by Robert Irwin
An equally elaborate and typically gloomy set-piece is devoted to the commonplace that all beasts must die:
There escapes not from the claws of time the tawny lion, whose food is not sahm or mard, but who tears every day some prey which the robber’s arts cannot ensnare. Nay more, he frightens and keeps the people in their homes; his eyes are like two burning torches, or two camp fires. The ass turns to fly when she scents him; and he alarms a whole caravan, when they know he is near. In some terrible place he feeds two whelps with the maneless lioness that gives them suck. Many a torn victim is in his cave, rendered undistinguishable in shape, whose orphans he overwhelmed by his capture, and whom he ousted from the possessions that he had won. He grew weary of hunting beasts, and abandoned them, and became enamoured of human flesh and sought after that. If the morning traveller came too late for him, he would attack the loiterer, and fiercely. A man would make a meal for him; and even the flesh of a couple would not be overmuch. In the prime of his life he could overcome the black ostrich, and the mountain goat could not protect himself from him. Often at midday he would pounce on some secure flock of sheep and take the best of them to his home-keeping mate. Often at eventide he would make a raid upon some lowing ox, and return to his cubs with a wild calf or wild ass that had grown fat, feeding on the sweetsmelling fields. Little thought he of the antelope; that he would leave the poor wolf to chase. And in his old age there passes by him a man having in his hands a bow and arrows; and he leaps on one enemy and embraces him, and rips his body open and disembowels it; but the rest of the company shoot at him with axes and spears, and though he thinks it impossible, with their missiles they make him like a porcupine, and when he is dead they at first think he is only asleep, until the truth appears, when they in their spite raise him on their swords; and so his brilliant career is over, – that long career wherein by his violence he earned the name Kaswar, and by his leaps the name Miswar, ‘the leaper’. Or else there comes against him some captain with a band of horse, who, finding him crouching on his foreleg, thrusts him through with lances levelled, or cruelly hits him in a fatal spot. Or if he escape the one and the other, still his soul is discharged by old age, contented with a scanty living after such splendid fare. Neither do the strokes of fate miss the fair-clad leopard, well-accustomed by long practice to sudden raids. The shepherds fear his onsets, and kind friends hasten to the traces of the wounds that he has inflicted. For him too there is assigned on some of his circuits a keeper of sheep or one who does not keep them; who thrusts a spear into his heart and saves the flock from his onslaught; who takes his skin, once his pride, and covers with it the mount of some runaway coward.Neither does the wolf escape the heel of time, even though he obtain the sheep that he covets, constantly snatching some lamb from the flock, and loosening some of its cords. Chased by the farmer’s hounds he escapes them, and seizes the keeper’s own lamb and devours it. He protects the cubs of the hyena after she has drunk the intoxicating cup that is not wine but death, treating them as his own, and feeding them with the product of his arts. At times he is starving and miserable, and even when hungry is envied for his fulness. ’Tis supposed that he has been drinking blood, whereas in truth he has had no lack of destitution. And often indeed the flocks perish before him and he has a merry time, and he catches the shepherd asleep and has a feast. Yet are his fasts longer than his feasts; and thirst is co-partner with his vile nature. With such a life howbeit he is satisfied with all its hardships, and why should his miserable nature avoid it? Then one day he sees a lad, who is no fool, alone with a small flock, and this excites his cupidity. Howbeit ‘there is many a wound in the arrows of a lad’, so when the wolf makes his attack, our stripling having a bow in his hand, sends one of his arrows into the last place that the wolf would wish, and the wolf’s cubs become orphans, and sadly do they miss their shrewd and sagacious father. The hyena too is no stranger to death, whether he die a natural death, or whether there chase him from behind his ears the father of some family who makes him their food, so that they avert with his flesh the pangs of hunger when they overtake them. Or some morning, it may be, a savage dog surprises him, and hurries after him furiously, and takes him cunningly, so that neither running nor leaping saves him. Or, a torrent of water comes while the hyena is with his spouse in his lair, and the water carries them both away, and when morning comes he is drowned and voiceless. He might as well have never howled over a carcase; and never battened on the remains of the lion’s feast. How merrily used he to run over the stones! And now his skin is made into a mantle! Such are time’s vicissitudes! It makes the saturated thirsty; the fox does not escape for all his cunning, neither does the spirit of the dun hyena of the sand-hills. Death too separates the hare from his mate, and cuts him off; neither is the rabbit’s mother helped by her prayer ‘God make me quick-footed, and stay-at-home, able to outrun the arrow up the hill’. She too is troubled by some snare, and finds herself suddenly in a bag; or else by some early-rising sporting Nimrod, whose heart is madly set upon the chase, who spurs against her on the high ground a fiery hunter, with a ribbon round his neck, or else sends against her some falcons which break the vertebrae of her back; or else an eagle pounces upon her, and so trouble overtakes her. Or can the decree of God be foiled by the wild ass, over whom day and night pass, keeping him still fresh, by no means decrepit, now braying, now rumbling, with five or eight mates, who trample the ground with no light step, having fed on plants watered by the spring rain, and scrambled for the puddles and Sumi? Off flies their fur, and only their flesh and bones remain, until the meadow plants dry up, when he takes them wherever there is the trace of a stream; and when Al-Han'ah or Al-Dhira rises, and they are hastening to a watering-place, the summer heat kindles fiery thirst, and they bethink them of some deep pond, whither at the false dawn they descend. But fate has set some bowman on the watch, with a twanging weapon in his hand, a weapon which says to the victim die! and it dies, a weapon selected by some vagabond of the tribe 'Abs or Kahlan; who watched it when it was a growing wand, until it became a magician’s wand in his hand. Every summer he would bring it water to shorten the dry period for it; and at last when its growth was complete and it was suitable for the chase, he came one morning and detached it, with no hasty or violent wrench, and set it on a stand in his tent. There he let it imbibe the juice of the bark, and then applied the knife. And when he had shaped it to his satisfaction, he took it to one of the fairs of the Arabs, merely intending to learn its value, not with any idea of selling it to any one to live upon its spoil. There, though offered for it sacks and garments, he flaunted it among the people, and refused to come to terms, and was unwilling to return home without it; and though offers were constantly increased, he thought it ruin to part with it, and going off to a watering-place with it in his hand, sat down to watch for the beasts. At the end of the night the she-asses come trooping, with the warlike champion in front; and now piercing death approaches, and he is shot by one who feeds on wild-beasts’ venison, who earns the title flanker or liverer. Straightway he hits him, and the mistresses abandon the mate who has found his death-blow, and the straight-shooter coming out of his hidingplace takes him to his little children, and makes of his flesh strips and slices, while his skin is despatched to the tanner. Like him does the short-nosed wild bull meet death – the creature who trembles if a man sees him, who endures for a long time, during which the hunter can devise nothing against him; and then one day he looks in the direction of the river-bed, and the channels greet him with a flowery carpet, and the high wind inspirits him with his skin free from wounds, till the north wind drive him to take refuge near some far-off lotus, nowhere near the other lotuses, where he remains the long night complaining of the cold, the clouds emptying their load of hail upon him: and at morning the hunter comes upon him with his hounds, keen-scented after game, stout, tough fighters, with eyes like grey 'adris flowers; with leashes fastened to their necks, a very torment to the quarry. When he sees them, he turns his back to f
ly, fancying that a fire is raging in the desert. Then, after fleeing far, he rounds in fear and cold, and plunges with the two spears that grow apart from each other in his head; and the dogs retreat from him and leave him the victory, while the boldest of the pursuers lies prostrate in the dust. And when he feels sure of escape there crosses his path a mounted horseman, from whose arrows he receives a wound in the breast or in the thigh, and who returns bringing with him the wild bull to his hearth after his hunt. Death overlooks neither the absent nor the present, and ‘God’s is the matter before and after, and that day shall the believers rejoice’. So also with his snubnosed mate, she too has no long term here; for often her calf falls into the power of some hungry wolf, some savage, wandering, rebellious creature; he makes the attack while she is in a desert land, heedless; and then when she returns to give milk to her calf, she finds nothing but blood and bones. Then she abides distraught three or four days, and after that returns to her feasting and watering. This makes her forget her calf, and she is satisfied to let things go their way. Had time overlooked her, she would not have blamed it; as it was, time afflicted her with adversity, and not she it. Neither is security from the assaults of destiny granted to the gazelle which never is sheltered by walls, but strays at large in the wide and empty plains, that spends not its nights between shih and ala, but haunts instead the countries that abound in gum acacia and arak, where it is safe from the hunters’ nets. God sends it fatness, and mischief is removed from it. There it pleases itself with the arak fruit, ripe and unripe, having taken to itself a lair with a bed, the fruit having stained its mouth cherry-colour, it being red (Adam) and its mate black (Eve), and the two in a Paradise if only they could abide there. Not indeed that they resemble our first parents, though their colours correspond with their names; – and while they are in this beatific existence, fate fouls their clear water, and the snake is sent to them, the snake by which it was decreed that the old Adam should fall; which finds our fair gazelle astray under the shade of some bush, fearing no mischief; and the seducer falls upon it with its poisonous fang, and gives it a taste of death, death which separates it from all its friends. It might as well never have tasted young herb or old; and never snuffed the pleasant Zephyr. Off flies his mate, miserable for loss of him; and then after the lapse of time becomes the mate of another; to be herself in her turn the prey of that destruction which gathers them that come after to them that have gone before. The life of this world is but a deceptive ware.’
Nor are the eyes of misfortune closed to the speckled ostrich, who goes without shoes and sandals, who drinks neither at watering-place nor channel, and is satisfied with colocynth and marjoram …
D. S. Margoliouth (trans.), The Letters of Abu ’l-'Ala of Ma'arrat
al-Nu’man (Oxford, 1898), pp. 54, 121-6
COMMENTARY
Ma'arri continues in the same vein for quite a bit longer.
Sahm is the name of a plant and mard is a form of fruit of the arak (a type of palm).
The name Kaswar derives from the verb qasara, meaning ‘to break’.
Sumi is the name of a spring.
Shih and ala are forms of wormwood.
Ma'arri’s best-known as well as most interesting work, the Risalat al-Ghufran, ‘The Epistle of Forgiveness’, is in prose, probably written in 1033. It is a vision of the afterlife, though he probably did not believe in such a thing, except perhaps for animals, for he thought that animals suffered so much in this life that there must be recompense for them elsewhere. Ma'arri constructed his version of Paradise on the basis of taking the text of the Qur’an extremely literally. The notional pretext of his book was a dispute with a friend of his, a minor Aleppan littérateur called Ibn al-Qarih, who was alleged to have expressed some harsh judgements about the immorality of certain pre-Islamic poets and their consequent fate in the afterlife. Ma'arri’s book is cast in the form of a letter to Ibn al-Qarih. This need not be taken too seriously; the letter-to-a-friend was a conventional device which served as an excuse for the production of literature. Thus it was that in another letter purportedly written to Ibn al-Qarih, Ma'arri had to say why he was explaining certain terms of whose meaning Ibn al-Qarih would be perfectly aware: ‘You certainly do not need such an explanation, but I fear that this letter may fall into the hands of a dull youth in his teens and that the vocabulary being strange to him, may form a shackle and bring him to a dead stop.’
To return to the Risalat al-Ghufran; in it Ma'arri has Ibn al-Qarih die and go to Paradise. There he has many discussions on philology and poetry (for this was Ma'arri’s and Ibn al-Qarih’s notion of Paradise). Ibn al-Qarih also conversed with houris and saw the Tree of Houris. After a tour of Paradise, Ibn al-Qarih was granted an overview of Hell (which is located in the bottom of a volcano) and then an interview with Iblis. Ibn al-Qarih talked about scholarship, but ‘A bad profession,’ rejoined Iblis. ‘Though it may afford a bare livelihood, it brings no comfort to one’s family and surely it makes the feet stumble. How many like thee has it destroyed!’ Ibn al-Qarih then went on to make a tour of Hell. Sadly, many of the most famous Jahili and Islamic poets seemed to have ended up there, including Imru’ al-Qays, Antara, Tarafa, Shanfara, Ta’abbata, Akhtal and Bashshar ibn Burd. (Bashshar, the blind poet, has his eyes opened in order to intensify his sufferings.) Apart from poets, Hell seems also to have been packed with philologists. Given that Ma'arri had purportedly set out to demonstrate the limitlessness of divine mercy, it is curious that his crowd of poets and philologists in Hell would rather seem to confirm Ibn al-Qarih’s initial prejudice. However, perhaps the point was to make Ibn al-Qarih feel sorry for the poets he so summarily consigned to the flames of torment. Al-Khansa’ (see Chapter 1) was one of the few first-rank poets to be encountered in Paradise.
In the second part of the Risalat al-Ghufran, Ma'arri rather loses the structure of his book and spends a lot of time exploring the nature of heresy and atheism, though there are many digressions on such matters as the hard life of scholars, the religious convictions of Abu Nuwas, lucky and unlucky names, metempsychosis, and women’s ability to judge poetry. Ma'arri’s fantasy had presented the afterlife as one big literary salon. The conversational exchanges with the dead are lively. Paradise and Hell are vividly evoked. Nevertheless, the overall flavour of the book is somewhat bleak and pessimistic, just like the rest of Ma'arri’s writings. The usual contempt for pleasure, for wine, women and song, comes through.
Despite the interest of its contents, the Risalat is likely to be hard going for a modern reader. What follows is one of the more accessible and self-contained passages, though some of Nicholson’s translation is conjectural. A banquet at which poetry was recited and debated has just finished. The Shaikh is, of course, the protagonist, Ibn al-Qarih.
When the guests departed, the Shaikh was left alone with two houris. Their exceeding beauty amazed him, and he was lavish of his compliments, but one of them burst into laughter, saying, ‘Do you know who I am, O Ibn Mansur? My name in the transitory world was Hamdun, and I lived at the Babu’l-Iraq in Aleppo. I worked a hand-mill, and was married to a seller of odds and ends, who divorced me on account of my ill-smelling breath. Being one of the ugliest women in Aleppo, I renounced worldly vanities and devoted myself to the service of God, and got a livelihood by spinning. Hence I am what you see.’ ‘And I,’ said the other, ‘am Taufiq al-Sauda. I was a servant in the Academy in Baghdad in the time of the Keeper Abu Mansur Muhammad b. ‘Ali, and I used to fetch books for the copyists.’
After this the Shaikh, wishing to satisfy his curiosity concerning the creation of houris, was led by an angel to a tree called ‘The Tree of the Houris’, which was laden with every sort of fruit. ‘Take one of these fruits,’ said the guide, ‘and break it.’ And lo! there came forth therefrom a maiden with large black eyes, who informed the Shaikh that she had looked forward to this meeting four thousand years ere the beginning of the world …
Now the Shaikh was fain to visit the people of the Fire, and to
increase his thankfulness for the favour of God by regarding their state, in accordance with His saying (Kor., xxxvii, 49–55). So he mounted on one of the horses of Paradise and fared on. And after a space he beheld cities crowned with no lovely light, but full of catacombs and dark passes. This, an angel told him, was the garden of the 'Ifrits who believed in Muhammad and are mentioned in the Suratu’l-Ahkaf and in the Suratu’l-Jinn. And lo! there was an old man seated at the mouth of a cave. Him the Shaikh greeted and got a courteous answer. ‘I have come,’ said he, ‘seeking knowledge of Paradise and what may perchance exist among you of the poetry of the Marids.’ ‘Surely,’ said the greybeard, ‘you have hit upon one acquainted with the bottom of the matter, one like the moon of the halo, not like him who burns the skin by filling it with hot butter. Ask what you please.’
‘What is your name?’ ‘I am Khaishafudh, one of the Banu Sha'saban: we do not belong to the race of Iblis, but to the Jinn, who inhabited the earth before the children of Adam.’ Then the Shaikh said: ‘Inform me concerning the poetry of the Jinn: a writer known as al-Marzubani has collected a good deal of it.’ ‘All this is untrustworthy nonsense,’ rejoined the old man. ‘What do men know of poetry, save as cattle know about astronomy and the dimensions of the earth? They have only fifteen kinds of metre, and this number is seldom exceeded by the poets, whereas we have thousands that your litterateur never heard of’ …
