19 - Abū ʾl-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī

Summary

In the early decades of this century, the poet and prose-writer al-Maʿarrī was an object of particular interest to western scholars as one of a number of possible links between medieval Christian and Muslim literature. More recent studies have investigated his writings in the light of a wider range of concerns, literary, historical and philosophical. A more general approach is attempted in the present chapter; many aspects of al-Maʿarrī's thought are of great contemporary appeal, and it is these that it is proposed to address here.

LIFE

Abū ʾl-ʿAlāʾ Aḥmad b. ʿAbdullāh b. Sulaymān al-Maʿarrī (363-449/973-1058) was of Arab stock, a member of the tribe of Tanūkh, and was born into a learned and distinguished family at Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān, a town near Aleppo which had long been a resort of eminent qāḍīs, scholars and poets; from the first he was trained up to assume his rightful place as a member of this social and cultural élite. At the age of four, however, he contracted smallpox, which left him not only disfigured but blind; his education nevertheless continued to follow a conventional course, but his blindness ultimately transformed both his personal and his artistic development. His father supervised his studies; he was taught the Qurʾān by some of the leading shaykhs of Maʿarrah, and ḥadīth by his father, grandparents and the local traditionists, and proved so proficient at the Islamic sciences and at Arabic that he was sent to his mother's family in Aleppo to continue studying Arabic under the leading scholar of the city.