Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi

Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi (full name Ali ibn Muhammad al-Tawhidi; the nisba "al-Tawhidi" is traditionally linked to a family trade in a kind of date, though some have instead connected it to the Mu'tazili 'ahl al-tawhid') was one of the most distinctive prose stylists and essayists of the Arabic-Islamic world under the Buyids, the Iranian dynasty — Shia in affiliation — that dominated Baghdad and western Iran in the tenth and eleventh centuries CE. The later biographer Yaqut is reported to have called him "the philosopher of the litterateurs and the litterateur of the philosophers."

His birth date and birthplace are genuinely disputed: sources place his birth somewhere between roughly 922 and 932 CE (c. 310-320 AH), and variously in Shiraz (the Fars region), Nishapur, Wasit, or Baghdad. The Encyclopaedia of Islam and Encyclopaedia Iranica regard Shiraz as the likeliest birthplace, but none of these can be firmly adjudicated. What is better attested is that he was trained in Baghdad as a warraq (copyist/scribe), studied with scholars including the grammarian al-Sirafi, and moved in the philosophical circle of Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani, whose discussions he preserved in his book al-Muqabasat.

Al-Tawhidi spent much of his life seeking, and losing, courtly patronage. After a difficult period at the Buyid court of Rayy — where his bitter falling-out with the vizier al-Sahib ibn Abbad later issued in the polemic Akhlaq al-wazirayn (also called Mathalib al-wazirayn, "The Vices of the Two Viziers") — he served the Baghdad vizier Ibn Sa'dan, whose salon-conversations he recorded in his masterpiece al-Imta wa-l-mu'anasa ("Enjoyment and Conviviality"), until that patron was executed in 985. Reportedly embittered by decades of poverty and neglect, late in life he is said to have burned his own books. He was still alive in 1009 and is traditionally held to have died at Shiraz around 1023 (some sources give c. 1010). Modern scholars are cautious: much of what we know comes from his own writings.