al-Ma'arri

Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri (973-1057) was an Arab poet and thinker born in Ma'arra, in what is now northwestern Syria, during the late Abbasid era. In his own time he was a controversial figure for questioning superstition and dogma. Later readers have debated his beliefs at length: some called him a deist or even an atheist, but he insisted in his self-defence, the Zajr al-Nabeh, that he remained a believing Muslim and that his barbs targeted the corruption and ignorance of religious figures rather than the core of the faith.

He lost his sight at the age of four to smallpox, yet this did not stop him from studying. He belonged to the Banu Sulayman, a respected family of the Tanukh tribe, and began writing poetry around the age of eleven or twelve. His education took him through Ma'arra, Aleppo and Antioch. He spent about eighteen months in Baghdad, where literary circles welcomed him, but he refused to sell his poems and eventually returned to his hometown around 1010. There he lived in seclusion for the rest of his life, following an ascetic routine and a strict diet that excluded meat and animal products. He kept up a correspondence with scholars elsewhere and attracted many students, among them Yahya ibn Ali Tibrizi.

His thought centres on reason set against custom, tradition and authority. He condemned superstition and regarded religion, in large part, as an inherited fable that served those who manipulated credulous crowds. His pessimism led him to advise against having children, so that they would be spared the suffering of life, and his compassion for animals made him a vegan, known in his time as a moral vegetarian.

His poetry, gathered in Saqt az-Zand and the Luzumiyat, brought him fame during his lifetime and is still admired for its formal daring. In the Risalat al-Ghufran, a prose epistle, he imagines a journey to paradise where he converses with pre-Islamic poets. The work has often been compared with Dante's Divine Comedy, a comparison Spanish scholar Miguel Asín Palacios pressed hard, though many critics regard it as a mere precursor. His legacy is now read as a defence of critical thinking within the Arab tradition.