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Abu al-Ala al-Maarri, the blind poet of Maarrat al-Numan in Syria, was one of the boldest thinkers in Arabic literature: sceptical of dogma and inherited…
Abu al-Ala al-Maarri, the blind poet of Maarrat al-Numan in Syria, was one of the boldest thinkers in Arabic literature: sceptical of dogma and inherited tradition, a vegetarian who refused all food from animals, and a pessimist who believed it better not to bring children into the world. This small book offers English verse renderings, in quatrains, of thoughts from his poetry on reason, death, injustice and the vanity of human pride.
Context and significance
Al-Maarri (973–1057), who lost his sight as a child and lived for decades in seclusion as 'the prisoner of two prisons', his blindness and his house, is the author of the Luzumiyyat and the Epistle of Forgiveness. This version, by Henry Baerlein, was published in 1908 in the Wisdom of the East series, and it is a free adaptation rather than a literal translation. Compare al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error.
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.