In February 2013, as
chaos raged through Syria, a small group of men from the Al Nusra front, the local
Al Qaida affiliate, gathered in the town of Maari, near Aleppo. They were there to settle scores with the
most distinguished sons of that town, one of the most famous poet of the whole
Muslim world, Abu 'L'Ala Ahmad ibn 'Abdallah al-Ma'arri, known simply as Al Ma’arri, was both one
of the greatest of Arab poets and a rare example of a Medieval rationalist. His poetry has relevance to struggles in Syria
and beyond.
You've had your way a long,
long time,
You kings and tyrants,
And still you work injustice hour
by hour.
What ails you that do not
tread a path of glory?
A man may take the field,
although he love the bower.
But some hope a divine leader
with prophetic voice
Will rise amid the gazing
silent ranks.
An idle thought! There's none
to lead but reason,
To point the morning and the
evening ways.
Until I started writing about
disabled people in history, I’d never heard of Al Ma’arri. A Persian colleague pointed me towards him,
explaining how prominent he was in the Islamic world. Yet because Al Ma’arri is so obscure in
ours, it took some detective work to piece together his story.
He was born to a prominent
family in Ma'arra, near Aleppo in 973, during the Abbasid Caliphate. One of his forebears had been the town’s first
Islamic judge, and others had been poets.
At the age of four, Al Ma’arri contracted smallpox and was left blind. He said of himself: “when I was four years
old, there was a decree of fate about me, that I could not distinguish a
full-grown camel from a tender young camel newly born.” However, he was to make up for his lack of
sight by having an extraordinarily powerful memory.
Beginning his career as a poet
at the age of 11, Al Ma’aari travelled around the region, to Aleppo, to Antioch,
in modern day Turkey, and then to Baghdad, receiving a religious, linguistic
and literary education through learning the poetic tradition. He may also
visited the Christian monastery of Dayr-al-Farus on his way to Tripoli, where
he was exposed to Hellenic philosophy. Maybe it was the Hellenic emphasis on
skepticism and rational argument that awakened doubts in his own mind.
His first collection of poems
was called The Tinder Spark. In
1004, his father, who had been his first teacher, died, and a few years later
he travelled to Baghdad, to consult the libraries there. At the
time, Baghdad would have been thronged with Christians, Jews, Buddhists,
Zoroastrians, Sufis, and also rationalists.
Although welcomed in the literary salons of Baghdad, he only stayed in
that city for about eighteen months.
It’s not clear whether he left because he ran out of money, or because
of literary arguments, or homesickness.
He may even have been expelled for asking too many critical questions.
Returning home, he was
heartbroken to find that his mother had already died. In reaction, Al Ma'arri announced his
intention of becoming an ascetic, and of avoiding other people. But like many aspiring hermits, Al Ma’arri’s growing reputation brought many
students and admirers to hear him lecture.
I wonder whether he was frustrated by all the attention, or glad of his
popularity?
He certainly had something to
communicate, because he went on to create another innovative and radical
collection of verse, the Luzumiyyat. This title, translated as “Unnecessary necessities”,
apparently referred both to his attitude to living, and to the obscure
vocabulary and complex structure of his poetry.
What appeals to me about his poems is not just the originality of his
ideas, but also the directness of his language. It feels like a modern thinker is speaking
to you, not a contemporary of William the Conqueror. Yet unlike for example Jalludin Rumi, the
13th century Persian who is apparently the best selling poet in
America, there seems to be no fresh modern translation of Al Ma’arri available
in the West. Instead we have to rely on
Reynolds Alleyne Nicholson, whose Studies
in Islamic Poetry was written during the First World War and reissued in
1967.
I do not know how Al Maa’rri
coped with his blindness in his daily life.
He composed his writings entirely in his head, and dictated it to others. He also conducted an extensive
correspondence. We think that he never
married. But he was held in high esteem
by his community, and I imagine his needs were met. After all, he was in his eighty-fifth year
when he died, which would have been extremely old for the eleventh century. We known from a Persian poet who visited Al
Ma’arri when he was in his seventies that he was “the chief man in the town,
very rich, revered by the inhabitants and surrounded by more than two hundred
students who came from all parts to attend his lectures on literature and
poetry.”
None of this
explains the actions of those men from the Al Nusra Front, who made a beeline
for his statue near Aleppo and beheaded it. What had he done, that Islamists would take
belated revenge against him? Given
recent terrorist outrages, vandalism to a mere statue is minor news. But the fact that Al-Maari was seen as an
important target for Islamists nearly a thousand years after his death says
something about this writer’s significance.
Al Ma'arri was controversial in his own time, and is
regarded as a heretic today, because he was one of the rare examples of
religious skepticism in the Islamic world. For example, he rejected the idea that Islam
had a monopoly on truth. He thought it was simply a matter of geographical accident what
faith people adopted and in any case, to quote the man himself:
They all err—Moslems, Jews,
Christians, and Zoroastrians:
Humanity follows two
world-wide sects:
One, man intelligent without
religion,
The second, religious without
intellect.
Those men are rushing towards
decomposition,
All religions are equally
strayed.
If one asks me, what is my
doctrine,
It is clear:
Am I not, like others,
An imbecile?
To me, he often feels like a
wittier and more self-effacing version of Richard Dawkins. Although Al Ma’ari did not believe in divine
revelation, he was probably a deist rather than an actual atheist. In other words, he may have accepted the
existence of God, but did not believe that God intervened in the world. Certainly for Al Ma'arri, reason alone should
guide human beings. In particular, he
was critical of the self-interested and often corrupt edifice of religion,
which he thought was a human-devised activity:
O fools, awake! The rites you
sacred hold
Are but a cheat contrived by
men of old,
Who lusted after wealth and
gained their lust
And died in baseness—and their
law is dust.
For example, he rejected the orthodox
Muslim duty to make the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, which he even described
as a pagan journey. Nor did he believe in an afterlife:
Death's debt is then and there
Paid down by dying men;
But it is a promise bare
That they shall rise again.
When you hear a poem like this
one, you can understand why an Islamist would reach for the Sharia law
concerning heresy. It’s a wonder to me
that the beheading didn’t happen to Al Ma’ari, and that he had a statue in
Syria in the first place:
The
Prophets, too, among us come to teach,
Are one
with those who from the pulpit preach;
They
pray, and slay, and pass away, and yet
Our
ills are as the pebbles on the beach.
Islam
does not have a monopoly on truth:
For Al Ma'arri, there was
either no ultimate meaning to life, or at the very least it was unknowable:
Two fates still hold us fast,
A future and a past;
Two vessels' vast embrace
Surrounds us—time and space.
And when we ask what end
Our maker did intend,
Some answering voice is heard
That utters no plain word.
His work promotes a pessimism
about human life and death, which I find very appealing and modern:
When I would string the pearls
of my desire,
Alas, life's too short thread
denies them room.
Huge volumes cannot yet
contain entire
Man's hope; his life is but a
summary of doom.
For him, life was
ephemeral. Because of the low opinion he
held about life, Al Ma’ari felt it better not to have children, so as to spare
them the pains of existence. He wanted
the epitaph on his grave to read “This wrong was by my father done to me, but
never by me to anyone”. It was for this reason that he never
married. He also opposed all violence
and killing, becoming a vegan and avoiding the use of animal skins in clothing
and footwear, and urging that no living creature should be harmed, as in his
poem "I No Longer Steal from Nature":
Do not unjustly eat fish the
water has given up,
And do not desire as food the
flesh of slaughtered animals,
Or the white milk of mothers
who intended its pure draught
for their young, not noble
ladies.
And do not grieve the
unsuspecting birds by taking eggs;
for injustice is the worst of
crimes.
And spare the honey which the
bees get industriously
from the flowers of fragrant
plants;
For they did not store it that
it might belong to others,
Nor did they gather it for
bounty and gifts.
I washed my hands of all this;
and wish that I
Perceived my way before my
hair went gray!
He seems to have been equally
radical in his political thinking. For
example, in another of his poems, a number of talking animals, including a
donkey, a camel, a horse and a fox pass judgement on the Fatimid rulers of
Aleppo.
His third great work was Risalat-al-Ghufran, or the Epistle
of Forgiveness, comparable to Dante’s Divine Comedy, which it may have
influenced. In this poem, the hero
visits the Gardens of Paradise, where he meets heathen poets who have found
forgiveness – again, violating Islamic doctrine. The work remains controversial, even today: in
2007, the Algerian Ministry of Religious Affairs banned it from the
International Book Fair in Algiers.
We may have the idea that atheism was invented during the
Enlightenment, but Al Ma'arri is not the only religious sceptic in the Islamic
world. The more famous Persian poet Omar
Khayyam wrote in the twelfth century “Deaf to religion, this is my credo”. Unlike other heretics of the Islamic world
such as Al-Hallaj and Ibn Muquaffa, Al Ma'arri avoided being killed for his
free thinking beliefs. He was charged with heresy although never prosecuted. There is a spiritual quest in his work, a
strand of monotheism, and perhaps this piety allowed him to appear more
orthodox than he was. He was also held
in great esteem by his neighbours and fellow citizens, which probably
helped. As an example of the irony with
which he approaches conventional subjects, there’s another poem where he depict
himself arguing with the Angel of Death about the origin of certain Arabic
words, in order to postphone the moment of his own mortality by another hour.
Being blind at that time was a different thing to today. For most of human history, disability was not
a matter of identity. Only comparatively
recently were people with different forms of illness and impairment considered
as one category. To talk of “disabled
people” or “people with disabilities” is a modern development, and the term disability
itself only came into usage in the twentieth century. On the other hand, in historical eras when
smallpox, polio, measles and other diseases were rife, illness and impairment
would have been very common. Although
many disabled people died prematurely, it is likely that prevalence of
disability was much higher.
Historically, blindness was always seen as much of
blessing as a curse. One recurring narrative suggests that blind
people had deeper insight by way of compensation. Homer after all was blind, as well as the prophetic Tiresias of Greek mythodology. A number of historical figures are known to
have been blind. For example, the revered C14th Italian composer Francesco
Landini and his French contemporary, the blind knight Jean l’Aveugle (d.
1346), who was represented as noble and heroic.
In
C15th England, the poets John Gower (d. 1408) and John Audelay (died c. 1426) both
wrote about their blindness.
In medieval Islam, blind people were not ostracized or
seen as less than perfect. This
positive attitude stems from the Koran and the Hadith, where disability is seen
as part of the human condition. In one
tradition, the Prophet Muhammed is preaching in Mecca, when a blind follower
comes to ask about interpreting the Koran, and the Prophet turns away. Muhammed is then rebuked, because everyone
who comes full of eagerness and in awe of God should be included. The Prophet’s companion Abdullah
Ibn Umm Maktum was blind, but was nevertheless responsible for the call to
prayer, was put in charge of Medina when the
Prophet was away, and finally died on the battlefield holding the Muslim
standard.
Al Ma’ari’s poem,
The Body is Your Vase, expresses some of this approach to disability:
The body, which gives
you during life a form,
Is but your vase: be
not deceived, my soul!
Cheap is the bowl for
storing honey in,
But precious for the
contents of the bowl.
Al Ma’arri lived
at a time and in a culture where blind people were not necessarily
excluded. He came from an elite family,
and he won fame due to his originality and intelligence. In the words of his translator, Reynolds
Nicholson, he was equally opposed to injustice, hypocrisy and
superstition. I find it striking that such
an Arab free thinker was writing half a millennium before Voltaire. The reason that many of Al Ma’ari’s works are
lost to us is that the Crusaders wreaked devastation that the Crusades wreaked
across Syria in the following centuries.
This, too, is a timely thought. I look forward to the day when Christians,
Muslims and free thinkers can read Al Ma’arri in peace and he is once again
revered in his Syrian birthplace.
