The Luzumiyat of Abu'l-Ala. Abu al-Ala al-Maarri
The Luzumiyat of Abu'l-Ala / Select from his Luzum ma la Yalzam and Suct us-Zand
TO ABU’L-ALA
In thy fountained peristyles of Reason
Glows the light and flame of desert noons;
And in the cloister of thy pensive Fancy
Wisdom burns the spikenard of her moons.
Closed by Fate the portals of the dwelling
Of thy sight, the light thus inward flowed;
And on the shoulders of the crouching Darkness
Thou hast risen to the highest road.
I have seen thee walking with Canopus
Through the stellar spaces of the night;
I have heard thee asking thy Companion,
“Where be now my staff, and where thy light?”
Abu’l-Ala, in the heaving darkness,
Didst thou not the whisperings hear of me?
In thy star-lit wilderness, my Brother,
Didst thou not a burdened shadow see?
I have walked and I have slept beside thee,
I have laughed and I have wept as well;
I have heard the voices of thy silence
Melting in thy Jannat and thy hell.
I remember, too, that once the Saki
Filled the antique cup and gave it thee;
Now, filled with the treasures of thy wisdom,
Thou dost pass that very cup to me.
By the God of thee, my Syrian Brother,
Which is best, the Saki’s cup or thine?
Which the mystery divine uncovers —
If the cover covers aught divine.
And if it lies hid in the soul of silence
Like incense in the dust of ambergris,
Wouldst thou burn it to perfume the terror
Of the caverns of the dried-up seas?
Where’er it be, Oh! let it be, my Brother. —
Though “thrice-imprisoned,”1 thou hast forged us more
Solid weapons for the life-long battle
Than all the Heaven-taught Armorers of yore.
“Thrice-imprisoned,” thou wert e’en as mighty,
In the boundless kingdom of the mind,
As the whirlwind that compels the ocean,
As the thunder that compels the wind.
“Thrice-imprisoned,” thou wert freer truly
Than the liegeless Arab on his mare, —
Freer than the bearers of the sceptre, —
Freer than the winged lords of the air.
“Thrice-imprisoned,” thou hast sung of freedom
As but a few of all her heroes can;
Thou hast undermined the triple prison
Of the mind and heart and soul of man.
In thy fountained peristyles of Reason
Glows the light and flame of desert noons;
And in the cloister of thy pensive Fancy
Wisdom burns the spikenard of her moons.
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.
Abu’l-Ala’l-Ma’arri,2 the Lucretius of Islam, the Voltaire of the East, was born in the spring of the year 973 A.D., in the obscure village of Ma’arrah,3 which is about eighteen hours’ journey south of Halab (Aleppo). And instead of Ahmad ibn Abdallah ibn Sulaiman ut-Tanukhi (of the tribe of Tanukh), he was called Abu’l-Ala (the Father of the Sublime), by which patronymic of distinction he is popularly known throughout the Arabic speaking world.
When a boy, Abu’l-Ala was instructed by his father; and subsequently he was sent to Halab, where he pursued his studies under the tutelage of the grammarian Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn us-Sad. His literary proclivity was evinced in his boyhood, and he wrote verse, we are told, before he was ten. Of these juvenile pieces, however, nothing was preserved.
He was about five years old when he fell a victim to small-pox and almost lost his sight from it. But a weakness in his eyes continued to trouble him and he became, in middle age, I presume, totally blind.4 Some of his biographers would have us believe he was born blind; others state that he completely lost his sight when he was attacked by the virulent disease; and a few intimate that he could see slightly at least with the right eye. As to whether or not he was blind when he was sent to Halab to pursue his studies, his biographers do not agree. My theory, based on the careful perusal of his poems and on a statement advanced by one of his biographers,5 is that he lost his sight gradually, and total blindness must have come upon him either in his youth or his middle age.6 Were we to believe that he was born blind or that he suffered the complete loss of his sight in his boyhood, we should be at a loss to know, not how he wrote his books, for that was done by dictation; not how he taught his pupils, for that was done by lectures; but how he himself was taught in the absence in those days of a regular system of instruction for the blind.
In 1010 A.D. he visited Baghdad, the centre of learning and intelligence and the capital of the Abbaside Khalifs, where he passed about two years and became acquainted with most of the literary men of the age.7 He attended the lectures and the readings of the leading doctors and grammarians, meeting with a civil reception at the hand of most of them.
He also journeyed to Tripoli,8 which boasted, in those days, of many public libraries; and, stopping at Ladhekiyah, he lodged in a monastery where he met and befriended a very learned monk. They discussed theology and metaphysics, digressing now and then into the profane. Indeed, the skepticism which permeates Abu’l-Ala’s writings must have been nursed in that convent by both the monk and the poet.
These are virtually the only data extant showing the various sources of Abu’l-Ala’s learning; but to one endowed with a keen perception, a powerful intellect, a prodigious memory, together with strong innate literary predilections, they seem sufficient. He was especially noted for the extraordinary memory he possessed; and around this our Arab biographers and historians weave a thick net of anecdotes, or rather fables. I have no doubt that one with such a prodigious memory could retain in a few minutes what the average person could not; but when we are told that Abu’l-Ala once heard one of his pupils speaking with a friend in a foreign tongue, and repeated there and then the long conversation, word for word, without having the slightest idea
In one of his poems he speaks of three prisons, his body being the third. Here is Professor Nicholson’s translation:
My learned friend, Count E. de Mulinen, called my attention to the work of Von Kremer on Abu’l-Ala. And I have seen copies of a certain German Asiatic Review in which were published translations, made by that eminent Orientalist, of many poems from the Luzumiyat. He speaks of Abu’l-Ala as one of the greatest moralists of all times, whose profound genius anticipated much that is commonly attributed to the so-called modern spirit of enlightenment.
Professor D. S. Margoliouth has also translated into English the Letters of Abu’l-Ala, which were published with the Arabic Text at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1898. Also Professor Raynold A. Nicholson, in his work, “A Literary History of the Arabs,” discusses the poet at length and renders into English some poems from the Luzumiyat. A work was published by Charles Carrington, Paris, 1904, under the title, “Un Précurseur d’Omar Khayyam, Le Poéte Aveugle: Extraits de Poémes et de Lettres d’Abu’l-Ala al-Ma’arri.” And another, “The Diwan of Abu’l-Ala,” done into English by Henry Baerlein, who must have helped himself freely to the Quatrains of Von Kremer.
For a picturesque description of the squalidness and sordidness of Ma’arrah and its people, see Letter XX of “The Letters of Abu’l-Ala,” Oxford Edition.
When he visited Baghdad he was about thirty-seven years of age. And when he went to attend a lecture there by one of the leading scholars, he was called by the lecturer,
“He was four years of age when he had the attack of small-pox. The sight of his left eye was entirely lost and the eyeball of his right had turned white. Al-Hafiz us-Silafi relates: ‘Abu Muhammad Abdallah told me that he visited him (Abu’l-Ala) once with his uncle and found him sitting on an old hair matting. He was very old, and the disease that attacked him in his boyhood had left its deep traces on his emaciated face. He bade me come near him and blessed me as he placed his hand on my head. I was a boy then, and I can picture him before me now. I looked into his eyes and remarked how the one was horribly protruding, and the other, buried in its socket, could barely be seen.’” – Ibn Khillikan.
“How long he retained any sort of vision is not certain. His frequent references in his writings to stars, flowers, and the forms of the Arabic letters imply that he could see a little at least some years after this calamity.” – D. S. Margoliouth: The Letters of Abu’l-Ala.
“He used to play chess and
For an interesting account of Literary Society in Baghdad see Renan’s “Islam and Science”; also the Biography to the Letters of Abu’l-Ala. Prof. Margoliouth, though not unfair in his judgment of the poet, is unnecessarily captious at times. He would seem partial to the suffrage of orthodox Mohammedans with regard to Abu’l-Ala’s unorthodox religious views. But they have a reason, these ulama, for endeavoring to keep a genius like Abu’l-Ala within the pale of belief. Which reason, let us hope, has no claim on Prof. Margoliouth. And in his attempt to depreciate Abu’l-Ala as a disinterested and independent scholar and poet, he does not escape the inconsistency which often follows in the wake of cavil. Read this, for instance:
“Like many of those who have failed to secure material prosperity, he found comfort in a system which flatters the vanity of those who have not succeeded by teaching that success is not worth attaining.”
And this, not on the same page perhaps, but close to it:
“For though other roads towards obtaining the means of supporting himself at Baghdad have been open to him,
Biography of Abu’l-Ala by Adh-Dhahabi.