an abstract discussion of philosophy, al-Rayḥānī was interested in practical morality: how people should learn, choose friends, control their emotions, recognize their own shortcomings and behave towards others. The surviving collection also became influential in later Arabic literature, with its sayings being reused by medieval writers and compilers.
Al-Rayḥānī himself explains why people need to be reminded of such lessons:
Mankind is not void of forgetfulness, in particular when hard pressed by earning a livelihood and continual afflictions on family and children. To these are added the recurring biting events, whether of festive celebrations or grievous surprises, or of anger and rage – the two emotions that blind the insight and conceal every merit – , and man’s persistence in ruinous habits.
He continues:
Because of these factors, people are in need of spiritual testaments and in want of warnings so as to convalesce from the barrenness of negligence to the knowledge of what they do not know, and to return from the path of forgetfulness to what they knew but forgot.
More than eleven centuries later, many of his observations still sound familiar. From the more than 2,000 pieces of wisdom contained in the collection, here are twenty of our favourites:
20 pieces of wisdom from al-Rayḥānī
1. Treat the weak justly as you would like the strong treat you.
2. Spend your wealth on your friend, your joy and greetings on your acquaintances, your gift and good company on the public, and your justice on your enemy, but be sparing with your religion and honor with everybody.
3. Whenever you notice someone’s fault, just recall yours and you will find enough to keep you busy from his, and you will find his defects even insignificant in comparison with yours. How abominable it is to find faults with people, and how more abominable it is to find faults with them that you yourself have!
4. He is not a perfect benevolent who confers favors to a good person but not to a bad.
5. Three are in a meeting but not present in it: The one who has to go to the bathroom, the one who is sick, and the one who has worries in his mind. So try to remove such grounds before you attend a scientific meeting, so that you will return from it with profit.
6. A wound inflicted by the tongue is more harmful than a wound inflicted by the hand.
7. If a person gets used to be alone, feels rich by being content, watches over his own faults and while engaging in improving them, he becomes too busy to look for the faults of others, then he has been given the best of this and the next world.
8. Lust has no limits, that is why they say it has no end.
9. Embark upon teaching children before becoming too busy.
10. Wishes are fulfilled by taking risks.
11. Take for your livelihood the best possible way, and raise your ambition as high as you can, for a man’s rank corresponds to his ambition.
12. The luckiest person in affairs is the one who, when he is in doubt with respect to two cases and does not know which is the right one, looks at the most frightening and terrifying of the two in consequence and avoids it.
13. Envy is the worst companion.
14. Learn much, memorize little.
15. If you feel sorrow for the diminishing of your wealth, then cry over the diminishing of your life.
16. Characteristics specific to the ignorant are: baseless anger, useless speech, inexpedient donation, carelessness in keeping secrets, lack of discernment in differentiating friend from foe, and trusting everybody.
17. To be criticized for knowledge is better than to be criticized for ignorance.
18. The signs of wretchedness are three: to be provided with knowledge, but to fail action; to be provided with action, but to fail sincerity; to be provided with the association of the pious, but fail to respect them.
19. He who praises you for qualities you lack will certainly blame you for faults you lack.
20. Admonish yourself first, and if you learn a lesson, then admonish the people, otherwise, hold back.
Four rules for a life of learning
Al-Rayḥānī did not merely collect the advice of others. Among his writings are four principles that he says he had learned over time and attempted to follow himself. They reveal something of his approach to knowledge, particularly his willingness to learn from people and traditions different from his own.
First: I do not treat haughtily anyone from whom I learn, when he knows something better than I do.
Second: I do not show enmity towards any science or any religion, and learn from each whatever I can learn, when its correctness and benefits become evident to me.
Third: I am persistent in this at all times, never becoming weary of it, and if some importunate need shall disrupt me from it, I shall return to it as soon as the cause of the disruption comes to an end.
Fourth: I covet science for the sake of science, and not for any other advantage that may be gained by it.
Those principles fit remarkably well with the broader purpose of The Jewels of Speech and the Pearls of Wisdom. Al-Rayḥānī was interested in collecting useful knowledge wherever it could be found and transforming it into concise lessons that readers could remember and apply.
His work also provides a glimpse into the movement of ideas across the medieval world. Fluent in Middle Persian, al-Rayḥānī helped transmit Persian intellectual traditions into Arabic, while his collection also incorporated material ultimately derived from Greek sources. His sayings, in turn, circulated among later medieval Arabic writers.
The result is something more than a collection of clever quotations. The Jewels of Speech and the Pearls of Wisdom represents an attempt by a ninth-century scholar to distil a lifetime of reading and experience into practical advice about how to live – advice on friendship, generosity, ambition, self-knowledge and the pursuit of learning that readers can still recognize more than a millennium later.
What can a ninth-century scholar teach us about friendship, ambition, learning and how to deal with other people? More than 1,100 years ago, ʿAlī b. ʿUbayda al-Rayḥānī assembled thousands of pieces of practical advice, many of which remain surprisingly relevant today.
Living in the Abbasid Caliphate during the late eighth and early ninth centuries, al-Rayḥānī was a writer, scholar and high-ranking civil secretary who served the caliph al-Maʾmūn. Born around the year 757 in Basra to an Iranian family originally from Khorasan, he reportedly began his career as a soldier before rising into the intellectual and political circles of the Abbasid court.
Al-Rayḥānī became known as a prolific man of letters. Medieval sources attribute around sixty books to him, dealing with subjects ranging from friendship and love to music, language and biography. Most have disappeared, but one particularly important work survives: The Jewels of Speech and the Pearls of Wisdom (Jawāhir al-kilam wa-farāʾid al-ḥikam).
A medieval guide to living well
The work contains slightly more than 2,000 maxims, proverbs and pieces of advice, arranged into thirty chapters. Some drew upon older Greek and Persian traditions, while others appear to represent al-Rayḥānī’s own observations about human behaviour.
Rather than offering an abstract discussion of philosophy, al-Rayḥānī was interested in practical morality: how people should learn, choose friends, control their emotions, recognize their own shortcomings and behave towards others. The surviving collection also became influential in later Arabic literature, with its sayings being reused by medieval writers and compilers.
Al-Rayḥānī himself explains why people need to be reminded of such lessons:
Mankind is not void of forgetfulness, in particular when hard pressed by earning a livelihood and continual afflictions on family and children. To these are added the recurring biting events, whether of festive celebrations or grievous surprises, or of anger and rage – the two emotions that blind the insight and conceal every merit – , and man’s persistence in ruinous habits.
He continues:
Because of these factors, people are in need of spiritual testaments and in want of warnings so as to convalesce from the barrenness of negligence to the knowledge of what they do not know, and to return from the path of forgetfulness to what they knew but forgot.
More than eleven centuries later, many of his observations still sound familiar. From the more than 2,000 pieces of wisdom contained in the collection, here are twenty of our favourites:
20 pieces of wisdom from al-Rayḥānī
1. Treat the weak justly as you would like the strong treat you.
2. Spend your wealth on your friend, your joy and greetings on your acquaintances, your gift and good company on the public, and your justice on your enemy, but be sparing with your religion and honor with everybody.
3. Whenever you notice someone’s fault, just recall yours and you will find enough to keep you busy from his, and you will find his defects even insignificant in comparison with yours. How abominable it is to find faults with people, and how more abominable it is to find faults with them that you yourself have!
4. He is not a perfect benevolent who confers favors to a good person but not to a bad.
5. Three are in a meeting but not present in it: The one who has to go to the bathroom, the one who is sick, and the one who has worries in his mind. So try to remove such grounds before you attend a scientific meeting, so that you will return from it with profit.
6. A wound inflicted by the tongue is more harmful than a wound inflicted by the hand.
7. If a person gets used to be alone, feels rich by being content, watches over his own faults and while engaging in improving them, he becomes too busy to look for the faults of others, then he has been given the best of this and the next world.
8. Lust has no limits, that is why they say it has no end.
9. Embark upon teaching children before becoming too busy.
10. Wishes are fulfilled by taking risks.
11. Take for your livelihood the best possible way, and raise your ambition as high as you can, for a man’s rank corresponds to his ambition.
12. The luckiest person in affairs is the one who, when he is in doubt with respect to two cases and does not know which is the right one, looks at the most frightening and terrifying of the two in consequence and avoids it.
13. Envy is the worst companion.
14. Learn much, memorize little.
15. If you feel sorrow for the diminishing of your wealth, then cry over the diminishing of your life.
16. Characteristics specific to the ignorant are: baseless anger, useless speech, inexpedient donation, carelessness in keeping secrets, lack of discernment in differentiating friend from foe, and trusting everybody.
17. To be criticized for knowledge is better than to be criticized for ignorance.
18. The signs of wretchedness are three: to be provided with knowledge, but to fail action; to be provided with action, but to fail sincerity; to be provided with the association of the pious, but fail to respect them.
19. He who praises you for qualities you lack will certainly blame you for faults you lack.
20. Admonish yourself first, and if you learn a lesson, then admonish the people, otherwise, hold back.
Four rules for a life of learning
Al-Rayḥānī did not merely collect the advice of others. Among his writings are four principles that he says he had learned over time and attempted to follow himself. They reveal something of his approach to knowledge, particularly his willingness to learn from people and traditions different from his own.
First: I do not treat haughtily anyone from whom I learn, when he knows something better than I do.
Second: I do not show enmity towards any science or any religion, and learn from each whatever I can learn, when its correctness and benefits become evident to me.
Third: I am persistent in this at all times, never becoming weary of it, and if some importunate need shall disrupt me from it, I shall return to it as soon as the cause of the disruption comes to an end.
Fourth: I covet science for the sake of science, and not for any other advantage that may be gained by it.
Those principles fit remarkably well with the broader purpose of The Jewels of Speech and the Pearls of Wisdom. Al-Rayḥānī was interested in collecting useful knowledge wherever it could be found and transforming it into concise lessons that readers could remember and apply.
His work also provides a glimpse into the movement of ideas across the medieval world. Fluent in Middle Persian, al-Rayḥānī helped transmit Persian intellectual traditions into Arabic, while his collection also incorporated material ultimately derived from Greek sources. His sayings, in turn, circulated among later medieval Arabic writers.
The result is something more than a collection of clever quotations. The Jewels of Speech and the Pearls of Wisdom represents an attempt by a ninth-century scholar to distil a lifetime of reading and experience into practical advice about how to live – advice on friendship, generosity, ambition, self-knowledge and the pursuit of learning that readers can still recognize more than a millennium later.
The complete translation of The Jewels of Speech and the Pearls of Wisdom, together with other surviving writings by al-Rayḥānī, can be found in Mohsen Zakeri’s two-volume Persian Wisdom in Arabic Garb: ʿAlī b. ʿUbayda al-Rayḥānī (d. 219/834) and his Jawāhir al-kilam wa-farāʾid al-ḥikam, published by Brill.
Top Image: BNF, Arabe 3465 fol. 131v
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