Al-Masāq

Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean

ISSN: 0950-3110 (Print) 1473-348X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/calm20

Al-Maʿarrī’s Esteem in the Islamic West: A

Preliminary Overview

Kevin Blankinship

To cite this article: Kevin Blankinship (2019): Al-Maʿarrī’s Esteem in the Islamic West: A
Preliminary Overview, Al-Masāq, DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2019.1574519

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2019.1574519

Published online: 12 Feb 2019.

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AL-MASĀQ
https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2019.1574519

Al-Maʿarrī’s Esteem in the Islamic West: A Preliminary

Overview1
Kevin Blankinship

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The blind poet and iconoclast Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 1058) is one of Received 19 September 2018
the most important figures in classical Arabic literature. He had an Accepted 18 December 2018
especially strong following in the Islamic west (Iberia and North
KEYWORDS
Africa). But despite that following, and despite studies on the Al-Maʿarrī; Arabic literature;
western response to other eastern Arabic poets, al-Maʿarrī’s legacy Poetry; Islamic studies;
has thus far received inadequate attention in scholarship, a fact Medieval studies; Spain and
that obscures a major aspect of his reception. This article helps fill North Africa; Literary
this knowledge gap by exploring al-Maʿarrī’s works that were reception
popular in Iberia and North Africa, as well as responses to those
works and the readers who did the responding. The results show
rupture in some areas, as in the particular works singled out by
Andalusī and Maghribī readers, and continuity in others, as in al-
Maʿarrī’s overall reputation. The article concludes with a discussion
about al-Maʿarrī’s importance to Arabic literary production in the
Islamic west.

Abbreviations: EI2 = Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition,

ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P.
Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill online, 2012); EI3 = Encyclopedia of Islam,
THREE, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John
Nawas and Evertt Rowson (Leiden: Brill, 2015-2018); BA = La
Biblioteca de al-Andalus, ed. Jorge Lirola Delgado, José Miguel
Puerta Vílchez, volumes I–VII (Almería: Fundación de Ibn Tufayl de
Estudios Árabes, 2004); TQ = Taʿrīf al-qudamāʾ bi-Abī l-ʿAlāʾ, ed.
T āhā H usayn et al., (Cairo: Wizārat al-Maʿārif al-ʿUmūmiyyah, 1944,
repr. 1965).

Introduction
“Whoever’s poetry is not on the level of al-Mutanabbī or al-Maʿarrī, he should just shut
up!” Andalusian vizier Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khat īb treats readers of his Kitāb aʿmāl
al-aʿlām (Deeds of the Notables) to this zappy outburst by Zaragozan author
Muh ammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Maslama, better known as Muz affar ibn al-Aft as, in
defence of his own (allegedly mediocre) poetry.2 Aside from tickling a few funny bones,

CONTACT Kevin Blankinship kevin_blankinship@byu.edu Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages,
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA.
1
Research for this article was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award (DDRA) and by grants
from Southern Denmark University and the University of Utah. Many thanks to Esther-Miriam Wagner, Jessica Tearney-
Pearce, Suzanne Stetkevych, Nizar Hermes, Gretchen Head, Enass Khansa, Mohamad Ballan, Theo Beers and the anon-
ymous reviewers for their valuable and generous feedback.
2
Man lam yakun shiʿruh mithla shiʿr al-Mutanabbī aw al-Maʿarrī, fa-l-yaskut! See Lisan ad-din ibn al-Khatib, Histoire de
l’Espagne musulmane (Kitab Aʿmāl al-aʿlam), texte arabe publié avec traduction et index, ed. E. Lévi-Provençal (Beirut:
© 2019 Society for the Medieval Mediterranean
2 K. BLANKINSHIP

Ibn al-Khat īb’s words hint at the centrality of two authors for Iberia and North Africa. The
first is Abū l-T ayyib al-Mutanabbī, “The Would-Be Prophet”, one of the most glossed,
anthologised, and imitated poets in classical Arabic literature.3 The second is Abū l-
ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, known to biographers as “The Sage of Maʿarra” (h akīm al-Maʿarra) or
“The Twofold Captive” (rahīn al-mah basayn), the latter a self-created, brooding gesture
toward two “prisons”, namely his voluntary house arrest and his physical blindness.
That Muz affar ibn al-Aft as names al-Maʿarrī in tandem with al-Mutanabbī signals a
general esteem for the former in Iberia and North Africa. Yet for all the studies on al-
Maʿarrī in the Islamic East (al-Mashriq), to say nothing of the attention given to al-Mu-
tanabbī’s legacy overall, one comes up short where al-Maʿarrī and the Islamic west (al-
Gharb al-Islāmī) is concerned. This has partly to do with his taxing language and style,
for which he was notorious even in his own day.4 Also, it is only in the past twenty-five
years that scholars have recovered key texts of or about his western Mediterranean
legacy. Whatever the reasons for this neglect, it means that scholars have missed fully
half of a canonical author’s pre-modern reception. Perhaps even graver is the lost oppor-
tunity to explore Arabic literature’s growth as a coherent tradition stretching all the way
from Iran to Spain, surely one of the most arresting phenomena in world literature.
This article picks up at this gap with a preliminary look at al-Maʿarrī’s reception in the
Islamic west. After an overview of his life, works and general reputation in that region,
studies of four individual works (named in the next paragraph) demonstrate confluence
and contrast between typical associations with al-Maʿarrī, and what readers in the
Islamic west saw in him. Those texts that were popular in Baghdad and Damascus took
a back seat to lesser known ones in al-Andalus and the Maghrib, and vice versa, while
his general reputation for difficult style and unorthodox belief followed him further
west. Of special note are the many creative imitations and reworkings that galvanised
the Islamic west’s already energetic literary production, and the rich intellectual networks
that characterised his legacy there.
To clarify terminology, “Islamic west” refers collectively to “al-Andalus” (Iberia, that is
modern-day Spain and Portugal) and the “Maghrib” (North Africa, namely modern-day
Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) under Muslim dominion by both Arabs and non-Arabs.
The use of multiple place names is meant to distinguish between the cultures of Iberia
and North Africa in this era, a distinction not always acknowledged even in pre-
modern Arabic, let alone modern, scholarship.5 Where possible, specific authors are desig-
nated by their city or region of origin. The term “medieval” should evoke textual practices
– manuscripts, scribal culture, commentaries, and anthologies, to name a few – and cul-
tural overtones similar to those in Europe at the same time.

Dar al-Makchouf, 1956), pp. 183–4. For more on this Muz affar, see Ibn ʿIdhārī al-Marrākushī, Al-Bayān al-mughrib fī akhbār
al-Maghrib, volumes I–IV (Beirut: Dār al-Thaqāfa, 1948–1967), II: 449–71; Bruna Soravia, “Aft asids”, in EI3. http://dx.doi.
org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_24862 (accessed 14 August 2018).
3
For studies of his reception, see for instance Yūnus T urkī Salūm al-Bajjārī, Al-Muʿārad a fī al-shiʿr al-Andalusī: Dirāsa naqdiyya
wa-muwāzana (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1971); Mohammed Bencherifah, Abū Tammām wa-Abū al-T ayyib fī adab
al-maghāriba (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1986); Majd Al-Mallah, In the Shadows of the Master: Al-Mutanabbi’s Legacy
and the Quest for the Center in Fāt imid and Andalusian Poetry (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Academic Press, 2012).
4
See the second section of this article, “Medieval Maghribī Secondary Sources on al-Maʿarrī”, for Ibn Khaldūn’s less-than-
flattering assessment.
5
For example, starting in the fourteenth century AD, North African historiography in Arabic adopted an “Andalus-centric”
approach that went on to inform regional identity for centuries. See Camilo Gómez-Rivas, “Exile, Encounter, and the
Articulation of Andalusī Identity in the Maghrib”, Medieval Encounters 20 (2014): 340–51.
 AL-MASĀQ 3

Speaking of period, the essay confines itself mainly to pre-1250 authors, due to avail-
ability of texts and the precursory nature of the study. One should bear in mind the
rich and so far-underexplored Marīnid and Nas rid corpora (ca. 1250–1500). Where
appropriate, the original Arabic is transliterated to clarify meaning, or, in two specific
places, to demonstrate a principle of poetic rhyme.
As to framework, the first section, “Al-Maʿarrī: life, works, state of the art”, reviews his
life and works, modern scholarship, and medieval biographies from the Islamic west.
Then, each of the following four sections takes up a single work and its reception.6
Section two is about Luzūm mā lā yalzam (Self-Imposed Necessity), a poetry collection
in double end-rhyme on topics such as denying worldliness (zuhd), memento mori
(waʿz ), and rationalist critique of religion.7 Section three treats a short work of prosime-
trum – a tight mixture of poetry and prose – called Malqā l-sabīl (The Crossroads, a
title that refers to the blending of styles) on similar themes as the Luzūm.8 Section four
handles Saqt al-zand (The First Tinder-Spark),9 al-Maʿarrī’s early poetry in a single
collection, comprising mainly panegyrics to local rulers. Section five treats Risālat
al-s āhil wa-l-shāh ij (The Epistle of the Horse and the Mule),10 a prose narrative put
into the mouths of animal characters trying to deliver a message. The final section extrap-
olates general insights from the preceding discussion.

Al-Maʿarrī: life, works, and state of the art

Even a passing acquaintance with the medieval Arabic writing of Iberia and North Africa
will betray what one scholar provocatively called its “orientalising moods”.11 Without
overstating the point, western Islamic authors often relied on models from Baghdad
and Damascus to fuel their writing, especially before the thirteenth century and in the
area of elite literary production.12 As prototypes of good language and style, the works
of al-Maʿarrī took part in this trend. Owing partly to inclination, and partly to his
family ties to the cognoscenti of Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān near Aleppo, al-Maʿarrī displayed
an early precocity for language. He would later cast his fate with the learned circles of
Baghdad when he undertook a courageous but unsuccessful journey to that city at age
thirty, in approximately 1000. Thereafter, al-Maʿarrī returned to his hometown for a life
6
The works are further introduced in their respective sections.
7
Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Sharh al-luzūmiyyāt, ed. H usayn Nas s ār et al. volumes I–III (Cairo: Al-Hayʾa al-Mis riyya al-ʿĀmma li-l-
Kitāb, 1992).
8
Idem, “Malqā al-sabīl”, in Rasāʾil al-bulaghāʾ, ed. Muh ammad Kurd ʿAlī (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya al-Kubrā, 1913), pp.
214–31.
9
Idem, Shurūh Saqt al-zand, ed. T āhā H usayn, ʿAbd al-Rah īm Mah mūd, Mus t afā al-Saqā, ʿAbd al-Salām Hārūn, H āmid ʿAbd
al-Majīd, and Ibrāhīm al-Ibyārī, volumes I–V (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub, 1945–1949).
10
Idem, Risālat al-s āhil wa-l-shāh ij, ed. ʿĀʾīsha ʿAbd al-Rah mān “Bint al-Shāt iʾ” (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1975).
11
Aziz al-Azmeh, “Mortal Enemies, Invisible Neighbors: Northerners in Andalusi Eyes”, in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed.
Salma Khadra Jayyusi, volumes I–II (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), I: 262.
12
Here, one should bear in mind that Andalusī and Maghribī authors did not rely uniformly on eastern models, and also that
their reliance does not imply slavish imitation. See Beatrice Gruendler, “Originality in Imitation: Two Muʿārad as by Ibn
Darrāj al-Qast allī”, Al-Qant ara 29/2 (2008): 179–207. By the time Ibn al-Nadīm published his Fihrist in the tenth
century, many Arabic works had already been produced in Iberia and North Africa and moved eastward, a trend that
continued for centuries. The spread of Arabic writing outward from the Islamic west is the subject of “Local Contexts
and Global Dynamics: Al-Andalus and the Maghreb in the Islamic east”, a multi-year project funded by the Spanish Min-
istry of Economy and Competitiveness and co-directed by Maribel Fierro and Mayte Penelas. See Maribel Fierro, “The
Other Edge: The Maghrib in the Mashriq”, in Studying the Near and Middle East at the Institute for Advanced Study, Prin-
ceton, 1935-2018, ed. Sabine Schmidtke (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2018), pp. 353–8.
4 K. BLANKINSHIP

of seclusion until his death half a century later. As to his works, pre-modern biographers
attribute to him more than 200 titles, most notably Luzūm mā lā yalzam and Risālat
al-ghufrān (The Epistle of Forgiveness),13 the latter a long prose journey through
heaven and hell.
At least half a dozen pre-modern Andalusī and Maghribī authors talk about al-Maʿarrī.
Here, relevant titles include the Fihrist (Booklist) of Ibn Khayr al-Ishbīlī (d. 1200),14 which
mentions Luzūm mā lā yalzam, and also works such as Saqt al-zand, Khut bat al-fas īh
(Sermon of the Eloquent Man), Kitāb tarsīl Abī l-ʿAlāʾ (Al-Maʿarrī’s Collected Correspon-
dence), and the short work Malqā al-sabīl. Poet and historian Ibn Bassām al-Shantarīnī
(d. 1147) voluminously cites al-Maʿarrī’s verse from Saqt al-zand, in contrast to the
paltry showing of the Luzūm, in his Al-Dhakhīra fī mah āsin ahl al-jazīra (The Treasury
on the Merits of the Folk of the [Iberian] Peninsula).15 A-Maʿarrī’s contemporary in the
Maghrib, Ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī (d. 1063), dedicates several edited pages to him in
Qurād at al-dhahab fī naqd ashʿār al-ʿarab (A Shred of Gold on Appraising the Poetry
of the Arabs).16 The Andalusī vizier ʿAbd al-Ghafūr al-Kalāʿī (d. 1147) examined al-
Maʿarrī’s works and presented his own creative responses to them in Ih kām s anʿat al-
kalām (Perfecting the Craft of Speech).17
In later centuries, North African historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) alleged in his “Pro-
legomenon” (Muqaddima) that the Arabs of his time disparaged al-Maʿarrī alongside
al-Mutanabbī for not holding closely enough to Arabic conventions (bi-ʿadam al-nasj
ʿalā al-asālīb al-ʿarabiyya), leading to the conclusion that theirs was “versified speech
falling short of the status of poetry” (kalām manz ūm nāzil ʿan t abaqat al-shiʿr).18 This
opinion held sway up to the early twentieth century, in the wake of an influential 1857
edition of Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima.19 The anthologist and polymath of Tlemcen,
Ah mad ibn Muh ammad al-Maqqarī (d. 1632), cites al-Maʿarrī a dozen times in his
work, Nafh al-t īb min ghus n al-Andalus al-rat īb, wa-dhikr wazīrihā Lisān al-Dīn Ibn
al-Khat īb (The Breath of Fragrance from the Verdant Branch of al-Andalus, and Remem-
brance of its Vizier Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khat īb).20
Modern Arab scholars have for decades been aware of al-Maʿarrī’s deep imprint on
Iberia and North Africa. Egyptian intellectual T āhā H usayn supervised a critical edition

13
Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Risālat al-ghufrān, ed. ʿĀʾisha ʿAbd al-Rah mān “Bint al-Shāt iʾ” (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1963); ed. and
trans. Gregor Schoeler and Geert Jan van Gelder, The Epistle of Forgiveness, volumes I–II (New York: New York University
Press, 2013-2014).
14
Ibn Khayr al-Ishbīlī, Fahrasat Ibn Khayr al-Ishbīlī, ed. Bashshār ʿAwwād Maʿrūf and Mah mūd Bashshār ʿAwwād (Tunis: Dār
al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 2009).
15
Abū l-H asan ʿAlī ibn Bassām al-Shantarīnī, Al-Dhakhīra fī mah āsin ahl al-jazīra, ed. Ih sān ʿAbbās, volumes I–IV (Beirut: Dār
al-Thaqāfa, 1997).
16
Ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī, Qurād at al-dhahab fī naqd ashʿār al-ʿarab (traité de critique poétique), ed. Chedly Bouyahia (Tunis:
Société tunisienne de Distribution (S. T. D.), 1972), pp. 96, 106–8, 111–15.
17
Abū l-Qāsim Muh ammad ibn ʿAbd al-Ghafūr al-Kalāʿī, Ih kām sanʿat al-kalām, ed. Muh ammad Rid wān al-Dāya (Beirut: Dār
al-Thaqāfa, 1966).
18
ʿAbd al-Rah mān ibn Muh ammad Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimat Ibn Khaldūn, ed. ʿAbd Allāh Muh ammad al-Darwīsh, volumes
I–II (Damascus: Maktabat al-Hidāya, 2004), II: 402.
19
Terri DeYoung, Mahmud Sami al-Barudi: Reconfiguring Society and the Self (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015).
20
Ah mad ibn Muh ammad al-Maqqarī, Nafh al-t īb, min ghus n al-Andalus al-rat ib, ed. Ih sān ʿAbbās, volumes I–VIII (Beirut: Dār
S ādir, 1968). Sabahat Adil at University of Colorado Boulder wrote her doctoral thesis on al-Maqqarī and has begun to
publish articles on the subject. See Sabahat Adil, “Scholarship, Space, and Strategies of Belonging in al-Maqqarī’s (d. 1031/
1632) Literary and Historical Writings,” Journal of North African Studies, forthcoming. Recently, Mohamad Ballan at the
Dartmouth Society of Fellows has completed a University of Chicago PhD thesis on the vizier Lisān al-Dīn, who is
named in al-Maqqarī’s title. See Mohamad Ballan, “The Scribe of the Alhambra: Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib, Sovereignty
and History in Nasrid Granada”, PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2018.
 AL-MASĀQ 5

that includes the Andalusī grammarian and philosopher Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat alyawsī’s
(d. 1127) commentary on Saqt al-zand,21 as well as creative responses by Maghribī
authors.22 Another Egyptian, ʿĀʾisha ʿAbd al-Rah mān “Bint al-Shāt iʾ”, edited al-Maʿarrī’s
Risālat al-s āhil wa-l-shāh ij, once thought lost but which survives in the Hasaniyya Archive
in Rabat, Morocco. Mohammed Bencherifah at Mohammed V University has over the
years created multiple scholarly editions,23 but also trained a new generation of specialists,
notably H ayāt Qāra24 and Thurāyā Lahī.25 Salvador Peña’s 1990 book Al-Maʿarrī según
Batalyawsi analyses al-Bat alyawsī’s response to a second grammarian and jurist, Abū
Bakr ibn al-ʿArabī of Seville (d. 1148) – not to be confused with the thirteenth-century
poet and mystic, Muh yī l-Dīn ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) – on al-Maʿarrī’s Saqt al-zand.26
More recently, Hanāʾ Mus t afā Nāfiʿ Abū al-Rabb published a 2009 monograph about
al-Maʿarrī’s reception in the Maghrib.27
What is the overall figure of al-Maʿarrī cut by biographers and other authors? For one
thing, and as in the Mashriq, he had a reputation for eccentric or unorthodox views. Ibn
Khāqān likens al-Maʿarrī to Ibn Hāniʾ al-Andalusī, on the grounds that Ibn Hāniʾ “became
stripped of religiosity [tajarrada min al-tadayyun wa-ʿariya], expressed himself in an out-
rageous way [abdā bi-l-ghuluww], and overstepped the clear bounds of what is right and
proper [taʿaddā al-h aqq al-majlū]”.28 Another anthologist, Ibn Bassām al-Shantarīnī,
harshly condemns the poet and littérateur al-Sumaysir al-Ilbīrī for being like al-Maʿarrī,
since the former “was excessive in his aping [of al-Maʿarrī] and overreached when
calling up wise sayings [akhadh al-ghuluww bi-l-taqlīd wa-nādā al-h ikma min makān
baʿīd]”.29
Suspicion of al-Maʿarrī had something to do with the literary themes for which he was
famous, most especially zuhd and waʿz . Also, due to his aphoristic wisdom, some con-
sidered him what one might call a “philosophical poet”.30 ʿAbd al-Ghafūr al-Kalāʿī says
of his original works that “the author relies on his thought, and scoops out of his ocean
thereof [wa-minhā mā yaʿtamid fīhā al-muʾallif ʿalā fikrih wa-yaghtarifuh min

21
Al-Maʿarrī, Shurūh Saqt al-zand. This is the best edition of Saqt al-zand. In addition to the poems themselves, it incorpor-
ates the commentaries of four men: Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat alyawsī, Ibn al-Khat īb al-Tibrīzī, Qāsim ibn al-H usayn al-Khwārazmī,
and al-Maʿarrī’s own self-commentary, D awʾ al-saqt (The Light of The Tinder Spark).
22
TQ 439–57.
23
See especially, Shurūh Andalusiyya ghayr maʿrūfa li-Saqt al-zand, ed. Mohammed Bencherifah (Casablanca: Mat baʿat al-
Najāh al-Jadīda, 2011).
24
See for example Qirāʾa fī adab al-nafs: shiʿr Abī ʿImrān al-Martullī al-Andalusī, ed. H ayāt Qāra (Rabat: Dār al-Amān, 2008).
25
See for example, Sulaymā ibn Mūsā al-Kalāʿī, Juhd al-nas īh wa-h az z al-manīh min musājalat al-Maʻarrī fī Khut bat al-Fas īh ,
ed. Thurayā Lahī (Rabat: Kullīyat al-Adāb wa-l-ʻUlūm al-Insānīya bi-l-Rabāṭ, 2001).
26
Salvador Peña, Maʿarrī según Batalyawsī: Crítica y poética en al-Andalus, siglo XI (Granada, SP: Universidad de Granada,
1990). The work by al-Bat alyawsī in question is Al-Intisār mimman ʿadala ʿan al-istibs ār, ed. H āmid ʿAbd al-Majīd
(Cairo: Al-Mat baʿa al-Amīriyya, 1955). Peña gives a succinct overview of his findings in the entry on al-Bat alyawsī for
the BA. See Salvador Peña Martín, “Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat alyawsī, Abū Muh ammad”, in BA, V: 304–37. For more on the gram-
marian Ibn al-ʿArabī, see A. (Ahmed) Ateş, “Ibn al-ʿArabī”, in EI2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0316
(accessed 23 August 2018).
27
Hanāʾ Mus t afā Nāfiʿ Abū l-Rabb, Āthār Abī l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī fī l-adab al-Andalusī (Amman: Dār al-Wird al-Urduniyya, 2009).
28
Abū al-Nas r al-Fath ibn Muh ammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Khāqān, Mat mah al-anfus wa-masrah al-taʾannus fī mulah ahl al-
Andalus, ed. Muh ammad ʿAlī al-Shawābka (Beirut: Dār ʿAmmār, Muʾassassat al-Risāla, 1983), pp. 322–3.
29
Al-Shantarīnī, Al-Dhakhīra, I: 889–90.
30
Readers should understand this term to mean a poet who uses his art to discuss topics common to philosophy, not one
espousing a coherent and comprehensive system of thought. For an overview of possible tensions between poetry and
philosophy, see for example George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1910), pp. 3–15.
6 K. BLANKINSHIP

bah rih].”31 Al-Kalāʿī and others were struck by his gnomic musings on life’s transience and
the need, therefore, to reject worldly desires.
But they were also struck by his distinctive – often notorious – style of writing. If one
turns again to al-Kalāʿī, he praises al-Maʿarrī for his poetic use of tars īʿ, “jewelling”,32 a
technical term that normally refers to morphological and syntactic parallelism, as in Al-
Infit ār (The Splitting), verses 13 and 14 of the Qurʿān: “Surely the pious shall be in
bliss, and the libertines shall be in a fiery furnace” [inna al-abrār la-fī naʿīm wa-inna
al-fujjār la-fī jah īm].33 But al-Kalāʿī means something different: “learned references”, indi-
cating al-Maʿarrī’s fondness for inserting obscure technical knowledge into his poetry.34
Another thinker, Ibn al-Rashīq al-Qayrawānī, lauds al-Maʿarrī together with al-Mutanabbī
for talfīq, “sewing together [two ends of a garment]”, that is, taking two closely related
meanings and making a new one (maʿnā muwallad), “like an innovation [ka-l-
ikhtirāʿ]”.35 Of course, many objected to his difficult language, as is seen in the opinions
of Ibn Khaldūn, on the grounds that it was technically virtuosic but not really beautiful.
Indeed, as in the Mashriq, his literary merit was the subject of controversy among Anda-
lusīs and Maghribīs, a fact that mirrors similar debates about his beliefs.

Luzūm mā lā yalzam (Self-Imposed Necessity)

Turning now to individual works, and to start with the most famous, al-Maʿarrī’s Luzūm mā
lā yalzam constitutes a unique triumph on the basis of form alone. All the poems in the col-
lection are written in double end-rhyme,36 luzūm mā lā yalzam – “making necessary that
which is not”. The term itself refers to the fact that, in classical Arabic poetry, only the
final consonant-vowel unit or “rhymeme”37 – made up of the consonant itself or “rhyme
letter”, h arf al-rawiyy, and its accompanying vowel, the latter being considered by classical
theorists as the “rhyme” itself (qāfiya) – was required to be the same in each line.
For an example of this basic condition of rhyme, and as against al-Maʿarrī’s double
rhyme, here are the fourth and fifth lines of an elegy from his first book of poetry, Saqt
al-zand (metre: khafīf):
ُ
‫ـ َﺐ َﻓﺄَ ْﻳ َﻦ ﺍﻟ ُﻘ ُﺒﻮ ُﺭ ِﻣ ْﻦ َﻋ ْﻬ ِﺪ َﻋﺎ ِﺩ‬ ‫ﺻﺎ ِﺡ ﻫﺬﻱ ُﻗ ُﺒﻮ ُﺭ َﻧﺎ َﺗ ْﻤ َﻸ ﺍﻟ ُﺮ ْﺣـ‬ َِ
‫ﺽ ﺇ َّﻻ ِﻣ ْﻦ ﻫ ِﺬ ِﻩ ﺍ َﻷ ْﺟ َﺴﺎ ِﺩ‬ َ
ِ ‫ـﺄ ْﺭ‬ ِ ‫َﺧ ّﻔ‬
‫ﻒ ﺍﻟ َﻮ ْﻁَء َﻣﺎ ﺃَ ُﻇ ُﻦ ﺃَ ِﺩﻳ َﻢ ﺍﻟـ‬

31
Al-Kalāʿī, Ih kām, 231. In contrast, says al-Kalāʿī, secondary commentaries by al-Maʿarrī on other poets are those works in
which he “does not scoop out of his own ocean [of thought]” (mā lam yaghtarifhu min bah rih). Al-Kalāʿī may be making a
simple distinction more than commenting on the thought content of al-Maʿarrī’s writings. Then again, he does not nor-
mally refer to a given poet’s mind as “his ocean”.
32
Ibid., 130–3.
33
Arthur J. Arberry, trans., The Koran Interpreted, volumes I–II in one (New York: George Allen & Unwin, 1955, 3rd repr. 1969),
II: 328. All English Qurʾān translations are from Arberry unless noted otherwise.
34
This seems to be an anomalous definition. Pre-modern rhetoricians overwhelmingly give the first sense of tars īʿ, that is,
parallelism. See for example ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Sarāyā ibn ʿAlī, S afī al-Dīn al-H illī, Sharh al-kāfiya al-badīʿiyya fī ʿulūm al-
balāgha wa-mah āsin al-badīʿ, ed. Nasīb Nishāwī (Damascus: Al-Jamʿ al-ʿIlmī al-ʿArabī bi-Dimashq, 1982; 2nd repr.
Beirut: Dār S ādir, 1992), pp. 191–2. Pierre Cachia, The Arch Rhetorician, or The Schemer’s Skimmer: A Handbook of Late
Arabic badīʻ Drawn from ʻAbd al-Ghanī an-Nābulsī’s Nafaḥāt al-azhār ʻala nasamāt al-asḥār (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz
Verlag, 1998), p. 18.
35
Ibn Rashīq, Qurād at al-dhahab, 106–8.
36
Geert Jan van Gelder goes a step further and calls it “rich rhyme”, since other elements beyond the two rhyming con-
sonants repeat throughout a given poem. See Geert Jan van Gelder, Sound and Sense in Classical Arabic Poetry (Wiesba-
den: Otto Harrassowitz, 2012), p. 212.
37
This is Rina Drory’s term. For an explanation, and a good overview of rhyme in theory and practice, see Rina Drory, Models
and Contacts: Arabic Literature and Its Impact on Medieval Jewish Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 60–103.
 AL-MASĀQ 7

S āh i hādhī qubūrunā tamlaʾu l-ruh /ba fa-ayna l-qubūru min ʿahdi ʿĀdī
Khaffifi l-wat ʾa mā az unnu adīma l-/ard i illā min hādhihi l-ajsādī
[Friend, these are our graves, filling up every open space;
and what about all the graves from the age of ʿĀd?
Lighten your step! It seems to me that the earth’s surface
is nothing other than all of these bodies.] 38

With the last two syllables in bold font, and penultimate being underlined, one can see
that the final consonant-vowel unit, dī, remains the same in both lines, while the penulti-
mate consonant is different, ʿĀ ( ‫ ) َﻋﺎ‬in line 4 and sā ( ‫ ) َﺳﺎ‬in line 5 (the long vowel alif does
not count toward the rhyme letter). Contrast the default of this one-consonant require-
ment – in which coming up with rhyme words is a much simpler task – with double
end-rhyme, in which both ultimate and penultimate consonant units stay the same
(metre: sarīʿ):
ِ ‫ﻓـﺈ َّﻥ‬
‫ﺻ ْﺪ ِﻗﻲ ِﺑــ َﻔ ِﻤﻲ ﺃ ْﻋ َﺬ ِ ُﺏ‬ ‫ﺇ ْﻥ َﻋ ُﺬ َﺏ ﺍﻟ َﻤـﻴ ُﻦ ِﺑﺄ ْﻓـﻮﺍ ِﻫ ُﻜﻢ‬
‫ﺻـ ُﻔﻮﺍ ﻭﻻ ُﻫ ّﺬ ُﺑﻮﺍ‬ ُ ‫ﺱ ﻣﺎ‬ ُ ‫َﻭﺍﻟﻨَّﺎ‬ ‫َﻃﻠﹷﺒ ُﺖ ﻟﻠِ َﻌﺎﻟَ ِﻢ َﺗ ْﻬﺬﻳـ َﺒ ُﻬ ْﻢ‬
In ʿadhuba l-maynu bi-afwāhikum/fa-inna s idqī bi-famī aʿdhabū
T alabtu li l-ʿālami tahdhībahum/wa-l-nāsu mā s ufū wa-lā hudhdhibū
[If falsehood is sweet in your mouths, then truth is sweeter in mine;
I asked the world to refine (its) people, but they were not purified or refined.]39

Here, the final rhymeme of al-rawiyy and qāfiya, bū, remains the same as per the basic
requirement of poetry, but so does the penultimate consonant, dh-; the change in vowel
does not affect the rhyme’s adherence to prescribed norms (dha in the first line, dhi in
the second).
The above examples also illustrate the kind of topics, themes and images found in
Luzūm mā lā yalzam. More than any other work, this was the one that made al-Maʿarrī
famous for renouncing worldliness, offering pious wisdom and questioning religious doc-
trine. The last subject often drove the choices that compilers and critics made about which
verses best represented al-Maʿarrī. In several places, for instance, Ibn Bassām deploys lines
from Luzūm mā lā yalzam as evidence of the poet’s ilh ād (deviation, unbelief),40 whereas
he more often uses earlier verses from Saqt al-zand to point out originality or poetic talent.
Both form and content in Luzūm mā lā yalzam became the fodder of western Islamic
authors following in al-Maʿarrī’s footsteps. One of these was Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat alyawsī,
whom Maribel Fierro calls “un pensador a la par erudito y original”.41 Certainly he was
a leading intellectual figure in his day. A contemporary of al-Zamakhsharī, and having
been born just a few years after the death of ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Ibn al-Sīd
partook of a general consonance among rationalist Andalusī thinkers of the era.42 Born
and raised at Badajoz in the western peninsula (Gharb al-Andalus), a buzzing cultural
centre at the time, he studied with prominent intellectuals such as Ibn Bashkuwāl
(d. 1183) before moving east to València to take up a life of writing and teaching.
There, he lived out the rest of his days and also established his legacy, not least through

38
Al-Maʿarrī, Shurūh Saqt al-zand, III: 974.
39
Idem, Sharh al-luzūmiyyāt, I: 127 (poem #69),
40
See, for example, Ibn Bassām al-Shantarīnī, Al-Dhakhīra, I: 718, 887; II: 482.
41
Maribel Fierro, Al-Ándalus: Saberes y intercambios culturales (Barcelona: Icaria, 2000), p. 25. See also Ibn al-Zaqqāq,
Poesías/Ibn al-Zaqqāq: Edición y traducción en verso [del árabe] de Emílio García Gomez (Madrid: Instituto Hispano-
Arabe de Cultura, 1986): p. 8. García Gomez calls him a “maestro reputado de la juventud valenciana de la época”.
42
Peña, “Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat alyawsī”, V: 309.
8 K. BLANKINSHIP

a large following of students. As to his works, Ibn al-Sīd wrote some three dozen studies
and commentaries on semantics, grammar and even esoteric philosophy.43
One of Ibn al-Sīd’s greatest achievements was a massive commentary on al-Maʿarrī’s
poems from both Saqt al-zand and Luzūm mā lā yalzam. Originally conceived as a
whole, the work has since been divided according to each separate text. The commentary
on Saqt al-zand survives along with that of al-Tibrīzī and al-Khwārazmī in Shurūh Saqt al-
zand, a text mentioned above. As for the Luzūm, Ibn al-Sīd’s gloss exists in a two-volume
edition, Sharh al-mukhtār min Luzūmiyyāt Abī l-ʿAlāʾ (A Commentary on Selections from
Luzūm mā lā yalzam by Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī).44 That modern scholars broke the two
works apart speaks to the perception, in many ways justified, of a rupture between the
early and later poems. But Ibn al-Sīd wrote it as a single unit, betraying a sensitivity to
al-Maʿarrī’s corpus as a unified whole.
He brings a similar sensitivity to the overall Arabic literary tradition. Throughout the
sharh , Ibn al-Sīd makes efforts to place al-Maʿarrī within the history of Arabic poetry up to
his time, aesthetically as much as lexically. Glossing a line from a luzūmiyya mīmiyya that
describes life as a “disease” (dāʾ) to the living, Ibn al-Sīd says, “This is like the saying of
Labīd [ibn Rabīʿa (d. 661), the famous mukhad ram poet]”,45 which he then quotes
(metre: kāmil):
ِ
‫ﺼ َّﺤ ِﻨﻲ َﻓﺈ َﺫﺍ ﺍﻟ َﺴ َﻼﻣ ُﺔ َﺩﺍ ُﺀ‬
ِ ‫ﻟِ ُﻴ‬ ‫َﻭ َﺩ َﻋ ْﻮ ُﺕ َﺭﺑّﻲ ِﺑﺎﻟ َﺴ َﻼﻣ ِﺔ َﺟﺎ ِﻫﺪﴽ‬
[I cried out to my lord for security to restore me
But did so as an ignorant man – see how security is a disease.]46

When Ibn al-Sīd associates this line with that of al-Maʿarrī, he does it on a figurative
(maʿnā) rather than merely lexical basis. He thus pays attention to higher-level, “literary”
properties and how they continue through time and across many authors.
Ibn al-Sīd wrote one other work directly related to al-Maʿarrī: Al-Intis ār mimman
ʿadala ʿan al-istibs ār (Victory over Those Who Have Abandoned Rational Insight).
In this short text, Ibn al-Sīd responds to the now-lost objections of Ibn al-ʿArabī to
al-Maʿarrī’s poetry. He complains at the outset that Ibn al-ʿArabī “went to extremes and
was not fair in his judgments [taʿassafa wa-mā ans afa]”.47 Then he considers specific
cases, such as two lines from the Luzūm in which al-Maʿarrī calls his blindness, self-exile

43
These works include Al-Muthallath, ed. S alāh Mahdī l-Fart ūsī, volumes I–II (Baghdad: Dār al-Rashīd, 1981), a text on
semantics that explores individual words grouped morphologically by three; Al-Iqtid āb fī sharh Adab al-kuttāb, ed.
Mus t afā l-Saqā and H āmid ʿAbd al-Majīd, volumes I–III (Cairo: Al-Hayʾa al-Mis riyya al-ʿĀmma li-l-Kitāb, 1981–1983),
which is a commentary on the Adab al-kātib by Ibn Qutayba, known to Andalusis as Adab al-kuttāb; and his philosophical
work Kitāb al-h adāʾiq fī l-mat ālib al-ʿāliya al-falsafiyya al-ʿawīs a, ed. Muh ammad Rid wān al-Dāya (Damascus: Dār al-Fikr,
1988), sometimes known as Kitāb al-dawāʾir (The Book of Imaginary Circles). This esoteric text has historically had more
influence beyond the Islamic tradition than within it, especially among medieval Jewish and Renaissance Christian thin-
kers. For more discussion, see Ayala Eliyahu, “From Kitāb al-h adāʾiq to Kitāb al-dawāʾir: Reconsidering Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat a-
lyawsī’s Philosophical Treatise”, Al-Qant ara 36/1 (2015): 165–98.
44
Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat alyawsī, Sharh al-mukhtār min Luzūmiyyāt Abī l-ʿAlāʾ, ed. H āmid ʿAbd al-Majīd, volumes I–II (Cairo:
Mat baʿat Dār al-Kutub, 1970).
45
This appears to be a misattribution. Ih sān ʿAbbās does not include any poems rhyming in hamza in his edition of Labīd’s
dīwān. See Sharh Dīwān Labīd ibn Rabīʿa al-ʿĀmirī, ed. Ih sān ʿAbbās (Kuwait: Wizārat al-Irshād wa-l-Anbāʾ, 1962), p.
1. Instead, other sources indicate that it was al-Nābigha al-Jaʿdī (d. 683) who wrote the line in question. See Dīwān
al-Nābigha al-Jaʿdī, ed. Wād ih al-S amad (Beirut: Dār S ādir, 1998), p. 17. Al-Thaʿālibī attributes it to al-Jaʿdī as one of
three cases of pre-Islamic poets, along with al-Namir ibn Tawlab and H umayd ibn Thawr al-Hilālī, who responded crea-
tively to the Prophetic saying, “Security is the greatest disease” (kafā bi-l-salāma dāʾan). See ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Muh ammad
al-Thaʿālibī, Khās s al-khāss , ed. Maʾmūn ibn Muh yī l-Dīn Jannān (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1994), p. 149.
46
Al-Bat alyawsī, Sharh al-mukhtār, 1:277.
47
Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat alyawsī, Al-Intis ār, 1.
 AL-MASĀQ 9

and sickly body “prisons,” sujūn.48 Ibn al-ʿArabī seems to have rejected this reading in
favour of shujūn, “pains”. Ibn al-Sīd refutes him with an appeal to other lines from the
Luzūm that use such punitive imagery, and to the fact that al-Maʿarrī called himself
rahīn al-mah basayn, the twofold captive (lit. “the captive of two prisons”).49
In another case, Ibn al-Sīd looks at a line that Ibn al-ʿArabī thought questionable not for
its language but for its content (metre: khafīf):
‫ــ ِﺮ ﻟَ َﻬﺎ َﻓ ْﻮ َﻕ ﺃَ ْﻫﻠِ َﻬﺎ ﺇِﻟْ َﻤﺎ ُﺀ‬ ‫َﻫ ِﺬ ِﻩ ﺍﻟ ُﺸ ْﻬ ُﺐ ِﺧﻠْﺘُ َﻬﺎ َﺷ َﺒ َﻚ ﺍﻟ َﺪ ْﻫـ‬
[These stars – I imagined them as the nets of eternity,
Taking in all of its (the earth’s) folk from above.]50

“Here, the poet meant that the heavens surround creation [al-falak muh īt bi-l-khalq]”, says
Ibn al-ʿArabī in Ibn al-Sīd’s secondhand report, “and that creation is in its grasp and
cannot escape it. But such a statement [lafz ] applies only to God”. To counter this
high-stakes objection, Ibn al-Sīd ups the ante by quoting verse 33 of Sūrat al-Rah mān
(The All-Merciful): “O tribe of jinn and of men, if you are able to pass through the
confines of heaven and earth, pass through them! You shall not pass through except
with an authority”.51 For Ibn al-Sīd, the verse posits “creation within the heavens’
grasp”, which justifies the metaphysical soundness of al-Maʿarrī’s line.52
Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat alyawsī has taken up extra space here for two reasons. First, his con-
stitutes the most direct engagement with Luzūm mā lā yalzam specifically, and second,
he returns time and again in the isnād chains of Andalusī and Maghribī writings about
al-Maʿarrī. A number of disciples benefitted from his master’s touch, such as the poet
Ibn al-Zaqqāq,53 and also the anthologist Ibn Khāqān.54 A third pupil responded to
al-Maʿarrī in particular: Abū T āhir Muh ammad al-Saraqust ī ibn al-Ashtarkūwī
(d. 1143), the Zaragozan author of Al-Maqāmāt al-luzūmiyya (Standups in the Mode of
Luzūm mā lā yalzam).55 A series of trickster tales after the style of Badīʿ al-Zamān
al-Hamadhānī and al-Qāsim ibn ʿAlī al-H arīrī, these maqāmāt owe a debt to al-Maʿarrī
since they are composed entirely in double end-rhyme, both the prose frame tales and
poetic interpolations. Al-Saraqust ī’s composition took part in a wider drift toward
formal experimentation, in which al-Maʿarrī’s text Malqā l-sabīl played a major role.

Malqā al-sabīl (The Crossroads)

During and soon after al-Maʿarrī’s lifetime, Arabic literature saw the rise of the stanza –
the Arabic word is dawr, “a round”, cognate to the Greek strophe and English strophe,
“turn” or “twist” – that is, grouped lines set off from each other by different rhymes
48
Ibid., 3.
49
Ibid., 4.
50
Ibid., 16. See al-Maʿarrī, Sharh al-luzūmiyyāt, I: 69 (poem #16, line 10).
51
Arberry, Koran Interpreted, II: 252.
52
Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat alyawsī, Al-Intis ār, 17.
53
Muh ammad Ibn Shākir al-Kutubī, Fawāt al-wafayāt wa-l-dhayl ʿalayhā, ed. Ih sān ʿAbbās et al., volumes I–V (Beirut: Dār
S ādir, 1974), III: 47 (entry #344).
54
Ibn al-Abbār, Al-Muʿjam fī as h āb al-qād ī al-imām Abī ʿAlī l-S adafī, ed. Francisco Codera y Zaidín (Madrid: Biblioteca
Arabico-Hispana, 1886; repr. Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfa al-Dīniyya, 2000), pp. 300-1.
55
Al-Maqāmāt al-luzūmīya by Abū l-T āhir Muh ammad ibn Yūsuf al-Tamīmī al-Saraqust ī ibn al-Aštarkūwī (d. 538/1143), trans-
lated with a Preliminary Study, trans. James T. Monroe (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Al-Suyūt ī affirms that al-Saraqust ī studied with
Ibn al-Sīd. See Jalāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Rah mān al-Suyūt ī, Bughyat al-wuʿāt fī t abaqāt al-lughawiyyīn wa-l-nuh āt, ed.
Muh ammad Abū l-Fad l Ibrāhīm, volumes I–II (Cairo: Mat baʿat ʿĪsā l-Bābī l-H alabī, 1964), I: 279 (entry #514).
10 K. BLANKINSHIP

within the same poem. The emergence of stanzaic poetry was a watershed moment in
Arabic, since, as far as we know, monorhyme was the norm prior to this point.56 Of
course, experiments with rhyme and metre were nothing new. Gregor Schoeler has
studied how early “families” of musammat stanzas led in time to fully strophic poems
like the muwashshah and zajal.57 But the variety of such experiments increased dramati-
cally after the tenth century.
This was not only the case in Arabic. It was also in this period that the first tarjīʿ-band
and tarkīb-band poems appeared in the Persian dīwāns of Qat rān Tabrīzī (d. 1009) and
Farrukhī-ya Sīstānī (d. 1031).58 In Hebrew, there is evidence of zajal forms a full
century before they appeared in Arabic.59 Strophic poetry first entered Europe around
the twelfth or thirteenth century through vernacular formes fixes like the rondeau, the
estornel, the virelai and the cantiga.60 As scholars have noted, these Romance poems
bear striking formal resemblance to the Arabic zajal.61 In addition, other Arabic forms
appeared that take similar liberties, such as the five-line mukhammasāt (also takhāmīs)
and ten-line muʿashsharāt in Iberia and North Africa.62
As a whole, al-Maʿarrī’s oeuvre fits neatly into this experimental trend. In his
alleged Qurʾānic parody called Al-Fus ūl wa-l-ghāyāt, he groups sections ( fus ūl) of
internally-rhyming prose under single end-rhymes (ghāyāt) for each letter of the
Arabic alphabet, thereby creating a sort of prose analogue to the stanza.63 But it
was the pithy style of Malqā l-sabīl that did more to hasten the stanza’s popularity
than any other of his writings. The work is structured around single units, each con-
taining one group of rhymed prose segments – medieval theorists called that prose
sajʿ, “dovesong”, and the segments fus ūl, sajaʿāt, fiqar or qarāʾin64 – and one set of
poetry lines. The number of segments and lines is equal within a given unit,
ranging between two and eight. Both the prose and poetry end on the same rhyme
letter per unit and are written in double end-rhyme (luzūm mā lā yalzam). There
is a unit for every Arabic consonant, plus the three long vowels and the combination
of alif-lām, totaling thirty units in all.
Thematically, Malqā l-sabīl echoes both Luzūm mā lā yalzam and Al-Fus ūl wa-l-
ghāyāt in warning about the shortness of mortality. Parallel resonances exchanged
between a single unit’s prose and poetry give the work a sense of call and response,

56
Notable exceptions include poetry written in rajaz metre. For more discussion, see Devin Stewart, “Sajʿ in the Qurʾān:
Prosody and Structure”, Journal of Arabic Literature 21/2 (1990): 101–39, p. 109.
57
Gregor Schoeler, “Musammat ”, in EI2.
58
Gabrielle van den Berg, “Stanzaic Poetry”, in Encyclopedia Iranica Online, December 6, 2012.
59
Schoeler, “Musammat ”, 660–1. Tova Rosen suggests an indigenous origin for the Hebrew forms. See Tova Rosen, “The
Muwashshah”, in The Literature of al-Andalus, ed. María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells (Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 165–89.
60
M.L. Gasparov, A History of European Versification, trans. G.S. Smith and Marina Tarlinskaja, ed. G.S. Smith and Leofranc
Holford-Strevens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 149–62.
61
Gregor Schoeler, "Muwaššah und Zag al: Einfluß auf die Troubadour-Dichtung?”, in Orientalisches Mittelalter, ed. W. Hein-
richs (Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 5) (Wiesbaden: Aula Verlag, 1990), 440–64.; Otto Zwartjes, Love
Songs from al-Andalus: History, Structure, and Meaning of the Kharja (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 94–125.
62
For an introduction to the latter form and its place in the works of Ibn ʿArabī, see Denis E. McAuley, “An A to Z of Sufi
Metaphysics: Ibn ʿArabī’s Muʿashsharāt”, in The Meeting Place of British Middle East Studies: Emerging Scholars, Emergent
Research and Approaches, ed. Amanda Phillips and Refqa Abu-Remaileh (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 60–
77. Similar forms also appeared at this time in Persian. See van den Berg, “Stanzaic Poetry”.
63
Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Al-Fus ūl wa-l-ghāyāt fī tamjīd Allāh wa-l-mawāʿiz , ed. Mah mūd H asan Zanātī (Beirut: Al-Maktab al-
Tijārī li-l-T ibāʿa wa-l-Tawzīʿ wa-l-Nashr, 1938).
64
For discussion of these and other terms, see Stewart, “Sajʿ in the Qurʾān”, 113–14.
 AL-MASĀQ 11

not unlike the polyphonic muwashshah and zajal forms that it may have helped to
inspire:
‫ﺍﻟﺒﺎﺀ‬
‘‫ ﻭﺗﻨﻘﻄﻊ ﺑﺎﻟ َﻤﻮﺕ ﺍﻷﺳﺒﺎﺏ‬،‫ ﻭﺑﺎﻟﻜﺎ ِﻓ ِﺮ َﻳ ِﺤ ّﻞ ﺍﻟﺘَ َﺒﺎﺏ‬،‫ َﻳﻔﺘ ِﻘ ُﺮ ﺇﻟﻰ ﺍﻟﻠﻪ ﺍﻷﺭﺑﺎﺏ‬،
.‫ﻭﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﺨﺎﻟﻖ ُﺗﺤﺎﺭ ﺍﻷﻟﺒﺎﺏ‬
(‫َﻧﻈﻤﻪ )ﺭﺟﺰ‬
‫ﻭﺑﺎﻟﻜﻔﻮﺭ ﻳﻠﺤﻖ ﺍﻟﺘﺒﺎﺑ‬ ‫ﺩﺍﻧ ْﺖ ﻟِ َﺮ ّﺏ ﺍﻟ َﻔﻠَﻚ ﺍﻷﺭﺑﺎﺏ‬
‫ﻭﺍﻓﺘﻘﺮ ْﺕ ﺑ َﺮﻏ ِﻤ َﻬﺎ ﺍﻷﺣﺒﺎﺏ‬ ‫ﻛ ْﻢ ُﻗ ِﻄ َﻌ ْﺖ ﻟﻤﻴﺘﺔ ﺃﺳﺒﺎﺏ‬

[Rhyme letter “Bāʾ”]

[Noble lords still have need of God; ruin descends on the unbeliever;
in death, ties to the world are cut; in pondering the Creator,
men’s wits are baffled.]
And in verse (rajaz)
[Noble lords are indebted to the Lord of
the Heavens; to unbelief, ruin attaches.
How many a corpse’s earthly ties have been cut?
How many loved ones left wanting in spite of it?]65

With such a tight shape, epigrammatic tone, and gnomic content, it is no wonder that Malqā
l-sabīl inspired creative imitations (muʿārad āt) by Andalusī and Maghribī admirers.66
One such imitation was by Ibn Abī l-Khis āl (d. 1146) – known by the sobriquet Dhū l-
wizāratayn, “Holder of the Two Vizierates”, an official title dating back to the Umayyad
era and which refers to unified control of chancery and military functions67 – who
served under the Almoravids, including the amīr Yūsuf ibn Tashfīn himself.68 His col-
lected letters have outlasted the caprices of history and were edited by Muh ammad
Rid wān al-Dāya in 1988.69 It is there that we find his muʿārad a to al-Maʿarrī’s Malqā l-
sabīl, the only such imitation that survives in full. He follows the same letter combinations
of double rhyme and, with few exceptions, the same number of prose and poetry segments
in a given unit. Here is the section for letter bāʾ:
‫َﺣﺮﻑ ﺍﻟﺒﺎﺀ‬
‫ َﻭ ُﻣﺮﻳ ٍﺪ‬،‫ ُﺭ َّﺏ َﻣ ِﻬﻴ ٍﺐ ﻻ ُﻳﻬﺎﺏ‬،‫ ﻭ َﺩ َﺑ َﻐ ْﺖ ﻭﻗﺪ َﺣﻠَ َﻢ ﺍﻹﻫﺎﺏ‬،‫َﻏ َّﺮ ْﺗﻬﺎ ﺍﻟﻨِ َﻬﺎﺏ‬
‫ ﻭﺫﺍ ِﻫ ٍﺐ ﺑﻨﻔ ِﺴ ِﻪ ﺃ ْﻋ َﺠﻠَ ُﻪ ﺍﻟ َﺬ َﻫﺎﺏ‬،‫ ﺃَ ْﺣ َﺮ َﻗ ُﻪ ﺍﻟ ِﺸﻬﺎﺏ‬:

‫َﺩ َﺑ َﻐ ْﺖ ﻟ ّﻤﺎ َﺣﻠِ َﻢ ﺍﻹﻫﺎﺏ‬ ‫َﻏ َّﺮ ْﺗ ِﻚ ﻳﺎ َﻣ ْﻐ ُﺮﻭﺭ ُﺓ ﺍﻟﻨِﻬﺎ ُﺏ‬

‫ﻭﻣﺎ ِﺭ ٍﺩ ﺃَ ْﺣ َﺮ َﻗ ُﻪ ﺍﻟ ِﺸﻬﺎ ُﺏ‬ ‫ُﺭ َّﺏ َﻣﻬﻴ ٍﺐ َﻭ ْﻳ ِﻚ ﻻ ُﻳﻬﺎ ُﺏ‬

65
Al-Maʿarrī, “Malqā l-sabīl”, 218.
66
H asan H usnī ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1968), the Tunisian historian and literary scholar, collated the responses of some ten or
twelve Andalusī and Maghribī authors to al-Maʿarrī, including four partially-surviving imitations of Malqā l-sabīl. See TQ
455–7.
67
From Rosenthal’s translation of Ibn Khaldūn, which is quotable though not without its faults: “The most powerful of (the
reyes de taifas) used the royal style and titles, and then inevitably mentioned the titles hajib and dul l-wizaratayn
[sic](Holder of the Two Wazirates), meaning the wazirates of ‘the sword’ and ‘the pen.’ The title of hajib referred to
the office that guarded the ruler from the common people and from his entourage. Dhu l-wizaratayn referred to the
fact that (the holder of the title) combined the functions of ‘the sword’ and ‘the pen’”. See Ibn Khaldun: The Muqaddimah,
translated from the Arabic (and with an introduction) by Franz Rosenthal, volumes IIII (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1958), I: 313. Thanks to Mohamad Ballan for pointing out this meaning of the title dhū l-wizāratayn.
68
F.J. Aguirre Sábada, “Ibn Abī l-Jis āl, Abū ʿAbd Allāh”, in BA, I: 698 (entry #225).
69
Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn Abī al-Khis āl, Rasāʾil ibn Abī l-Khis āl, ed. Muh ammad Rid wān al-Dāya (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1988).
12 K. BLANKINSHIP

[Rhyme letter “Bāʾ”]

[Earthly spoils tricked her [the soul]; she tanned the hide after it tore from wear, tick-
bitten.70 How many a dreaded fate unheeded! How many a denier consumed by blaze!
How many a goer whose going sped them along!]
And in verse (rajaz)
[O you gulled soul, earth’s spoils tricked you!
And you tanned a hide already torn
Woe to you! How many a dreaded fate unheeded,
How many a denier consumed by a blaze,
And a goer sped along by the going!]71

Elsewhere in his letters, with a mosaic of vivid images couched in dense rhyming prose,
Ibn Abī l-Khis āl heaps approval on “his clarity of expression [bayān], which shone with
the tongue of Ibn ʿAmmār,72 and with speech [mant iq/mint iq] as colourful as a Yemenī
girdle,73 and with the bracing support [muntat iq] of much strength and vigour”.74
Clearly for him, few works compare to those of al-Maʿarrī in terms of their overall impact.
Many other people responded creatively to Malqā l-sabīl. One of the imitations came
from the pen of Ibn al-Abbār (d. 1260), the Andalusī anthologiser, diplomat and court
poet to the North African H afsid dynasty.75 His now-lost response to al-Maʿarrī is
called Muz āharat al-masʿā l-jamīl wa-muh ād arat al-marʿā l-wabīl fī muʿārad at Malqā
l-sabīl (Supporting Goodly Effort and Countering the Noxious Grassland, in emulation
of Malqā l-sabīl). According to critic Ibn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Marrākushī, that work was
written “in alphabetical order, versifying what was in prose after prosifying what was in
verse [ʿalā h urūf al-muʿjam, bi-naz m mā yunthar baʿd nathr mā yunz am]”,76 a report
that accurately captures the form of Malqā l-sabīl. A third imitator was Abū l-Rabīʿ
al-Kalāʿī (d. 1237), the h adīth transmitter and historian who, in addition to his lost
answer to Malqā l-sabīl, also wrote a work in dialogue with al-Maʿarrī’s grammar tract-
turned pious reflection, Khut bat al-Fas īh .77 Still a fourth was ʿAlī ibn Muh ammad al-
Tujībī l-Mursī (ca. mid-thirteenth century), a minor Andalusi poet.78
Additionally, the discrete, stanza-like groupings of Malqā l-sabīl may have animated a
form of Arabic poetry that was wildly popular in the medieval Islamic west but which all
but escapes modern attention: muʿashsharāt, “decastichs” or “ten-liners”, poems whose
individual verses start and end on the same letter, with ten lines in a single poem. The

70
This comes from a popular maxim referring to any attempt to fix what is beyond repair, as if to say, “too little, too late”.
See Abū Hilāl al-ʿAskarī, Jamharat amthāl al-ʿarab, ed. Ah mad ʿAbd al-Salām and Muh ammad Saʿīd Basyūnī Zaghlūl,
volumes I–II (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1988), I: 340.
71
Ibn Abī l-Khis āl, Rasāʾil, 371.
72
An Andalusī poet and vizier renowned for his eloquence.
73
The somewhat incongruous image of “speech like a girdle” makes more sense if one remembers that the word for
“speech”, mant iq, means “girdle” or “belt” when vowelled as mint iq. See J.G. Hava, Al-Farāʾid al-durriyya fī l-lughatayn
al-ʿarabiyya wa-l-inklīziyya: Arabic-English Dictionary for the Use of Students (Beirut: Catholic Press, 1899), p. 771. Such
wordplay is typical of Ibn Abī l-Khis āl (see also the phrase that follows).
74
Ibn Abī l-Khis āl, Rasāʾil, 312–15, current quote at p. 313.
75
Muh ammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Abbār, Al-Takmila li-Kitāb al-sila, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām al-Harrās, volumes I–IV (Beirut: Dār
al-Fikr, 1999).
76
Muh ammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Marrākushī, Al-Dhayl wa-l-takmila li-Kitābay al-maws ūl wa-l-s ila, ed. Ih sān ʿAbbās,
Mohammed Bencherifah, and Bashshār ʿAwwād Maʿrūf, volumes I–VI (Tūnis: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 2012), IV: 282.
77
For information on Ibn Sālim’s life and works, see A. Carmona González, “Ibn Sālim al-Kalāʿī, Abū l-Rabīʿ” in BA, V: 205–11.
Unlike his imitation of Malqā l-sabīl, his response to Khut bat al-Fasīh survives and has been edited. See Al-Kalāʿī, Juhd al-
nas īh .
78
TQ, 456–7.
 AL-MASĀQ 13

earliest examples are those of the blind North African poet Abū l-H asan ʿAlī l-H us rī
l-Qayrawānī (d. 1095) on his wife’s infidelity, a brooding theme which, along with his
other poetic work on his son’s untimely death, resonates with topics explored by
al-Maʿarrī. A more explicit connection appears in the writings of a linguist, Ibn al-
Uqlīshī (d. 1154): Muʿashsharāt zuhdiyya wa-fus ūl zuhdiyya ʿalā h urūf al-muʿjam,
naz man wa-nathran, ʿalā t arīqat Malqā l-sabīl li-l-Maʿarrī (Renunciant Decistichs and
Rhymed Prose Segments in Order of the Alphabet, Versified and Prosified, in the mode
of Malqā l-sabīl by al-Maʿarrī).79 While the decastich poets themselves left no indication
that al-Maʿarrī was their direct model, a preponderance of evidence suggests that he was.

Saqt al-zand (The First Tinder-Spark)

Written before 1020, Saqt al-zand was popular in its day but has since become obscured by
other works, especially Luzūm mā lā yalzam. It offers readers a standard menu of premo-
dern Arabic verse genres: madh (panegyric),80 rithāʾ (elegy)81 – the most famous is a
marthiya to his own father – and hijāʾ (insult).82 But a group of thirty dirʿiyyāt (armour
poems) personifying battle gear, probably a unique phenomenon at the time, come
with the collection too, as do themes of death, decay and scepticism;83 a key example is
the line cited earlier about the earth’s surface heaped with bodies. As for its literary
afterlife, the Saqt survives in dozens of manuscripts and just as many commentaries,
and it served as a major teaching text during al-Maʿarrī’s lifetime and for centuries
thereafter.84
The Saqt also enjoyed keen reception in the medieval Islamic west. It was known to
readers generally, as citations by Ibn Khayr and ʿAbd al-Ghafūr al-Kalāʿī demonstrate,85
and the commentary by Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat alyawsī survives in the Shurūh edition by T āhā
H usayn. But it is Mohammed Bencherifah who has put the Saqt ’s Iberian and North
African afterlife on full display. In his edition and study of a Moroccan National
Library manuscript containing Andalusi glosses on the work, Bencherifah lists a full
dozen commentators, only three of whom are included in the text itself.86 They include

79
Ibn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Marrākushī, Al-Dhayl wa l-takmila, I: 722 (the whole entry is #837, pp. 719–26).
80
Traditionally, praise poetry directed at a patron in order to seek some benefit, whether material or otherwise. However, “a
panegyric might be addressed to a land, a city or a group”. See G.M. Wickens et al., “Madīh , Madh ”, in EI2. For a book-
length study of panegyric in service to the Islamic state, see Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Poetics of Islamic Legiti-
macy: Myth, Gender, and Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
81
According to Charles Pellat, “A poem composed in Arabic (or in an Islamic language following the Arabic tradition) to
lament the passing of a beloved person and to celebrate his merits”. See Ch. Pellat et al., “Marthiya”, in EI2. Historically
a women’s funeral song for slain warriors, the elegiac genre grew into other functions that include lamenting the fall of
cities. See for example Nizar F. Hermes, “‘Woe is me for Qayrawan!’ Ibn Sharaf’s Lāmiyya, the Plight of Refugees and the
Cityscape”, in The City in Arabic Literature, ed. Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2018), pp. 81–102.
82
Often translated “invective” or “satire”, hijāʾ can generally be thought of as verbal warfare against other individuals, tribes,
cultures, and so on. As van Gelder points out, it occupies perhaps the broadest generic and thematic spectrum in classical
Arabic poetry. See Geert Jan van Gelder, The Bad and the Ugly: Attitudes Toward Invective Poetry (Hijāʾ) in Classical Arabic
Literature (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988), pp. 2–4.
83
For a secondary study of the dirʿiyyāt, see Pierre Cachia, “The Dramatic Dialogues of al-Maʿarrī”, Journal of Arabic Literature
1 (1970): 129–36.
84
S.M. Stern, “Some Noteworthy Manuscripts of the Poems of Abu’l-‘Alā’ al-Ma‘arrī”, Oriens 7/2 (1954): 322–47. Stern notes
the crucial impact of al-Maʿarrī on “the Baghdad school of philologists in the 6th/12th century”, primarily through his
student al-Tibrīzī.
85
Ibn Khayr, Fahrasat, 504–5; al-Kalāʿī, Ih kām, 231.
86
Shurūh Andalusiyya, 16–26.
14 K. BLANKINSHIP

Ibn al-H addād, the Muslim poet known for falling in love with a Christian woman,87 and
the jurist and polymath Abū l-Walīd al-Waqqashī, whom Bencherifah claims to be one of
the “first transmitters of Saqt al-zand in al-Andalus”.88 These names and the copies of the
Saqt that they relied on show three centuries’ worth of engagement with that work in the
Islamic west. They also confirm the importance of al-Maʿarrī’s protégé, the grammarian
Abū Zakariyyā al-Khat īb al-Tibrīzī, who appears in many isnād chains furnished by
peninsular readers.
In terms of content, the text edited by Bencherifah is unremarkable as poetic commen-
tary (sharh ). As a general rule, the text’s redactor will single out a word or phrase, then list
what each commentator says about lexical and grammatical matters. In a few cases,
however, the commentators indulge in what might now be called “literary critical
interpretation”. For example, in the opening lines of poem 2, al-Maʿarrī depicts a night
traveller following lightning flashes through the desert. In deciphering this image, Ibn
Marzūq al-Dībājī, one of the three commentators, speculates on the traveller’s mental
state.
Everything a person awaits, whether it be joyful or distressing, if it be at night, he imagines it
to be in front of him, since what was behind him has already left his mind. It is the opposite
during the day, since what’s in front of him he can see, and therefore his imagination
proceeds to what is behind him.89

One can disagree with this conclusion and still appreciate a sentiment that rises above lin-
guistic niceties to broader human experience.
The Moroccan manuscript also incorporates a variant recension of D awʾ al-saqt
(The Light of the Spark), al-Maʿarrī’s self-commentary on Saqt al-zand. This is
perhaps the most exciting feature of the text. For decades, scholars have had to
content themselves with a unique manuscript from seventeenth-century Istanbul and
housed at the French National Library,90 and with the two editions of the D awʾ that
it has yielded so far.91 Bencherifah’s manuscript therefore supplies a second, badly
needed witness.
Many places in the Andalusi version show variance from that which was produced at
Istanbul. As a brief example, poem 1 of the dīwān begins with two lines that address the
poet’s own soul, or possibly a notional critic or faultfinder, according to the commentators
(metre: wāfir):
‫ﻭ ِﻣ ْﻦ ِﻋ ْﻨ ِﺪ ﺍﻟ َﻈ َﻼ ِﻡ َﻃﻠَ ْﺒ ِﺖ َﻣﺎ َﻻ‬ ‫ﺹ َﻛ َﺸ ْﻔ ِﺖ َﺣﺎ َﻻ‬ َ
ِ ‫ﺃ َﻋ ْﻦ َﻭ ْﺧ ِﺪ ﺍﻟ ِﻘ َﻼ‬
َ‫َﻓ َﻬ َّﻼ ِﺧﻠْ ِﺘ ِﻬ ّﻦ ِﺑ ِﻪ ُﺫ َﺑﺎﻻ‬ ْ َ ْ
‫َﻭ ُﺩ ّﺭﴽ ِﺧﻠ ِﺖ ﺃﻧ ُﺠ َﻤ ُﻪ ﻋﻠﻴﻪ‬
[Did you uncover truth for all the hurrying, like a camel cow?
Did you find riches for all your searching in the dark?
Or a pearl, which you thought the nighttime stars to be?
Did you not picture in them a profitless blazing wick?]92

87
Ibid., 18–20. For Ibn H addād’s verses on his Christian (rūmiyya) lover, who is known to literary history as Nuwayra, see
Dīwān Ibn al-H addād al-Andalusī, ed. Yūsuf ʿAlī T awīl (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1990), pp. 190, 241–2, 247, 256–7,
264, 305–6, 308–9. For more on his life and works, see ibid., 7–98; Hussain Monés, “Ibn al-H addād”, in EI2.
88
Shurūh Andalusiyya, 21. For more on al-Waqqashī’s life and works, see Maribel Fierro, “al-Wak k ashī”, in EI2.
89
Shurūh Andalusiyya, 67.
90
Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, D awʾ al-saqt , ca. 1650 (ARAB3111), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
91
Shurūh Saqt al-zand; D awʾ al-saqt li-Abī l-ʿAlāʾ Ah mad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Maʿarrī (t. 449 h), ed. Binh āmī Fāt ima (Abu Dhabi:
Al-Majmaʿ al-Thaqāfī, 2003).
92
Shurūh Saqt al-zand, 25–8; Shurūh Andalusiyya, 45–6.
 AL-MASĀQ 15

In his own self-commentary, al-Maʿarrī asserts here that the poet is taking counsel with his
own soul, as if to say, “You [my very self] should not commit a reprehensible act” (laysa
yanbaghī an tafʿalī fiʿl munkar).93 Thus, with rhetorical questioning, the poet conveys a
message that is not really a question at all, but instead an injunction – both to himself
and to others – against striving for eternal reward through worldly gain.
At this point, variant readings enter the D awʾ al-saqt . In H usayn’s edition – which, like
Binh āmī Fāt ima’s edition, relies on the Paris manuscript – he edits out a statement that
nevertheless remains in the source text, as confirmed by Binh āmī, and which is corrobo-
rated by the Morocco manuscript: “As you might say to a man when you see him commit a
reprehensible act” (kamā taqūl li-l-rajul idhā raʾaytah yafʿal fi l-munkar).94 With this, the
commentary puts poetry in the context of everyday language use, thereby adding another
dimension to its analysis. A second, similar emphasis shows up slightly below this
comment in the Paris manuscript but not its Moroccan counterpart. A simple phrase,
dākhil(a) ʿalā l-istifhām, “entering with the purpose of interrogation”, again fleshes out
the function of language, this time referring to the indefinite accusative durran, “a
pearl”. These and other variations impart connotative shades and meaningful
contrasts, while also demonstrating the details that the poetry’s Andalusī readers found
worthy of note.

Risālat al-s āhil wa-l-shāh ij (The Epistle of the Horse and the Mule)
As with much medieval Arabic literature, al-Maʿarrī’s readers will not get far without
encountering animals as a major theme. They abound for example in Al-Fus ūl wa-l-
ghāyāt, as in this comparison: “People – when hungering for more, they are lions, and
when death comes, they are newborn camel-calves [al-nās idhā t alabū sibāʿ wa-idhā jāʾ
al-mawt ribāʿ]”.95 Another salient case is al-Maʿarrī’s exchange of letters on veganism
with the Fāt imid missionary al-Muʾayyad fī-l-Dīn al-Shīrāzī.96 In surveying medieval bio-
graphies of al-Maʿarrī, one finds several now-lost titles in which animals appear to have
played a role. One is the Kitāb al-qāʾif (The Book of the Tracker), a collection of versified
stories commissioned by the then-governor of Aleppo, Abū Shujāʿ Fātik ʿAzīz al-Dawla
(d. 1022), and which is, according to biographers, modelled on the fables of Kalīla
wa-Dimna.97 Other works include Sajʿ al-h amāʾim, a conversation between four doves
on memento mori, and H arz wa-duʿāʾ al-khayl, an equine discussion about rhyme.98
But al-Maʿarrī’s Al-S āhil wa-l-shāh ij, written around 1021,99 stands out among his
extant writings for its concentration on animals and animalia. The work ostensibly
93
Shurūh Saqt al-zand, 26; Shurūh Andalusiyya, 45.
94
D awʾ al-saqt , 48; Shurūh Andalusiyya, 46.
95
Al-Maʿarrī, Al-Fus ūl wa-l-ghāyāt, 103.
96
Idem, Rasāʾil Abī l-ʿAlāʾ l-Maʿarrī, al-juzʾ al-awwal, ed. Ih sān ʿAbbās (Beirut: Dār al-Shurūq, 1982); D.S. Margoliouth, “Abu’l-
ʿAlā al-Maʿarrī’s Correspondence on Vegetarianism”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (April
1902): 289–332; Elias Saad Ghali, “Le végétalisme et le doute chez Abul-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (363–449/973–1058)”, Bulletin
d’Études Orientales 32–33 (1980–1981): 99–112; Kevin Blankinship, “Missionary and Heretic: Debating Veganism in the
Medieval Islamic World”, in Food as a Cultural Signifier, ed. Bilal Orfali, Kirill Dmitriev, and Julia Hauser (Leiden: Brill,
forthcoming).
97
TQ, 451–3.
98
For these and other titles, see for example Yāqūt al-H amawī, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ, irshād al-arīb ilā maʿrifat al-adīb, ed. Ih sān
ʿAbbās, volumes I–VII (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1993), I: 327–34.
99
Pieter Smoor, “Enigmatic Allusion and Double Meaning in Maʿarrī’s Newly-Discovered ‘Letter of a Horse and a Mule’: Part
II”, Journal of Arabic Literature 13 (1982): 23–52, esp. 50.
16 K. BLANKINSHIP

pleads with ʿAzīz al-Dawla to pardon a land tax owed by al-Maʿarrī’s relatives, a conceit
mirrored in the epistle’s narrative frame. The main characters – the mule (al-shāh ij,
“the brayer”), the horse (al-s āhil, “the neigher”), the dove (al-fākhita, “the piercing
crier”), the camel (Abu Ayyūb, “father of Job”), the hyena (Umm ʿAmr, “mother of
ʿAmr”), and the fox (Thuʿāla, a play on the proper name of the grammarian Thaʿlab,
which also means “fox”) – attempt to deliver a message to ʿAzīz al-Dawla on behalf of
the mule, who is blind and chained to a waterwheel. Here he is appealing to the horse
for help in this affair:
ِ
.‫ ﻓﺈِ َّﻥ ﺍﻟ ِﺬﻛﺮﻯ ﺗَﻨ َﻔ ُﻊ ﺍﻟﻤﺆﻣﻨﻴﻦ‬،‫ ﻟِ ُﺘ َﺬ ّﻛ َﺮ ﺑﻲ ُﻭﻻ َﺓ ﺍﻟ َﻌ ْﺪ ِﻝ‬،‫ ﺃ ْﻥ ﺃَﺳﺘﻮﺩ َﻋﻚ ﺭﺳﺎﻟ ًﺔ ﺇﻟﻰ ﺣﻀﺮ ِﺓ ﻫﺬﺍ ﺍﻷﻣﻴﺮ‬،‫ﻭﻗ ْﺪ ﻋﺰﻣ ُﺖ ﻳﺎ ﺧﺎﻟﻲ‬
[Truly, my uncle, I decided to entrust you with a message for his majesty the governor (ʿAzīz
al-Dawla), so that you might remind our just rulers of my case; for the reminder profits the
believers.]100

Unlike its progenitors, especially Kalīla wa-Dimna, the S āhil comprises a single prolix
thread rather than many loosely-connected moral tales. Humans and animals exist side
by side in its notional universe, a point seen in the characters’ many references to
humans, and the plot often turns on aphoristic wisdom about animals.
Awareness in modern times of the S āhil and its western Islamic afterlife begins in 1970,
when Egyptian scholar ʿĀʾisha ʿAbd al-Rah mān “Bint al-Shāt iʾ” discovered the work’s two
surviving manuscripts in the Royal H asaniyya Archive in Rabat, Morocco. Both date to the
twelfth or thirteenth century and are written in Maghribī hand; in the earlier of the two,
H asaniyya 6146, later hands indicate borrowing among poets and scholars in the Islamic
west.101 It was taken as a model of good prose writing by ʿAbd al-Ghafūr al-Kalāʿī, who
claims to have reinterpreted it with his own animal-themed work, Risālat al-sājiʿa wa-l-
ghirbīb (The Epistle of the Dove and the Raven), for which he gives the preamble in the
Ih kām.102 These several data points suggest an exuberant response to al-Maʿarrī’s S āhil
in Iberia and North Africa.
To take one such point a bit further, Baghdad-born insult poet Muh ammad ibn
Muh ammad ibn al-Habbāriya (d. ca. 1111) wrote what is most likely a creative reworking
of the S āhil: a long, narrative urjūza – the rajaz metre is irregular, as are the rhyme letters –
called Al-S ādih wa-l-bāghim al-munās ih (The Sincerely Advising Rooster and Gazelle).103
Although he does not call on al-Maʿarrī directly as his source, Ibn al-Habbāriya did know
his writings, as is confirmed by a statement in another work, Fulk al-maʿānī (The Firma-
ment of Ideas).104 Moreover, both works’ titles are strikingly similar: a pair of active par-
ticiples as monikers for animals based on the sounds that they make (Al-S āhil wa-l-shāh ij,
“the neigher and the brayer”, and Al-S ādih wa-l-bāghim, “the crower and the crier”).105

100
Al-Maʿarrī, Al-s āhil wa-l-shāh ij, 96–7. The mule cites from the Qurʾān, Sūrat al-Dhāriyāt, verse 55. See Arthur J. Arberry, ed.
and trans., The Koran Intepreted, 2 vols in 1 (London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1955, 3rd repr. 1969), II: 239.
101
Al-Maʿarrī, Al-sāhil wa-l-shāh ij, 69–71.
102
Al-Kalāʿī, Ih kām, 26.
103
Muh ammad ibn Muh ammad Ibn al-Habbāriya, Al-S ādih wa-l-bāghim li-Ibn al-Habbāriya, ed. Wurayda Jumʿat ʿAwd,
volumes I-II (Benghazi: Jāmiʿat Qāryūns, 1999).
104
The Fulk does not survive in its own right, but parts are preserved in secondary sources. For this particular passage, see
al-H amawī, Muʿjam al-udabā’, I: 339–40. For an English translation, see Margoliouth, “Correspondence”, 313–14.
105
Some manuscripts give other names for Ibn al-Habbāriya’s work, such as al-fātik wa-l-nāsik and al-h āzim wa-l-ʿāzim.
These are based on internal sections of the story, but always in addition to the primary pair of animals, al-s ādih wa-l-
bāghim.
 AL-MASĀQ 17

Additionally, and to indulge in speculation, Ibn al-Habbāriya and al-Maʿarrī seem to have
been kindred spirits in their taste for polemic and cynicism.
In contrast to al-Maʿarrī’s S āhil, Ibn al-Habbāriya’s S ādih pretends to sincere, un-ironic
moral instruction, in the style of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Kalīla wa-Dimna. A single conversation
frames the entire work, between an Indian and a Persian, each trying to prove the super-
iority of his own people. After a short proem, the text divides into three parts: “Al-Nāsik
wa-l-fātik” (The Pious and the Rogue), referring to the Persian man and a roving bandit
whom he instructs morally; “Al-Bayān wa-mufākharat al-h ayawān” (Clear Speech and the
Boasting of Animals), an animal–jinn debate on the status of humankind that further
ramifies into sixteen individual wisdom tales (“The Talk of the Two Lions”, “The
Gazelle and the Wolf”, “The Peacock and the Owl”, and so on); and finally “Al-Adab”,
consisting of speeches by individual animals, especially the titular rooster and gazelle,
on themes of zuhd and waʿz .
The middle section, boasting of animals, depicts a journey by the narrator beginning at
Bīrīn, a town near H ums in modern-day Syria, who comes upon an oasis populated with
talking animals. They are led by the phoenix, a frontrunner among birds in the Islamic
bestiary, who sets the scene by elaborating both the goodness and the hatefulness of
humans (metre: rajaz):
‫َﻭ ْﻫ َﻮ ﺃَ ِﻣﻴ ُﺮ ﺍﻟﻄﻴ ِﺮ َﻳ ْﺒﻐﻲ ﺍﻟ ُﺨ ْﻄ َﺒﻪ‬ ‫ﻭﺍ ْﺭ َﺗ َﻔ َﻊ ﺍﻟ َﻌ ْﻨ َﻘﺎ ُﺀ َﻓ ْﻮ َﻕ ﺩﻟﺒ ْﻪ‬
… ‫َﻭ ُﺷ ْﻜ ُﺮ ُﻩ ﻓﺮﺽ ﻭﻛﻴﺪ ﺍﻟﺤ ِﻖ‬ ‫َﻓ َﻘﺎ َﻝ َﺣ ْﻤ ُﺪ ﺍﻟﻠﻪ ﺧﻴ ُﺮ ُﻧﻄﻘﻲ‬
‫ﺑﺼﻮﺭ ٍﺓ ﺷﺎﻫﺪ ٍﺓ ﺑ ُﻘ ْﺪ َﺭ ِﺗ ْﻪ‬ ‫ﺃَ ْﻓ َﺮ َﺩ ِﻧﻲ ِﻣ ْﻦ ﻟُ ْﻄ ِﻔﻪ َﻭ ِﺣ ْﻜ َﻤ ِﺘ ْﻪ‬
‫َﻭ َﺷ َّﻚ ﻓﻲ ُﻭ ُﺟﻮﺩﻱ ﺍﻷﻧﺎﻡ‬ ‫ﺣﺘّﻰ ﻟﻘﺪ ﻛﺬﺏ ﺑﻲ ﺍﻟﻄﻐﺎﻡ‬
[Then the phoenix – he, the prince of fowls –
rose atop a sycamore, wishing to speak.
“Praise to God is the best I can say”, he said,
“And thanks to Him is truth’s certain duty …
“In His wisdom and grace He set me apart
“In a (singular) form that affirms His power,
“So much that vile creatures106 deny me
“And humans doubt that I even exist”.]107

Proceeding from here, the animals take turns enumerating virtues and vices, in an attempt
to judge human worthiness compared to their own. This debate leads into the wisdom
stories noted above.
Ibn al-Habbāriya’s S ādih spread throughout the pre-modern Arab world with great
energy. For his critical edition, Tunisian scholar Wurayda Jumʿat ʿAwd found no less
than fourteen manuscripts housed at libraries in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Cairo,
Damascus and Tunis. Another dozen exist that he did not use. At least half of these
were produced in Iberia and North Africa and disseminated throughout the Islamic
west. Every major library in Morocco has at least one manuscript copy of the S ādih ,
including the National Library of Morocco,108 the H asaniyya Archive,109 the ʿAllāl al-

106
Lane says that the word I translate as “vile creatures”, al-t aghām, may refer to either people or animals – especially fowl –
in terms of stupidity, weakness or ignobility. See Edward William Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, volumes I–VIII (London:
Williams and Norgate, 1893), 2655.
107
Ibn al-Habbāriya, Al-S ādih wa-l-bāghim, 71–2.
108
Ibn al-Habbāriya, Kitāb al-s ādih wa-l-bāghim al-munāsih (d991), digital scan, Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du
Maroc, Rabat.
109
Idem (2059), digital scan, H asaniyya Archive, Rabat.
18 K. BLANKINSHIP

Fāsī Archive,110 the Ibn Yūsuf Library111 and the great Qarawiyyīn mosque.112 Some date
to as early as 1162 (AH 557), just half a century after Ibn al-Habbāriya’s death, as with
Oxford’s Bodleian 147; while others, such as BNRM d991, have colophons dating to the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, produced in the city of Rabat itself.
With such a rich reception history, the S ādih , like al-Maʿarrī’s Saqt al-zand, qualifies as
something of a medieval bestseller. The question is what made it so popular. Again to
engage in cautious speculation, popular themes such as animal lore proved more
mobile than other, more erudite topics or genres, to judge by the penetration of Kalīla
wa-Dimna into myriad languages. Even more significant was an overall decentralising
of regional power, which might explain the corollary upsurge of animal symbolism as a
laboratory in which to investigate sociopolitical disintegration. For two brief examples,
Ibn Z afar al-S iqillī (d. 1170) wrote Sulwān al-mut āʿ fī ʿudwān al-atbāʿ (The Sovereign’s
Comfort in [the face of his] Subjects’ Ire), using animal debates as a vehicle to reflect
on kings and other sovereigns,113 while Muh ammad ibn ʿAbd al-Salām al-Muqaddisī
(d. 1279) composed Kashf al-asrār fī h ukm al-t uyūr wa-l-azhār (Unveiling the Secrets,
on Rule by Birds and Flowers).114 It is sensible to think that Ibn al-Habbāriya’s Al-
S ādih wa-l-bāghim had its appeal for similar reasons.

General observations
As this preliminary overview suggests, al-Maʿarrī was widely read and talked about in the
Islamic west. Such an energetic reception alone justifies placing him among the cadre of
eastern authors whose work left a deep imprint on Iberia and North Africa. That the bio-
graphers of these lands often saw him in the company of al-Mutanabbī lends further
weight here. Perhaps even more dramatic, however, are the individual creative responses
by Andalusī and Maghribī writers to al-Maʿarrī’s works. These responses take a remark-
able array of forms – and are on a variety of subjects, sometimes only tangentially
related to what he wrote – which reveals the Islamic west’s intellectual dynamism and
al-Maʿarrī’s role therein.
The responses also reveal confluent “nodes” in the transmission networks that con-
ducted his writings from east to west. Some of these nodes are individual people. As in
the Mashriq, al-Khat īb al-Tibrīzī played a pivotal role in passing down what he learned
from al-Maʿarrī. The same can be said of Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat alyawsī, whose writings often
bear al-Maʿarrī’s imprint in their attention to linguistic detail and overall rationalist
bent, and of several authors bearing the name al-Kalāʿī, given their creative responses
to al-Maʿarrī. But it was also geographic locations, not just individuals, that acted
as points of contact. In Iberia, Valencia and Seville gathered societies of scholars who

110
Idem (2329), digital scan, ʿAllāl al-Fāsī Archive, Salé.
111
Idem (1/462), digital scan, Ibn Yūsuf Library, Marrakech.
112
Idem (1532), digital scan, Qarawiyyīn Mosque and University, Fez.
113
Muh ammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Z afar al-S iqillī, Sulwān al-mut āʿ fī ʿudwān al-atbāʿ, ed. Ayman ʿAbd al-Jābir Buh ayrī (Cairo:
Dār al-Āfāq al-ʿArabiyya, 1999); Michele Amari, trans., Solwan, or Waters of Comfort, volumes I–II (London: Richard Bentley,
New Burlington Street, 1852). For a more recent English translation and analysis, see Joseph A. Kechichian and R. Hrair
Dekmejian, trans., The Just Prince: A Manual of Leadership (London: Saqi Books, 2003).
114
ʿIzz al-Dīn ibn ʿAbd al-Salām ibn Ghānim al-Muqaddisī, Kashf al-asrār fī h ukm al-t uyūr wa-l-azhār, ed. ʿAlāʾ ʿAbd al-
Wahhāb Muh ammad (Cairo: Dār al-Fad īla); M. Garcin, Les oiseaux et les fleurs: Allégories morales d’Azz-eddin Elmocaddessi,
publiées en arabe avec une traduction et des notes par M. Garcin (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1821).
 AL-MASĀQ 19

followed al-Maʿarrī’s works, while in North Africa, the port city of Ceuta was an important
intellectual trade post.115
Concerning regional differences between Iberia and North Africa, most authors
responding to al-Maʿarrī are from al-Andalus, including figures like Ibn al-Abbār and
Ibn Khaldūn, who belonged to the Andalusi emigré class in the Maghrib; with some
works, especially Luzūm ma la yalzam, initial evidence shows an exclusively Andalusi
reception.116 Difficult though it is to account for this outsized representation of Iberian
littérateurs, one reason could be the sustained interest in promoting al-Maʿarrī on the
part of individual people who happen to be Andalusi, such as Ibn al-Sīd and al-Kalāʿī.
Another might be related to the first, namely a difference in literary taste between the
two regions, or in sympathy with al-Maʿarrī’s worldview.
Looking at the medieval Islamic world as a whole, and despite observable differences
between east and west, some parts of al-Maʿarrī’s reception remain the same. Although
many works that escaped notice in the Mashriq were given wider attention in the
Islamic west, the same controversies that attended him back east followed him across
the Mediterranean. This often makes for an unabashedly pro-Maʿarrī tenor of writing,
as illustrated by Ibn al-Sīd al-Bat alyawsī’s rebuttal to the complaints of Ibn al-ʿArabī.
Yet even in the act of barricading against attack, Ibn al-Sīd preserves the whole polemic
on display, including Ibn al-ʿArabī’s original protestations. A similar process was
already underway back east and had reached the Maghrib during al-Maʿarrī’s lifetime,
seen in polemical self-commentaries such as Zajr al-nābih (Driving Off the Barking
Dog).117 By the twelfth century, al-Maʿarrī’s name had accrued much of the same
polemic in the Islamic west as in the east, ensuring that his legacy would remain both con-
tested and, therefore, relevant.

115
Al-Kalāʿī, Juhd al-nasīh , 202–5.
116
Many thanks to Mohamad Ballan for bringing both of these points to my attention.
117
Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Zajr al-nābih : “Muqtat afāt”, ed. Amjad al-T arābulsī (Damascus: Al-Maktaba al-Hāshimiyya bi-
Dimashq, 1965).