Two Lines. That Is the Whole Entry.

I have been working through this book entry by entry for weeks now — lions, fleas, parrots, falcons — and nothing prepared me for this one. When the alphabetical march finally reaches the human, the great medieval zoologist gives him two lines. Not two pages. Two lines.

Here they are, the complete entry:

البشر: الإنسان الواحد والجمع والمذكر والمؤنث في ذلك سواء. وقد يثنى وفي التنزيل أنؤمن لبشرين مثلنا والجمع أبشر.

“Al-bashar: the human (al-insān) — singular and plural, masculine and feminine, are the same in it. It may be dualized; and in the revelation: 'Shall we believe in two humans like us?' And the plural is abshur.”

That is it. On the page (shamela.ws/book/10664/178), the human gets less ink than the flea's jump.

One Word for One Human, a Hundred Humans, Men, Women

Most of the entry's weight is grammar, so let me unpack it honestly, because it is genuinely beautiful.

Al-bashar is one of those Arabic words that does the work of many. One human, a hundred humans — same word. A man, a woman — same word. English has a few of these (“sheep,” “deer”), but Arabic builds its whole idea of humanity on a single one. The entry insists on it: الواحد والجمع والمذكر والمؤنث في ذلك سواء — “the singular and the plural, the masculine and the feminine, are the same in that.”

But — وقد يثنى — “it may be dualized.” When there are exactly two humans, Arabic gives you بشران (basharān). And the proof comes straight from the revelation: أَنُؤْمِنُ لِبَشَرَيْنِ مِثْلِنَا — “Shall we believe in two humans like us?” Those were the words thrown at Moses and Aaron by people who could not accept that two ordinary humans — mere بشرين — could be sent by GOD. The book quotes the verse the way a grammarian cites evidence: here, the dual exists. Case closed.

And the plural, for when you need one anyway, is أبشر (abshur).

The Entry That Says Nothing Is the Loudest Entry in the Book

Here is what I cannot stop thinking about.

This book gives the flea pages — its jumps, its tusks, its trunk, its souls carried off by the Angel of Death. The lion gets twenty-odd pages. And man — the animal the author himself belonged to — gets two lines of grammar. No anecdotes. No “the book claims” remedies. No khawass, no strange tales, no poetry contest about his nobility.

Al-Damiri filed humans the same way he filed everything else: alphabetically, between the water bird (البركة) and the duck (البط). Just one more entry in a book of animals. And then, faced with his own species, the medieval zoologist apparently found nothing strange to say — or found it all too close to say.

I find that quietly honest. Maybe humbling. Every other entry tries to pin the animal down with stories; for man, the definition is enough: one word, the same for one and many, for men and women. As if the author is telling us: we are the one creature here that needs no introduction, and the one no introduction could cover.

The Ledger

The strict ledger, because this series does not invent: (1) البشر means “the human” (الإنسان), and the word is the same for singular and plural, masculine and feminine; (2) it takes a dual, proven by the revelation's أَنُؤْمِنُ لِبَشَرَيْنِ مِثْلِنَا — “shall we believe in two humans like us?”; (3) its plural is أبشر (abshur); (4) in book order it sits between the water bird (البركة) and the duck (البط), at shamela.ws/book/10664/178. Every fact here comes from those two lines — and from nothing else.

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. What does al-bashar mean?

    Al-bashar (البشر) means “the human” in Arabic — al-insān. In Hayat al-Hayawan it gets a two-line entry explaining that the word is the same whether you mean one person or many, a man or a woman. It can be dualized for two people (basharān), and its broken plural is abshur (أبشر).

  2. What is the Qur'anic verse quoted in the human entry?

    The entry quotes أَنُؤْمِنُ لِبَشَرَيْنِ مِثْلِنَا — “Shall we believe in two humans like us?” — the challenge thrown at Moses and Aaron by people who refused to accept that two ordinary humans could be sent by GOD. Al-Damiri cites it as grammatical proof that bashar takes a dual form.

  3. Why is the human entry so short?

    The book gives man only two lines of grammar — no anecdotes, no strange remedies, none of the khawass that fill the animal entries around it. The entry sits alphabetically between the water bird and the duck, filed like any other animal, and simply defines the word. It is the one creature in Hayat al-Hayawan the author didn't fill with strange stories.

Source: Al-Damiri, Hayat al-Hayawan al-Kubra, the bashar (البشر) entry — shamela.ws/book/10664/178.