The Epistle of Forgiveness. Abu l-'Ala al-Ma'arri

       Return to Paradise

      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