Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri

Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri (973–1057) was a blind poet, philosopher and sceptic born in Ma'arrat al-Nu'man in northern Syria. Blinded by smallpox in childhood, he studied in Aleppo and Antioch, spent a short period in Baghdad, and returned to his home town, where he lived for decades as a celebrated ascetic and teacher, a vegetarian who called himself a prisoner of three things: blindness, solitude and the body. His verse questions revelation, priestly authority and the claims of every rival creed, and he has often been called the Voltaire or Lucretius of the Arabs.

His two great collections are Saqt al-zand (Sparks of the Tinder) and the Luzum ma la yalzam (The Necessity of What Is Not Necessary), the latter known as the Luzumiyat. The poems here are from Ameen Rihani's 1918 English version, a free rendering in quatrains selected from those books; they follow the sense and spirit of the Arabic rather than its form, which is monorhymed and in a different metre.