Al-Bayan wa at-Tabyin – البيان والتبيين

Al-Bayan wa at-Tabyin was one of al-Jahiz’s later works, in which he wrote on epiphanies, rhetorical speeches, sectarian leaders, and princes. Though he was neither a poet nor a philologist in the proper sense – al-Jahiz took a keen interest in almost any imaginable subject – the book is considered to have started Arabic literary theory in a formal, systemic fashion.Al-Jahiz’s defining of eloquence as the ability of the speaker to deliver an effective message while maintaining it as brief or elaborate at will was widely accepted by later Arabic literary critics.