I quote again from Omar, Fitzgerald’s version, quatrain 44:
“Why, if the Soul can fling the dust aside,
And naked on the air of Heaven ride,
Were’t not a shame—were’t not a shame for him
In this clay carcass crippled to abide?”
And from Heron-Allen’s, quatrain 145:
“O Soul, if thou canst purify thyself from the dust of the clay,
Thou, naked spirit, canst soar in the heav’ns,
The Empyrian is thy sphere—let it be thy shame
That thou comest and art a dweller within the confines of earth.”
“The walking dust was once a thing of stone,” is my rendering of the line,
“And he concerning whom the world is puzzled
Is an animal evolved of inorganic matter.”
This line of Abu al-ʻAlaʼ is much quoted by his enthusiastic admirers of the present day to prove that he anticipated Darwin’s theory of evolution. And it is remarkable how the fancy of the poet sometimes coincides with the logical conclusions of the scientist. ↩
“Iblis,” the devil. ↩
“Rabbi,” my lord God. ↩
This quatrain is quoted by many of the biographers of Abu al-ʻAlaʼ to prove that he is a materialist. Which argument is easily refuted, however, with others quatrains taken at random from the Luzumiyat. ↩
Omar was also a confessed cynical-hypocrite. Thus runs the first line of the 114th quatrain of Heron-Allen’s:
“The world being fleeting I practise naught but artifice.”
And he also chafes in the chains of his sins. Following is the 23rd quatrain of the same translation:
“Khayyam, why mourn for thy sins?
From grieving thus what advantage more or less dost thou gain?
Mercy was never for him who sins not,
Mercy is granted for sins; why then grieve?”
Abu al-ʻAlaʼ, in a quatrain which I did not translate, goes even farther in his questioning perplexity. “Why do good since thou art to be forgiven for thy sins?” he asks. ↩
“Kaaba Stone,” the sacred black stone in the Kaaba at Meccah. ↩
The American poet, Lowell, in “The Crisis,” utters the same cry:
“Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne.”
“And the poor beetle that we tread upon
—Shakespeare: Measure for Measure.
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.”
“To let go a flea is a more virtuous act than to give a dirham to a beggar.” —Abu al-ʻAlaʼ ↩
Omar too, in the 157th quatrain of Heron-Allen’s—
“Had I charge of the matter I would not have come,
And likewise could I control my going, where could I go?”
“Thy two soul-devouring angels,” the angels of death and resurrection. ↩
“Nubakht,” one of the opponents of the Prophet Mohammed. ↩
“Rabbi,” my lord God. ↩
“And like the dead of Ind,” referring to the practice of the Hindus who burn their dead.
“Munkar” and “Nakir,” the two angels who on the Day of Judgment open the graves of the dead and cross-examine them—the process is said to be very cruel—as to their faith. Whosoever is found wanting in this is pushed back into the grave and thence thrown into Jahannam. No wonder Abu al-ʻAlaʼ prefers cremation. ↩
He wrote his own epitaph, which is:
“This wrong to me was by my father done,
But never by me to any one.”
“Azrael,” the angel of death. ↩
These will suggest to the reader Shakespeare’s lines:
“Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away;
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should stop a wall t’expel the winter’s flaw.”
Compare this with Omar’s:
“Thou hast no power over the morrow,
And anxiety about the morrow is useless to thee:
Waste not thou the moment, if thy heart is not mad,
For the value of the remainder of thy life is not certain.”
Colophon
The Luzumiyat
was published in the 11th century CE by
Abu al-ʻAlaʼ al-Maʻarri.
It was translated from Arabic in 1920 by
Ameen Rihani.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Weijia Cheng,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2015 by
Jeroen Hellingman and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Algerian Water Carrier,
a painting completed after 1874 by
William Sartain.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
June 10, 2024, 6:42 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/abu-al-ala-al-maarri/the-luzumiyat/ameen-rihani.
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Uncopyright
May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
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