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Оглавлениеرسالة الغفران
لأبي العلاء المعرّيّ
المجلّد الأوّل
The Epistle of Forgiveness
or
A Pardon to Enter the Garden
by
Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī
edited and translated by
Geert Jan van Gelder and Gregor Schoeler
Volume One:
A Vision of Heaven and Hell
preceded by
Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s Epistle
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
Table of Contents
Letter from the General Editor
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations used in the Introduction and Translation
Introduction
A Note on the Text
A Note on the Edition
Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s Hopes for a Meeting with al-Maʿarrī
Criticism of Heresy and Heretics
On Fate
Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s Complaints of Old Age
The Prophet at the Beginning of his Mission
Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s Weaknesses and Self-Reproach
The Sheikh Exculpates Himself
Praise of al-Maʿarrī
On Memorizing and Forgetting; Ibn al-Qāriḥ Complains Again
al-Maʿarrī’s Description of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s Letter
Description of Paradise
A Drinking Scene
The Sheikh’s Excursion
The Conversation with al-Aʿshā Maymūn
The Conversation with Zuhayr
The Conversation with ʿAbīd ibn al-Abraṣ
The Conversation with ʿAdī ibn Zayd
The Conversation with Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī
The Conversation with the Two Nābighahs, al-Dhubyānī and al-Jaʿdī
The Geese of Paradise
The First Conversation with Labīd
The Singing of the Damsels
An Altercation in Paradise
The Conversation with Ḥassān ibn Thābit
The Five One-Eyed Men of Qays
The Story of Tamīm ibn Ubayy ibn Muqbil
The Sheikh’s Story of his Resurrection, the Day of Judgment, and his Entry into Paradise
The Sheikh’s Conversation with Riḍwān and Zufar, Guards of the Garden
The Conversation with ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib
The Conversation with Fāṭimah, the Prophet’s Daughter
The Prophet’s Intercession
The Crossing of the Bridging Path
The Second Conversation with Riḍwān; the Entry into Paradise
The Conversation with “the Camel-Herd” and Ḥumayd ibn Thawr
The Second Conversation with Labīd
A Banquet in Paradise
The Conversation with the two “Locusts”
The Conversation with Jirān al-ʿAwd
The Dance of the Damsels
Beer, Marinated Peacock, and Roast Goose
The Conversation with the Two Damsels
The Tree of Damsels
The Paradise of the Demons
The Poetry of the Demons
Abū Hadrash al-Khaytaʿūr’s Heroic Deeds
Animals in Paradise
In the Furthest Reaches of Paradise; A Conversation with al-Ḥuṭayʾah
The Conversation with al-Khansāʾ
The Conversation with Satan
The Conversation with Bashshār ibn Burd
The Conversation with Imruʾ al-Qays
The Conversation with ʿAntarah
The Conversation with ʿAlqamah
The Conversation with ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm
al-Ḥārith ibn Ḥillizah
The Conversation with Ṭarafah
The Conversation with Aws ibn Ḥajar
The Conversations with the Hudhalī poets Abū Kabīr and Ṣakhr al-Ghayy
The Conversation with al-Akhṭal
The Conversation with Muhalhil
The Conversation with the Two Poets Called Muraqqish
The Conversation with the Two Brigand Poets, al-Shanfarā and Taʾabbaṭa Sharrā
A Meeting with Adam
The Snakes of Paradise
The Sheikh’s Return to his Paradisical Damsel
In the Paradise of the Rajaz Poets
The Joys of Paradise
Notes
Glossary of Names and Terms
Bibliography
Further Reading
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. Mongotmery
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
To our spouses, Sheila and Christa, asking their Forgiveness for spending so many hours in al-Maʿarrī’s company instead of theirs.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful for the encouragement and help we received from the LAL editors, in particular Philip Kennedy, Shawkat Toorawa, and James Montgomery. Our labors were alleviated by the great efficiency and expertise of the LAL managing editor, Chip Rossetti; of the digital production manager Stuart Brown; of Carolyn Brunelle, who extracted a Glossary from our endnotes; and from the copy editor, Kelly Zaug. Of all these it was James Montgomery who contributed most, with his countless stylistic and linguistic improvements and his editorial accuracy. If, on very rare occasions, we disagreed with him and stuck to our own ideas, we hope for his forgiveness—which is, after all, the leitmotiv of the present work.
Abbreviations used in the Introduction and Translation
| EI2 | Encyclopaedia of Islam, New [= Second] Edition |
| Gh | Risālat al-Ghufrān / The Epistle of Forgiveness |
| IQ | Risālat Ibn al-Qāriḥ / The Epistle of Ibn al-Qāriḥ |
| L | (in prosody) long syllable |
| O | (in prosody) overlong syllable |
| Q | Qurʾan |
| S | (in prosody) short syllable |
Introduction
The lengthy, mocking reply by a cantankerous maverick, obsessed with lexicography and grammar, to a rambling, groveling, and self-righteous letter by an obscure grammarian and mediocre stylist: this does not sound, prima facie, like a masterwork to be included in a series of Arabic classics. It is even doubtful whether it firmly belongs to the canonical works of Arabic literature. The maverick author, Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, was certainly famous, or infamous, as we shall see, but in the entry on him in the biographical dictionary by Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1282),1 who calls him the author of “many famous compositions and widely known epistles,” the present work is not even mentioned; in the very long entry on him in a somewhat earlier, similar work by Yāqūt (d. 626/1229) it is merely listed in a long list of works, without commentary.2 It is true that the same Yāqūt has an entry on the rather obscure author of the original letter, the grammarian Ibn al-Qāriḥ, whom he describes as “the one who wrote a well-known letter to Abū l-ʿAlāʾ, known as ‘the Epistle of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’,”3 which suggests that Abū l-ʿAlāʾ’s reply was famous. However, the work is not often mentioned or discussed in pre-modern times, unlike Abū l-ʿAlāʾ’s poetry.
As happens occasionally in the history of Arabic literature, the Risālat al-Ghufrān (The Epistle of Forgiveness), owes its present fame mostly to the rediscovery in modern times, by a western Arabist. Reynold A. Nicholson, in a letter to the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,4 describes a collection of manuscripts gathered by his grandfather, to which, as he writes, “I would call special attention, because it is, as I believe, a genuine work, hitherto unknown and undescribed, of the famous blind poet and man of letters, Abū ’l ʿAlā al-Maʿarrī.” Over the following few years, between 1900 and 1902, he published a partial edition with a summary and at times paraphrasing translation of the contents in a series of articles in the same journal.5 The Epistle’s subsequent rise to fame is mainly due to the fact that it seemed to prefigure Dante’s Commedia Divina and that misguided attempts were made to prove the influence of the Arabic work on the Italian. This thesis has now been abandoned and one can appreciate Risālat al-Ghufrān in its own right.
Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī
The earliest appearance of al-Maʿarrī in Arabic literature is found in a work by a contemporary, one of the greatest anthologists of Arabic literature, al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038). In the supplement to his Yatīmat al-dahr, he quotes a certain poet, Abū l-Ḥasan al-Dulafī al-Maṣṣīsī, who told him:
In Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān I came across a true marvel. I saw a blind man, a witty poet, who played chess and backgammon, and who was at home in every genre of seriousness and jesting. He was called Abū l-ʿAlāʾ. I heard him say, “I praise God for being blind, just as others praise Him for being able to see. He did me a favor and did me a good turn by sparing me the sight of boring and hateful people.”6
Our author is usually called Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī,7 the first part (literally “Father of Loftiness”) not being a teknonym8 in this case—for he never had children—but an added honorific name or nickname, and the second part derived from his place of birth, Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān, or al-Maʿarrah for short, a town in northern Syria, between Aleppo and Homs. The medieval biographical dictionaries, usually arranged alphabetically, list him under his given name, Aḥmad, and supply not only the name of his father, ʿAbd Allāh, and grandfather, Sulaymān, but also some twenty to thirty further generations, tracing him back to the legendary realm of pre-Islamic Arab genealogy; he belonged to the famous tribal confederation called Tanūkh, entitling him to the epithet al-Tanūkhī. He was born toward sunset on Friday, 27 Rabīʿ Awwal, 363h (26 December ad 973) in a respectable family of religious scholars and judges. At the age of four he lost his eyesight due to smallpox. He made up for this disability by having a truly prodigious memory, about which several anecdotes are related; apparently he had the aural equivalent of a photographic memory and he stood out in a milieu that was already accustomed to memorization on a large scale. His blindness meant that he wrote his numerous works by dictating them; his pupil al-Tibrīzī mentioned that al-Maʿarrī at one stage had four well-qualified secretaries and a servant girl (jāriyah), who wrote down his dictations.9 As a boy he studied with several teachers, including his own father, in his hometown and Aleppo; his main interest was poetry and he became an ardent admirer of the great poet al-Mutanabbī (d. 354/965), on whose poetry he was to write a commentary, entitled Muʿjiz Aḥmad (Aḥmad’s Miracle), exploiting not only the fact that he shared his given name with the poet but also, rather daringly, alluding to the Qurʾan, which was the prophetic “miracle” (muʿjizah) of the Prophet Muḥammad, who is sometimes called Aḥmad.
It seems that his own poetic efforts date from an early age, when he was eleven or twelve. Normally the poetry of a poet is collected in a single dīwān, in which poems are arranged alphabetically on rhyme letter, or chronologically, or thematically. Most of al-Maʿarrī’s poetry however, as far as it is preserved (for many of his works are lost), is contained in two very distinct major collections; yet more poems are found in some minor works. His early poetry, in a dīwān called Saqṭ (or Siqṭ) al-zand (The Spark of the Fire Stick10), shows the influence of al-Mutanabbī. The second collection contains his later poetry and it is very different. Instead of more or less conventional odes, it offers nearly sixteen hundred mostly short pieces. Thematically and stylistically the collection is unusually coherent: it is a sustained invective on mankind in general, a glorification of wisdom and reason, and it expresses skepticism to a degree that made the poet very suspect in pious circles. Dogmatically, however, it cannot be called coherent, for doubts about the Resurrection and afterlife or the value of prophethood alternate with professions of orthodox belief. The title, Luzūm mā lā yalzam,11 literally “the necessity of what is not necessary,” could also be translated as “the self-imposed constraints,” one of these being a form of rich rhyme, involving two rhyme consonants instead of one and using all the letters of the alphabet as rhyme consonant. Another constant trait is the sustained use of figures such as paronomasia. The poems are riddled with allusions and studded with rare words and recondite expressions.12 In order to refute allegations of unbelief detected in this collection he wrote a work called Zajr al-nābiḥ (Chiding Away the Barking Dog), parts of which are extant.13
Al-Maʿarrī’s gloomy outlook on the world probably has something to do with his unsuccessful attempt to settle in Baghdad in 399/1008. He returned to al-Maʿarrah after some eighteen months, partly, it seems, because he was unable to secure suitable patronage and because he fell out with a leading personality in the cultural and literary life of the metropolis, al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā. They quarreled about the merits of al-Mutanabbī; when al-Murtaḍā made a disparaging remark about the poet, al-Maʿarrī retorted with a cleverly allusive and insinuating quotation, after which he was unceremoniously dragged by his feet from the literary gathering. Henceforth, for the rest of his long life, with only one brief exception, he remained in his birthplace, describing himself as rahīn (or rahn) al-maḥbisayn, “hostage to two prisons,” meaning his blindness and his seclusion; in an epigram he mentions a third prison, his soul being confined to his body.14 Although contemporaries mention that he was wealthy and greatly esteemed in his town, he lived like an ascetic. He was obviously fond of various forms of self-imposed constraints. He abstained from marriage and sexual intercourse; the inscription on his grave says “This is my father’s crime against me, | a crime that I did not commit to anyone.”15 His diet was extremely frugal, consisting chiefly of lentils, with figs for sweet;16 and, very unusually for a Muslim, he was not only a vegetarian, but a vegan who abstained from meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, and honey, because he did not want to kill or hurt animals or deprive them of their food. This was an attitude he had to defend when he was attacked by the famous Ismāʿīlī ideologue and “chief propagandist” (dāʿī l-duʿāh), Abū Naṣr al-Muʾayyad fī l-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, a kind of Grand Mufti of the Fāṭimids in Cairo (whose influence extended to Syria). This attack branded him as a heretic who tried to pose as someone “more merciful than the Merciful,” i.e., God, who, after all, allowed the consumption of meat. The interesting exchange of letters between the theologian and Abū l-ʿAlāʾ has been preserved.17 It is not clear from where he derived his ideas; his critics speculated that he might have adopted the vegan lifestyle from the Indian Brahmans.18
In spite of his ascetic attitude, Abū l-ʿAlāʾ was no true recluse, someone who cuts himself off from society. On the contrary, people flocked to him and scholars and viziers visited him, paying their respect and hoping to learn from him. Among his pupils were famous philologists such as the poet and critic Ibn Sinān al-Khafājī (d. 466/1074) and Abū Zakariyyā Yaḥyā ibn ʿAlī al-Tibrīzī (d. 502/1109). The latter reported that when Abū l-ʿAlāʾ died, after a short illness at the age of eighty-four in the month Rabīʿ al-Awwal of 449h (May, ad 1057), eighty-four poets recited elegies at his grave;19 whether or not this is true, several such elegies have been preserved. Abū l-ʿAlāʾ also took a lively interest in the intricate politics of his own time and place (involving several dynasties and realms, such as the Ḥamdānids, Būyids, Mirdāsids, Fāṭimids, and the infidel Byzantines); an interest that is apparent from references in his poetry and from some of his letters and prose works. Probably the most interesting work in this respect is his Risālat al-Ṣāhil wa-l-shāḥij (The Epistle of the Neigher and the Brayer), a lengthy work in which the main characters are animals, notably a horse and a mule. Speaking animals had been familiar to the Arabs since the famous collection of animal fables, Kalīlah wa-Dimnah, was translated from the Pahlavi into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. ca. 139/756),20 but Abū l-ʿAlāʾ’s book, composed around the year 144/1021, does not contain fables; it is a commentary on contemporary politics involving the Mirdāsid and Fāṭimid dynasties and the Byzantines. It also discusses matters such as taxation. At the same time, like other works of his, it is full of digressions on highly technical matters in the fields of grammar, lexicography, poetics, prosody, and rhyme.
Abū l-ʿAlāʾ ranks as one of the great poets in Arabic literary history. Unlike most poets of the first rank he also excelled as a prose writer. In addition to the present work and the Epistle of the Neigher and the Brayer, mention should be made of a controversial work of his: al-Fuṣūl wa-l-ghāyāt (Paragraphs and Periods). It is composed in an exceptionally difficult idiom (the author regularly interrupts his text with a commentary and explanation of obscure words and expressions), but once one has grasped the sense the work is, at first sight, not shocking: it is a series of homiletic, sermon-like texts, containing praise of God, which call for piety, asceticism, and submission to Fate. The controversy that arose about the book is on account of its style and its form, together with the suspicion that the author’s intention was to outdo the Qurʾan. It is composed in an intricate form of rhymed prose, with rhymes interwoven on two text levels: short range within the various sections or paragraphs (fuṣūl), and long range, because the last words (“ends”, ghāyāt) of successive sections also rhyme in an alphabetic series. It uses many idioms that have a Qurʾanic flavor. Altogether, it is not surprising that some thought that its author intended to surpass the Qurʾan, an attitude clearly blasphemous to orthodox Muslims, who believe that the style of the Qurʾan, God’s literal words, is inimitable and unsurpassable. When someone rhetorically asked how al-Fuṣūl wa-l-ghāyāt could possibly be compared to the Surahs and āyāt (“verses”) of the Qurʾan, Abū l-ʿAlāʾ reputedly replied, “Wait until it has been polished by tongues for four hundred years; then see how it is,”21 an answer that would not endear him to the pious.
Although he has been called “the poet among philosophers and the philosopher among poets,” it does not do him justice to consider him a philosopher. It is probably wrong to see a consistent world view in his works. He is a humanist who generally hates humanity and loves animals, a Muslim who expresses many unorthodox thoughts (such as his frequently expressed doubts about a bodily resurrection), a rationalist, a skeptic, and a stoic, a precursor of Arthur Schopenhauer. But above all he is a witty and erudite man of letters, a satirist and moralist, with an incredible command of the Arabic language.
Among his other works that have been preserved is a treatise on morphology (Risālat al-Malāʾikah); a “prosimetrical” work, Mulqā l-sabīl, in which each section consists of a very short ethical paragraph in prose followed by a versification; a collection of letters in ornate style; and commentaries on the collected poetry by famous Abbasid poets: Abū Tammām, al-Buḥturī, and al-Mutanabbī. Many other works listed in the ancient sources are no longer extant.
Al-Maʿarrī lived at the end of what has been called “the Golden Age” of Arabic literature.22 Whether or not this qualification and this periodization are justified, he firmly belongs to the “classic” Arabic authors. But his reputation has always been mixed throughout the pre-modern period. “People have different opinions about Abū l-ʿAlāʾ,” says Yāqūt, “Some say that he was a heretic (zindīq) . . ., others say that he was a pious ascetic who subsisted on little and who imposed on himself a harsh regimen, being content with little and turning away from worldly matters.”23 Against the many admirers there are as many detractors. One of the latter, a certain Abū Ghālib ibn Nabhān, apparently had a dream shortly after al-Maʿarrī’s death:
Last night I had a dream in which I saw a blind man with two vipers on his shoulders, dangling down to his thighs. Each of them raised its mouth toward his face, biting off the flesh and devouring it. The man was yelling and crying for help. Shocked and frightened as I was by seeing the man in this state, I asked who he was. “This is al-Maʿarrī, the heretic (mulḥid),” was the reply.24
With this fancy about the afterlife of a presumed heretic we turn to the present work, al-Maʿarrī’s imaginations about life in heaven and hell, much of which is devoted to heresy. It also has several passages about snakes.
Risālat Ibn al-Qāriḥ and Risālat al-Ghufrān
Around the year 424/1033 Abū l-ʿAlāʾ received a long and somewhat rambling letter from a grammarian and Hadith scholar from Aleppo, called ʿAlī ibn Manṣūr ibn al-Qāriḥ, also known as Dawkhalah.25 The elderly writer, already in his seventies, obviously tries to ingratiate himself with the famous inhabitant of al-Maʿarrah. He complains at length of his infirmities and indigence, apologizes for his foibles, and attempts to impress the addressee in the customary ornate style, employing rhymed prose (sajʿ) with much display of erudition and orthodoxy, in the course of which he digresses with a discussion of a number of notorious heretics.26 One of the aims of the letter to Abū l-ʿAlāʾ, whom he praises volubly, is to exculpate himself of allegations, which he knows Abū l-ʿAlāʾ has heard about him: he had been accused of ingratitude toward a family that had patronized him, a family some of whose members had close links with al-Maʿarrī. Abū l-Ḥasan al-Maghribī (d. 400/1009–10) was a man of letters who became state secretary, serving under the Ḥamdānids in Aleppo and later under the Fāṭimids in Cairo. He made Ibn al-Qāriḥ the tutor of his children, in particular Abū l-Qāsim (d. 418/1027), who later became vizier. When the family fell into disgrace and several were executed at the orders of the notorious Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥākim, Abū l-Qāsim was the only prominent member of his kin who escaped. Ibn al-Qāriḥ not only disassociated himself from his former patron but even composed invective poems lampooning him.27 One might expect that in his letter to Abū l-ʿAlāʾ, Ibn al-Qāriḥ would apologize for his vicious attacks on al-Maʿarrī’s friend. Instead, he goes to some length in trying to justify his views, by describing Abū l-Qāsim as a madman, and a very unpleasant one at that.
It is easy to imagine Abū l-ʿAlāʾ being not a little irritated by this rather incoherent and self-righteous appeal and the attacks on a friend. Apparently he took some time before replying, and when he did it was in the form of this strange book known as Risālat al-Ghufrān, The Epistle of Forgiveness. Formally it is a risālah, a letter, but it is longer than many a book, and like many Arabic “epistles” addressed to one person it is obviously meant to be read by many. Abū l-ʿAlāʾ does not openly refute or rebuke his correspondent; he remains as polite and respectful as Ibn al-Qāriḥ. Both epistles are brimful with pious wishes and blessings, parenthetically added whenever the other is addressed or mentioned (in the polite epistolary style of the time, the third person is used instead of direct address, to refer to the recipient). Abū l-ʿAlāʾ’s work opens with sections expressing his affection for Ibn al-Qāriḥ and praise of his letter, and the second part of al-Ghufrān opens with a discussion of hypocrisy, of which Ibn al-Qāriḥ is said to be wholly free. The reader will not be fooled, however: it is clear that all this is ironical. The very difficult preamble of Part One (usually omitted by translators)28 ostensibly expresses al-Maʿarrī’s affection for Ibn al-Qāriḥ, but it is an exercise in double entendre, where words, said to refer to the writer’s “heart,” are closely linked to words for “black” and “snake.” It is an odd way to open a friendly letter, and Bint al-Shāṭiʾ has suggested that al-Maʿarrī, with these snakes and the blackness, obliquely refers to what he really thinks of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s hypocrisy and malice.29 There is a problem with this interpretation, because al-Maʿarrī is speaking of his own heart in this preamble, not that of Ibn al-Qāriḥ;30 but in any case the ambiguous and punning diction seems to suggest that the fulsome praise is not to be taken at face value: al-Maʿarrī’s epistle is steeped in sardonic irony, even though it is not always clear when he is being ironic.
When Abū l-ʿAlāʾ extols the qualities of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s letter, his irony takes a different direction. He imagines that this letter will help the writer to secure God’s favor and forgiveness. Taking the theme of forgiveness as his starting point and as a leitmotiv for his text, he then embarks on a lengthy and extraordinary flight of fancy, which takes all of Part One of his Epistle. He imagines that on the Day of Resurrection, at the end of the world, Ibn al-Qāriḥ is revived like all mortal beings. He is admitted to Paradise, but not without difficulty. He has to cope, even at the Last Day, with what one could call the hardships of bureaucracy: one cannot be admitted without a document stating one’s true repentance of sins. Unfortunately, the Sheikh (as Ibn al-Qāriḥ is often called) has lost this crucial document amidst the hustle and bustle and he must find someone to testify for him. When at last he has taken this hurdle and someone has duly attested that Ibn al-Qāriḥ showed true repentance in the nick of time, he still needs the intercession of the Prophet and the help of the latter’s daughter and son. Having arrived in Paradise, after crossing the narrow Bridging Path in a rather undignified manner, riding piggyback on a helpful girl, he decides to go on an excursion. He meets with poets and grammarians—he is, after all, himself a grammarian with a great knowledge of poetry—and asks them how they have been able to attain eternal bliss. Some poets died before the coming of Islam; others composed verses of a dubious, irreligious nature, and one may wonder why they have been forgiven. The conversations are often about points of morphology, syntax, lexicography, and matters of versification, such as irregularities of meter and rhyme; in general, the Sheikh’s interest is keener than that of the poets themselves, many of whom have forgotten, on account of the terrors of the Last Day, what they produced in the “Fleeting World.”
The blessings and pleasures of Paradise are also described: the quality of the wine, at last permitted, and hangover-free; the food (a banquet is depicted), and the heavenly singing of beautiful damsels. Ibn al-Qāriḥ meets some ravishing girls who tell him that they were ugly but pious on earth and have been rewarded. Not all paradisial females had a worldly pre-existence: other black-eyed beauties emerge from fruits that can be plucked from a tree; Ibn al-Qāriḥ acquires his personal houri in this manner. Before settling with her he leaves for another excursion. He visits the part of Heaven reserved for the jinn or demons (for some of them are believing Muslims). There he meets the extraordinary demon called Abū Hadrash, who boasts in long poems of his devious exploits, but who has been forgiven because of his repentance. Then the Sheikh heads for the spot where there is (as the Qurʾan states) a kind of peephole, through which one can look into Hell and gloat. Our Sheikh converses with poets who have been consigned to Hell for various reasons; he pesters them with queries about their poetry, but mostly meets with a less than enthusiastic response. He also talks to the Devil, who in turn asks him some perplexing questions about Paradise. On his way back the Sheikh visits yet another region: the relatively dusky and lowly Paradise of the rajaz poets, rajaz being an old and rather simple meter that is deemed inferior. Finally he rests, seated on a couch, carried by damsels and immortal youths, surrounded by fruit trees, the fruits of which move toward his mouth of their own accord.
This concludes Part One of the Epistle of Forgiveness. The author admits that he has been rather prolix and says, “Now we shall turn to a reply to the letter.” This he does in Part Two, which is a point-by-point discussion of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s epistle. The bulk of this part is devoted to the various heretics and schismatics mentioned by Ibn al-Qāriḥ, after which al-Maʿarrī turns to the Sheikh’s “repentance” and other matters. He concludes by apologizing for the delay in replying. This second part will appear in a second volume in the Library of Arabic Literature. The first part can be read on its own; indeed, most existing translations do not even contain the second part.
Yet the two parts hang together. Al-Maʿarrī’s irony is present on a deeper level. There are strong indications31 that the true purpose of his Epistle is to enjoin Ibn al-Qāriḥ to repent of his insolent and ungrateful behavior toward a former patron, of his self-confessed self-indulging in the past, of his hypocrisy in his own Epistle, of his sometimes tactless and self-righteous condemnation of poets and heretics, and of being generally obsessed with himself. The fictional Ibn al-Qāriḥ, in al-Ghufrān, only acquires forgiveness and reaches Paradise with much difficulty; it turns out that he only truly repented of his sins at the last moment: it may still happen in reality, implies al-Maʿarrī, if God wills. He also implies, therefore, that in his view Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s own letter does not amount to true repentance. He mocks Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s obsession with himself and his own profession (grammar and poetry) by imagining him in Paradise as being interested only in poets and philologists; even when he meets others, such as Adam, Abū Hadrash the jinn, or the devil, the conversation is mostly about poetry. Part One is therefore an elaborate and extremely lengthy introduction to the proper reply to the original letter. In Part Two several points reappear, such as the importance of true repentance. The fictional Ibn al-Qāriḥ had seen the poet Bashshār in Hell, but al-Maʿarrī says in Part Two that he will not categorically say that Bashshār’s destination will be Hell; God is merciful and kind.
While Risālat al-Ghufrān did not receive as much attention from pre-modern authors as his al-Fuṣūl wa-l-ghāyāt or the poems of Luzūm mā lā yalzam, it met with some mixed criticism. A note by al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) encapsulates it all: “It contains Mazdakism (mazdakah) and irreverence (istikhfāf); there is much erudition (adab) in it.”32 Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s imagined experiences in Heaven (with glimpses of Hell) as told by al-Maʿarrī form an interesting kind of fiction. Overt fiction was often frowned upon in pre-modern Arab literary culture; hence, for instance, the condemnation of fairytales and fantastic stories such as are found in The Thousand and One Nights. But al-Maʿarrī did not pretend that his fantasies about his correspondent actually happened: the events are set in the future and the Arabic present tense (which can refer to the future, for events that will or merely might happen) is used consistently, rather than the perfect tense normally employed in narrative texts. If he cannot be accused of writing fictions or lies, one might think that his apparently irreverent descriptions of Paradise border on the blasphemous. There can, in fact, be no doubt that he is mocking popular and pious beliefs about the hereafter; after all, he himself frequently questioned the reality of bodily resurrection, one of the central dogmas of orthodox Islam. Yet he does not introduce anything in his descriptions of Paradise and Hell that has not been, or could not be, imagined or written by pious Muslims. As is well known, Qurʾanic descriptions of the Last Day and the Last Things (Heaven and Hell) are vivid and full of concrete images; popular pious literature greatly expanded and elaborated the Qurʾanic images, turning Paradise into a Land of Cockayne, where birds fly around asking to be consumed, not unlike the peacock and the goose in the Epistle of Forgiveness that are instantly marinated or roasted as desired, and are then revived again. The Qurʾan (56:20–21), after all, promises the believers “whatever fruit they choose and whatever fowl they desire.”
Eschatological tourism is known from several literatures, notably through Dante’s Divine Comedy. That the latter was inspired partly by al-Maʿarrī was a hypothesis put forward by several scholars, notably Miguel Asín Palacios, and eagerly embraced, naturally, by some Arab scholars such as Kāmil Kaylānī, whose abridged edition of Risālat al-Ghufrān also contains a summary of Dante in Arabic, and who provides Part One of al-Ghufrān with the subtitle Kūmīdiyā ilāhiyyah masraḥuhā l-jannah wa-l-nār, “A Divine Comedy, Staged in Paradise and Hell.”33 One Arab writer even argued that Dante, having stolen al-Maʿarrī’s ideas, produced a greatly inferior work, in which he should have made al-Maʿarrī his guide rather than Virgil.34 The hypothesis that Dante was influenced by al-Maʿarrī has now been largely abandoned; if there is an Islamic root to Dante’s Commedia, it is more likely to have been inspired by popular ideas about the Prophet’s celebrated short excursion, his ascension to heaven (al-miʿrāj) after his “nocturnal journey” to Jerusalem (al-isrāʾ); a European translation of the anonymous Kitāb al-Miʿrāj (of which Latin, French, and Castilian versions were popular) was probably known to Dante. It has also been suggested that Dante may have been inspired by a Hebrew version of a work by Avicenna, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, describing an imaginative “cosmic” journey.35
Nicholson rightly remarks36 that while the Risālat al-Ghufrān “faintly” resembles the Sixth Book of Virgil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas visits the Underworld, the Divine Comedy, or the Zoroastrian, Middle Persian Book of Ardā Vīrāf, a more significant parallel can be found in Lucian (d. ca. ad 180), who like al-Maʿarrī was a Syrian, though Greek-educated. In his ironically entitled True Histories (or True Fictions) Lucian describes his fantastic journeys on earth and even to the moon. He visits a Blessed Isle, the delights of which are depicted in some detail; there he meets not only ancient worthies such as heroes of the Trojan War but also Homer, whom he questions about his poetry.37 All this is written in a lively and very irreverent style, altogether akin to that of al-Maʿarrī, who shared Lucian’s rationalism, skepticism, and pessimism. It must not be supposed, however, that al-Maʿarrī knew Lucian’s work, for he was not translated into Arabic and al-Maʿarrī did not know Greek. But Lucian was popular with the Byzantines: his works were much copied, annotated, imitated, and taught in schools38 and one could imagine that some of Lucian’s themes reached al-Maʿarrī orally. One also notes that the motif of the tree woman, exploited in The Epistle of Forgiveness, admittedly known in Arabic popular lore,39 is also found in Lucian’s True Histories.40
It has been suggested41 that Risālat al-Ghufrān was inspired by Risālat al-Tawābiʿ wa-l-zawābiʿ by the Andalusian Arab poet and prose-writer Ibn Shuhayd (d. 426/1035), who composed it only a few years before al-Maʿarrī wrote his work. In this short, incompletely preserved work, translated by James T. Monroe as The Treatise of Familiar Spirits and Demons,42 the author takes as his starting point the ancient Arab idea that a poet is inspired by a demon or genius, an idea that survived in Islamic times even though many would not take it more seriously than European poets would literally believe in the existence of the Muses or a personal muse. Ibn Shuhayd describes his imagined conversations with the demons of some famous poets: the pre-Islamic Imruʾ al-Qays, Ṭarafah, and Qays ibn al-Khaṭīm, and the Abbasid poets Abū Nuwās and Abū Tammām; he boldly expands the idea by assigning similar demons to prose writers such as ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd ibn Yaḥyā, Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī, and al-Jāḥiẓ (who no doubt would have been surprised by the fancy), and by describing some animal genii: a mule and a goose. It is not impossible that al-Maʿarrī (who in fact composed a short epistle on the same topic)43 was aware of this work, but one would underestimate his powers of invention if one assumed he was unable to compose his Epistle without such inspiration.
The Epistle of Forgiveness builds to some extent on his own Risālat al-Malāʾikah (The Epistle of the Angels), mentioned above as a work on morphology. In this work, composed probably a few years before the Epistle of Forgiveness, al-Maʿarrī imagines that he himself discusses oddities of the Arabic lexicon with angels in the afterlife. He surprises the angels with his analysis of the word for “angel” (malak, pl. malāʾikah),44 and he discusses other words with them. He argues that those who end up in heaven enjoying the ḥūr (black-and-white-eyed damsels) and other delights such as the sundus and istabraq (“silk and brocade”) should at least be aware of the morphology and etymology of these words.45 The imagined conversations are at times very similar to those in al-Ghufrān, for instance when al-Maʿarrī quotes poets and grammarians to prove a point, whereupon an angel exclaims, “Who is this Ibn Abī Rabīʿah, what’s this Abū ʿUbaydah, what’s all this nonsense? If you have done any pious deeds you will be happy; if not, get out of here!”46 There is clearly some self-mockery here.
Similarly, although al-Maʿarrī is clearly mocking Ibn al-Qāriḥ in al-Ghufrān, one suspects that many of the philological concerns of the latter were also his own. Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s fictional persona often uses obscure and rare words, which he immediately explains in plainer language; it looks as if he is being mocked for his pedantry. However, al-Maʿarrī does the same when he writes in his own voice; he appears to flaunt his extraordinary knowledge of the Arabic lexicon. A passage in Part Two hints at another, practical reason why he added his glosses: our blind author fears that his dictations, with their recondite diction, may be misunderstood or garbled by his scribes.47 Likewise, one assumes that some of the criticism voiced by Ibn al-Qāriḥ on points of grammar and versification is shared by al-Maʿarrī. A similar preoccupation with philology is found in other works by him, such as The Epistle of the Neigher and the Brayer. It is clear that for al-Maʿarrī and, as he imagines, for Ibn al-Qāriḥ the expected delights of Paradise are not primarily sensual but intellectual. The various delights provided by pretty girls, music, food, and drink are generally described in a somewhat ironical vein and the comparisons of heavenly substances with earthly equivalents are couched in ludicrously hyperbolic expressions; but the pleasures of poetry and philological pedantry are taken, on the whole, rather more seriously, even though here, too, a modicum of mockery is not altogether absent.
It is not surprising that in almost all translations of The Epistle of Forgiveness such passages about grammar, lexicon, and prosody have been drastically curtailed or omitted altogether, for a combination of reasons: they will not greatly interest those who do not know Arabic, they will seem an annoying interruption of the narrative to those who read the text for the story, and not least because they are rather difficult to translate and in need of copious annotation. When Bint al-Shāṭiʾ published her adaptation of Part One of the Epistle of Forgiveness for the stage, as a play in three acts,48 she naturally excised much of the philology, even though she lets the actors discuss some matters regarding grammatical case endings and poetic meters on the stage. It is not known if the play has ever been performed and one cannot but have some doubts about its viability.49
Al-Maʿarrī’s rationalist critique of religion has influenced and inspired neoclassicist and modernist Arabic writers and poets, such as the Iraqi poets Jamīl Ṣidqī l-Zahāwī (1863–1936) and Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfī (1875–1945). The former wrote a verse epic, Thawrah fī l-jaḥīm (Revolution in Hell, 1931) in which he offers an interesting and subversive interpretation of the Epistle of Forgiveness, involving many well-known figures from Western and Arab history and culture. Heaven is the place for the establishment, Hell for the maladjusted and the socially ambitious, who are punished for their courage. Finally, supported by the angels of Hell, they storm Heaven, claiming it as their rightful place since it is they who have advanced mankind.50 Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām (The Story of ʿĪsā ibn Hishām), a well-known work of fiction first published serially between 1898 and 1902 by the Egyptian author Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī (1858?–1930), is often linked with the Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 398/1008) but it has several things in common with Risālat al-Ghufrān: a protagonist who is resurrected from the dead before an imaginary journey, implicit and explicit criticism of contemporary beliefs and customs, and a style in which rhymed prose alternates with ordinary prose.
The varied fate of the text, with its incomplete, truncated translations and its transformation into a play, clearly shows how difficult it is to classify it, to those who love neat classifications. Although called a risālah and addressed to one person, it is not an ordinary letter, nor is it intended to be read only by the addressee. While containing a narrative complete with a lengthy flashback it is not a normal story, qiṣṣah, ḥadīth, khabar, or ḥikāyah. It incorporates much of what normally belongs to the genre of philological “dictations,” amālī. It contains, in al-Dhahabī’s words quoted above, “much adab,” which here has all its meanings of erudition, literary quotations including much poetry, moral edification, and entertaining anecdotes. Searchers for the “organic unity” of this heterogeneous literary work will have an arduous task. One could argue that part of its originality and its attractiveness lies precisely in the impossibility of pigeonholing it; but not every reader, critic, or publisher will be charmed by this.
A Note on the Text
Language, Style, and Translation
The present translators originally harbored some doubts about translating the text in full. However, it is the admirable purpose of the Library of Arabic Literature to present complete texts, in the original Arabic and in an English translation. We consented and took on the task as a daunting but stimulating challenge. The present translation, for the first time in any language, is complete, for the sake of the integrity of the text and in order not to distort its actual character, which reflects the author’s character, as far as we can know it. Abū l-ʿAlāʾ is not first-and-foremost a storyteller: he is a satirist, a moralist, and a philologist who, in his physical blindness and linguistic insight, lives in a universe of language to such an extent that one could even say that, in addition to the two or three “prisons” mentioned above, he also lived in the admittedly very spacious prison of the Arabic language. It was a prison in which he felt at home like no other. The reader should be warned that The Epistle of Forgiveness is not exactly an easy read; but the philological passages can be skipped by impatient readers.
Telling a story could be done in a simple, unadorned style. The stories in al-Faraj baʿd al-Shiddah (Relief after Distress) by al-Muḥassin al-Tanūkhī (d. 384/994), for instance, are written in a relatively plain Arabic, and so are innumerable anecdotes and stories in various collections and anthologies. However, the aim of epistolary prose, in al-Maʿarrī’s time, was not always primarily to express one’s meaning clearly: that would be paramount to an insult, as if the recipient could only understand plain speech. One ought to employ a flowery style, rich in metaphors, allusions, syntactical and semantic parallelism, recondite vocabulary, and above all sajʿ or rhymed prose, usually in the form of paired rhyme (aabbccdd . . .). Such an ornate style is found especially in preambles of letters and books, and in descriptive, “purple” passages, or on any occasion where the author wishes to display his erudition and stylistic prowess. Already in al-Maʿarrī’s lifetime interesting experiments had been done to introduce sajʿ into narrative prose texts continuously rather than on specific occasions, Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 398/1008) being a pioneer in this field, as the “inventor” of the maqāmah genre.
Al-Maʿarrī, in Part One of his Epistle, does not use sajʿ throughout but only at certain points. Since it is such a characteristic and striking element of classical Arabic prose, it has been imitated in the translation, at the risk of sounding somewhat quaint.51 The same has not been done, except very occasionally, in the translation of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s epistle; likewise, the frequency of sajʿ in Part Two of Risālat al-Ghufrān will make it impossible to imitate it in English. The reader should be aware that many a strange expression could have been caused by an Arabic rhyme; as Nicholson says, perhaps too harshly, “Abū’l-ʿAlā seldom escapes from his artificial prose with its forced metaphors and tyrannous rhymes.”52 Often, especially in Part Two, he is not content with ordinary rhyme but employs the “rich rhyme” that also marks the poems in his Luzūmiyyāt. Where al-Maʿarrī uses an obscure word, the translation also uses an unusual English word, if possible. Fidelity to the text therefore overrides readability at times. The translators have stayed as close as possible to the Arabic text and have never resorted, unlike predecessors such as Brackenbury, Meïssa, and Monteil, to summary, large-scale paraphrase, and blatant glossing over difficulties by simple omission (Brackenbury and Meïssa cannot be blamed for this, since they relied on Kaylānī’s edition, which leaves out everything that is difficult or obscure). Some concessions to English style and usage had to be made, of course. Thus we have not hesitated to make pronouns (the ubiquitous and often confusing “he,” “him,” and “his” of Arabic narrative) explicit in order to make it clear who or what is meant, wherever this seemed desirable. Very often, when al-Maʿarrī refers to Ibn al-Qāriḥ, we have rendered “he” as “the Sheikh.” Al-Maʿarrī’s language is difficult and not all problems have been solved. Arab editors and commentators can ignore them, or pretend they do not find them problematical rather than confess their ignorance (we suspect this is often the case); a translator cannot hide in the same manner. In the notes we have discussed some of our difficulties and doubts or professed our inability to understand the text.
Many such problems are found in the poetry quoted in the text. Both epistles contain much of it, most of it by other poets, although the poems recited by the demon Abū Hadrash in Risālat al-Ghufrān are obviously by al-Maʿarrī himself. Classical Arabic poetry always rhymes (normally with “monorhyme”: aaaaaa . . .), but our translations, with very few exceptions, do not use rhyme, which would normally be incompatible with accuracy; instead of the Arabic quantitative meters (not unlike those of ancient Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit) a loose English meter (e.g., iambic) has generally been chosen. In view of the difficulties of many verses and the fact that they do not contribute to the bare narrative, it is not surprising that all earlier translators drastically cut the verse. Needless to say, in the present translation nothing has been cut.
The two translators have collaborated closely. The English text of the translation, annotation, and introduction, was made by van Gelder, who was helped, in varying degrees, by predecessors such as Nicholson, Brackenbury, Meïssa, Dechico, and Monteil,53 by Bint al-Shāṭiʾ’s excellent annotation, by Schoeler’s published, partial, German translation, and by his unpublished rough draft of the complete German translation of Part One. Van Gelder’s drafts were thoroughly revised by Schoeler and difficulties were discussed in frequent and fruitful email exchanges. The final English version was polished by two native speakers, Sheila Ottway and especially James Montgomery, our project editor at LAL. Translations from the Qurʾan are by van Gelder; they are marked by angle brackets (French quotation marks) to distinguish them from other quotations, just as in Arabic they are customarily given in special decorative “bow brackets.” English and Arabic titles of the various chapters have been added.
After the completion of Part One, the translators were made aware of a new translation into Italian of Part One, by Martino Diez, who kindly sent a copy. Unlike its predecessors, it is virtually complete and includes the various digressions on grammar, lexicon, and prosody; it is provided with informative notes. We could make only limited use of this excellent translation.
A Note on the Edition
Reynold A. Nicholson may have been the pioneer in studying The Epistle of Forgiveness and making scholars acquainted with it, but the towering figure in the field is without question the Egyptian scholar ʿĀʾishah ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (1913–98), who named herself Bint al-Shāṭiʾ (“Daughter of the Riverbank”54), and whose doctoral dissertation at the University of Cairo in 1950 became the basis for the first scholarly edition of the epistles by al-Maʿarrī and Ibn al-Qāriḥ. Her richly annotated edition, a monument of scholarship, appeared in 1954 (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif) and was republished several times with minor revisions. For the present bilingual edition it was decided not to duplicate her efforts, but to rely for the most part on her edition. The ninth edition that appeared in Cairo in 1993 forms the basis of the Arabic text offered here; we have also used some of her earlier editions, notably the third (Cairo, 1963) and fourth (Cairo, n.d.), because even though the later edition corrects some mistakes and inaccuracies, some new typographical errors have crept in occasionally. Furthermore, we have consulted other printed editions, all of them uncritical. Nicholson’s articles contain only selected parts of the Arabic text. The oldest of these printed texts is that by Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-Hindiyyah, 1903); rather fully voweled, the edition is devoid of annotation and does not contain Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s letter. Kāmil Kaylānī, in an undated volume published in Cairo (Dār al-Maʿārif) in 1943, entitled Risālat al-Ghufrān li-l-shāʿir al-faylasūf Abī l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (The Epistle of Forgiveness by the poet-philosopher Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī), offered a shortened version of the epistles of Ibn al-Qāriḥ and al-Maʿarrī, stripped of most of the difficult passages, together with much relevant and sometimes irrelevant annotation and a selection of other epistles by al-Maʿarrī. Later editions, all uncritical, are obviously (but only rarely explicitly) dependent on Bint al-Shāṭiʾ: the lightly annotated one of Mufīd Qumayḥah (Beirut: Dār Maktabat al-Hilāl, 1406/1986, no indexes) and the more fully (but often erroneously) annotated one by Muḥammad al-Iskandarānī and Inʿām Fawwāl (Beirut: Dār al-Kātib al-ʿArabī, 2011/1432, provided with indexes).
In her critical edition of the two epistles Bint al-Shāṭiʾ explains that for Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s Epistle she relied on two manuscripts from the Taymūriyyah collection in the National Library (Dār al-Kutub) in Cairo and one printed edition, the one incorporated by Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī in his collection Rasāʾil al-bulaghāʾ.55 The older, undated manuscript was apparently the basis for both the later one (copied in 1327/1909) and the edition in Rasāʾil al-bulaghāʾ, and Bint al-Shāṭiʾ took it as the basis for her own edition. We have also benefited from the only other critical edition of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s epistle, part of the unpublished doctoral dissertation by Michel Dechico, which also contains a study and a translation.56
For her edition of Risālat al-Ghufrān, Bint al-Shāṭiʾ used seven manuscripts, as well as Nicholson’s publication and earlier printed editions. The most important manuscript, preserved in Istanbul, seems to date from the seventh/thirteenth century; its copyist remarks that he collated the text with a manuscript corrected by Abū Zakariyyā l-Tibrīzī, mentioned above as a pupil and great admirer of al-Maʿarrī, and an important scholar himself. The other manuscripts used by Bint al-Shāṭiʾ are obviously of less importance, being later, sometimes incomplete, and offering a less reliable text.
Bint al-Shāṭiʾ provides two kinds of footnotes. One supplies textual commentary, including meticulous, detailed information about variant readings in the manuscripts and parallel texts, occasional emendations, and glosses that explain difficult words. At times she cites Nicholson’s readings and interpretations, often with gratuitously scathing remarks when he was wrong. The other set of footnotes gives basic information on persons and places mentioned in the text. Even though her editorial practice has been criticized,57 altogether her notes display stupendous learning and she is almost always right. In our own annotation we have relied much on her notes, but we have not slavishly followed her and it would have been impossible simply to translate her annotation. The textual notes to the present Arabic edition only provide the main variants and those instances where we decided to deviate from Bint al-Shāṭiʾ’s text; variants that are obviously scribal errors have been ignored. For detailed information about manuscript variants the reader is referred to Bint al-Shāṭiʾ’s edition. Where needed, explanations and justifications of our choices are found in the annotation to the English translation.
The original guidelines of the Library of Arabic Literature recommend that annotation be kept to a minimum. We are grateful to the editors for approving the increased volume of annotations included in the present work. Because of the difficulty of the present text and the plethora of names and allusions it contains, a great deal more explanation was considered essential; there would have been yet more if we had done full justice to the text. Instead, we have limited the annotation to a minimum. A full list of the names of individuals, places, tribes and dynasties which occur in the text is given in the Glossary of Names and Terms.
الرموز
| إف | محمد الإسكندراني وإنعام فوّال (٢٠١١) |
| ب | بنت الشاطئ ط. ٩ (١٩٩٣) |
| ٤ | بنت الشاطئ ط. ٤ (دون تاريخ) |
| د | Michel Dechico (1980) |
| ك | كامل كيلاني (١٩٤٣) |
| كع | محمد كرد علي (١٩٥٤) |
| ن | R. A. Nicholson (1900–2) |
| ق | مفيد قميحة (١٩٨٦) |
| ي | إبراهيم اليازجي (١٩٠٣) |
Notes to the Introduction
| 1 | Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt, i, 113–16; the same in al-Ṣafadī, al-Wāfī, iv, 94–111. |
| 2 | Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ, iii, 107–217; see p. 161. |
| 3 | Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ, xv, 83. |
| 4 | Nicholson, “Persian Manuscripts.” |
| 5 | Nicholson, “The Risālatu ’l-Ghufrān by Abū ’l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1900): 637–720; (1902): 75–101, 337–62, 813–47. |
| 6 | Al-Thaʿālibī, Tatimmat al-Yatīmah, p. 16; also in Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ, iii, 129–30; Ibn al-ʿAdīm, Bughyat al-ṭalab, p. 897; al-Ṣafadī, al-Wāfī bi-l-Wafayāt, vii, 96. Ibn al-ʿAdīm, always keen to defend al-Maʿarrī, doubts that he ever played games or even jested. Al-Maʿarrī’s jesting cannot be denied but it is admittedly always of a serious kind. |
| 7 | Following Arabic usage, in this introduction he will be called either al-Maʿarrī or Abū l-ʿAlāʾ, for the sake of variety. |
| 8 | The Arabic term is kunyah (incorrectly translated as “patronymic” in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, New [= Second] Edition, v, 395). |
| 9 | Ibn al-ʿAdīm, Bughyat al-ṭalab, pp. 896–97. |
| 10 | An allusion to making fire by means of the friction between two pieces of wood, one hard and one soft. |
| 11 | The collection is often called al-Luzūmiyyāt. |
| 12 | For a good selection, with English translations, see Nicholson, “The Meditations of Maʿarrī.” |
| 13 | Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Zajr al-nābiḥ: Muqtaṭafāt. |
| 14 | Al-Maʿarrī, Luzūm mā lā yalzam, i, 188 (rhyme -īthī): “I see myself in my three prisons | (so do not ask me about my secret story) || Because of my loss of sight, being homebound | and my soul’s residing in an evil body.” |
| 15 | See, e.g., Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt, i, 115. |
| 16 | Al-Qifṭī, Inbāh al-ruwah, i, 85. |
| 17 | Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ, iii, 176–213; see Margoliouth, “Abū ’l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s Correspondence on Vegetarianism.” |
| 18 | e.g., Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ, iii, 125. |
| 19 | Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ, iii, 126; Ibn al-ʿAdīm, Bughyat al-ṭalab, p. 910 mentions “seventy poets from al-Maʿarrah.” |
| 20 | On speaking animals, see Wagner, “Sprechende Tiere in der arabischen Prosa.” |
| 21 | There are several versions of this anecdote, see, e.g., Ibn al-ʿAdīm, Bughyat al-ṭalab, pp. 879–80. |
| 22 | Gibb, Arabic Literature: An Introduction, whose “Silver Age” begins two years before al-Maʿarrī’s death, with the Seljuqs entering Baghdad. |
| 23 | Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ, iii, 142; cf. e.g. Ibn al-ʿAdīm, Bughyat al-ṭalab, p. 865. |
| 24 | Ibn al-ʿAdīm, Bughyat al-ṭalab, p. 909, al-ʿAbbāsī, Maʿāhid al-tanṣīṣ, i, 52. The two snakes growing on the shoulders are reminiscent of al-Ḍaḥḥāk/Zahhāk/Zuhāk, the evil Arabian king of Iranian lore; see, e.g., E. Yarshater, “Zuhāk.” Ibn al-ʿAdīm gives the dream an interpretation that is favorable to al-Maʿarrī: the snakes are the false accusations of heresy and unbelief; the dream describes the sheikh’s life, not his afterlife. |
| 25 | Dawkhalah or dawkhallah means “date basket made of palm leaves.” |
| 26 | On Ibn al-Qāriḥ see Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ, xv, 83–88; shortened in al-Ṣafadī, Wāfī, xxii, 233–35; al-Suyūṭī, Bughyat al-wuʿāh, ii, 207. It is said that he died after 421/1030 (al-Ṣafadī, xxii, 234; Yāqūt, implausibly, has “after 461/1068”). |
| 27 | For a fragment of four verses, see Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ, xv, 84. |
| 28 | For a German translation and study, see Schoeler, “Abū l-Alāʾ al-Maʿarrīs Prolog zum Sendschreiben über die Vergebung.” |
| 29 | ʿĀʾishah ʿAbd al-Raḥmān “Bint al-Shāṭiʾ,” Qirāʾah jadīdah fī Risālat al-Ghufrān, pp. 52–54; eadem, “Abū ʾl-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī,” p. 337. |
| 30 | Schoeler, “Abū l-Alāʾ al-Maʿarrīs Prolog,” p. 421. |
| 31 | Schoeler, “Die Vision, der auf einer Hypothese gründet: Zur Deutung von Abū ’l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrīs Risālat al-Ġufrān.” |
| 32 | Al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-Islām: Ḥawādith wa-wafayāt 441–50, 451–60, pp. 199–200; the Arabic words are mazdakah, istikhfāf, and adab. The term mazdakah, instead of the normal mazdakiyyah, is unusual but found elsewhere, e.g., al-Ṣafadī, Wāfī, xv, p. 426. Since Mazdak is not mentioned in Risālat al-Ghufrān, Nicholson suggests (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1900, p. 637) that mazdakah could be a corruption of the common word zandaqah, which has a related meaning. The former is derived from Mazdak, who was the leader of a pre-Islamic revolutionary religious movement in Sassanid Iran in the early sixth century ad, while zandaqah is derived from zindīq, “heretic,” often implying Manichaeism. |
| 33 | He is followed by Brackenbury in his English translation, which is based on Kaylānī’s edition. |
| 34 | Qusṭākī l-Ḥimṣī, in articles published in Majallat Maʿhad al-Lughah al-ʿArabiyyah (Damascus), 7 (1927) and 8 (1928); see Hassan Osman, “Dante in Arabic.” |
| 35 | See Strohmaier, “Chaj ben Mekitz – die unbekannte Quelle der Divina Commedia.” |
| 36 | “The Risālatu’l-Ghufrān,” p. 76. |
| 37 | True Histories, in Lucian, Chattering Courtesans, pp. 308–46; see esp. pp. 330–39. |
| 38 | Keith Sidwell, in his introduction to Lucian, Chattering Courtesans, p. xx. |
| 39 | See e.g. Tibbets and Toorawa, section “The tree” in the entry “Wāḳwāḳ,” EI2, xi (2002), pp. 107–8. |
| 40 | Lucian, Chattering Courtesans, p. 312. |
| 41 | See e.g. J. M. Continente Ferrer, “Consideraciones en torno a las relaciones entre la Risālat al-Tawābiʿ wa-l-Zawābiʿ de ibn Šuhayd y la Risālat al-Gufrān de al-Maʿarrī,” in Actas de las jornadas de cultura árabe e islámica, 1978, (Madrid, 1981), pp. 124–34; ʿAbd al-Salām al-Harrās, “Risālat al-Tawābiʿ wa-l-zawābiʿ wa-ʿalāqatuhā li-Risālat al-Ghufrān,” al-Manāhil, 9:25 (1982): 211–20. |
| 42 | Ibn Shuhayd, The Treatise of Familiar Spirits and Demons. |
| 43 | Risālat al-shayāṭīn, published in Kāmil Kaylānī’s edition of Risālat al-Ghufrān, pp. 475–506 (only the beginning of the epistle deals with the demons of poets). |
| 44 | Al-Maʿarrī, Risālat al-Malāʾikah, pp. 5–8. |
| 45 | Al-Maʿarrī, Risālat al-Malāʾikah, pp. 26–28, 36–38; for sundus and istabraq see Q Kahf 18:31 and Dukhān 44:53. |
| 46 | Al-Maʿarrī, Risālat al-Malāʾikah, p. 8. |
| 47 | Risālat al-Ghufrān, p. 382. |
| 48 | Qirāʾah jadīdah fī Risālat al-Ghufrān (A New Reading of The Epistle of Forgiveness), subtitled Naṣṣ masraḥī min al-qarn al-khāmis al-hijrī (“A Dramatic Text of the Fifth Century of the Hijra”), see pp. 65–186; cf. Moreh, Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arabic World, pp. 112–13. |
| 49 | There is no drama in the classical Arabic “high” literary tradition; the texts employed in popular slapstick acting were almost never written down. |
| 50 | See Wiebke Walther’s review of Schoeler’s translation of Risālat al-Ghufrān in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 157 (2007): 225–28, her article “Camīl Ṣidqī az-Zahāwī,” her entry “az-Zahāwī, Ǵamīl Sidqī” in Kindlers Neues Literatur Lexikon, Bd. 22 (Suppl.) 1998, p. 741, and the German translation by G. Widmer in Welt des Islams, 17 (1935): 1–79. |
| 51 | Recent examples of prose rhyme in English translations from the Arabic may be found in Paul M. Cobb’s translation (2008) of al-Iʿtibār, the memoirs of Usāmah ibn Munqidh (d. 584/1188), as The Book of Contemplation, and in Humphrey Davies’ translation (2007) of a seventeenth-century work, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded. |
| 52 | Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1902, p. 75. |
| 53 | Monteil’s “translation” is full of wild guesses that are often wrong and without any solid basis in the Arabic text, even though they seem to produce a plausible sense. |
| 54 | She grew up in Dimyāṭ (Damietta). |
| 55 | Fourth ed. Cairo, 1954 (first ed. Cairo, 1908); for the Risālah see pp. 254–79. |
| 56 | “La Risāla d’Ibn al-Qāriḥ: traduction et étude lexicographique,” Thèse pour le Doctorat de 3e Cycle, Paris: Université de Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1980. |
| 57 | See Hellmut Ritter’s review in Oriens, 6 (1953): 189–91. |
