The Epistle of Forgiveness. Abu l-'Ala al-Ma'arri

      NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

       New York and London

      Table of Contents

      Letter from the General Editor

      Abbreviations used in the Introduction and Translation

      Introduction

       Notes to the Introduction

       The Epistle of Forgiveness

       On Hypocrisy

       The Sheikh’s Return to Aleppo

       Heretics, Apostates, and Impious Poets

       Old Age, Grave Sins, Pilgrimages, and Sincere Repentance

       The Stolen Dinars and the Number Eighty

       Notes

      Glossary

      Bibliography

      Concordance with Risālat al-Ghufrān, 9th edition, edited by Bint al-Shāṭiʾ

      Index of Verses

      About the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute

      About this E-book

      About the Editor-Translators

      Library of Arabic Literature

       Editorial Board

      General Editor

      Philip F. Kennedy, New York University

      Executive Editors

      James E. Montgomery, University of Cambridge

      Shawkat M. Toorawa, Cornell University

      Editors

      Julia Bray, University of Oxford

      Michael Cooperson, University of California, Los Angeles

      Joseph E. Lowry, University of Pennsylvania

      Tahera Qutbuddin, University of Chicago

      Devin J. Stewart, Emory University

      Managing Editor

      Chip Rossetti

      Volume Editor

      James E. Montgomery

      Letter from the General Editor

      The Library of Arabic Literature is a new series offering Arabic editions and English ‎translations of key works of classical and pre-modern Arabic literature, as well as anthologies ‎and thematic readers. Books in the series are edited and translated by distinguished scholars of ‎Arabic and Islamic studies, and are published in parallel-text format with Arabic and English ‎on facing pages. The Library of Arabic Literature includes texts from the pre-Islamic era to the ‎cusp of the modern period, and encompasses a wide range of genres, including poetry, poetics, ‎fiction, religion, philosophy, law, science, history, and historiography.‎

      Supported by a grant from the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute, and established in ‎partnership with NYU Press, the Library of Arabic Literature produces authoritative Arabic ‎editions and modern, lucid English translations, with the goal of introducing the Arabic ‎literary heritage to scholars and students, as well as to a general audience of readers.‎

      Philip F. Kennedy

       General Editor, Library of Arabic Literature

      Abbreviations used in the Introduction and Translation

      Introduction

      At the end of the first part of al-Maʿarrī’s Epistle of Forgiveness the author says that he has been “long-winded in this part. Now we shall turn to reply to the letter.” In other words, Part One is merely the introduction to the proper answer to Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s letter. This introduction is in fact what made the Epistle famous, the part that has received the lion’s share and more of the attention of critics and translators. One is reminded of the even lengthier introduction that Ibn Khaldūn wrote several centuries later to his History: this Muqaddimah or Introduction has become a seminal text, one of the great achievements in the intellectual history of the world.

Part One of the Epistle of Forgiveness is a text about the idea of forgiveness, cast in the shape of an imaginary narrative in which the protagonist is, unusually, neither a fictional persona nor a thinly disguised version of the author, but the addressee and recipient of the Epistle, Ibn al-Qāriḥ, “the Sheikh.” In Part Two¹ al-Maʿarrī turns directly to Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s somewhat rambling letter, commenting on it point by point, topic by topic, in the order in which they appear in the letter. As a result, Part Two is equally rambling, jumping from item to item, without the overarching narrative and the more or less unified theme (in spite of all its digressions) of Part One.

      One of al-Maʿarrī’s prominent methods in responding to Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s letter is to treat the points made by Ibn al-Qāriḥ with profound and pervading irony, for it is rather obvious that, just as in Part One, the writer is mocking his correspondent. This begins right at the start: when al-Maʿarrī declares the Sheikh to be free of hypocrisy we can be certain that he means exactly the opposite of what he is saying. Much of the rest of the point-by-point reply should be read in the same light. When he objects to the Sheikh’s praise by playing down his own learning, one suspects that he was not unaware of his superior erudition. The