By Rasheed Al-Khayoon

When Nouri Jaffar, the well-known scholar, wrote a research, we high school students read it cautiously, despite the high standard of high school education at the time. And if we could understand it, it was only with profound difficulty. He did not write literary thoughts or political journalistic articles, but he put down science in such a way that blended several elements together. His written text would combine science with its facts, heritage with its evidence, and literature in its style. He would sail inside the human soul, brain, psychology, and the functions of the nervous system altogether. Functions that started from sensation heading toward thinking, and the way the feelings of love and hatred existed in that strange mechanism. Then he moved on to the search of how the language we spoke had originated, a matter that was not for the speakers of that language to look for, because that was the duty and occupation of the scholar. Such subjects were not touched upon within the Iraqi cultural milieu when they were first introduced to us, as if they meant nothing to us then. In fact, we avoided scrutinizing into them because of their difficulty and oddity at the time. I remember very well that Nouri Jaffar’s name compelled us to keep the issue of the magazine or newspaper that published his essay or research.

We might not remember well the details of what Nouri Jaffar wrote at that time, despite the fact that he was a well-trained researcher, especially after his obtaining his Ph.D. degree in 1949. But his field of specialization, namely the human psyche, remained etched in memory until we became capable of reading his work and looking forward to his writings. Those writings displayed how he commingled the study of the psyche and its depths with whatever evidence he could find in heritage of how the psyche was approached with psycho analysis.

Nouri Jaffar wrote in various fields, but he always related whatever he had written to his foremost and ultimate specialization. Thus, when he wrote about Al-Jahidh ( a major 9th C.A.D. encyclopaedic  Arab literary author), he spoke of his psychological influence, in his time, upon his society and the reflection of that influence on his own personality. He spoke of Al-Jahidh’s being a specimen of the psychology of his society right then, and he matched him to George Bernard Shaw and Nobel Prize. This was comprised in a book that had a rather strange title, that was published in the form of a booklet in a series entitled (The Mini-Encyclopaedia), a series of booklets published by The House of General Cultural Affairs in Baghdad in 1990. The booklet was entitled “Two Books Between Al-Jahidh, George Bernard Shaw and Nobel Prize”, and it had originally been a research written for a conference commemorating Al-Jahidh’s Millennium back in 1983. We do not even know if it was held indeed or if it was probably cancelled due to the war that had been flaring up over the palm trees of Basrah, the most important administrative extension of which was Al-Qurna, Jaffar’s birthplace. Eventually, Jaffar published his research on Al-Jahidh in a booklet that stands in front me now, no more than the size of a notebook; yet as you finish reading it, you feel as though you have read three bulky volumes in view of the amount of information, sources and ideas it offers.