The Epistle of Forgiveness. Abu l-'Ala al-Ma'arri

further generations, tracing him back to the legendary realm of pre-Islamic Arab genealogy; he belonged to the famous tribal confederation called Tanūkh, entitling him to the epithet al-Tanūkhī. He was born toward sunset on Friday, 27 Rabīʿ Awwal, 363h (26 December ad 973) in a respectable family of religious scholars and judges. At the age of four he lost his eyesight due to smallpox. He made up for this disability by having a truly prodigious memory, about which several anecdotes are related; apparently he had the aural equivalent of a photographic memory and he stood out in a milieu that was already accustomed to memorization on a large scale. His blindness meant that he wrote his numerous works by dictating them; his pupil al-Tibrīzī mentioned that al-Maʿarrī at one stage had four well-qualified secretaries and a servant girl (jāriyah), who wrote down his dictations.⁹ As a boy he studied with several teachers, including his own father, in his hometown and Aleppo; his main interest was poetry and he became an ardent admirer of the great poet al-Mutanabbī (d. 354/965), on whose poetry he was to write a commentary, entitled Muʿjiz Aḥmad (Aḥmad’s Miracle), exploiting not only the fact that he shared his given name with the poet but also, rather daringly, alluding to the Qurʾan, which was the prophetic “miracle” (muʿjizah) of the Prophet Muḥammad, who is sometimes called Aḥmad.

It seems that his own poetic efforts date from an early age, when he was eleven or twelve. Normally the poetry of a poet is collected in a single dīwān, in which poems are arranged alphabetically on rhyme letter, or chronologically, or thematically. Most of al-Maʿarrī’s poetry however, as far as it is preserved (for many of his works are lost), is contained in two very distinct major collections; yet more poems are found in some minor works. His early poetry, in a dīwān called Saqṭ (or Siqṭ) al-zand (The Spark of the Fire Stick¹⁰), shows the influence of al-Mutanabbī. The second collection contains his later poetry and it is very different. Instead of more or less conventional odes, it offers nearly sixteen hundred mostly short pieces. Thematically and stylistically the collection is unusually coherent: it is a sustained invective on mankind in general, a glorification of wisdom and reason, and it expresses skepticism to a degree that made the poet very suspect in pious circles. Dogmatically, however, it cannot be called coherent, for doubts about the Resurrection and afterlife or the value of prophethood alternate with professions of orthodox belief. The title, Luzūm mā lā yalzam,¹¹ literally “the necessity of what is not necessary,” could also be translated as “the self-imposed constraints,” one of these being a form of rich rhyme, involving two rhyme consonants instead of one and using all the letters of the alphabet as rhyme consonant. Another constant trait is the sustained use of figures such as paronomasia. The poems are riddled with allusions and studded with rare words and recondite expressions.¹² In order to refute allegations of unbelief detected in this collection he wrote a work called Zajr al-nābiḥ (Chiding Away the Barking Dog), parts of which are extant.¹³

Al-Maʿarrī’s gloomy outlook on the world probably has something to do with his unsuccessful attempt to settle in Baghdad in 399/1008. He returned to al-Maʿarrah after some eighteen months, partly, it seems, because he was unable to secure suitable patronage and because he fell out with a leading personality in the cultural and literary life of the metropolis, al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā. They quarreled about the merits of al-Mutanabbī; when al-Murtaḍā made a disparaging remark about the poet, al-Maʿarrī retorted with a cleverly allusive and insinuating quotation, after which he was unceremoniously dragged by his feet from the literary gathering. Henceforth, for the rest of his long life, with only one brief exception, he remained in his birthplace, describing himself as rahīn (or rahn) al-maḥbisayn, “hostage to two prisons,” meaning his blindness and his seclusion; in an epigram he mentions a third prison, his soul being confined to his body.¹⁴ Although contemporaries mention that he was wealthy and greatly esteemed in his town, he lived like an ascetic. He was obviously fond of various forms of self-imposed constraints. He abstained from marriage and sexual intercourse; the inscription on his grave says “This is my father’s crime against me, | a crime that I did not commit to anyone.”¹⁵ His diet was extremely frugal, consisting chiefly of lentils, with figs for sweet;¹⁶ and, very unusually for a Muslim, he was not only a vegetarian, but a vegan who abstained from meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, and honey, because he did not want to kill or hurt animals or deprive them of their food. This was an attitude he had to defend when he was attacked by the famous Ismāʿīlī ideologue and “chief propagandist” (dāʿī l-duʿāh), Abū Naṣr al-Muʾayyad fī l-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, a kind of Grand Mufti of the Fāṭimids in Cairo (whose influence extended to Syria). This attack branded him as a heretic who tried to pose as someone “more merciful than the Merciful,” i.e., God, who, after all, allowed the consumption of meat. The interesting exchange of letters between the theologian and Abū l-ʿAlāʾ has been preserved.¹⁷ It is not clear from where he derived his ideas; his critics speculated that he might have adopted the vegan lifestyle from the Indian Brahmans.¹⁸

In spite of his ascetic attitude, Abū l-ʿAlāʾ was no true recluse, someone who cuts himself off from society. On the contrary, people flocked to him and scholars and viziers visited him, paying their respect and hoping to learn from him. Among his pupils were famous philologists such as the poet and critic Ibn Sinān al-Khafājī (d. 466/1074) and Abū Zakariyyā Yaḥyā ibn ʿAlī al-Tibrīzī (d. 502/1109). The latter reported that when Abū l-ʿAlāʾ died, after a short illness at the age of eighty-four in the month Rabīʿ al-Awwal of 449h (May, ad 1057), eighty-four poets recited elegies at his grave;¹⁹ whether or not this is true, several such elegies have been preserved. Abū l-ʿAlāʾ also took a lively interest in the intricate politics of his own time and place (involving several dynasties and realms, such as the Ḥamdānids, Būyids, Mirdāsids, Fāṭimids, and the infidel Byzantines); an interest that is apparent from references in his poetry and from some of his letters and prose works. Probably the most interesting work in this respect is his Risālat al-Ṣāhil wa-l-shāḥij (The Epistle of the Neigher and the Brayer), a lengthy work in which the main characters are animals, notably a horse and a mule. Speaking animals had been familiar to the Arabs since the famous collection of animal fables, Kalīlah wa-Dimnah, was translated from the Pahlavi into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. ca. 139/756),²⁰ but Abū l-ʿAlāʾ’s book, composed around the year 144/1021, does not contain fables; it is a commentary on contemporary politics involving the Mirdāsid and Fāṭimid dynasties and the Byzantines. It also discusses matters such as taxation. At the same time, like other works of his, it is full of digressions on highly technical matters in the fields of grammar, lexicography, poetics, prosody, and rhyme.

Abū l-ʿAlāʾ ranks as one of the great poets in Arabic literary history. Unlike most poets of the first rank he also excelled as a prose writer. In addition to the present work and the Epistle of the Neigher and the Brayer, mention should be made of a controversial work of his: al-Fuṣūl wa-l-ghāyāt (Paragraphs and Periods). It is composed in an exceptionally difficult idiom (the author regularly interrupts his text with a commentary and explanation of obscure words and expressions), but once one has grasped the sense the work is, at first sight, not shocking: it is a series of homiletic, sermon-like texts, containing praise of God, which call for piety, asceticism, and submission to Fate. The controversy that arose about the book is on account of its style and its form, together with the suspicion that the author’s intention was to outdo the Qurʾan. It is composed in an intricate form of rhymed prose, with rhymes interwoven on two text levels: short range within the various sections or paragraphs (fuṣūl), and long range, because the last words (“ends”, ghāyāt) of successive sections also rhyme in an alphabetic series. It uses many idioms that have a Qurʾanic flavor. Altogether, it is not surprising that some thought that its author intended to surpass the Qurʾan, an attitude clearly blasphemous to orthodox Muslims, who believe that the style of the Qurʾan, God’s literal words, is inimitable and unsurpassable. When someone rhetorically asked how al-Fuṣūl wa-l-ghāyāt could possibly be compared to the Surahs and āyāt (“verses”) of the Qurʾan, Abū l-ʿAlāʾ reputedly replied, “Wait until it has been polished by tongues for four hundred years; then see how it is,”²¹ an answer that would not endear