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Abul 'Ala Al-Ma'arri was born in December 973 in modern day Maarrat al-Nu'man, near Aleppo, in Syria. He was a member of the Banu Sulayman, a noted family of Ma'arra, belonging to the larger Tanukh tribe that had formed part of the aristocracy in Syria dating back many hundreds of years. Aged only four he was rendered virtually blind due to smallpox and whilst this was thought to explain his pessimistic outlook on life and his fellow man it seems too young an age to support that. He was educated at Aleppo, Tripoli and Antioch and the area itself was part of the Abbasid Caliphate, the third Islamic caliphate, during what is now considered the Golden Age of Islam. During his schooling he began...
DIWAN OF ABU'L- 'ALA AL-MA'ARRI Translation & Introduction Paul Smith CONTENTS: The Life and Works of al Ma'arri, The Ruba'i & Qit'a, Ghazal & Qasida: Form, Use, History. Abu'l- 'Ala al-Ma'arri was born in Ma'arra, south of Aleppo in Syria in 973 A.D. He achieved fame as one of greatest of Arab poets. Al-Ma'arri was stricken with smallpox when four and became blind. His early poems in ruba'i form gained great popularity as did his other poems. As he grew older, he was able to travel to Aleppo, Antioch and other Syrian cities. Al-Ma'arri spent 18 months at Baghdad, then the centre of learning and poetry, leaving to return to his native town. There he created the Luzumiyyat, a famous collectio...
Known as “one of the most complex and unusual texts in Arabic literature” (Banipal Magazine), The Epistle of Forgiveness is the lengthy reply by the prolific Syrian poet and prose writer, Abu l-'Ala' al-Ma'arri (d. 449/1057), to a letter by an obscure grammarian, Ibn al-Qari. With biting irony, The Epistle of Forgiveness mocks Ibn al-Qari’s hypocrisy and sycophancy by imagining he has died and arrived with some difficulty in Heaven, where he meets famous poets and philologists from the past. In al-Ma'arri’s imaginative telling, Ibn al-Qari also glimpses Hell and converses with the Devil and various heretics. Al-Ma'arri—a maverick, a vegan, and often branded a heretic himself—seem...
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This book studies the phenomenon of freethinking in medieval Islam, as exemplified in the figures of Ibn al-R wand and Ab Bakr al-R z . It reconstructs their thought and analyzes the relations of the phenomenon to Islamic prophetology and its repercussions in Islamic thought.
When Christendom was groping amid the superstitions of the Dark Ages, and the Norsemen were ravaging the western part of Europe, and the princes of Islam were cutting each other's throats in the name of Allah and his Prophet, Abu'l-Ala'l-Ma'arri was waging his bloodless war against the follies and evils of his age. He attacked the superstitions and false traditions of law and religion, proclaiming the supremacy of the mind; he hurled his trenchant invectives at the tyranny, the bigotry, and the quackery of his times, asserting the supremacy of the soul; he held the standard of reason high above that of authority, fighting to the end the battle of the human intellect. An intransigeant with the exquisite mind of a sage and scholar, his weapons were never idle. But he was, above all, a poet; for when he stood before the eternal mystery of Life and Death, he sheathed his sword and murmured a prayer.
Translations of 12 Arabic plays written and produced during the past thirty years.