The Luzumiyat of Abu'l-Ala Selected from his Luzum ma la Yalzam and Suct us-Zand

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.