The Epistle of Forgiveness

"It’s almost impossible to get hold of this in English, but there is an edited extract in the anthology Classical Arab Stories . Few in the West will have heard of Abul Ala al-Ma’arri. Indeed, few in the Muslim world will know of him. Yet he is immensely important in the development of freethinking. Al-Ma’arri was one of the greatest poets in the Arab tradition and renowned for his unflinching religious scepticism. In one poem he wrote: They all err ­– Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. Humanity follows two worldwide sects: One, man intelligent without religion, The second, religious without intellect. We have become used to thinking of the Islamic world as walled-in, insular, hostile to reason and freethinking, with a single, unquestioned and unquestionable view of God, faith and the Quran. Much of the Islamic world came to be that way. But in the first half-millennium of its existence, especially during the Abbasid period [750-1258], there was within the Islamic empire an extraordinary flourishing of philosophical debate and of freethinking, of a kind unseen since the heights of Greek philosophy, and that would be unseen again until the Enlightenment. Al-Ma’arri was one of the most important thinkers and writers of this golden age. The Epistle of Forgiveness is his most famous work, in which he describes visiting paradise and meeting Arab poets of the pagan period. It is a work that has been compared to Dante’s Divine Comedy . What is striking about al-Ma’arri’s poetry is not simply its religious scepticism but also its deep strain of pessimism: We laugh, but inept is our laughter, We should weep, and weep sore, Who are shattered like glass and thereafter Remoulded no more. Al-Ma’arri had a great belief in the sanctity of life – he became a vegetarian, not wishing to harm other living creatures – but seemed sometimes to be overwhelmed by the ephemeral, pain-filled character of human life. Life’s two gifts, it seemed to him, were pain or death: Over many a race the sun’s bright net was spread And loosed their pearls nor left them even a thread. This dire world delights us, though all sup – All whom she mothers – from one mortal cup. Choose from two ills: which rather in the main Suits you? – to perish or to live in pain? Sometimes it seemed to him that it would have been better had humans never been created: Better for Adam and all who issued forth from his loins That he and they, yet unborn, created never had been! For whilst his body was dust and rotten bones in the earth Ah, did he feel what his children saw and suffered of woe. Yes, the almost un-plumbable darkness of al-Ma’arri’s vision reveals the difficulty of living without God in 10th century Arabia. Modern humanism has its material roots in the ability of humans to transform their world, a world in which the great revolutions – scientific, industrial and political – have provided concrete meaning to the idea of human-driven progress. This was not al-Ma’arri’s world. His was a world in which life seemed forever static and immovable, constrained by the brute facts of nature. In which the idea that humans could transform the world for the better would have seemed not merely hubristic but irrational and insane. In which grief and anguish were as much a natural, ineradicable part of life as the sun rising in the morning and the leaves falling in autumn. It was a world in which without God there seemed no possibility of comfort and solace, no prospect of infusing life with a sense of meaning, no hope of recompense for a life of pain and torment. In such a world it took immense courage to look into the void and accept the darkness, to examine one’s life and acknowledge unflinchingly its unremitting pain."