Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri
973–1057
Biography
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri (973–1057) was a poet, philosopher and scholar of the Arabic language and its grammar. He was born in Ma'arrat al-Nu'man, a town in what is now Syria and was then part of the Emirate of Aleppo. Smallpox left him blind as a boy, but he studied in Aleppo and then in Tripoli and Antioch. In Baghdad his verse won him a reputation, though he would not sell his texts. He returned home around 1010, when his mother's health was failing, and spent the rest of his life there in seclusion and simple living.
His poems are harsh on the corruption of scholars, rulers and religious hypocrites, and critics in his own time and later took him for a sceptic or an unbeliever. He answered such charges in a self-defence, Zajr al-Nabeh, in which he affirmed his Islamic faith, yet scholars still argue over what he really believed. He lived as a moral vegetarian who avoided meat and animal products, and his outlook on life was deeply pessimistic. His major works include the poetry collections Saqt al-Zand and Luzumiyat.
Two parts of his best-known prose work, Risalat al-Ghufran, are on this site. In it a fictional narrator travels after death through paradise and hell, meeting poets and other figures from across the history of Arabic literature and discussing poetry, language and human vanity with them. The first and second parts here show how he used the journey through the afterlife as a vehicle for wit and criticism. It remains one of the most original works of medieval Arabic literature.
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Books
رسالة الغفران: الجزء الأول
by أبو العلاء المعري
The blind poet Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri of Syria wrote this long letter to a minor Aleppan scholar in the eleventh century, and it turns into an imagined journey through the Garden: the scholar enters paradise and meets the great poets of Arabic, from al-A'sha and Labid to Antara…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.رسالة الغفران: الجزء الثاني
by أبو العلاء المعري
The second part of al-Ma'arri's Epistle of Forgiveness leaves the Garden for the other side of the next world, where the scholar meets Sibawayh, Di'bil, al-Hallaj, Ibn al-Rumi, Ibn al-Rawandi and other grammarians, poets and freethinkers of earlier centuries and hears what…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.