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

who have been consigned to Hell for various reasons; he pesters them with queries about their poetry, but mostly meets with a less than enthusiastic response. He also talks to the Devil, who in turn asks him some perplexing questions about Paradise. On his way back the Sheikh visits yet another region: the relatively dusky and lowly Paradise of the rajaz poets, rajaz being an old and rather simple meter that is deemed inferior. Finally he rests, seated on a couch, carried by damsels and immortal youths, surrounded by fruit trees, the fruits of which move toward his mouth of their own accord.

      This concludes Part One of the Epistle of Forgiveness. The author admits that he has been rather prolix and says, “Now we shall turn to a reply to the letter.” This he does in Part Two, which is a point-by-point discussion of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s epistle. The bulk of this part is devoted to the various heretics and schismatics mentioned by Ibn al-Qāriḥ, after which al-Maʿarrī turns to the Sheikh’s “repentance” and other matters. He concludes by apologizing for the delay in replying. This second part will appear in a second volume in the Library of Arabic Literature. The first part can be read on its own; indeed, most existing translations do not even contain the second part.

Yet the two parts hang together. Al-Maʿarrī’s irony is present on a deeper level. There are strong indications³¹ that the true purpose of his Epistle is to enjoin Ibn al-Qāriḥ to repent of his insolent and ungrateful behavior toward a former patron, of his self-confessed self-indulging in the past, of his hypocrisy in his own Epistle, of his sometimes tactless and self-righteous condemnation of poets and heretics, and of being generally obsessed with himself. The fictional Ibn al-Qāriḥ, in al-Ghufrān, only acquires forgiveness and reaches Paradise with much difficulty; it turns out that he only truly repented of his sins at the last moment: it may still happen in reality, implies al-Maʿarrī, if God wills. He also implies, therefore, that in his view Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s own letter does not amount to true repentance. He mocks Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s obsession with himself and his own profession (grammar and poetry) by imagining him in Paradise as being interested only in poets and philologists; even when he meets others, such as Adam, Abū Hadrash the jinn, or the devil, the conversation is mostly about poetry. Part One is therefore an elaborate and extremely lengthy introduction to the proper reply to the original letter. In Part Two several points reappear, such as the importance of true repentance. The fictional Ibn al-Qāriḥ had seen the poet Bashshār in Hell, but al-Maʿarrī says in Part Two that he will not categorically say that Bashshār’s destination will be Hell; God is merciful and kind.

While Risālat al-Ghufrān did not receive as much attention from pre-modern authors as his al-Fuṣūl wa-l-ghāyāt or the poems of Luzūm mā lā yalzam, it met with some mixed criticism. A note by al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) encapsulates it all: “It contains Mazdakism (mazdakah) and irreverence (istikhfāf); there is much erudition (adab) in it.”³² Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s imagined experiences in Heaven (with glimpses of Hell) as told by al-Maʿarrī form an interesting kind of fiction. Overt fiction was often frowned upon in pre-modern Arab literary culture; hence, for instance, the condemnation of fairytales and fantastic stories such as are found in The Thousand and One Nights. But al-Maʿarrī did not pretend that his fantasies about his correspondent actually happened: the events are set in the future and the Arabic present tense (which can refer to the future, for events that will or merely might happen) is used consistently, rather than the perfect tense normally employed in narrative texts. If he cannot be accused of writing fictions or lies, one might think that his apparently irreverent descriptions of Paradise border on the blasphemous. There can, in fact, be no doubt that he is mocking popular and pious beliefs about the hereafter; after all, he himself frequently questioned the reality of bodily resurrection, one of the central dogmas of orthodox Islam. Yet he does not introduce anything in his descriptions of Paradise and Hell that has not been, or could not be, imagined or written by pious Muslims. As is well known, Qurʾanic descriptions of the Last Day and the Last Things (Heaven and Hell) are vivid and full of concrete images; popular pious literature greatly expanded and elaborated the Qurʾanic images, turning Paradise into a Land of Cockayne, where birds fly around asking to be consumed, not unlike the peacock and the goose in the Epistle of Forgiveness that are instantly marinated or roasted as desired, and are then revived again. The Qurʾan (56:20–21), after all, promises the believers “whatever fruit they choose and whatever fowl they desire.”

Eschatological tourism is known from several literatures, notably through Dante’s Divine Comedy. That the latter was inspired partly by al-Maʿarrī was a hypothesis put forward by several scholars, notably Miguel Asín Palacios, and eagerly embraced, naturally, by some Arab scholars such as Kāmil Kaylānī, whose abridged edition of Risālat al-Ghufrān also contains a summary of Dante in Arabic, and who provides Part One of al-Ghufrān with the subtitle Kūmīdiyā ilāhiyyah masraḥuhā l-jannah wa-l-nār, “A Divine Comedy, Staged in Paradise and Hell.”³³ One Arab writer even argued that Dante, having stolen al-Maʿarrī’s ideas, produced a greatly inferior work, in which he should have made al-Maʿarrī his guide rather than Virgil.³⁴ The hypothesis that Dante was influenced by al-Maʿarrī has now been largely abandoned; if there is an Islamic root to Dante’s Commedia, it is more likely to have been inspired by popular ideas about the Prophet’s celebrated short excursion, his ascension to heaven (al-miʿrāj) after his “nocturnal journey” to Jerusalem (al-isrāʾ); a European translation of the anonymous Kitāb al-Miʿrāj (of which Latin, French, and Castilian versions were popular) was probably known to Dante. It has also been suggested that Dante may have been inspired by a Hebrew version of a work by Avicenna, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, describing an imaginative “cosmic” journey.³⁵

Nicholson rightly remarks³⁶ that while the Risālat al-Ghufrān “faintly” resembles the Sixth Book of Virgil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas visits the Underworld, the Divine Comedy, or the Zoroastrian, Middle Persian Book of Ardā Vīrāf, a more significant parallel can be found in Lucian (d. ca. ad 180), who like al-Maʿarrī was a Syrian, though Greek-educated. In his ironically entitled True Histories (or True Fictions) Lucian describes his fantastic journeys on earth and even to the moon. He visits a Blessed Isle, the delights of which are depicted in some detail; there he meets not only ancient worthies such as heroes of the Trojan War but also Homer, whom he questions about his poetry.³⁷ All this is written in a lively and very irreverent style, altogether akin to that of al-Maʿarrī, who shared Lucian’s rationalism, skepticism, and pessimism. It must not be supposed, however, that al-Maʿarrī knew Lucian’s work, for he was not translated into Arabic and al-Maʿarrī did not know Greek. But Lucian was popular with the Byzantines: his works were much copied, annotated, imitated, and taught in schools³⁸ and one could imagine that some of Lucian’s themes reached al-Maʿarrī orally. One also notes that the motif of the tree woman, exploited in The Epistle of Forgiveness, admittedly known in Arabic popular lore,³⁹ is also found in Lucian’s True Histories.⁴⁰

It has been suggested⁴¹ that Risālat al-Ghufrān was inspired by Risālat al-Tawābiʿ wa-l-zawābiʿ by the Andalusian Arab poet and prose-writer Ibn Shuhayd (d. 426/1035), who composed it only a few years before al-Maʿarrī wrote his work. In this short, incompletely preserved work, translated by James T. Monroe as The Treatise of Familiar Spirits and Demons,⁴² the author takes as his starting point the ancient Arab idea that a poet is inspired by a demon or genius, an idea that survived in Islamic times even though many would not take it more seriously than European poets would literally believe in the existence of the Muses or a personal muse. Ibn Shuhayd describes his imagined conversations with the demons of some famous poets: the pre-Islamic Imruʾ al-Qays, Ṭarafah, and Qays ibn al-Khaṭīm, and the Abbasid poets Abū Nuwās and Abū Tammām; he boldly expands the idea by assigning similar demons to prose writers such as ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd ibn Yaḥyā, Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī, and al-Jāḥiẓ (who no doubt would have been surprised by the fancy), and by describing some animal genii: a mule and a goose. It is not impossible that al-Maʿarrī (who in fact composed a short epistle on the same topic)⁴³ was aware of this work, but one would underestimate his