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Books by Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri

1,598 works by Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri at Al-Warraq Library, with links to their open and legal sources. Browse in the library

About the author

Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri (973–1057), the blind poet-philosopher of Ma'arrat al-Nu'man in Syria, lost his sight to smallpox as a child and became one of the most learned men of his time. After a stay in Baghdad he shut himself away at home for almost fifty years, calling himself 'the prisoner of two prisons': blindness and his house.

His youthful diwan Saqt al-Zand, the sceptical, demanding Luzumiyyat and the Epistle of Forgiveness, an imagined journey to the afterlife among poets, still read as remarkably modern.

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